Old dog, new tricks

There’s no better place to watch the mechanics of change happening than in kids.

They say “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks” (which, incidentally, is nonsense) and I suppose the corollary of that is that the young pups are constantly evolving.

Not just in the domain of skills, but also in the domain of behaviour.

As any parent will confirm.

Where it gets really interesting is when you realise you’ve got a little Zen master living with you, though at times I’ll grant it may not look like that.

(Zen’s not about sitting around quietly, BTW.)

“What, the curtains?”

For a time, Croftus Minimus set some very clear boundaries around the living room curtains and TV watching.

What surely started as a perfectly reasonable shutting out of low, late-afternoon sun rays bouncing off the screen, quickly became a rigid, non-negotiable rule: the curtains must be closed whenever I am in residence in front of the gogglebox.

And, as any parent will confirm, when rigid, non-negotiable rules created by little people get alluded to, discussed, challenged or in any way negotiated—however gently, lovingly, or reasonably—there’s pushback.

(And when I say “pushback,” I mean total and utter meltdowns with tears and screaming.)

😩

It was quite the thing, for a while. Whatever the weather, whatever the time of day, the living room (a shared space we traverse, on the way to the kitchen) had to be in total darkness whenever she was in there.

Non-negotiable.

This scenario was all made worse by the fact that these are big long curtains she couldn’t close herself, so we were made complicit in the behaviour each time, consigning ourselves to a life of darkness by turning the living room into one third of the household’s private cinema 🤨

I gotta say, neither of the remaining two-thirds of the household enjoyed this state of affairs one bit, and we tried lots of different ways of tackling this; trying to change the behaviour.

Utterly fruitless. Nearly broke us.

A change of script

Let’s be clear what’s going on here.