On a Child's Potential
Each child holds the power to reset society, to go back to the very beginning, and find a better way of life, one that serves to uplift more people.
Being a father of a 2-year-old has me thinking a lot about potential.
I'm thankful that our daughter is growing up to be a smart child. We believe she's more advanced, especially in terms of language development, than other kids.
That's fantastic, of course. But as we get ready to enroll her in preschool, I've begun to wonder more about what it means to train a child, how choosing which skills to develop, values to acquire, and lessons to learn is a very calculated and intentional act by parents. And this act of choosing, so innocent on the surface, has more immediate consequences and repercussions down the road than we can imagine, not just for us but for our children, and ultimately, for society.
Some would say I'm overthinking it. Maybe.
But the truth is, being a father has made me realize that educating a child also has the unforeseen and sometimes unintended effect of setting limits to their potential.
In our case, for example, my wife and I once considered which primary language to teach our daughter: Tagalog or English? For various reasons, we decided on English. Now her worldview probably aligns more with Western categories of thought than Filipino or Asian.
To illustrate: she understands showing respect is important, but doesn't fully grasp what "po" and "opo" (Tagalog honorifics) have to do with it.
This is generally harmless, of course. But choosing one thing usually presupposes other options are not selected. On the one hand, we have realized her potential to speak a global language, English; but on the other, we may have just limited her capacity to apprehend social concepts and realities nearer to home where Tagalog fluency is an advantage, if not a requirement.
Language is relative. It affects how we perceive reality, and thus our actions.
By choosing one primary language for our child, and not the other, I wonder if we have inadvertently set her down a path and shut off another.
Tagalog is a beautiful language. It evokes images rooted in the daily lives of ordinary Filipinos, and I feel that's important. Filipino kids who can't speak it are that much poorer in terms of the realities they could behold.
But there are many more daily decisions, beyond which language to teach a child, that a parent has to make. And again, choosing one option over another has more implications the more you think about it.
What Does "Limitless Potential" Actually Mean?
“Free the child’s potential, and you will transform him into the world.” - Maria Montessori
Let me stress: I am not an expert at parenting, and if I come off as pretending to be, that is not my intention. Nevertheless, I do have a trite proposition that I want to explore more—that a child can be anything.
Theoretically, that is, their potential is quite literally limitless.
Realistically, however, their potential can be limited early on by so many factors, including their socioeconomic status. It can also be constrained by our choices as parents, as we are the ones who steer them towards our concepts or wishes of who they should become.
A friend of mine, another father, said he's consciously teaching his son to be better at things he isn't good at, for example, at talking to people. It's something that commonly happens where parents, in a way, try to make up for their personal shortcomings through their children.
Again, this may or may not be harmful depending on the context, and as parents, we often do it because we only want the best for our kids.
That's why we want them to be simply excellent. We tell them they can be doctors or engineers. Scientists and writers. Even astronauts or the president of the country.
But when I say a child can be anything, I mean I believe that they have in them possibilities we can't even see yet. And perhaps talking to them, for example, about professions we want them to pursue in the future in itself is a way of imposing limits on their imagination.
When we ask our daughter the same question, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" she always has an interesting answer.
"I want to be a princess."
While it would seem like a pretty common and unremarkable response, it got me thinking: is there more to it than a child playfully fantasizing?
Disney princesses, especially our daughter's favorite, Princess Elsa, are brave, confident, fiercely love their family and friends, powerful, and beautiful. They are supremely heroic figures.
And we can talk at length about Disney princesses as commercialized archetypes, but I think that misses the point: a child does not think in terms of the usual categories (professions) when imagining who they can become. They gravitate more towards the qualities they want to embody when they grow up, such as courage, confidence, and truthfulness.
Try to look at it from an innocent child's perspective: why just a doctor? Why not be something... more?
Sure, being a doctor is a distinguished job. Doctors treat patients in a hospital. To a child, that may be clearly good, but doesn't it also feel... severely limiting? Compared to a Disney princess, of course, who could do literally anything: build ice castles out of snow, sail the seas to discover uncharted islands, turn into a frog and back into a princess again, have long, magical hair that can fix anything.
Being a princess offers unending possibilities. It is not bounded by any clear list of tasks or rules.
What if this wish to be a princess is more than childish fantasy, but another hint of a child's capacity and desire for the realization of their limitless potential?
The Need to Redefine Society Through Our Children
I'd like to end by painting a picture of the greater significance of our role as parents.
It's often been said that children are tabula rasa, a blank slate.
The rules we see are invisible to them. In their pure innocence, they make us question the necessity of those rules and their hold upon our lives.
Why be a doctor, and not a princess?
Why this and not that?
Why live this way, and not the other?
Children are reminders that we live in a socially constructed reality with meanings that can be questioned and redefined.
And there is doubtless a need to redefine, reenvision, and reconceptualize taken-for-granted realities that are growing more restrictive every day.
We don't need to talk a great deal about these. Take your pick: social inequality, exploitation, manipulation and misinformation, the various -isms that have made our lives almost unbearable.
These facts of life may appear immovable to us now but as long as meanings are social constructs, these oppressive forces are essentially wisps of smoke in the dark.
And our children, with their boundless potential, may be our best chance of introducing fundamental changes for the future.
That's why I contend again that choosing for our kids actually carries more responsibility than we might imagine. While it's not always a zero-sum game, selecting paths for our children may lead to closing off others; paths that could lead them down much-needed solutions for the problems of tomorrow.
It starts with us, as parents. Our children's potential may be determined by how critical we can be of our deeply held beliefs and assumptions.
We know more than anyone else the biases, prejudices, and pressures that control our lives. We may have continually failed to scale them, but nobody is in a better position to see the walls that have until this point prevented us from seeing the other side where a new kind of reality is not yet fully formed.
Each child holds the power to reset society, to go back to the very beginning, and find a better way of life, one that serves to uplift more people. The challenge for us parents is how to unlock it.