inquiring parent

In the first article on this blog I wrote about how children unconsciously mirror parents. This article looks at the impact of the wider environment. Everything we come into contact with as children has some bearing on how we think and feel, be it family, friends or the society we grow up in. The effect can be blindingly obvious, or so subtle it’s hard to notice. It’s easy to see that children who grow up in alcoholic families or in a war zone are going to be affected by that environment, but subtle effects on our development can go unnoticed. 

My daughters both love to swim. LB, the elder, joined a club a couple of years ago and has entered a few competitions. She has come second or third in several races, and has a small stash of medals. She has a dream that one day she may be a ‘really good’ swimmer and make it to the national team. Will she, won’t she? Who knows? I have Albert at UrbanMonk.net to thank for helping me see that doesn’t much matter right now. In an article about finding our purpose in life, he writes about years spent boxing, dreaming of glory, till one day he lost interest and stopped, to later realise the purpose of it hadn’t been to make him a brilliant boxer, but to give him confidence. (See link at the end of this post.)

 So, LB has dreams and can swim well – she is also prone to minor, niggling illnesses. A few weeks ago she had a heavy cold and a big competition coming up. She was determined she was well enough to compete, and determined to enjoy her birthday a few days before. All week she had gone off to school coughing and sneezing and brimming with excitement. (Not her usual behaviour – more often she huddles in bed at the first sneeze.) On the morning of the event she was still coughing and her nose dripped a wonderful stream of green snot. But she was going!!!! 

She didn’t win any medals, or even come close. People – including me -  still told her she’d done well: pointing out she’d been the youngest in her races,  had swum strokes she’s not confident in, hugely improved her time in one of them, and swam half a second faster than before in another stroke – and she had a cold.  She smiled as people pointed this out to her, she smiled as people told her it’s not coming first or second that matters, but getting personal bests, or even just taking part. Not everyone can come first, people said, and she had done well just to enter a big long race. People asked if she was pleased with how she’d done – she smiled and said yes. 

By evening she was in tears. All day she had tried to be upbeat, tried to keep thinking it was okay, that everything was fine, that she was pleased with the improvements she had made, that coming last in that long race didn’t bother her. She thought she was supposed to be happy, that was how people behaved.  She was having huge doubts about whether she was any use at swimming at all, as she’d watched some of her friends knock three or four seconds off their personal bests in every race, and as she compared her times to the winning times. 

I knew so well what she was feeling, and I told her it was okay to feel disappointed, frustrated, okay to feel sad. And I sent a little memo to my own mind to remember that too. 

Thinking about it the next day I realised what had happened was something I often notice – that when we adults find it hard to deal with children’s feelings we try to stop them instead. It’s a mite confusing to tell children that what really matters in these competitions is personal bests, because if that was true the medals would go to the kids who knocked the most off their times, not to the ones who swim the fastest. This lie, because that’s what it is, is told with the intention of being kind and encouraging the children who will probably never win medals. So we throw children into competitions telling them it’s not winning that matters and yet get excited when they win, and expect them to go on smiling and not be jealous when they don’t. Likewise, we divide them in classrooms into reading groups and call them Owls and Pigeons and don’t let on to them that the myth of owls being intelligent isn’t true, till one day the Owls realise that the Pigeons are reading Dostoyevsky, while they are still on Spot the Dog. (Okay I’m exaggerating, but you get the picture.) 

My gut feeling is that when we aren’t honest with children, even when our intentions are kind, deep down they know. Our lies don’t stop the feelings, they just stop the expression of those feelings and lead to children feeling something’s wrong with them. In the short term it might serve adults to dodge dealing with children’s more difficult emotions, but in the long term it comes back to us – if we’re lucky it’s later the same day when our children cry at bedtime. If we’re less lucky they stifle those feelings and go on stifling them and carry with them a simmering resentment. When I realised how disappointed my daughter was I couldn’t tell her she’ll win next time – she might , or she might not. Instead I guided her through The Work on some of her beliefs around that disappointment. Doing this she remembered the joy she gets from swimming, from feeling the water around her, the feel of moving quickly through it, the pleasure she gets at pushing herself to see how fast she can go – and her sense of purpose returned. 

The next day LB came to me with some drawings she was doing and told me she couldn’t get them right, saying that her friend is better at drawing than she is. Having worked as an art teacher years ago I noticed that children often approach drawing with their minds, not their eyes, drawing what they think they should see, not what they do see, in an attempt to get it right. I showed LB how to look more closely and to draw what she sees and not what she knows. Five minutes later she was back with another drawing, pleased as punch that she had discovered she could draw well after all. Was this coincidence or did it have something to do with working through her disappointment the night before? Hmm, I wonder…

(Read the full article at: 

www.urbanmonk.net/268/finding-a-purpose-and-passion-in-life-part-2-impermanency-inner-purpose-meaning-and-more/)