This morning I woke up at 5am, thinking. I was thinking about how I’m being with my kids, it’s something of a preoccupation with me. My wife and I have been deliberately stepping back and giving them more responsibility; you’re hungry get yourself a snack, you want your tablet time? Have you put your laundry away, emptied the dishwasher, tidied up your stuff and been to the loo? Much strife in our house comes down to kids being hungry or needing the loo.
Our boys are eight and ten. I woke up realising I wasn't following our agreed approach in the mornings. I do the school run three days a week and the pick up once, my wife does two mornings and four picks ups. It wasn’t just me falling into old habits of making sure everything gets done, various people in our house have been ill recently, which makes for early nights. When I looked back over the last few weeks I realised the weekdays had fallen into a rather flat routine. Get ready for school or work, get there, do that, come home. Get dinner done, a bit of reading or a game, bath occasionally, kid bedtime, quick tidy, a read or a watch, bed. Rise and repeat.
I’m already aware of the danger of repetition, especially with little minds, when my youngest was four, he told me I liked cleaning. It horrified me, because I don’t. He saw me tidying and cleaning around him and assumed it was how I liked spending my time. It wasn’t, it’s just a away of me getting things back in order, so I can then relax.
You see, we build up our ideas and mental models with repetition. The more something is repeated the more it stays in our minds, it influences the way we see the world and each other, the decisions we make and the things we do. The current state politics illustrates this perfectly, if sadly. A fact can be proven technically false, yet repeated often enough has the same effect as a truth. Those that want to believe it will. They ignore anything to the contrary. It’s called confirmation bias. Or, because it’s repeated so much, we believe it, something researchers think is down to the ease with which we process the lie after we’ve seen it once. It becomes familiar, the outrage dissipates. It’s called the illusory truth effect.
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Put the illusory truth effect together with, our now rather flat, weekday routine, and you have a pattern that doesn't portray the truth of our attitude to life, nor the kind of values we want to instil in our kids. Yes, work is important and getting to places on time is a necessity, but it's not really the priority or the main thing, at least for us. Connecting with people, valuing relationships and being playful are. The last thing I want is a mundane life with my children. I don’t work so bloody hard to be there with them for that. In our run down and busy-with-work-state, we had let an unwanted routine take hold and were sliding down an unpleasant slope.
No time like the present to correct it, so I’m breaking out all the old, over breakfast, games, questions and quizzes. And it’s working, of course it is, because when you’ve got kids and you stop focusing on that laborious layer of life, filled with chores and commutes, you get back to laughs, connections, cuddles and the things that make life, well life.
