"Parents were invented to make children happy by giving them something to ignore."

 -Ogden Nash

Why is it that children have such selective hearing? Say your child is in another room at the other end of the house, and you say something about candy. Immediately that child will come running through the house wondering if he or she can have a piece of the candy. And they are there before you even finished the word candy.

But if you ask your four-year-old to pick up the toys in his room, you have to ask five times before he even acknowledges that you said something. And then he's only responding to say "What toys?" 

I don't think children always ignore parents on purpose. Sometimes they are just lost in a world created by their imagination. In that world, there are no parents asking them to pick up toys. It's a lot like the old Calvin and Hobbes cartoons. They are so involved in the world they've created that the first few times a parent asks something, the question does not even register. It's not a part of the world, so it can be ignored.

Of course, as parents, we want our children to listen. But maybe there is a difference between willfully ignoring what a parent says and ignoring because they are imagining. I just hope I can tell the difference at the time, so that I can have the patience to see the world of my child's imagination, and maybe even participate in it.