Saturday, February 19, 2000
Let children learn what they love to do
BY KRISTA RAMSEY
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Those of us who spend any time observing children eventually come to one conclusion: There are things you know when you're a child that you don't know as an adult.
And you spend the rest of your life trying to remember them.
One of them, oddly enough, is what makes you happy. It's a very handy thing to know out there in the world, where you're asked to spend 40 years of life doing something. At age 18, 27, even 50, we struggle mightily with what that “something” should be. At age 9, we knew.
We knew what we loved to do. We knew what made our hearts race. We knew what made our moms call us five times for dinner.
That it did not come to us in specific terms is not important. It came to us, as everything does in childhood, in clean, bold declaratives. I love to create things. I love to move around. I like to teach people things. I must make music.
Recently I spoke to a group of especially clever and enthusiastic elementary students. I told them that in fourth grade I knew in a blinding flash of insight — while reading my Thanksgiving poem at an assembly — what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to write. That simple truth was one of the great blessings of my life.
Grant that permission
Telling the story, I glanced around the room and saw a touching affirmation. Many students sat with eyes gleaming, cheeks flushed, their heads bobbing slowly in secret, joyous agreement. They knew what they loved. They just wanted permission to know it.
Granting that permission is one of the great gifts we give our child. When we do, we give him power.
A child who knows what he can do, what his gift is, is a child who will be just fine no matter what. He or she will rise above academic struggles. Boredom. Exclusion by peers. Shyness. Mediocre instruction. Loneliness. Self-doubt.
He will move with a new confidence that we well-intentioned adults could never quite provide for him. He will own something for which we could never before make him responsible. His road in life will unfold before his feet.
For the last 15 years or so, the self-esteem ball has bounced around from theory to theory, most inadequate, some downright silly. But one truth works for every child: Let him find the thing he loves, and let him begin to do it.
It is our nature as adults to make even this hard. We “confer” with our children about it. We take it on as a goal. If we knew how, we'd search it out on the Internet. Alas, it isn't usually uncovered in quite that way.
A power that sizzles
In a sense I speak as one of the lucky ones. My “gift” came not only clearly, but with a nice, clean verb attached. Write, it commanded me. Still, looking back, I see that a number of deliberate steps led to discovering my gift, and that they are available to every child.
I had the opportunity to explore my gift. I tried it in different forms, with no high stakes attached. I got steady feedback — low-key, but important — that this might be something I was good at.
Perceptive adults saw that it brought me joy. Finally, I had the chance to showcase it, to be recognized for it.
I can still see myself on that stage, still feel that life-changing moment. The power of knowing what was mine to do sizzled right down to my sneakers.
We give our children so many things today. We drown them in stuff. We enrich them to burn out. But the great gift of childhood is to connect them to that secret joy that bubbles within them, unbidden by us.
It tells them who they are, and perhaps even an answer of that eternal question — why they are.
What life gives them, in that golden moment, is a destination. With that in place, the roads they are to choose will unfold along the way.
Krista Ramsey's column appears on Saturdays. Write her at 312 Elm St., Cincinnati45202, or e-mail her at krista_ramsey@hotmail.com.
