Mind-Changing

I read a blog post awhile back about how the number one piece of advice the author of said blog post would give to other moms is that it is ok to change your mind. In her case she was referring to the fact that she'd been letting her 4 year old daughter watch some of those Disney tv shows like Hannah Montana meant for older children, and she realized that a lot of the behavioral issues she was starting to have with her daughter were learned behaviors from those shows where parents are depicted as imbeciles and the humor largely derives from the kids talking back and so on. So, she decided to not let her daughter watch those shows anymore. And you know what? The behavior stopped over time.

It sounds like such obvious advice: it's ok to change your mind. But for some reason, it is advice I have needed since becoming a mom. Early on, I would read this or that book and think that that was the way I had to do something. It would sometimes take me months to figure out that a particular thing wasn't working for us. Recently, we felt like we'd started letting Penny watch too much television, well, movies really. It started out small. At first we thought it was so cute that she liked Nemo, or Toy Story. But then she started wanted to watch them every day multiple times. And cry if you said no. She'd also be more interested in the movie than in doing anything else, which just drove us nuts. So we decided to back off and go days or weeks without tv or movies. Now we might let her watch a short episode of something like Blue's Clues or the Backyardigans once in a while under certain circumstances. It's a special event type thing, and it is so far working for us quite well. I'm so glad that Tray and I had that talk and decided that we could change our minds.