Since my early childhood, I have been a person who asks the question, “why?” Why do I have to clean my room? Why do I have to eat my vegetables? Why do I need to go to this event? Was this rooted in curiosity, or perhaps just pure disagreeableness? To this I do not know the answer, although I would like to say that it was based in a spirit of inquiry. I know for a fact that my parents got tired of taking the time to explain, and on most occasions argue with me over a given topic, because eventually the answer morphed into simply, “because I said so.”
“Because I said so,” four words that I have grown to despise over the course of my life. I’ve heard them from my parents, babysitters, teachers, family members and a slew of others, and I think I’ve gotten to the point where I understand why. As children, I think we do need an authoritative figure, namely our parents, to tell us what we need to and cannot do. I am of the opinion that this authoritativeness should fade away as a child gets older, but I don’t know how that graph of age and level of authoritativeness looks. I recently heard about a whole parenting style that is based on the common phrase that goes a little something like “mess around and find out.” What this looks like, is that if there are no dire safety concerns for the child in a situation, then they should be free to mess around and find out, and the parents are not going to help them unless absolutely necessary.
Instead of telling younger me, “no, you may not climb that tree,” and me throwing a temper-tantrum in protest, my parents should have let me climb up and made me figure out how to get myself down once I got stuck up to high. I think that valuable lessons can be learned about high stakes situations in these types of relatively low stakes situations that some people think may be the end of the world for a child. Let me be the one to learn the consequences of my actions, so that in the future I either know that I can succeed, or know I will fail based on my own previous experiences. As I mentioned earlier though, at times there needs to be an authoritative figure to establish good habits, such as cleaning your room or eating your vegetables. Nowadays, that may look more like homework deadlines or team workouts, things that are good practice for the real world, but that we may need a little convincing to do on a daily basis.
Administrators, professors, to whomever this may be applicable, please take our questions and inquiries seriously. We know that life is busy for everyone right now, and we understand that an interruption to that flow is not always what you are looking for. Our concerns, regarding whatever they may be, do not deserve to be so easily disregarded as ungrounded just because of who they are coming from. Please, if you are ever presented a question or concern by a student or anyone else, take the time to thoroughly and thoughtfully answer. Let us be the ones to open that can of worms for ourselves, and decide if we want to mess around and find out.