First impressions

First impressions are powerful.

I have two sons, spaced 363 days apart. The older was not a "good sleeper" as a newborn. That is, I did not get good sleep for the first eight months of his life. I got good reading, game playing, and movie watching between 10 PM and 4 AM, but not good sleep.

The younger was a different story. He (and his twin sister) liked to sleep from the beginning. We got more sleep from day one with two newborns than we did with the one older one.

So to this day, in my mind, the elder is a "bad" sleeper and the younger a "good" sleeper. Yet when I stop and actually think about the reality of the last week, I realized that I was up three or four nights to comfort the younger one, and never for the older. My first impressions dominate my current reality.

Sleep characterization is a small thing. What are the chances that the same phenomenon applies to other things, too? Will I judge one as fast, the other slow, based on their crawling speed? Is one smart and the other not because of how they interact with Boynton books? I must be careful to treat my kids the way they are, not the way I have prejudged them to be.

How about you? How do you characterize your kids? Or colleagues? First impressions are powerful, and possibly dangerous.