stop, look and listen

When the kids were little, I read a Lot! of child psychology and child development literature. One book that made a big impression, was called "Drama of the Gifted Child" and it was written by Alice Miller. It was a simple, small book, but it made two important points: 1) a child's #1 need is to be listened to and taken seriously, and 2) the way an adult treats him/herself and others, is a reflection of the way that person was treated as a child by his/her parents.

Now that was interesting and actually novel. I thought about my own childhood. I was the middle child of 6 born in 8 years and even my mother always admitted she treated us as a group, not paying undue attention to us individually. When I thought really hard, I still couldn't remember my mother paying individual attention to me, unless I was being reprimanded or questioned. I thought about my dad, his perpetual sarcasm. My dad was a brilliant person~~top of his scientific technology field, but personally, he was a little stagnant and opinionated: for example, when discussing our futures, he would blithely and repetitiously joke that we should all become brain surgeons. Or, in a more serious moment, he would recommend a marketable future: accounting or computer science~~never taking our individuality into consideration.

I began to listen to my children and to take them seriously as unique individuals. Almost immediately, I realized that I consistently disrupted their play to drag them off on my errands or to whisk them off to their activities, or to preschool. How many times had my four-year old daughter screamed and cried, "You're ruining my game!!!", while I insisted it was time to go... it didn't matter... we had to get somewhere right now!!

Something that completely changed in my behavior and recognition and realization regarding my children was the critical importance of not ruining their game! I came to respect their 'game' and to believe that their play, especially make-believe, was more important then getting to the grocery store now, getting to the 2-year-old class, or even going to preschool at ages 3 and 4. As time went on, I listened more and more to my children and to other children and I observed their behavior and their play. I wound up homeschooling and even 'unschooling', because the more I let them play (and nowadays, it really is a matter of Letting Them Play!) the more I realized that children live in a magic wonderland!! which is slowly but definitely being eroded and decimated, pretty much like the rain forests and other forests of this planet... and being replaced by an impoverished kind of standardized, structured, adult-imposed, scheduled, conformed and hyper-controlled kind of existance... even at the ages of 2, 3, 4...