way of educating children

by Ruth Salles

My husband once commented that I had a funny way of raising children, a little different way.

But it is because one child is different from the other. Depending on which one was pranking, I would talk to one of them calmly, another would get a serious scolding, but without shouting, another I would take the hand and say: "Let's just sit on the couch for a while to rest."

One night, at bedtime, one, still small, rebelled and threw himself on the floor kicking. I sat quietly on the couch, watching him quietly, until he got tired of kicking, looked at me… and went to sleep.

One day my very young daughter came to me in the living room and said, “Mommy, I'm so happy. Sings Neta Ua”. She wanted to hear that song:

There is a forest on this street,
which is called solitude.
Inside it lives an angel
that stole my heart.

It's an already sad song because it's in a minor key, but I thought she needed to spend her sadness, so I rocked her singing in the rocking chair. When I finished singing it all, she jumped off my lap and exclaimed, “There, Mom!” and ran outside to play.

Another time, when she was already a teenager, she came to me and said she was very angry, without knowing what, very angry indeed. So I got up, went to the kitchen, picked up three already cracked plates and advised her to go smash the plates with all her might against the backyard wall. My husband thought the best, got another old plate and went to help her. My husband, as usual, was joking, throwing the dishes on his back, under his legs. And there the two of them stayed breaking and breaking again, until they got tired, the dishes on the wall. And ready. The anger went away, but today my daughter comments that the worst thing was having to sweep up the pieces afterwards…

Later, when my husband was reading the newspaper at the dinner table and I held a granddaughter by the hand, saying “Let's rest with Grandma on the couch”, he stopped reading the newspaper and said, “You're still the same…”

But as for the broken dishes on the backyard wall, many years passed, each child with his life, that whole block was demolished, and as they began to build a vast condominium of enormous buildings, the work's siding showed pictures of things found underneath. from the land of the block. Well, it's not that one of my children decided to look at the photos and saw a shard of one of my dishes!!!

*Image: Ruth Salles and children – Rubens (with cap), Cláudio (in lap) and Marília. (Pedro Paulo was not yet born) – photo by Aloysio Salles.

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