Kids have a lot to learn about life.
To be fair, even adults keep learning (or are supposed to) until the day they die but kids have a lot of catching up to do. After all, they came into this world knowing practically nothing about it and have to rely on their parents and personal experiences in order to fill in those gaps.
We’ve all been kids once so we know what that’s like. But it’s not just the intellectual stuff that needs to be learned but the emotional and physical ones, as well. Moving around in a body that’s constantly growing can be an awkward experience.
Because we’re talking about learning something, this often involves making mistakes. This is why it’s important for parents to take this into account because not all mishaps are caused by children being naughty or wanting to cause havoc.
And a mom named Rosie Lamphere showed how her unexpected response not only allowed her daughter to learn a valuable lesson about her mistake without shaming her but also won her praise across the Internet for how she handled it.
It all started when her daughter suddenly ran down the stairs to tell her that she had accidentally put a hole in the whole while she was playing with her sister. The 9-year-old was devastated because she knew she did something wrong, was very contrite, and was dreading the fact that her dad was going to get angry.
“Daddy is going to be so mad!!! I’m not ready to tell him yet,” the little girl said.
Instead of going ballistic herself, Rosie paused and assessed the situation. That’s when she came upon a novel approach to teach her daughter an important lesson without traumatizing her in the process.
First, she approached her husband and told him what happened. She said they could either yell and get angry and make their daughter feel worse or simply accept that she made a mistake that she’s sorry for and take it for what it was.
In the end, she did eventually apologize to her dad and even better, she has learned to trust her parents more because she knows that they’re not going to instinctively snap if she makes a mistake.
Rosie shared her story on her parenting blog Play at Home Mom and social media just exploded with likes and positive reactions. So far, the story has gotten 218k reactions and more than 249k shares. And it even got parents sharing ideas about what it means to discipline one’s kids.
“My daughter took 10 minutes to live up the courage to tell her dad about it,” Rosie, from Raleigh, North Carolina, said. “She wanted to write him a note. We all had a good laugh.”
“We would love to have people join us in our book club,” the mom added. “We are reading The Power of Showing Up: How Parental Presence Shapes Who Our Kids Become and How Their Brains Get Wired by Dan Siegel and Tina Bryson.”
“A quote from the book that actually ties in very nicely to our original post: ‘Kids should know, at their core, that when they are hurting, and even when they’re at their worst, we will be there. We have to let them learn that with life comes pain, but that lesson should be accompanied by the deep awareness that they’ll never have to suffer alone.’”
Replaced!