You are So Spoiled!

So the other day my husband and I were talking to our oldest son about wants versus needs. For example, Mommy needs van (but wasn’t quite ready to be that girl) so we bought the SUV that Mommy wanted instead. Which is why you and your brothers are climbing all over my seats with your dirty sneakers and having to exit haphazardly out of the back gate. Anyway, this conversation was prompted after receiving a more than stellar report card in the mail. We have a point system where you accrue a number of points due to academic excellence, and you can choose different levels of rewards based on how many points you have to spend. Well, it just so happened that his iPad had crashed. It is dead. It has raised the white flag. Dead on Arrival!

Now as a parent, I am not really ready to replace an iPad just 3 months before his birthday, but… as a parent whose kids are all out of school for the summer, there needed to be some room for compromise here. He would need an iPad regardless when school started back, but should we wait and endure a summer full of road trips without him having one? I am pretty confident the answer to that question is Hell no!

Anyway, we told him that he should really give up all his points that he had earned (which were not nearly enough for this recommendation by the way) and put them towards getting a new iPad. You would have thought we told him his dog had died the way his eyes welled up with tears. The horror of having to choose between a new game for his PlayStation or a new iPad. This is what we would call a no-brainer! *Please keep in mind that I am über aware that these are first world problems.*

Needless to say when his eyes filled with tears his father and I looked at each other and both said “Are you kidding me? You are so spoiled!”   He continued to mope and his dad pulled out this wheel of words that help to describe emotion. He asked him to describe what he was feeling. The way it works is one word leads to a group of other words and so on and so forth and by the end of it we had

Sad->Ashamed->Remorseful.

The word that struck a cord with us  was “Ashamed”. We asked, “Buddy what on earth do you have to be ashamed about?” His reply was because he was spoiled. At which point we began to explain that was more our fault than any fault of his own. So then I thought to ask him… what did he think the definition of spoiled was? His definition, and I quote was, “When something has gone bad!”  Well you can just about imagine that was like taking a bullet to the heart!

He explained that it was like when you leave milk out and it spoils. I can not tell you how hard that was to swallow and how grateful I am that I thought to ask! If my husband had never pulled out that wheel of words we would have never gotten to the core of what he was really feeling and why? We use phrases so flippantly, expecting our children to be able to process and understand exactly in which context we mean it, and they don’t. And I don’t think we can expect them too. As adults we misinterpret each other all the time, so just imagine the mind of a child trying to process it all and still have a good sense of self.

I am not sharing this to be all preachy, but to spark a gentle awareness of how we communicate with our children and each other for that matter. Once we explained to him what our true intention was behind that statement, that it was more about a lack of value for things instead a lack of value in the person, he had a sense of relief and understanding. And while he walked away feeling relieved, I on the other hand, felt weighed down just thinking about how many other times that I may not have thought to ask what HE was hearing when I said things. I know I can’t go back and fix all those moments, but I can move forward with intention and so can you if this applies. Magical Epiphany Number one! That was a conversation that ended Wine and not coffee! Have a great day!