Life Out Loud

Sometimes, when I would be in a public place with my children and they would see someone smoking, one of them would loudly say “mom, why is that man smoking?”  It’s hard to know what to say in these situations because you want your children to know that smoking, or any other behavior you object to, is not okay but at the same time you don’t want to embarrass the person your child is talking about. Children are great at pointing out incongruities while they are trying to figure out family and societal rules. They are trying to make sense of what they have been taught and what they are actually seeing, and that can lead to awkward situations.  After thinking about it over time I came up with a statement that worked for me.  When one of my kids would loudly point out something that went against what they had been taught I would tell them “we all have things that we need to change about ourselves and smoking (or whatever it was) is just a more obvious thing.”  Sometimes they asked a few more questions but they usually seemed to understand what I meant, that even with good rules people aren’t perfect and we all need to improve.