The language makes the difference
As Tin is acquiring language and I mean rapidly acquiring it, he often gets one word off, like when he asks, “Can I hold you?” I’m leaving for California this morning and last night he asked me in the bathtub if he could hold me several times and then afterwards when we got out. He’s at that stage where tender is achingly tender and terrible is even worse. While he was supposed to be napping, he ripped two of his favorite books. Tatjana and i were trying to figure out how to discipline him and I went online and there I read so many things that it made my head twirl – one mother talking about how she put a television in her toddler’s room and let’s him watch a show before he falls asleep. He’s three years old. Unreal. A psychologist who says that you should remove all the books because they are going to rip and then you should maybe give him a magazine that he can rip (isn’t this like giving your dog a shoe that he can chew?). Unreal. Then there was the mother who said that books that were destroyed were gone and not replaced. More our philosophy.
Instead we called Tin into the den for a family meeting about ripping books. And we taped the pages that were torn and have now put the books away for a period of unspecified time. We don’t rip books, we told him. Again the language – as if we (Tatjana and I) are even accused here. No, we don’t rip books, we should have said, and neither do you.