Can and Able
What really defines my child?
Sometimes the most unassuming, seemingly benign things can cause the most harm. And more often than not, the perpetrators of that harm are the people (or things) most trusted to care for the very people they end up harming.
Case in point — the words can and able, and the impact that they have on children.
It starts with a positive intention– tracking growth. Like the developmental milestones of a new-born. What can the baby do — can she follow a sound? Can she do visual tracking? Is she able to turn? Is she able to sit? And then we move to the child being able to crawl, stand up, walk and talk — from babbling to 2–3 word phrases and gradually to understanding and speaking more complex sentences.
These milestones need to be tracked so that parents can tell if the baby is healthy. They serve as tools to identify the needs of any medical diagnosis or intervention for the baby at an early stage. Without this tracking, the parents or caregivers could miss detecting potentially serious physical, mental or developmental conditions which could have been treated, or eased by additional interventions.
But the problem starts when these single dimensional indicators become the boundaries of our children’s identity. ‘Can’ and ‘able’ become ‘must’ and ‘should’, and leave no room for imagining anything else. Fast forward to school admissions and the same words start making small but permanent scratches — Can the child read, write, count, identify numbers and what not. Is the child able to sit still? Walk straight? Follow instructions? And this is just kindergarten. The questions start to dig much deeper as the grade levels increase. The journey into primary, secondary and levels beyond have the potential to turn the same words — can and able- into nightmares and a source of severe anxiety.
Consider Math. We ask if the child can add, subtract, multiply and divide numbers. More often than not, these operations are introduced in the curriculum before children are able to even make sense of numbers. As a result, children are always trying to catch up with a subject, which if left to their own devices, children would ace naturally through play. When it comes to Science and Humanities, where the focus should be on the child comprehending language, expressing themselves freely, making inferences from the text, and understanding and relating scientific and historical facts with the things they see around them, the attention instead turns to whether or not they are able to memorize answers and essays that run into pages.
With most schools running like a tightly wound clock, pressure keeps building on parents, caregivers and teachers to tick these milestones off their checklists, to the extent that we forget to ask the most important questions about the child — How is the child? Are they happy? Do they feel safe? Do they like themselves? Do they have friends they can trust? What is their hobby?
Here’s the thing though — this is not something that happened overnight. Like all systemic changes, this mindset has been passed down to us gradually, but persistently. Through our parents’, relatives’ and teachers’ opinions and judgments, their experiences, our own experiences, and constant images of celebrations of academic achievements over artistic expression through music, poetry, literature or human values like kindness, grit, compassion, honesty. It doesn’t help that schools don’t always have schedules that allow teachers to let students explore their areas of interests or alternate methods of learning. It doesn’t help either that we, as parents, don’t always create safe spaces for our children that allow them to falter and fail so that they can get comfortable with the idea of struggle. And it definitely doesn’t help that all avenues of higher studies and employment seek only the highest rankers, leaving behind a huge majority of students who end up not knowing what to do. What we miss seeing is that at the other end of these problems is a child who goes through the drill of academics with a constant fear of failure, or disappointment of not being able to meet standards that someone else decided to apply to them, or complying with these unreasonable expectations without ever learning what they are passionate about.
It would be an injustice to our achievers if we thought that this entire system is unfair only to those who don’t make it to the top. We need to recognize that it’s equally unfair to any child who doesn’t get the choice to be free and to do what they really like, who feel the constant pressure of having to prove themselves, or have to stay alert and focused at all times without the liberty of zoning off into a daydream. And that is irrespective of the school that the child goes to, or the scores and the grades that they get in school. Some noteworthy exceptions would be Open Schools and Learning Centers for differently abled children and adults.
It has taken a long time for us as a people to start taking notice of mental health issues. But now that we have, we would do well to think about the origin of these problems in adults, and identify at least the environmental and circumstantial causes so that we don’t put our children through the same. If we must use the words — ‘can’ and ‘able’ to define our children, let us think of newer items to add in our checklist. Can the child carry a tune? Are they able to dance to a beat? Or paint a picture, or make a story, or play a sport? Can they ask questions freely? Are they able to express their emotions freely, whether pleasant or unpleasant? Are they able to do housework? Can they care for another? Are they content with who they are?
As schools reopen across the country and the world, it remains an important task for us to ensure the safety of children. Not just in terms of the physical space, but also the mental and emotional conditions we are subjecting them to. This Children’s Day (celebrated in India on November 14th), let us spend some time reflecting on how we really see our children. Are they just adults in the making who need to be moulded into specific parts of a machinery which is not even of their design? Or might they be individuals with their own rights, hopes, thoughts, expressions and freedom? We owe our children a kinder lens to view themselves and the world. Let us not wait for another health crisis to give them that.
