There was an episode in Bones, where she talks passionately about how she was experimenting with medical stuff when she was a teen and Booth is just listening with fillers like ‘a-huh’ knowing that she is a perfect geek and at the same time trying not to freak out or judge her. Obviously her classmates at that point, thought she was a weirdo and would make fun of her. This serial also has another character – who was interested and invested in bugs and insects. Since I belonged to ‘scream like a banshee when you see an insect’ family, I seriously did not get how a person can even spend so much time with bugs.
I realized something then, if there was a person like that in real-life (in my school) how would I react to that?
I have to be honest here, I would have thought they are weird as well. And most of thought process comes from what I grew up with – nurture than my nature
Think of a horror or creepy or thriller movie that you saw that shows the life of a villain. It mostly starts with a kid (mostly with oily hair, don’t know why) doing something with insects and rest of the world shunning that kid as a weirdo and sure enough once they are grown up they are main antagonists of the movie.
And for perspective have you ever thought what a doctor does? they do the cut and dissection – things that makes some of us throw up or close our eyes in fear or disgust – but they do it, to safe a life.
Think of thousands of babies born through c-section, think of millions of lives saved because a doctor is brave and open-minded enough to know what needs to be done and they do it anyway.
And yet, we continue to portray these skills as something to be shameful about.
I bet if the kid who is portrayed as villain, instead of people shunning them, if they had found some redirection activities like
- if they had bought legos or some anatomy toys to play with
- if they were taught how to care for insects and grow insects safely
- or shown how to create a bug farm ( sorry i do not know right term for it)
- or shown lifecycle of insects
- or even redirected their skills into kitchen activities
- or any other resource to cultivate their interests,
they would instead become scientists or doctors when they grow up.
I know it is easy to say but hard to practice but from my end as a first step I am doing the following:
- I have stopped screaming like a banshee (unless the said insect decides to surprise me – then I convert that scream into a song once I recovered 😀 )
- I throw insects outside the house gently (instead of swatting them)
- if there is a picture of insects – I take a quick nervous gulp, scroll up again slowly and bring myself to take a peek
- This is already causing a mindset shift for me – starting to appreciate them as living beings instead of horrible creatures.
And once again understanding schemas really helps here – you start seeing every activity as your kid trying to master a new skill instead of assuming kid is trying to misbehave.
The moment we stop assuming that a child is doing an activity because they are bad or misbehaving and instead observe and redirect and cultivate their interest in right direction, we are setting up that child for success.
Ergo, Start with a clean slate of mind!
Dedicated to all the kids who are perceived as weirdos because the world is not matured enough to understand who they are!