tea party?”). Your child’s pretend play is a wonderful window into what’s going on in her mind.
Try using your child’s imagination to get him to cooperate. Here’s how one mother taught her three-year-old to brush his teeth: “On Billy’s toothbrush there is a little picture of Oscar the Grouch, so I become the voice of Oscar the Grouch. I say, ‘is there any trash in your teeth? Let me come in and see.’ He immediately opens his mouth for Oscar to come in and look at his teeth and eat up the trash that’s in there. Then we talk about having clean teeth, and how we don’t want to leave trash in our teeth. Brushing Billy’s teeth has not become a big issue because I help him cooperate.”
The mind of the preschool child is rich with fantasy. To three-year-olds Big Bird and Barney are real. They don’t waste energy separating real from pretend; they sit back and enjoy. While parents may feel it’s their disciplinary duty to purge their child’s gullible mind of things unreal, resist this urge. Strike a balance. Let the child enjoy his fantasies, and as his thought processes become more sophisticated he will accept that these fictitious characters are only pretend. You don’t have to manipulate his environment in order to maintain the fiction, the way some parents do to keep a child believing in Santa or the Easter Bunny. Just enjoy these games for what they are – pretend. Santa at best is a jolly, benevolent figure, not a punishing one. Everyone enjoys fantasy, and even for adults it’s therapeutic. Use your child’s behaviour as a barometer of whether his imaginary experiences are helpful or harmful. The same imaginative mind that creates the fantasies also creates fears. We make sure our children know it’s Mummy and Daddy who give them gifts at Christmas. We’ve never agreed with telling children that “Santa Claus” is watching to see if they’re good. Be especially vigilant about cartoons. (See “Helping Your Child Handle Fears”.)
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