So much in a child

I was playing with my little pri 1 cousin this afternoon... and he's a little terror of sorts. Here's his profile: Bad tempered, mischievous, stubborn, rough, messes up the place, wants all the little things, wants things his way... a little monster. (Don't get me wrong, I still love him. Read on.) He wanted me to play with him today but I wasn't in the mood. Of coz, being the insistent little one, I had little strength left from my overnight studying to resist him.

Actually, he's quite an active boy and all he wants is just some attention. ok, I'm fine with that. So, he did his usual terrorizing around my room, carrying my soft toys all over the place and took off all the notices on my white board. He dug for a marker ( I made sure it was non-Permanent!) and started drawing on the whiteboard. He started role-playing... as a maths teacher, an art teacher and a chinese teacher. I was his only student, listening and nodding in amusement (much to his delight). It was indeed amusing to hear him teach. In all his innocence, he mimicked his English teacher's british accent, his chinese teacher's style and portrayed his maths teacher's strictness.

We played some sort of doctor RPG too. He was the doctor. I was the obliging patient and nurse. He soon got bored of just curing patients and told me to start talking a lot and make a lot of noise. Well, I did.

Then he went, "shut up!"

"That's quite rude you know, doctors aren't supposed to do that," I said.

"But the dentist in my school also told the children to shut up. But not me, because I'm a good boy. But I was terrified," he said.

Poor thing. Dentists and doctors should mind their language. Kids pick things like theses up quickly. And they don't hestiate in the doing the same.

He got bored quickly and I had to occupy him with some sort of guess-the-number-saga-seeds-in-my-hand game (before he finds more things to destroy or desire around my room...). He very much wanted to win, changing answers here and there. But when he finally counted the saga seeds hidden in my palm, he didn't purposely miscount them to win the game. He's honest. We played some sort of flag eraser game (you know, the primary school kind of game-- flip the eraser till yours lands on top of your opponents). He was quite fair too, making sure we had erasers of similar size. There's this basic and simple sense of fairness and justice.

And kids like him have an eye for detail too. He noticed that surgeons wear masks. And their curiousity is limitless.

"Why must doctor wear mask?"
"Where does saga seed come from?"
"Is the saga seed tree big?"

Curious little imp he is. Yet, he's scared of the dark. He's scared of the monsters under the bed. Somehow I don't exactly believe in telling kids myths to scare them into being obedient. I think logical reasoning works better. Kids may be young and innocent, but they think too. It'd be quite hard burst their bubble and challenge their mythical reality later on in life when they get too old for the Tooth fairy or Santa Claus story. So, I've decided to spoil his monster world reality.

I told him firmly, " There are no monsters under my bed and there are no monsters in this world. The biggest monsters are you and I. When we get angry and start shouting at people, we become scary monsters. You know how scary people get when they are angry right? You know how scary you can get when you start getting angry right?"

"There are really no monsters?" he asked in all innocence.

"Yes there are no monsters. You are a little monster when you start throwing tantrums."

"Yes, I can shout so loudly until the windows break. I can shout until everybody in Hillington (did I get that right?) can hear."

"That's scary isn't it? You're like a little monster. Don't go around being a monster. It's scary."

"I don't always shout. I only shout when people ask me to do bad things."

"oh... what bad things?"

"Like if they ask me to murder people or if they ask me to bully younger kids, I shout at them."

"oh... don't shout at them. Tell them that they are wrong. When you shout, you start becoming a little monster again. You don't like to be shouted at right? So be nice to people even if they shout at you. Tell them properly. You like gentle people right? So you must be gentle to people too. Sometimes when you are gentle towards people, they still shout at you. And you still have to be gentle. It may take one, two, three, four, even five times before other people realise that you are actually being gentle to them."

"So I must be gentle to them even if they shout?"

"Yes, be nice and gentle. After a while, or a long while, they will realise that you are a gentle boy."

This little boy beamed with his toothless grin as he would when someone complemented him.

The issue of shouting at others aside, we came back to monsters.

"There are really no monsters? But monsters come out at night when you don't sleep. So children must sleep at night."

"No... But you still must sleep. Do you know why you must sleep?"

"Why?"

"Have you ever gotten a bad headache before? No right? That's because you sleep. If you don't sleep, you'll wake up with a headache. And you will look like a panda. Panda has dark eye rings like me. And you won't look good anymore."

"I don't like pandas. I will become cranky also."

"Yah, when you don't sleep, you'll become a canky monster with a headache. So must sleep at night ok?"

All ended with a game of tic-tac-toe. And he actually let me start first. He's not bad at tic-tac-toe at all.

He's still a little boy, and there's so much in this child.