It's All in the Attitude

In a recent artcle in the Hearts at Home Magazine, Holly Schurter lists some of the attitudes that are prevalent in our kids.

In Infancy: "It's all about me, me, me."
In Toddlerhood: "What's mine is mine. What's yours is mine too."
In Preschool: "What my mom doesn't know won't hurt her."
In Gradeschool: "My teacher knows a lot more than mom does. So do my friends."

Her article is about teenagers and how they can display all of the above attitudes. While I can't speak from personal experience about teenagers or gradeschoolers. The other three are very real to me right now. The Infancy and Toddlerhood attitudes came as no surprise - I knew to expect those and have had a lot of experience dealing with them to date. The preschool attitude she listed finally put words to the attitude I am noticing in my oldest!

Let me give an example:

Last Saturday morning our kids were up earlier than their parents wanted them to be (surprise, surprise). Being the attentive parent I am, I heard them go downstairs and heard them banging around, but didn't actually get up to check on them until I heard the eerie silence. I shuffled downstairs to find half eaten ice cream bars sitting on the table, two boys with chocolate all over their faces playing sweetly with their blocks, and one little girl trying to finish her ice cream in the kitchen.

"What are you doing?" I asked (although I didn't really need to hear an answer to know). My daughter quickly replied "I wanted to finish this before you found me!"

Allow me to share one more example with you. When asking my daughter from another room what she is doing, the answer I am starting to get more frequently is "I don't want to tell you." This is never a good thing to hear, but at least she is being honest!

It will be interesting to see how the "What my mom doesn't know won't hurt her" attitude will continue to manifest itself in the coming months. For now, I am just thankful she still thinks I'm smarter than her!