By Winnie Bolton
As I watched children play in the schoolyard it made me think about what it is that makes children so daring?
To find the answers, I needed to become a child again – if only in my memory. Suddenly, I was a gangly, 12-year-old girl climbing an oak tree in our back yard. I felt the exhilaration of taking higher and higher steps, over onto a branch. Would it hold me? It did! I crouched and thus secured, dared to look down. The world was different from up there. I could see my house and yard… my sister, Barbara, on her bike… my mother hanging the laundry. I looked down into the neighbor’s yard.
I wanted to see farther. Another step and I was on a large, horizontal branch. Slowly, I stretched my body along the length of the branch so I could see my friend Peggy reading a book while swinging on a hammock. Slowly and carefully – for I had learned the wisdom of caution in climbing trees – I made my way down and ran to join her.
Children don’t verbalize or understand the force that drives them to take steps upward and outward. That force is life force. It is the propulsion that takes them from birth to life’s end. Without it, there would be no growth, no learning acquired, no wisdom attained, no experiences gained. How far children climb and how much they experience is determined in great part by who they are, their personalities and their innate individual characteristics. It’s important for parents to understand the part they play in limiting or enhancing the desires of their children to learn by experiencing – encouraging, restricting, reassuring or suggesting.
It is necessary to understand children’s need to climb, whether trees, mountains or the ladder of success, for each new step expands their horizons and gives them a larger view of life. In allowing our children to follow their own life purpose and individual path is an expression of unconditional love.
To keep expanding our adult horizons as we grow older ain’t a bad idea either.
