as a parent….
Friday, November 27th, 2009Brasov, Romania
In my role as parent (or perhaps tour guide), I’ve posed a few questions to the children over the past couple of days. Questions like “What did you think of the trip?” and “What have you learnt this past year?” and “How will this experience affect your future life, both the immediate future and perhaps longterm – if you can imagine beyond your childhood, that is?” and “What’s the worst thing that happened?” and “What was your favourite thing/place/food/experience” and “Why?”
We know that when we get back, we will need to slot into “normal daily life” (whatever that is), and that most people we come across will have no interest in our goings-on (not you, who is reading, of course – we feel your lurve!), but *some* people will pose a question or two. A number of times the children have already been faced with the impossible, “What’s your favourite so far?” or even more vaguely, “What do you think of the trip?” (Actually, it’s fascinating how people are more interested in what the kids think than the adults!! And I LIKE that they are treated as *people* and not some of our baggage). Context usually limits the answer to a twenty second one, but where do you start in under a minute? How can you compare riding an elephant with a roller coaster? Slurping a bowl of spicy noodle soup with biting into a thick custardy cream cake or chomping on the most flavour-filled crispy apple you have ever tasted, that you just picked off the tree? Come to think of it, how do you compare a slice of watermelon with a slice of buffalo mozzarella, a pot of Mongolian sheep’s tail with a bag of freshly fried crickets? How do you choose between scaling a mountain in Thailand and clambering over four thousand year old ruins? How do you choose between floating down the Mekong river for a couple of days and the fastest scariest zippy-dippy tuktuk ride across town? Oh, and what about the time we crammed fourteen people into one tuktuk?
How do you choose between experiences and relationships? Seeing the marvel of Angkor Wat was absolutely amazing, but so was seeing the look on the face of a child who had just received their first ever book. Climbing castles inspired, but so did visiting an orphanage. Cycling anywhere (whether in China or Holland or Greece or…) was always a favourite…and so was realising that Grandpa would be rejoining us earlier than planned.
Discovering a new beetle or bones at an archaeological site or a new word or a spectacular sunset was always exciting….as was discovering your journal entries becoming more interestingly written and longer and longer and longer.
So I’ve been grooming the children…. “Listen up kids, it’s better to answer, “Oooh that’s a tricky question; I’ll try to answer it” than to stare dumbly saying, “Ummmm I dunno.””
How to teach them to discern whether someone is asking out of politeness or because they are genuinely interested, though, is tricky – you see, we work on a philosophy of “take people at their word” – we don’t go looking for hidden agendas or unspoken intentions. And so that means the lady who told our young lad she really was interested in rugby, got much more than she bargained for. All she could stammer as I pulled him on to the next pillar at Philippi was, “My, he is articulate, isn’t he? It’s homeschooling that does that.” Which was a really funny comment for her to make when she’d just expressed real concern to me that homeschooled children can’t interact socially <wink> He was certainly *interacting*, even if inappropriately by adult standards!! But he was six and she had asked him a question….so he had answered. Hopefully we’ll have got Body Language 101 and Clues About Whether Someone Is Listening Interestedly Or Merely Politely down pat by the time we get back (eg they look engaged versus distant, they ask more questions versus grunting, they share their own experiences – must remind the kids to pick up on those stories and take on the role of Good Listener, asking further questions of the speaker…)
If you haven’t read enough yet today, there’s a bit more on the now-updated Parenting Page, and quite a few pictures too.
rayres