September 2022 Volume 5 Issue 2

PROVIDING SPACE

“Providing space for children and young people to think isthe most profound gift we can give them.” - Marilyn Dyck

Marilyn Dyck

I do not visit social media with any regularity, but I have noticed a feature called 'Watch" and have several times encountered clips of babies and young children videoed doing what they do in response to their adults and to their world. As a Mum and a Nana, I am immediately drawn into the scenes that invite me to watch.

So many adults are paying extra attention to their children and capturing the responses of little ones to various aspects of adult behavior and interaction. The shared laughter and learning is precious and inspiring and fun! The gift of children is lived out with laughter and tenderness and affirmation. As adults we cannot resist the power of care and love that fills our being when engaging with little persons.

At every stage of development for a child, it is the role and responsibility of adults to provide the necessary space for each one to discover who they are by being given the 'space' to think and process.

This space is not just a physical area in their built environment - aka their home. From their day of birth they not only need our physical attention in their physical environment, but also the internal space of their hearts and their spirits which will read (without any language qualifiers) the ways we speak, touch, hold, handle … . As they develop, the behavior and attitudes of adults are diligently seen and read by infants and young children. This continues through the rest of their lives in different phases and spaces.

Relationships are the critical context for children to discover themselves, who they are, what they think, how and what others think and do and appropriate responses to the growing social context of their culture.

Adults must give them the space to navigate physically and emotionally, and to grow the spirit within themselves. Adults hold the responsibility for them, to provide for their safety in all situations and circumstances. Adults model the information about appropriate responses that are necessary or required in the cultural milieu of the people they live with and encounter in their community.

Learning not only requires experiences in reality, but frequent and necessary time-outs to process what is seen and heard ... and to THINK. Children surrounded by adults who dominate conversations, discourse, activities, encounters, need space to consider what they have observed and experienced. This is critically important to their 24/7 learning.

A child is thinking from the start. Their brains are phenomenally flexible and capable. As time passes the complexities introduced in development require space inside themselves to feel and assess and ask questions about their experiences. To feel entirely safe to explore what is happening in their thinking, children need to deeply understand the TRUST they can have with adults. It is the challenge most important for adults to achieve. They must convince the children who watch them that complete transparent honest trust is the basis for their shared relationship.

TRUST is indeed the most vulnerable and fragile of all aspects of our adult personhood to offer to children. They have wisdom. In their observations of adults they are able to sense legitimate integrity, reliability, consistency, of the adults in their lives. Children who turn away from an overt adult gesture are not convinced of trust. Children know and they learn that many things adults say are often staged, and do not deliver truth in the long run.

In my years of engagement with young people I have deeply learned that loss of trust is the most profound way adults hurt and damage children. Loss of trust is not just a repeated one-off. It is a forever broken piece that cannot be fixed by anything but proven integrity over a long period of time.

Providing space for children and young people to think is the most profound gift we can give them. That space is a complete statement of RESPECT. That space has no control switches. That space holds no judgement. That space offers warmth and unconditional acceptance of the child as a person. It is private and accessed by invitation only.

Our children and young people need THEIR OWN SPACE to process, to question, to organize their thoughts, to consider, to wonder, to imagine, to make decisions that fit who they are and what they have learned so far.

If children are surrounded and managed by adults at all times, they stop growing inside and become their best version of accommodation to adult mandates. They are crippled with a persona that is not really them, just the adult version of their adults imposed on a new canvas which lacks autonomy and identity.

A society which does not offer children opportunities to create and be original and different and to challenge status quo, becomes a stagnant entity turning in on itself with no newness to enhance itself and grow better.

I recently discovered a quote by a foundational thinker in education: Jean Piaget

"Education for most people means trying to lead the child to resemble the typical adult of his society. But for me, education means making creators ... You have to make inventors, innovators, not conformists."

Our children and young people are the future of the world. Providing space for them to grow and learn and question is our highest calling and the essential contribution of our generation of adults. We must nurture the hope and learning and wisdom of what they have seen and heard and processed as they have developed from birth. We must LISTEN to them and LEARN with and from them.

We must recognize and learn how to engage with the PERSONHOOD of children. Current society adults are still largely assumed to represent appropriate power and control. Parenting is endorsed as a power based approach by belief systems, policy statements, social structures and strategies, to raise ‘good’ children. Children, who are raised by adults who believe their role and right is to manage and control children as ‘owned’, are punished for thinking differently and questioning. Children are learning from their world. Learning produces new ideas and creates innovation. To a great extent our adult culture is entrenched in reinforcing and repeating status quo.

We cannot risk making our children duplicates of ourselves. We need to encourage their thinking and their belief in themselves. Their confidence in themselves must be double underlined by our belief and trust in them. They are as capable as we allow them to be.