Last weekend we had a friend of ours visiting from out of town. He has been a good friend of my husband for over 10 years and gets along great with the kids. Baby girl thinks he’s pretty funny and as is true with most people, she loves talking to him, which is fine by us.
Except, there are those times when the adults get to talking and are so heavily involved in their conversation that it’s hard to let the kids participate. When you’re friends with someone for over 10 years, this can be especially true, since you have plenty of memories and inside jokes. You can imagine there were a couple of instances where this happened while our friend was visiting.
The first night our friend visited, as I tucked baby girl into bed, she said, “Mommy, when people visit us or we visit them, I don’t really get to talk a lot.” I responded by reminding her that she did talk quite a bit and that she even played a game with our friend and read a book. I proceeded to tell her that when her dad and I were her age, things were worse. “We weren’t allowed to just come up and talk to the adults like you do. If they talked to us, then we’d respond, but it wasn’t like we just started conversations with them on our own. At least you get to do that!”
This was probably the worst thing I could have said at that moment because she started to cry saying, “That’s just not fair mommy!” I quickly told her that’s just the way it was and those were the rules, but that it’s not her rule. This didn’t help as she continued to cry repeating it wasn’t fair. I finally calmed her down by telling her it was a long time ago and that her daddy and I were over it, so she didn’t have to worry about it.
I left her room laughing, which was the same reaction my husband and our visitor had. It’s funny that even though she’s able to interact with adults in a manner significantly different to how my husband and I did as kids, she found it unnerving we couldn’t.
What is something from your childhood your children found surprising?
Photo by Catherine
My kids can’t quite understand the concept of waiting for something to rewind or fast forward, (even though we still used a cassette player and VCR in their younger years.)
As for your girl wanting to participate in adult conversations – we’ve had the same “problem” with my older son especially. He will jump into any conversation regardless of the topic or people involved and he see’s absolutely nothing wrong with it.
Carlos was definitely raised with the older notion that kids don’t belong in adult conversations and he would tell our son he was being rude. Our older son just didn’t understand it – why was it rude? He was just participating along with everyone else. LOL.
We had to find a balance and at 13 years old now, our son is very mature and can talk politics, economics, current events, or any number of things on a very adult level, (better than some adults probably! LOL.)