The universal relationship between parent and child is fraught with wild swings in emotion, running the gamut from frustration to philosophy, letting go to love – in the midst of some that defy definition.

Moira Yuill speaks for all sleep deprived new parents when she drily observes, “People who say they ’slept like a baby’ generally don’t have any.” And the new father’s woes are articulated by Imogene Fey: “A man finds out what is meant by a spitting image when he tries to feed cereal to his infant.”

Childhood is a learning experience – oftentimes more for the parent, though it may be the second or even third time around. “Having children makes you no more a parent than having a piano makes you a pianist.” contends Michael Levine. Matrimony and parenthood has its champion in Peter de Vries who emphasizes that “The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.”

For the child, “Childhood is measured out by sounds and smells and sights, before the dark hour of reason grows.” according to John Betjeman. Montaigne was ahead of his time when he asserted over four hundred years ago that “… children at play are not playing about; their games should be seen at their most serious-minded activity.”

On the flip side, Susan Lewis observes, “Children don’t need toys to play. My one-year-old is never happier than when he is unraveling an audio tape, wearing underwear on his head or making music by clinking a crystal ornament against the glass coffee table. And his favorite part of birthdays and Christmas is the chance to taste so many kinds of colored wrapping paper while everyone else is distracted with whatever is inside. Even my older children don’t need toys — they are quite content reprogramming my computer, taking apart the lens of my camera or face-painting with the makeup in my bathroom. It is parents who need toys. We need toys to keep our children away from our things.”

When a parent is involved in instruction there is an added bonus; as the Talmud puts it: “When you teach your son, you teach your son’s son.”  J B Priestley reflects on the joy of a childhood relived, be it through a book, a song or an experience recounted: “To show a child what once delighted you, to find the child’s delight added to your own – this is happiness.”

This poignant feeling is expressed so well by Thomas S Jones, Jr in his evocative verse from the poem “Sometimes”:

“Across the fields of yesterday
He sometimes comes to me,
A little lad just back from play—
The lad I used to be.”

So parents would do well to empathize with their offspring as A Marcel proclaimed, “It is not for the young to understand us. It is for us to understand them. After all they cannot put themselves in our places, while we have already been in theirs.”

Some parents have have unnaturally high expectations, forgetting that, as David Elkind commented in his acclaimed work, ‘The Hurried Child‘, “… a child is an active, participating and contributing member of society from birth. Childhood isn’t a time when he is molded into a human who will then live life; he is a human who is living life. No child will miss the zest and joy of living unless these are denied him by adults who have convinced themselves that childhood is a period of preparation.”

And, as Carolyn Coats so succinctly put it, “Children have more need of models than of critics.”

Children can annoy and exasperate: “There are many questions that no man can answer and most of them are asked by 5-year-olds.” They can also cause anxious moments. Floyd R Miller speaks for the panic-stricken parent:

“Even much worse than a storm or a riot,
Is a bunch of kids who are suddenly quiet.”

Also as Ogden Nash recited:

“Children aren’t happy with nothing to ignore
And that’s what parents were created for.”

Finally at the end of an exhausting day, Ralph Waldo Emerson remarks, “There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him asleep.”

© Sosha Srinivasan