Fire illuminates darkness, warms spaces, and burns things, while water extinguishes fire and wets things. It boils and freezes, and has no color or smell. These are clear facts we have learned through experience, supplemented by the properties we learned in science classes, until we understood the chemical components of water and fire, and the precise temperature at which they boil and freeze.
God Almighty created for everything characteristics that distinguish it from others, and imbued it with certain qualities that set it apart. Our knowledge of these characteristics and features makes us more knowledgeable in dealing with the things around us and determining their needs.
Have you ever seen someone scream at a fire when their finger is burned? Or scold water when it spills on the floor? Of course, this seems foolish and difficult to see when dealing with objects and inanimate objects.
But with living people - and specifically with human beings - we often see a parent or teacher grumbling and complaining about their child's excessive questioning, or expressing annoyance at their excessive activity, or reprimanding them for their chatter, even though they keep repeating that they are the apple of their eye.
Anyone familiar with the characteristics of child development knows that children between the ages of three and five love to ask questions and talk so much that we think they won't stop. Later on, they become calmer, to the point that we wish they would start talking to us. At a certain stage, they become self-absorbed and balanced. These are the stages and phases our children go through on their journey to adulthood and the world of adults.
What's confusing is how we calmly handle pouring water and apply burn ointment, counting the reward, while we don't act with the same calmness and understanding with our children when they make mistakes or behave in a way that might provoke us. We rush to pass judgment and label them (naughty, goblins, annoying) and impose all kinds of punishments on them that soothe our angry hearts. After we calm down and reflect, we find that they are behaving normally, in keeping with their age group with all its characteristics and features, and that their annoying behavior is nothing but an expression of not meeting an urgent need of the child, or an uneducational collision with their developmental characteristics. The situation here is very similar to a farmer who trims a tree while blindfolded, believing he is competent, and when he removes the blindfold, he discovers that he trimmed the wrong branches, so the tree has become crooked.
Like all other sciences, theories in education are worn out and new ones emerge, and so it evolves and is renewed. Our children today have specific educational methods that suit them, different from those we were raised with. Our precise knowledge of the characteristics of our children at every age, and their physical, psychological and cognitive needs, whether through self-observation or through reading and learning, makes us able to provide the best and most optimal care for them with awareness and knowledge, and without being blindfolded, like our farmer friend did!!
I ask God to help us and guide our steps.