A Little Person

My little girl got her first baby shoes last weekend. I love how little they are and I took a picture of her shoes next to mine to emphasize the scale. But I have also found a metaphor in this picture I took. Although her shoes are smaller than mine, relatively, they look the same. That's because Alexis is a person, just like me.

I am so grateful that part of my experience as a teacher was teaching preschool. I learned during that time to think like a four year old. I went out of my way to make my preschoolers' concerns my own concerns. You see, Elmo may not be a big deal to you, but he is to a four year old. Or that movie may not look scary to you, but it does to a four year old. Or you might not think it matters that a four year old color with a red crayon, but it matters to her. What I really did was go out of my way to see my preschoolers for who they were: little people with their own personal and valid concerns.

We as adults don't like it when others bypass our concerns, our troubles or our hearts. Yet sometimes adults forget that children are also people and they also have concerns, troubles and hearts. Children's concerns can be brushed away because we, the adults, realize they aren't that important. But aren't they? A child that has a developing brain and mind has legitimate concerns. Dare we treat our children as if what they are concerned about is less important than our concerns? To do so is to treat them as less a person than we are.

I think parents can fall into the trap of seeing their children in 2D. In the daily slogging through life, it is easy to rush through and not take the time to really hear our kids. We need to slow down and hear our children out and learn to walk in their little shoes. It would be nice if we remembered how we felt as little ones. But since we have left childhood behind, we need to recapture it as parents, putting ourselves in the places of our kids and remembering that they are just little people who want to be valued, too.