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| "WHERE ARE YOU GOING WITH MY BLANKIE???" |
They say "hell hath no fury like a woman scorned." Well, "they" never tried to take a security blanket away from a toddler. A child and her inanimate, dirty, germ-infested friend: there is no stronger bond. Oh, you can try to momentarily separate the two- for a bath, a meal, or even a trip to the park- but never, EVER, lose track of where you put it, because, as any experienced parent will tell you, if you lose your kid's blankie--- YOU'RE SCREWED.
The problem is, what do you do when your child’s source of comfort, her solace, her “fuzzy wuzzy” looks more like a delivery system for the Ebola virus than a comforting friend? As, let’s be honest, that whole image of Linus caressing his baby blue blankie- the really clean one- is a farce. Try imaging Pigpen carrying around that blanket for two years, dragging it anywhere and everywhere he goes and then you start to get an inkling of what you’re REALLY dealing with. It’s disgusting. And sooner or later that thing’s going to have to be removed with a Hasmat suit and one of those plastic cases they use to ship plutonium.
Now, here’s the problem: most new parents aren’t too bright. Or, rather they don’t see the big picture when it comes to the baby blankie. Your infant child cries during the night so you give her that blanket Aunt Ethel knitted for her before she was born. Great! A week later, she’s addicted to it, like crack, and you don’t have a back-up blankie because Aunt Ethel developed a serious case of arthritis and won’t be knitting for anybody ever again. This is mistake # 1: never give your child something that cannot easily be replaced (see also goldfish). Or, maybe, your mother-in-law bought your child a cute, cuddly, bunny blankie at the toy store. It was all the rage at the time, but now that your baby needs a replacement they’ve been taken off the market due to slow sales. This is mistake # 2: if you child shows an interest in anything that could become a security blanket of any kind… BUY OUT THE STORE!
Okay, so now you have this disgustingly dirty security blanket that your child won’t give up, you don’t have anyone to make you another one, and the stores are all out of the specific one that she likes (not that there is a guarantee this would actually work… because kids aren’t stupid), so now what? Well, at the very least, you’re going to have to try to wash it. And, well, you’re going to have to take it away long enough to do that, but who are you kidding: there’s going to be lots of screaming and crying (mostly you going “please, just let me wash it for you!?!”)?
So the battle begins. You, wearing a ski mask and dishwashing gloves, try to pull the bunny blankie away from your kicking and screaming child, not realizing the turmoil, the anguish that is running through little her head as you take away the only true, self-soothing comfort she has ever known. I imagine if you could read her thoughts, they would sound something like this...
So, unable to deal with the hooror of imagining the emotional scars you might be inflicting on your screaming child, you just give up, hoping that one day she just loses the stupid thing- in a mall, when she's out for the day with your in-laws- and you can just replace it with something better, like a car. But we all know the truth... no matter what we do as parents, we will never, ever be able to truly help our children get over the loss of a security blanket... as this alarming epidemic (see next photo) implies...
But, what do we know... we're no experts? (Pssst... check out the links).
Related Links (Security Blanket Attachment):
My son is 18 months and HAS to have his blankie, he takes it every where! He has a habit of chewing on it, so I try to wash it once a week. At first it wasn't all that hard to separate him from it to wash it. Maybe 5-10 minutes of crying then he was over it. Then it became an all out nightmare trying to take it from him! I finally figured it out, it's a large blanket (one of those fleece blankets from Wal-Mart) so I got the wonderful idea to cut it in half and sew the ends so they didn't mess up. Now when it needs to be washed, when he isn't looking I rotate them and he doesn't know the difference.
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