I discovered that my youngest daughter could speak a foreign language when she was around 6 years old. We call it “whinese” because entire sentences and comments for many hours a day can be in this new and irritating tongue. Maybe you know this language – it is common among members of the early elementary school year tribe. What’s amazing is that all kids are born knowing it.
Unlike other languages, this one can dull the parental senses and either gets us to tune out our kids all together or become very irritable and molt into a different species before our kids’ eyes. When my daughter was 6, she was notorious for switching to whinese whenever things didn’t go her way – and usually because she’s just wasn’t in the mood to be cooperative. However, every once in a while, she would food us and whine about issues that were important and we actually should have paid attention to – like the “boot incident” of one very memorable February.
We had taken her to a local mountain for a ski lesson to work up her nerve for hitting the bigger slopes in Vermont. No sooner were the boots on her feet than the all to familiar whine started: “they are too tight! I hate the boots! You’re going to parent jail for making me wear these!” As the automatic shut off switch of our ears had kicked in by the end of the first whined phrase, we failed to notice the pained look on her face and adopted the usual parental stance of “stop trying to get out of skiing – the boots are fine! They will loosen while you are skiing”. And, she actually seemed to calm down.
An hour later, after a fun lesson, true tears stared running down her face once in the lodge. “I can’t feel my toes! It hurts – take these off!” We took off her boots and were completely shocked to see the toes on her left foot completely red and utterly frigid. After warming her up, and offering a peace-making piece of chocolate to ease the parental guilt, we took the boots to the ski shop at the mountain. Not only were the boots the wrong size but they were 2 different wrong sizes – the left being 2 sizes smaller than the right which was actually bigger than she needed.
We were now in a sticky parental situation – do we apologize to her for not listening and let her off the hook for the whining, or do we use this as a concrete “boy who cried wolf” example? We actually did both – apologized and explained to her that if she did not always whine when she did complain we’d take it more seriously.
We were once again reminded that a 6-year-old is and will always be a 6-year-old, at least until her next birthday! Sometimes you have to take the “if you can’t beat them, join them” approach with kids and use the very thing that is driving you nuts to actually correct this situation. So, with that in mind, we went for the silly humor remedy and started speaking to her in “whinese”. She laughed, told us she did not understand us and we all agreed that English was the preferable language in our house. Now she enjoys speaking whinese just to get us to!
Sometimes we win some and sometimes we lose some as parents – but we will always be able to set things back on track with a healthy dose of laughter and a hug. Kids are very forgiving that way!
(Originally posted May, 2004. Updated Nov, 2009.)
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