I have a confession to make. I’ve got some whiney little boys right now.
I mean no disrespect by telling you that. It’s just the truth.
And it’s been surprising to me. “Thanks” to gender stereotypes, and based on a little of my own personal experience, it’s the exact opposite of what I expected before boys entered the picture.
Let me explain.
I grew up in a family FULL OF GIRLS.
My poor father.
By the time my sister and I graduated from high school, he could critique the technique of a ballerina, identify the steps she was performing using their french name, and sew ribbons on point shoes.
He could also french braid hair.
He endured countless fashion shows when mom and I returned from long days of clothes shopping at the beginning of every season.
And the number of “concerts” he filmed with the VHS camera we got when I was about 8?
Too numerous to begin counting.
(That camera was so big, mom had to lug it around in a carry-on bag. As I think about that now, there’s some serious blackmail laying around my parents’ house….)
But my dad’s moto?
If you can’t beat ’em, join em!
Yes, our lifestyle, interests, and activities fell right in line with the stereotypes for little girls. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Because we also grew up in a home with parents who never told us there was something we couldn’t do because we were girls.
If we’d wanted to play soccer or basketball, they’d have let us.
We just didn’t want to.
We spent our lives upside down, twirling, and on the stage, and that suited us just fine. But because our parents were so supportive of our dreams and aspirations, my sister, Lindsay, and I both grew up to be strong, driven, ambitious women.
It worked for our family.
So having zero experience with little boys, when I found out I was having one, I looked at our doctor like he had three eyes.
What was I going to do with one of those?
I assumed he would be the exact opposite of my sister and me. He would love snips and snails and puppy dog tails because, that is after all, what little boys are made of, right?
He would throw everything that came into contact with his hands.
He would live in the dirt.
And he would seek out all the adventures of life.
But our boys are not all that adventurous. At least not now. On a recent trip to Silver Dollar City, they road three rides, combined.
They LOATHE bugs.
Dirt on their hands is like death to them.
And the drama?
Wow.
They are so dramatic right now.
Our daughter defies gender stereotypes in just about every way too. (There’s a little bit of drama but it’s never been to the level of what we experience with the boys.)
This is one of the reasons I love having both boys and girls.
God is teaching me so much about His unique design for each of us through each of them. As a result, life is never dull. It keeps us on our toes!
But back to the whining. (Which is why I started this post to begin with.)
It’s gotten really out of hand.
And I’m learning that whining isn’t something we have to teach. Our kids just know how to do it. Instinctively.
I’m also learning that when whining becomes persistent, it tells me two things.
- We’ve created a conditioned response, which means we’ve been giving in to whining when we probably shouldn’t be; and
- Our kids are struggling with contentment
Trouble-shooting the first issue is really easy. It’s just a matter of our self-control as parents. Because Kory and I have found that when we move to the “no whining zone,” where whiners are sent to their rooms to whine in private, and where whining reaps no rewards, it will generally stop altogether in a few days time.
But how do we address the second issue?
Teaching contentment (which is really an expression of thankfulness) is a much more daunting task.
Several years ago, though, I was in therapy, working through some pretty difficult issues. And my therapist, realizing that I, too, was struggling in the area of contentment, gave me an exercise. He told me to begin every day making a list of things I could be thankful for. That didn’t seem so tough when he gave me the assignment. But when I went home to tackle it, I really struggled. Because I was so bogged down by the things that were wrong with my life, I couldn’t begin to see all the things that were so very right.
On day one, I could only come up with one thing.
One. Thing.
Can you imagine that?
I lived in the place of “one thing” for several days.
But because I had shifted my focus from what was wrong to what was right, slowly, and I mean very slowly, my list began to grow. Before I knew it, my hand couldn’t keep up with my mind as I wrote my thankful list each day. And while this certainly didn’t solve my problems, it did help me cope with them. Because the world didn’t seem so off-center to me anymore.
So recently, I decided to try this with my boys.
Instead of sending them to their rooms to whine in private, I gave them an exercise. I told them to go to their rooms, stop whining, and think of five things they were thankful for. When they had a list of things to share with me, I told them they could come back down and share them in a non-whiney voice.
Just like the thankful list worked for me, it worked for them too. Because it took their minds off their scarcity and put their minds on their abundance. I was amazed at the change in their demeanor. But it shouldn’t have surprised me. Because when we focus on our abundance, it’s pretty hard to whine!
What do you do to help yourself or your children move from a mindset of scarcity to a mindset of abundance? How do you move from discontentment to thanksgiving?
The post How We’re Turning Whiney Children Into Thankful Children appeared first on Confessions of a Pastor's Family.