on Being and Doing

A conversation over lunch today touched on many of the  ideas that have been rattling around in my mind lately.

Often, parenting in our culture emphasizes doing- helping your child cruise through developmental milestones, nurturing a higher IQ, pushing them to get that academic edge over others.  Not only are we pushing ideas of achievement-oriented success,  and zero growth = failure; but we are also teaching our children to be constantly comparing themselves to others.  Testing, scoring, grading, analyzing data, comparing.  Infant growth percentiles are based not on symptoms of poor health, but solely upon how one child compares to another, statistically.  If you're not average, you're abnormal.  Something is wrong with you.  Learning disabilities are based on this same idea.  If a child learns to read later than other children, if they can't complete a math times tables test or cannot sit still and listen, something is WRONG with them.  But what, really is the problem?  Do all children really need to learn in exactly the same way, at the same time as others?   It is the systems of society that cannot accommodate these wide ranges of human characteristics.  If the child cannot read at the same level of classmates, they will probably struggle to keep up with the preset curriculum for their grade.  They will certainly need interventions.

I think they need us to let them be.  Humans are naturally curious, especially children.  Children are always learning- through play. It works like this- if something is not stimulating, we get bored and lose interest.  We self-regulate.

And so,  I have these questions:
Is it really necessary to interfere with and micromanage children's learning?
Is it really necessary to get them "on track" for being just like everyone else?
How will this homogeneity further our species?
Would it not serve us to have a range of specialties we have honed through self-selection, based on our own interests and skills?
Would our satisfaction with life not be higher if we were allowed to explore life on our own terms?
Can we be trusted to learn what we need to learn to survive, to grow, to be inspired, to wonder, to make progress?

Perhaps, if we can step back and allow ourselves and our children to follow their own curiosity and to support what is alive in them, we can find our way out of this joyless pursuit of empty successes, bottom-line focused systems,  disassociation with our best selves, and of chronic dissatisfaction. 

I believe that right now, at 9 months of life, my son knows exactly how to BE.  My job is to try, as well as I am able, to protect that precious and primitive state.  I want to encourage him to listen to that which is alive in him, and to never, never trade it in for outside recognition and social approval.  When he inevitably learns that he will have to earn his merit badges, I will encourage him to earn them on his own terms.  Or perhaps we will give the achievement trophies away at Yard Sales, because our Mantlepiece will be filled with a rotating collection of colorful rocks and fossils, imperfectly perfect works of art, binoculars and magnifying glasses, skateboards and tambourines and aquariums.  An ode to life and everything in it that is-truly- worth doing.