Our young plant is thriving in the greenhouse. The stem is getting longer and stronger, second and third pairs of leaves are growing: the plant seems ready to be set out in the garden. But there is also important work going on at this point in both our plant’s life and our children’s lives that is hard to see – they are growing roots. I don’t know how many times I’ve taken a young seedling out to the garden to plant it only to find that even though the stems and leaves look mature, the plant has a weak root system. It just needed more time before transplanting.
Our children were doing important work between the ages of 7 and 11 – developing strong roots. They were in the process of establishing a firm base – a solid confidence that home was secure. They identified themselves as part of our family.
Also, if you have observed children, then you know that at about 7 years of age there is a turning point in the child’s life. Part of it is physical – the round chubbiness and straight baby teeth of the preschooler are replaced by growing gangly limbs and missing teeth – but a big part is also emotional. The growing child starts to separate from the parents in a way that a toddler and preschooler never would. The 7 year old is becoming an individual.
I know it sounds like I just contradicted myself – read through those last paragraphs again. The growing child starts to separate from the parents at the same time that they are establishing a firm base? There’s a line from a poem by John Donne – “Thy firmness makes my circle just”. What he’s talking about is a compass, the kind used to draw circles. John Donne was saying that his wife was the “fixed foot” – the foot that establishes the center of the circle. He was the other foot, the foot that must “obliquely run” – but no matter how far he went, his wife was the fixed center to his circle. I don’t want to get too far from my greenhouse illustration, but I think it’s important at this point to see that this is one of our roles as parents of growing adults – we are that firm, fixed foot of the compass that brings our children back to the center, that makes their circle just (or true, or perfectly circular).
So the strong roots make the separation possible and almost unnoticeable. It is the secure child that can take risks. Consequently, around 7 years old we started the serious hardening off work at the same time that we reassured them that the fixed foot of the compass would not move.
It was time to put our seedlings in a larger pot – but still under the protection of the greenhouse. In controlled circumstances we put our children into the larger world, the same way you put young seedlings out on a sunny day. They would have a sleep over at a friend’s house or go on an outing to the zoo with the neighbor family.
Between the ages of 7 and 11 we would expose our children to the world outside our home in increasingly large doses. The activities we allowed our children to participate in were carefully chosen – even at the ripe age of 11 years old when our children went on their first week long adventure without us (usually camp), we knew who they were going with, what they would be doing and who was going to be responsible for them.
As they were exposed to the outside world, our young plants were no longer in that strictly controlled environment that I wrote about in my last posting. If you leave a young plant in those conditions for too long you’ll have a weak, sickly plant. A young plant needs to be exposed to adverse conditions to help it grow stronger – but that exposure is carefully controlled.
During this hardening off time they experienced life in different families and different environments, and learned that different places have different rules. Sometimes they would encounter things that we didn’t anticipate, or things that we wish they had never seen, but those experiences helped them see the differences between our family and others. They also learned that they were expected to live by our family’s rules no matter where they were. Home was still the greenhouse – but they were getting ready for the garden.
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