For the record - he is generally saying this when I am doing 60 or under. You know, the speed limit.
Today we had Rio over for an hour, and it is getting kinda fascinating watching those two interact.
We have been doing an advent calendar with Atti and this morning he got a little rubik's cube. He has also found his Dad's mini cube, so he had two of them, and, not strangely, Rio wanted to play with one of them. She was asking him to share, and I was backing her up. Well he took off to his room and hid them (badly).
I was interested in this, because I have always said that kids should be able to nominate some of their toys as things they don't want to share. In our case I intend on claiming that there are some toys that are in fact mine, and they are public goods. And that if you have friends over to play it is plain rude to then not share your stuff with them. That having been said, he can choose to put some things that he feels are precious away before the playdate. You can't have anything out that you won't share.
We have some versions of these kinds of rules in play now. Rio is not allowed to bring down any toys she won't share. When Atti is up there she has to put away non-share toys before he comes. And he is allowed to play with certain things we have deemed off limits. When friends come to play we insist on taking turns on anything another kid wants. If you won't share, you will be put on the stool to sit until you are ready to apologise and share. Or more likely end up in other room with Mummy have a cry and a talk about friends and sharing.
I was surprised that he is already getting the idea that he can put some things away and not have to share them. I ended up taking them off them both and putting them away and then getting out some other toys for them.
It got funnier because Rio was then working a whole bunch of angles to try to get hold of one of those cubes. I was amusing myself in the conversations we were having about it, but you know, there was also some education going on.
She kept referring to the cubes as 'ours'. I kept correcting her that they were Atti's. Eventually she was asking why they didn't belong to them both. I said why should they. She, all of 5, tried a 'communal property' argument on me. I said fine, so long as it also applied to everything in her flat. She tried pretty hard to come up with decent reasons why she should have rights over Atti's toys, without vice versa. It was an interesting morning. Then, thankfully, she went off to school.
I was then thinking about the fact that 5 year olds are annoying - they are such entitled brats. And it occurred to me that, yeah, they are, because that is what being 5 is really. This kid is NOT spoilt. She is being given a hard core grounding in manners and consideration and community and all the stuff you want to see in young kids. She is actually very considerate and polite. I have a couple of other kids that age I spend time with and I frequently come away thinking 'wow Rio is a bloody good kid'. But she is still an entitled brat. Because that is 5.
But here's the thing. The only reason it is so annoying is because you spend so much of the rest of your life surrounded by entitled brats. The amount of people these days who never seemed to outgrow that stage is staggering. And so it can be really hard to remember that she isn't actually a brat, she is 5 and at a normal developmental stage. Take any rage out on the non-5-year-old brats, not on the one who is actually age appropriate.
But I have to say, listening to the two of them invent and sing, loudly and lustily a song over dinner (the lyrics of which appeared to be "boat boat boat boat boat (then repeat)" was hilarious. They so adore each other. All the good bits of siblings…. not none of the bad, but a limit to the bad bits. Awesome-sauce.
I love my communal living situation.
No comments:
Post a Comment