As I was combing my hair, I thought about her, messy mass and thought better of my own hair, but she likely has my hair, so I thought, it sure will be nice when she grows up. I thought a similar thing about walking and Portugal training. Why do we insist on teaching and forcing children to do things our way and in our time frame? I concluded that it must be for our sake.
Now, I plan to take you on my little mental journey to that conclusion. Mary has a discipline problem. She refuses to hold still to have her hair brushed. But, still I do it and though Nick likes to laugh at her willful nature and call her as threen (a three year old teenager) he does absolutely nothing to offer any discpline, leaving it all up to me. Well, I figure she is not able to reason things out yet, so my know is just to provide love when she needs it. I will wait until she is ready to teach her how to behave, like with her embarassingly unruly hair. It looks bad, but she ought not be even slightly concerned with appearance yet, and when she is ready she will want her hair fixed.
Then, I realized why we do it then. I figured it was stupid to care at all how she looked to others, but that us not why we do it. We are building good habits for a lifetime. She will hate us or love us eternally for the habits we help set, so, it is more for me to learn to fix her hair, even if she cries, because that one day that she finally understands things might come latter than we expect, and habits might have already been set.
