Simple Rules for Children

While having dinner with a friend recently, he shared advice he gave one of his grandchildren, let's call it a boy who was having a difficult time coping with the variety of stresses that can affect a child in the early elementary years.  The difficulties he was having are a bit besides the point for this discussion.

He told his grandson 3 simple rules of life:

1. Smile and the whole world smiles with you.  Cry and you cry alone.
2. If you look for trouble, there will always be people around willing to help you find it.
3. When you are happy, you win, when you are sad, you lose.

I see a great deal of wisdom in these rules:

1. Smile and the whole world smiles with you.  Cry and you cry alone.  Having a positive attitude is a critical skill to child development (and not too shabby a skill for the rest of us to work on either.)  My friend's grandchild often would cry as a way of getting attention.  At some point, if you cry a lot (or complain a lot for the adults who need translation), people will begin to tune you out, or at least discount the veracity of your concerns.  Ultimately we can find ourselves pretty isolated, wondering why we no longer have the attention to our concerns that we believe they merit.  It can easily lead to the lesson learned in "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" fable.

Loneliness is a horrible place to be.  Crying alone all the more so.  Most of us have experienced times of loneliness and know about its isolation and sadness.  It can create its own whirlpool of stagnation, with loneliness leading to tears that are ultimately shed alone, which is sad, depressing, and leads back to more loneliness.

Learning how to smile and, as a result, creating a positive attitude is always a win.  We all know people who are amazingly bright and cheerful (you may even be lucky enough to be one of them!)  We all can cite examples of how much the success of a smile brings success in relationships, business and life.  We see the proof of this daily.

2. If you look for trouble, there will always be people around willing to help you find it.  My friend's grandson had a habit of getting attention by instigating conflict with siblings - a trick as old as the hills.  Provocation breeds conflict, and then the opportunity for attention.  The boy was repeatedly provoking his siblings in a fashion that left him the victim (see #1) and he couldn't find a way out of it.  Learning that trouble will find you much more easily if you are looking for it can assist in teaching the child to cease from looking for trouble.

My friend notes that these first two points are behavioral.  Smiling is a behavior, as is "behaving badly" (a phrase often used by Ross Greene - see other posts on his work) is also a behavior  The next one, he cites is emotional, drawing on our natural draw towards competition.

3. When you are happy you win.  When you are sad, you lose.  The "win - lose" paradigm is simple, yet elegant, to borrow a phrase.  Its simplicity is in its view of causality.  Happiness causes winning, sadness causes losing (so to speak.)  The elegance is that what we win is so variable depending on ones' station in life.  For children it might mean getting the positive attention that is a normal craving.  For adults its often much more subtle, more varied, as the things that make us feel good are so often less tangible.  But success, no matter its shape for form, no matter the age is a win.

I'm planning on using this and will let you know how it works.  So far, for my friend's grandson, its working quite well - after his mom remarked about what a lovely sparkle he had in his eye at the playground, he explained to her in his own words, that when he's happy, he wins.