Living our dreams through our children

Recently I did some research on the Internet to find ways of encouraging a child's creative side, boosting their imagination and skills at the same time. I also looked for ways to help a child enjoy sports and being outdoors. My motives were to ensure Lydia's future could be whatever she wanted it to be, and that she wouldn't be stuck inside playing video games and watching TV while the world outside passed her by.

During my research I found countless articles about pushy parents, those who practically force their own children to do a ridiculous amount of activities outside of school, often to the extreme of depriving them of being a child. Examples of this include parents forcing their children to have insanely busy after school schedules, with ballet lessons, soccer practise, piano practise and various other musical or sporting lessons.

I read an article on the Psychology Today website (which you can read here) on this very subject. One parent in question wondered why her 9 year old son was complaining that he was tired all the time, despite the fact that she had set up a series of extracurricular activities for him that included "three team sports, church activities, scouts and ... piano lessons twice a week". When the psychologist mentioned that this might be the cause of his tiredness, she said she was simply giving her son all the opportunities that she never had when she was a child. This is probably very reasonable thinking, as we all want our children to enjoy their lives and have every opportunity available to them. However, this kind of thing has to be done in moderation.

Crawling, crawling, crawling

I finished work for the Christmas holidays on the 21st December. Aside from the upcoming festivities of Christmas itself, the 22nd December looked like being a day like any other. Until something unexpected happened...

On my first day off, I was sat on the carpet with my 8 month (and 1 day) old daughter Lydia, trying to get her to play with one of her many, many toys. Christelle was sitting on the sofa next to us, and we both watched as Lydia propped herself up on her hands and knees and did her familiar bobbing motion. She had been doing this for a couple of weeks now, but would always end up rolling onto her back (and then usually giving out a cry of frustration). She couldn't seem to master the coordination required to actually move herself forwards.

So, we sat and watched as she continued bobbing on her hands and knees, expecting her to get annoyed at any moment. What we didn't expect, however, was to see her suddenly crawl several steps forward and reach out to grab the Christmas tree. Christelle and I looked at each other in surprise, both unsure if what we had just witnessed had really happened.

We quickly congratulated Lydia and then tried to encourage her to do it again. To our continued amazement, she crawled again. Tears of joy and pride welled up in both our eyes. Our little girl had worked out how to move around, all by herself.

12 Months Later - Continued

More of my own observations about life in Switzerland, and what I have learnt since moving here a year ago, including languages, transportation, shopping and pride.