Which leads me to my point. We sat down to play, and in my usual way of not really paying attention to detail, Ethan beat me twice before I realized the little bugger was setting up this certain pattern every single time and I was falling into his trap. The third time I started to put in a circle (thankfully, he lets me have the Red Sox-themed red circles) he didn't like where I was dropping it and tried to put up his hand to block me.
"What do you think you're doing?" I challenged him.
"Well...Ben is nicer than you! He lets me do that at school." Ben is one of his good buddies. They play sometimes during indoor recess.
"You're right, Ben is nicer than me," I said with a smile and made my move.
"Noooo! You can't do that. I had a strategy and you're ruining it!" he complained.
"Exactly," I replied.
As the game went on I observed how truly agitated he was that I had found him out and that he was going to have to devise another plan to win. As often happens, I realized how there are so many teachable moments sitting in front of us -- opportunities to take those lessons learned in social skills group and with the social thinking curriculum and apply them to everyday activities.
"Ethan, you're going to have to be more flexible. The old way's not going to work. You're going to have to come up with a new way to win." He hemmed and hawed, growled and groaned, but after a few minutes settled down and started thinking. Sure enough, once he focused and stopped being so hung up on his plans being changed, he was able to come up with a new strategy. He won the next game.
I just have to say it's kind of sad when you just KNOW your nine-year-old is smarter than you. I'm not just saying that. I always feel like I'm a relatively smart person until I'm around Ethan and Dan.
But smarts aren't everything. They're not nearly as much as you think. We've all heard about emotional intelligence in recent years. Never mind the fact that it's more important that my children be loving, kind and generous rather than simply smart. That aside, even if you have smarts you can fail spectacularly if you lack confidence, empathy, flexibility, and perseverance, to name just a few.
To bring it back down to Connect Four: winning means next to nothing if Ethan always wins the exact same way...if someone lets him win...if he has no idea how to adapt when someone figures out how to beat him...and if he doesn't know how to cope if he doesn't win.
Next time we play, maybe we'll do Battleship. The last time we played his idea was to put all the ships in the center right next to each other. This plan worked great until I figured it out and wiped out all of his ships one after the other.
Then he got mad and threw his ships across the room.
Yup. Another game, another lesson for another day.
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