Mindful Parenting: Discovering the Consequences of Your Actions
By Meghan McChesney Gilroy
- Thursday, June 4th, 2009
Bodhi and I learned an important life lesson today: eating raw bread dough makes your belly feel not so good. The corollary lessons? Eating raw dough can cause you to throw up, make a mess in the car, and prevent you from playing outside because you now need to change your clothes. Oh, and it means the adult gets to spend an hour cleaning it all up. (But boy, my car – and his carseat – are now clean!)
And if you’d like a true confession? Secretly I’d been hoping this would happen.
Every Thursday, Bodhi and I go to school (a Mommy-and-Me kind of class) and one of the activities is making bread. We sing as sweet little song as we do so, “We mix the dough, we knead the dough, we let it rise…” While all the other children (girls!), mix and knead and roll, Bodhi eats the raw dough.
I have tried many tactics to dissuade him of this habit: I’ve focused more energy on the times he does shape the dough, we’ve talked about how yummy the bread is once it’s baked, I’ve taken away the raw dough, I’ve ignored the raw dough eating, the teacher has tried distracting him with more flour. And of course I have pointed out that too much raw dough isn’t good for your belly.
As you can guess, Bodhi eats the raw dough. And for most of the year, there was no problem with the belly/no other real consequences. When I reported Bodhi’s raw dough eating habits to Jamie, he not-so-helpfully grinned and pointed out that it must be genetic. Apparently he has a love of eating raw dough that stems from his days as a baker. Hmmm. Never knew that about you honey. Thankfully Bodhi has never seen him do so, so at least that eliminates the imitation rationalization.
Until this Thursday, I had decided to let it go. This wasn’t a battle worth picking. And I reminded myself every time my jaw clenched as Bodhi popped another piece into his mouth, that I am a big believer in allowing children to discover the results of their choices themselves (within the strong boundaries of what is safe and age-appropriate). Jamie and I like to say (as one of our tenets of Mindful Parenting ), let children make their own choices, even if it’s not the choice we would make, until it is evident that they cannot make a good choice for themselves.
All of this set in motion the mess of the day – and the learning experience. As you probably know, most of us learn best from experience. We can be told the consequences of our actions and have some intellectual understanding (this is called knowledge) or we can experience the consequences of our actions and then absorb the learning on a physical, emotional, spiritual and/or mental level (this is called wisdom). Bodhi now has the building blocks needed to make the connection between eating too much raw dough and not feeling so good. We’ve talked this through and re-enacted what happens with his puppets to reinforce the wisdom.
Of course I never wanted Bodhi to have to experience vomiting to gather wisdom. But I do think giving him the freedom to discover how his body responds to his choices supports his unique path of self-discovery in life and will ultimately help him care for himself better than me telling him what does or doesn’t work according to my unique experiences.
In addition to Bodhi’s life lesson, I’ve gained the wisdom to be a more conscious parent. I see that this is a situation where I will need to step in to make a better choice for him if Bodhi doesn’t modify his actions. I “suffered” the natural consequences (having to clean it up!) of allowing him to eat the dough as well. Now let’s see what happens at school next Thursday.
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