New philosophy

Here's my new parenting philosophy: quit trying to teach them stuff, and just have fun.

No, not really. But sort of.

I mentioned in my last post that I often overestimate Isaac's level of understanding and abilities, and in fact my overly high expectations of him are often something I regret at the end of the day. This new philosophy is related to this regret.

Also, it's related to sports. Isaac took a soccer class last summer, and fairly recently, many months after the despised class had ended, he said to me, "If you don't learn it now, Mama, pretty soon you'll be the only one who doesn't know how, and you'll never catch up." (I don't remember what he was lecturing me about, unfortunately!)

Isn't that a destructive way to try to motivate someone? I am so ashamed that he learned it from me. As I blogged while his soccer class was going on, Isn't he going to be left behind because his fellow upper-middle-class suburban classmates all joined a swim club or learned lacrosse in infancy? At the time I tried to tell myself I was kidding, but apparently I was not. And Isaac knew it.

Why do I have such an unhealthy attitude about sports? I hated playing sports in school; I wasn't particularly good at them, and worse, I didn't understand them. Perhaps I want Isaac to avoid a similar fate by gaining athletic experience early on.

Yesterday, for one of the first times in his entire life, Isaac wanted to play sports in our yard. First we played with the golf set his paternal grandparents gave him several years ago; then after he suspected I was winning at golf*, he wanted to play with a whiffle ball bat. I rigged up a T-ball setup, and we took turns hitting and fielding. It was fun, except that Isaac wanted to boast about dominating every aspect of play, and I wanted to teach him to be a good sport. For instance, when I let him reach the ball before me, he crowed, "I'm faster than you, Mama!" I crushed his imaginary fun by pointing out that I, the adult, was naturally much faster.

But worse than this, I became obsessed with teaching him to catch. If you know me, you are probably laughing at me. There is no one in the world who hates catching more than me; I positively recoil whenever someone throws something my way. So of course I want Isaac to learn to catch properly! You should have seen me throwing the Nerf ball at his chest over and over, trying to demonstrate that it didn't hurt. It was nearly sadism.

So I was surprised when Isaac said he wanted to "play T-ball" again today, but I was also grateful for the second chance. I shelved all my stupid pedagogical strategies and decided to just make him happy. So we played his version of T-ball: he got to bat 90% of the time, there was absolutely no catching, and in the race to see who could field the ball first, he always won. There was lots of bumbling and cheering on my part.

Then he suggested a version of golf in which one player tries to keep his opponent's ball from being sunk. I said it sounded more like polo, or maybe hockey. Here are the rules: the shorter player has a plastic golf club and the taller player has a plastic wiffle ball bat; only these implements may touch the ball. One player tries to hit a plastic golf ball into a plastic one-gallon plant pot tipped on its side, and the other player tries to prevent it. If the lawn is on the long side, the game will require an abundance of choppy strokes; expect to get hit in the ankle with a plastic golf club quite frequently. There are no fouls.

It was a game almost entirely of Isaac's invention and we had a wonderful time playing it together. It was so fun, especially in contrast with the day before, that it became the inspiration for my new philosophy.

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*I got a hole-in-two yesterday! It was amazing! From way across the yard, using a whiffle ball bat as a club! Isaac's face fell when he saw me do it, but I made him congratulate me anyway. Poor kid.

On the other hand, when we were playing golf-hockey today, he was the only one who actually sank a goal, so he got his share of accolades.