Chewymom

The other morning I HAD to run the vacuum. We’ve rearranged some furniture in our house, and all kinds of dust bunnies came hopping out from under bookshelves and sofas. We were being over-run by them (it isn’t just real rabbits that reproduce at amazing rates!), and the house had to be vacuumed. As I was crawling around, poking the vacuum hose into various corners and crevices, DD3 said, “Mommy, I need you!” “Not now,” I replied. “Let me finish vacuuming.” So DD3 sulked off, plopped on the sofa and inserted one thumb into her mouth and the other index finger into her “nana” (bellybutton) and stared at me, sullenly. And the phrase “demand-attention” flashed into my mind.

It raced me back about ten years to when that was a phrase no mother I associated with wanted to have used in the same sentence as her child’s name. “Demand-attention” children were to be avoided at all costs, at least within Ezzo circles. And yet, this morning, as I tried to figure out how to keep DD3 occupied while I finished my vacuuming, and hopefully moved on to other chores, I thought, “Where does this so-called demanding nature come from?”

The Ezzos would have you believe it is a part of our sinful nature that infants and children are demanding. And it is something that they must be trained out of. They may be right. I mean, there were no infants in the garden, so we don’t really know what a perfect infant would have been like. (And no, the line in “Away in a Manger,” which says, “The little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes,” is not our model of a perfect infant.) But lets suppose for a minute that there had been an infant in the garden. We all know that watches had not been invented yet, so obviously Eve could not have fed her infant every three hours. And there really couldn’t have been a lot of crying between feedings–this was a perfect world, remember?? So what could she have done? Fed the baby according to its hunger cues, maybe? Which Gary Ezzo fondly calls “demand feeding.” If the baby never demanded attention, it would’ve starved. It wouldn’t have had the ability to kindly place it’s tiny newborn hand politely on Eve’s shoulder and said, “Mommy, I’m hungry now. May I please have a little breastmilk?”

If you demand-feed your baby, Gary says, you’ll end up with a toddler who demands attention. And yet, isn’t that what toddlers need? Our attention? If you don’t give your toddler attention, she may end up trying on your nail polish, like DD3 did when she was two and I was ignoring her. You know that feeling…that “wait a minute…it sure is quiet…that CAN’T be good…” and the ensuing racing around the house trying to find said toddler. One of mine gave himself a haircut when he did not have my attention. One scribbled on the wall. One used a sharpie to decorate my chair. It is the nature of a toddler to demand attention. How else can they learn? They explore, create (yes, even on fingernails, hair, walls, chairs), feel, taste, squish, bounce, and lick the world around them. And everything they explore gets filed away in their brains, and they learn more about the world around them. And if we aren’t paying attention, they’ll get into mischief. And we’ll miss a lot of joy, watching them learn and teaching them about the world. They absolutely demand our attention! It is how they form their world-view, and how they figure out who they are and how they relate to everything and everyone around them. And I think it is by design that they do so, not due to their sinful nature. (I’m not denying that nature, by the way….) God has designed toddlers and young children to need that intense attention so that their parents are engaged in their world–attending, caring, training and nurturing them along. And as most grandmothers would say, it is also why God gives children to people when they young and energetic!!

And on that note, I’m preparing myself for when DD3 wakes up, busy, cheerful, chatty and demanding my attention! And I’m determined to shed my previous mindset that feels annoyed when I want to get things done, and she wants my attention. (And I’m thankful that her brothers are out of school this week and can help entertain her! Tee hee!)

This entry was posted on Monday, December 19th, 2005 at 7:21 am and is filed under GFI/Ezzo/Babywise. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.