A couple of days ago Faro left us this vignette as a reflection of life full of schedules that we have planned for our children. Get up early to go to school, some even before school starts. Staying there all day for a matter of incompatibility of schedules with parents. Leave school and go directly to language, music, sports and whatever extracurricular out-of-school. Do homework and review what they have done during the day, or what they have been told to review, without time to do the things that children do.
Something like starting from small to prepare to, in the future, have a more than complete curriculum, at the risk of spoiling their childhoods. As a reflection it is very valid and useful, because many children have worse hours than their own parents, with more directed activities and less free time. I want to go a little further, because the father responds to the son that to be a child "there is always time" and that is precisely one of the symptoms that children who as children could not be, can suffer, that behave as such when they are older, when they no longer play.
Childhood, that time when ...
Childhood is that time when children have to play, they have to run, they have to invent, they have to have time to practice their creativity, to dream, to believe in impossible things and discover for themselves why they are and even to believe that they can get things that we, as adults, would never believe. Childhood is that time when you do crazy things, that children do not seem such, surely, and that because they can be allowed (from which we find out, because other crazy things we will know when they are older ) and it is the time to try to be happy, to live with joy and carelessness, without responsibilities and without anything that prevents them from sleeping soundly.
Surely I will have left many things and that you can help me to better define what childhood is, but so, in summary, I think that it is more or less clear that it is something a bit far from what I have explained paragraphs above, with those schedules terrible and that lot of activities that little free time leave to be, in short, free children.
If you are not a child when you play, you will be when you do not play
Then it can happen, and I think that it is already happening, that children who cannot be when they play, children who do not feel freedom when they should feel it, those who have not been able to explore the world and life with relative autonomy because they have always been doing what others have marked on their agenda, They try to recover lost time when they don't touch. Something like trying to burn, in adulthood, the stages that could not burn when they were to be rebellious, capricious and disobedient.
I don't know about you, but I know cases of embarrassed children and teenagers because their parents dedicate themselves to living the disco life in a disco, returning to the many (sometimes later than their children), spending money they have or don't have and behaving in a way too capricious for an age in which a "sitting head" is presupposed. Something like yes everything that did not mature as a child should mature as a child, with the difficulty of doing it when you are no longer a child and at the risk of not really doing it.
Now, I know, I cannot generalize because not everyone will behave in the same way, but I have this hypothesis, I have this feeling and I have it because society is certainly moving towards a point where it is getting younger for longer, every time he "feels his head" later, every time older responsibilities are assumed and although in some ways the "Carpe diem" and living life offers us more time of fun and a sense of freedom that perhaps we did not have little ones, our children need adults, adult parents, figures to look at, examples of sanity.
There is a time for everything, and when you are a parent and an adult, that is the time to look for how to live in a conscious way, looking for freedom or ratios of freedom, what alternatives there are, because you can feel free without having to spend the night. without spending too much money, but not forgetting that we are parents and that our children and their well-being depend on us.
I don't know, maybe I'm turning into a carca What do you think?
