Communication is a skill that takes a lifetime to develop. It’s very easy to completely forget the difficulties that arise when you first start to learn it. For children, there are communication concepts that are almost impossible to explain with words. Two areas that have caused great difficulty in our house is understanding what “sassiness” is, and grasping the difference between joking with someone as opposed to lying to them.
On many occasions I’ve seen my kids say something with a sneer or a roll of the eyes, then immediately get busted for sassiness. You can watch the sneer quickly morph into an expression of confusion, and it makes you think ‘they just don’t get what sassiness is’.
Griffin has also been branching out into the areas of sarcasm and joking, but in his efforts to talk more like a grown-up, he’s zoomed right passed that line of “joshing” and straight into flat out lying. At times, I can see the confusion on his face when he gets reprimanded for what he thinks is done in good fun.
Like I said, to use only words to explain the differences is a monumentally difficult task. I have found that it is much more effective to demonstrate the differences by playing a little game with them. I call it the Game of Differences.
In Gage’s case, when he has said something particularly sassy to one of us and gotten in trouble for it, I take him aside and show him how he was sassy by imitating what he did. Next, I show him a better way that he could have said it. Then, finally, we start the game. I make a statement, but do it two different ways:
1) “Gage, please hand me the soap.”
2) “HAND ME THE SOAP NOW!”
Then I ask him which was the nice way to say it and which was the sassy way to say it. He always picks up on this one easy enough. Then, I try a different statement with eye-rolling or sighing. Next, maybe I’ll just change the inflection on certain words, but by this point, he’s having so much fun that he doesn’t want to stop playing the game, and he’s getting really good at picking up on the cues that get him busted for sassiness.
The same is true for Griffin and his joking/lying dilemma. I first noticed we had a problem when I told him something so outlandish that it couldn’t possibly be believed, something like, “I ate an elephant for lunch.” He accused me of lying…which is technically true, except for the fact that I never meant for him to believe it. We played a similar game where he had to differentiate between a statement that was an outlandish assertion and one that was a lie. At this point, let me caution you NOT to let your 3 year-old overhear you tell the other son that there’s a shark in the toilet. It’ll totally de-rail any efforts you’ve put toward potty training. Not that that happened. I’m just sayin’…it could cause problems.
Now, I’m not a certified child psychologist, or even an uncertified one, but I’ve seen this technique work really well in our household. Bear in mind that I’m doing this with a 5 and a 3 year old. I wouldn’t advise using this on your tween daughter unless you’re looking to see her generate some big time snark.
Happy Parenting!
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