I keep remembering what happened in DH’s family when he was growing up. Fights were not really squashed, but often encouraged. I watched a home video of my FIL encouraging DH and his brother to HIT each other, like boxers. They were small children, as well. Really terrible and selfish behavior. Needless to say, DH has almost no relationship with his siblings.

My mother would make us hold hands and sit in a corner together if we started fighting.

Thank you for the thoughtful comment. I’m pretty sure that we did apologize to her at the time for not knowing how much the sandals meant to her and validated her feelings too. But it was one of many things we said, trying to find the right words to help her deal with the situation. Many of which were probably not useful in retrospect.

With regards to Julian, I think he was just trying to defend and deflect. With regards to why he was so upset that the brownies were finished…well…he really likes brownies and perhaps Emma and Daddy should have saved him one or even half of one, but again hindsight is 50/50.

I’ve learned a lot by discussing the situation.

Personally I have a lot of sympathy with what “raising smart girls” wrote. Certainly, to read a lot of moral content into the child’s reaction is incorrect. I also feel that to cite moral considerations to belittle her reaction is insensitive and even manipulative. It tries to instil morality through guilt. This misses that you and she just possess different frames of reference in which the same action means different things. I would be more conscious of this and not appeal to the superiority of my own. I am not of course saying it isn’t superior, but I think you do so not to cultivate moral feelings but to override her objections using your own authority as a parent – you are using a trump card. This is too easy. In such a context, I would have tried to find an agreement with her, using the kind of win-win creative thinking suggested by “Green”. If I couldn’t do that, I’d let her keep the sandals. This way she would know that her feelings counted and that there was not an authority script before which she was powerless. (Of course, I might override her if I understood her reaction differently, as trying to take control by gaming my indulgence – but that is not, I think, the case here.)

Clearly you couldn’t go back to ask the sandals back and doubtless you gave them away innocently, i.e. you had no reason to anticipate her negative reaction. Still, it is clear that this episode has been totemized by her and there is an emotional content to it which remains unresolved. I think before offering to buy a new pair, in the absence of a more creative idea you should have said you didn’t realize how much they meant to her and that if you had understood that, then even though you believe it would have been better to give them away, you would still have let her keep them. Then you can say all the other good stuff about thinking of others, how happy they would make the other little girl, how it’s really not such a big deal. But I think you needed to apologize, and perhaps you still do. She didn’t need the sandals, but she needed to know you cared about her feelings.

Fast forward to Julian and I am not quite clear on what’s going on or whether these episodes are really organically connected or were just thrown together by an association of circumstance. I think he’s just trying to defend himself. It can’t be seen why he was initially so upset that the brownies had been finished. Let’s just say there’s a reason for that which we don’t know. Appreciating this, I would try to get at the reason, but of course often you will not succeed. Then I would let him just abreact the emotions as he wishes to, so long as it does not endanger himself or anyone else. I see you are accepting his feelings but even though you let it happen there still seems to be a subtext that he should not express his feelings in a certain way, maybe that you think you must be doing something wrong if he is crying and screaming. It should be ok to cry and scream, we all need that sometimes. I’m not sure why you then felt the comments about Haiti were necessary, but I don’t think they were necessary, not in the context of trying to communicate that they should feel guilty for the emotionality of their reaction to what to you are trivialities. I wouldn’t have made this link. It again results only in a superego morality of guilt, not in a compassionate morality from the heart. The message is “you shouldn’t feel as you do”, and it invites them to reject their feelings.

Well of course it is the kind of scenario and reaction we all have all the time and there is no need to feel bad about it, but if we stop by it and analyze it, as you commendably invite us to, then those would be my feelings about it. What our children need is love and acceptance, not moral education and in particular not in relation to abstract matters that they are too young to appreciate. When they are grounded in love and self-confidence, compassion will come naturally.

Keep up the great blog!