My 3-year-old has a lot of anxieties. Can you call then anxieties when he’s only 3? He’s afraid of the clapping on talk shows (so he really doesn’t like Ellen). He’s afraid of the hooray and yay after Happy Birthday. He’s not crazy about car washes. He doesn’t like Raffi. The list goes on.
All this makes it hard for me to know when to push and when to just hold back. So today he had Sportball after school. Now, I admit, I knew from the start this would be a struggle. He’s not the most athletic kid. But I reasoned that especially in the winter, I want him to get some exercise. And it never hurts to try new things.
Sportball is a program offered at his nursery once a week after Lunch and Play. The first session was a disaster. Boaz wouldn’t even go in the gym. He convinced his teacher to take him for a walk instead. For days afterwards he said to me, “And there’s no more Sportball, Mummy?”
Today I offered to come along and help integrate him into the program. It’s actually a lot of fun. The kids get to run around, toss balls, sit on the coloured lines, get called “bananas” by the two instructors. For the first 10 minutes, Boaz stayed firmly attached to my lap. A couple of times he tried to convince me it was time to leave. I wondered if I should just get a refund.
But then the balls came out, and all of the sudden my little scaredy-cat came alive. He tossed the ball back and forth with me, he ran around the gym, he sat in the circle and stood up when he was told to. By the end of the day his new mantra was, “Sportball is a really fun program.”
I feel like we scored one point today. He proved to himself he could do it, and he enjoyed it as well. Maybe the next time he goes we might even be able to get him through the door without him screaming first. That said, later today we asked him if he wanted to go for a car wash and his answer was, decidedly, NO.
I guess you can only push so much for one day.
