For a long time, one of the arbitrary rules in Jeannie Gaffigan’s house had to do with where, when, and how slime could be made. Maybe your kids are too old to care about slime, but it’s not difficult to relate to Jeannie’s dilemma. Sure, slime is fun for kids to make, but it’s a pain in the ass to clean up, and who do you think is the one left with the scrubber and the paper towels in their hands? At some point, though, Jeannie Gaffigan, a mother of five and the wife and longtime collaborator of the comedian Jim Gaffigan, had a change of heart about her rules—particularly after a battle with a life-threatening brain tumor: “I realized that I never asked, ‘Can you teach me how to make the slime?’ I never engaged with the slime. I engaged with the control of the slime.”
Life is too short to nix your children’s interests because you don’t want to deal with a mess afterward. Think about it: How many negative rules do we make related to things? Food in the living room, shoes on the carpet, toys outside the playroom. These rules are often designed to make our lives easier as parents, but one of their unintended side effects is to make our kids’ lives less fun.
At the same time, we also seem to have fewer positive rules for ourselves. Why not a rule about being interested? Why not a rule about playing and having fun together? Why not a rule about encouraging their fascinations rather than curtailing them? Let’s work with the slime, not against it.