I'm feeling philosophical today--contemplating the way we experience our interaction with others and how our views shape our behavior. Specifically, what are the implications of seeing other people, including children, as fully human, beings whose emotions and experience of life stand on equal footing with our own in their relevance and importance?
When my five year old daughter, I will call her Honeybee, is nagging and whining because she wants me to help her make pancakes, it is easy to dismiss her wants and concerns--they seem childish, unimportant, her intrusion interrupts my activities. If I view them this way, I am placing her personhood on a level below my own--my wants and needs, my experience of life, are more real and more important to me than hers. This does not of course mean that our needs, feelings, and desires should be ignored in favor of the needs of others. It does mean that in my interractions with others, including my children, I need to weigh their experience of life in equal measure with my own.
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I try really hard to rememver that when the boys are having a meltdown. Just because they are having a hard time exrpressing thier feelings doesn't mean they are wrong. I want the boys to know that their feelings are important no matter what they are. My job is to teach them how to express them in a way that works for both of us.
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