Children Taught me That Mary Oliver is Right

“You do not have to be good.”

Listening to her say this made me feel content with all my vices and virtues, with all my flaws and functionalities, even if it was momentary. It also made me wonder how things would’ve been if I was told this when I was a little kid. As an adult in her early 20s, I wondered if I could’ve been any different and as a psychologist in training, having worked with children so intensively over the past 7-8 months, I believe I would’ve been different, I could’ve been different.

Times may have changed,

but the expectations levied on kids have managed to remain the same. Children are still expected to “act better”, “be quiet”, “ “score well on exams”, so on and so forth. From the time a child is born till the time the child becomes an adult, a life is imagined and imposed on them, leaving little to no space for any sort of deviation. This said “deviation” can manifest in the forms of neurodivergence, intellectual deficits, motor and movement deficits, etc. Given the rigidity of these expectations, the parents or the caregivers try anything and everything they can to pave the way for the kid to meet the narratives they had fabricated, entirely dissipating the unique and specific ways in which their child’s brain functions.
 

Working in the counselling unit of a school and under a clinical child psychologist,

I've come across cases wherein the parents have travelled lengths to understand why their child cannot, for example, pronounce certain sounds, parents who have yielded the resilience and put in the work to work alongside their children. I’ve also come across parents who have direly wished for their child to be “normal”, cases wherein the parents have refused to believe that their child looks at things from a rather distinctive lens. And it just made me wonder whether things would’ve turned out differently if these parents were also liberated from the pressure of being good by their parents. It’s a generational spiral and we’re all bound in it by what is expected of us at every stage of life.

Mother to a girl of 7 with ADHD I interacted with at the hospital the other day asked, “Yeh theek toh ho jayegi na?” (“She will be fine right?”). While I know as someone who isn’t in the field for long enough, what I say holds little credibility, I thought it’d be right to tell her “Woh theek hi hai.” (“She is already fine.”). I do know for a fact that that didn’t alleviate a lot of her fears, but I also sincerely hope that at some point in the foreseeable future, she understands that her child doesn’t have to be “good” but be the child that they know to be.
 

Mary Oliver was right.

I do not have to be good, neither does anyone else, and most definitely, not a child who is still attributing colours to the world. And this is with the hope that we create a space where a child is allowed to be who they are, without defining who they should be.