When a child is born he is a clean slate, a tabula rasa; nothing is written on him.
That’s his beauty: the mirror is without any dust. He can see more clearly.
Mom: “Jimmy, did you fall over with your new trousers on?”
Jimmy: “Yes, Mom, there wasn’t time to take them off.”
The first-grade teacher was talking to her class about nature and she called it “The World Around You.” She asked little Helen in the first row, “Now, Helen, tell everyone in the class. Are you vegetable, animal or mineral?”
“I’m not any of those,” she replied promptly. “I’m a real live girl!”
A little fellow who was fishing off the end of a pier lost his balance while trying to land a fish and fell in the lake. Several men who also were fishing nearby rushed to his aid and pulled him out.
“How did you come to fall in?” one of the men asked him.
“I didn’t come to fall in,” the kid said. “I came to fish!”
A large family was finally able to move into a more spacious home. Some time later an uncle asked his nephew, “How do you like your new house?”
“Just fine,” replied the lad. “My brother and I have our own rooms and so do my sisters. But poor Mom, she’s still stuck in the same room with Dad!”
A woman was almost panic-stricken as she called her long-time friend on the telephone, but the friend was in the bathroom and her young daughter took up the phone. “Oh dear,” she said, “I just have to talk to someone! I just found this note on my kitchen table. My husband has run off with another woman. Gone, gone, gone forever! I am so full of pent-up emotion I don’t know what to do. I am sure that any minute I’ll just let go.”
“That’s the thing to do,” the daughter said. “Just give in to your emotions. Let yourself go. Nothing will do you any more good right now than a good laugh!”
Every child is born intelligent, clear, clean, but we start heaping rubbish on him.
Silvera, you ask me: Does a child not have as much right to privacy and freedom from parental conditioning as the parents themselves expect?
He has much more right than the parents because he is beginning his life. The parents are already burdened, they are already crippled, they are already depending on crutches.
He has more right to be his own self. He needs privacy, but parents don’t allow him any privacy; they are very afraid of the child’s privacy. They are continuously poking their noses into the child’s affairs; they want to have their say about everything.
The Mystic Rose, Chapter 30
