Learning to give him his space

After recovering from the blacklisting I experienced from my son last weekend I thought that we might be onto something. Coincidentally while reading How Children Learn by John Holt, the author outlines some situations similar to the one that we had happen.

It was becoming clear to us that our son needed to feel that his time with my wife wasn’t threatened in order for him to not feel the need to be clingy. So all this past week I did my best to give him space and not make it seem as if he was going to be forced to spend time with his father and taken away from his mother. You see he had become sensitive enough that in some situations he would think this was going to happen even if it wasn’t going to.

Even though I was very careful this week there were still mornings when he would wake up and give me the Papa no! However most of the time I found that he would come to the office here at home and want to show me something or tell me something without me having called him or his mother having sent him. Although he had done this in the past it was an infrequent occurrence and this week it happened more often.

The best part of all of this is I can think of at least four occasions in the past week that I received unsolicited hugs for my son. Needless to say this is very rewarding for me as his father and also the first time I think this has happened.

What I find in learning more and more is that it comes down to space: whether he’s playing, trying to learn a new skill or simply being curious with things around the house he is at the age now – 23 months – where he wants to explore things on his own and he has no problem asking us for help. Well that is not true sometimes he does get frustrated, but most of the time the answer is to give him the space to figure it out on his own and wait for him to come to me.

The downside to this is that perhaps my wife has had to spend more time with my son, and as most people know mothers are the most overworked people on the planet. With any luck maybe Alex will learn that being with his father doesn’t mean that he is unable to be with his mother.