Daddy Days: Seeing more clearly now
My wife has worn glasses for years but recently tried out some contacts. The boys were not having it. The younger a boy was, the less they liked this change.
The barely speaking 1-year-old would stare and say, “glasses, on. Glasses on?” The 5-year-old, every few hours, would ask when Mom was going to put her glasses back on.
I guess if you’ve had glasses as long as you’ve had kids, you’re just not Mom without them. I imagine if I shaved my beard, it would be the same sort of reaction from the kids. And from my wife.
Kids are particularly sensitive to changes in their parents’ faces. You can see this especially when they’re really young. They won’t be listening to what you say so much as how you say it. But even more, they’re looking at your eyes to see what you mean.
Every parent has had that situation where you’re looking at a kid and trying to be serious but are somewhat amused at what’s going on. The kid is looking back at you seriously, but then detects that little crinkle by your eye or whatever it is that they know means you’re amused and then they break into a huge smile.
Maybe it’s because their world is so small, but whatever the reason they are much more tuned in to the little things than most adults. This reminds me of a brain teaser National Geographic put out once. It had caught my attention because it said it was a puzzle that adults typically struggled with but four out of five kids solved quickly.
The puzzle is just a picture of a bright yellow, flat-nosed school bus with no doors or steering wheel visible. Both ends of the bus look exactly the same and you’re asked to determine in which direction the bus is moving.
While adults seem to struggle with the lack of a clue to determine the direction, the lack of a clue catches most kids’ attention as quickly as the lack of glasses on a parent.
The lacking clue? The door to get on the bus. If there’s no door visible, that means it’s on the other side; and if the passenger door is on the other side, then the bus is moving to the left (assuming it’s moving forward and driving on the right side of the road like we do in the U.S.).
This is the part of the column where I tie together my assumption that kids’ attention to detail when it comes to facial characteristics translates into the same sort of attention in other instances. But my plans, as so often occurs in parenthood, were unexpectedly blown up in my face. Instead of four out of five of my kids solving the puzzle when I showed them, five out of five failed it!
Now, kids who ride school buses certainly have an advantage to solve this puzzle based on their common experience, so that may explain why my homeschooled kids, who have never ridden on a school bus, didn’t get this.
But I think there’s a bigger and better lesson here. These sorts of puzzles are a good example of what I like to call the “kids rule, parents drool” assumption. Examples of this way of thinking are abundant, and columns like this have a way of tending to at least give that impression at times, if not outright suggest it.
While there are aspects of childhood that are superior to adulthood, in the end kids are just kids.
Adults may import unnecessary difficulties into a puzzle and solving riddles by overthinking things, but for all the help their uncomplicatedness gives kids, they’re still developing and are not surpassing adults in important skills like reasoning and critical thinking.
The way most family movies from the 90s (and today) pit the savvy, clever and wise kid against the bumbling, foolish adults isn’t accurate or helpful. Kids need guidance from their parents and other adults, not the other way around. It helps both adults and kids when things are rightly ordered in this way.
Kids may not be sure if Mom is really Mom without her glasses. But Mom certainly knows the answer to that stumper. Harris and his wife live in Pflugerville with their six sons. Please email comments or suggestions for future columns to thoughtsforcaleb@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Daddy Days: Seeing more clearly now
