After a long hectic series of football, baseball, and hide and seek games with my nephew, we sat on the couch to rest for a while. Unfortunately, I ran out of energy to even stay with him in the same place, my imagination has become boring in comparison to that of a child’s.
For most people in my age group, sitting on a couch is their favorite pastime, however it could prove impossible if you’re sitting with a bubbly, energetic eight-year-old. I tried to distract him by asking him a question, but all what came to my tired mind was the stereotypical question of, “what do you want to be when you grow up?”
His response was like all children his age, “I want to be a pilot, or a police officer or a doctor.” His answer made me pause for a second and think if I had just asked him the right question, or if I should burst his bubble with a dose of depressive reality. Will his dreams actually come true? Maybe yes, maybe no.
The education journey, with its fixed curriculum, ends up with grades determining children’s universities, and there is a narrow labor market with limited choices, the reality is the jobs will choose them in the end, not the other way around.
Although this might seem frustrating, perhaps there is another solution. Maybe before asking children this question and talking to them about the reality they will face, we should gauge and determine their true desires and strengths in hopes of giving them a better understanding of what lies ahead for them.
According to Sigmund Freud, who has conducted extensive research about children’s mental development and impulses that involuntarily effect their behavior, children go through several developmental stages that determine their tendencies and personalities.
Freud proposed one of the greatest and most famous theories of child development that tackles the child’s psychosexual stages of development. This theory states that a child’s development goes through a series of stages that focus on different senses of pleasure. The child faces different conflicts at every stage that play a significant role in shaping his personality and beliefs.
The Austrian neurologist’s theory suggests that failure to cross a stage may cause persistence at a point of growth, which can impact the child’s actions as he matures.
So what happens to the child at each stage? What happens if a child performs poorly at one stage? Eventual completion of that stage (no matter how long it takes) leads to the healthy development of the child’s personality as he or she moves to adulthood. Failure to resolve inconsistencies at a certain stage leads to growth instability points that may adversely affect his or her personality during the puberty stage.
So maybe we can conclude that parents should focus more on how their children complete their development stages, and ask themselves about what their child enjoyed or hated the most, rather than focusing on the “grades” or “awards” he or she got or did not get. Perhaps when they understand what their children want and how they develop; the rhetoric question that parents have repeated throughout the years will have some more perspective.
*This article was written by Mention’s Senior Creative Copywriter, Muhammed Tawfik, and it was translated by Omar Ramy*
