You Get What You Get

Wow. Okay. There's a bunch of different kinds of animals, but the book centers around a family of squirrels. The main character is Melvin, and he's very picky about things. I have a child who's like this. Melvin throws tantrums whenever he doesn't get what he wants (which my child sometimes does), but at school there's a rule: "You get what you get and you don't throw a fit." Apparently it's just enforced by pure virtue of being a rule. His family doesn't know about it at home, until one day when he and his sister are arguing over what movie to watch, he smugly tells her, "You get what you get and you don't throw a fit." His parents are stunned, and decide to implement that rule at home, which causes him to no longer throw fits.

So, yeah. Magical solution to an actual real problem. That I really have. I'm pretty sure if I told my child, "You get what you get and you don't throw a fit," (he's almost three) he would ignore me and continue throwing his fit. And it's about as condescending as "Because I said so." Who gets to decide "what you get"? The supreme dictator of parent? Maybe the child has a valid suggestion, and this saying shuts down all discussion. In the book, after the argument about the movie, they end up watching what his sister wanted to watch. It comes off like the rule only applies to Melvin.

True, children need to learn to deal with disappointment, but parroting inane cliches is not the way to teach them. Some people never learn how, and you occasionally see entitled adults demanding unreasonable things from others, but I don't think it's because nobody ever told them something like this. And telling an adult this phrase isn't going to work in the slightest. I can even imagine someone using this phrase against an adult with a reasonable grievance. Why not try, with both adults and children, respect? Explaining why something is a good idea, or must be the way it is? Empathizing when they have a real sense of frustration? Yes, it is frustrating when, like in the book, someone else has more chocolate chips in their cookie than you. It's not fair! Or someone else wants to watch a different movie than you want to. The only reason that blows up to a tantrum in children (and adults) is because of a lack of self control. Sometimes it's a long-term lack, like when children haven't learned it yet, and sometimes it's a short-term lack, like when an adult under a lot of stress hits the last straw and it happens to be something trivial. And no amount of trite sayings is going to erase the actual feelings of actual human beings.