Author — Denis Chizh
At the weekend I went for a walk with a friend of mine. They took her son with them to take him to a lesson in a section in a local recreation center during a walk. My son is 8 years old and lives with his mother. When someone else is in the field of attention of the mother, the son begins to act up, to draw attention to himself.
We ended up at the House of Culture an hour before the start of classes, after which an interesting dialogue between mother and son took place. At the same time, the mother remained calm all the time, although I sometimes wanted to apply inadequate educational measures to the child:
Girl: “Will you go for a walk with us further, and then we will bring you here again? Or will you wait for the class to start here, and we will take a walk without you?
Child (wearily): «I don’t want to go out.»
Girl: «Okay, then we’ll go for a walk with Denis, and you’ll be waiting for the start of classes here.»
Child (capriciously): «I don’t want to be alone, I’m bored alone!»
Girl: «Then let’s go, take a walk with us.»
Child (with beginning anger): «I told you, I’m tired!»
Girl: “Decide what you want more: walk with us or sit and relax here. We want to go for a walk, so we won’t sit here with you.”
Child (angrily): «I won’t let you go anywhere!»
Girl: «Okay, wait for the start of classes here, and we’ll go for a walk.»
Despite the ongoing emotional actions of the child, we left the recreation center and went for a walk. After 2 minutes, when we were on the other side of the square, my mother received a call from her son. He asked to give him money for slot machines so that he would have something to do while waiting.
Girl: “Okay, we have already moved away from the palace, we are standing on the other side of the square, come to us and I will give you money.”
The child ran out of the palace, looked around, found us and began to wave his hand for his mother to go to him. In response, the girl began to wave her hand so that her son would come to her. To which the son began to jump up (apparently, depicting anger), and energetically call his mother to him. This lasted about ten seconds, after which the girl turned away from her son and told me: “Let’s go.” We walked away and after half a minute disappeared around the corner. A minute later, a second call came from his son:
Child (capriciously): «Why didn’t you come to me?»
Girl: “Because you need money for vending machines. I told you how you can get them from me: come to me and take them. You didn’t want to go to me, it’s your choice, you yourself made it so that you won’t play slots.”
This ended the dialogue, and I concluded that I needed to practice more often in managing children’s manipulations. So far, I am emotionally twitching at such childish «tricks».