Pink
Cup or Blue Cup and Why We Shouldn’t Always Take Parenting Articles to Heart
When
I was newly pregnant with my first child, I read this article about the five
reasons modern day parenting was in crisis. I devoured the piece, soaking in
every word, swearing to myself that I would not commit these wrongs. The point
that resonated most with me was what she called “the Sippy Cup test.” She
surmised that if a parent filled a blue cup of milk, handed it to the toddler,
and then quickly switched the cup after that child threw a fit over the color
of said cup, it proved that the parent feared his/her child and was letting
them rule the house. I swore, that scenario would never occur in my house. I
would control the color of the cup my child drank out of at every meal.
Then,
I had my daughter. Getting her to eat or drink ANYTHING was far more important
than the color cup it was in. She had bigger issues to work through. If
drinking out of only one certain pink cup calmed her to the point where she
would drink her milk (which contained crucial medicines), then we would make
sure to only offer her that cup. I struggled with this. Was I the horrible
parent the author talked about, the one who was causing a modern day parenting
crisis? Was I ruining my child? Believe me when I say, I dedicated a lot of
time and unnecessary worry on this issue. What I should have been doing is
looking beyond the cup and asking the questions, why did my daughter need this
cup? What did this tell me about her? Is the cup even the real issue?
Had
I taken the time to look beyond the color of the cup being the issue, I would
have discovered that the milk was the problem. My daughter was lactose
intolerant and drinking milk was extremely painful for her. She took the cup
because pink and purple were her favorite colors but she fought drinking the
liquid every day because her little body was screaming at her “don’t do it,
it’s bad for you!” She fought eating, not because she was trying to be picky,
but because her body was so uncomfortable there was no room for food. In an
attempt to make her gain weight, we were actually hurting her more. The cup was
the only thing she could control. It was her attempt to let us know that
something was horribly wrong.
I
am writing this article so that other parents, who have read similar articles,
trust their instinct instead of their eyes. While, I am not discounting that
the author had a point in her piece, there needed to be an asterisk at the end
of the article that said “this does not apply to all scenarios”. It took us a long
time to get to the bottom of our food/lack of weight gain/extreme emotional
responses to everything problem but after years of questioning doctors and
pursuing every avenue, we landed with a diagnosis of sensory processing
disorder. It all began to make sense. We had to keep her environment constant
so that she could orient herself in this scary world. Eventually, the color of
the cup, the size of the spoon, the shape of the plate, began to matter less
and what was in it mattered more.
Today,
the dishwasher was dirty when we got up and my son’s normal cup was not clean.
My husband gave my son one of my daughter’s cups to drink out of and I thought
“Oh God, this is going to be ugly,” and it was at first. But, before my
daughter could reach a full blown meltdown, Brian explained why he had to use
her cup and she understood. The drama ended there. My husband and I breathed a
sigh of relief and we moved on with our day. It was just a small example of how
far we have come. It was also a great reminder to us both that if you do have
to bend on a cup for a little while, it doesn’t mean you always will have to,
or that you are a horrible parent. Sometimes, there are just bigger fish to
fry. Oh and in case you are wondering if my son threw a fit over getting a
different cup, the answer is no. He will drink from any cup you give him
because he just got up, and that kid is thirsty.
No comments:
Post a Comment