My ParenTime | Article - What Were You Thinking?

Support a Nat'l Amusement Park Ride Safety Act!

Child Safety Book: "I KNOW SAFETY!"

MyParenTime.com's Articles

| Article List | Submit an Article |

What Were You Thinking?

The other night my sister-in-law, Jennifer took her two young daughters to a ballet performance by a church group in a nearby town. As her young daughters watched the ballerinas dance and twirl, the youngest daughter sat up and said, "Aunt Shan can do that!" My sister-in-law laughed and said, "Really? Have you seen your Aunt Shannon twirl like that?" For a moment, she wondered if my secret obsession was ballet and her kids had quietly peeked in on one of my performances staged in my bedroom.

While Jennifer was telling me of the incident my other sister-in-law, Rachel, sat and listened. While I was listening, my mind was spinning as to what could have caused this child to perceive that. Suddenly Rachel said, "While I was carrying Mason the other day, the wind was blowing my hair and he said, "Mom, you look like Shannon."

Great. Now I'm known to my nieces and nephews as the windblown ballerina dancer.

A few days later I was visiting a friends house. As we sat there visiting her two-year-old came in and announced that "the girl was knocking on the window again". My friend said that her daughter had been scared at night because she thought she heard a girl knocking on the window. As she explained the story to me, her daughter interrupted and said, "Did you hear that knocking?" My friend and I looked at each other. Neither of us had heard a thing.

What goes through our small children's minds? There are days that I would love to see the world through the eyes of my children. Everything is beautiful and exciting from the fresh fallen snow to the horse manure out in the field. Yet, they have such vivid imaginations. Sometimes they perceive things to be so real, things that have no reality whatsoever. Other times thoughts creep into their world and are made real by their imaginations. Yet there is no one else around who understands it.

This is when we have to stop and think "what do our children see that we don't want them to?" Our age has blinded us or made us hard to things that sometimes have a negative effect on our children. The cartoons they watch that are sometimes violent, the video games they play and the music we listen to on the radio need to be monitored at all times by us so that we know that this is what we really want entering their little minds.

Let's remember how fragile our children's minds are, how clean they start out. Let's try to fill them with good thoughts, good books, good television. It only takes a little while now to shape their behavior for a lifetime.

Click here to read other articles by Shannon.

Copyright © Shannon is webmaster to a website that offers Premade Scrapbook Pages that tell interesting facts about the day a person was born or married. Reprinted with permission.

| Article List | Submit an Article |

If you have found our articles helpful, please consider helping us keep our community online. We appreciate your support :)!

Click Here To Get Your Site Hosted With FutureQuest