You’ve got to have some empathy for Ben, the dad who keeps trying, and keeps getting it wrong. Or so it seems to him.
Here’s a story about a father who, after screwing up his daughter’s birthday party, tries to earn her love and trust at the fair. Objectively, it seems like they have a good time and that he is connected to Emma and tuned in to her. But then there are times when the best parenting decision turns out to backfire a little: he puts her on the Frog Drop and she nearly throws up.
This isn’t a blunder; it’s a normal parental miscalculation.
Rather than joke guilt-free with the other dad, Ben is angry at the father for pointing out his own feelings of failure. This is Ben’s own baggage, his fear that he isn’t competent.
When the silver man comes alive and terrifies Emma, Ben sees the man’s gesture as an immense failure rather than an unfortunate misread on what this unknown child can tolerate. Emma freaks out, and so does Ben, half-heartedly threatening the man.
With respect to the silver man, we might wonder why Emma is so terrified. Developmentally, as a just-turned four-year-old, Emma is trying to distinguish what is real and what is pretend. At this age, a child may believe that if she wishes for something, she can wish it into existence. It’s a time when magic really is magic, when tomatoes can be found behind one’s own ears.
But how does she explain that a silver statue of a man suddenly comes alive? What appears to be true—that he’s a statue—turns out not to be true. Can she trust her own eyes? Similarly, when her father tries to perform “muffin magic,” can she trust that, too?
For Ben’s part, he’s desperate to fix his fumbles. He—like so many of us—tries the intellectual route, appealing to Emma’s thinking. In her heightened emotional state, it simply can’t work. In the end, he resorts to magic but it’s unclear if Emma will buy it.
Instead, what if Ben had said something like this: “You’re sad that I cut the muffin in half. You wanted a big, whole muffin and now it’s small and broken. It feels like I ruined it, and we can’t put it back together again. If that makes you sad and mad, I get it, and I’m really sorry.”
In saying this, he would have addressed a range of emotions, from sadness and anger to a feeling of powerlessness. He wouldn’t be offering a solution because there is none. There’s no backup muffin, just like there’s no backup parent to bail him out.
But by first speaking to her feelings, he’s bringing them into the open where she can start dealing with them. Only after this does Ben have a chance of appealing to her intellect, that she gets the same amount of muffin, though I suspect this isn’t even the cause of her distress: she simply wanted her muffin whole.
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4 thoughts on “What’s going on in “Muffin Magic””
I think Emma wanted her muffin whole, just like she wanted her family to be whole.
Wow, fantastic! I don’t think you’re going too far with your interpretation here. That is how kids work. Not consciously, but through their perceptions. She’s aware her family is broken, and now she’s upset her muffin is broken. Perhaps you’ve gotten at the root cause of her distress.
One thing that jumped out to me was Ben’s sense of humor. He tries to bring humor into everything, like wearing a purple gorilla suit at his daughter’s birthday party. He means well but it doesn’t work out how he wanted.
I thought it was interesting how he feels he’s failing so much, but he’s always trying to use humor with Emma. He jokes how her legs don’t work when he gets her own of the car seat and then jokes how no animals were hurt in the making of the muffin. It’s like he’s joking with her but also himself because I can’t imagine that a four year old kid is understanding his jokes. I actually laughed out loud when he tells himself that she needs a better grip on math.
As a parent, I’ve found that humor is a life saver for me. Things can get serious, but usually the problems we run into aren’t that serious. Humor reminds me to laugh at the little things. It’s good for me and it’s good for my kids.
Hi Claire,
Great observations, thanks! You’re right, humor is really important. It helps us get past the hard stuff. Ever notice that comedians often have had really rough childhoods? It’s no coincidence, I think. It’s how they’ve learned to get through the hard times, their humor taking the edge off.
Humor can also work really well with kids. For example, instead of struggling with getting a three-year-old’s socks on their feet, what would happen if you say something like, “Now socks. Hold up your hands, we’ll get them on those hands the right way!”
Suddenly the struggle turns into a joke, and your child feels delighted to know more than you.