When her mom asked her to put her shoes on, two-year
old Havana kneeled down, resting on her feet, uttered
the 3 words every parent fears. “I’m on strike!”
Naturally, this was not her first strike. She had been
on strike on many occasions before. It mostly involved
food preference issues or an unwillingness to
cooperate with an innevitable diaper changing. But
this was her first articulation of her method.
In some ways it was a senseless strike that was going
to hurt her own cause. Her parents were not going to
take her to the revered “park” without her shoes on.
The strike collapsed within less than a minute.
However a new tradition had been established and there
was no going back.
Where did the words come from? It’s hard to say.
Perhaps we as parents had brought it on ourselves. We
had, after all, on occasion accused our two-year old
of being “on strike”. But it was never said as an
encouragement. We think it came from a library book we
took out, “Click, Clack, Moo” where the cows go on
strike against Farmer Brown. Public libraries!
It’s behavior like this that cause parents to dread
their child learning to read and write by themselves.
