For a while after my children were born, all the input they received came from people in our household. We talked to them, read to them, sang to them. I remember my husband carrying our newborns around, introducing them to things in the house.
Before long, other people had input too. We took them out in public; people got up in their faces and talked to them. They spent some time in the nursery at church.
I remember my daughter, aged nearly two, using a word we knew she hadn't heard from us. She used it dramatically, standing in the middle of the room, and, appearing to enjoy the shocked reaction she got from us, repeated it many times, gleefully. But it wasn't too hard to track down where she'd heard it; we had a good idea where she'd been, and with whom.
But when they went to school, suddenly there was so much more input. Teachers, other kids, people I didn't know. Experiences I wasn't there for.
And then. And then my children learned to read. And the whole world was open to them, all the knowledge, things I knew too, but so many, many things I didn't.
One morning last week, as we got out of the car at school, my 18-year-old met the director of our school, and the two of them started talking about sports, and statistics, and a game that had happened recently (unbeknownst to me). I knew nothing about any of the topics of the conversation. Nothing. My son knew everything about it.
And that wasn't unusual. There are so many times when he helps me understand things, about popular culture, and politics, and sports, and ... so many subjects. There is so much he knows, from others, and from YouTube, and from reading. He is a person with some knowledge that came from me, and from his dad, and so much that came from other sources.
All of this is normal. It's the way it is supposed to be. First they need you for everything, and gradually they need you for less and less. Until they move away and become their own people. My daughter did it, and my son will do it soon. And I'm so very proud of both of them.
Once when my daughter was in my class, quite a few years ago, I was griping about how she didn't learn any of the vocabulary I was teaching because she already knew all of it before the lesson began. She looked at me, with all her 14-year-old wisdom, and she said, "Mom. You taught me to talk."
I'm so glad I got to have part of the input into these amazing people I gave birth to. And I'm so glad for all the other input they've had. And I have to trust that in the future, there will be more wonderful, life-giving input even when I'm not there to see it.
You can read other people's Slices of Life here.
3 comments:
It's so interesting to think about how our children absorb the world and become their own people, influenced by us but also so very different.
I love having adult children. They have made me so proud. Wait until you get to do it all over again with grands. The joys of raising children!
It's so true that we are only a part of the input for our children, absolutely essential at first, but then less and less so (depending on individual children and their characters. My children are grown up, some with grandchildren and some of their thoughts and ways are SOOO different from mine, not in a wrong way, but absolutely unique.
I love the depth of description you have put into describing all the various inputs for your children and some of their responses!
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