Читать книгу A Spoonful of Sugar - Liz Fraser - Страница 12

Worry is a terrible thing to load onto a child and causes all manner of problems. They should be free to learn without any responsibility and concerns that belong in the adult world. They don’t need to be bombarded with information and offered hundreds of choices – tell them what they need to know, make sure they have what they need, and leave the rest to the grown ups.

The issue of work and marital issues is one many of us can identify with: I get really crotchety when either of these is causing me grief (usually it’s both, but let’s not dig too deep into this!) and I know my kids pick up on it very fast. The same was true when we moved house and started to have financial concerns recently. My usually delightful and sunny temperament (a mild note of sarcasm here …) was replaced by that of an irritable and decidedly un-jolly witch, and I know my kids were all affected by the general stress that floated on every dust particle in the entire house – and given the state of the building work, there were millions of those.

Of course, family stress is nothing terribly new – who doesn’t remember overhearing a blazing row between parents and waiting upstairs with bated breath, convinced they were either about to kill each other with frying pans or file for divorce before bath time? But the difference is that any worries we may have had were lessened because we had more freedom elsewhere. Having talked to many adults about this, it’s pretty clear to me that a significant majority of us had plenty of opportunity to get away from it all and be kids: to run about unsupervised and loosen our knots out properly, in the fresh air, and in relative freedom from the Adult World. These days it happens far less as children are contained, controlled and generally smothered and squashed from every direction.

Or, of course, they seek refuge in the wonderful, though equally worrying for reasons we’ll come to later, two-dimensional world of the internet.

So am I right to want to get some of this sense of mental and emotional freedom back for my children? Certainly the way things are doesn’t feel quite right to me – and I know it’s not what many other parents I chat with on a daily basis want for their kids either. Perhaps by putting some of what Granny suggests into practice we can make things better for our pressurised children, and so far Granny’s thoughts have given me plenty of ideas of how to do this. Wonder what else she has up her sleeve …