The instruction manual for children; look for opportunities to facilitate
By: Kerry L Moss Jr
Tags: Relationships, Personal Development, Parenting Advice, Parenting, Family

Lesson 1 rather than trying to avoid it, look for opportunities to facilitate.

What this statement means is rather than avoiding chaos put scenarios in play to facilitate it rather than trying to avoid destruction Create opportunities for your children to break stuff, rather than trying to make them stationary in an effort to not be distracted designate time specific to them exclusively giving all of your attention to them.

Human beings are constantly growing and developing this is especially true during your early years this is something that never leaves you so rather than looking at a broken tool or a very loud child or a child who enjoys taking things apart as destructive or an obstacle it might be a better perspective to view them and their true form which is a pursuit of knowledge and understanding of their environment. The reality is our children are going to do things that are inconvenient costly an objectively destructive to both themselves and others and things one method of being a great parent is to facilitate opportunities for them where they can explore safely in an environment designed around their development. A great example of this from my own life is the time I had to replace a toilet. Yes, you read correctly I had to replace an entire toilet. Our five-year-old enjoy exploring how things worked. See that summer we had been gardening and I had been doing odd jobs around the house you know very hands-on break it down figure out what’s wrong with it put it back together kind of projects. That was also the summer of COVID-19 which meant we as a family were in the house even more and sometimes unoccupied, but it allowed us to give attention where it was required most. On a Friday evening, I believe, it was discovered that the toilet was clogged. A few days before this was discovered. I found the glass part of the door handle on the floor behind the door. Usually, the protocol was to round our children up and question everyone, however, this evening I was working on getting our toilet unclogged, so my wife questioned the little people. After about 40 minutes of trying everything I could think of to get the toilet unclogged, my wife delivered the news. The clog in the toilet was caused by a piece of glass from the door handle. Yes, the same piece of glass that I had placed on the vanity a few days ago. In traditional guy style, I continued trying to get the piece of glass out of the toilet even though I knew it was the perfect size and material to render my efforts useless. I will admit I was angry, with our five-year-old because he was getting into more and more stuff lately. I was also angry with myself because leaving the piece of glass on the vanity was literally the worse place, I could have left it. My wife and I are the types of parents that believe in processing every situation, and she could tell from my face and actions that I was in no place to process so she did it. I continued tinkering with the toilet late into the night which did nothing but make the clog worse. At close to midnight after the kids had gone to bed, I finally threw in the towel. Now it was time for me to process what had happened with my wife, and she was ready for me. I started by admitting my contribution to this debacle and followed that with my diagnoses of the issue, and potential solutions. Once I was finished talking the tactics of fixing the toilet, she asked one question, how are you. As soon as I heard this, I went into this spiraling rant about how our children get away with everything, and how they don’t take care of anything. She asked the next question as if she was reading from a queued list of questions. She said, “Would I feel the same way about our children if we had the money to replace the toilet”. In our home, I am the money guy, so I know what our finances are always doing, and I knew we had the money to repair and replace everything that had been damaged or broken. The issue for me was that I had to spend money on something that I didn’t want to, and I felt I should not have to. Now I don’t know if my wife didn’t have anything else to say, or she was waiting for me to consider what I had just said, but after saying that she didn’t respond at all. Sitting there staring off, the thought that came to me was, I wish I had put the handle in another location. My brain replied he still may have found it and did the same thing. Then I thought well I could have put some of the PVC piping together in the basement for him to experiment on. Then it occurred to me this had been something he had been experimenting with all month. As it so happens cause and effect were also something that had been covered in his homeschooling lessons as well. That was followed by all the mishaps that he had been involved in over the past week, and it all started to make sense, he was exploring the concept. This is what had driven him to stick a pencil in the air conditioner and smash some old light bulbs, and yes you guessed it flushed the door handle down the toilet. This realization leads me to another thought if I had bought some things for him to experience cause and effect, perhaps he would have been able to rational the outcome of flushing the door handle in the toilet without doing it.

If I had done more to facilitate opportunities for him to explore cause and effect it would have been costly, but not as costly as replacing an entire toilet.