DATING WOMAN
Channel: KID BOOKS
Date: 2016-05-15

http://www.greenfroggotoschool.com/
The term ‘childing’ first arrived on the scene around 1250 A.D. Collins American dictionary defines it as: “bearing a cluster of newer blossoms around an older blossom.”

Such a rendering, if applied to the human condition, would indicate that there is no shedding of the old as we add the new, but a continual super-adding of the new to the old.

If that’s so, then those of us in a position to do so need to do all we can to make sure each and every one of us can unfold in the most optimal ways. Only then can all of cultivate and harness throughout our lives our unique capacities for empathy, reason, curiosity, creativity, exploration.

My ‘philosophy of childing’ challenges the traditional boundaries between childhood and adulthood. I assert in my book that, rather than lapse into adulthood, we can achieve what the Greeks of old called arête—all-around excellence — only when we older folks look to children and youth as a lodestar for our own development.

The fact is that never before has our culture been as child-centric as it is today — and yet, never before has childhood been as strained and pinched. Its seren- dipity and spontaneity is fast disappearing in our heavily vocationalized, over-scheduled culture. Kids are expected to be adults-in-training and to be thinking about college by the time they’re in third grade. To the extent that we’ve bought into this hyper-utilitarian notion of childhood, we not only do tremendous damage to kids, but to ourselves as well, severely constricting our possibilities for being all that we can be.