Not too long ago, I had to pull out the ladder to retrieve an overly large stick that had been tossed on to the roof.<\/p>\n
From the moment I started climbing, my seven-year old started trying to convince me to let him join me on the roof.<\/p>\n
I gave him all the usual excuses. He’s not old enough. It’s not safe. I said no. His mom would kill me if I let him up there. You know the list. If you haven’t said them, I’m sure you’ve heard them.<\/p>\n
He wasn’t buying any of it. Finally, my frustration won out.<\/p>\n
“Listen kiddo,” I said as I walked across the roof. “I can’t let you climb on the roof, or do anything that dangerous, until I see you can focus better.”<\/p>\n
“I can focus,” he said.<\/p>\n
“When you’re climbing – whether it’s roofs or cliffs – you can’t forget what you’re doing. You have to stay focused. You can’t get distracted. You can’t daydream. You have to stay totally focussed.”<\/p>\n
“I can focus, Daddy!” he shouted. “I can!”<\/p>\n
“You can,” I said. “But sometimes you don’t. When momma asks you to put something away, you get halfway there and then forget what you’re doing. Right?”<\/p>\n
“Only sometimes!”<\/p>\n
I stepped carefully back on to the ladder and climbed down. “I know,” I said. “But sometimes isn’t good enough. Forgetting what you’re doing when you’re standing on the roof can get you seriously hurt.\u00a0Once I see you focusing better, we’ll talk about climbing on the roof. Okay?”<\/p>\n
He didn’t like it one bit, and who could blame him? I’d been way too heavy-handed. Feeling guilty, I folded the ladder up and carried it through the house and into the garage.<\/p>\n
When I came back, I found the big guy clinging to the drain pipe, already about five feet off the ground, and progressing steadily upwards toward the roof.<\/p>\n
Now that’s focus.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I really should have seen this coming. Never lecture a seven-year old about why he is not allowed to do something. It never works. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[118],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-693","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-c"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s6DpYi-focus","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/693","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=693"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/693\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}