Growing up is never easy
Madison fell on the couch. Not off the couch — she fell backwards on the couch and hit an oddly shaped toy and hurt her neck. There are few things scarier than having your child scream, “I fell and hurt my neck! Ow! I can’t move! Ow!” Because I didn’t witness the fall I had no idea how far and how hard she’d fallen. Turns out she’s ok but her neck is sore and she was really scared.
She’s scared about bodies these days. She’s scared about getting hit by a car. She’s afraid that someday she will accidentally lie down in the middle of the street and a car will run over her. She asks often, what will happen to her if she does this? We go over all the ways this will not happen. We talk about how she is always safe in the street and how Mommy or Daddy are always with her when we walk down the street. We talk about how she would never lie down in the middle of the street but that if she did, Mommy or Daddy would move her. But what if it does happen? She demands to know. So we talk about doctors and hospitals and ambulance drivers and through it all I want her to see the many, many safety catches there are in this world. She is strong and healthy. Doctors and hospitals are there to help us stay that way. She will be ok, I tell her often. Whatever happens, she will get through it.
But she’s still nervous about forgetting and lying down in the middle of the street. Because now she’s old enough that she knows she has more autonomy and as much as kids want to grow, all that freedom looks pretty frightening.
“It’s not easy being three,” she told me this morning. “Sometimes it’s scary.”
Noah is having his own challenges. I noticed that the more he embraces his tween-ness (music, friends, long hair, cool clothes and a smart mouth) the more he retreats to his Ramona and Moffat books. I did get him to make a leap to Zilpha Keatley Snyder this week and he just finished The Egypt Game. (You may remember that his favorite books are about ordinary kids doing ordinary things.) He reminds me a little of David Stanley so I hope he’ll go for those next. I’m not sure though because when it’s nighttime and he’s ready to head to bed, he wants something calm to make up for all the growing he’s done that day.
I remember feeling the same way as a little girl. For me, it was being inside a high rise building. I was scared I would ‘accidentally’ walk over to the window, open it, stand on the ledge, and jump off. My rapidly developing imagination was to blame.
It isn’t easy being three…just old enough to realize that the world is dangerous and your parents can’t protect you from everything.
When Andrew was five, several months after witnesses a child nearly drown while adults including is parents didn’t even notice until he called for help, started worrying about everything. The most common one was that he might run out of water and dehydrate and die. We talked on and on about how water was available everywhere and how extremely unlikely it was that that would happen.
We finally got a child psychologist involved who gave us some techniques. He actually gave us a lot of ways to respond that were respectful but did not feed it. The basic part was realizing that we couldn’t reasure him out of being worried. One of the things the psychologist suggested was to ask, “Is that a little worry, or a big worry?” The answer turned out to always be “Little” or “medium-sized.” Sometimes we would ask him why he thought that worry was in his head. It was supposed to help him take a step back — stop worrying about dying from dehydration and thinking about where the thought came from.
After a while we got more casual. We would give him a hug or smile and tell him that we were glad he told us. We would ask if he wanted to talk about it, and if he didn’t we would change the something. If he did wat to talk about it we would, but we would still move on to something else as soon as we could. Sometimes we would say things like, “That is a scary thing to think about! It isn’t something that worries me though. I’m more worried about whether I have everything I need for dinner. Do you want to help me check?”
I was worried, being a worrier myself, that these techniques would make him feel like we didn’t respect him or care about what he felt. It turn out though that this response really helped him. It was like he didn’t really need to talk about it. He just needed to tell us and then guage how worrisome it really was by our reaction.
It was, at least, very successful with him.
Sigh. I either have to PROOF-READ my comments or just not read them after I post.
Why isn’t there an edit button for comments on blogs?
Noah and his tween-ness made me chuckle. You know our sons are a year apart, almost to the day. So I feel your pain on the tween-ness. Nikolas has gotten to become a bit sullen, sometimes a bit fresh, often withdrawn and morose. I see an EMO kid on the horizon (and lord knows his mother is EMO).
He called me today and I was laying in bed, napping, and he said “Whats wrong with you? You sound like a moody teenager?”
I laughed and said “You would know..”
He laughed and said “Exactly..”
Yondalla - I so agree with you about the edit button!
Have you recommended The Penderwicks (Jeanne Marie Birdsall) or any of Elizabeth Enright’s books about the Melendy family to Noah? Wonderful, wonderful books about ordinary kids doing ordinary stuff. Those are some of my favorites, too!
I love that she knows it’s not easy being three (it’s been ages since I posted–but I have a three-year-old too…). I love that she reminded you of it. The trouble is, from way up here it looks easy!
But I would not find it easy to spend an entire afternoon in a turquoise hand-me-down Care Bear costume, as Lily did today.