Through the Eyes of a Child

E171: Bringing back a child-like wonder and awe to this joyous season

This celebration edition is dedicated to Eric who will be piloting the skies on Christmas Day. Our conversation on your childhood treasure and the wisps of things we remember inspired parts of this essay. Thank you for reading ‘Tilt the Future’ regularly, Eric!

It is also dedicated to

Emma Dorge

and all young mothers this celebration week. Enjoy the little moments. Make great memories.

Through the Eyes of a Child

Today I invite you to do two things in the middle of the muddle and bus-y-ness of this festive season:

• Enjoy this season through the littles in your life - who see life at the height of your knees. Set the stage. Let them use that to create their own special memories.

• Reach back to your own enjoyment of this season of joy. How many of your awe-some memories (and expectations) hark back to your childhood—and knee-high—recollections?

I remember sitting at the window as a five-year-old, staring at the lights twinkling on the fir tree outside, waiting for the fire engine. Why? In equatorial Uganda - sans snow or chimneys - my Dad had convinced me that Santa Claus arrives on the Fire Engine! Another distinct memory is standing in the kitchen, just tall enough to rest my chin on the table, staring at all the Christmas goodies my mother was creating particularly the delicious marzipan fruit she would shape and paint. The petite clusters of strawberries, oranges and apples were gorgeous. Her pears looked real, a pale green tipped with a rose blush, studded with a clove to create a realistic stalk.

Children remember …

Twenty years ago (November 2004) we moved our family from New Jersey to Toronto. Instead of driving straight north we hung a left as we departed JFK. Nine months and sixteen countries later, we had circumnavigated the globe and landed in Toronto.¹

Our children were 4, 6, and 8 at the time.

As a 20-year retrospective, I’m sharing a daily private blog with our children. I start with my memories: boarding passes, map of a crocodile farm, the ticket stub for the Cultural Museum, receipt for Pokemon ice cream, etc. These join the hand written journal entries, sketches, blog² and extensive photo gallery for each day. We reflect on our individual memories of that day, and how it may have impacted us in the twenty subsequent years. We scour our many photos and vote on our favourite of that day.

I am absolutely blown away by what these young children noticed, what they saved in their memories. The detail. Trivia. Not the adult Frommer’s “Top 10 best things to see”, but their recollections from their Hobbit-height vantage points.

Even the four-year-old (who has spent the past twenty years moaning about how his older brother got so much from the trip and he was too young to remember) had distinct memories. Hot cocoa, dal-bhat, stuffy noses, sleeping bags and the 3,000 steps they had to climb in the Himalayas. The smell and experience of eating jackfruit for the first time on a river boat in Bangkok. Watching The Incredibles around a tiny screen on Thanksgiving evening in Phuket. The hot tub in a hotel in New Jersey. The hug after getting lost in a museum in Hong Kong. The ‘christmas’ twig decorated with balloons and streamers, and Santa galloping in triumphantly on a bullock cart in our little corner of Goa. The memory of folding culculs with their cousins, and eating them as fast as they exit the fryer.

Some Christmas memories from Goa

The trivial tangled in with consequential memories, some that continue to impact and inspire them as their lives unfold over the decades.

… but not what we expect.

We cannot predict what our children will take away from the experiences we place before them.

“Tell me more about ‘The Little Red Ball’,” asked

Ishan Shanavas

for a recent podcast interview. He really wanted to hear this parenting story in the days after our trek into the Himalayas which had also resonated strongly with

人生探索

Angie Wang (47:47 in her podcast episode).

From The ‘The. The. The.’ Battle :

I wanted to know that this momentous event would not be just another walk in the park mountains for this child, lost in his memory banks.

I wanted assurances that he had paid attention, that he had absorbed the generosity of these hard-working people, the laughter, the culture, the thirst for education, and yes, the scenery.

On that day, in that battle, I convinced myself that if he did not write it down, right there, right then, he would forget.

I “wanted”.

But he remembered all that.
And 8 years later, I would discover that he had remembered so much more. Far from forgetting, he remembered how he had created communication and relationship. With sport and play.

And a little red ball. Its impact etched in his memory banks. Waiting to bounce back into his mind’s peripheral vision when he needed it.

As parents, we sometimes insist on one single clear path of action for them to follow, based on our own experience. Because we only see the world through grown-up, experienced, parent eyes.

But if we hold too tightly to one idea, we could miss that one casual conversation that could become a pivotal moment, and be cheated out of the real beauty of self-discovery.

Because it is in the ‘space’, in the in-between, that great things are discovered and new ideas come along that disrupt the status quo.

Because little things can have a big impact.

[Read all three stories³ ]

I crafted adventures for my children from an adult’s perspective (not just our trip around the world, but other activities too) - “Here, I’ve heard this is the best thing to experience.” “Let me leapfrog all the pain points for you.”

But a child engages with the world from a completely different perspective. They are only knee-high. They don’t see what we see. They approach the world with an innocence. Their executive function cannot yet process fear and logic, deadlines and timelines the way that an adult brain evolves to do (short cut that process at your peril … who would put their crawling baby on a two-wheeler bike and expect them to have balance?)

We may curate the opportunities we present them, but we cannot pre·scribe the memories they form.

For an adult, a highlight of trekking the Annapurna circuit was watching the dawn light up the arc of mountain peaks like a Ring of Fire 10,000 feet above sea level. For a child it was a Little Red Ball and discovering that in this world we can find universal languages to communicate with one another.

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Little things can have a big impact

The birth of a little baby 2,025 years ago would change the world as we knew it.

Wishing you rejuvenation, peace and joy in the company of family and friends in these coming weeks. And if you are surrounded by little children, create the space for them to make some of their most favourite lifetime memories!

What is your favourite childhood holiday memory? How tall were you?

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Thank you for joining Tribe Tilt!

We are a powerful, wonderful group. We believe we can make a difference to the people and places that are precious to us, with fun, hope and agency in our lives. We believe that the best ideas can come from anyone, anywhere, at any time. Please add your voice to our conversations.

Stay healthy. From there all else becomes possible.

Until next week …

Karena

1. Why? How? If these questions intrigue you, I have written an e-book that explains how we came to these decisions and touched on how we planned and managed the journey:
https://www.amazon.com/Contours-Courageous-Parenting-Tilting-Decisions-ebook/dp/B08XTJZZL5/

Read one reader’s review of the book:

She’s looked at raising kids as a business case with the fundamental question: How do we raise kids—pack them full of love and skills and empathy and tolerance—for a world that is unpredictable at a scale that is off the charts from any other generation? Well. We make decisions. Every day. Lots of them. But—how do we position those decisions to include that future that so many people are terrified of thinking about—but that comes nonetheless? We make CALCULATED decisions. She tells her readers how she learned to do that—and makes herself and her family and their adventure around the world the case study. Contours of Courageous Parenting is a generous work by an author with a clear and earnest desire to be of service to others. Although helpful for new parents, I think this book is particularly inspiring for mid-career parents—during those years when so few other parenting books are aimed at us.

2. Inspired by “Flat Stanley” I shared a hard-coded HTML blog with classmates, work colleagues, friends, and our family who were tracking our uncommon experience traveling the world.

Flat Stanley was a project that our oldest child did in Grade 2. They coloured a paper version of themselves, then sent it to a trusted friend or family in a different state. That F&F would explore their surroundings, sending back stories and photos of Flat Stanley’s experiences. Learn more about Flat Stanley which is based on book of the same name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flat_Stanley_Project

3. Read the full Nepal trip-tych: Ring of Fire The “The The” Battle and The little red ball