I Failed

Parenting is a continually evolving job.   As soon as you get one thing under control your small offspring develop more talents, skills and challenges that have to be met by you, their parents.   Sometimes this can be frustrating, sometimes it can be rewarding and sometimes it can be challenging.   My husband and I try to walk a fine line between letting our children be children while expecting them to be independent and capable.  

Managing the independence, turning it into opportunities where the children can be capable can be tricky.   There’s a balance of work that needs to happen.   Sure, I can get the breakfasts and the flow of the morning routine quickly by doing it myself—because I’m faster by far than a six- and seven-year-old, but they need to learn how to do it themselves.   For example, if we hadn’t told them they had to get dressed or their breakfast wouldn’t be served to them, I would hazard a guess they’d still be waiting upstairs in their bedroom right now for us to dress them.  

So we push.   And we expect results.   Sometimes we do this by not extending privileges (such as eating breakfast) and other times we accomplish it through rewards.   Both work and both get results. Iteratively we expect them to do more and more to manage their lives.   Over the past week my husband and I have been talking about more ways we can get them to step up to things in their daily lives and how to best accomplish them.

We have a stamp system.   They were getting stamps for doing certain things and they could, “spend” them on things like screen time on the weekend, eating a piece of candy, picking the restaurant when we go out, etc.   But they had gotten less interested over time and we had gotten slack in tracking spent stamps.   So tonight we changed the game.

There were new guidelines on how we’d give out stamps.   Mostly those guidelines were to our advantage, picking things they didn’t want to do—like reading books or playing a game of chess for Chess Team practice.   There was also putting dishes in the dishwasher and cleaning up from doing craft work with paper, scissors and markers.   These were things they didn’t want to do.   But when they found out they could earn stamps for them suddenly there was a flurry of activity.

One of the things was nighttime routine.   We said we’d give them a ten minute timer to get dressed for bed, brush, floss and swish for their teeth and they could earn a stamp.    They do this now, but typically my husband and I get the toothbrushes ready with toothpaste on them and put out some pajamas for the children on the bed.

Tonight my son and husband were deep into a game of chess (that my son won fair and square I heard).   I was cleaning up from dinner and my daughter was happily getting ready for bed while I cleaned up from dinner.    Ten minutes later I came into the bathroom to find my daughter crying.

She had gotten her pajamas on (backward) and was at the sink to brush her teeth.   I came over to her and she said in a voice so sad it almost made me cry.   She said, “I failed”.   I looked at her and she had toothpaste all over her shirt.   She had gotten the stool out and put it at the sink.   She had the swish ready.   He flosser was on the counter and there was toothpaste everywhere.    She was crying in true sadness.   She had tried to get the toothpaste on the toothbrush but she couldn’t tell where to put it our how much had come out and it got everywhere.

I told her it was okay, that the most important thing was she tried.   I gave her an extra stamp for trying, I told her.   We got her a second pajama shirt and then I gave her a lesson on how to hold the toothbrush to put the toothpaste on with some control over where and how much came out.   When we got done she said, “but I already brushed my teeth.”   Then she said, “that’s okay, I’ll brush them again.”

Enabling children is important.   Enabling my blind child sometimes takes extra thought on how it can since she can’t see what she’s doing.

The Big Boy Update:  My son can see.  Sometimes because he can see, I think he can do things just because he’s normally sighted.   But he had trouble loading the toothpaste on the toothbrush too.   I gave him the same lesson as his sister.   Tomorrow we’ll see if he can get only a dab of toothpaste on his toothbrush or if he’ll go for a huge blob and get it everywhere.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  After “failing” tonight with the toothpaste I think the most poignant thing, that I didn’t want to tell my daughter, was that she had a perfect toilet paper “tail” coming out of her pajama pants all the way down to her feet from going to the bathroom.   I pulled it out and threw it away and didn’t tell her.   I was quite proud of her for getting ready for bed all by herself.