Through Children's Eyes

I don't know if you've ever read anything by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, but if you haven't you may just want to run out and do so, right now. Or better yet, here's her blog! - it's destined for my ever-lengthening blogroll, as soon as I finish this post.

She writes about knitting, and I came across her book, Knitting Rules! after I'd been obsessed with knitting for a month or so. She made me laugh out loud, and also relax about knitting perfectly. She kind of helped me come up with my own way to practice this craft, with that book.

Recently I picked up her book of essays, Free-Range Knitter, and while I laugh and admire, I'm also finding answers to questions far beyond the realm of knitting.

Here's a quote from an essay about Stephanie's daughter:

Tenacity. Intelligence. Constructive discontent. Persistence. Sensitivity. A fantastic sense of humor. Independence. Mercy. Fearlessness. Kindness. Equity.

Now, these qualities are terrible qualities in a child. North America wants children (especially little girls) to be polite. Polite, obedient, and pliable... Kids who fight back and challenge you, say "no," and think for themselves are hard to raise and not thought well of at all.... I realized you couldn't tell a kid, "Do what I tell you," praise her for obedience, and then turn right around when she becomes a grownup and suddenly say, "Think for yourself" and condemn adults who are still compliant.

These words keep coming back to me. They make me think of a song by the Limeliters, a band my Dad loves from the era of The Kingston Trio and The Clancy Brothers. This particular song, Through Children's Eyes, is about how easy it is as grown-ups to forget that children are learning all the time, and that they do certain things for certain reasons. Here's the chorus:

Hey Jimmy Joe John Jim Jack/
Even little tigers lose their knack/
When somebody twice their size/
Can't see the world through children's eyes

The preceeding verse was about a tiny little tiger whose nursemaid "made him so afraid, he didn't dare make a noise." And guess what happened to him when he grew up?

He's just a mat
Stretched out flat
On somebody's bedroom floor

A harsh verse for a children's song, you think? But that is where the lesson comes in. We are given exactly one childhood each, and what we learn in that childhood must take us through our whole lives. Will we teach our children to question, to say no, to challenge, to show kindness where an adult might not? As frustrating as parenthood can be, my answer to those questions has to be yes.

Because I'm not interested in an obedient, compliant adulthood for my boys, one in which they're the mat on the bedroom floor. I want them to be as tiger-y as their hearts will allow. I know that they'll be tigers interested in justice, tigers on the side of good.