As a mother, I’ve learned that I have to be an extremely quick thinker and problem solver. Sometimes I’m good at this, but if it kicks into my emotions (like fear or frustration) then I can end up making the problem worse with my reaction.
Last week, I had one of these situations but I think I reacted well and wish I could do this more often. The girls were playing very nicely out back and I had been enjoying this peace for about 15 minutes when all of the sudden, Peyton runs in screaming. Usually, this indicates a fight…a hit, a push, a mean name, etc. But I quickly realized this was a hurt-type cry. She said…or screamed…”Jordyn got it in my eye!!!”. When I looked at her eye and saw bright orange, I immediately realized that they had tried to use the bright orange nail polish as eye-shadow. Oh man, not good. Pey was in pain!
Jordyn ran in after her and I had no idea what to say to her, I needed to help Peyton…and I didn’t want to hear Jordyn’s whole back story as to why this happened and why it wasn’t “her fault”. So I just said “Go to your room until I can talk to you”. Of course she ran off crying and stayed in her room crying. I think she felt bad that Pey was hurt…and that I might be mad.
So I flushed Peyton’s eye out with milk (a trick I learned young from the Clark’s – thanks!) and got her settled and calmed down. Poor kid’s eyes were red the rest of the day, but they were okay.
And then I had to decide how to handle this with Jordyn. My initial knee-jerk reaction was to say “You are NINE years old, you know better than this!!!”. But she wouldn’t have heard me, she would have ONLY heard the criticism. So I had to tuck that away and reach for a more teaching response.
So I got online, found a little paragraph about the dangers of nail polish in the eye and printed it off. I brought it into her room and explained to her that this was an important learning moment. Even though it was common sense to me, I had to remember that to a 9 year old, it probably sounded like a fun idea in the moment when Peyton asked for orange eye shadow…not understanding the dangers. I went on to tell her that this type of learning is important to become a great babysitter in a few years. Maybe someday she’ll babysit some kids who want to do the same thing and now she’ll know to catch it and stop it before someone gets hurt.
So I handed her the print-out and told her I needed her to read it and re-write it on a separate piece of paper, sign it and bring it to me.
I was proud of myself for keeping my cool and when she brought out the paper to me, all finished, I felt like she really learned from her experience and not from me nagging and yelling about it.
Now if I can only apply this reaction to the other 99.9% of situations…
