The daughter is a very leisurely eater. She eats like a tortoise walks, casually chewing her food with absolutely no sense of urgency. A single eating session can last over 30 minutes, and standing in front of her patiently the whole time as she chews and eats is not really my idea of entertainment.
I decide to teach her how to feed herself, so I can get around the business of my daily life without having to wait on her.
I’m going to start with breakfast. She usually starts by eating a fruit, and on today’s menu is a banana. I place her on her high chair and start preparing her breakfast plate. She’s in a good mood this morning, smiling and babbling merrily, creating ideal environmental conditions for this experiment.
On her plate, I cut up half a banana into little pieces that she should be able to eat readily. I place the plate in front of her, and she looks at it with a great deal of puzzlement. She looks at the plate, then at me, and then again at the plate. She’s not sure what it means for a plate full of food to be in front of her, since usually the plate comes with an adult on the side that shovels the food into her mouth. She stares at the plate for several seconds, trying to make sense of this mysterious turn of events.
“Eat!” I say, trying to mime the action of picking up the banana and placing it in my mouth. “Eat with your hands” I say to her again, repeating the hand-to-mouth motion indicating that I want her to pick up the banana.
Blank stare continues.
OK, I have to be a bit more hands on. I place her hand in mine, and guide it to the pieces of banana on the plate in front of her, I pick up a piece with her hands, guiding her fingers with mine, and then take her hands up to her mouth, placing the piece in front of her. “Oh, OK” she seems to be thinking, as she opens her mouth, puts it in, and starts chewing the banana.
I step back a bit, hoping she’ll do the next one herself. She takes her hand and picks up a piece of banana. “Yes! Good Girl!” I say to her, proudly. There, I’ve taught the daughter how to eat by herself in under 2 minutes. “Why do all these people write books about how to teach toddlers how to eat and sleep? Parenting is so easy.” I think to myself.
As I’m patting myself on the back, the daughter picks up the piece of banana, and instead of taking it up to her mouth, she moves her hand sideways, and is now holding her hand outstretched to one side, like a roman emperor about to give the thumbs-up or thumbs-down after a gladiatorial contest. She’s looking straight into my eyes, and I can see the same intensity in her eyes that the emperor probably had as he decided the fate of the defeated gladiator. Except here, the daughter is deciding on what happens to that poor piece of banana.
A horrified realization dawns on me - She’s about to splat that poor banana onto the ground. I reflexively lurch forward to try and grab that piece of banana before it hits the ground and I have to clean it up. The daughter, without breaking eye contact with me, opens her fingers and releases the piece of banana. Lacking anyone holding it up, it rapidly accelerates to the ground. Gravity, I’ve always suspected, acts more strongly on objects that would make large messes when they hit the ground.
Splat. Straight on the floor. I see a blob of yellow with splat-lines radiating outwards from the point of impact.
That someone can throw food on the floor like that is so beyond my sphere of experience, that I just stand there, frozen mid-way through my aborted attempt to catch this piece of banana before it hit the floor. The daughter is still looking straight at me, showing no sign of remorse or apology. And I’m looking at her, unsure of what I should do here.
Should I make her clean it up? Scold her? Will that just encourage her to do it again to get a reaction from me? Maybe I should ignore it, so she won’t think it is a big deal and won’t do it again. But then again, how will she learn not to throw food? Maybe I should explain it to her, but then again will her one-year old’s understanding be able to process my explanation? Oh God. Why is parenting so hard? Maybe I should read some parenting books or something.
I’m still standing frozen mid-leap, stuck because of indecision, and while I’m still pondering the best course of action, I see that the daughter is reaching for another piece of banana. I can see in her eyes that she’s planning to re-unite it with its little banana friend on the floor, who’s probably lonely by itself down there. This time, I grab her hand and am able to stop her from throwing it to the floor.
I decide to just give in and clean it up myself, making a mental note to figure out what I should do in such situations in the future. I take her plate, put it off to the side, grab a paper towel and kneel down, wiping the floor and picking up the banana piece.
While I’m down there, I feel a little plop on my head. Followed by a feeling of something moist sinking through my hair. The moist object has landed at the edge of the top of my head, and half-a-second later, I feel it sliding down the back of my head and towards my neck. I immediately free my left hand from the floor and retrieve this foreign object, catching it just before it sinks into the back of my shirt.
Another piece of banana.
I look up, and see that the daughter has used her other hand to get a hold of the plate that I thought was beyond her reach, and decided that it would be a good idea to throw another piece of banana on daddy’s head, because why not?
I immediately abort the experiment, cleaning up the floor and my head, and keep the plate at a safe distance on the counter. The daughter doesn’t like this, starts screaming because she apparently got attached to the bananas, and the rest of the morning degenerates into a temper-tantrum filled bonanza.
Later that week, we had a regular doctor’s appointment for the daughter. Towards the end of the appointment, I bring up this behavior - The daughter’s propensity to throw food, plates, toys and any manner of things that she can get her grubby little hands on - and ask why toddlers to this and what parents can do about it. The doctor says that kids do this all the time, they’re just learning how the world works, how gravity works, how causality works, and it is a normal part of growing up. We leave the doctor’s office with a better understanding of what’s happening, but no more in terms of tools or techniques that we can use to curb this behavior. Not receiving any help from the doctor, I decide to innovate on my own.
Over the next several weeks, an arms race of sort develops between the daughter and I.
While insisting she feed herself, I stand by in close proximity, ready to jump in and intercept her hand any time she tries to throw something off of her high chair. At first, I have a great amount of success, my alertness allowing me to grab her hand before it can extend beyond the bounds of the high chair, and re-directing it, gently, back to her mouth.
Here’s the funny thing about kids: Like evolutionary pressure allows organisms to learn new tricks and evolve to fit nature, so too do kids evolve new tactics to allow them to do what they really want to do. The daughter made rapid strides in hand-eye co-ordination, learning to quickly grab and move food from plates in front of her and pretty soon, she was quick enough to evade my capture.
As I started to miss more and more of her attempts to drop food from great heights, I responded by placing a large bowl on the floor to catch everything that I had missed. At first, this solution worked for both of us, but after a while, noticing that the food she’d thrown started to re-appear in front of her in a bowl, she got suspicious. She started switching up her hands, using both her left and right hand to drop food at random, to which I responded with two bowls, placed on either side of the high chair.
And then she started imparting lateral velocity to thrown food, looking proudly at me when her projectiles missed the two bowls. I upped the stakes by acquiring a “High-Chair floor protector mat, multi-purpose” on Amazon which covered an area of almost 2000 square inches around the high chair. The daughter took this as an invitation to carpet-bomb the mat, learning to shoot an entire handful of cheerios in a perfect semi-circle around herself.
And so it went, back and forth, our race to the bottom, neither of us willing to give the other the satisfaction of victory.
After several weeks of our mutual game of one-upmanship, the daughter got bored and eventually gave up on throwing food, moving on to making messes in other areas of our life, handing me a much needed parenting victory.
She must have finally figured out how causality works.
When my daughter was born, I took lots of pictures but found that they didn't quite capture the entourage of emotions that accompany parenting. So I started writing down the daily adventures with my daughter into stories.