Average

Danny, my beloved child who proudly strives to do the minimum required work with any task, thought he was giving Tom and me a compliment when he said, "Mom, as far as parenting skills go, you and Dad are average."  The look on my face must've told him that I didn't receive it as a compliment so he quickly clarified his statement by saying, "Average is good, Mom, isn't it? It's good to be average."  Taking a moment to compose my thoughts, I said, "Danny, average is not bad but it is also not great.  It's squeaking by.  A person should strive to be more than just average in what they do.  You wouldn't want an average doctor, or an average teacher.  You want excellence from people. By calling someone's skills 'average', it actually means 'inferior' a lot of the time."  I could tell that he took my words to heart, understood what I was trying to say, and he simply responded, "Oh." 
Then I said, "Dan, you know that you, James and Katie are the most important people in the world to us and we would be very unhappy and would be doing you an injustice if we had only 'average' parenting skills."  He said, "Oh.  I really didn't mean it that way."
After retracting his previous  statement, he reissued it with, "Mom,  your parenting skills are definately better than average. "
I simply said, "Thank you, Dan, that means alot to me." For in his mind, that truly is high praise. (4/19/11)