According to Webster, "taking delight" means "to enjoy very much". Here I would like to introduce a new term that I have coined -- "cute-ify" to mean "to turn something that exists without any intent into a cute thing and get entertained by it". In the context of parenting, many a time I have noticed "taking delight" slipping into "cute-ification". I would like to compare and contrast the two processes here in this article.
When "taking delight" in what a child is doing:
- the adult is either a non-judgmental observer or a participant in the process
- the child is allowed to just "be" and not made self-conscious
When "cute-ification" occurs:
- the adult is being judgmental
- it is quite likely that the child (if old enough) gets self-conscious
To illustrate these two responses I would like to present some examples:
Five year old Ruby shows me the rangoli that she had made. Her caregiver immediately says “Did you see that? How cute! She loves making rangoli. She is very talented.” Overwhelmed with anxiety, the caregiver took over the space and I was not allowed to respond. I could see in the face of the child, subtle ways in which she was becoming self-conscious.
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10 month old Satva just learned to stand up on his own. The other day he crawled to the nearby window, held on to the wall, stood up and lifted the curtain up. This let in light and he was delighted by the experience. Fascinated by this experience, he repeated it over and over again. The mom was observing this and taking delight in the process in which her baby was excited about. She just let him be.
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Four year old Anu invented a repetitive game in which she and her friend would pass a coin and call out each other’s name while doing so. A simple game that could go on forever! There was absolute delight on Anu’s face, until an overseeing adult said, “Look! How cute! How well she is playing!” The delight on Anu’s face was gone. She got self-conscious. She twitched her mouth and started baby-talk.
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Two year old Ishan liked doing everything on his own and refused to take help. He was potty trained. Once when he said that he needed to go to the toilet, the mom rushed to the toilet with him, opened the toilet door, turned on the light and helped him get setup for the job. Ishan tightened up, pulled up his pants, turned off the light, got out of the toilet and closed the door behind him. He said “BABY!” and redid the whole process, this time on his own, without any help -- opened the toilet door, turned on the light and went on to pee. The mom was overjoyed by what her child had demonstrated. She understood the cues and followed them right on from the next time onwards. She didn’t trivialize the child’s attempt to assert himself, nor was she condescending.
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I find babies, toddlers and young children serious about what they are doing. They are trying to figure things out, making sense of the world and people around them. There is absolute, sheer, unsurmounted joy in being there with a young child as he is figuring things out. I have repeatedly observed that the experience gets diminished when the child’s behaviour is “cute-ified”. I have also noticed that if there’s unrest within ourselves, if there’s anxiety, we tend to “cute-ify” and move on rather than participate in a wholesome manner.
Now, what does becoming self-conscious do? When we become self-conscious, we are aware of the response that our behaviour will elicit from others. We understand that we can modify/manipulate our behaviour to elicit the response that we are looking for. Thus our authenticity can get compromised. This is a common game that people play. Little children don’t by default play this adult game. But they can learn to play this game after they have been “cute-ified” enough.
-- Hema
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