This entry was posted on Thursday, April 30th, 2009 at 5:06 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
An interesting development has been taking place with my daughter, and has caught me off guard a bit. She’s becoming cocky. While I am completely in the dark and totally baffled as to where she may have picked up this despicable behavior, I am determined to nip it in the bud. No one likes an arrogant kid. Except, of course, me.
In all seriousness, this is not something I had ever even considered when my wife gave birth to my daughter, and I am not completely sure how to deal with it. I am certain that it manifested itself with our desire to implant as much self-confidence as possible into her from a very young age. Say what you will about us as parents, but we have never knocked her down for anything she has attempted, and have always encouraged and praised the heck out of any behavior or ability from her that we considered to be positive. Examples? She belts out her favorite Clique Girlz (say a word, and I will flog you) song in the back seat of the car and we make her feel like she’s the next Lena Horne. She draws cool stuff like this and a second later you can bet she will consider herself to be right up there with Shepard Fairey. You know, that kind of thing. Great parenting, right?
Lately, though, she has begun to believe it a bit too much. As we were roaming leisurely through the supermarket the other day, an elderly lady looked at her and kindly stated “My lord, what an adorable little girl,” to which my daughter flatly replied “I know.” After I mentioned to her that I liked how she was adding vibrato and runs to her songs (enter: proud daddy) she waved me off with a casual “Yeah, I’m a really good singer.” Then, the icing on the cake, she came into the kitchen unprompted and exclaimed “Daddy, I am very beautiful. I am a princess!”
Uh Oh.
So what to do? I can honestly say I do not know how to teach modesty to a four-year-old. I certainly do not want to respond, particularly to her last statement, with “No way, you’re not!” or some such terrible thing. But I also am not certain she will grasp the overall concept of modesty and why it is important. For the time being I settled on “Heh heh. Ummmmm…..*cough*….Tory Holt left the Rams, that’s the last of the original super bowl team, can you believe it? Let’s have Spaghettios!” But I know I can’t keep avoiding the situation forever.
Quite a pickle, I must say,
-Matt
Guess who won the little BookSwim giveaway. Jessie Leigh from Parenting The Tiniest Of Miracles. She’s a fellow preemie parent, so I’m super happy to give the prize to her. Congratulations!
April 30th, 2009 at 6:30 pm
THREE posts in one week! Y’all are staying in a lot these days, aren’tcha?
Very good reference on my site today – for how to teach whatyouasked.
Nonetheless, it is typical for 4-year-olds to think they can do anything, and well.
(I personnally did self-perception testing on preschoolers for my dissertation research.)
So, the trick is to ease them into reality. You can do this, Matt.
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