Sometimes life really does make me laugh. Little events perfectly coincide and the outcome is so ironic it smacks you in the face. This has literally just happened to me. We’ve had a challenging few days with an unusually very emotional/unhappy Rosie and whilst I’ve spent the last few hours of my life pondering whether my approach to her unhappiness is ok, or if my cold hearted, sometimes unsympathetic response is going to permanently damage her, I find myself singing as loud as I can (as I often do in the car) to the music playing in the background. All of a sudden the words ‘if it makes you happy, it can’t be that baaaaad, if it makes you happy, then why the hell are you so sad’. Yep, Sheryl Crow was randomly on the playlist and I was taken out of my deep overthinking and unconscious singing to hearing the words I was actually singing and it really made me laugh. Sometimes it can take something like that to bring you back down to earth and see things a bit more clearly.
I’m very lucky with Rosie, she has always been really consistent emotionally, we really haven’t had many times where she has needed additional emotional support, other than the day to day stuff that all children need. She seems to just take things on the chin and go with it. She has a natural, infectious little bounce about her that is totally endearing and it really makes me smile (of course, I’m her Mummy, so I’m bound to be totally bowled over by this, she is my little ray of sunshine!) and anyone reading this who actually knows Rosie, may not see her in the same way, but that’s ok. Lydia, is so totally different to this (and a whole new blog) but that’s also ok, she’s like a little rollercoaster, it’s part of what makes her, her.
I could and have made all the excuses I have to explain Rosie’s unhappiness and all of them are totally legitimate. Daddy has been away, she has had chicken pox, 4 weeks off school and last week everything returned to normal. By Friday she was exhausted and missing her Daddy. I can totally understand this and we counted down the sleeps until Daddy came home, we had extra hugs and lots of chilled out time at home. But she was still being really emotional. Now, this is the bit that some may think is a bit cold hearted- I totally get why people would think that and this is the bit that has got me thinking.
Rosie had had an emotional day at school and had lots of extra cuddles and care thrown her way by her amazing, tentative, caring teachers. When I collected her I asked her why she was sad and she said ‘I don’t know, I just missed you’. I said, ‘that’s ok, you know Mummy will always come and collect you at the end of the day, so you don’t need to be sad’. She then continued to have numerous break downs at the most random times, one because Daddy gave her milk in her Snow White cup and she was fed up of having it in her Snow White cup. Then, when she went to her stage school class (which she loves) and the final straw was when we were going to a party. We got out of the car and she burst into tears, I gave her a hug and asked her what was wrong. She said she didn’t know. She was then clinging onto my legs and I couldn’t move. So I bent down and looked at her, hugged her and said ‘you have 3 choices, A) tell me what’s wrong and I will fix it, Mummy will fix anything she can. B) stop crying and enjoy the party. C) we can just go home (She chose option B).
I got to the stage where I thought at what point does she think ‘if I cry now, I’ll get lots of attention, I’ll get what I want, people will be extra kind to me’. I don’t think that’s a good lesson and I don’t want this to become a habit that she is in total control of. I can understand how to a 4 year old it’s very easy to think if I’m sad, people will do all they can to make me happy, I’ll get much more attention than I do when I’m really happy and just getting on with life. But this isn’t the way I want her to think, this isn’t a lesson I want her to learn. To the mature thinker we can all see that living a happy life and navigating our way through with a positive outlook is much more preferable than having to deal with negative emotion, and that the attention and reward we get from being happy and getting on with it is actually a lot more meaningful than the bargaining rewards we get if we don’t cry every ten minutes for no reason. She isn’t old enough or mature enough to understand that.
So after her amazing scrap book writing, her perfect reading and her best violin practice to date, I stood on my soap box and said to her. ‘Isn’t the world a wonderful place when we do things the best way we can, when we are happy that we’ve tried our best and when we are just happy to be able to do these things. Aren’t things just so much better when we don’t feel sad, but when we have a great big smile on our face and feel all warm inside’. At this point Rich (Daddy) said, wow Mummy is a motivational speaker’. Rosie laughed at this and said I was great (I think she was just humouring me, but I’ll take it!).
I’ve been dreading school drop off all weekend and when we got in the car I asked Rosie if she was going to have a happy day and said if you have a really happy day maybe you’ll get a little treat. She asked for a lollipop, which I have duly gone and bought for her in the hope we have overcome the emotion and do in fact have a genuinely happy day, like most of the other days in her little life.
I’ve never rewarded Rosie for being happy, I’ve only ever rewarded her for not doing something negative. Or for displaying certain positive behaviour and I’ve realised that I should reward her for her natural happiness. I want her to know that being a little ray of sunshine has a far greater impact on the way she sees her world and the effect she has on others than feeling sad and not knowing why she’s sad. I’ve taken her happiness for granted and won’t do this any longer.
As a society we are driven to reward positive behaviour as a direct result of not displaying negative behaviour, or for achieving something great. When the positive behaviour is a natural occurrence and is something that just happens it can often be overlooked. I’m not saying that happiness should be rewarded with treats, toys or anything materialist, but I am saying it should be acknowledged, appreciated and nurtured as much as we acknowledge times when a battle over negative behaviour has been won. They say you should ignore the negative and reinforce the positive, which in principal is great, but is not always practical. Without addressing the negative the positive can get lost in translation. Sometimes you don’t even realise that something is so positive until you’ve seen the negative opposite. I have everything crossed that when I collect my little ray of sunshine from school, she will come bouncing over to me like she usually does and these last few days will be nothing more than a valuable lesson for both of us.
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