“A friend accepts us as we are yet helps us to be what we should.” – unknown

About five years ago when I was about 6 months into the parenting journey, a friend whose kids were high school aged casually threw out this line of advice, “Logic doesn’t work with kids between 2 ½ years old and 4 years old.” I had been around my nieces and my friends’ kids but hadn’t worked with kids well enough to know what that meant so I somehow internalized that line as if there would be a loss of logic when my daughter was 2 ½ years old. Like at age 2 I would be able to say to her “You can’t have that piece of candy because it has too much sugar and that’s not good for your body” but at age 2 ½, I’d no longer have that tool. I know all of you that have kids are laughing and now that I have lived through those years and have a 5 year old and a 1 ½ year old, I giggle too.  Who knows why my friend tacked on that lower age limit instead of saying “kids under 4” but it left me a small sense of loss at the time.

Isn’t that the interesting thing about the advice we give each other? We say something to convey our experience and wisdom and also to help and sometimes it causes panic. I loved this advice column post that Real Life of an MSW blogged about the other day. The person writing in was asking whether they should correct the grammar of a person that they wanted to help who was seeking a job advancement. The answer was brilliant because timing is everything.

It makes me wonder whether we offer advice more for ourselves or for the other person. I remember my very wise dad, who as a retired pastor who counselled and mentored many people, saying “Mostly, I listened” about times he’d get together for coffee with people seeking his advice. That resonates with the trail ethic I’ve learned from hiking — to greet other hikers when I see them but I don’t offer any advice about the path ahead unless I’m asked because I learned early on that my need to provide unsolicited commentary came directly from my ego wanting to prove experience or status.  

Yet we can offer such great comfort and direction to others when we do advice well. Sometime about a year ago when the pandemic was just shutting everything down, a woman who is now a grandmother many times over said to me, “It gets less busy.” I think about that piece of advice a lot in these days of shepherding my little ones back into in-person activities and it gives me the stamina to push through when I’m tired because I know I won’t always have to.

This morning when my 1 ½ year old didn’t want to get dressed, I didn’t even try logic. But I held him and told him that I understood that sometimes we don’t feel like going to work or preschool. Then I buckled him into the car seat with his pj’s on, we changed when we got there and he was fine with it. It felt as if I worked for him like it does me when I get good advice – a softening that comes from a compassionate ear and then an opening into a shift of perspective.