Favorite post of the week

A Child's World

“Is it possible that our modern way of teaching, all gentleness, persuasiveness and human contact tends to make children get themselves and their work all mixed up?…….Maybe it was easier for children to grow up in a world in which, when they impinged on the world of adults, they were treated firmly, impersonally and ceremoniously but were otherwise left alone.”
John Holt, ‘How Children Fail’

I have been mulling over this quotation for a while now. It seems harsh coming from a man who cared so much about the welfare of children and actually seems like it goes against everything he stands for. But I am convinced that there is some element of truth to what he says here. Children should mix with other children, making their own rules and boundaries as is befitting the world of a child and the complicated world of an adult should remain for the most part a million miles away.

In primitive societies this is what children are left to do. They run around in large packs with no supervision whatsoever. When they do interact with the adults, at meal times for example, children are usually quiet, obedient and conform to their parents rules of proper conduct. Adults are firm and unceremonious. All this I learned from The Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff.

We rarely see this nowadays. Children are hounded by teachers and hounded by parents. What Holt is saying is that children are not here to please us or be our entertainment, nor are they here to be entertained by us - children are here to learn about life through the eyes of a child, free from critical observation.

Holt goes on to talk about overbearing parents who never let their children experiment, take risks or stretch themselves; parents who hover at the end of slides and climbing frames, who constantly tell their offspring to, “Be careful!” or, “Don’t do that, you will hurt yourself,” or the like. He talks of a playground in London, where the parents are prevented from entering and have to sit where they cannot see the children, who can enjoy themselves in peace and hardly ever hurt themselves.

When kids are left to test themselves to the fullest in a natural way, with the guidance of other children, they develop a strong sense of body awareness, of safety, of their own limits and they seldom, if ever then need to take unnecessary risks. When the parent always steps in to try to set the limit for the child, they never get a sense of their own strengths and weaknesses and subsequently when they are left their own devises can be reckless and unsafe.

This can be true with children’s interactions with others too. With an adult continually butting in and trying to resolve children’s conflicts for them, they never are allowed to weigh the other one up, suss out the situation, act accordingly and learn to get along with others.

It is all about letting children get on with it, sort out their differences themselves. DoH often tells me about the fisticuffs that would go on after school with rivals, even with friends. He knew then how to handle himself, as he does now. ‘Street-wise’ he calls it. Does this mean that children who are bullied (or bully) have never been allowed to settle their own disputes themselves in their own way and are therefore left defenseless (or tyrannical) in a dog eat dog world???

I believe we all need to learn how to be idle parents. In short, we shouldn’t try to make our kids interpret their world through our eyes. The same is true for schooling; the ‘persuasiveness of modern teaching’ is far more damaging than leaving a child to learn in their own way. And so much for the ‘persuasiveness of modern parenting’ - i.e. the modern trend of feeling that children should be ‘entertained’ 24/7; doing things together as a family, spending time at theme parks, at the zoo, at the cinema etc. In the ‘olden days’, parents had too much to do - washing, cooking, cleaning, working - to care about entertaining the kids. Children ran through the woods by themselves, unobserved, unimpeded and FREE.

And they knew how to behave in front of the grown ups.