In the first few years of life, children are inundated with new stimuli. They are constantly looking every which way, trying to make sense out of the colors, shapes, tastes, scents, and sounds in the world around them. During childhood, children begin developing their own way of viewing the world, each piecing together the components of the world that they are slowly introduced to in a slightly different way. As older siblings and parents, children look to us to help them to fill in the missing pieces, to close the gaps in their understanding and add color to their perspective.
In many ways, we serve as a backboard for children – a platform that they can bounce ideas off of to shape their interpretation of the world accordingly, based upon our reactions. When children are exploring all of their ‘firsts’ in life, their inherent curiosity is running wild. They point at objects, and they ask an overwhelming amount of questions – trying to gage the whats and whys of what they are seeing, feeling, tasting, hearing, and touching.
Though our interactions continue to shape our individual perspectives as we progress into adolescence and adulthood, children are particularly vulnerable to the constraints of conformity influenced by the opinions and reactions of others. As their backboards, we as older siblings and parents largely hold the power to shape the way that our children think and the way that they develop new ideas and interpretations about the world around them. Given the power imbalance between children and their parents, children are taught to assume that their parents are always right; given their inability to fully formulate complex ideas and arguments on their own, they often have no other choice.
As I’ve watched my four younger siblings grow up and learn to form their own individualistic perspectives, the one question that I heard them ask over and over again, was (why?). As infants, children are fixated on learning the whats of the world around them – working on object and word recognition until they have a good enough grasp on their surroundings to function as an individual. After mastering the basics and accepting what they have been taught as simply conventions or the ultimate truth, they begin to develop a deeper level of curiosity, as they want to know why they can’t do certain things or why aspects of the world around them are the way that they are.
In an attempt to teach children to follow orders and respect authority at an early age, parents often respond to children’s questions of why with shut-down phrases, such as because I said so. While we may be busy and not want to explain why certain things are the way they are, repetitively shutting children down when their curiosity is peaked encourages the type of deindividuation and conformity that we need to ‘unlearn’ in adulthood. While it is crucial to instill a certain level of discipline in the household to lay the groundwork for the limitations and boundaries that children will be faced with in the school system and otherwise, allowing children to respectfully push back and ask further questions about the world around them will give them the foundation necessary to think outside the box.
In many ways, our society has enforced the conformity aligned with accepting what we are told as the truth through rewarding those who follow orders, respect authority, and do what we are told. While we should not encourage children to be disrespectful to their parents, teachers, or older siblings, we should make a point to give them the room that they need to ask the hard questions to gain a deeper understanding of the world around them. Through giving them this extra breathing room rather than shutting down their questions and imaginative ideas, we should do all in our power to reward them for asking the hard questions and thinking more creatively about the various aspects of the world around them. This back and forth collaboration and form of brainstorming will help children to understand how to push their ideas further, how to ask the questions that others often overlook, and how to tap into their imaginations and begin to dream big.