Fortunately or unfortunately, my daughter is following in her father’s footsteps and is becoming an avid jumper. On some jumps, she sticks the landing – like in the image above from the Children’s Museum of Manhattan. On some other jumps…not so much.
The other night, My daughter was demanding I take pictures with “Daddy’s Camera” of her taking flying leaps off the couch. So, I set up to do so, and she takes a few bounces and leaps off the couch and full-on belly flops on the floor, hard.
Now, generally, what I’ve found most useful in this case is the simple “Tell Me About It” assist, which you can read about in full here. These have worked great with Mackenzie – I’ll ask her “What happened”, she tells me what happened, or if she can’t articulate it in words, she’ll show me with one of her dolls, brighten up, and then go back to playing.
But this time, after crying for a sec, she gets up, comes running to me and lets loose this flurry of a sentence saying,
“Daddy! I was doing the BIG JUMP and I WENT DOWN and BONKED and I was WHAT’S HAPPENING?!!!!”
I could only laugh, and she thought it was AWESOME and then ran back to do more jumping.
Made me think of the final paragraph of that Scientology Handbook article:
There is nothing difficult about it. After a child has had a few assists this way, he will, upon being injured, run to the person who can administer this painless help and reassurance, demanding to “tell about it.” – LRH
Somehow I don’t think this was the last time we’ll be doing that assist after a “big jump”. 🙂
I would definitely recommend anyone who spends any time around children to take the free Children course available on the Volunteer Ministers website. It’s fast, effective know-how that anyone can use to improve the whole activity of raising & looking after children.