The plants have different seasons in their life in the garden. One such season is the flowering season, which starts with buds. What is concealed in a bud in a few days would be open flowers with their colour and aroma, offering a vibrant look to the garden. It is when plants are watered and manured they reach the stage of flowering. The earth beneath it feeds them and provides the ambience to grow and flower.
A home is such a place!
It is from a home where children receive nurture and care and move out into the school for their formal leaning and then proceed on to become young adults to pursue their calling in life!
The transition from being a bud to a flower is both a spontaneous and a facilitated process.
I have wondered in the recent times, whether the facilitating process at home to support children in their transitions, is as active and intentional as they ought to be !
The parenting support is an enabling process for childhood formation, which is an integrating process cognitively, socially, morally and behaviourally.
In an engagement with some parents last week, I felt concerned that individual conversation time with children to create endearing memories and emotional attachment occur only occasionally. A child between six and eleven years is at a crucial formative stage when he or she is seeking for a moral and social anchor. Parents are able to hold the attention of their children during this stage of developmental formation, as for most children, parents are the role models at this season in their lives.
The buds grow in the plant. The plants are rooted in the soil.
Children are the buds and flowers of every family. They are rooted in the milieu of a home. How the soil of the home can be supportive of children in their pre-adolescent years is a decision which parents need to make. Often a child becomes an adolescent largely conditioned by the parenting style and the home environment.
I have been persuading parents to find a personal reading time with pre-adolescent children- a biography, fiction with a healthy story line, historical events, Scripture passages of life events and parables, and such other books that can engage the attention and imagination of a child. The conversation that follows the reading and the evolution of personal thoughts springing from what was read to, can become the moral formative strand in the subconscious of a child. That is how we influence the formation of the true self in childhood, according to Carl Jung, who proposed the individuation from persona to true self.
I wish parenting for childhood formation would become a planned pathway in each home !
M.C.Mathew (text and photo)
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