Yesterday, I had the kids at work. They stayed in the Child Center and I had lunch with them at lunchtime. When I went downstairs to pick them up, Sullivan was playing chess with a little girl and in full trash-talk mode. He was trying to impress her. <\/p>\n
We got onto the elevator with a bunch of people, including the girl and her mother. Sullivan continued his trash talking. It was kind of cute at first, but then he switched topics, crowing: “You’re ten, so you have to pay tithing, and I don’t!” (At some point, years ago, someone told Sullivan that he would have to start paying tithing after he got baptized. He has stuck to this interpretation.) The girl looked mystified. Sullivan’s brother Kace joined in, and both boys started loudly pointing out that she had to pay tithing of ten percent, or else she would be sinning. The elevator was full of attorneys and other co-workers. I tried to shush the kids, but they paid me the usual heed.<\/p>\n
Thankfully, the girl and her mother eventually got out of the elevator.<\/p>\n
As Sullivan gets older, he’s become more aggressive in telling other people when they’re sinning. He’s been known to call people on the carpet for drinking coffee or for smoking. He reminds other people that they have to pay tithing. This comes out at school, at work, at the park. It’s particularly ironic and often embarrassing, since there are so few other Mormons that he interacts with outside of church.<\/p>\n
Of course, these are the lessons that he’s supposed to be picking up in church, and I’m proud that he remembers his lessons. But does he have to be such a pest about it? How can we teach our kids to understand, for example, that they need to obey the Word of Wisdom, without inducing them to bother classmates, teachers, or friends about it? I’d like them to learn the gospel, but they’re also going to have to figure out how to be tolerant of the fact that not everyone is Mormon. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yesterday, I had the kids at work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2352","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corn"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2352","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2352"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2352\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}