Childhood

Little hands and feet

It’s a long time since I was a child but there’s still a child within me who wants to laugh, dance, sing, and be free.  The photos in this collage depict both the innocence and the potential of children as seen in their tiny hands and feet.  Some of the children are personally known to me and they were having a good time playing freely and enjoying themselves with careful abandon.

To enjoy these little ones as they are is a challenge for many parents.  We have so many plans for them even before they come into the world.  Of course, every parent wants the best for their child, or so we say.   Even when we are enjoying the moment with them, we sometimes have some other motivation beyond just that. We read them bedtime stories for their enjoyment as well as to make good readers out of them.

When the time comes for them to go to school, we pass them on into the educational system with the belief that the experts there will take care of them.  In any system, there are strengths and weaknesses.  I was having a haircut the other day and my hairdresser told me that her child wasn’t counting to as high a number as were the other children.  She was worried.

Well-meaning parents sometimes listen to everything that is told to them about their child and take the reports given by their educators very seriously.  I told her not to take this seriously. Although she didn’t go to teacher’s college, she is a sensible person and “educated” at that.  Every child eventually learns to read, write, count, and acquire many other skills.  They just do this at different times.  Just as they emerge from the womb at different times and not just on the due date given by the doctor, so the emergence of different skills takes place at different times.

I told her that each child finds out, through trial and error sometimes, what it is that they are good at and inclined to. This starts in childhood and can go well into adulthood.  The process of learning begins at birth, and I daresay, doesn’t finish until death. We all learn and relearn and unlearn.

It is alright for the child to be a child just as it is alright for me to be the age I am at now.  What I can do at this age may be different to what a person of my same age can do or cannot do.  This is alright.  We aren’t all the same.  I wish I had understood this at a much earlier age because I would have spent much less time wishing my life away.

This collage is also about enjoying your child, enjoying the moment, their presence and their childhood.  We must respect their educators and the systems in which they are raised but we don’t have to take everything they say to heart.  At the end of the day, make sure that you are happy and your child is too.  This is what will count in the long run.  It is alright for me to say these things because I’m at the unlearning stage of life. This Latebloomer wishes that you and your children will live long, happy lives.  May you enjoy your grand-children too.

“Because children grow up, we think a child’s purpose is to grow up. But a child’s purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn’t disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of itself into the each moment. We don’t value the lily less for not being made of flint and built to last. Life’s bounty is in its flow, later is too late.”

Tom Stoppard, The Coast of Utopia

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