It’s not my fault…

Kids get things wrong.  Hell, adults get things wrong.  But kids especially get things wrong.  They’re kids, they’re learning.  Getting stuff wrong is a fact of life that they just have to deal with.  In adult life we have backups, restores, procedures in place for when, say, the IT department accidentally deletes every third file from the system because of a single typo in a renaming script.  Not that that’s happened, that’s just an example I plucked out of the air and certainly has never happened to me.  Stupid semicolons.

Anyway.  The important thing when you make a mistake is to acknowledge that mistake, take responsibility for it (if it was your fault), learn from it, and try not to do it again.  My eldest son, hereafter referred to as Thing2, has a different approach.  He approaches step 2, take responsibility for it, with the plaintive cry “but it wasn’t my fault!”

Whether it was an accident (that, by the way, we could all see coming from miles away), a deliberate act of malice or something that falls somewhere in between on that spectrum, nothing was ever – ever – his fault.

“It wasn’t my fault the plate fell off the table.”  He’d put the plate down on the edge of the table, more than half of it over the edge.  The culprit here?  The guilty party?  Gravity.

“It wasn’t my fault I hit him.”  Apparently one of his brothers had moved some Lego.  The guilty party here, obviously, being the brother.

“It wasn’t my fault I spilled my drink!” He’d sneezed.  Sunlight to blame, this time.

I reckon he’s got a career in politics ahead of him.