Yesterday I went to Target, where I heard someone admonishing a child from a couple of aisles away. "Stop it now," a female voice was saying. "Stop it now. Stop it now -- I mean it." Coincidentally, they were in the aisle I was heading to. A boy who looked to be about 5 came crawling across the floor, head down. "MEOW!" he was yelling. "MEOW!" He was with his grandma and his slightly older sister. "You're going to bump into somebody," cautioned his irate grandma. And indeed, he crawled right up to my shins before he looked up at me. "Hello," I said, and smiled at him, because I have dealt with my share of animal impersonations in Target. I exchanged a smile with his grandma, too, and went on my way. I encountered them again 10 minutes later, and once again I heard the grandma from a distance. "Stop it now, Cory. Stop it now. Stop it now. Stop it now."
I wasn't clear on what she wanted, exactly (about which more below), but if you ever find yourself in a similar bind in Target I have some thoughts for you.
If it's the crawling around on the floor that's the problem, you can...
- Scoop him up and plunk him in the cart's child seat, saying kindly but firmly, "Time to get out of the floor now."
- Say, "Hey, kitty cat, show me how you can walk on your hind legs like a fancy circus cat! Wow, can you do it all the way to the end of the aisle? Wow, how about around the corner and down the next aisle?"
- Set a deadline: "In two more minutes, it will be time to walk." You might get more enthusiastic buy-in if the walking has a Target-friendly fillip: walk like a zombie? walk like a soldier on parade? walk like a grandma?
- If the crawling isn't actually bothering anybody besides you, then you can also consider letting him crawl all the way to the restroom to wash the ICKY ICKY HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT from his hands. That's probably enough crawling to get it out of his system.
If it's the loudness that's the problem, you can...
- Tell a very quiet story together. "Once upon a time [whispered] there was a very quiet armadillo, and one day in its wanderings it met a--" [pause for kid to fill in the blank; if he does so with a yell you can say, "Oh, no, let's not alarm the armadillo. No alarmed-adillos allowed!"]
- Share a favorite story that involves pursuit. My own youngest kids were very fond of Why the Chicken Crossed the Road. If you re-tell the story together (modeling a quiet voice), and then pretend to be Desperate Dan on a Target run together, quiet voices will follow naturally. Would you want to be responsible for Desperate Dan's arrest?
- You can adapt that idea if you have favorite hunting stories. You can be Pooh, he can be Piglet, and BY GUM you will find the heffalumps lurking in aisle 12. Or maybe you need to keep being quiet while you search in aisle 13...
- What's a nice quiet sea creature? Could your cat become an anemone waving its fronds around? Maybe an octopus that sits in the cart and contemplates its tentacles?
- If you're stuck with a cat, make it an alphabet cat -- one that only meows when it encounters the letters of the alphabet in sequence. No meows until you spot an A, and then a B, and so on. Bring down the volume and boost pre-literacy skills at the same time -- winning!
You can also make the most of the environment. You can...
- Get some shopping help. Send him to the snack aisle with the mission of bringing back the Pringles. #sanemomrevolution, baby!
- Invite participation in a low-stakes decision. Pick the toothpaste flavor! Pick the laundry detergent fragrance! But I can only hear you when you whisper. What? What? I can't understand you; your voice is too loud.
- You are surrounded by distractions -- make use of them. If you're in the seasonal aisle, you can hand him a bucket and shovel. "This is something special for you to play with while we are here today," you might say. "We will say goodbye to it when we check out, but you can scoop up pretend sand the whole time we're shopping. Want to build me a pretend castle?"
- Or do something similar with a kid's book.
- If that feels like a dangerous idea because of the potential for checkout counter meltdowns, a 5yo might also be perfectly happy to spin the wheel on a can opener (or some other inexpensive kitchen tool) for a while, and less inclined to freak out about leaving it behind.
This is the part I feel awkward about writing, since this grandma at Target clearly has more years of experience with child-rearing than me, but I am writing it anyway: I submit that it's not a great strategy to keep repeating an instruction that's being ignored. It sends the message that you don't expect to be listened to, and that's not a message any caregiver wants to broadcast deliberately. I further submit that "now" is a Really Useful Word, one to be used with caution. I wrote about this in my croissants series: if you teach your kids that "now" means "you have to do this now, no dawdling" rather than "I'm thinking about this now but I don't really care if you do it now or not," then you have a powerful tool to wield in moments of stress and time pressure. The downside is that you have to police your own language pretty carefully, and follow through on "now" pretty vigorously, before the magic happens. (But oh! so magical when it does.)
With that in mind, my last set of strategies is all about how to talk to the kid in this situation:
- Be really explicit about what you want. "Stand up on your feet"? "Inside voice"? He has to know what you want him to stop before he can stop it.*
- As far as possible, keep the annoyance out of your voice. I get it, I really do, that it's annoying. Some kids respond to distracted caregivers with the view that negative attention is better than no attention. Don't feed that beast -- starve it right out.
- Related: if you are dealing with a kid in annoying mode, it's probably prudent to minimize your own distractions. This means phone in airplane mode, all extraneous purchases deferred until another day. This is not the time to compare the conventional chocolate-covered açai berries in aisle 28 with the organic ones in aisle 29. Git 'er done.
- Consider proffering a treat: if we all use our best Target manners today, then we'll each have a few Pringles IN THE CAR. If we don't, then we'll have to wait until we get home. Food rewards are not an optimal strategy, but it is a true fact that sometimes in life good manners will offer you a speedier route to a desired outcome.
*I started this post yesterday and saved it in my drafts folder overnight. Today, out of the blue, my 14yo reminded me of a story from when he was 7. We were at Mass, sitting on folding chairs, and he was up and down, up and down, between his folding chair and the floor. I leaned over at him and hissed, "Stop wallowing around like a hippopotamus." "Hm," he thought to himself. "Maybe 'wallowing' means yawning. I'm not sure." So he tried valiantly, mightily, desperately not to yawn -- holding his mouth shut with his hands, even, in the effort to obey. But...he kept moving around until I hissed again (because I'm holy like that), "Get up off the floor!!!" "...Oh," he thought to himself. "Wallowing doesn't mean yawning."
Learn from my mistakes, friends.
Recent Comments