8. Be creative. This is often a challenge for parents. We spend so much time becoming "grown-ups" and giving up on childish pleasures. We work hard to get organized and maintain regular schedules. We emphasize intellectualism and crave reason.
Then we have children--and we are totally at a loss for how to deal with them! We wonder why they do things that make no sense. We simply get to a point, somewhere along the line, in which we can no longer sympathize with the joy of riding a merry-go-round. Seriously, I used to love those things, but since my son started enjoying them, I have discovered that my adoration of the merry-go-round has been replaced by discomfort when I feel the loss of control and head-spinning craziness that whirling about in circles induces. Kids LOVE that stuff. Adults...not so much.
In order to get in tune with how children experience the world, we have to go back and try to remember what it was like being young. With more and more people waiting longer to have children, this only becomes more challenging. The boring adult rut is tough to bust out of, but to truly relate to a child, we have to walk a mile in shoes that are way too small for us now. Which just looks ridiculous--yet that's actually part of what we need to do. We need to embrace a level of silly that helps us connect with our children.
I didn't know I had lost my touch. I had retained it for a long time, even up until about halfway through my 20s. But by the time my son Jackson became a toddler, something was very different in me, and I felt I had to relearn old ways of relating to children. Thankfully he has developed some small level of patience and understanding that sometimes Mommy and Daddy are a little dense about certain "obvious" concepts.
For example, when Jackson was 12 months old, he began behaving very strangely in relation to food. He would be quite clearly hungry, but lacking verbal skills, he simply could not articulate to us why it was that he was refusing to eat food that he obviously wanted to ingest. Out of desperation, we began to try to discover what would appease him. Andrew and I learned a LOT about toddlers from this sort of behavior. Why didn't Jackson eat his food? He was learning about lids. He wanted to take the lid off his baby food and put it back on. Between EVERY bite. EVERY time. For MONTHS.
Sure, we could have argued. We could have tried to tell him he was being ridiculous. But truly, had we forced him to get upset over something so trivial and easily accommodated as covering and uncovering his food between bites, who is the more ridiculous? He was asserting power in his largely powerless life. He was developing fine motor skills. He was learning about his environment. And more than that, he was eating without a fight.
Being creative with your interactions with your child can help in numerous ways. Say your child is hungry. You're on your way home to get food but have run out of food with you in the car. She's upset because she wants food and keeps asking for it, but no matter how much sense you try to use to reassure her that you understand she is hungry and that you are making strides toward acquiring sustenance, all she can focus on is the sensation in her belly. Crack the window. Talk about the wind. Sing a silly song. Point out words that she's been learning: "Look! Trees! Bicycle! Running! Ambulance! School bus!" The important part of this, of course, is that you first acknowledge the desires expressed by your child and reassure her that you are actively working to resolve the sensations in her belly--then you can try a distractionary technique.
Kid won't eat something you call broccoli? Call it a little tree. Want your child to learn about road safety as a pedestrian? Teach him about the Road Fairy/Ferry who has to be with him to help make sure there aren't any cars coming. He asks for a banana and refuses to eat it? Get him into a silly place and call it the Banana Zone.
It's okay for kids to splash in puddles once in a while. It's okay for them to treat curbs as balance beams. It's okay for them to do silly things and for you to join them. But remember: if you do it once, they will expect you to do it again. And again. And again. Begging may be involved. Whining as well, if you do not bend sufficiently to allow the game to happen again. So whatever you allow, whatever silliness or creative game you decide to play, consider whether or not it's one you'd be willing to do with any sort of regularity. If it's any kind of success, your child will want to repeat the fun time with Mommy and/or Daddy.
Also if your child has some issues that need resolving, be they significant (traumatic event) or minor (afraid of monsters under the bed), you may want to consider flipping through a copy of Dr. Lawrence Cohen's book Playful Parenting. I acknowledge that his writing could be better organized than it is, but for those looking for some ideas on where to start, it's a place to go. Dr. Cohen is a child psychologist who uses play as a form of therapy to help children recover from incidents ranging from violent behaviors to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) to a fear of riding on swings. He describes play as many researchers today do, which is the main form of learning for children, particularly through about age 7. Play is how they study the world around them, how they make sense of what they perceive, and therefore play is the most critical aspect of childhood as well as the most educational.
The main thing for you as a parent is that you connect with your child. So you have to get down on the child's level. Get on the floor and roll around. Pretend to be a train or an elephant. Make silly noises and encourage your child to copy them or make up his own for you to repeat. Discuss ridiculous hypothetical situations with your older child (e.g. What would happen if you launched a water balloon into space? Whose house would it land on?). Life can be fun if we allow it to be so. Be creative, and enjoy more of life as a parent.
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