On Being Social

Every parent has those eerie moments where you see yourself in your children. Not just in subtle physical features, but in behaviors that bring back memories of your own childhood. Recently, Kaia has been reluctant to go to Kids Central, the simple mention of “Kids C” will usually spin off into a “bye-bye Kids C” mantra. It all started a few weeks ago when there was an event with the older children at the school and some kids were wearing masks that really frightened him. According to one of his teachers, when he saw the mask-wearing kids, he tried—as quickly as possible—to climb up on her head, much like a frightened cat. Ever since that day, he’s been waving it off from breakfast time until we get there. When I drop him off now, it is accompanied by much clinging and he’ll reach out to me crying as the teacher takes him off to class. It is never easy to have to deny your child when they are reaching out for you like that.

The funny thing is, and this is where the memories come back, is that he ALWAYS has a good time and is saying “Kids C is fun!” when I pick him up. It is a combination of being happy to see me and what he did, but recently he’s been also saying, “Kaia was crying” almost as if to ask himself what the problem was. Now this behavior is something that I can remember whenever my mom would force me to go to things that I really didn’t want to go to. I can remember birthday parties, summer camps, soccer practices, (especially) church, you name it—that I really didn’t want to go to and protesting hard not to. As an introverted person, social gatherings are not something that I seek out, I am very much unlike my mother in this regard. Anyway, those times that I took the step and ventured out, I would say that 75% of the time I had the equivalent “Kids C is fun!” experience, 5% if you looked just at church;) So I can empathize with Kaia’s pleads to ‘go home’ and ‘play with papa’ because those were places and spaces that I longed for rather than mingling with strangers. What I am already struggling with is just when I should heed his pleas and not make him go to something. The Kids Central call is a relatively easy one, but with other stuff it gets a bit more difficult. We shall see.

Why I Love this Time: The use of complete sentences is becoming much more frequent—and (on the opposite end of the grammatical spectrum) for the first time yesterday, he started to say ‘yeah’ instead of ‘yes’. I’d love to reclaim his resounding, formal “yes!” but hearing his first bits of slang is awfully cute.