Healthy Children Are Spontaneous, Noisy, Sensitive And Colorful

Children were not born to be quiet, not to touch things, to be patient, or to entertain themselves. Children were not born to sit still, watch TV or play with a tablet. They do not want to be quiet all the time.

They need to move, to discover things, find new things and create new adventures. They want to discover the world around them. They are people who teach, who mushroom. They are naturally playful, treasure-seekers, they are like powerful earthquakes.

Children are free and pure souls who want to fly. They will not stand next to watch, they will not be weighed down. Let us not turn them into slaves to adulthood, where one must always hurry, where one lacks the ability to imagine things, as the present generation of adults does.

Let us not lock them inside our disillusioned world. Let us rather encourage their capacity for wonder, and guarantee them an emotional, social and cognitive world rich in stimuli, in the smell of flowers, in sensory expressions, in happiness and knowledge.

What happens in the brains of children who play?

The benefits of playing at all levels (psychological, emotional, behavioral and cognitive) are not a mystery. In fact, we know many of the cohesive effects of playing:

• It regulates the mood and anxiety they have.
• It is good for attention, for learning and for memory.
• It reduces neurological tension and promotes calm, well-being and joy.
• It increases the physical motivation by the fact that their muscles are in motion and when they play.
• It is an advantage for imagination and creativity, and helps them create imagination in their lives.

Society has encouraged a form of ” hyper-parenting”, or parental obsession, that their children should achieve special abilities that will guarantee them a good job sometime in the future. We forget, both as a society and as those who raise children, that children are worth much more than just their grades,  and when we insist on prioritizing results, we neglect their other abilities in life.

Our young children need us to love them, not because of what they achieve, or where they fail, but rather because they are themselves, unique by nature. As children, we are not responsible for the way we are raised, but as adults, we are fully responsible for arranging it.

Keep childhood simple

We always say that everyone is unique, but it does not seem that we really take note of it all the time. This is shown, among other things, in the simple fact that we have established a set of rules we must follow when raising children.

This is a big mistake, and it does not correspond at all with the idea that everyone is unique.  Therefore, it is not surprising that our beliefs and actions are constantly in conflict when we raise children.

In addition to that, as, among others, professor and advisor Kim Payne  has pointed out, we raise our children with:

• too much information.
• too many material things.
• too many options.
• too much haste.

We prevent them from exploring, reflecting on and freeing themselves from the tensions of daily life. We stuff them with technology, new toys, with school and leisure activities. What we are doing is distorting their childhood, and what is even worse is that we are preventing them from playing and developing.

Today, children spend less time in the fresh air than people in prison do. Why is it like that? Yes, because we keep them “entertained and busy” with other activities that we see as more necessary, we try to keep them untouched and not soiled by mud. This is unacceptable and very worrying. Let’s look at some of the reasons why we should change this:

• Excessive hygiene increases the chance that children will develop allergies. It shows a study conducted by Gothenburg Hospital in Sweden.
• Not allowing children to enjoy fresh air is a form of torture that hinders their creative and developmental potential.
• The fact that children are glued to their smartphones, tablets, computers or TV screens is very harmful both cognitively, emotionally, psychologically and behaviorally.

We can go on for a long time, but for now I think most people  have already found countless examples of how we destroy the magic that belongs to childhood. As teacher Francesco Tonucci has said:

This is without a doubt a much healthier way to work with them, a healthier way to raise them, and a guarantee that they will be able to succeed.