After a very long train journey, Gabriel had reached the end of what he could handle.
Too tired. Too much noise. Too many people.
At the bottom of an escalator, he stopped completely.
Not that escalator. Not another one either. And not the lift.
I could see that this was no longer really about an escalator. He was simply exhausted, and asking one more thing of him risked turning a small refusal into a huge battle. So instead of insisting, I tried something else.
I asked:
He thought for a few seconds.
Suddenly the escalator was no longer the problem. He took my hand and walked towards the elephant escalator, smiling.
For the rest of our journey through the station, we looked for the animals that might be powering all the other escalators.
When a child refuses to move, play can help
In moments like this, my first instinct could easily be to repeat: “Come on, Gabriel, we need to go.” But when the refusal is mostly coming from exhaustion, more insistence does not necessarily give a child the energy they are missing.
This time, I did not try to convince him. I simply stepped into his world for a few seconds, and that little detour through imagination helped us move forward.
Sometimes children do not need us to push them through a difficult moment. They just need us to meet them where they are. 🤍
