Playdate

At K's playdate yesterday, he emerged from the closet where he had been hiding and wailed, "Kaden scratched my ear!" His friend's response was to run away to the corner, yelling, "I didn't! I didn't do anything!" K came to me, crying, and I led him out of the room while Kaden's mom talked to him in the closet.

K's ear was fine. He was mostly upset because of his friend's reaction. "What if you were playing and your friend suddenly said you hurt them? How would you feel?" He considered this. "Bad," he replied. Ordinarily I would go farther with this and ask him why. But I know what K would say. He would feel bad that he hurt his friend. Instead I replied, "Maybe that's how Kaden feels. Sometimes when we do something wrong by accident, we feel bad about what we did, and we also feel scared that people will be mad at us." He understood, stopped crying, and started playing by himself, occasionally trying to get his friend to join in. His friend took a long time to calm down, but K was patient and eventually the two boys were running around laughing again.

Later, K's grandmother told me that she had been pretending to cry about something silly, and K laughed at first but then got worried and said, "Grandma, you're joking, right? Are you really sad?"

Sometimes I wish K weren't so sensitive. I see so much of myself in him and that was not a trait that served me well during my childhood. But I also love how caring he is. He'll need that emotional maturity when his friends are making fun of him for refusing to watch the terrifying Cars movie.