Unexpected Consequences
It doesn't take a parent long to learn that any seemingly good action can have subtle effects down the years. When our first born was a few months old and starting to reach out and grab stuff, we were delighted that she loved pens. This was the beginning of what in our house is a great truth: children prefer real items to toys. They don't want the pretend cell phone, they want mine. They don't want actual old keys gathered and placed on a genuine key ring; they want my actual set of keys I use to open the house and car. They don't even want my backup-spare set. They want the main set. So the pens which we so often use were very attractive to my daughter. We could hand one to her and she'd enjoy minutes and minutes of interrupted happy play, waving it around and smiling. She was far too small to take the top off, so we proceeded happy at our parenting cleverness.
Soon of course she grew stronger and one day was able to fulfill what by then had to be a long cherished ambition and took the top off of a pen. Presto! Our great solution for a 4 month old was rendered astonishingly short-sighted. She immediately copied our pen behavior by joyfully drawing marks on anything she could reach. Even now, another child and six years later, we have a very scribbly house. (Although, to prove that it's always too soon to decide if something is good or bad, our daughter can be given a few pens and a notebook and entertain herself without offending anyone else for amazingly long periods of time during what I recall as excruciatingly boring activities - long car trips, long adult conversations, even community organizing meetings).
Today's example of this principal of unexpected consequences is almost cute. My son has a great love of trucks of all sorts. Since the weather's been nice, we've sat outside and watched our trash and recycling being picked up a good half dozen times. We also sometimes watch a video of trash being sorted at the dump and then either buried or recycled. So recently, he has decided that whenever a container has a lot of stuff in it is like a recycling bin. So he runs toward the containers of stuff, dumps out the contents (on the floor or sometimes in the back of a dump truck) and then, in flawless mimicry of the people we've been watching take our own recycling, flings the container a few feet away. Interest in putting the stuff back into the containers? Zero. Interest in finding another container full of stuff? Very high.
This wouldn't be such a serious problem if we hadn't spent the last 12 months consolidating our toys into a lot of small plastic containers to keep them off of the floor (Legos underfoot at night can be shockingly sharp). And I wouldn't be so surprised if he hadn't been such a tidy person. Unlike my daughter, he hasn't really distinguished from the pleasure of taking out and the pleasure of putting away. Just two weeks ago, he enjoyed sorting the stuff into the proper containers. Now, it's just dump, pause, fling, dump, pause, fling.