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Show m v. Our Children : ' Father can still express love ment passes sooner or later, but in the meantime it can be a roval pain in the neck to some parents. Your choices are limited. limit-ed. You can let him go on with his games, hoping the involvement will end pretty pret-ty soon. You can try to substitute sub-stitute a real train, doll or ball, and even occasionally involve yourself with him in the play activity. (This distraction approach may be the most attractive to you.) Or you might make the Kleenex less available, phasing it out gradually, or perhaps make it totally unavailable. un-available. In any case, it's kind of nice to have less serious problems like this one in our families; isn't it? Q. I can't help but respond re-spond to your recent column col-umn about the 5-year-old who squints and whose mother feared ridicule of glasses by other children. My daughter (just now 5) has been wearing bifocals for nine months. They were awkward for her for a few days, and they are a pain to keep clean due to dirty little lit-tle fingers, but she can now see without crossing her eyes or having one eye drift out. Most of the adults she meets are stunned at bifocals bifo-cals on so young a child, but all of her friends at school who saw her with them for the first time asked their parents to buy them "real" glasses like hers instead of "play" glasses! A. Whether it Is a major condition like blindness, deafness or mental retardation, retar-dation, or a minor one of the type this parent described, de-scribed, it is possible to capitalize on it help the child feel good about himself him-self or herself work closely with teachers to make certain that no or few negative attitudes emerge em-erge among the other children. chil-dren. Prejudice isn't inborn; it is learned, or "Carefully Taught" as the young Lt. Cable told us in the famous musical play, "South Pacific." Pacif-ic." As parents, one of our major tasks it to accept differences in people. After all, we're the major model for what our children will become. What do you think about that? Bv WILLARD ABRAHAM Ph.D. Copley News Service Q. My husband and I come from families that are very different. His family is cold and detached, seldom showing any emotion. Mine is highly high-ly emotional, easily showing show-ing how we feel, very demonstrative de-monstrative in our display of affection. We kiss and hug quite a bit. Maybe all this is because all of my grandparents came from southern Europe Eu-rope (Italy) and his were born in a cold country (Norway). I keep trying to get him to loosen up with our children chil-dren because I want them to love him as I do, but he just can't seem to let himself him-self go. I think it is important import-ant for our children to see him as the fine and wonderful won-derful person he is, but it is almost impossible for him to show any warmth. For example, he will never kiss our two young children, and won't even hold them on his lap. I'd appreciate, any suggestions you have to offer. A. One of the problems we create in marriage appears ap-pears to be our desire to change our partners, instead in-stead of trying to accept them as they are. It is difficult diffi-cult to alter personalities; maybe even impossible in most cases. Children often seem to be able to adapt to and respect re-spect the differences in their parents, and perhaps yours will be able to recognize recog-nize how "fine and wonderful" wonder-ful" their father is. In his own way perhaps . he can. demonstrate to them that he loves them, even though his display of emotion may be controlled. Q. I guess my problem is peculiar, but I really do need your advice. Our 3-year-old has a strange interest, in-terest, and I want to get him away from it as quickly quick-ly as I can. Would you be-lieve be-lieve that he loves Kleenex? Honestly, he does! He doesn't eat it, or anything any-thing like that, but he does pull it out of the box piece after piece and play with it, pretending it's a train or a doll or a ball. So what should I do? Your ideas please. A. It's widely known that young children often have an attraction, even a fetish, toward certain things, like their bottle, blanket or favorite fa-vorite toy. The involve- |
