When it comes to Honoring the Light in Everyone, I’m caught somewhere between “let’s make flower crowns” and “Mr. Brocklehurst during the typhus epidemic.” I want my children to know both that they’re exquisitely valued AND that the world doesn’t owe them $275 electric tractors with radios or Sequin Elsa Cowboy Boots in Frozen Blue.
When does being generous become spoiling? When does adjusting to a child’s needs and quirks become coddling? The only answers to these questions of course are drifting somewhere in the rank and gelatinous Gray Area Soup we all dog-paddle around in, and they shift from day to day or moment to moment.
But I’d like to get a handle on at least a few threads here, both so that I can get on with my cat-herding operation with my kids and so that I can decide whether I should be allowed to hide under a large fleece and eat Cabot Seriously Sharp Cheddar for more than twenty minutes at a time.
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When one of the teachers at my children’s preschool (back yard with sandbox, straw bales, & bumpy slide / indoor room with beanbag, dress-up scarves, & blocks) suggested that we might get an evaluation for my son to see if an IEP might be helpful— for both his ease of navigation through his thoughts/emotions/behaviors and the teachers’ access to him in caring for and supporting his growth—I felt like I’d just shat myself at the grocery store. I’ve always been so very careful to fit myself to the system, not to cause any alarm or stir or require a change of course from anyone (see meme about best pedestrian ever), and here my kid was biting holes in sweaters and beanbags and had easily broken the whole preschool’s lunch system in his first week. It made me feel I had failed everyone— him, myself, the teachers, the system, the world… plus I’d singlehandedly caused climate change.
Such was my shame response to the idea that a person might require something of the world around them in order to thrive.
But here’s the rub: