Have you ever heard the saying “Good girls go to heaven. Bad girls go everywhere?” I thought of that recently on the way home from IKEA.
My sweet little 5-year-old had an unfortunate experience at Småland, the free play area for children. To be clear, it was not the IKEA workers’ fault.
What I think happened is that my daughter misunderstood the rules. She thought she was only allowed in the ball pit. A consummate rule follower, my daughter stayed in the ball pit for the entire 45 minutes, even while the other children had fun moving to different play areas.
What’s worse, the bathroom was in the other room, so by the time I picked her up she was ready to burst.
“I was so lonely, Mommy,” she told me. “And you weren’t even allowed to cry!” I don’t think that was true either, but I told her she should feel very proud of herself for being so brave.
My daughter is a people pleaser, which usually makes her easy to parent. But in this case, being well behaved caused her distress.
My son by contrast, is a strong-willed iconoclast. It’s made for some interesting conversations with authority figures over the years.
On the long drive home from IKEA I tried to picture what a 5-year-old version of my son would have done in a similar situation. Chucked balls at the kid next to him until they paged me? Argued his way into the room with the crayons? When I picked him up from fourth grade that afternoon I asked him.
“I don’t know what I would have done in kindergarten but when I was two or three I would have bit the IKEA woman and made them call you.”
Since this was a purely hypothetical situation, I felt a bit proud. My son knows how to advocate for himself — one way or another. I want my daughter to be able to speak up too.
I know there are probably a lot of parents reading the paper this morning who have challenging kids to parent. Maybe your teenager just yelled at you for waking her up at 10 a.m., or your 6-year-old complained that you made pancakes wrong. These are the types of kids we worry about.
But maybe we should really be worried about the child who quietly ate your fat pancakes when he actually wanted cereal, or the teenager who didn’t complain when you woke her up even though she was exhausted because she was up until 2 a.m. completing her school project a week early.
Everyone always judges the kid who bites. It’s easy to disparage the child who is too loud. Rule followers can be a lot easier to parent. But rule followers don’t make history unless we teach them to complain. Otherwise, they’ll be stuck in the ball pit forever.
Jennifer Bardsley is an Edmonds mom of two.
She blogs at www.heraldnet.com/ibrakeformoms and teachingmybabytoread.com.
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