A Seven-Year-Old's Inquiry

The summer has churned by quickly and the time that we could count upon with the leisure of the long, warm days has not accumulated as I would like.  Days have ended with G too tired to do much more than eat his dinner and begin the rituals of bedtime. There are still the books, the tooth brushing and the requests hugs to fold ourselves into the end of the day.

Friday night though, he asked:

"Why did you take your ring off?"

It has been nearly eight months of separation, but the ring came off 3 years ago.  Part rite of passage, part cry for attention, it came off to do the dishes and I a particular pique, I decided not to put it back on.  The in-laws had asked about it and now my son. Few others noted it, but never his mother.

I stalled and redirected for a moment with a comment, but he held me accountable.  Ultimately I was relieved that he asked.  There are things that need to talk about and waiting until I perceive he is ready for certain talks may let too much time pass.  When others have asked me how he is doing with everything, I cite the greater calm that has prevailed since I moved out. Fewer tantrums, with me at least, are a positive sign.  There were times when he would be violently inconsolable, my perception being that he was picking up on the tension between his parents but without ever seeing a fight, he only had the differences in parenting styles to cue him that something was vaguely awry. Whatever he had evidence of never lined up with the tensions that he picked up on.

I proceeded cautiously, holding myself to the conviction that I was only ever going to hold myself to account, rather than blame his mother.

"Mum and I never communicating very well. I'm not very good at asking for things.  I've always hoped that I could model the way I want to be treated and demonstrate the things that are important to me but that didn't work."

He did not interrogate further. In the past he is said that he thought everything was okay and that we were happy. There was normalcy, at least for him but in that familiarity he remains attached to there were those tantrums.  They have ceased, at least with me, over the last eight months.  There have been a few occasions when he has sought the restoration of that past, with the orchestration of a group hug or a round robin of kisses.

For the most part, he has managed with the parting. I'm a few floors away, living in the same building and our ergot has adopted "upstairs" and "downstairs" to refer to our respective homes, if either or both of them ever equate to the place that he recalls me being in during those earlier chapters of his life.

Never sure if I've said enough, too much or too little, the night routine commenced and he fell asleep after a reading of Dr. Seuss' "Tad and Todd."

In the morning, I let him know that I was proud of him for asking the tough question and that it would always be welcome and encouraged. Beyond that it was a skill that would put him ahead of me and serve him in good stead in the years to come.

Holding Him Back

"So, what have you decided?"




I'm in the dentist chair, puzzling over the question. My dentist adds that he read my post about whether or not to send Gabriel to school this year and I muster a nod of recognition. The topic of when to start a child in school is an exhaustively discussed one and, for the most part, the advice I've received is a chorus of, "What's the rush?... I waited... My daughter was fine early but... my son was... well... uhm..." Or struggled, or what have you.  Parents of the autumn-born who were particularly experienced and informed on the subject and the advice was all valuable. There was also a serendipitous barrage of articles on childhood and education that advised us to sit tight and hold him back a year more. Last week, we even encountered a parent who had found her 18-year-old son foundering and dropping out of his first year of university -- an account that made me ponder the math if her son was still only 18 years old in the spring after his freshman year.

Unwittingly, he is looking forward to the graduation from day care that the rest of his classmates will celebrate.  He is not, however, going to graduate with his friends. The social disruption for him will be a challenge. Close friends that he has had a lot of history with will be moving on and his friendships with those kids may end or require a lot more work to maintain as routines change. The social connections are already changing form as this fork in the road emerges.

Still, we have to look long term rather than reinforce the social expectations.

As great as he is in our eyes (except for when he is too tired to listen to us or insists that his diet consist exclusively of starches, or as I put it, "his whites") we would rather not have him spend the rest of his childhood and adolescence pressured into playing catch up. If we made the move to include him with the older peers who are moving on over the next little while we will be doing him an injustice. With an extroverted only child, who is at turns a nurturing leader of younger kids and displays great vulnerability trying to find a random kid to play with or be accepted by, we suspect that he will play to his strengths if he stays behind with kids who are a little younger than him.

While his daycare suggested there was a risk of Gabriel getting bored while in the same room for another year, I recalled a concept from my studies in Education - over-learning. If he is covering similar topics or themes in the coming year, I am fine with that. I get the impression that Gabriel is more of an analytical mind and that he may continue to process familiar knowledge in different ways. (Recently he wanted me to "play" with his Hot Wheels with him. For some reason our play consisted of sorting out all his dinkeys and separating the Hot Wheels from the non-Hot Wheels cars.

If he grows bored with too-familiar lessons and stories, perhaps there is an opportunity for him to play more of a nurturing or empathetic role. Since making our decision to keep him in daycare for another year, we told the daycare that we are prepared to adapt what we do at home to ensure that we are on the same page as the staff at the daycare in encouraging the leadership, empathy and social development that we would like to support in the coming year.

We have been conscious from day one of Gabriel being big for his age and my wife and I still tell one another that he was never that small when we see newborns. We have always seen his size as presenting a mixed blessing when he is in school and it is probably better for us to embrace that and get him accustomed to that size distinction rather than try to get him to blend in with a group of kids who are three to nine months older than him. When he is with younger and smaller kids we can prompt him to be gentler with them and perhaps he will get the sense of the responsibilities that come with being the big kid and take the opportunity to protect with his size and maturity.

All in all, we have concluded that it is better and lower stakes to hold him back now rather than pressure him throughout his school years to keep up or hold him back later in life when the stakes are a little higher than they are now.