Mini-me.
Are kids meant to become mini versions of ourselves? We all are born with our own cocktail of genes and into a very individual set of circumstances. So how can we be like our parents without having to bend ourselves into a non-fitting corset of expectations?
Why do we have kids in the first place? To hand down our dreams? To continue a legacy of imperfect beings to make ourselves feel better? To feel powerful and in control? Or to see ourselves reflected in what is just a physical reflection as we seem to value ‘you look like your dad’ and look for family resemblance in newborns. Strange that physical similarity is praised which is only a dice-throw by nature. Does that mean that kids, who don’t look like their parents, are not as good? Should we give those back?
Parents tell me that I should not participate in any discussion about raising children, because I don’t have kids. I would argue that being a child qualifies me. I need to preface also that I understand and have observed that being a parent can be very challenging and stressful and is definitely not an easy task! But I am arguing here for children and their needs.
I was a mini-me and, most likely, still am. I ‘looked like my dad’ but grew up without him as an only child with a divorced mother and ‘walked and talked like her’. Where was I in all this? Buried under the expectation of sameness, as I know now. I always thought that coming out as a person with an unconventional sexual orientation has advantages to being straight. Nobody challenges straight people not to be their true selves or asks us to stand up for who we are. Our individuality gets swept under a rug and stays there until we free ourselves to be who we are.
Once I prayed a bedtime prayer with the gently mentally disabled son of a friend of mine, which was new to me, because I grew up in decidedly non-religious family. No praying. Church was only on christmas eve during ski vacations in an Austrian catholic village and more like an anthropological study for me. So, when this ten-year-old kid was praying, I was totally out of my depth. When he was done, a thought came to me and I said ‘How about adding: …and give me the strength to be who I am!’ His eyes lit up. I had unknowingly hit a cord. A year later I was visiting again, brought him to bed and I found that he had been ending his prayers with this phrase ever since.
Kids spend time in therapy to muster up the courage to be themselves, to unleash their inner desires, to make a life they want. To replace the parental voices in their heads with their own. To individuate and, eventually, to celebrate their uniqueness. We have been told that some of us are better, smarter, more valuable than others and are entitled to succeed in our society. We are divided and conquered, our impulses labeled and made insignificant. Our inner spirit is suffering while we are taught not to believe in ourselves. A society of ‘Untertanen (followers) and the chastity of sameness produces screwed (-up) individuals with the pathological urge to be accepted, to fit in and with their spirits crushed and invisible.
How about asking a child ‘Who are you and how can I best serve you?’ and ‘How can I help you become who you are?’ What if we would tailor schools and education to the children’s interests? Instruct through play and fun? Instead our schools are still modeled after the 19th century society and ideals with a strict, all-knowing and judging teacher in front of a classroom of children arranged in rows, like a military assembly. Knowledge is now just an internet search away. There is already a large inter-generational gap because kids understand technology better than most adults. Ten-year-olds program computer apps and have internet friends and youtube role models. We adults can’t even imagine the jobs of the future so how can we prepare our children? What will they need in a world where people will live in several realities at once?
The kids of today create their alternate reality on Mind Craft and they might fall in love with AI simulation or go on to marry another Avatar on…. As foreign as this sounds to us, we can help our children by helping them to become confident, humble, caring, inclusive, and creative human beings. Old world values might hold up even in virtual realities. If we are authentic, vulnerable, non-judgmental, and live by our morals and ideals in front of them, they will too.
I am envisioning a world of individuals, beautifully diverse, unleashed, bold and living to their full potential. I am imagining the buzz, the light, the joy that would generate. ‘Give me the strength to be who I am.’
Photo credit New Line Cinema.