How hard can it be to wash your hands... and what exactly is so awful about shoes?
ISN’T it odd how kids seem to take against certain seemingly innocuous tasks?
Jobs like brushing teeth or cutting nails – that adults accept as something to just get done before continuing with our day.
With kids, it’s different. Once they’ve developed a stubborn and completely baffling dislike of something, there’s no going back. They will object and complain despite their protestations requiring a hundred times more effort than the original task.
I became aware of this phenomenon recently when I saw someone on Twitter lamenting their children’s reluctance to put their shoes on in the morning.
Now, I’m not saying ALL children start playing up when you ask them to complete the final piece in the jigsaw for getting ready to leave the house, but I do know quite a few who do, including my own. In the case of my eight-year-old, he needs at least three requests, which are then promoted to instructions, before I deliver one final burst of exasperation in a voice that’s risen several octaves and risks cracking the double glazing.
Only then will he he reluctantly drag his shoes onto his feet. I’ve never understood this. What can anyone have against shoes? Shoes are lovely as far as I’m concerned, not the two leather bricks of doom my kids seem to consider them.
But that’s just the start of the list of inanimate objects or completely harmless jobs to
which children seem to have a moral objection.
Take hair washing. You might think from their reaction that I’m going to take a pressure washer to their head, not just a nice strawberry scented shampoo and some warm water.
And while we’re on the subject of personal hygiene, I know my boys can’t be the only ones who, when asked to wash their hands before dinner, go into the bathroom and make a whooshing sound impersonating the tap. Because, clearly, it’s far less of an effort to put on a noisy, Oscar-winning performance mimicking the cleaning of your hands than to just do it.
Mealtimes produce their own long list of bizarre things kids don’t like.
Mushrooms. The brown bits on bananas. Granary bread (‘Argh BITS!’).
The confusing thing about all of the above is not just that my kids have an illogical dislike of them all. It’s that loads of kids do. How can this conspiracy have happened? If I didn’t know any better I’d think they all got together before the stork came to collect them to be given lessons avoiding sandwiches with the crusts still on… before being unleashed on the world and their exhausted parents. Summer Nights at the Moonlight Hotel by Jane Costello is out now