Flex for February - February 9, 2023 | Kids Out and About Seattle <

Flex for February

February 9, 2023

Debra Ross

See the sabre-toothed tiger in the photo above? That's you. And the round dude he's with, that's your toddler. Or your teenager, or your 'tween.

I snapped the above photo, which I called Frustration, at the Houston Museum of Natural Science a few years back. The tiger (Xenosmilus) is trying to lunch on what you would have called a Glyptodon, a Pleistocene Era armadillo ancestor. He's out of luck: The armor is impenetrable, and the tiger isn't bright enough to change his approach. So he's doomed... in this case, forever frozen inside the HMNS, never getting the Armadillo Tartare he was craving.

Every parent has experienced Xenosmilus's frustration: We try the same strategies over and over again, metaphorically banging our heads against their little armored hides, and somehow we keep being surprised when it doesn't work. Fortunately, humans have something that the tiger lacked even when he had more than bones: a brain that refuses to be limited, that adapts to find solutions. I know this sounds simplistic, but simply reminding myself that I can draw on our gifts of creativity and flexibility is often enough to make me stop what I'm doing and try something else. Even if that doesn't magically fix the problem, it makes me somewhat more confident and infinitely more cheerful.

I've found that the Tiger and Armadill-o-zilla lesson also has helped me manage something as simple but intractable as February. I know I'm not the only one who finds the shortest month to drag on longest. Even given our remarkable prefrontal cortex, humans haven't (yet!) figured out how to fix the weather, but I can remind myself that there are ingenious ways to refuse to be limited by it. When I take five minutes to focus, I find that it's possible to adapt to February Gray, and the frustration melts away.

Deb