The Good Unseen and Unsung

I discovered part of the reason that our son takes so long in the bathroom.  After he brushes his teeth in the morning or at night, he carefully cleans the toothpaste dispenser.  I don't know whether he actually gets toothpaste on the dispenser when he brushes.  What I do know is that we often give him a hard time for taking so long in the bathroom.  As usual, my wife was the first to take a better approach, which was to take the time to  thank him for cleaning the dispenser and compliment him on what a good job he did.  Since then, I've tried to keep an eye out for similar behavior and take time to say thank you or offer a compliment.  For example, after lunch my son threw his water bottle in the sink.  I was tempted to say, "Hey, this is still clean.  It goes in the fridge."  He also kept an unchewed piece of gum in his sock, because he didn't have any pockets (he wanted to wear his Spiderman costume today).  My wife and I wanted to tell him not to do that, especially because he had taken the wrapper off before he put it in his sock.  Instead, we complimented him on coming up with such a smart solution to having no pockets and suggested he keep the wrapper on should he do that in the future.  Our daughter also picked up trash in our car on the way into the house, then got distracted and threw the trash on our kitchen floor.  Although I had her pick it up and put it in the trash, I did thank her and compliment her for picking up hers and her brother's trash in the car without being asked.  This has actually been a pretty entertaining exercise--the things they do are very cute and very sweet.  We don't notice what our kids do for us because we don't need it or they don't do it right.  But taking the time to notice really confirms to me how good they really are.  They do a lot for us, but we just didn't see it.

Having said that, I can understand times when they do something right in conjunction with something wrong, and I skip straight to pointing out what was wrong--today's examples include our oldest asking politely to be excused from the dinner table but also wiggling so much at the table that he kept spilling rice on the floor, our toddler asking politely for more water but actually throwing her rice on the floor, and our oldest washing himself in the bath but overshooting the water he was pouring on his head so that it landed on the floor.  Obviously, I have a thing against messes.  My favorite all-time example is our son running through the hallways at church with arms reverently folded.  One can't go around complimenting all the time and failing to discipline, but one can be quick to compliment and slow to criticize.  One thing that helps a semi-OCD father like myself to keep things in perspective is to think of the confidence level I would like them to have in themselves when it matters most.  I realize constant criticism, regardless of how often I compliment them, will likely cause long-term damage to their confidence.  As my wife always says, "Choose your battles, but at this point focus on the ones that are life or death--they're just little kids."