I did not have the privilege of having my own children, but I have had the privilege of working with children for the past 30 years in early education settings, church music programs, and with children and grandchildren of family and friends. I have famously (or perhaps, infamously) said that I don’t like all the children I meet. It’s true. That statement usually evokes a gasp of some sort from the audience, but children are just little people. Not one of us instinctively likes every person we meet. Then I go on to explain that unlikeable children are the ones who need us to love them the most, and loving them is a choice we can and must make.
I am by no means the early childhood education (ECE) expert, but I have worked with and learned from the very best ECE experts the field has to offer. In a nutshell, I have learned that in the first five years of children’s lives, they learn to trust or distrust the world. If they learn to trust because of the ways adults in their lives have treated them, then I believe they learn the very beginnings of how to hope for the best. They can learn self-control without losing self-esteem if they have the right role models. They can learn to trust their instincts and to have the grit or the will not only to survive but also to thrive in this world. There are expert resources bemoaning the lack of grit in our young people, and at the same time indicating grit is the deciding factor in predicting success.
With the right examples and appropriate doses of love, affection, and, yes, correction, children learn to take risks, to be good followers, to lead, and to develop and recognize purpose in their lives. It is almostunbelievable that in the first five years of a child’s life, this kind of foundation can be laid. And it should be laid. It will be laid if we realize our responsibility as adults in their world. This subject is a deep, deep one for the experts, but I am a layman in the ECE world, and I am speaking in layman’s terms.
Dr. Tim Elmore, President of the nonprofit Growing Leaders, tells us that children born since 2000 do not need adults for information. They can find out anything they need to know on the Internet. In fact, the danger of technology is that while children are growing up in the digital age with access to the whole world, they do not learn social-emotional skills in the digital world.
So, why do children need us? It is our responsibility to teach them how to live and create meaningful relationships, to be productive citizens, to engage with others as compassionate friends, to be able to devote themselves to a task and finish it, and to be teachable, life-long learners. That list could beextended exponentially, but that’s enough to get the point across that we are important in the lives of children.
The question is whether we realize, by the way we live in front of them and by the way we treat them and others in their presence, that we are teaching them how to treat us as they grow older. I have heard it said that if your fifteen-year-old is consistently disgruntled, disrespectful, yells back, and even sometimes shoots the finger to the authority figure in his or her life, the parents in the scenario might want to check back to see how they treated that fifteen-year-old when he or she was five and younger.
They are watching us, listening to us, and reading us. They are born with the ability to imitate us very early in life. Do we want them to be like we are? It is far more important who we are than what we know in every situation of life—for our own benefit first and then for the benefit of others.
Here’s a great place to start: parents, leave the cell phones put away when your family goes out to eat, when your children are in the car, when you are dropping off at an early childhood facility, and whenyou are picking up at the end of the day. The children won’t see you or haven’t seen you all day. Theydeserve your undivided attention. Have meaningful conversations when you have them with you. Remember, we are teaching children how to treat us and others by the way we treat them. Giving one
another our undivided attention tells our loved ones, “You is smart; you is kind; you is important.” Let’sbegin changing their world and ours right now. Our future depends on it.
