Avoiding the Rush

This is Ariam, the author of this entry, playing
"All grown up!" when she was much younger!

Reading the chapter From a Tiny Seed made me remember my childhood, and how I would yearn to interact with a baby once I saw one. I immediately related to what the author was talking about when Gordon mentioned, “[…] Tomas was on his tummy; the children wait eagerly to see what he will do” (p. 4). I recall many occasions in my childhood when playing with a toddler was really fun, and I now attribute that to the free spirit that children have at this age. Having a broad imagination makes play so much better, and that was something that I always looked forward to as a child. As you get older you sometimes lose out on that imagination due to life experiences, or because you don’t have someone with whom to shares your thoughts and feelings. I find it helpful that the program advocates for children to talk about their experiences with other children. At times one child can feel that they are the only ones going through a particular problem, when in many instances it is not the case. When having a discussion about a typical problem more than one child is prone to open up because they have experienced it themselves.

I agree with many aspects of the program because having the children witness real life events can help them comprehend that life can be so much better if we learn how to understand others in our environment. I worked in a Homework Center program in my hometown’s local library that targeted children from five to twelve years of age who did not have parental support. I encountered a couple children who could have used a discussion about how to understand other people’s feelings, but more importantly, their own feelings. Not knowing how to indentify one’s feelings can hurt us in the long run because we may hurt others, or do negative things such as bullying. Through work and college courses within my major, I learned to be empathetic towards others and that not everybody grows with the same life experiences that I had. As I read this chapter, I recalled my education and I noticed that I was not taught many social and life skills during the thirteen years of required schooling. 

After learning about the program’s main focus it made me realize that small changes within the home can really make a change in a child’s life. I took special interest when reading about the author making the curriculum suitable for eighth grade classes. Considering the current trends of teenage pregnancy, I thought that the whole idea of offering the teens experience with a child would help them realize that a baby requires a lot of work. A quote from a mother within the program was, “In a twenty- four-hour day, there are fifteen minutes of pure joy and twenty-three hours and forty-five minutes of hard work” (p.15). I love this quote, and it will stay in my mind forever because it explains how caring for another individual on a daily basis is not like eating a piece of cake. As children we often want to be grown up as fast as possible so that we can do the things that we are not able to do at our current age. Sooner or later we start to notice that we lost out on the little stuff that really makes our life full of long-lasting memories.