Week ending March 15, 2008: This week I realized how complicated 4 year old kids can be in their emotional relationships. Alex and Chloe spent time with their cousin Natalie and although they always look forward to seeing Natalie, they fought and cried and pouted a not-insignificant amount of the time. Children are emotionally volatile and their reactions very primitive in that they go from on-top-of-the-world, to crying, and back to on-top-of-the-world in the time that it takes most of us to tie our shoes, so the crying and fighting is nothing remarkable, but I started to wonder why the kids display so much negative emotion around Natalie. Later in the week the kids spent time with their friend Angie and they all played nicely for a very long time which further led me to wonder why they can play nicely with Angie while they sometimes won’t with Natalie. The more I watched, the more I learned. Angie, Chloe and Natalie are head-strong and opinionated, but when playing with Angie, Chloe will acquiesce, and when playing with Natalie, Chloe puts her foot down and demands that Natalie play the game the way Chloe wants it played, and then Chloe cries when Natalie (rightly so) refuses to be bossed around. While it originally looked like Chloe played better with Angie, it later seemed that Chloe was being truer to her own desires when she plays with Natalie. Chloe spends more time with Natalie than she does with Angie and may be more comfortable asserting herself, even though her assertions are not always socially appropriate. I’m amazed that people so young make such fine distinctions (between friends they see every couple of months and relatives they see weekly) and have such complexity in their reactions. Or maybe I’m projecting my feelings onto her and my whole theory is a bunch of garbage and I’ve just bored the heck out of my readers by over-analyzing kids playing. But hey, I don’t have much to think about while I’m folding laundry and doing the myriad other mindless tasks of an at home mom, so I try to explain the inexplicable.
Alex’s story of the week starts as Alex walks up to me and says “Mom, I need a phillips”. “Why?” I say. “So I can take my space shuttle apart”, he says. I ask to see the shuttle and he shows me the two Phillips head screws holding it together, so I told him where the screw driver was. I turns out that he couldn’t actually get the tiny jeweler’s screw driver to turn the tiny screws, so I helped, but I’d like to state, for the record, that Alex’s first attempt to take apart a toy that wasn’t meant to be taken apart, was at 4 years old.
Early Easter this year made for some chilly egg-dying outside!
Alex’s story of the week starts as Alex walks up to me and says “Mom, I need a phillips”. “Why?” I say. “So I can take my space shuttle apart”, he says. I ask to see the shuttle and he shows me the two Phillips head screws holding it together, so I told him where the screw driver was. I turns out that he couldn’t actually get the tiny jeweler’s screw driver to turn the tiny screws, so I helped, but I’d like to state, for the record, that Alex’s first attempt to take apart a toy that wasn’t meant to be taken apart, was at 4 years old.
Early Easter this year made for some chilly egg-dying outside!
1 comment:
I spend a lot of time pondering the same thing -- why Angie is bossy with some friends, and acquiesces with others. I'm not really fond of either extreme, but I figure it must be typical for the age. I'd much rather see her taking her friend's wishes into consideration than be bossy and see her assert herself rather than follow along all the time. We talk about both situations as they arise. I'm glad Angie has the opportunity to experience and practice in both roles as painful as it can be to watch! Funny thing was that when Chloe complained that she didn't want to play because Angie was telling her what to do, Angie didn't recognize that she says the same thing about another playmate. I guess that awareness and empathy comes later ... sometime around 20????
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