Thanks, mate. I believe that you have told me about the right to express our negative emotions to our kid before. I agree about the part about keeping our emotional responses appropriate. I think the ideal for me to attain is to convey anger/disappointment/annoyance in a serious, yet light-hearted manner. I find that it goes over children’s heads if they are subjected to too much lecturing.

The thing I struggle with (both in parenting and in teaching) is the whole notion of playfulness. True, children can’t know better, but they can save themselves (and me) a whole lot of grief if they don’t be playful and just do things the way they are supposed to. There is a time for experimentation, and there is a time for following instructions - but it’s play time 💯 for some of the kids I work with.

I did buy him another Tomica toy in the end. It wasn’t a replacement toy. Since several years ago, we have arrived at a tacit understanding that he can get a new toy every month. I decided that the mature thing to do here is to honour this agreement (yesterday was coincidentally 1st Dec) and keep this incident of loss (though we got the toy back in the end) separate from our usual agreement