The Importance of NOT Letting Your Kids Be Kids.

I felt it necessary to do a follow up post on "The Importance of Letting Your Kids Be Kids". The day after posting that the universe pushed the troll button to put the recently publish theory to test. Not sure if you are aware, but as a follower you should know the universe trolls me often.

We were having a daddy daughter morning letting @aprilangel sleep in a bit. I decided we should go grab some breakfast at the local chi-fil-a and play afterword for a while. Now the latter part of that was my major reason for choosing chic-fil-a, of course to my daughters and I dismay it was temporarily closed.

My daughter is just now starting to get the hang of living on earth and immediately started yelling "pay! pay!" when we walked to the dining area. There were some other children with their parents also, most likely for the same reason as me. After breakfast I got her out of the high chair and she immediately headed for the door to the play area.

Obviously she ignored the sign and to my surprise pulled the door open and started to go in. I followed her with the intent of letting her investigate a bit and then do my best to explain it was closed and we would play somewhere else. Almost immediately an employee ran over to tell us it was closed and we could not go in.

S#!T hit the fan, immediately my daughter went into a full blown melt down as she was denied the fun right in front of her baby eye balls. I am sure everyone in the restaurant heard the cries for fun as I walked her flailing back to our table. Within moments a lady walked over to shower promotional gifts to her. As you can see below it worked well, she is a little shy so a smiling face giving her stuff was a good distraction from the intense grief.

The closed play place was a perfect moment where I could not "let her be a kid". Not sure how the situation could have been avoided or play out differently. Just a lesson for both of us in the balance between desire and social responsibility. Would have been nice had the employee given me a moment to bribe her with the chance to go see some "kitties" at the nearby pet shop.

The rest of our morning went well and the "kitties" were lots of fun, seems like they are a lot more active in the morning. I sometimes feel the pressure in society to wrangle my child and force her to be quit or sit still. This theme of her being "bad" or "good" seems to come up a lot. My father @richardd and @aprilangel had an issue once where he referred to as being bad for not eating her breakfast. She quickly pointed out that even though she may have done something bad that she herself was not bad.

This is an important thing to distinguish and I am glad she corrected my father. Language like that can create a self fulfilling prophecy where after repeatedly being told you are bad, you then become bad. Instead, positive affirmation works much better in my opinion.

I feel this type of parenting leads to negative inner dialog and right wrong thinking. If you are reading this please start paying attention on how you talk to yourself. A good practice is to take the things your say to yourself and imagine another person saying it to you. How would that make you feel? You can also reverse that and imagine saying it to someone else. There is nothing wrong with constructive criticism and critical thinking but there is no reason to beat yourself up.

In closing I plan to do my best to respect the freedom of my daughter and let her explore the world around her as much as possible preventing harm to herself or others. We came across a super well behaved child at a restaurant recently and his parents seemed religious. I couldn't help but feel there was a cost to his complacency that will possibly show up later in life. I would much rather have a wild child and an adventurous adult than a good child and that becomes a wall flower later in life.

Thanks for reading, any comments are appreciated as support goes a long way.