I spent the better part of the day this past Saturday shuttling my brood from one "fun-filled" holiday activity to the next, kicking off with pancakes with Santa and winding down with a trip to a holiday festival at a local park. With my husband mostly out of pocket (though he did meet us at church for breakfast with the big man), the sheer logistics of the day were almost more than I could handle - physically or mentally. But with my older two kids in the prime season of their lives for getting uber-hyped for Christmas, I was committed to indulging them in all manner of holiday revelry occurring between now and 2012
After Saturday, I started to re-think that approach.
It wasn't for lack of stamina or Christmas spirit that I considered reneging, though both were rigorously tested over the weekend. Rather, it was because at the end of our holly jolly Saturday, my five-year old announced in a huff that I never let her do anything fun. I was dumbstruck.
Breakfast with Santa wasn't fun, I asked? Our mid-day romp with my brother's new puppy wasn't fun? Light-up-the-neighborhood in the park wasn't fun? The day had been filled with pancakes, candy canes, hot chocolate and sugar-dusted cookies. They'd visited with Santa and been rewarded by his elf with a plush toy that we definitely don't need. They'd careened through the park on an unusually mild December afternoon, rolling down leaf-littered hills until they couldn't stand up and petting a menagerie of animals trucked in for the occasion.
I never let her do anything fun? Perhaps the real problem was that I enabled her to have too much fun.
I spent the 10 minutes following her proclamation explaining to her that lots (lots!) of children don't get to do half (or any!) of the things she and her brother had done in that one day and recapping the highlights of our adventures to remind her that she had, in fact, done plenty of fun things in the past nine hours. But it was all for naught. In her mind, the day was derailed when I hurried her out of the petting zoo at the park before she had a chance to hold a rooster.
Realizing that my lecture was getting me nowhere, I stopped wasting my breath and headed to the kitchen to fix dinner. As I plopped frozen ravioli into the pot of water that was boiling almost as rapidly as my blood at that point, I racked my brain for the answer to how to teach her to be grateful.
And then it hit me.
Kids her age see themselves as the center of the universe, so telling her how fortunate she is to have a mommy and daddy who have both the will and the way to give her opportunities and experiences that other parents can't provide for lack of one or both of those provisions was like telling the tide that it was lucky to have a beach to wash over. I needed to show her how to be grateful and appreciative, and, to date, my in-home gratitude model had been largely limited to saying thank you when someone did the chore I asked them to do the first time I asked them to do it.
I had a sinking feeling that her ingratitude wasn't completely a byproduct of her age. A measure of it might be learned from me. Ouch.
My mind flashed back to an incident from earlier in that week. We'd been playing with some friends, and my daughter, a bonafide baby junky, had attempted, despite my admonitions to the contrary, to hoist their 12-month old onto her bed. As you might imagine, he ended up with a tear-inducing, though not serious (thankfully), bump on the head.
I was downstairs at the time it happened, but she promptly came to me and confessed her transgression. Though I didn't scold or punish her, choosing instead to point out that this was precisely why I told her not to try to pick him up, I definitely didn't praise her for having the courage to come tell me the truth about what happened. My friend, the one whose child had suffered the bumped noggin, did that. Double ouch.
If I want her to be appreciative of the things that I do for her, then I need to extend her the same courtesy. I need to thank her and praise her not just when she picks up her brother's tractors from the living room floor but when she treats him with kindness and respect while they're playing.
It was ironic to me that I had been missing the point all along, as part of what I do at my office job is manage our corporate recognition programs. I train managers on how to identify what motivates their employees and then provide suggestions for developing a plan for expressing meaningful appreciation on a regular basis. As it turns out, I need to apply that philosophy in my own home.
I've missed opportunities aplenty to show gratitude to my husband. (One opportunity in particular, after he'd spent days tiling our kitchen floor, still haunts me.) And what have I been teaching my son to expect from his future wife? Criticism and the expectation of unattainable perfection?
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