As a parent, you spend your whole life drawing lines and making rules for your child and for yourself. How far do I go? How far do I let him go? Some of the lines are very serious and must be enforced (You must hold a grown-ups hand when you are walking in a parking lot because you are too short and the drivers can’t see you). And then there are those like last night.
I bought Junior a 100 piece Power Rangers puzzle last night. I thought it would be good for the old noggin after 5 straight years of cartoons. (Okay, only a slight exaggeration) Now a 100 piece puzzle for a 5-year-old is actually a tricky thing, and in our case, he is still building the skills that allow him to look at the picture on the box and match what he sees on the individual pieces to that picture.
It’s a total exercise in frustration for me. I’ll admit it. It’s one of the few things that drives me buggy. We try to do the outside edge first, like good Americans, and I clench my fists every time I have to repeat “No, you need a piece that’s straight on one side”. We worked on the puzzle for quite a while – eventually his interest lagged and I didn’t want to force him to stay there and finish the danged puzzle. What kind of freak would that make me? And I didn’t want to do the puzzle for him. That’s the line I’m talking about. How much should I help him, and at what point is it no longer help? As a toddler, he was notorious for saying “you do it” for everything. And sometimes it’s just easier to say “here, let me finish that so we can get on with our lives”. But I want him to learn how to do a puzzle.
Maybe we’ll finish it tonight.
