Sometimes messing around is good

August 7, 2008 in Art, Family, Personal
Tags: Child, Color, Family, painting, Paper, Pravit

For me having a child was like magic. I still sometime feel that it is not for real and someday I might wake up to know that the last 3 years was a dream.

Thank god for the small mercies. I have not had to wake to any such thing

Let children be by themselves and see the magic. The picture here is by a 3 year old. The color, forms, strokes are all by him. He messed his shirt, hands, feet, legs, the floor and whatever came between him, the colors and the sheet of paper.

My wife sometimes reacts to the mess that the child is creating. Fortunately I have been brought up in a family of artists and I have seen colors and messy tables all my life. Again Thank god for small mercies.

Why do we start to curb the habits of the child at such an age? Colors can’t harm your child, they can’t bruise, burn or cut them, yes the colors may take a while to get off the clothes and the floor. But for these would one like to curb the magic that a child creates with colors.

The same applies to all other things – playing in sand, playing with clay. OK the child might eat sand or clay, but tell me how many of us haven’t done so. The child without reading will understand colors, textures, how things feel, how they taste, how they smell. What else does a child of that age need to know? Or do they?

Let the child be a child! They have to grow up sometime. Why now? Let them just be children. Let them play with colors, let them get their hands messed with glue, let them play in the sand, let them run in the sun.

I feel this is far better than having your child grow in an air conditioned environment, with computers and the television or now a play-station as their playmates.

Think about it, just how many times we stop our kids from doing exactly those things that we did as a child.

Let them explore the world in their way, not ours! Let them teach us what it is to be a child, what it is to think of ‘elephants driving a car’, what it to laze without a care, actually – what it is to enjoy life with the least needs.

BTW, this is my 100th post and I could not find a better thing to write about that ‘letting a child be a child’.