A 6-year-old Schooled Me

So the other day I am in the kitchen making dinner and I ask my younger son to get a pan out for me and “sit it on the stove.”

“You don’t sit it, Mom,” he corrects me. “You set it. People sit, you set things.” 

“And animals sit,” pipes in my older son from the living room. 

Of course I know this, and who knows why I didn’t use the word correctly. I asked my younger son why he knows this and he says he just does. The boy can’t read, so I’m 100 percent sure he didn’t learn this distinction in kindergarten.

Finally I pinned down that my older son, who just finished second grade, taught his little brother the difference. 

What blows my mind, though, is that my younger son realized the mistake in context and verbalized the correction. My children are geniuses! But really, all kids are, aren't they? Truthfully though, I, or we as parents, only think this because we think kids aren’t very intelligent.

The truth is, however, and this is solely my opinion since I have no scientific data to back me up, that we start out smarter than we end up. Our mental capacities only diminish as life wears on us and we decided to stop using our brains. Maybe it’s a matter of survival and focusing on other things. Maybe it’s society’s complete lack of emphasis on the little things like “sit vs set” and correct word pronunciation. Maybe it’s our parents faults and their parents faults for underestimating the talents and abilities of their children. 

At the same time my kids are giving me grammar lessons, I am finishing up reading The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. It’s a book I stumbled upon at the library and that I now remember I overheard being criticized, in my opinion, out of context and unfairly at a luncheon back in the fall. The book is a super easy read and I recommend it to any parent, even non-parents honestly.

The woman, Amy Chua, is a wonderfully witty writer, transparent and to the point. She explores the idea of being a “Chinese mother” as opposed to a “Western mother” and the difficultly of practicing the former style over the later in American society. I realized in the second chapter when she’s telling a story of her younger daughter refusing to come in the house, choosing to stand in the freezing weather in no coat over giving in to her mother’s directions, that Amy Chua’s story was mine. Her children and their temperaments were mine. Her parenting style was what mine tended toward. I am a Chinese mother and I didn’t even know it. 

While I am taken aback when my 6-year-old corrects my grammar or my second grader is reading at a seventh grade level, I do realize that I have taught them this. I treat them like they are able, yet I am surprised when they live up to their potential.

I guess what is dawning on me this last week is that I simultaneously underestimate and enable my children. I am going to try to stop doing this. They have proven over and over to me that they are capable, or as I will continue to say, geniuses. I should not be shocked when they deliver or, for that matter, be ashamed to expect them to do so.