With respect to Sir Elton John, I am not a pinball wizard. I found this out the other day while trying to amuse my five-year-old. He loves to play computer games. I figured why not? That’s how it started such a simple plan. But as we all know the best laid plans…
What happened is it turned into a big ole competition when I found that my son was basically beating the crap out of me. Game after game he kept getting the higher score. Something had to be wrong I thought to myself. I decided to watch him carefully to see what his strategy was. To my surprise his strategy seemed to be to have no real strategy. He just kept banging on the control keys and yelling “take that!” and somehow when the game was over he had the higher score most times. He had no real concept of how to play the game he just liked the sounds, the bells and whistles, the music. This got me to thinking about being a parent and my own strategy. When I was pregnant I dreamed of a perfectly behaved child. One who never cried or talked loud or talked back to me. Terrible two’s– forget about it. He’d breeze though toddlerhood and emerge this Little Einstein who would sit around with me and discuss the classics and Newton’s Laws of Physics. Maybe play a little chess like Bobby Fischer. Then I woke up from my fantasy.
Little kids play all the time. This got me to thinking. Maybe we as parents should take a step back and simply enjoy being a parent. Maybe we should not strategize and plan so much. Children have their own agendas and the sooner we learn that, the better we all will be. Maybe life is so much simpler than we adults make it out to be. Maybe it’s really about a lot of bells and whistles and music. About following the bouncing ball to see where it leads us. If we’re not careful, we can actually learn a lot from our kids. So take that!