What’s that expression about dressing something up (is it a pig?)…but in the end, it’s still a pig? Is it lipstick? LOL, you can see that I’m clearly not a master at retrieving idioms. [Running to Google to “search it up”, because while I am not a master at retrieving idioms, I am pretty good at hunches].
Hey! I was right! Hunches for the win once again. I suspect I was confused by the “old” version, “you can’t make a silk purse from a sow’s ear.”, which apparently holds the same meaning. I knew it was something about a pig.
Just in case you’re not familiar with either expression—old or more newfangled–here’s the definition: “making superficial or cosmetic changes to a product in a futile effort to disguise its fundamental failings.” Perfect.
You well may ask, what does this have to do with parenting or relationships with young children? Well, I’ll tell you. There’s probably more than one way that it applies, but today, I want to focus on one particular bane of my existence:
“You get what you get and you don’t get upset.”
Or, in some regions of the U.S., “You get what you get and you don’t pitch a fit” Because apparently in some places, “fit” rhymes with the “-get”, pronounced “git”) Go figure!
I presume that most of you who live or work with children have heard (or used?) this phrase. I consider myself fortunate that, through some work of magic, it did not seem to be a thing during my long tenure in early childhood education, but appeared a bit later. I have to admit that I first encountered it—I remember the exact moment—when I had a job overseeing (in the interest of program improvement) a network of childcare programs affiliated with a high-level U.S. university. One of my tasks was observing in classrooms, and it was on one of those days that I first heard this phrase. A teacher—I believe it was the head teacher—was passing out cups and snacks, and I heard her repeatedly say, as she passed them out, “You get what you get and you don’t get upset.” She also had a pronounced habit of referring to the children as “friends”, which is another one that is like fingernails on a chalkboard for me, but we’ll save that one for another day.
The kids didn’t seem to mind. I’m sure they were used to it. As for me, it made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. What? First off, why do they “get what they get”? That sounds like a power play by an adult who feels the need to repeatedly assert that the adults make the rules and choices, or who doesn’t want to be inconvenienced by slowing down and collaborating with children. Or maybe it’s grounded in fear, not in the privilege of adulthood—a lot of adults have an outsized fear of “creating entitled children”, so in order to prevent that, we have to make sure to get them used to not getting what they want, a sort of moral (?) imperative. Neither of those reflects how I typically choose to engage with young children, committed as I am to a philosophy of radical respect and collaboration.
Yes, I know I’m an outlier on this “respect for kids” spectrum, so this may seem a bit extreme to you. That’s okay. Sit with it. It’s okay to feel how you feel (in constrast to the spirit of the phrase we’re discussing!) about this expression. And it’s okay for me to feel the way I feel. There’s never any harm done in considering another perspective.
And then, as if the first power play wasn’t enough, there’s another one. Not only do adults make decisions, but adults also dictate how children are allowed to feel about those decisions.
Ick.
To be honest, I just don’t really understand the whole trend. Children are people. Even young children. Really. I promise. They’re people. And we can just speak to them like people. You know, like the way we speak with people of other ages, whom we somehow hold in higher regard.
One way to assess this in ourselves is to engage in some little thought experiments about similar scenarios with friends, adult family members, or elderly relatives. Allow me to illustrate:
Let’s say you’re serving dinner. Cousins have come in from out of town and you’ve cooked (or ordered in) and you’re serving it all up in the kitchen. As you make your way around the table, distributing plates of food, do you imagine naturally repeating “you get what you get and you don’t get upset”? Why? Or why not?
Imagine that you have a beloved elderly relative visiting for the afternoon. You bring her a tall glass of iced tea, and she says “Oh dear, I think that’s a bit much for me. Would it be too much trouble for me to have it in a smaller glass?” How would you be likely to respond? Would you see her as “entitled” for preferring a certain sort of glass over another? Might you even ask her ahead of time what sort of glass she would like before serving it to her? Would you think it was okay because she asked so politely? Would it even occur to you to say something like “You get what you get and you don’t get upset?” Why? Or why not?
You get the idea. What’s the difference to you?
Don’t get me wrong. I’ve been around the block. I can imagine some of the arguments.
“But those are adults, and it’s not my job to teach them that sometimes life doesn’t give them what they want.”
“Sure, I give my elderly relative the glass she wants when she asks. But 4 year olds don’t ask politely, they throw a fit if they don’t get what they want.”
“That’s a few people. In the classroom, there are 16 kids and we’re just trying to get snack time done without too many disruptions or meltdowns, because we can’t attend to every child’s preferences and feelings, we just need to get them their food!”
“They might have really good reasons for not eating a certain food, or for wanting a smaller glass. My preschoolers don’t have good reasons, they just want the blue cup or the red cup or they want more crackers than the person sitting next to them. They just want what they want, and it doesn’t make sense, because the cups are all the same, and we’re giving everyone the same number of crackers.”
“This is how you create entitled kids, this is the problem with young people nowadays, they just think that everything revolves around them and that they should get whatever they want. That’s not how life works, and a whole generation seems to have missed that message!”
See? I do know, don’t I? Did I miss yours? Feel free to leave them in the comments—all objections considered!
I could address each of those, but I have confidence that, with a bit of mindfulness, putting on your respectful relationships glasses, you can do that yourself. Give it a go. Be me. Channel me. What are the answers to those statements? You can do this.
To be fair, there are those in the early childhood and parenting community who have similar concerns to mine, and taken them to heart. It’s a good start—we can’t change the world in one fell swoop (or “one swell foop”, as I’m inclined to say.) So, with the best of intentions, people have been offering adaptations.
“You get what you get and you can get upset.”
Or, as I was informed today, there is this version that was popularized in a well traveled post:
”You get what you get
And you might get upset
If you don’t get your fave
You can practice being brave
Breathe in and breathe out
You don’t need to shout
If you don’t get your way
You can still be okay.”
I mean, they’re definitely trying. It’s motion in a more positive direction. I read that the psychologist who wrote that longer version collaborated on it with her children, which makes it even better. I feel certain that we all have similar intentions and desires to take children’s authentic emotions into account, to not be dismissive, and to not abuse the power we have by default as adults. And I genuinely feel that if you’ve made these shifts, you’re on the right path. So keep at it.
And.
Being the curmudgeon and nag that I am, it still feels to me like putting lipstick on a pig. Make it sound better. Make it rhyme. Make it not be quite so dismissive. Still be able to share a lesson or value, but a little bit more nicely. It still means the same thing: I’m in charge. I’m going to give you what I want to give you, and if you’re not happy about that, you have to take care of that yourself by practicing emotional regulation skills that most adults haven’t mastered.
But yes, you’re still on the right path. Here’s the thing: I want to invite you to continue down that path, just a little bit further, to a different sort of place. This place, that I have lived and worked in for nearly 50 years, is a place in which we do not need clever, rolling rhymes to send messages to children. This place, which I still embody and love, is a place that does not feel the need for cutesy ways of saying things to young children, we can just speak to and with them. So, if you were to arrive at this place where I live, what would it look like? And maybe even more importantly, what would it not look like? These are important things to know, so you’ll know where you are if and when you arrive.
Would it be a place where children are taught that they can always just “get whatever they want?” No, absolutely not. I simply reject the idea of a need to “teach them” and recognize that all of us, as human beings, face countless experiences—even from the point of birth—that elicit frustration, places and things and times when we don’t get what we want. This is true throughout the lifespan. It’s something we all learn in the natural course of events, as long as someone doesn’t step in preemptively, seeing us as frail and incapable, to prevent us from experiencing those things. Children are capable learners, inherently gifted at learning from their own experience, as long as they have the room to express themselves and have loving adults who will be present and patient with them as they wend their way through difficult emotions, in increasingly sophisticated ways as they grow. That is, it’s not that I think this is not an important thing for children to learn. I do. They do learn it, they will learn it, through their own experience, every day. We don’t have to create artificial experiences and “lessons” to make sure they learn it.
Would it be a place where all would stop as we sit with a seemingly inconsolable child for as long as it takes them to work through their own emotion? No. That would be impractical, at least in settings where there are routines to be completed, and other children to attend to. As one of the objections above says, that would be unrealistic. Three, four, and five-year-old children sometimes feel things more intensely than we might expect, and sometimes their expressions about those disappointments might seem outsized. But then again, it may be that, as I often say, “it’s not about the cup.” Young children, like all of us, carry around a lot of emotion that builds up as they work hard to function well, be cooperative, and manage overstimulating environments. Sometimes—again, just like adults—a “small thing” is the drop that makes all of that emotion spill over. Maybe they’re not upset about the cup or the crackers. Maybe they’re upset about a time earlier, on the playground, when someone wouldn’t let them join a group of children sliding down the slide together or pretending to be pirates together. Maybe in the moment, they “let that go” and didn’t hit or scream or tell the teacher. Maybe they did what some people call “making good choices” (I do not embrace that phrase either, as I believe children do well when they can, not when they choose to) and they found another place to play, alone or with another child. They did what we wish them to do. They did well. But the feelings didn’t go away, because that’s not what feelings do. They need expression. And the children are little—so little, not so far from babyhood—and the disappointment about the cup, the inability to have a bit of autonomy and make a choice, just made their emotions overflow. They’re not “entitled” small people who think they can always have the cup they want. They are hurting small people who don’t yet have a firm command over their emotions, who just needed one little break, needed something to go their way. Not everything. Something. This is the gift of a lens shift.
Might we need to give them some time, ideally with a compassionate adult, to receive empathy and work through or unload what they feel? Sure. Will that be as long or as huge as we fear? Rarely. Will every child then do that, because we’ve “allowed” it? Almost certainly not. These are the fears that unconsciously run our interactions and relationships with children and that make us feel like we have to seize control or all will be chaos. That’s usually not true.
So what do I suggest as an alternative? The same thing I always suggest. Honest conversation. Collaboration. Compromise. Child-led solutions. Adults as emotional support. Sitting down with children at a group time in an unrushed way, putting a problem to them (yes, even at three years old), and telling them the truth. “I’ve noticed that sometimes it’s hard at snack time because there’s some cups that lots of kids want, and it’s sometimes so hard, because sometimes kids get the ones they like and sometimes they don’t. I think we can figure this out together, figure out what to do about this. What do you think?” We can even be a bit transparent and humble and tell them that we’re not exactly sure what to do when that happens, because it’s a tricky situation. Then we listen, with openness. We make lists. We ask other kids what they think of what their classmates say. Kids can and do figure these things out, in community. They are capable and competent.
Maybe they’ll decide that children should take turns. Maybe they’ll decide that teachers should just pass them out and kids should do their best to accept that (not too far from the adult idea, eh?) Maybe they’ll decide there should be a chart that says names and then kids know ahead of time who will get the cups. Maybe they’ll suggest that we paint the cups. Maybe they’ll ask if we can get more of that kind of cup. Maybe they’ll suggest that if a kid doesn’t get the “good cup”, they get an extra cracker. Maybe they’ll suggest that kids should get to pick, but that it should start at a different table each day, and if the supply runs out before their table’s turn, it will start with their table tomorrow. Maybe they’ll make a kind and compassionate suggestion about how to help and support a classmate of theirs who is more upset by these events than other children seem to be.
Children have so many good ideas. And as any parent or educator knows, when solutions are children’s ideas, they always work better than when they are our ideas. They implement them better, and they manage the feelings that come along with them better.
We can figure it out with them. Without rhymes. Without admonishments, either plain or with lipstick on. Without seeing them as people who are just trying to put one over on us. With compassion. With collaboration. In community.