The Three “Jobs” of All Children
Each has a hidden lesson that prepares them to be awesome adults.
When my daughter was five, she wanted to know what her job was. The daycare she had attended was on the campus of the college where both my wife and I teach. She had been to our offices and classrooms and met our colleagues and students. At home, she saw us grading essays and preparing classes. She understood what went into our jobs, but what about hers?
I told her that she, like all children, had not one but three jobs, and they were the most important ones of all. She found this very exciting, and apparently I have repeated this idea to her often enough that when she was in second grade she wrote a beautiful paragraph explaining the three jobs of children. Each one has a hidden lesson that makes them more consequential than a parent may initially realize. Her paragraph earned “the maximum number of stars,” she told me. I will try to make this essay nearly as good.
Job 1: Learn as much as you can
The first job of children is for them to learn as much as they can about everything. This may seem obvious. As a result, caregivers may think that because children go to school and constantly have new experiences that learning is automatic. It is, but that is not enough. Children need to be encouraged to be active learners. Learning is one of their jobs. They need to do it willfully, deliberately and proudly.
Caregivers, as much as they can, should strive to be mentors to their children. Answer their questions. Encourages their curiosity. Expose them to information and activities, and as much variety of sound, smells, people and places as possible. Make them feel that everything is interesting — despite your true feelings. Who knows what interests of their own may develop and where their explorations may take them?
Often anxious parents actively training their children because they worry about how well their children will do as adults in our increasingly competitive world. These parents want their kids to be prepared so that they will be successful in a cutthroat capitalist economy. Thinking this way, though well intended, misses the point and often stresses the child out.
The real reason for children to learn as much as they can about everything is that life is better when a person is capable of doing more and appreciating things more deeply. Music is richer when a person understands its elements and especially when one can participate in making it. Eating is more satisfying when at a young age a person develops a discerning palate by partaking from diverse cuisines. (The child is also more likely to develop a healthy revulsion to processed and fast “foods.”) Learning additional languages makes it possible for a person to communicate with more people and access more of the joys the world has to offer. A child should know as much vocabulary as possible to understand and express their feelings and ideas preciously. Children should study art and nature to be able to experience beauty more fully. When children learn science and math, history and everything they feel more connected to the world around them and better understand their place in it and their potential. Their futures will take care of themselves.
Our daughter is adopted. As soon as we saw pictures of this underweight infant with supposed developmental delays, we knew she was smart and talented. We knew this because that was how we were going to treat her. She just needed a chance to fulfill her potential. We were that chance. And the young lady she is becoming is indeed smart and talented. She is thriving in every possible way and will be successful as an adult not just in her career but in living.
I do not want to minimize the very real disorders, diseases, and disabilities so many children live with. In no way am I trying to say that diagnosed conditions can be willed away with positive thinking and parental determination. I know my wife and I are lucky.
But so many children, like the ones in my daughter’s daycare and public school classes, had the same potential as she did, but it is wasted because it was disregarded. Years of their minds being undernourished, so much smarts and talent were left on the table. What these children could have been they will never be. So many problems the world has today are a result of adults trying to make up for the way their promise as children was extinguished.
Job 2: Follow directions
The second job of children is to follow directions so that they are safe. My daughter has always been impulsive and strong willed. She has the curiosity of a future scientist. Until recently, her urge to do things to see what will happen had been greater than her ability to evaluate the possible dangers. It has been essential to get her to understand that all our management of her behavior is primarily about protecting her.
I am very explicit: “We know more than you. We have more experience. We know how to work the oven. We know how to cross the street. Someday you will know how to do these things and everything else. But right now you don’t and you don’t have to. You have us. We will keep you safe. All you have to do is listen to us and trust us.”
The hidden lesson in this idea is just as important. It will keep her safe later.
Yes, children need to listen and cooperate when they are young and don’t know enough, but the inverse is also true: When they are older, they will know enough, and they should not automatically be obedient to authority or anyone and always do what they are told to do. They need to be shown when they are young that they can and will have to evaluate situations for themselves when they are older and make the best — hopefully safest — decisions about what to do on their own. By guiding them not to blindly follow anyone — including peers, teachers, police, bosses, politicians and ultimately you — they will be less likely to do extreme things and get into risky situations that could put their whole worlds in jeopardy. That’s the hope. As a parent, the best thing you can do to protect them later is train them to be mindful about protecting themselves.
Job 3: Enjoy being a child
The final job of a child is enjoy childhood because everyone only gets to do it once. Some adults say to kids, “Enjoy being young now, while you can, because adulthood is so demanding.” But I encourage children to enjoy childhood for the opposite reason: so that they can internalize those magical feelings of wonder and optimism, creativity and vitality and take them with them into adulthood.
The hidden lesson here reminds adults that our negativity and fears for our children’s futures should not be added to their burden. Children should implicitly feel adulthood will be full of opportunity and that their lives will be robust with rewarding experiences. They need to believe in these possibilities to make them happen and for them to have a chance to fix the problems previous generations have left for them to solve.
In an ideal world, no child would have to deal with poverty, illness, violence, and fear. All children would get the loving mentoring that they deserve. Unfortunately, all too often in the real world, children don’t get to be children. It is not fair. If only more of them were able to be exclusively and rigorously engaged in these three jobs, their lives and indeed our whole society would be so much the better for it.
