Davy Crockett woke me up yesterday, shouting something about the Alamo. The day before that, it was Newzeeki, an avant grade artist who was tight with Vincent Van Gogh back in the day. This afternoon, a newspaper reporter hand-delivered a special edition to my lap; the headline, “Bile Gram dis,” was clear to anyone who’s ever ridden the early-phonics-in-action train.
Davy, Newzeeki, and that reporter are all about waist-high, blonde, and blue-eyed. They also bear a shocking resemblance to my five year-old, Simon.
Five year-olds bring a special kind of magic to a house. I’m a big fan of that half-decade mark, which opens the door to loose teeth, emergent skills, and, more often than not, a breathtaking imagination. Five year-olds are curious, exuberant, adventurous, and passionate. They are the happiest person in the room, the one with all the questions, and always, always, the last person to want to go to bed.
They’re also little sponges; dip them into the right water, and they will swell with facts about sea creatures, become amateur ornithologists, and reenact their favorite chapter of Doctor Doolittle all day. Leave them in a bath of first-person shooter games, mouthy comic book characters, and trashy t.v. shows and what comes out looks exactly like what went in. Feeding the soul of a five year-old is a much more time-consuming business than most people realize. It’s not about offering a buffet of distractions; that’s where most of us fall short. Five year-old don’t need more access to apps that tell them everything they ever wanted to know about Bengal tigers, and they don’t need books with Disney characters trotting through the motions of how to be a friend. Five year-olds need to glean little nuggets of info from their world, stew on them a bit, then find their own way to the next question. They need dirty knees and friends whose faces are every color of God’s human rainbow. They need to look at art, be read to for hours on end, hear stories of heroes and amazing places, and imagine what it was like for a little girl two hundred years ago to ride in a wagon train across the prairie.
A five year-old should be just annoying enough to show that he’s got a healthy sense of wonder; the world is an absolutely amazing place, and he’s trying to define it. That means questions at inopportune times and misadventures involving things that you started out with the best of intentions. He shouldn’t be able to sit in a chair for an hour and a half while you correct his pencil grip and make him recite the alphabet and expect him to draw a circle around the sets of three objects on the worksheet. He should be genuinely surprised when grown-ups do bad things, not jaded from years of mature content filtering into his eyes, ears, and soul. Does that mean the inconvenience of continuing to police your viewing habits and conversations even though preschool is behind you now? Yep.
Five year-olds are bigger… but still small.
They still live in a world where we, the parents, are the gatekeepers. God has assigned us the task of deciding how we, as a family, define “age-appropriate.” He has charged us with praying over what current events we share, what we point out as worthy of emulation, and what are expectations are.
It’s our job to enjoy the ride, even as we keep gently guiding our five year-olds towards the season when they’re ready to wade into the bigger world. It’s a privilege and a burden to have a five year-old in your life. I hope, if you’re so blessed, you’re embracing the joy.