J and I often get some time together while Anna makes breakfast. This morning he was narrating some conflict at his school that he perceived as continuing into his summer camp, even though to my knowledge summer camp is a completely different group of kids.
"...and then I thought, I'm going to get those kids. I'm going to use those two aikido techniques on them."
"Well, aikido is really for when people physically attack us. For everything else, we use talking."
"I made them up, so they're not real aikido techniques."
"Even so, we use talking."
J growled and stuffed his head inside the pillowcase.
"I'm sticking my head in the pillow so I can't hear you saying things that try to make me use talking."
"Aw, kiddo. I just want you to live in peace with everybody else."
"Grrrrrr!"
Anna called him to the table for breakfast.
"Grrr, I'm so mad about what you said, I don't think I can eat breakfast."
"Do you remember what I said?"
"No."
"So does it really matter?"
"No!"
He gets up to go to the table.
"You don't own me, you don't get to decide what's important to me."
"That's absolutely true."
It's amazing what happens when you raise kids to communicate. It shouldn't be surprising when that's what they do, but it sort of is.
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It's good that he's communicating with you, and I honestly understand his frustration about communicating with the kids that are harassing him. Kids can be cruel, and sometimes talking doesn't help, but it's certainly better than turning the conflict physical. Good luck!
ReplyDeleteWell, one of the things about J is that he can wildly misinterpret what other kids are doing, and he will stick hard to his misinterpretation. So he'll start to get upset if he thinks some kids are staring at him, or if he feels they're in our space in line at the roller coaster and that obviously means they're coming over to cause trouble, and so on. He does have problems sometimes with kids picking on him or purposefully winding him up, but it's usually pretty complex and Anna has to sit and unpack the actual events and then compare to what he thinks happened.
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