I’m working on balancing my obsessive-compulsive control freakness with my humanist, child-led learningness. Yes, I know those aren’t real words, I’m attempting to be cute. So, anyway, I got thrown into quite a tizzy yesterday when my 4 year old announced that she was giving up on a new type of problem in Explode The Code.

I had intended to skip that page because I thought it was all about spelling, which she can’t really do yet. But she protested, loudly, that she wanted to do the page. So we looked at the first problem in the workbook. She didn’t understand what to do, and as usual her first step was to stop listening to me as I try help her figure that out.

As I looked at it, it became clear to me that the work really was something she could do.

So, what to do? Follow her impulse to give up as soon as things got hard? Or heartlessly impose my will on her and force her to try? Rephrasing, should I let her make her own choice about not trying and support the development of her will and make sure her schooling experience is not more stressful than she wants to handle, or should I teach her that she can do hard things if she tries and that she shouldn’t quit something she wants just because its harder than she thought it would be?

I suspect a better parent would have found a way to manage both.

I went with forcing her. She got the concept easily once the mini-tantrum was over, and did the rest of the page happily. My choice was intuitive, and I think it worked out well. I’ve been emphasizing with her that she can do things if she tries, that mistakes are only failures if you don’t correct them, and that she CAN do hard things. So perhaps that was why I made the choice I did. On another day, I’d have let her choose to quit. I think the big issue for me in that moment of decision was that she had specifically said she wanted to do the page. She made a choice, and I guess I wanted her to follow through on it by at least TRYING the work.

So all’s well that ended well, I guess.