My son, who is almost 12, is more inclined to activities like reading, the Internet, Wii (his newest passion) and less inclined to sports. We do encourage him to swim and run at times and only push it hard when he has been especially LUMPY ON THE COUCH.
On Saturday of last weekend, I mentioned to him that there was a short run race on Sunday afternoon through a local park that might interest him. He didn’t seem too interested and I assumed I wouldn’t hear any more about it. Sunday came around and I had built my own internal To-Do list. Taking my son to Overton Park for a run was not one of them. Working on my start-up and some other “David Centric” tasks were.
So I was a bit surprised just after lunch (not much time to get ready) when he announced “Dad, I think I would like to go to that race today”. Since running IS one of my favorite activities, my spouse gave me the “this is your department” look.
This is one those times as a parent when you have to make trade-offs between things YOU want or need to do and something YOUR CHILD wants or needs to do. That happens all the time of course. But, when it is one of those occasions where your child has made a choice or request that demonstrates progress towards a desired change in behavior, it adds additional importance to the decision. In other words, be very careful about saying “no” to these types of requests. Showing that you can make sacrifices in support of them can really make a difference in continued progress toward a goal. “Sure, let’s go run – we both can use the exercise.”
In the end, I didn’t get as much checked off of MY LIST, but my son and I had a great time running together. We even signed up for a few more of the runs. Now we have to practice a little bit more – which is fine with me, especially if he is the one getting us out the door.
March 18, 2008 at 8:28 pm
Very well said David! I cannot agree more as I have had a few of the similar incidents with my daughter (just 3 years old) who is really good at teaching me back what ever I thought her. Just as an example, my daughter goes to bed around 9PM and every day I have to push into the bed room. Some times when I am busy with my work and forget about it, she yells from down stairs that it is time (because my wife said so) for her to go to bed. I almost all the times try to break away from what ever I am doing just to reinforce the proper behavior on her part.
Uday