It's Just Bad Luck

I called my sister the other morning and woke her up. She had only been asleep for a couple of hours. Because she spent the night before in the ER with Benjamin.

Benjamin had been at Scouts and was running around with his friends. They ran under a pine tree and Benjamin gashed his head open when he ran into one of the branches. It was a 9cm gash and required 8 staples.

Practically as soon as they were leaving, Benjamin was already wanting to run rather than walk, trying to balance on curbs and do all sorts of activities other than just plain walking. Right after the doctor said no PE for a week.

Kathy was so frustrated with him. She was basically wondering if he was trying to reopen his wound or drive her insane.

I told her about a class that several of my friends took a few years back about raising boys. I think was based on the book "Bringing Up Boys" by James Dobson, but I'm not certain. I didn't attend the class myself, but one of my friends told me about two things that struck her in the class.

The first was that it doesn't matter if you don't allow any toy guns in the house, boys will find a way to play with "guns." Some will even chew their sandwich into a gun shape and "shoot" with it.
Why? I have no idea.
Why do I remember this? I have no idea.
Maybe I should go read the book. Especially since I have a boy now.

The second thing that stuck out to my friend was that boys think that everything is just bad luck.
What does that mean?
For example, a girl is bouncing on the bed, falls off and breaks her arm. She doesn't bounce again (at least not for a long time) because bouncing caused her to break her arm.

A boy, however, in the same situation, thinks that it was just bad luck, not a result of his behavior and goes right back to the same behavior almost immediately. And it doesn't matter how many times he gets the same result. It is still just bad luck that it happened.

So I told my sister about the bad luck idea, and she thinks that it sounds about right. That it fits her son. And my friend who told me about it originally thought that it was spot on as well. And now I have a boy to be bringing up. Maybe I really do need to go read that book.