Marylhurst Early Childhood Center

I once had a four-year old in my preschool class who went around to every child on the yard, telling them over and over again, “You are weird,” until they cried.

You know how four-year olds can be, right? They glom onto a new word, assess its cache and power and then commit to using it in every possible way until they tire of it and find a new word with which to torment their peers and siblings.

Being a brand newly minted preschool teacher at the time (and a year away from being a parent myself), I tried all the textbook responses and consequences I could think of. Which were about two. And they both failed. This four-year old was hugely infatuated with the word “weird” and continued to bestow it upon every other child in the school for the entire day.

Finally, at a loss for anything else to say about it, I asked her: “So, are you weird?”

She looked at me with great disdain, as if I had peed myself or something.

“No,” she said, rolling her eyes at me, “I am a duck.”

This sounds like a Zen parable or an ancient Talmudic allegory, I know, but it’s not. There is no deeper meaning to the story, only this:

Sometimes we just gotta accept the random quirkiness around us.

Quirky is a word that evokes strong feelings in us. We either embrace it or we work hard to avoid it. Often, we proclaim to embrace it but secretly avoid it.

To be quirky is to be different. We might stand out from everyone else, and not always in a good way. We might not be popular in middle school if we are quirky. We might not get invited to every birthday party, or go to the prom. Well-meaning friends and family members might want to “help” us not be so odd; we might suffer years of “helpful” suggestions as to how to best blend in, to not be so weird.

Working with your two and three year olds, I live in a world where quirky is king. Walk into our classroom any day, observe the children in there and imagine them to be, say, thirty or forty year olds. You’d be looking at a scene out of “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest”. Someone is talking to himself. Someone is laughing at nothing. Someone is arguing with a spoon. Someone is gesticulating to herself as she looks into a mirror. Someone is hoarding golf tees. Someone is eating another person’s snack. Someone is rattling the baby gate to get out.

It’s all surreal, it’s all weird, they’re all quirky and we all dig it. Some mornings, honestly, I cannot wait to get to work to see what bizarre things your kids are going to do or say in class.

* a loosely related, but actually, mostly tangential anecdote:

There was a kid last week; I think he was in Kindergarten, outside my classroom with another child and a teacher. The teacher needed to go get something so I offered to hang out with the two Kindy kids until she got back. I introduced myself to them, asked them their names, etc. After a short awkward silence, one of the kids said to me in a shaky voice, “I don’t think we are supposed to be here in the hallway without a grownup.”

I said to him, “I am a grownup, did you know that?”

He studied me for a moment and turned to his friend as if I had said nothing.

“I really don’t think she is a grown-up,” he whispered to his friend.

Now, frankly, this is a hugely interesting topic to me, begging all sorts of discussion topics on what, exactly, is a grownup but I could see that this little boy needed real answers.

“Yes, I am a grownup,” I told him. “And I am teacher here, too. And a mom.”  I was ready to show him my turkey neck, liver spots and crow’s feet, just to assure him that I am, indeed, a safe person to be caring for him.

Thankfully, at that moment, his teacher returned, the little boy heaved a big sigh of relief and I went back to my classroom.

Okay, back to my point…..

As our kids get older, of course, we hope that they develop the social skills and emotional intelligence to be successful in the world. But do we still value the individualism, the slight oddness, the things that make them uniquely them?

It’s easy to see our children as a never-ending “to do” list of stuff we think we have to change about them. And, to be sure, there are things that we need to be aware of, areas in which our kids will need our guidance and redirection. But I think we have to not lose sight of the fact that the goal isn’t necessarily to match, or fit in line, or not make waves. The goal is to know ourselves, accept ourselves, and strive to be authentic without offending or repelling those around us.

Our kids need to hear it from us because they are not going to hear it from their peers or from mainstream media: Be yourself!

Because sometimes everyone around you is weird and you are just a lone duck, calling it as you see it.

—————————————————

Ann Brown is available for private parenting consults. Please contact the school for her fees and schedules.