When we had the Hensley Girls over weekend before last, we were reminded yet again of a Toddler’s pure, simple and cheerful indifference to any moral authority that can be brought to bear to compel them to eat, with Subject Zero on this particular occasion being Jenna Grace. We also got more than a few first-hand demonstrations of a Toddler’s highly theoretical and ever-evolving relationship with the Truth, as in: the complete randomness of the prospect of them actually telling it. It’s not a moral failing per se, as any parent would acknowledge; rather, for Little Ones truth is a commodity, something that can be produced, withheld or parsed out, depending on the situation. In the right circumstances, it is a favor, a gift that Kids bestow upon their parents and other guardians: the Kids eager to please, the adults eager to be pleased.
Given their tenuous grasp of English, toddlers in particular have a monopoly on this form of currency. I won’t say they willfully leverage their nominal language skills so as to create the ambiguity which gives them some wriggle room, but I’m not at all convinced that it’s not happening, and on their terms. After all, if you’re not fluent in “Jenna Grace”, maybe you misunderstood the conversation, and perhaps there was no prevarication at all.
It’s breakfast time Saturday morning, Mama Sharon has whipped up oatmeal and cinnamon toast for everybody, and Jenna is slow-rolling us once again, the meal winding down and the previous night's Spanikopita Incident still on everybody's mind. Last night’s affair started with JG admitting she loved her Mom’s Spanikopita, and ended with none being eaten, interspersed with cajoling, stern voices, an escalation of tensions on both sides, tears, a plate shoved sullenly to the center of the table, and JG’s hilarious exit. In this case, the exit came about because JG mistakenly thought a leg of the table was right in front of her; she stiffened her body with the intention of reaching out to kick it, missed, and slid silently and completely out of her chair, her wide-eyed face disappearing, but not before I caught the expression on her face, an expression which I will preserve and carry with me always.
But, I digress.
Now it’s Saturday morning, and prior to taking any notice of Jenna, I watched in wonder as Kayla Zane wolfs down her entire breakfast, as in, like a wolf. She used both hands, alternating bites of oatmeal with bites of cinnamon toast. Sharon was amused; I was amazed and a little bit afraid. At one point, a wisp of hair had fallen across Kayla’s face. I would have brushed it back, but was uncertain that I would come away uninjured. So, we let her eat, and I swear her breakfast was Gone In Sixty Seconds.
I had noticed that she did this regularly so as to clear her schedule for the Jenna Grace sideshow sure to follow.
By the time Kayla was done, Jenna had yet to eat any of her oatmeal. Mama Sharon saw the trend early on and reminded JG that she had to eat her oatmeal, not just the cinnamon toast. Jenna responded with a masterful combination of feints meant to approximate the act of eating, including picking the spoon up, slowly raising it to her lips and opening her mouth, all with a winning smile and excellent eye contact. The final flourish would be to close her mouth over the completely empty spoon, fake chewing and swallowing followed by another winning smile. Then she would show her tongue.
Suffice to say, there was no actual eating done after the promise was made.
After regular entreaties by Sharon and me to eat her oatmeal, Sharon finally said "Eat five more bites". The cinnamon toast was of course, gone, accorded the same discretion JG had shown the oatmeal cookies from the day before, and I couldn’t help but feel that we had lost some critical leverage in the negotiations that were to follow.
See, in saying “Eat five more bites", Sharon was already throwing Jenna Grace a face-saving bone by allowing everybody at the table to accept as truth that any bites had already been eaten. Jenna looked at both of us as if she was sizing us up, deciding how much further she could push the envelope. We all knew what was going on.
A full minute passed before Jenna Grace proudly proclaimed “I ate five more bites!” This statement was accompanied by her Number One smile and both hands extended victoriously over her head, inviting us to share in her accomplishment, assuming we could suspend disbelief given the impossibly short period of time that had gone by since the original request, and seeing as how her oatmeal was serenely undisturbed, now going on a full fifteen minutes.
At this point, the negotiations were at a critical juncture. JG hand gone “All In” with her bold claim. Still smarting from my complete failure the night before, I said nothing. Sharon finally said “OK, three more bites Jenna, then you can get down”. You can imagine what came next. Suffice to say, the spoon did finally disturb the oatmeal, and at least one bite was consumed. Crisis averted.
Kayla took the whole thing in with a big smile on her face, hugely amused by her little sister’s performance art.
Besides the constraints of language, there is another important ethical point to be made here, mostly based on the age of the perpetrator and her tenuous grasp of mathematics. Being only two, Jenna might reasonably be cut some slack on having eaten exactly five bites, “five” being a fuzzy concept at best. For example, I had observed her attempting to count the fairies in Kayla's Fairy Castle the day before, a game that involved nothing more than attaching the fairies and flowers to the cardboard uprights that comprised the castle, taking them off, and then putting them back on again. When Jenna joined in, she insisted on counting everything, a deviation that Kayla bore with great good grace, even counting them slowly out to ten and then waiting for JG to repeat the gesture. And while JG could in fact count to ten, she would count certain objects twice, and others not at all. On that basis, we might fairly conclude that she understood the moral difference between, say, eating "zero" bites of oatmeal, and, say, "many", while everything in between was a little fuzzy.
But, back to the breakfast table: It is safe to say that on this occasion, the adults won a moral victory only. It is also safe to say that Jenna Grace did not eat five extra bites, but did eat more than one, assuming you count the bite that fell out of her mouth onto the chair, which she then picked up, swiped past her mouth and then discretely put back in her bowl.
Her victory at the breakfast table near complete, JG's gleeful, unselfconscious and wholly inconsequential lies proliferated. The afternoon of the last day, I ate a later lunch than the girls and had a plate of crackers, olives and cheese whilst watching TV. Jenna walked over, looked at the crackers, looked at me, and waited, her huge blue eyes soberly locking my gaze. "Yes", I said. "You may have some crackers." With that, she ate several in rapid succession. Kayla had some too. As the meal progressed, the girls got rambunctious and started running about. "No running with crackers!" I commanded, surely the least of any seasoned parents’ concerns, but hey, they were on loan here. I was bound and determined to return the Girls in at least as good of condition as we got them, Sharon’s amused lack of concern notwithstanding.
The point is that I as an adult had made a demand of the Girls and gone to the trouble of explaining that I didn’t want them running around with crackers in their mouths and choking on them, and wouldn’t it be terrible if they were to choke? Jenna nodded solemnly and around a mouthful of crackers told me with great difficulty that she did not have any crackers in her mouth. “No crackers in your mouth?” “No”, she said, as she reached for another handful. She then proceeded to run around the house with a mouthful of crackers and a handful of crackers, secure in the knowledge that the established protocols had been observed.
At least as she interpreted them.
Given their tenuous grasp of English, toddlers in particular have a monopoly on this form of currency. I won’t say they willfully leverage their nominal language skills so as to create the ambiguity which gives them some wriggle room, but I’m not at all convinced that it’s not happening, and on their terms. After all, if you’re not fluent in “Jenna Grace”, maybe you misunderstood the conversation, and perhaps there was no prevarication at all.
It’s breakfast time Saturday morning, Mama Sharon has whipped up oatmeal and cinnamon toast for everybody, and Jenna is slow-rolling us once again, the meal winding down and the previous night's Spanikopita Incident still on everybody's mind. Last night’s affair started with JG admitting she loved her Mom’s Spanikopita, and ended with none being eaten, interspersed with cajoling, stern voices, an escalation of tensions on both sides, tears, a plate shoved sullenly to the center of the table, and JG’s hilarious exit. In this case, the exit came about because JG mistakenly thought a leg of the table was right in front of her; she stiffened her body with the intention of reaching out to kick it, missed, and slid silently and completely out of her chair, her wide-eyed face disappearing, but not before I caught the expression on her face, an expression which I will preserve and carry with me always.
But, I digress.
Now it’s Saturday morning, and prior to taking any notice of Jenna, I watched in wonder as Kayla Zane wolfs down her entire breakfast, as in, like a wolf. She used both hands, alternating bites of oatmeal with bites of cinnamon toast. Sharon was amused; I was amazed and a little bit afraid. At one point, a wisp of hair had fallen across Kayla’s face. I would have brushed it back, but was uncertain that I would come away uninjured. So, we let her eat, and I swear her breakfast was Gone In Sixty Seconds.
I had noticed that she did this regularly so as to clear her schedule for the Jenna Grace sideshow sure to follow.
By the time Kayla was done, Jenna had yet to eat any of her oatmeal. Mama Sharon saw the trend early on and reminded JG that she had to eat her oatmeal, not just the cinnamon toast. Jenna responded with a masterful combination of feints meant to approximate the act of eating, including picking the spoon up, slowly raising it to her lips and opening her mouth, all with a winning smile and excellent eye contact. The final flourish would be to close her mouth over the completely empty spoon, fake chewing and swallowing followed by another winning smile. Then she would show her tongue.
Suffice to say, there was no actual eating done after the promise was made.
After regular entreaties by Sharon and me to eat her oatmeal, Sharon finally said "Eat five more bites". The cinnamon toast was of course, gone, accorded the same discretion JG had shown the oatmeal cookies from the day before, and I couldn’t help but feel that we had lost some critical leverage in the negotiations that were to follow.
See, in saying “Eat five more bites", Sharon was already throwing Jenna Grace a face-saving bone by allowing everybody at the table to accept as truth that any bites had already been eaten. Jenna looked at both of us as if she was sizing us up, deciding how much further she could push the envelope. We all knew what was going on.
A full minute passed before Jenna Grace proudly proclaimed “I ate five more bites!” This statement was accompanied by her Number One smile and both hands extended victoriously over her head, inviting us to share in her accomplishment, assuming we could suspend disbelief given the impossibly short period of time that had gone by since the original request, and seeing as how her oatmeal was serenely undisturbed, now going on a full fifteen minutes.
At this point, the negotiations were at a critical juncture. JG hand gone “All In” with her bold claim. Still smarting from my complete failure the night before, I said nothing. Sharon finally said “OK, three more bites Jenna, then you can get down”. You can imagine what came next. Suffice to say, the spoon did finally disturb the oatmeal, and at least one bite was consumed. Crisis averted.
Kayla took the whole thing in with a big smile on her face, hugely amused by her little sister’s performance art.
Besides the constraints of language, there is another important ethical point to be made here, mostly based on the age of the perpetrator and her tenuous grasp of mathematics. Being only two, Jenna might reasonably be cut some slack on having eaten exactly five bites, “five” being a fuzzy concept at best. For example, I had observed her attempting to count the fairies in Kayla's Fairy Castle the day before, a game that involved nothing more than attaching the fairies and flowers to the cardboard uprights that comprised the castle, taking them off, and then putting them back on again. When Jenna joined in, she insisted on counting everything, a deviation that Kayla bore with great good grace, even counting them slowly out to ten and then waiting for JG to repeat the gesture. And while JG could in fact count to ten, she would count certain objects twice, and others not at all. On that basis, we might fairly conclude that she understood the moral difference between, say, eating "zero" bites of oatmeal, and, say, "many", while everything in between was a little fuzzy.
But, back to the breakfast table: It is safe to say that on this occasion, the adults won a moral victory only. It is also safe to say that Jenna Grace did not eat five extra bites, but did eat more than one, assuming you count the bite that fell out of her mouth onto the chair, which she then picked up, swiped past her mouth and then discretely put back in her bowl.
Her victory at the breakfast table near complete, JG's gleeful, unselfconscious and wholly inconsequential lies proliferated. The afternoon of the last day, I ate a later lunch than the girls and had a plate of crackers, olives and cheese whilst watching TV. Jenna walked over, looked at the crackers, looked at me, and waited, her huge blue eyes soberly locking my gaze. "Yes", I said. "You may have some crackers." With that, she ate several in rapid succession. Kayla had some too. As the meal progressed, the girls got rambunctious and started running about. "No running with crackers!" I commanded, surely the least of any seasoned parents’ concerns, but hey, they were on loan here. I was bound and determined to return the Girls in at least as good of condition as we got them, Sharon’s amused lack of concern notwithstanding.
The point is that I as an adult had made a demand of the Girls and gone to the trouble of explaining that I didn’t want them running around with crackers in their mouths and choking on them, and wouldn’t it be terrible if they were to choke? Jenna nodded solemnly and around a mouthful of crackers told me with great difficulty that she did not have any crackers in her mouth. “No crackers in your mouth?” “No”, she said, as she reached for another handful. She then proceeded to run around the house with a mouthful of crackers and a handful of crackers, secure in the knowledge that the established protocols had been observed.
At least as she interpreted them.
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