How a Broken Dinner Plate Can Be a Learning Opportunity for a Child
As parents, we all want to raise children who are independent, connected, and resilient. If you’ve been a parent for very long, you know this is easier said than done.
The best way we’ve found to work toward this goal is by educating our children. It is not by bribing, rewarding, threatening, or lecturing them to alter behavior. Children will not thrive because you withhold affection or hope they will figure the world out on their own.
Nor will they flourish through our smothering attention or instinct to do things for them.
We know these methods to be flawed, but all parents, ourselves included, have employed them consciously or unconsciously with disappointing results.
Instead of repeating these blunders and continuously achieving lackluster and impermanent results, we can approach our role as educators. The more often parents can exchange negative response patterns like bribes and lectures for substantive lessons, the more opportunities our children will have for growth.
Children want to do well; it feels good to succeed. If they are not doing well, it’s because they have not been sufficiently taught to do so. Now we can hear you already: “I’ve told my son a hundred times in a hundred different ways not to…” In truth, though, if your child had learned the lesson of which you speak, you would not need to repeat it.
There are two possibilities: Either a child does not sufficiently understand how to behave correctly, or he has not internalized why the behavior is important.
For example, if he breaks something, he has not learned how to be sufficiently careful, or why one should be careful. We’re calling ourselves out on this one.
In this article, we’ll use the story of a broken dinner plate to show how a seemingly small behavior problem can be an excellent learning opportunity for your children.
The Broken Plate
One winter, the five of us were staying at a hotel in Daytona Beach. Early one morning, we had breakfast at the buffet; I turned my back for just a moment and heard a crash. My six-year-old son had just shattered a plate full of food in a nice restaurant.
I went over to assess the situation. It turned out my son could not reach the shelf where the plate was supposed to go. He was trying to juggle too many things, and he failed.
When such a situation occurs, we have a few options. We can scold and punish the child for carelessness. We can console him if he is upset. We can decide he is not ready for the challenge, clean up his mess, and do the job for him.
Alternatively, we can be teachers—addressing the topic in a spirit of learning, without adversity, without pandering. That is what we did.
First the Why, Then the How
First, we talked about the why:
Together, my son and I established the downsides of having broken the plate—it was wasteful and messy. We needed to make sure it would not happen again.
Then, we discussed the how:
My son and I imagined how a child his size could best approach the buffet. We discussed where he could put the plate to be more careful, and how to take food he could reach rather than choosing something out of reach.
Throughout this conversation, my son engaged in the brainstorming process. He thought it through, practiced, and succeeded in bringing a full plate to the table.
This method—approaching problems as opportunities for education—works well because it simultaneously empowers and engages children.
Taking the Lesson a Step Further
Learning how to navigate a breakfast buffet properly is a comparatively specific tool; when we generalize the lesson to a broader scope, we can avoid the risk of sounding like nitpickers and enter the ranks of inspiring mentors. Once my son was able to transport a plate of food to the table, I took the time to generalize the lesson.
First the why:
We talked about other ways in which people might be wasteful through lack of planning or care. We came up with situations that would be bad for the environment, that would waste money, and that would cause other people to have to clean up our messes.
Then I helped my son understand how these big ideas apply to his everyday life in the form of things like dented car doors, torn clothing, and careless comments.
Then the how:
We then generalized the process of how to not break things into any situation where we encounter difficulty. Together, we concluded that when we are challenged, we have some options. We might strategize creative ways to solve our problem, we might decide to do something different entirely, or we might ask for help.
Through generalizing this lesson, we entered into a discussion of both independence and connectedness. We underscored for our son the connection that individuals have to the world at large and helped him develop ways to make those connections positive.
Another Learning Opportunities Arises
To my surprise, this situation offered more education opportunities for independence.
As we ate our breakfast, I saw that my son was sulking, not at all the picture of accomplishment I expected. I probed what was wrong. It turns out he was worried about what everyone else in the restaurant thought of him because he had broken the plate.
He felt like everyone was looking at him and judging him. I recognized this moment as an opportunity to teach my son something even more valuable than being careful.
I listened to his theories without commenting. Then I asked my son to look away from the tables in the restaurant. While he looked out the window, I asked him to describe the other people in the restaurant. He could hardly describe a single one.
I loved watching my son’s eyes light up. All of a sudden, he understood that if he had not noticed anyone else in the restaurant, then they probably hadn’t noticed him either.
I did not need to explain; he worked it out all on his own.
As we left the restaurant, my son was standing tall. He’d shifted from embarrassment and frustration to confidence and joy. I could see that he felt liberated.
Several Lessons from a Broken Plate
That day, our son learned about being careful and not wasting things, and he learned that most people are not paying attention to him, but most importantly, he learned how to take situations apart, think about them, and figure out what to do.
You may think you will never be able to impart a lesson for every sticky situation that crops up in your child’s life. You’re right. It’s impossible to address every possibility.
However, we can address the categories of problems our children will face in life and talk with them about appropriate responses so they’re equipped to respond in the future.
There is something profoundly gratifying about learning. There is also something remarkable about the educators who invest energy into helping us do so.
Therefore, our best bet for raising children with empowering, engaged lives is to embody the role of a teacher. It gives noble distinction to our parental purpose.