Hands Off or Hands On: When the Zipper Will Not Catch

By the front door, shoes on, running late. Your toddler or preschooler is trying to zip the jacket. Once. The zipper slips. Twice. Your hands are already moving and you pull them back. Three times, and the jacket hits the floor along with your child. You were watching the whole time, trying to decide whether to help, and now the decision has been made for you.

Watching a child fail at something is harder than failing yourself, and both of your instincts are good ones. Stepping in gets the jacket zipped. Waiting lets your child find out the zipper is not the boss. Three tries is a long time for a preschooler to stay with a thing that is not working, and the meltdown is what happens when the trying runs out before the zipper does. After more than 20 years around people who make things for a living, I have watched a lot of third tries. The useful ones often end with somebody putting the thing down and looking at it instead of pulling harder.

What Kit does

In Kit Sees a Puzzle, Naya, a girl with a magnifying glass, shows Kit what to do after the pulling and the shaking have failed: look. Then the book leaves the jar behind. "Puzzles are EVERYWHERE," says Naya. A girl at the water fountain goes up on tiptoes. "Tip-TIP-toes. Still too high." A dog walker is all tangled up, round and round. Kit points at a cat asleep on a wall. "Uh oh! A PUZZLE!" Is it? "NO! That is a cat, Kit. Cats are SUPPOSED to do that." Then at home a little girl named Mia reaches for her cup. TIP. "Nobody says it for him." Kit finds the words himself: "Uh oh! I see a PUZZLE!" The child listening stands on tiptoes, shakes their head like Naya, and shouts the line at every find, including the cat.

What you can try

• Ask before your hands move: "Want help, or one more try?" Sometimes the answer is a snarl. Sometimes it is "one more," and the fourth try is theirs.
• When you do step in, try doing half. Seat the zipper, then let your child pull it up. The jacket is on, and the last part was theirs.
• When the jacket and the child are both on the floor and the clock is against you, take the zipper and hand over a different job. "I'm doing the zipper. You're doing the door." The morning keeps moving, and one job is still theirs.

Where the coloring page fits

The free pack has four coloring pages, the tiny ladybug, Kit pulling on the jar, the sleepy cat, and Kit's VERY big eyes behind the magnifying glass, plus two games, Puzzle Spotting and The Second Way. On the evening after a morning like that, the page is a place to look at a stuck thing from a safe distance. You color the jar and ask what Naya did that Kit did not. The cat page is there for the laugh.

Out the door, jacket half zipped.

More for this book

• The book: Kit Sees a Puzzle (Book 3)
• All 20 STEM picture books for toddlers and preschoolers
• Free coloring pages for all 20 books
• Blog: More parent moments

Sources

• Kit Sees a Puzzle: Uh Oh! I See A Puzzle, Book 3 of Kit's Little Sparks.
• Free coloring and activity pack for Book 3 (8 pages, PDF, no sign-up).

Chris Kuczynski is an engineer turned registered patent attorney, a preschool co-founder, and a dad. He is the author of Kit's Little Sparks, a 20-book STEM series that gives children ages 2 to 4 the social and emotional foundations of the inventor's mindset. It is the first of four age-tiered series for readers ages 2 to 12.