I took a nap yesterday and woke up feeling as though someone had used a hammer to rearrange my bones. I don’t know what happened while I was sleeping, but whatever it was, my body clearly did not approve. I also had this horrible muscle pull around my hip that was so painful I had to lie there stretching and enduring the pain for a few minutes before I could convince my legs that we were, in fact, supposed to get up.
Eventually, I wobbled to the bathroom, splashed some water on my face and tried to rinse whatever remained of sleep from my eyes. When I finally came around, I started thinking about what could possibly have caused such an aggressive attack on my body. Maybe I was deficient in some vitamins and my bones were protesting or I had simply slept like a question mark. Whatever the case, I decided I needed fruits.
So I walked to a nearby store to buy some. When I got there, I met a little girl behind the counter. Her mother had apparently left her in charge of the store. And I was impressed. From my estimation, she couldn’t have been more than six years old, yet the moment she saw me, she enthusiastically asked what I wanted to buy.
I lowkey thought she asked because she wanted to call her mother but no, lil mama was ready for business as she confidently assured me that she could attend to me herself.
I was intrigued, so I decided to let her. I started calling out the fruits I wanted, and she began giving me their prices with the confidence of someone who had been running a supermarket since 1998.
I needed oranges and apples but when she told me the price of the oranges, I paused because the price was different from what her mother had charged me the previous time I bought from her. And interestingly, the little girl’s price was cheaper. That’s when I realised she clearly knew how to sell fruits, but perhaps hadn’t completely mastered the economics of fruit pricing.
Still, I didn’t want to take advantage of her. I couldn’t tell whether the prices had genuinely changed overnight or whether she had simply invented a very generous discount. So rather than telling her outright that she was wrong, I suggested that she sell them to me at the price her mother had previously given me. I told her that if her mother later confirmed that the price had actually changed and her own price was correct, I’d come back and get whatever difference was owed.
She agreed and began packing the fruits. Fortunately, before she finished, her mother returned and the orange-price mystery was solved.
The little girl had indeed been selling them for less than the actual price and her mother immediately scolded her. She immediately looked embarrassed, and I could see her trying very hard not to cry. I literally felt bad for her. Not really because her mother had corrected her( she needed to learn that prices matter when you’re selling something), what bothered me was the way the correction happened.
She had been trusted with something, she had tried to do it but she made a small mistake. And suddenly, that little burst of confidence she’d walked around with when I first arrived seemed to disappear.
I wanted to say something but I remembered that there’s an unwritten rule of adulthood that warns against becoming a parenting consultant in someone else’s family so I kept my opinion to myself.
Some parents don’t appreciate it when you try to tell them how to handle their children, even when you’re genuinely trying to help. So I minded my business, paid for my fruits and left. But, lil mama stayed on my mind. I actually admired her. At such a young age, she was willing to help her mother. She saw a customer walk in and immediately thought she could do it without thinking about being too young. That kind of confidence is worth protecting.
Children are going to make mistakes. That’s practically one of their job descriptions. And while mistakes should certainly be corrected, I think there’s a difference between correcting a child and crushing their confidence while doing it.
You can correct a child without making them feel stupid for trying because sometimes the thing we’re correcting isn’t just a mistake, we’re also shaping how that child feels about trying again. Don’t be your child’s first bully. Parenting is difficult, I don’t even pretend to know the perfect way to raise a child, and I’m certainly not qualified to hand out parenting manuals but watching that little girl go from proudly announcing that she could handle my order to looking like she wanted to disappear made me feel really bad.
