Childhood

When I was a parent, I was busy raising my son, attending to my career, maintaining all kinds of relationships, having fun, keeping the house in shape. So I grew up with my son and did the best I could to make sense of what was happening in his life.

But as a grandparent, I have the leisure to watch and listen and respond with more experience, more patience and more insight. Children under the age of six are being indelibly formed for life. And they are clueless about what events big and small (sometimes the big ones are small and the small ones big) that will imprint them. They are who they are before they know who they are, and they will spend the rest of their lives building on that or struggling against that.

So I have been asking myself some questions about childhood.  Here are some examples.

What is learned in a sandbox?
What is the true nature and meaning of play?
What is communicated and imprinted by the nonverbal, tactile encounters a child experiences?
How does language--tone, vocabulary, baby talk, reading, volume level, grammar--impact the child?
How is the child affected by their relationship to trees? To nature?
What is the relationship of looking up at adults all those years to eventually looking them in the eye?