On Perspective Taking
Parenting is so hard! I think it’s hard to remember what it’s like to be a child. It's hard to see that children are not mini-adults. They have preoccupying concerns that are so much their own. "Don't put those beans on my plate. I don't want them to feel sad if I don't eat them" said an 8 year-old to me. "I mean, I know they won't. . . .but I still wonder if they do." I need to remember the boundary between childhood and adulthood more often - that permeable border between fantasy and reality, between what is and what should be. It is so porous in childhood and it becomes so rigid as we turn into adults.
Parenting classes can be hard on parents. They endlessly try to train us to validate our kids’ emotions without validating that we as caregivers are trying SO HARD already. I was recently in one more parenting class trying ceaselessly and with limited success to be better, when the person who was teaching the class said to us: “I’m so grateful to parents who are trying everywhere.” As a bunch of us welled up with tears, I thought – wow, this validating thing really works. As a couples therapist of my early forties taught me: “a willingness to change is everything.”
Change is hard and filled with struggle, it’s a spiral and we often fall back into our old ways. Taking the perspective of our children is so challenging! My son got into the car after school a few weeks ago and told me: “it’s the learning.” “Sorry?” I asked, not understanding. “It’s the learning!” Again, I asked him to repeat. “It’s the learning,” he finally yelled in frustration. “That makes time go slow!” "Oh!" I said, the light finally dawning. "You had a long day?" “That’s what I’ve been saying!” he told me incredulously. Holy.
Given that entering our children’s worlds is somewhat of an Alice-in-Wonderland adventure, I thought I might offer up a few books to help both ourselves and our children to walk along that long, shaky bridge into the perspective of another person. For those children and grownups who struggle to be empathetic, to imagine what their child is thinking, or just for those of us who want to peer behind the curtain into the strange and wondrous worlds of children, these very visual books are here to help.
(en français: À chacun son chat)
By Brendan Wenzel
Well, usually I need to consult the book before I can write the summary. And yet, I can recite They All Saw a Cat from memory. And the truth is, I still love it. “And the cat walked through the world, with its whiskers, ears and paws. And the worm saw a cat, and the bat saw a cat.” All the illustrations are delightfully different. And then, at the end, the big reveal! The cat walks to a lake and sees itself in the mirror: “and imagine what it saw!” I have used this book so many times in university classrooms to teach postmodernism, to teach perspective-taking across difference, and to talk about how where we are in life really structures how we see what’s in front of us. I can’t believe how hard it is to learn perspective-taking. I remember my mother saying to me long ago: "I realized that we never know what somebody else is thinking! I thought my friend had been thinking this, and to my surprise she had been thinking the complete opposite!" At the time I literally had no respect for this wise pronouncement. Anyway, way to go mom, fully thirty-five years later I appreciate your wisdom.
By Lesléa Newman, illustrated by Maria Mola
I find Sparkle Boy’s effect on my children so interesting. It makes them absolutely incensed. It features a little boy named Casey who is entranced by all the sparkly things his sister has – her shimmery clothing, her glittery bracelets, and her sparkly nail polish. Sparkle Boy’s sister doesn’t think Casey should wear all of these sparkly accessories and continually tries to stop him. However, Casey’s mother and grandmother and father tell her that if Casey wants to wear them, he should, because they make Casey look like Casey. Casey wears his sparkly getup to the library, and he gets misgendered and taken for a sister. “I’m not a sister, I’m a brother” says Casey, confused. Then some older boys try to school Casey in masculinity – saying “boys don’t wear skirts and bracelets and nail polish. Everybody knows that . . . .That’s just the way it is.” Just when her brother Casey is about to cry, his big sister steps in to rescue him, telling the boys “Not anymore” and putting her arm around his shoulder. My youngest son got enraged at this book, just enraged. He would want it read to him and then would then tell me “Sparkle Boy is the worst!” I finally discerned that it was because Sparkle Boy always takes everything his sister has – including her bracelets and skirts, when he should know not to copy her. This just shows. What makes children feel big feelings is *so different* from what we imagine as adults. Children are not mini-adults, nor do they have mini-adult preoccupations. This can be so surprising. As surprising as the time I said to my child in the back seat, “what are you thinking about honey?” And he said, “I am having the guinea pig blues.”
There Must Be More Than That
By Shinsuke Yoshitake
Anxiety does seem to be on the rise for any person who is awake during this very challenging time in the world. This book is perfect for people of any age who struggles with worrying about the future. It features a little girl who is racked with anxiety because her brother has just told her that the future is sure to be terrible, full of war, not enough food, and other terrible calamities. She dissolves into floods of tears and runs into talk to her grandmother. Her grandmother reminds her gently - using co-regulation - that we don’t know what the future holds, but “there must be more” than a horrible future or a sunny utopia. Explaining that nobody, not even grownups, can know the future, the girl’s grandmother suggests many different futures: might there be a future where robots do our homework? Where Christmas is every Saturday? Where this is a zero-gravity switch in all of our bedrooms? Her grandmother reminds her granddaughter that children are often offered a binary set of choices: a cat or a dog, the park or inside, but that the world is full of beautiful and endless possibilities which will only be revealed with time. I think this book is helpful for any person to remind themselves of the gentle aphorism that, as my first very beloved therapist told me, “worry is a rocking chair, it gets you going and it takes you nowhere” and that the future will only be revealed with time.
As we struggle to understand one another, as we try to cross those rickety bridges into one another's worlds, let's try and hold on to self-compassion for ourselves and all of our shared humanity. As a child in my son's class said to me, observing my struggle with my powerpoint slides: "It's not the end of the world. Only the end of the world is the end of the world." And really, who can argue with these words of wisdom.