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Create Quality Experience for Your Child
By Linda Dobson
Scientists have confirmed what anyone who has ever watched a child grow already knows: Nature and nurture are inextricably intertwined. Nurture is that which the environment contributes to the whole that is any of us. The environment includes the influence of home and family and everything else that is a child’s experience. Experience includes the emotions your child feels on the ball field, in church, and during time spent at grandma’s house. It includes the programs he sees on television and movies and video games. It includes the messages he receives from books, peers, elders, and dinner table conversations.
Healthy Experience Is Healthy Nurturing
Experience includes every sight, touch, sniff, and sound. It includes every word, gesture, and emotion. It includes what goes on in the schoolyard, the bus, the classroom, and the locker room, in the friend’s house, in the dark. It includes every birth we witness as well as every death. All of it becomes the experience that nurtures us as we grow. That nurture then becomes inextricably intertwined with our nature, that which is already inside us to be.
See also It’s Time: Ditch Curriculum
As our children’s guides, we parents choose the nurture that is going to inextricably intertwine with the nature that is already inside our child. It is only right to put the quality of the nurture we provide at the top of our priority lists. Sometimes it seems we pay much more attention to that which nurtures children physically than to that which nurtures the whole person a child is and is yet to be. Continual consumption of junk food is dangerous to a child’s health. Continual consumption of junk experience is dangerous to who our child becomes.
Power to Create a Healthy Experience Intake
All parents will not define junk experience in the same way, and, even if they did, everyone’s list of experiences that meet that definition would be different. It’s up to individual parents to think about and observe their children’s experiences so they may determine if a change of diet is in order. If a parent decides change should occur, that knowledge becomes the power to alter your child’s experience intake.
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