The Unhurried Child
Written By Catherine Newman
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Our lollygagging kids are always slowing us down. Then we lament that they grow up too fast. What's the rush?
"Are these going to be fizzy?" My son is holding a tube of candies. I squint at the writing on the package — at words like "fizzplosion" and "megafizz." "Yes," I say. "Definitely." He shakes the tube. "But are they going to be fizzy like, 'Oooh, fizzy!' or fizzy like, 'Yikes, fizzy!'?" In the illustration, a child's head effervesces away from his neck on a carbonated geyser. "I think more like 'Yikes!'" I say, and Ben carefully puts the tube back on the shelf.
Ben has 65 cents burning a hole in his pocket, and we're in the old-fashioned stationery store in town, where he studies the racks of candy as though he expects to be tested on them. Attractive candidates are evaluated for flaws: The Dubble Bubble will, he fears, make his jaw ache; Red Hots are too spicy, Lemonheads too sour. Malted milk balls? He palpates them through the package: There are only seven. Hmmm. Hmmm.
I, meanwhile, am the sole competitor in an invisible but grueling Olympics of patience. If I were in a sitcom, I'd be turning to the camera with wide eyes, biting my fist. But Ben's been looking forward to this outing all week, so I smile and say, "Take your time, sweetie" — even though I keep picturing that surrealist painting, the one with clocks and stopwatches melted all over the place and crawling with ants. Perhaps Salvador Dali had just taken his kids candy shopping.
When it comes to time, children and adults are like different species thrown together in a cruel zoological experiment: We hurry exhaustedly to and fro while our kids dawdle around with boundless energy. A child sitting on the floor with untied shoes, for example, might well exasperate his late and waiting grown-ups, but those moments unwind for him from an infinite spool. Little kids don't multitask, as you've surely noticed, and shoe-tying is rarely first on the agenda. "Children have a sort of strange, elastic relationship to time," is how Canadian journalist Carl Honoré explains it to me. "They have their own rhythm — and it's not at all like an adult rhythm. It kind of ebbs and flows. It defies the clock."
Honoré is not exactly speaking off the cuff here: In addition to being the father of two kids, 8 and 5, he's the author of In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed. In that book, Honoré describes a cultural epidemic of what he calls "time-sickness," the constant pressure to move faster, to get more done. With more and more kids overscheduled and "living like high-powered grown-ups," childhood — with time for play, imagination, and carefree idleness — may be its most heartbreaking casualty.
Reading Honoré's diagnosis, I can't help but remember the time I took Ben to an aquarium and we watched the smiley-sleek sea lions swoop and bubble through the water while a man standing near us by their tank muttered under his breath: "Sure, it's all fun and games — for the seals." We joked for months about his bizarre pinniped resentment ("Yeah, life's a ball — when you're a walrus!"). But I'm worrying about it now: Don't we sometimes feel this way about our own children, irritably envious of their carefree nature?
I picture a recent bedtime. Ben scoots along the floor, tummy down, toward his pajamas, announcing, "I'm a prowling crocodile!" I have no imagination left on this particular evening, so I don't say, "Let's pretend those pajamas are your prey!" or even "Scary!" What I say is: "I'm setting the alarm for 15 minutes. When it goes off, that's when I turn the lights out, whether or not we've read our chapter yet." It's a miserable idea. Yes, he gets ready lickety-split, but the cost is too high: I see his hands shaking while he pulls his pajama top on, the worried knit of his eyebrows when he scuttles into bed. It's one thing, of course, when you're late for work or school or your flu shot, and you really do need to prod the little slowpokes into action. The world can't always wait just because your children would prefer to lie on Coat Mountain rather than put on their jackets. But this? This is another thing; it's just bedtime.
Chastened by similar brushes with brusqueness, Honoré vowed to slow down, and in his book explains how people like me might do the same. Don't panic. He's not trying to get you to trade your watch for a sundial. He's just looking at our hurry-up culture, at its food and medicine, work and relationships. I admit I laughed aloud over the inadvertently comical "slow-sex" chapter — at the image of us panting and shivering for Tantric hours on end while our kids sit in the other room spooning up mac and cheese.
But the chapter that's called "Children: Raising an Unhurried Child" is as provocative and inspiring as I'd hoped. Honoré investigates the double helix of time-sick parenting: pressuring children to become instant adults while hurrying them through their days, filling every moment with busyness and anxiety until there's not a single spacious hour left for contemplation or idleness. Literally and figuratively, we are rushing our children through their childhoods.
Honoré's book has me wondering about our family's time-sickness. My kids take the odd swimming lesson or dance class and host a few playdates, but they aren't especially overscheduled. (I picture Ben, typing on his college applications, under Extracurricular Activities: finger knitting, using Scotch tape.) We make time for family dinners, board games, and lying in the hammock with a book.
And yet our days are often frantic nonetheless, paced by a kind of frenzied dillydallying that feels, with respect to speed and slowness, like the worst of both worlds. (Perhaps childbirth itself should have been the first clue — dashing to the hospital only to dilate half a centimeter every few eons.)
Next page: Catherine asks: "Am I a rusher?"
