parenting confession

So....Elijah is quite the mimic.  And he has been for quite a while.  When you realize that your child will copy anything you do and the "power" that you have over him, you perhaps start to think of ways to take advantage of this.  (Ok, so you may not do this, but apparently Justin and I do)!

This means that we randomly have discussed teaching Elijah that the name for an elephant is really giraffe or something like that.  Well...Justin decided to take it a step further and threw out the idea of teaching Elijah to hit someone when he heard the name of a certain animal.  (Think Pavlov's dogs).  We both agreed that this would qualify as bad parenting and decided to leave it alone.

{Insert long, stressful car ride at bed time here.}

In just a few minutes we indeed became the aforementioned bad parents.  Justin and I usually sing a song from Elijah's signing video called "The Pets I Love" when we are in the car with Elijah.  (Pretty much the equivalent of Old McDonald).  After we sang this song for a little while, we ran out of animals to sing about and Justin (pay close attention that he initiates this!) decided to start telling Elijah what sound a hippo makes.

Now think about this.  Do you know what sound a hippo makes?  Right, we don't either.  So Justin and I are in the front of the car with Elijah's car seat right in between us in the back.  Justin (initiating!) proceeds to show Elijah that a hippo (gently) slaps Mommy on the cheek.  We (yes, both of us, I admit) demonstrate this several times.  Next time we are out of the car talking about what sounds animals make....sure enough...Elijah remembers that hippos slap people.    In fact, we discovered today that it is much easier to get him to tell us what a hippo does than it is to get him to give us a kiss now.  So sad!  We are officially bad parents and now the "redirecting" has to begin.

It is kind of scary how much "power" we hold in teaching our children.  I'm so glad Elijah is a quick learner, but from here on out we will utilize this for positive learning experiences.

And not for what is going to get him kicked out of preschool one day.