Once there was a boy whose teacher was giving away a pair of zebra finches.
"Please, could we take them home?" he asked. "Please? I know how to take care of them and it's not hard and I'll do it faithfully, I promise." So the finches came to live at the boy's house.
At first he was meticulous about the care schedule the teacher had given him. When he went away to Grandma's house he extracted a solemn promise from his mother that she would stick to that selfsame schedule. "If you don't," he said earnestly, "they could die, Mom." [<-foreshadowing]
Gradually the luster of pet ownership faded and the boy and his mother had some heated exchanges about finch care. When was their water last changed? When was their cage last cleaned? Can you be responsible for those birds or do they need a new home?
And then things settled down. Whenever the mother peeked in there seemed to be fresh water in the cage and not too much birdseed on the floor around it. What the mother didn't know was that when the cage was moved to another part of the little room, the food was not. Instead of going to get the food, the boy fed the birds spray millet snacks. And more spray millet snacks, and more spray millet snacks.
In case you wondered, finches can survive for about ten days on a diet of spray millet snacks.
He is so sad, so sad. Last night I just rubbed his head and let him cry on one side of me while his brother cried on the other. I am sad too -- ashamed that these little things died in my house while I assumed they were getting what they needed. (I can't be certain that they died because of their diet, but it seems the most plausible explanation under the circumstances.)
Lately we have been wrestling with the question of how to teach the kids about responsibility. I hope they will grow into men who lead well-ordered lives, men who see that something needs doing and then DO IT rather than waiting for someone else to take care of it. Men who can claim their mistakes and resolve to do better, instead of making excuses.
It might be easier to teach them to be philosophers, or sword-swallowers, or sword-swallowing philosophizing blindfolded flaming-torch-juggling high-wire walkers. We've been a little frustrated, Elwood and I.
I would no sooner say "It was probably your fault, you know," to a child who was still crying over the death of his pets than I would pour salt in a cut sustained by a child playing with a knife. You clean the wound, you bandage it, you comfort and soothe and later you talk about knife safety. But eventually you do have that talk about knife safety, and eventually I will need to say something about the habit of walking past out-of-place items instead of putting them in their places, and taking shortcuts when doing the thing properly isn't really very hard.
I have an unfortunate tendency, which I honestly try to keep in check, to be heavy-handed about things like this. Heavy-handedness isn't just something that causes long-term trouble (child in therapy twenty years from now: "...and every time I forgot something for the next year, my mother intoned, 'Remember the finches!'"). I think that in the short term, an overly dramatic response from a parent can impede both a child's recognition of a problem and his resolve to do better. If my reaction triggers defensiveness and not thoughtfulness, I've lowered the odds that anything good can come from this.
So I need some discernment here, to figure out how to balance a gentle response to a heartbroken boy with an effective (and appropriately timed) reminder that choices can have irreparable consequences.
Wish me luck.
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