Redbook Teaches Acceptance
Posted Jul 20, 2010
While flipping through the August 2010 issue of Redbook I found this article under Making It Work. This article in Redbook teaches acceptance. The article caught my eye because I am going through something similar with my 3 year old…the age old war of trying new foods. Man (child) was not meant to live on chicken nuggets and peanut butter sandwiches alone!
The article is written by Alice Bradley and she expresses her pure frustration with her 7-year-old who seems to be permanently stuck on liking the opposite of everything for no particular reason. I read the whole article hoping for some golden nugget of knowledge that I had not considered, but upon finishing I felt unfulfilled. "What? No solution highlighted in red bold call out or neatly spaced numbered list??"
The next morning I realized that I was being lazy waiting for a magazine writer to serve me a perfect how-to solution, when the point of the article is actually an anecdote of acceptance. My theory is, as adults I think we like predictability since it appears to anchor our sanity, especially with children. However, when a child explores a new path, we feel out of sync with our offspring. It feels uncomfortable to us because we are the ones who crave consistency and patterns.
So it appears that I made the same fatal error in judgment with the magazine as we do sometimes with our children. I was disappointed that the answer was not handed to me on a silver platter. Instead of being disappointed, I should have taken the path of acceptance. Accept that sometimes the solution to a problem is to embrace it. And maybe, just maybe find the humor within the folly.
Un-cloud your judgment with more articles like this found in Redbook magazine. You can get 12 issues a year for only $12! That will save you 71% off the cover price.