Hi moms! Hope your day with your little one is going well! I’m here to share an interesting perspective about children’s way of thinking!
This morning, when my mother and I were working in the kitchen, she accidentally dropped a whistle into the open sink hole. We forget to focus on solutions. Instead, we started arguing about who left the sink open. Actually, it’s a small sink hole and we can’t get our hands inside to lift the whistle out. But it remained stuck inside the hole, out of reach for our hands.
While we were still arguing about the situation, my 2.5-year-old daughter observed us stressing out. She asked, “What happened? Did food get into it?” I replied, “The whistle got stuck inside the sink hole.” While we were discussing the consequences of the whistle being stuck, my daughter went outside and came back with a small stick in her hand. She gave it to us and asked to lift the whistle out with the stick.
My mother said, “I have already dropped another whistle inside the sink a few years ago, but we couldn’t pick it up. We had to repair the whole pipeline to retrieve it.” But my daughter kept insisting that we try to pick the whistle out using the stick. I don’t know where she got the idea. Maybe she observed a similar scenario from a different situation in the past few days. I took the stick from her hand as a safety measure to prevent her from injuring her eyes or face with it.
When I had the small stick in my hand, my mind started considering the idea of trying to pick the whistle out of the sink. My mother still argued that we couldn’t pick it because the hole was too deep and narrow inside. But I said, “Let’s try once,” and I tried. After a few failed attempts, I managed to pick the whistle out of the sink.
That incident was a small, silly thing that happened in my life, but it gave me bigger insights about parenting! Do you know what insightful lesson it taught me? Any guesses?
It’s about our level of preconceptions. When the whistle was dropped, my mother and I didn’t first think about how to solve the problem. Instead, we questioned each other about who left the sink hole open. Second, we analyzed past failed attempts to pick the whistle out of the sink but didn’t try any new attempts. We were like, “One failure is always a failure,” and we didn’t even try any tricks to pick it out of the sink. Instead, we started arguing about the consequences instead of focusing on the solution.
But what about my daughter? She was just 2.5 years old and couldn’t even talk properly, yet she thought about the solution first. She never thought about who left the sink open or looked for someone to blame. Also, she didn’t have any past experience or analysis regarding the situation. It was like a fresh incident in the notebook of her life. So, she didn’t consume herself with past assumptions and inferences. By nature, Children Focus on Solutions! When she heard something was stuck, she identified it as a problem, and the next moment she thought about a small stick as a solution. She focused on solution rather than stressing out with consequences!
I would say that if she hadn’t brought that stick, I wouldn’t have tried picking it up with any other stick. Because I’m already in the notion that previous attempts to pick it up had failed. Which means I’m a person with a fixed mindset and the attitude that “once failed, always failed.”
But what about children’s minds? They are open to trying solutions without any false assumptions. It’s us, the society, that stops them from being open to different approaches to old problems with the tagline of “you can’t because many people can’t.”
Let’s not normalize this way of teaching in the name of giving insights to children. Let them explore and learn about what they can and can’t do, at least in simple matters. Let’s not write our own stories on their fresh pages and turn them into old stories, as we’re not even aware that our notions may not suit the current age and scenario. So, we should be aware not to fill their lives with our assumptions and let them think and grow as they are meant to be. This is what I realized from the core of this incident!
Have you faced any incidents similar to this? Do your kid by any circumstances taught you to focus on solutions! Do you ever felt like you have many things to learn from children’s way of thinking? If so, then send your parenting stories to raisingalphakidz@gmail.com, and I’ll be happy to share your parenting insights with the community here. Let’s focus on solutions and share insightful things to make a world full of better parents !