The first time I thought about this was when my friend Tyler got me to help his wife with her back pain. While at their super-Kevin-McCallister-looking-brick-house I got to hang with their kids, a girl and a boy, with the boy the younger and a wonderful little tank. Once me and Robert were over for dinner and had a fantastic hide and seek game with them. And homemade pho! Drool.
Anyway, through hanging out at the house a few times I learned that the little boy loved throwing things. His parents were cool but they also couldn’t have him constantly throwing stuff at people across the living room.
I kept thinking about it and eventually asked Tyler if they had ever set him up in a place where he could throw AS MUCH AS HE WANTED. Or practiced catch with him. Or rolled a ball back and forth on the ground. Or given him a big box he could destroy with abandon in the backyard as crazy as he wanted to. Like, maybe they could set up his bedroom or something, or a spare room, with pillows or other soft things that would be super fun to throw but no threat within his throwing abilities. Tyler said he’d never thought of that and they’d see what they could do.
I think there are a lot of people who encourage the shit out of throwing because they want the kid to play major league baseball, probably fewer parents that see value in it just because the kid wants to do it. Zero projection into the future. Unless you count his spatial, muscular, and connective tissue future. (Etc., we could go on about everything that IS happening for his healthy future through throwing things.)
Let’s chat about giving kids ways to throw that work for everybody.
One of the tales as old as time is the relationship between people and throwing rocks into bodies of water. Why oh why is it so fun.
That’s a perfect place to set a kid to throwing to their heart’s content. You might even join them. The variability in rock size and the potential for learning how to skip rocks adds a lot of awesomeness here.
There is unlikely to be a threat to anything you care about breaking as they throw it in the water. Just make sure nobody is trying to fish nearby, at least. I’m barely resisting going off on a tangent about how maybe you could teach about fish and habitat etc…
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When considering when it’s ok or not for a kid to throw, consider a few things:
Their current actual strength: matters because if you tell them to stop throwing things at a goose, you may be stupid because the goose is so much farther away than the kid could dream of reaching yet
Their conceptual development: also gonna use the goose thing here. They may be too young to have a concept of how their throwing things at a goose could end up with a secondary affect of harming the goose. They know throwing rocks is fun. Empathy, especially past a primary affect which is how much fun throwing is for the narcissistic adorable little living-in-the-moment bastards, is not the first thing that develops in a human being.
Their motor skill development: how good is the kid’s aim? Related to the strength factor, can they coordinate enough to throw it “forward” and have it not go behind them yet? My friend Moses uses an analogy around little kids throwing and how awful it is at first before their brains pare away all the extraneous information they’re throwing in before the coordination develops to help people in Kinstretch classes understand it’s ok that their body isn’t doing what they want it to be doing, YET. Click that link to get more coordinated in my full mobility membership. Can you wiggle just your big toe?
Most adults seem to just write off the whole idea of throwing because they don’t take in the gems of information I’m writing here. You can adjust so many factors to allow a kid to practice and get better at what they are so very interested in. You can help them and still stay sane, within reasonable risk of your own making.
Please apply this to every other thing a kid does that seems to be pissing you off. Ask yourself -
Is it possible to adjust the parameters to create a container in which they CAN practice and do the thing?
What would have to be true for you to be comfortable? What can you control right now?
Is this actually a problem?
If I take a step back and observe, what are all the things being practiced here? What do I want to adjust?
Does it need to be at a later time, or can it be adjusted with the materials and space already present?
This will help develop your own creativity and awareness of your environment.
My last tip for today on this is the target game. This helped the owner of Wild Child San Diego preschool while I was a part of their staff. If kids are throwing things and it’s getting a little out of control in some way, give them a target. Kids love a target. You don’t have to convince them. Just name the target. I do recommend throwing with them a few times. Little kids/poor motor coordination: big target like throwing at a bush or a patch of grass or even a hill or something. Bigger kids/more experience: smaller target like a certain rock, etc. I even did this with putting a stick on the ground as a target. This gives you an immediate container and sense of control over the whole thing. And it helps develop their skill in a very important way. This kind of motor control is priceless. It may even help you feel less nervous while they’re doing other things.
Throwing with or even starting the throwing-at-a-target game with this one kid who had a really hard time when he was not succeeding at things (something I incredibly related to) helped me demonstrate that I would also miss, often, and then keep throwing, keep practicing, and get better for my efforts. I wasn’t lying; I wanted to practice in earnest. He just happened to be there. I also didn’t force him to keep going at any point. I just demonstrated, knowing something would sink in.
You wanna be comfortable, and your comfort is important when caring for children. It’s not just about them. I hope I’ve shown that you have some freedom in how you make it work for all of you today.
I feel like I just closed out a seminar at a Holiday Inn near your house or something. ::lol::