Category: Parenting

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House of Cards

So much of parenthood is about the “teachable moment.”  My guess is you know what I mean, even if you haven’t heard the phrase before. eachable moments are those spontaneous moments in our day that demonstrate the opportunity to share life’s lessons with our children in accessible ways they will easily understand.  I think I first learned about the concept in grad school, long before kiddos, but it’s served me well in my parenting.

I had one the other day with Mary Tyler Son that was pretty profound, actually.  We were reading from Museum ABC and talking about the art on each page.  The letter “G” was for games and shared this image:

"Boy with a House of Cards" painted by Francois Hubert Drouais, from a collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art
“Boy with a House of Cards” painted by Francois Hubert Drouais, from a collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Mary Tyler Son was fascinated by what the boy was doing and full of questions.  We play a couple of easy card games, but never tried to build with them.  I promised I would teach him the next day.

So we did.

Oy.  The boy’s eyes expanded almost out of his head with appreciation for the idea of building a structure with cards, but it took all of 30 seconds for him to thrown down his own cards in disgust and frustration when his house didn’t immediately morph into a three story abode.  These were not cooperating like Legos and he was mad.

Ha!  Silly me had a whole teachable moment planned about how family members have to lean on one another in order to stand up and that we are all dependent on others we love for their support, yada yada yada. You get the drill.  Instead, I found myself working hard to prevent a total meltdown because the cards weren’t standing like the painting!  BAH! WHY IS THIS NOT WORKING, MAMA!  

So, yeah, the teachable moment became about something else entirely.

We talked about managing our frustration and how things might look easy, but they aren’t easy at all and that when something is hard the solution is not to throw your hands up in disgust and get angry and yell at your mother like she sold you a bill of rotten goods.  Nope, none of those things.

I had myself my own teachable moment over the cards and tears.  I’m not a sports gal, but get the concept and think that so much of parenting is about reading a situation and calling audibles as needed.  In that moment, my boy could care less about leaning on one another for support and the concept of interdependence.  He needed to process his frustration and calm the hell down.

When you’re a bright kid and things come easily to you, well, it’s natural to get complacent that life is that way.  It’s not.  Life can be a real jerk sometimes.  Even a five year old is not too young to understand that.  Not all things are easy.  Some things take practice.  Some things take work. Some things will never be mastered, no matter how much you might try. That kind of sucks.

Our house of cards success wasn’t triple story construction like the overachieving kid in the painting above.  Nope.  Our house of cards success was the little one, after much patience, standing two cards up and having them stay there about three seconds before they toppled over and he, in response, not toppling over as well.

It wasn’t the teachable moment I had expected, but it was a pretty good one.

House of Cards 2

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Children’s Book Review: The Day the Crayons Quit

I love this book.  Seriously.  We’re at the stage where I thought we would be out of the picture book arena for a while, as Mary Tyler Son has moved on to chapter books and Lego guides almost exclusively.  I’ve missed them, honestly, as the picture books in our home library gather dust while they wait for Mary Tyler Baby not to drool on them or rip their pages.  Board books for baby for the foreseeable future.

The Day the Crayons Quit, by Drew Daywalt and illustrated by Oliver Jeffers
The Day the Crayons Quit, by Drew Daywalt and illustrated by Oliver Jeffers

Friends gifted our older boy with The Day the Crayons Quit a few weeks ago and it was instant love from mom and child both.  Written by Drew Daywalt and illustrated by Oliver Jeffers, this kid’s book delivers in some pretty surprising ways.

At the heart of the story are the demands of individual crayon colors, stating their position on why they have it harder than the other colors in the box and how that leads to their decision to quit.  My son is amused by the idea of a crayon quitting, and not so sub-consciously, loves the concept of standing up for yourself and calling the shots for once — a five year old’s dream.

I love it for how it expertly weaves the lesson of empathy through its pages.  Color by color, readers young and old are brought into the hidden lives of crayons — the color pecking order, if you will.  Red whines about how busy it is and how it is employed even on holidays like Christmas and Valentine’s Day.  Red wants a break.  White feels empty, not even showing up on the page.  Pink bemoans being thought of as a girl’s color and dreams of being used to draw dinosaurs and cowboys.  Black is tired of only being used as an outline color and fantasizes about a day at the beach.

Red wants you to know how hard he has it.
Red wants you to know how hard he has it.
Poor pink picks adventure over princesses.
Poor pink picks adventure over princesses.
Black just wants a day at the beach and to enjoy the advantages his more colorful friends enjoy.
Black just wants a day at the beach and to enjoy the advantages his more colorful friends enjoy.

The book concept is clever and humorous and won’t bore a parent to death while also making kiddo think without knowing it.  They’ll be too busy giggling to realize the important lesson they are learning.  Teaching a child to empathize, the act of understanding and sharing the feelings of another, is, from my point of view, one of the primary tasks of successful parenting.

Imagine a childhood where all children could better empathize with one another.  Bullying would cease to exist as we know it.  How amazing would that be?  Pffft, a mom can dare to dream, can’t I?  Racism, sexism, classism, violence — *POOF*.  A lovely world, indeed!

But enough with my Utopian fantasies.

Long story short, this book is a great tool for introducing the concept of empathy to young children.  Read it with them, giggle with them, then slowly encourage them to employ empathy themselves in their day-to-day. Start with the bugs they squash or the flowers and leaves they pick distractedly.  Teach them about the value of all living things.  From crayons and nature, move on to higher order empahty — why Sally might feel left out when the boys refuse to play with her, or why Billy might be afraid to play baseball, as all kiddos don’t like flying orbs careening towards their heads.

If you want to read more about teaching our children empathy, here is an article I highly recommend.

Another great feature of empathy is that when you are bone tired, frustrated, at the end of your parental rope, you can sit down and explain that to your kiddos, with the hope that they will actually understand.  Ha! Speaking of fantasies . . .

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Little Kids and Their Great Big Enormous Feelings

Next week, Mary Tyler Son will wrap up two years at the beloved school both he and Donna attended.  Come fall, he will step into the much larger Chicago Public School system.  I have many, many feelings about this. Many feelings . . .  Turns out, though, that five year old Mary Tyler Son does, too.

He said to me the other day that he wished time would just stop because it kept passing him by so quickly.  This from a five year old.  He definitely has the Irish sentimentalist in him, just like his mom.  He has also been working on a picture story that involves a “mysterious door to a magical world” where there is no sickness.  Originally, there was just one key that could only be used once by one person.  Naturally, the key was for him.  When it dawned on him that he would be all alone in that magical and healthy world, other keys started to pop up — enough keys so that he could be in that perfect place with me and his Dad and brother and his favorite playmate.

There are lots of feelings going on with the boy right now.

Some of the time the feelings are coming out in these profound ways that I’ve described above where I can beam with pride and exclaim, “My Son!”  Most of the time, though, the feelings he is feeling are spilling out in ways that aren’t nearly so charming or prophetic or acceptable in polite company.  Once they came out in a way that hurt his baby brother and that required some swift discipline.

When I hold my baby, it is so simple.  He is this darling creature that I project all my hopes on and there he is, just sort of absorbing those hopes and projections of mine, happily.  But with a five year old, well, they are more apt to be doing their own thing in their own way.  There is lots less that I can so easily project on to my boy, because with each passing day, it is clearer and clearer that he is very much his own boy.

Part of being your own person is experiencing your own feelings your own way.  As I mom, this is what I am working for with my kiddos, right?  That they have the self-possession and confidence to feel all the feelings.

Imagine a five year old trying to sort this all out . . .
Imagine a five year old trying to sort this all out . . .

Turns out, though, that a five year old feeling all the feelings is hard.  Like really hard.  Feelings are nuanced and complicated and sometimes contradictory.  They confuse me, a woman in her forties with a Master’s degree in clinical social work, and as I watch all the feelings overwhelm my boy at times and there I am, Ms. Clinical Social Worker, shaking my head about how to help him, well, I don’t feel like I’ll be nominated for any Mom of the Year awards anytime soon.

It’s humbling and confusing and makes me feel a wee bit useless.  Sheesh, if I am struggling with the needs of my five year old, how I going to handle 10 and 15 and all those other years in between?

The answer is one day at a time to the best of my ability.

This morning I spoke about all of this with my son’s teacher.  Lordy, will I miss her calm wisdom next year.  Mary Tyler Dad and I have had more than a few conversations about these big feelings from such a little boy, too.  The thinking and talking and considering have helped me, at least, and I think with me feeling calmer and more settled, I hope some of that trickles down to the boy.

In the end, with many of the things our children face — even cancer — so much of what a parent does is just stick with them.  See them through, keep them company, hold their hand or offer a hug.  That seems simple, but in the midst of these big feelings that part of me just wants to regulate already, sitting and holding and making room for all of that is deceptively hard.

Today, in this moment, I feel calm.  That calm is what I will try to connect to the next time my lovely, sweet, charming, boy flies off the handle when it is time to leave the park or is told that the only snack in the car is a graham cracker and his response is as if his favorite pet bunny was just decapitated right in front of him.  Oh the misery of only graham crackers for snack time!  

I will try to keep my cool. not escalate an already escalating situation, and find the empathy of five when little things seemed awfully BIG and feelings are sometimes more complicated and powerful than your ability to express them.