Hello and welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Kim Jon Paine. Gosh, glad again you could make this little bit of time to listen to these small podcasts. Recently, I've been thinking about boundaries and manners and behavior when kids are out of the home, when we take them to other places.
It's often when we get a bit of a reflection on how we're doing within the home, right? Because there are things that we can just get used to. And then we go to a friend's place or to the in-laws or one's own parents and you see them looking at the kids and you're thinking, oh, yeah, that's not good, is it? Or no, it's okay. But you get this reflection.
One parent was saying to me recently, they had a situation where within their own home, they're fine with the kids deconstructing their sofa and armchairs and pulling all the cushions off and making forts out of them or jumping up and down on them and on the sofa and using the sofa, like with the springs in it, really enjoying pulling the cushions off and then jumping up and down on the sofa. Of course, they're little kids. And they went over to another person's house and the kids started doing the same thing, right? Deconstructing the sofa and the friend's children sort of stood back and looked a little bit like they didn't know what to do because they weren't allowed to do that or at least they'd never done it before.
And before they knew it, the sofa had been pulled apart and they were jumping up and down. And the other parents in the house they were visiting, it was awkward because they could see that there was fun going on. They didn't want to sort of be horrible about it, but it sure wasn't a thing they let their own kids do.
And there was just this moment of real awkwardness. And the mum did say to me quietly aside, well, actually their sofa was in a lot better condition than mine. And then she added, but I guess mine isn't in very good condition because I let that happen.
She'd got a reflection of, is this okay? All sorts of situations like that come up, don't they? The classic one is table manners, with children having much more relaxed table manners, being able to take food and walk away. It's a real phenomenon now where kids won't sit and the parents don't insist that their children sit and eat at the table with them. They grab food and then they go.
They sit for very short periods of time and then off they go, three or four times. But if you take a child to a restaurant who's doing that, who's grabbing food off the table and then circulating around the restaurant, getting underfoot of the waitstaff, bothering, maybe not, but probably making other people a little bit awkward who were there to have a nice romantic evening and this little child pops up and wants to chat to them and maybe take some food. I'm not making that up.
That did happen. Take some food from a stranger's table as well. It just doesn't feel good, right? And you can sort of say to the children, no, don't do that.
Don't do that. Don't behave. Come back and sit right here right now.
But it's very hard on the children because they're used to doing it. That's what mealtime means. Similarly with language, words that at home you might not like but you put up with.
And then you go to your parent-in-law's place and they use those words and the parent-in-law's just look surprised if not horrified and tell a child that they may not speak like that or you try and shush them up because they're saying all kinds of stuff which you know is problematic to your partner's parents. And yet again, it's unfair, right? It's unfair on the kids because they've normalized this behavior. One more example, just while I'm in this sort of depressing part of the podcast, is interrupting adult conversations.
If we allow children just to interrupt our conversations when we're at home speaking to other people on the phone or if you have a partner at home speaking to your partner, speaking with a friend that comes over and we allow a child to interrupt, when we take them elsewhere or even like I said, if a friend comes over and the child feels that it's just normal to interrupt and say what they need and be able to break you out of that conversation to serve their needs, when we take them to other places, it's really tough because other people are bothered by that. So I guess where this all sort of circles and spirals down to is that we've got our family culture that we might be comfortable with the deconstructing sofa or the interrupting child or the grab-and-go kid at mealtimes or whatever it is. We might be able to be comfortable with it in our home but I think it's worth pausing and balancing that with, okay, if this behavior goes outside the home, would it be fair on my child? It's not just that you're wanting to conform, it's more would this be fair because grabbing-and-go type of food habits, for example, the one example I gave in a restaurant, I don't think that would be okay in anyone's books with kids getting under feet of the waitstaff and interrupting other people's meals.
There are very few parents who would think that was okay or cute or anything, or maybe cute at first, but after a while it gets a bit old for most people in that restaurant. So when we're making decisions about what our values are, which parental hill are we willing to die on to have them sit at the dinner table and not grab-and-go, for example, but there are lots of examples, right? When we're making those decisions about what we're really going to emphasize and be consistent with and stay with, maybe our minds can turn a little bit to and how do I want my child to, yes, be free and all that, but also be a functioning little human being out there in the wider world and strike a bit of a balance between the two. Okay, food for thought.
I sure hope that's helpful. Okay, bye-bye for now.
