Skip to main content

Flexible Perimeter

Our walks in the evening frequently take us past a tennis court where people around the community come out to play. Recently, while passing by we saw a toddler sitting by the edge of the court away from the action engrossed with picking out tennis balls from a bag one at a time and squeezing in through the gap between the fence and the ground. Outside, there were at least a dozen balls scattered on the slope leading the the street and some on the street itself. The child was intensely focused on getting those balls out while his parents played tennis. On our way back, we found the balls gone and the child prancing around the nets as his parents were wrapping up. A common and amusing sight to see child do such things but it got me thinking about what it means more broadly to allow unrestricted freeplay and if choosing to disengage the child from an activity which the adult does not like for some reason, the best way to make that transition. 

It called to mind the times in J's childhood when I would get worn out by her "silly" games and want a pause or even a total stop. While I tried to not to stifle her spirit, I don't think I knew the proper way to get her to transition from the silly play mode. There is no book of rules that parents can follow for such things. Each kid is different, they can be different levels of risk averse and each situation presents its unique challenges. Most importantly, the parents of a child that age are very likely to be perpetually exhausted - it would be very lucky if just one of them is not. A young dad I work with is grappling with this problem and shared his solution - create a flexible and permeable perimeter around the child, so the rules and guidance are shape shifting. It seems like a good idea except that it goes against the traditional wisdom that children like structure and predictable outcomes. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...