My daughter wanted to play "School" today, where I was the teacher getting her to write or cut something from some paper and I was wondering, at what age does this become the worst game in the world?
Smallsteps doesn't go to school yet, so she hasn't had her will to learn crushed by the system, but she will head there after the summer to her preschool. It isn't all bad though, as while I would rather homeschool perhaps, it really isn't possible for us at the moment and, I am not one of those parents who will rely on the education system to teach my child how to live her life.
I have a few friends who are school teachers and the stories they tell about parents are fascinating and terrible. In Finland, there is a reporting service for school communication, but is seemingly mostly used by parents complaining about teachers who they expect to raise their children these days.
A lot of parents over the last decade or two have decided that they will be friends with their kids and let the teachers do the parenting. However, the teachers have simultaneously had their authority weakened, which means kids are coming to school acting like terrors due to the lack of parenting in the home and, the teachers haven't the tools to do anything about it. Then on top of this, anything they do is criticized in a public forum by parents who do not want to upset their children, so blame the teacher. Definitely not worth the teaching degree and the salary attached to it.
We are living in a weird world.
I am pretty lucky though, as Smallsteps has always been one of those kids that most parents would want, as she is smart, neat, conscientious, kind and generally self-directed. She is still a kid of course so has her moments, but all in all, a good kid.
The challenge I think that I have had with her is remembering that she is indeed a child at times, as I think I might expect too much from her. At least, this is according to some of my friends who seem not to give their children at this age much responsibility and tend to let their kids do what they want and behave how they want with very little consequence.
I could be wrong here, but I feel this kind of thing leads to entitlement issues bound with the expectation that no matter what we do, we don't have to face the repercussions of our actions. At least from my own experience through hiring practices and the way some of the younger people I work with behave, there is a sense that the world is there to serve them, whether they offer anything of value or not.
While this might not be the mean behavior, it means that the average is changing and over time, the culture will shift in that direction. What I think is going to be interesting in the future though, is that the value of many positions are going to be based on the ability to hustle and I wonder, how many of these kids are going to have the hustle in them and how many of them are going to fall at their first rejection, and never get back up.
"The children are our future" is fact, but there is more to it than clean air and water, though they probably aren't going to have that anyway. Giving opportunity to children is one part of the equation, but that child also has to have the ability to take that opportunity and I get a sense that fewer of them are able, as while they might have some skills in some areas, they are lacking the emotional mental resilience to deal with all of the disappointments that come bundled with doing anything in this life.
Like learning to play the piano, resilience can be exercised, but if there aren't the opportunities to learn how to try and fail, face difficult people and take responsibility for consequences of behavior, what chance do people have to learn them?
From my own experience, the most successful people I know haven't had the easiest of childhoods, and I don't just mean financial success here, I mean success as humans. Many of them have faced adversity and still carry scars from it, but have managed to overcome themselves and live a good life regardless.
Are they happier? I don't know, but in comparison to the ones who have easy childhoods, they complain less and tend to be able to enjoy themselves with less. They tend to have a wider spectrum of tolerance for disruption and missed expectations, where things don't have to be "perfect" to be brilliant, while the easy lifers complain if even the slightest thing goes wrong.
This a generalization of course and anecdotal from my own world, but for me I feel that a good life doesn't mean an easy life and often an easy life seems to live to a hard life down the track. It is like cutting corners and taking shortcuts to ease the journey, but ending up in a place never wanted. I think this occurs financially too, where people spend to have now because they only live once, but fail to see that the one life can be very long and their lack of preparation for it leaves them living in increasing hardship.
I want what is best for my child and I want her to be healthy and content in her life, but what this actually means is to prepare her for a world in which she will hopefully live in for another 100 years. I don't know what is down that road, I don't know what technological, social or environmental conditions she will face, so to give her the best opportunity to succeed, is to give her the tools to learn, identify opportunity, take what she can and revive failure into a win.
She needs to be able to cope in a world I don't understand, so teaching her to do what I do and works for me, only goes so far. At some point, she has to be able to teach herself and a big part of that is facing the common situation, that we learned the wrong thing and need to forget what we know, and start again.
Life might be like a song, but the piano is out of tune, keys are broken and the fingers don't always hit the right note - yet we still have to find a way to listen to the rhythms we can find and dance the best we can. It is imperfect at best, but that doesn't mean it is bad life to live.
My daughter might not know it yet, but she will soon learn I am an imperfect parent too, but that doesn't mean she has to be held back by my own failures to do what is best for her and who knows, she might end up stronger for it.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]