Life Advice from a Five-year-old

Stressed? Overwhelmed? Maybe doughnuts, dinosaurs, and Dolly Parton can help.

When Gwenyth Todebush told her five-year-old son, Clark, that she was feeling anxious about a meeting, he knew he could help.

“Mama, I am nervous all the time,” he said. “I know what to do.”

What followed was a stream of uplifting advice through a five-year-old’s filter. Gwenyth posted their exchange on Twitter, and it went viral.

“Everybody is kind of coping with one kind of stress or another in a pandemic,” says Gwenyth, who lives in northern Michigan. “I think it rang true with people. I said on Twitter that he’s the only life coach I know that gets paid in goldfish crackers.” Here is Clark’s advice, followed by brief explanations from his mother:

“You gotta say your affirmations in your mouth and your heart.” “Another mom on Twitter talked about saying affirmations with their kid before school. We tried it. Sometimes I tell him, ‘Say it like you mean it.’ I guess he translated that.”

“You say, ‘I am brave of this meeting! I am loved! I smell good!’”

“He knows you can be ‘scared of’ something, so he talks about being ‘brave of’ things. I love the grammatical construction. I’ve never corrected it because I like it better.

I don’t know where the ‘I smell good’ came up, but I like it. I’m going to use it a lot.”

“You gotta walk big. You gotta mean it. Like Dolly on a dinosaur. Because you got it.”

“He really loves Dolly Parton’s ‘Coat of Many Colors.’ When kids are making fun of her in school, she still went in and was brave and talks to those kids. I don’t know where the dinosaur thing came from.”

“Never put a skunk on a bus.”

“I don’t know what it has to do with being nervous.”

“Think about the doughnuts of your day!”

“We used to go to this little record shop. There was a room in the back and a whole section of records for a dollar. I would take him down there with a dollar bill, and he came back with a Burl Ives record from the ’50s. There’s a song on there called ‘The Donut

Song.’ It goes, ‘Watch the doughnut, not the hole.’ After we listened to that song a lot, that became our thing. Every night at bed he tells me about the doughnuts of his day.”

“Even if you cry a little, you can think about potato chips!”

“When he’s upset, sometimes I tell him to think about things he’s looking forward to. Potato chips are high on his list.”

“Even if it’s a yucky day, you can get a hug.”

“There have been so many times when there’s nothing I can do. I tell him, ‘Even if it’s a bad day, when you get home, I’ll hug you.’”

Clark didn’t have other kids around during the pandemic, Gwenyth says, so she’s been working with him to make the transition to school easier. Affirmations helped, though she didn’t realize how much until Clark offered his own versions of them.