Some time ago, I worked with a child who was having a hard time internalizing the rules. Cognitively, he totally understood what he should and shouldn’t be doing at any given moment, but he just couldn’t seem to stop himself. It’s what educators call poor impulse control. This was also a child who loved animals. So to help him play out the idea of appropriate and inappropriate behavior, we played “lion tamer.” We spent some time learning about a lion tamers job and why it was important that the lions behaved. One day in the height of play, the child’s mother asked me a question. As I turned to answer her, the child called out: “Dana! Excuse me, Dana! The lion’s ‘being haved’…now what?!” Kids do say the darndest things.
