# OreoGate

#Oreo Gate

My social media feed is currently all about #Oreo-Gate.  If you haven’t heard what’s going on, the story starts with one mum who doesn’t allow her daughter to have Oreos.  When another child brought them in their lunchbox, she reportedly asked the other mums to stop sending them because her daughter was envious and coming home upset after seeing other kids eating them.  The internet has a lot of opinions about this.  So, pretending this isn’t an elaborate marketing campaign by Oreo – it got me thinking too.  There are some valuable takeaways that extend far beyond a school lunchbox.

You cannot control the environment, but you can only control your response. We can control what happens inside our home to a certain point. I can't build a world where my child never sees someone making a different choice than the one I made for them.  Eventually, they come across the snack I didn’t buy, the TV show we don’t watch, the phone I said no to, the clothes I refused to buy, the rules that are different in our house.  Your child will see other people get things they can’t have; they’ll be invited to some things and excluded from others; they’ll lose; they’ll fail; they’ll hear no.

I read one interesting opinion – she noted, “Maybe the goal isn’t how do I keep my child from being exposed to something I don’t want for them. Maybe it is how do I raise a child who understands why we make certain choices and can navigate a world where other families choose differently?”  Such a great teachable moment.

Parenting isn’t preparing the world for our children.  It is preparing our children for the world.  This is so much more than just cookies.  Our job as parents isn’t to remove every adverse feeling or experience.  It’s teaching them that they can handle it. Teaching kids to handle disappointment helps them build resilience and navigate real-life challenges.  When ‘good’ parenting gets confused with preventing discomfort, we feel responsible for rushing in to fix the feelings.  Removing the hard thing also removes the opportunity to learn how to deal with the hard things.   There will be times when things don’t go their way, they struggle or are frustrated, but we have amazing opportunities to build frustration tolerance and feel the feelings.  Create your empathetic, firm boundaries; it’s your family!  You can’t control what other families pack for lunch, but you can guide your child’s perspective.  

Our kids don’t need us to create a world where they never experience disappointment – they need us to raise them to believe “I can be disappointed and still be okay.”

Now don’t get me started on the WhatsApp side chat…

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