The light in children’s eyes

The longer I do this the closer to tears I am all the time when I watch children. I can feel that rush. I can feel my eyes well up, that freshness, the aliveness, the spirit of children. The more I’m with children, the more I travel the world, the more I see environments for children, environments that adults have established, the more frightened I become of the light going out in children’s eyes because we haven’t, as adults, kept that spirit of the child going in the places where they are every day, where they are cared for.

Things to Think About

Do you experience the unique spirit inside each child or do you only see what you expect of them, what you think they should be?
Are you able to see the children you serve change right before your eyes?
They do every day but do you see it?
Are you able to experience and participate in the freshness, the aliveness, the spirit the children share? How is this different from being with adults, especially parents and colleagues?
If you don’t experience in that aliveness, that spirit, then you won’t notice when that light goes out in their eyes. If you do experience and share that light – what can you do each day to keep that light shining bright?

Highlights from Playful Wisdom
by Michael Mendizza featuring Bev Bos and Joseph Chilton Pearce

The beginning defines the ending. If we get the beginning right each age and stage of our child’s development continually opens and expands as nature designed. If not, there is trouble at every turn, trouble for everyone. I remember reading that a child’s basic nature is etched by age five or six. Some speculate that we are mostly cooked by age three. I know for certain that our basic nature – are we safe, do we trust, do we feel our feelings and needs are appreciated and respected, is the world scary or a wonderland, are we kind or not – is formed while most fathers are rather distant, certainly by a child’s first or second year. We know that this basic nature is forming before birth. Babies need mothers and mothers can’t mother without the support of their partners and their community, the extended family, something our industrial-medical-technocratic society has forgotten. Failure to recognize and support women to be available, attentive and stress free mothers places children at risk. High risk children often grow into high risk, narcissistic, selfish, addictive and aggressive adults. This is particularly true for boys. This inner psyche of the high risk child-adult is mirrored in the society with its corruption, violence and environmental callousness. And this in turn feeds back further impairing the mother-infant bond, the biological foundation upon which the entire human experience stands. Round and round it goes. The key, of course, is to break the cycle at the very beginning by honoring the sanctity of the first bond, that between mother and father, and upon this creating a sanctuary for the entire human species, one child at a time. That is really what we are doing as parents and those who mentor children – holding the future of humanity in our hands.

Michael Mendizza
Playful Wisdom

In the very beginning, when I first started working with children, what I didn’t understand was how exceedingly interesting every day was going to be. How every day children see, find things. There’s a spirit inside every child and every day it seems to change because they’re interested in new things and in different things and it has kept me so fully alive. I know that in all the workshops that I’ve done, thousands of workshops, I could not be as sure of myself as I am about children if I weren’t with them all the time. I think you can study development. I think you can study how kids learn and I think there’s great value in doing that. There’s been some Masters before us; Piaget, Montessori, people who really, really liked children as much as I do. But I don’t think that you can stay fully alive unless you’re with children all the time. It keeps me grounded.

The thing that I notice about being with children, the longer I do this, and of course maybe it’s age, but the closer to tears I am all the time when I watch children. It’s just I can feel that rush. I can feel my eyes kind of well up. Just that freshness, the aliveness, the spirit of children. The more I’m with children, the more I travel the world, the more I see environments for children, environments that adults have established, the more frightened I become of the light going out in children’s eyes. They’re so fresh and alive, filled with wisdom, I think, curiosity. The thing that I see disappearing so quickly or so often is the curiosity of a child, being curious about everything. It’s like a child is walking around with a magnifying glass in their hands and they have to see everything. And I am so frightened of waking up some day and realizing that the light has gone out of every child’s eyes because we haven’t, as adults, kept that spirit of the child going in the places where they are every day, where they are cared for. Whether it be a home, whether it be a childcare center, whether it be family childcare, whatever it is, there’s this feeling for me that we’re not paying attention. You know James Hillman said such an interesting thing, he said that he thinks what we don’t do is we don’t pay attention to the idiocincies of childhood.

I think we don’t pay enough attention to the wild kind of spirit that there is. That spirit that needs to be nurtured. You know the world that we’re growing up in is so filled with so many conveniences but that’s not the world of a child. A world of the child’s space is present. It’s right here. They’ve got to figure out water and sand and dirt and absorption and song and especially they have to figure out who they are in all of this. And when you know who you are, and it takes such a long time to understand that, then they can survive anything. But I am really, really afraid that we have just gone way too far past understanding the kind of environments kids need to have to grow and learn.