Self-Reliance vs. Presumption

The other day a very wise friend of mine was talking about siblings and how often the way they relate to each other is indicative of how they relate to the world. In her case, her oldest daughter often takes responsibility for her younger brothers and while that trait can be helpful at home - the "big sister" mentality and resulting bossiness often doesn't work out in the real world of 4th grade. It was a lightbulb moment for me in regards to my son Devin.

He is the child that makes everything work with his siblings. Partly it is his personality which has always had a certain "mother hen" component. He knows the rules and want to make sure that everyone follows them correctly and he knows what needs to get done and he wants to see it done correctly. So he is the one that always opened the door for Caitlin before she learned how to do it herself, he is the one that empties the trash without being asked because it needs to be done, he is the one that will set up the game for Hannah while I am cooking dinner. Right or wrong he often takes responsibility for everything running smoothly and I don't correct that tendency because it is helpful to me at home.

But I never thought how that caretaking and mediating trait would apply outside of our home. It has become expected that Devin often works out issues on his own and we have even encouraged this trait. Unfortunately, we have not taken the time to explain that there are some issues that we as his parents have to handle. Case in point - Devin got upset with something that a neighbor child was doing and so he marched himself over to his house and preceded to tell the neighbors Mom (very undiplomatically) that he did not like what her son was doing and that she needed to make him stop. She was less than understanding and so he repeated his demand in the way only Devin can - so matter of fact and expectant. Our neighbor is kind of an ass anyway so this presumption on my son's part did not go well.

When we talked to him about it, he just could not understand what he had done wrong. Why it was wrong for him to try and "handle" a disagreement with a neighbor who was an adult and why those issues should be left to my husband and I. I felt like beating my head against the wall - he felt like we weren't standing up for him because our neighbor was such an ass to him and we couldn't get him to understand that our position was affected because he had taken on an issue that should be left to adults. We pretty much left it at a standstill - he still didn't understand but accepted our new rule that any complaints that needed to be made to an adult had to be filtered through us first until we can explain how to handle out of family disagreements appropriately.

And then the next day - my lightbulb moment. Hearing Shari talk about how kids relate to the world, Devin is our self-reliant fixer - of course he would assume that he could just march over to the neighbors to air his grievance. We have taught him to be an independent problem solver and that is his first reaction to a problem "How can I solve this expediently?". Now we just need to teach him the social guidelines of adult/child interactions or put another way - telling the neighbor that her kid is a destructive jerk (even if he is) may not be the best way to handle things.