Welcome to Learned, a short, weekly look at language, education, and everything else under the sun. I’m Joel, linguist and professional slacker. This week, we're letting our interests diverge.
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My daughter is at an age now where her interests are beginning to diverge from those of her mother and myself. It's a fascinating and sometimes terrifying process to watch as she discards things I love (dinosaurs, yeah!) and replaces them with things I, well, don't love (J-pop, boo). At the moment, her primary interests are space (parental influence) and ballet (peer influence). And, as it turns out, it's a good time to be into both those things.
It gets fully dark by about 5:00 pm in my corner of nowhere, which means we can start looking skyward well before dinner is even on the table. For the past few days, that's meant that we could see the Great Conjunction, a time when the orbits of Saturn and Jupiter cause them to line up so that from here on Earth they look like one very-bright star. We've been keeping track of each planet as they have drawn closer together. This evening, we managed to track both planets for just a few minutes before they dipped below the horizon and the cold drove us back inside.
Just a few days prior, we had stayed up past bedtime to come outside and spend an hour staring straight up during the Ursid meteor shower and then all around watching shooting star after shooting star flash through the sky. My daughter had previously only really known shooting stars from the occasional Animal Crossing in-game event. Watching her see really bright shooting stars for the first time was sweet.
But both these experiences were driven by me and my wife. We were able to guide my daughter's interest and use our deeper knowledge to show her something new and interesting. And it's had a fantastic effect for our family - we experienced enough to maintain and even renew the whole family's interest in astronomy and stargazing. (And hey, this coming year, where social distancing still needs to be practiced? What better hobby than setting up in a remote field in the middle of the night and looking skyward?)
Whether to give your child the same experiences you had as a child is a constant battle for any parent, I think. You have to weigh tradition against practicality and the child's interest. And, when you're an ex-pat parent, like me, you have the added pressure to have your child experience something just so that they'll share another part of your culture.
When my daughter decided she wanted to take up ballet, I was supportive but didn't think too much on it. Little girls like ballet and that's that. Only, as Christmas has approached, I find myself remembering the Nutcracker and wondering if I ought to show it to my kid.
For suburban Americans, watching (or performing in) the Nutcracker has become as much a Christmas tradition as putting up trees and lights. Every small ballet company or school puts on a performance and families, friends, friends of friends, and friends of families end up going to see it. For a lot of us, it may be the only ballet they've ever seen performed.
As a kid, I didn't really care for it. Neither ballet nor classical music were things I cared about. At all. Not even a little. These days, I have a bit more appreciation for things I don't understand and a much deeper desire to learn and experience the world beyond my narrow existence. But that doesn't mean I need to shove it at my kid, right?
I am happy to inform or lead my child's interest in space. That is, ahem, a space that she understands is shared by me. She knows I have a deeper knowledge of the subject and that she can trust that when I tell her there's something interesting or cool to see, there will be.
But I don't think I need to do that for every interest she has. The temptation is to take my experience and quickly re-shape it to match her interest, but I think it's a temptation that has to be resisted. I want her interest in ballet to remain her interest. I want her to find her own space within that interest and if she wants to share it with either her mother or myself (or both of us, naturally) that needs to be her choice. And so I don't think I'll be seeking out the Nutcracker or any other ballet for her. Not unless she asks me to.
And that's not an easy thing for me to do. After all, as with most dads, I know everything and my taste in all pop culture is superb. But that's why I'm writing this - to remind myself that it's okay to let her be herself. Even when she just wants to listen to horrible music and talk about things I don't understand.
That's all for this week. Stay safe, stay sane. Merry Christmas.
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Joel