Turn, Turn, Turn - January 20, 2022 | Kids Out and About Westchester <

Turn, Turn, Turn

January 20, 2022

Debra Ross

When my daughter Ella was 7 months old, she caught an early winter cold that hung around until late spring: It was never truly alarming, just a nose that wouldn't stop running and lots of restless nights. And the whining, my goodness, the whining. She was irritable through all the milestones of early toddlerhood: taking her first steps, learning new words, eating new foods.

After months of Ella being perpetually cranky, my mind started to inch toward labeling her as a perpetually cranky kid. But that would have been a mistake, because of two main truths:

  1. Kids change.
  2. Expectations about kids, positive or negative, influence how they change.

It was hard not to think of Ella as a "difficult child"—because, for that time, she WAS a difficult child. But I knew that treating her as one could keep her in that rut, and boy did I want her out of it. Telling myself "Today she's cranky and needy, but someday she won't be," helped me stay the course.

Similarly, when Ella was learning to read, her progress was slower than average for her age. We had both the luxury and the pressure of being home schoolers, so it was David's and my job to figure out what to do about it. My instinct to label her as a "slow reader" (because she was in fact slow to learn to read) was at odds with what I understood about how individual brains develop at their own pace. Plus, I sure didn't want ELLA to get in her own way by labeling herself that way. So as long as she was progressing, even if not as fast as others, I talked myself out of worrying or fussing with her about it. She caught up by the time she was 12.

When you're raising kids, it can be hard to remember that the truths that are in your face aren't any more true, and may in fact be less important, than the truths in the background. And one of the most important of those quiet truths is that everyone passes through their seasons at their own pace and in their own way.

Sometimes a winter is long and hard. But then it turns to mud, and then to spring.

Deb