Comfortable With The Mischief

Beckett has a behavior management color clip chart in his classroom. He told me about it last fall when we were driving home from school, because he needed to know every detail about the principal’s office. That’s where you go when you clip down to the color red...

I’m going to be honest, I really don’t care what color he ends his day on. We have had no threatening conversations around this color chart. I want him to be respectful and kind to his teachers and classmates, but beyond that, I’m really not fretting it. He’s a great kid, but I’m under no delusion that he will be perfect at school. With full awareness of the privilege inherent in this, I’d prefer he not be. I want him to be comfortable with a little bit of mischief. 

Here’s why:

Mischief gets them comfortable disturbing the peace.

For that reason, I feel oddly protective of his child-like ability to stretch the rules all day. Kids that are comfortable disturbing the peace when they are young are going to be comfortable with it when they are adults … I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what our world needs, a generation of people that are unafraid to make some noise in order to make some necessary changes in the world.

That was on my mind this week when we read Eloise by Kay Thompson. I pulled this classic off the shelf to read for Women’s History Month, with the hope of easing him into books about precocious women with a super funny one. Thompson might have created a near-perfect depiction of childhood in Eloise, with her hilarious stream of conscious commentary of her life full of mischief in her home at New York’s Plaza Hotel. She traipses around, crashing elegant weddings and charging room service, heckling her private tutor and antagonizing the staff. Most notably, perhaps, is that she does it all with a total lack of fear of getting in trouble.

Now, I’m going to make sure my boys have boundaries and expectations around kindness and respect and safety, but I’m not going to harp on the behavior chart. I don’t want to scare the mischief out of them.

If I send my boys out into the world with kindness, love and a little of Eloise’s disregard, there’s no telling what they can do.

#eloiseattheplaza

#womenshistorymonth