He has bitten one of his classmates. I have edged toward livid but know that a rant is not going to get me anywhere. I still approach the border of rant, with the litany of the base questions that get me through the walk home. Does Mom bite you? Do I bite you? How would you like it if N bit you? I dread writing them down again for their utter lack of originality or constructiveness, but that is what I was left resorting to. From there I get a sense of needing a different approach, a strategy that will give him a different approach or outlet rather than urging greater and greater levels of self-control.
The conversation turns and we get into the details of what happened, which I already gathered from the report. Earlier on in the day, he bit a girl in a fight over a spoon. For clarity and context I have to add -- despite it making me sound like a 4-year-old -- that he had it first. For whatever reason he was expected to give the spoon over and in the escalation over said spoon, he bit the girl. The conversation lead to the topic of sharing, but it was clear to me that sharing was not quite be what I would be encouraging. In reality it would be capitulation that I would be insisting upon: keep giving you her her way and... well... she'll walk all... over you. Everyone would.
No Gabriel, sharing is a little more complicated than you'd like or hope it to be. Your conflict-averse father knows that all too well at his age.
By the time we got home my mind was onto the topic of what he ought to be doing. I ushered him to his spot at the kitchen table and brought out the green plastic IKEA spoon that is core to his breakfast rituals - green being his favourite colour. I gave him the spoon and tried to role play what happened this morning. He didn't play his role with the emotion that he had in the morning. It was loosely gripped and it was easy for me to pluck it out of his relaxed fist rather than take him the brink of the conflict he was in prior to the bite. I never quite got him to act it out as vividly as I would have liked, but I did make the case that it was time to inquire when something was leading to conflict or disrespecting his boundaries. (The boundaries conversation will be for another day.) I tried to instill in him the question, "Why are you doing that?"
In the role play, however, Gabriel didn't abstract well enough to pose the question to me. Instead he felt compelled to answer it and he never quite got around to asking it. We discussed it again when my wife got home and tried to coach him on using the question throughout the evening and we will do it over the coming days and weeks as well. Hopefully he will be able to employ it and make the effort to defuse a situation before it gets to the point that it did in daycare yesterday morning. My hope is that the question will bring about another level of consciousness on the part of both protagonists in this rite of childhood. I would dread Gabriel merely receiving the response, "Because I want it," and flounder with the challenge of coming up with the appropriate follow-up question. Perhaps the question would give his friend the chance to ask herself the same thing or give him the time to tell her to get another spoon elsewhere rather than insist on the one he had.
On the topic of daycare, I hope this is not too jarring a transition, last night I wrote our daycare to inform them of our desire to keep Gabriel there for another year to ensure he is more developed before thrusting him into kindergarten and onto a gerbil wheel of perpetual catch up throughout his schooling.
