Designed Childhood
I have a lovely niece who is only 5 years old and named Feifei. This summer holiday, I had wanted to invite her around to play for several days. To my surprise, her mother's reaction was overwhelmingly objective," No! Faifei has piano Monday, dancing Tuesday, swimming Wednesday... she will lag behind others if she absent from these courses." I finally did not succeed in persuading her mother, but leave with so much eagerness in Feifei's eyes, the eagerness to swim and catch fishes in the river that I had promised to do with her. The pressure-cooked child is not a new phenomenon but it's a growing one. Some parents call it giving kids a good start in a competitive world and uncertain times, or bring out the best in a child. Prestige via children is not unheard of. We often hear some parentsboasting that their children can make PowerPoint presentation that their children can play a concerto that their children can recite 100 poems of Tang Dynasty. While the parents are so proudly showing off their "works", the children are struggling painfully trying to meet their parents's demands. I realize, for so many people being the parents of an only child, they may have very good justification for investing great expectation on the kid, expecting him a prosperous future. But do all these efforts work?? It's an old saying: play is the work of young children. Many parents do not seem to realize this basic principle. I remember a parent ever took his kid to my mom, a primary school teacher for consultation that the kid couldn’t learn arithmetic well, despite using various teaching instruments. My mom later found that the child did not as the parent said, "have learning disability". The fact is that he was lacking of relaxing learning atmosphere, but was under great pressure his parents had exerted on him. This reminds me of my childhood, which is totally different from today's kids'. To us, learning being combined with play is a merely happy and natural process. We didn't need a parent to tell us what is a lizard and what is a grasshopper by showing us the color pictures or a full-sized model. We knew all of these animals by climbing up a tree or sneaking into the wild fields. The big differences are that we explored it instead of learning it, that we kept these vividly formed knowledge seared in our brain, but just a flash of memorizing. A bird confined to the cage can never learn to fly; a child being designed his childhood can never grow up healthily. Hyper-parenting and overscheduling are like the cage inhibiting children from discovering and developing the potential in them. Only when the children are given more personal space and free time can the process of discovering and developing be preceded smoothly.
