The Parenting Instinct

It is kind of fun (albeit sometimes disconcerting) to see Arjun playing the parent with Abhishek. He will use the same reasoning and sometimes the exact same words that we have used with him. I guess this should give us some assurance that he has indeed been paying attention, but sometimes its bit like, did we really say that?

Their bedtime ritual is pretty simple - drink a cup of milk each, brush their teeth, read a book, and go to sleep. The other day Arjun drank his milk quickly while Abhi had drunk only about half and for whatever reason Arjun decided that he had to get Abhi to drink up the rest. Neither Malini nor I had said anything - Abhi is fond of milk and he will drink what he wants without any prompting.

Arjun (in a very mature tone): "Abhi, you haven't drunk anything. You should finish your milk."
Abhi: "No, I don't want to."
Arjun: "Why are you doing like this Abhi? Here, finish it." Abhi is not budging. Now came the admonishments:
Arjun: "If you don't drink the milk, you will be hungry. And if you wake up in the night hungry I am not going to come down and bring you food." The funny part is of course that this has no connection to reality - there is no way Arjun is waking up in the night to do anything, let alone bring food for Abhi - but this is exactly what we have tried on him a million times, futilely of course.

That has no effect and instead Abhi starts playing with a little truck. After all, he has got his pride to consider. Arjun tries a new tack:
Arjun: "Abhi, give me that truck. Aeta will show you a game." But of course, Abhi was going to have none of that and ran away with the truck.
More parental channeling on Arjun's part: "Abhi, I am not going to chase you. I am going to count to 10, if you don't give aeta the truck by then, aeta is not going to play with you."
The counting starts and now its a game of chicken - who is going to blink first? I sense that Abhi is really in no mood to give in, but I don't want Arjun to lose face. So I step in and encourage Abhi to give the truck to Arjun, which he just manages to do as the count reaches 10. So, now the "game" begins:
Arjun (balancing the sippy cup on the truck): "Aeta will push the truck to you. When the truck reaches you, you drink some milk and push the truck back to me."
I am thinking, yeah, sure, this is going work, and what do you know: As soon as the truck reaches him, Abhi happily picks up the cup and starts chugging away. Clearly, we are better role models than we thought.....:-)