Every Saturday morning, my wife and I shuttle our 2-year-old daughter off to a tiny tots gymnastics class.
I use the term gymnastics loosely because I don’t remember Mary Lou Retton winning a gold medal and landing on a Wheaties box for wildly swinging on a rope or marching in a circle with a musical instrument.
But for a group of children, varying in ages, it’s the best that can be done. You don’t want to spring Bela Karolyi on some happy-go-lucky 2-year-old. It could get ugly.
But the real show isn’t the kids anyway.
Parents are the ones to watch when it comes to this class.
Parents, despite taking on probably the toughest job in the world (if you do it right) get less credit today than ever before.
Kids are too fat, kids are babysat by television, so on and so on.
But something happens when parents get around other parents, at least in this class. It’s an overwhelming need to make sure the other parents know that you are in control of your child.
Take for example the child who cut in front of my child waiting to go down the slide. I didn’t notice it and neither did my daughter.
But almost instantly the mother was fervently pulling her child from in front of ours and demanding her child apologize.
My daughter turns around and looks at us confused.
It leads to the “tree falls in the forest” argument, if somebody cut in front of my daughter but she didn’t know it, is it still that big of a deal?
The answer, of course, is yes. The parent saw a behavior they needed to correct and it didn’t matter if it bothered my kid or not.
In the same token, I chastised my daughter when she snatched a purple ball from another child only moments later. Granted, the other girl was on the verge of crying like it was the only thing she ever loved and I didn’t want to be at the center of the scene.
Good intentions in each instance, but more often than not we seem to confuse the heck out of our kids.
Take the aforementioned purple ball girl for example. Later, she was playing with a hula-hoop when another boy came and grabbed it away from her. The girl, clearly still shaken by the ball theft and wondering “why does this always happen to me?” again began to cry.
You simultaneously have two parents barking out completely different directions to their respective children.
Purple ball girl’s dad tells her, “You can share with other kids, honey.”
At the same time, the other dad is telling his son, “she was playing with that, you need to give that back.”
And you have two utterly confused kids.
The solution to me is clear. I should have immediately grabbed the hula-hoop and let my kid play with it.
Then you have two crying kids, my daughter’s happy and things balance out.
Maybe two parents sending their kids different messages isn’t the worst thing. Purple ball girl should share, the hula snatcher should get his grubby mitts off.
If they both meet in the middle, you have a compromise.
Instill these kind of ideas in our future leaders and we might avoid a war here and there.
Or another option, close the door on the parents and let the kids hash it out. Survival of the fittest, and fastest.
