Your children send a message when they give you gifts. Do you know what it is?
Find out with this guest post by Kathy West, Type 2 editor of The Child Whisperer:
If your child gives you rocks, pay attention.
Quick story: Whenever we went on walks, my 4-year-old daughter found and gave me rocks. I often left them in the little gravel bed in our front yard without much thought.
But then.
One day, I noticed how carefully she picked my rock, discarding many to find the right one.
So I asked if she’d like me to find a rock to give to her.
And she gave me one of the largest smiles I’ve ever seen on her face.
What our child’s gifts and gestures are actually saying…
The idea seems obvious to me now, but I hadn’t fully understood it until that moment:
Our children show us love in the way they want to be loved.
- As a Type 1 child, my daughter loves surprises, so she constantly tries to surprise me.
- She loves imaginative play, so she invites me daily to pretend with her.
- She loves rocks and so she gives them to me on every walk.
If we want to know how to show our love in a way our children will recognize best, we just have to look at how they show it to us. Amazing connections form when we respond in kind.
(The Child Whisperer is invaluable in helping you discover your child’s list of priorities.)
The gifts they give when they don’t have money
One other thing struck me about the little rock gifts from my daughter.
Because she doesn’t yet have certain means, rocks are one of the few resources available to her—and she gives them to me constantly.
I’m paying for a lot of things: clothes, toys, gymnastics, etc. But seeing my daughter give so freely of the non-monetary resource she has, I looked at myself.
Am I consistently giving with other, simple resources: time, snuggles, kind words?
Giving the gifts our children want most
I’ve decided that every time my daughter hands me a rock, a picture, or a flower she picked from someone else’s yard, I will try to reciprocate it in the way she’s unknowingly asking me to.
I did on that walk, sitting down on the ground and talking through selections:
Did she want a rock with lines? A big one, a small one?
When I looked up at her standing next to me, I found it didn’t really matter which rock I chose. She didn’t say anything; she just beamed that I was picking out a rock for her at all. So I took my time and chose the pinkest one I could find, close to her favorite color.
When I gave it to her, she held it tight and said, “This is my favorite rock I ever had.”
I did a little victory dance that I had paid attention.
(Image courtesy of Andy Dean)
The post THE INSIGHT WRAPPED UP IN YOUR CHILD’S GIFTS appeared first on The Child Whisperer.
