My two-year-old daughter is very excited about tomorrow.
It doesn’t matter what day you’re reading this, the sentence holds true.
For her, tomorrow is a magical day where everything has been promised and anything is possible.
We’re going to the library AND the park. She can eat unlimited amounts of cookies.
The favorite shirt she wanted to wear that was dirty today will be clean tomorrow. Episodes of the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse will play on our TV one after another and they’ll do the final hot dog dance twice per episode.
We’ll ceaselessly read books without regard to bedtime. The number of monkeys jumping on the bed will never skip from five to two to save a little time.
The only problem, you may have guessed, is that tomorrow’s never coming – at least not the one she’s been promised.
“Tomorrow” is just something we talk about that has been completely made up like Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, cryptocurrency, or politicians’ values.
By some unfortunate linguistic trick, we’re always living in “today.” Tomorrow forever hangs on the periphery of her consciousness; something she can see but never have.
This is perfect for toddlers’ parents. “Tomorrow” is soon enough to seem like a reasonable amount of time to wait for a toddler but far enough away to divert their attention without causing a temper tantrum.
Every day I fill my daughter Senita with hope for a tomorrow that will never come and then let that hope sizzle out while she sleeps so we can start the next day with a clean slate. It’s like a pressure relief valve on her need for instant gratification.
I never intended to habitually lie straight into my two-year-old daughter’s face but that’s the situation I’m in and I’ve made peace with it.
It all started very innocently with a genuine desire to teach Senita about time, giving her some sense of ownership over the future instead of blindly moving her from moment to moment.
A simple example is telling her while she’s in the bath that she’ll next be drying off with a towel, brushing her teeth, putting on lotion, and getting clean pajamas. It’s very helpful and she loves knowing the routine before it happens.
This naturally introduced the concept of “tomorrow,” which she immediately grasped.
When we lay out an outfit for her to wear the next day, she now expects it to still be there the next morning.
If we tell her Grandma and Papa are coming over tomorrow, she’s less shy when they visit, and more likely to ask about them before they even show up.
But the “tomorrow” concept also unlocked a loophole in Senita’s cognitive processes where something she desperately wants in the moment (like one more cookie) can be calmly and joyfully deflated. I’m entirely incapable of exploiting this loophole.
My wife Jenny and I used this tactic on Senita so many times with Girls Scout Thin Mint Cookies that Senita now asks for them as, “Cookie Tomorrow.”
She’s very smart so this tactic won’t work forever but I’ll worry about that tomorrow.
I do wonder sometimes if we’re setting her up to be a serial procrastinator, but I never worry about it for long because if we are, we won’t know about it until the last minute anyways.
There’s also the possibility that her visions of “tomorrow” are helping her set goals. In just the past week or so she’s started aspirationally raising the “tomorrow” concept.
Several times when putting a bedtime story book away she’s vowed to “read SO MANY books tomorrow.”
Similarly, she’s started testing our limits by running away any time she needs to be picked up to go in her crib or sit on the changing table and when I finally catch her she sighs dramatically and resignedly promises to, “run faster tomorrow.”
Since she has to believe in something, let her believe in the future. It may disappoint her one day, but that day will quickly pass and another tomorrow will be waiting.
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