Читать книгу A Spoonful of Sugar - Liz Fraser - Страница 10

‘Granny?’

‘Yes?’

‘You know there’s a lot of concern these days about what’s happening to our children’s health and happiness, and that many kids aren’t having what we consider to be a proper childhood any more.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘Well,’ I pop my drowning friend on the corner of an old copy of National Geographic so he can take some time to reconsider all his life choices. ‘What do you think childhood is actually for?’

There is a long pause, as she searches for a tactful way to answer this that won’t make me feel as stupid as a remarkably stupid person sitting a remarkably difficult nuclear physics exam.

‘Well,’ she offers at last, giving her coffee a little stir. ‘Firstly, I think childhood is for having TIME. Time to think, time to learn, to process, to experiment, to grow into yourself. There seems to be so little time available to kids these days for any of that. It’s all rush, rush, rush.’

‘Yes, but that’s just how it is in modern times, Granny, isn’t it? So much can happen at once, with email and mobile phones and BlackBerrys – that’s a kind of phone by the way, not a fruit – that we never get a chance to just stop.’

‘Exactly, and there’s your problem. Adults can rush about if they like, but rushing children means they lose that important freedom to play properly. You have your whole adult life for such responsibilities and constraints – they’re not for children. How can they learn through play, using their imagination, if they are stopped every twenty minutes to rush on to the next task?’

OK, here I am guilty as charged, and, dare I say it, you quite possibly are too. My kids are constantly being told to ‘Stop doing that now, it’s time for …’ and if that sentence doesn’t end in ‘school’ then it’s ballet or dinner, or homework, or bed. Or something! We all know kids who are marched from pillar to post, in a supposed bid to give them the ‘best’ childhood, whatever that means.

Granny isn’t done yet.

‘And it’s not just the pace of their lives that takes their childhood away. It’s also what they’re exposed to and how they are treated. Childhood is a heavenly time and you should try to make it last as long as you possibly can for them – so why dress your three year old up like a pop star or coach your little ones for university or stage school? There are plenty of years ahead for that, and the early years of childhood are not the time. You don’t need to cram it all in before they’re ten!’