Don’t rush the child.
“We want children to grow up really fast, and as adults we want to be the children we never were.”
This brilliant observation vividly depicts the malady that has afflicted the parental approach to rearing up children.
Parents and teachers try to “rush” the kids to grow up fast. In the process the children lose the bliss of childhood! It is something that you could never “rewind” to get back to!!
So goes an article by Annalisa Barbieri that appeared in The Guardian.
A child’s life nowadays has been made more stressful than that of adults. There is so much of peer pressure, competition, symbolism and snobbery that the charm of enjoying the pleasures of being a child is totally lost in this kind of bourgeois rigmarole, until these children “grow up” and realise that they don’t want to!
Barbieri has raised many pertinent queries:
“For whose benefit is all this rushing?
Is it any wonder that when we are supposed to magically turn into adults we think:
Hang on a minute, I just wannahavvalittlefun?
And what better way to have fun – and spite those parents who tried to turn you into mini-adults too early – than to base yourself in the family home, with little responsibility and a laundry service.
It is a pity that great many parents don’t know how to play anymore with their own offspring. They’re too competitive, don’t let their children take risks, or use their imagination.”
High time we let the child savour the ecstasy of being a child and acting like one, and not “fast-forwarding” to become what they are not.