Parenting: Try Saying Yes

A note to young parents.

I overheard the following exchange between a girl of about five or six and her father at a Sydney beach on a late October afternoon:

“Daddy, can I play in the sand?”

“No, darling. You’ll get your clothes dirty.”

“Can I take my shoes off and walk in the water?”

“Not today, sweetheart, you’ll be soaked and we’ve got Nanna’s after this.”

“Is it OK if I play with the other children?”

“You need to stay close to me or I could lose you in the crowd.”

“Daddy, buy me an ice cream.”

“No. That’s just sugar, it’s not good for you.”

The girl began to cry. The father turned to a man standing nearby and shook his head: “Jeez, kids these days.”

—

Sand sticks to clothes. Water is wet. A crowd can swallow a small person. Ice cream is indeed mostly sugar, and somewhere a dentist was applauding.

But a truth can be put to work in the service of a lie, and the lie here is that a child is kept safe by being kept from everything.

A wet dress dries. Sand comes out in the wash. An ice cream is not a metabolic catastrophe. And a child who wanders ten metres away to make a friend has not joined the Bolivian navy.

We love our children, and yet we spend much of their childhood protecting them from childhood. We keep them clean, close, dry, supervised, nutritionally respectable and, if we’re not careful, thoroughly miserable.

When they do cry, before we shake our heads, it may be worth checking whether we’ve just spent the afternoon saying no to every reason they had for being one.