Cars and Dinosaurs.

One day, I witnessed another beautiful conversation between a grade 1 student and the teacher, as I was volunteering in their class.

The teacher noticed that the kid was wearing a sock with Car prints on one foot and Dinosaurs print on another foot. When the teacher shared that with the child, the child replied: “ Yes, one is from the future and one is from the past”.

As another adult witnessing this whole conversation made me realize a few beautiful aspects about children and us adults.

The actual conversation.

Children were changing their clothes to get ready for outdoor time. And it being winter season, children had to layer up and wear snow boots, etc. As this child was dressing up, a teacher was passing by and suddenly paused to share something she noticed.

Teacher: Hmm, I notice, one of your socks has a car print, while the other one has a dinosaur print.

Child: Yes, one is from the future. And another one is from the past.

Teacher: Did you know, the gasoline that is needed for the cars to run, was contributed by the Dinosaurs,?

Child: Yeah, but my cars are going to be all-electric, I don’t need Gasoline.

This conversation was happening on a busy day, on a day when the class was busy with the different needs of different children. Of course, it is like any other day for the teachers. Maybe, because I get to experience this only once a week so I found this special.

Because, in spite of the fact that, there was so much going on one hand, this teacher/adult, took a pause to notice this as she was passing by, made me realize the value of connection and BEING IN THE PRESENT.

She made an attempt to build a small connection with the Child. An opportunity window to make the relationship a little stronger with the Child. These moments of being in the present add to the filling up of the emotional bucket of the child. It is such genuine intentional investments of time and thought, that will slowly build a connection with the child and ultimately the child will trust, or in turn listen to, or understand when the adult requests something.

This whole thought opened up a lot of connected thoughts in my mind.

1. Practicing being in the moment/present. Many new parents get bombarded with a lot of advice, on do’s and don’ts. But if someone approaches me to ask for a piece of advice, I would suggest this one thing. To start practicing being mindful or conscious or being in the moment. With more and more choices, decisions to be taken, and greater distractions to handle, the modern lifestyle seems to be getting complicated. And with all these on our heads, imagine the quality of our interactions with our kids at the end of the day or the beginning of the day. So I realized it is becoming more and more imperative for me to practice mindfulness, and make meditation and other rituals, part of my habits, that help me bring me back to the present as much. Especially, when I am with my child.
2. Sharing the load from the primary caretaker so that they can recharge themselves. As a community/society, I believe it’s time we understand that raising children is like a full-time job minus pay. So a working mother or stay-at-home mother has to definite amount of things for the kids. And they need to deliver, day after day, without a gap or a holiday. So if someone, be it a colleague or a family member could share the load of the primary caretaker, they would be able to recharge. Thus, will be able to perform their primary duty with more presence.
3. Children value our time and presence more than screens or toys. Some of us parents, tend to cover our guilt of not spending enough time with kids, with gifts/toys for them. Kids would surely love us in the moment for this trick of ours. But this path, wouldn’t help us build a connection. They can’t verbalize, but if there was a way for us to know, what children, especially young children prefer more, it would be our presence and spending quality time with them any day over the toys.
4. Daily or regular tiny investments of our genuine presence with children today will have compounding returns of better relationships and connections with them, in the long run. The compounding effect is also applicable to relationships. We and our children will somehow survive and irrespective of our habits or our efforts we will end up somewhere. However, we as parents need to ask ourselves a few important questions. Does the end alone matter? And can we be sure, that there won’t be anything further that end? Will there ever be a final end? When the majority of our lives are spent on the journey, why are we so focused only on the end? Since journey takes up the majority of our lives, the quality of it matters. Investing our time wisely matters.
5. By being more present, and being conscious of our conversations, we can make these interactions a lot richer and multi-dimensional for our children. For most of us, teaching a kid reminds us of a book or giving a lecture about do’s /don’ts. However, there are so many other moments and possibilities outside these too. Like in the above-mentioned conversation, there was a choice available to use a generic statement “Wow that’s a beautiful pair of socks”. However, the teacher, being more present, chose specific words to describe her observation. And the conversation from socks went to the future, and present, from fossil fuels to electric cars. So there are so many opportunities to trigger their curiosity, enabling them to ponder and reflect, etc, but for that magic to happen, we need to be present in the moment.