Cutting Corners

This morning, because I am an awesome parent, I gave my daughter a Pop Tart for breakfast. Not just any Pop Tart, mind you. This one was flavored like chocolate chip cookie dough and contained, I imagine, the same nutritional value. After finishing her healthy breakfast, she asked to watch cartoons. Now, there was a time when the first thing she would do every morning was watch cartoons, because I didn’t want to have to fight with her. But recently we realized that those cartoons were making for a difficult morning, making us late to school. As a result of this, I told her that there were several things she had to do to get ready for school before this could happen. Because we have been using the cartoons as a reward for speedy morning preparation rather than just a Lockwood family birthright, she knew right away what had to be done, and sped off to prepare herself.

At this point, I looked down at her plate, and noticed something interesting. There were four pieces of her Pop Tart that had been left uneaten. This is not surprising, she often leaves a little bit of food on her plate and we expect this. What I found interesting was which parts of the breakfast pastry were left behind. She had eaten everything except the corners of her Pop Tart.

Often we cut corners in our lives. We do things the easy way, or what we think is the easy way. However, often those cut corners result in a short term gain but a long term loss. As I was thinking about her corners this morning I thought about our new morning schedule. We used to begin the day with cartoons because we didn’t want any fights. But what I realized was that this didn’t remove the fighting, it just relocated it. We didn’t fight at first, but then when we were late for school we would fight then. However, after a few weeks of using the cartoons as a motivator for early morning success, we don’t fight at all. She knows what she has to do, and she does it in a timely manner. We knew it was the right thing to do all along, but we were lazy and so we decided to cut corners. However, we have found that when we don’t cut corners it turns into a win/win for everybody.