The other day I overhead R giving W advice in a sweet patient voice reserved exclusively for her sisters when they haven’t annoyed her yet: “Don’t say that you can’t do it. You can if you keep trying! You already learned to do so many things so just keep going and you’ll get there”.
Excellent advice. It’s always uncanny to hear your words repeated by your kids to someone else. And when I tell her the same thing (R tends to say she can’t do something a lot) it doesn’t help much in the moment and I sometimes wonder if she can even hear me. Apparently she can.
Kids love giving others wise advice, at least mine do. Before the twins were fully toilet trained, my parents who were visiting at the time took them to a playground and W had an accident in her undies. The entire way home I. was lecturing W that she should be using the toilet. Should I mention that she herself was wearing a nappy at the time?
So kids are little hypocrites. But so am I and I don’t claim to be little anymore. I tell R to stop striving for perfection and just start doing whatever she is afraid to do instead, step by step. I try to encourage her to try different things (with various success). I tell her how much I love writing (she hates it to the point I sometimes wonder if she is my child). But do I listen to my own advice? I am exhausted all the time so instead of writing or even reading I stare at my phone even though reading Reddit makes me feel slightly nauseous, like eating too much cake. Sometimes I catch myself watching meaningless videos on Facebook, it’s my way of disassociating and numbing myself (especially when I’m overwhelmed by noise, both inside and outside my own head).
We are all told that the best way to encourage kids to do something is modelling. It doesn’t always work in a straightforward way but we definitely normalise whatever we do in front of them. So I better model not being a hypocrite. And when I tell R I love writing I should probably back it up by actually writing. And when I say there are many fun things to do, I can point out to her that I play the piano at least occasionally and sometimes I crochet. Maybe one day I’ll even have time for sailing again. One can dream! Most importantly though, I’m learning to be kind to myself so they at least know that it’s the best (and normal) thing to do.
Sails and Commas 