Kevin Baldeosingh
My daughter’s pre-school is having their prizes-giving ceremony next month and Jinaki will be getting awards in two categories. One of them is Most Obedient Child: and that has me a little worried.
I know that most parents would be happy to know that their child is obedient in school. It means that the teachers will like her and perhaps give her more positive attention. But obedience is not high on the list of virtues I want either my daughter or son to have.
Questions buzz in my parental brain. Does this award mean that Jinaki is the type of child who goes along with the crowd? Will she never challenge anyone in a position of authority? Will she respect position rather than person? I don’t know. It’s possible that her obedience is a phase which will set a good foundation for later academic skills and functioning in an institution. Or it may be that she is learning to be conventional and, since her Daddy is not conventional, maybe the real basis of my concern is that my daughter is not following in my footsteps.
I’d have felt better if she was in the Most Accurate Recall or Most Curious/Explorative categories. I mean, I want my children to be considerate and sociable.
But I definitely do not want them kowtowing to authority figures, since it is from unquestioning obedience that a host of ills, like locusts or Trinis on the first day a foreign food franchise opens, arise.
At home, Jinaki is a typical three-year-old—neither particularly obedient nor disobedient. Her mother and I long ago agreed not to spank as a method of discipline and, even though at her age Jinaki cannot truly appreciate reasoned argument, we have already started the habit of explanation, telling her why she cannot do certain things. We also negotiate when she wants something, so that she understands that life is about give and take and compromise. And I at times shout, especially when she’s about to jump on her one-year-old brother Kyle after I have warned her to be careful. That’s a reaction I have to break myself out of. I say all this in the context that our approach may be useless at this stage of Jinaki’s development. It may even be why her behaviour at home in respect to obedience is different from at school. There, apparently, she does what she’s told. We already knew this already from her school reports, and what the teacher explained to us is that “obedience” means that she does the various class tasks without protest. And, indeed, at home she does come to me or her Mommy to say “Come and do an activity with me.”
In a society like ours, teaching my children to be obedient may be better for their future prospects. But I think any conscientious parent wants to achieve a balance between obedience and independence in their child.
At any rate, the second award Jinaki’s getting is for Most Expressive and Imaginative. This quality is dominant both at home and at school: and I take some comfort in the fact that imagination is antithetical to mindless obedience.