All my life I have avoided spending quality time with children due to false assumptions I held regarding how to properly interface with them, the foundational belief being that I would have to dumb myself down in speech and action in order to be palatable to a child’s fragile, unformed mind. I felt too self-conscious for that. Children also frightened me with their dire needs and unfiltered thought, two things I felt I could not handle.
But recently, childcare has become present in my life because of Emilia’s nannying job. Since June, she has been responsible for three boys, ages seven (Jonny), five (Willy), and three (Teddy), but it was only a couple weeks ago that I finally accepted the open offer to swing by on one of my days off to co-babysit (I’ve helped one more time since then). I had been swayed by Emilia’s hilarious and/or adorable anecdotes, the fact that they were reportedly dying to meet “Big Teddy,” and that Kendrick Lamar had said in this interview with Rick Rubin that he gets most inspired from interactions with children. If it’s good enough for Kendrick, it’s good enough for me.
It’s too simple to say I was wrong in my assumptions about childcare. It is perhaps more accurate to say that I was wrong in letting my assumptions stop me from experiencing childcare to form a more informed opinion. I guess it helps to be silly when I’m dealing with the boys, but I don’t have to transform into a clown. I’m still me, I still talk and act like me, and it works just fine. And while I am aware that the experience I’ve gained via the role of Fun Boyfriend Figure Who Likes To Roughhouse doesn’t even begin to touch upon the full range of responsibilities that come with taking care of a child, it is an experience that has moved me and made some thoughts come into focus.
Exchanges between me and these boys are unique to any other exchange I have in my day-to-day life, and even if they weren’t as delightful as they are, the change of pace alone would still make my time with them feel incredibly valuable. They don’t know about irony or what any of the social rules are. I wouldn’t call them particularly wise, but I would call them hilarious and sweet in ways that are simply lost with age.
Also: Once I became aware of how the boys typically processed/responded to what I was saying to them, a fascinating dichotomy presented itself. On one hand, I am cognizant of the fact that children are incredibly impressionable, that at the age the boys are at, the words/images/feelings/ideas that stick with them will stick. On the other hand, in a more immediate respect, the boys only acknowledge roughly half of what anyone says to them. I could ask them what their favorite part of the playground was and they could just not respond at all, or start talking about knights. So, the aforementioned dichotomy is between speech that is deeply meaningful and speech that is meaningless, but the speaker can never tell if what they’re saying is one or the other.
This leaves the speaker with a choice: With their not knowing taken into account, do they take the responsibility of speaking with the possibility that any phrase could be loaded, or do they throw caution to the wind and say whatever? And what if I started thinking this way with all my interactions?
I choose to believe what I say is significant because these boys have my heart, and it is easy for me to take up that responsibility for their sake. Responsibility. One of the major lessons I have been learning as I grow up is that you take care of yourself not just for yourself, but for the people who love and depend on you. Spending time with these boys makes me want to be good, because only a person who is trying to be good deserves to care for them, because it’s what they deserve.
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