The graham cracker thief

It is hard to know at what age you can start to teach your child lessons about life. I think it is safe to assume that until a certain age, any efforts to instill certain values may be futile. But what is that magical age? The age where they know that they should or shouldn't be doing something.

Case in point: Yesterday as I was picking Liam up from daycare, his class was having a snack. His favorite snack. Graham crackers. Because I didn't want to disturb his schedule, I just sat at the table with Liam and his two buddies. Liam demolished his snack pretty quickly. I turned my head to converse with one of the teachers, but upon looking back to Liam, he had another graham cracker.

My first thought is that he had retrieved the cracker from someplace on his body. For anyone who has kids, you know that the folds of a baby's body can be hiding places for the most interesting things. It is not uncommon during bath time to disrobe him to discover a Cheerio between his chin and neck, or a rogue strawberry in his diaper. It briefly crossed my mind that he had taken another kid's graham cracker. But not my child. After all, he is the kid who usually has his snack, his sippy cup, his blanket taken by the more self assured babies.

Upon demolishing the second graham cracker, I caught him red handed. He was trying to take another baby boy's graham cracker right from his hand! I gently, but firmly grabbed his hand, looked him in the eye, and told Liam that it was not his graham cracker and that he was NOT to take it away from the other baby. Liam promptly melted down, at being denied this tasty forbidden treat. I am not sure if it was because I was there or whether this is standard practice, but one of the teachers promptly responded by giving him another graham cracker from the box. Liam greedily took said snack and "went to town."

Because I am a first-time parent, I feel like I sometimes struggle to figure these situations out as I am approached with them. But it begs the question, at what age do you start to teach these lessons? The first lesson being that you can't take something from somebody else just because you want it. Sure I know that this is just a graham cracker, but I also realize that the world is full of people who were never told that they couldn't take something they coveted even though it belonged to someone else.

And the second lesson being that, sometimes the proverbial graham cracker is gone. Finished. And you can't have anymore for now. Dare we indulge our kids to the point where they believe that there is "always more where that came from." As I look around and see what an epidemic childhood obesity has become, I want to raise kids that don't have food issues, but to also realize that just because you can have more, doesn't mean you should.

Any how, I realize the irony of posting about a graham cracker as a metaphor for life lessons, but I also don't want to be one of those parents who never thought to teach any lessons until it was too late.

Caught in the act.