Listen To Your Children - Especially At Christmas

Imagine a special little girl waking on Christmas morning. She rushes to the tree hoping to find a pretty doll or beautiful new dress.

"A train set? Must be for my brother," she says to herself.

She looks around. No doll. "Well, maybe it's wrapped up."

All the packages are wrapped in a generic paper or boy's paper. She sees nothing that look girly.

She pulls out all the packages that have that name that doesn't really suit her very well. Opening the first, she finds, "A flannel shirt? Yuck!" The next has socks, then boy's pajamas.

Absolutely nothing that says, "We know you feel like a girl." Everything says, "You were born with that thing, so you have to be a boy."

And this happens every year. Even after she tells her parents how she envied that boy who wore a dress to school because he got all his clothes dirty. Even after they caught her wearing her mother's old nightgown to bed. Even after they found some of her mother's clothes under her pillow because she didn't have a chance to sneak them back. And they certainly never noticed her tears on Christmas morning.

How can she ever enjoy Christmas?

 

Parents, listen to your children; pay attention to what they don't say, but show. It may only be a phase, but it is important to them. And if it's not just a phase, it's even more important.