An excited father was being congratulated on becoming a father (though there is not exactly any great skill required to achieve such an honour and distinction) by a colleague at work and was told, “Well done, mate. Your work will begin in five years’ time!” Presumably the colleague was thinking that the role of a father is to keep out of the way for the first five years and then his work of teaching the child to play sport, enjoy the bush and do other healthy physical activities will begin. What the colleague did not understand was that if the father waited that long to be involved with his child, he would have lost him; he would have actually wasted five crucial fundamental (note, in passing, the words ‘fun’ and ‘men’ in that word) years.
The colleague clearly had never heard, understood or appreciated the Jesuit philosophy, based even further back on Aristotle’s thinking which declared boldly that “Give me the child before seven, and I shall give you the man.” The first years of life define to a huge extent our future character through the early influences and instilled core values. Those early years are crucial.
It is said (and sad) that “Only about one in eight male lions survive to adulthood. A majority of lions die shortly after being kicked out of their pride around the age of two.” As a result, those early years of childhood for a male lion are very important. That may well be true but here is a thing we may not have noticed entirely: humans are not lions; we are humans. Yet we tend to think like lions. We think that the way to help our children survive through the dangerous early years is to focus on their academic ability, pushing them to learn letters and numbers, to read and write as soon as possible, thinking that they will be ahead of other children when they enter school.
Shakespeare wrote in his play ‘As You Like It’ that there are seven stages of man (being “infant, whining schoolboy, lover, soldier, justice, lean and slippered pantaloon, and second childishness”); we can more specifically, scientifically and strictly state that there are key stages in childhood (being infancy, toddlerhood, preschool, school age, and adolescence), each with unique physical, cognitive, and social milestones. The first three stages cover the first five years of a child’s life.
Sir Ken Robinson, the highly respected educationist, can be heard in a fascinating YouTube clip repeating a friend’s statement that “a three-year-old is not half a six-year-old”. He was responding to seeing a promotional piece which stated that “College begins in kindergarten” - nonsense! That only increases pressure on parents to try to get children at a very young age to prepare for an academic position. He underlines that kindergarten begins in kindergarten. He further highlights the “absurdity of practices like kindergarten entrance exams or early ‘résumés for toddlers,’ which push conformity and competition from the start, long before natural curiosity has matured”.
A child of three years old is not half a child of six years old just as a twelve-year-old is not half a twenty-four-year-old. A twelve-year-old may still travel half price but he is not half an adult. He does not have the maturity to handle half of what an adult does. A three-year-old child does not read half the amount of a six-year-old. A three-year-old is not half a six-year-old.
Children in these first five years need to learn to experiment and explore, by making mistakes, by looking, asking, touching, getting dirty and messy, and above all by playing. In doing that they will have opportunities crucially to connect with people and the world, to develop their emotional, mental, social skills at the most basic but important level, especially with their parents.
The message is very simple and clear: let children develop in their own time at the appropriate level. Our children are not lions in the jungle, facing their own hazardous journey through life. The only jungle for our three-year-old child should be the jungle gym where there is a playground full of “interconnected bars, ropes, and ladders for children to climb, swing, and hang on, developing strength, balance, and coordination through active, imaginative play”. The early years are only dangerous when we push them to study. We do not kick them out of the home; in fact, we need to keep them in a close loving family home environment. We will miss the bus with them if we do not understand that. And lions do not need to take the bus; they stay in the bush.
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