Sometimes wonder if we have lost the ability to have a good laugh. One of my most favorite things to do is to make people laugh, but there have certainly been times in my life where there isn’t much laughter going on in my world.
The thing is, life can get pretty serious and we get on the hamster wheel of parenting, working, living and we forget to have fun along the way. Having kids has certainly taught me to have more fun, but having kids has also made me feel as repetitive and annoying as a Kylie Minogue song on repeat.
“Don’t throw your clothes on the floor next to the clothes basket. Stop picking your nose. Don’t pee in the backyard. Stop hitting each other. Close the fridge. Can I just go to the toilet in peace? Stop running. Don’t fart at the dinner table! If you hurry up and have your shower, yes, we can watch guinea pig videos on YouTube. Yes, girls have a vagina and boys have a penis.”
Sigh. Insert sad country song, start feeling sorry for myself wondering how I can go from high-level discussions as a business owner and semi-intelligent woman to talking about why you should stop sniffing your brother’s butt. WTH? You will get ‘pink eye’ is my usual finish to that sentence.
So the other day, I tried something new.
I started behaving and modelling my kid’s behavior to my kids. I threw my clothes on the floor. I picked my nose in front of them, I followed them into the toilet to ask them to get me something, I ran through the shops, I farted at the dinner table, and I peed in the backyard. Ok, maybe some of that is an exaggeration, but you get my point. I did everything I could to show them how they behave and then spoke to them about how they felt when I behaved that way.
It was a lot of fun for me finding my inner child, and there were a lot of laughs, and my kids’ faces were, ‘OMG! I can’t believe mum just did that’. But hey, they learnt, and it made me teach them in a way that was way more fun than I had done in the past. You see, kids don’t really learn well through logic. They learn much better through emotion, whether that be a bad emotion or a good emotion, according to researchers we learn and retain things 90 per cent better when there is emotion behind logic. For example, if a child drops a bowl of cereal on the floor, they don’t really get upset. Why? Because they aren’t emotionally attached to the cereal – they get it every day, and they will probably drop it again tomorrow no matter how much you tell them to be careful. However, if they drop a bowl of ice-cream that is a rare treat, they will lose their $&%T, even if logically you still have a full tub of ice cream on the bench to refill the bowl. Why? Because emotionally, they were so excited and happy to have that bowl in their hands. Will they drop the bowl of ice-cream again next time? I highly doubt it. It will be held onto like it’s glued to their little hands because they learnt the hard way.
So my dears, try and make your parenting fun by telling your kids stories and by teaching them lessons in a fun way that engages their emotions, and makes them feel and think at the same time. Let’s get that damn Kylie Minogue song off air for good.
