"It's Ok To Cry"

So I said to her (my daughter) then, when we got home, I said, "You know, you can cry. It's totally okay. You can cry drop off, you can cry at pick up, you can cry the whole time you're there. It's okay to let your feelings out. Okay? You know that?" Then she said, "Why did she say that?" And I said, "I don't know. But that might be true for her. But it doesn't need to be true for you. In our family, it's okay to cry. That's a Rogers thing. In the Roger's family, it's okay to cry whenever, however much you want. All right?"

And that seemed good for her. And yesterday, I wasn't at pickup. My husband was. But she came out of the room, out of the classroom, and announced to outside of the room. "My mom says I can cryyyyy." And then the teacher looked a little bit sheepish. And then my husband said to her, "What?" And my friend who was there also picking up her son laughed and said, "You're right, Gracie, you can cry; your mom is right, you can." And then she said it again. "I can cry if I want." And then they kind of looked at the teacher and she said the teacher goes, "Oh, I just said to her that, you know, she doesn't need to cry. Because when she cries it upsets her mom, and so she doesn't need to upset her." And then it was like, Oh, please stop talking. Because my child is not responsible for my emotions.

Anyway, so they told me that - I got a text from my friend saying it's hilarious what Gracie said when she came out of school. And my husband told me the same story too. And I was just laughing. Because this kid is just, she's fierce. And so when I came home from work yesterday, I said to her, "Hey, how was school today? Daddy said that it went it went really well. And you had a good day." She said, Yeah. I said, "and I heard that when you came out, you said it's okay to cry." And she go like that (nods). And I said, "That's awesome, bud. You're right. It is okay to cry. And did your teacher say that you weren't?" She said, "Yep. And I said, No, it's, my mom says it's okay for me to cry." "Y"ou got that, right, bud."

Whenever your kids come home and tell you some values, some beliefs, some rule, whatever that the teacher says that you don't agree with, it doesn't align with you. You always can repair it at home. And you can say things like, "Well, that might be a rule in their classroom, or that might be a value or a rule that that teacher operates with or lives with in their life. But that's not how we do it in our family. So it might be that when we're in their classroom or in their presence, we maybe have to tweak, tweak ourselves a little bit. But just so you know, in the rest of the world and in our family and in our house, it's okay to do 'whatever'. So you always want to have a repair conversation. This could be grandparents, other kids parents that they might have different values or different rules and you just repair it. You know, there's the rupture, repair, rupture, repair, that you get them kind of aligned with you and your family and what works for you guys.

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