It is very interesting and brings many lessons to the way eagles teach their young to fly. It's a very “simple and gentle” method: the bird simply throws its young from a height of a World Trade Center (or more) and the baby learns to soar through the sky or it dies. You may think this mother is cruel or something, but she is doing one of the best things a mother can do for her child: let him free.
But calm down. I'm not saying here to let your offspring run wild. In the biopic of American singer Ray Charles, there is an example of what I mean. When the artist was seven years old, and was just learning to play the first piano chords, he lost his eyesight after having an accident with chemicals falling into his eyes. From that event, his mother, even with few resources and single, had to teach her son to get by.
In one scene, little Ray trips over his chair and screams for help from his mother, who is about five meters away from him. Heartbroken, she shuts up. The boy asks: “Are you there, Mom?” No answer is said. Unable to count on help, he gets up, wipes away his tears and begins to pay attention to the sounds that were around him.
He takes a few steps forward with his hands outstretched so he doesn't hit anything. He comes close to the oven and, without getting burned, feels the heat of the fire. He hears the noise of the carts that pass in front of his house and, soon after, as in a miracle, he manages to identify a cricket that was walking on the ground and takes it in his hands.
His mother starts to cry silently, but she didn't tell him that Ray had learned to listen until her silence and says: “Mom, I know you are here”. She hugs him excitedly, as she knew she had done the right thing. At the age of seven, little Ray was ready to face and see the world, even without seeing it.
Let your child play in the street, interact with other children, get dirty and live different experiences, as this will make your little one create a kind of “sixth sense” for us, but something extremely natural: the survival instinct.
So get your child out of the astronaut suit, argonaut and the bubble that surrounds him. I know it's hard, but he'll survive and he'll have the magical feeling of learning something on his own, and that's going to be important for him to overcome challenges in the future. Obviously, you have a million ways to do this, without throwing it off a building. Falling off a bike or cutting yourself with scissors isn't the end of the world. Certainly, he will be much more cautious when dealing with situations where he didn't do well.
Text written by Diego Rennan from the Eu Sem Fronteiras Team
