Two weeks ago, on the last day of school, I stood outside the elementary school and watched boys after the bell. Bursting from the building like firecrackers alight, they fizzed and buzzed.
The backpacks detached first — flying through the air like colored sparks flung and raining down. Thud. Thud. Thud. They landed and piled, heaps of Gore-Tex and canvas. Next came the balls, appearing suddenly as though they had been there all along, zinging overhead like low birds diving.
The adults moved aside instinctively to let them pass, wide-mouthed and yelling, calling to one another in the “I’m open, throw to me, here I am!” screech of boys.
The girls, most, came more slowly, like sparklers just firing up, in slow twirl-circles moving around one another, talking and planning, before picking up to a canter and heading off under trees.
School’s out for summer. Time for adults to contort themselves into a state of permissiveness. You read that sentence again, didn’t you?
Permissive is a delicious word. It means giving permission, allowing something to be done or to happen — not forbidding or hindering. Perfect.
Sometimes children need redirecting. Sure. Sometimes they need consequences. Sure. They certainly need rules. And they need discipline. But some kinds of discipline only make life easier for parents who have learned that kids behave better when they are afraid. The concept of permissiveness pushes us past the make-believe view that children should always be pleasant and perfectly aligned. They shouldn’t. Forcing children to walk the edge of some fictional straight and narrow by instilling fear and demanding control does not a better child make. Fear is not respect. It’s just fear.
Ah, but permissiveness allows for all sorts of situations, and predicaments, just like life. Perfect.
Permission to try, to fail, to thrive, to grow, to mess up badly, to succeed, to burn out and fall apart after a really heavy day. Permission for a “do over” again and again and a parade of “good jobs” if no do-over is needed. Permission to burst with energy and bustle and tumble and sometimes track dirt across the floor (and then learn to clean it up). Permission to explore, and to come back home, for shelter, or understanding, or help.
Sometimes small mistakes will happen, sometimes big ones, sometimes for a moment, sometimes all day long. But making mistakes helps children and teens learn what to do to make the situation better. This is a skill they will need lifelong.
There are no chalkboard answers to discipline or permission. No 1+1=2. If you meet someone who thinks raising good, polite, smart, upstanding, well-behaved children is as clear-cut as an easy arithmetic problem, run. Because if you don’t, they’ll fill you with the raised-eyebrow “shoulds” (what you should be doing if you were good) and the guilty “coulds” (scaring you with what could happen if you don’t do it their way). Helping any child grow is all about the nuance of the unknown equation.
It can never be as simple as focusing on one set of child- rearing rules, even if they are religiously based rules, even if they are said to be extrapolated from the Bible, or Torah, or Koran. What is sometimes petal-plucked from holy tomes leaves the stem and the structure of the flower behind in the book.
No book that can tell us exactly what our children need (though promising to do so is a great way to sell books and advertise websites).
Each child is as different from another as a carrot is from a cow. We have to do the figuring: sifting and paring and honing information from others to fit our hearts and our soul and our children. The most essential thing we can find is the feeling in our gut that we know what this child needs now.
So breathe deeply and pray for gentleness, patience and the ability to forgo perfect control or perfect behavior at every turn. Guide, and then let them run and tumble, and go by themselves, and sometimes fail. Let the little ones get wet and get dirty, let the teens borrow the car and go without you. They grow anyway, hindered or unhindered by us.
E-mail Fort Collins poet and writer Natalie Costanza-Chavez at grace-notes@comcast.net. Read more of her essays at .
