All day long, since he got home from school, he’s been raising his voice, letting it hang up there in the whine-range, and it’s grating and annoying and maddening, and his daddy and I say it over and over so it plays like a broken record, “Please speak in an honoring tone,” but he’s having a hard time still, even with all these constant reminders.
And some days we just have to let it be.
Because we know the truth of it, how all those pressures can keep mounting and those disappointments can keep piling and those expectations can keep crumbling, and before we know it, we’re stuck there at the bottom of a negativity pit, all of us, and we can’t even see to climb our way back out.
Sometimes believing in who our children are created to be means accepting who they choose to be, right here, this moment, knowing that one moment or a few moments or a whole bad day or fifty of them does not define who they are.
This boy, he is not a negative boy, defined by the dark clouds that follow him today. He is a boy who sees light in everything, who feels wonder at the world’s mysteries, who explores the possibility living in all things. He is curious and marvelous and magnificent.
“Remember that children are not miniature adults,” says Susan Stiffelman, a family therapist, parent coach and author. “They are reasonably new inhabitants of the planet, programmed to discover all they can about the world around them…rather than seeing your boys as misbehaving, recognize how healthy it is that they are so engaged with life!”
She is talking about how boys are constantly on the move and how it can annoy and frustrate those of us who just want them to sit still, but I hear it for everything, because we parents can too often hold up that bar of unrealistic expectation for our children, the bar that demands perfect behavior and perfect sitting still and perfect peace and quiet.
[Tweet “Everyone dies under the bar of perfection. So let’s tear it down.”]
Maybe we turn, instead, toward accepting, believing that our children are more than just what they do today—because they are.
It’s not an easy turn, when they are running wild and flipping over couches and talking in a roar, when it’s all I can do to keep from demanding that silent sit-still so I can hear myself think, just for a minute, please. But this is nature. It’s how they’re made. It’s unique and wonderful and wild and heart-stopping and life-giving and exhausting and beautiful and true.
Turning our hearts begins with the turning of our mind, so we see the way they stand on their heads during story time not as disobedience but as necessary to their listening; so we see that standing on a chair during dinner, after all those times we’ve told him to sit down and he forgets, not as blatant defiance but as necessary for his always-fidgety legs; so we see their hand taps and then their foot taps and their bottom wiggles during phonics lessons not as rebellion but as necessary to their learning.
Our children are more than what they do. May we be the first ones to believe it.
This is an excerpt from the Family on Purpose April: We Believe in Jesus. In Ourselves. In Each Other. To find out more about the Family on Purpose series, visit the project landing page.
