Bigging Up The Little Ones

My little daughter has a great sense of who she is. She has some very clear moods. She can be blue--meaning sad. She can be red--meaning she is mad or angry. She is yellow--when she is happy, and full of light like the sun. She can be grey--when she feels alone. When she is pink, she is very, very happy. She thinks that she is prettier than her class mate because she has a better singing voice; she displayed this to me early this morning. I think her facial beauty is much more than that displayed by her voice, though.

Confidence and self-respect are attributes that comes from regular reinforcement. Even while being upbraided for spilling juice and tea and cake crumbs all over my office desk, she needs to be left with her confidence in tact. So, she gets her lesson in tidiness, but gets praise for the quality of the clean up she does. She felt so good about that, that I later saw her going around with a large broom sweeping up a floor.

Insults are not part of the building blocks for making confident people. Parents who curse their children are just like Bobby Knight--the renowned basketball coach at Indiana University, famed for his foul-mouthed diatribes against players. They may produce people who perform at a certain high level, but at the cost of a lot of psychological damage, that may not appear until much later. Many adults lack patience when it comes to children, and are more likely to want to stop what they see as 'foolishness' rather than figure out that a 3 year old has only a limited way of expressing itself. Children's logic is different, and need not be nonsense.

Self-confident children are often ready to take on a task because they have not been forced to live with punishment for failure or less-than-perfect results. They see mistakes as natural and part of learning how to be better. Parents' focusing on the missed 3 points out of a 100 rather than the 97 gained is the stuff of much despair for children. They also understand well that not having something is part of life, whether you give away or lose something you like or never have something at all.

We are watching Barney and a story about Franklin (the tortoise), who was supposed to be digging potatoes for his mother, but got distracted playing with a spinning top. His mother reminds him of his chore, and he goes off to find a spade and fork. He digs for the potatoes for dinner and comes across a fossil, a trilobite. His father encourages him to build a little museum. He goes off with his friend to play but meets Mr. Mole, who is an expert on fossils. What should they do? Give him their newly found fossil? Mr. Mole solves the problem and tells Franklin to keep the fossil and learn about the history that is in that hardened object; how it used to live in the sea and more. He decides to charge 2 cookies for entrance. Some of his friends think that is too much to see rusty nails, and pictures of grandma, or even a really old fossil. They collect a boxful of cookies, but get a bunch of upset friends who really don't care about the fossil. So, they give the fossil to Mr. Mole, who really can appreciate it...

Another day of building and learning ahead.