“I had a healthy breakfast today. I had a long john!”
From the mouths of babes, right? This is not to pick on either of my kids, but more to highlight the challenges of being a parent.
How do you get kids to pay attention, think clearly, and care about what they’re doing?
At this point in my fathering career, this is the most important and most challenging question.
Here’s some backstory on the above quote. The school running club started this week. It starts at 7am. Most kids run, then eat breakfast at the school before going home. My wife, knowing that they normally serve Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal and cereal bars, let our runner know that these do not constitute a good breakfast. Either eat something else (presumably healthier than the mentioned items), or come home and eat at home. The long john was the only other item. The logic used I guess, was that since it wasn’t on the prohibited list, and “it’s like bread”, then it must be okay. Here, okay equals healthy.
Critical thinking is not a common quality among North Americans. I’m amazed at what people get suckered into that could have been prevented with a little bit of rational thought. Since public schools don’t teach critical thinking well, it is up to us parents.
Going back to the example above, a modicum of logic was used. There were certain items available for breakfast. Two were prohibited as being unhealthy. Therefore, the other items must be better than the prohibited items. Ergo, we’ll eat the long john.
In my child’s defense, donuts have been served for breakfast in the Clapp household. When that’s happened, it’s been a treat brought in by someone else. So, a donut for breakfast, while rare, happens here.
A second important challenge that this example highlights is the selective listening of the child. While I explained a somewhat rational way that the child could have thought through the breakfast choices, it could just have easily been that all he heard was “don’t eat X or Y” and stopped paying attention to the rest of the context. Without that context, the decision tree at breakfast would simply have been “a long john isn’t X or Y, so must be okay, okay = healthy”.
One of our children especially exercises the selective listening trait. Any instruction more than one or two sentences includes “are you listening?”, “did you hear that?”. Later when questioned about it, we hear “I forgot”. Alternatively, when I give detailed instructions, because they weren’t followed the last time, I get “I know dad”. If you knew, then why didn’t you do it last time?
These traits are not unique to my children. In writing the previous paragraph, I hear my own mother’s voice in my head.
So what’s the best way to move the needle? How do you teach someone to listen fully, and pay attention to detail?
I wrote the first draft of this on Wednesday morning. Wednesday evening I was at church. Two different people there said that I should be proud of my children. First because of how well they worked at our local VBS that week, and second, that one of them routinely opens the door for people at church on Sunday mornings. I’m sure that I beamed with pride. I did on the inside. I told my kids how proud I was to hear people say that of them, and that they help others in those ways.
Maybe they listen more often than I think. Maybe they behave well more often than I know. The whole process of childhood and adolescence is learning and developing. That means that not everything is going to be perfect.
Perhaps I need to focus on encouraging the good behavior that I see and hear about, and so much on the bad.
When taken seriously, parenting is a tough job. There are days I want to pull out my hair out. More often, I wonder how I could be so blessed. Overall, it’s worth it.
Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay