Friendship with Children

Monday @ Montpelier:

October 14

Connection, Not just Care

I have made the most wonderful discovery this year in the atrium. I have been surprised and delighted by the realization that the children in the atrium have become my friends. I have spent so much of my life caring for kids, and have certainly been friendly with kids, but I’m not sure that I could honestly say that I’ve experienced friendship with them.

Adults are often primarily focused on responsibility for the kids in our lives, and so we always seem to need a break from them. I wonder how often what’s happening is that we always seem to need a break from them because we are focusing on our responsibility to them. What if we made more space in our relationships with children where connection with them took center stage? Are we missing friendship with kids because the bonds we form with them have a tendency to be just about keeping them alive or maintaining the environments in which we coexist? What would it even look like to make connections simply for the purpose of really knowing a child?

Those of us gathered along the fringes of parks and classrooms and gyms and fields, watching our kids play together, marvel at how easily friendships are formed. We struggle to do that ourselves, and so many of our lives bear the dark marks of loneliness. When does it get so hard to form relationships? It’s very easy to look down on children—to “despise their youth” and assume they have nothing to give to us adults—but we’ve established time and again here how much we have to learn from their open and wise way of being in the world.

Proceed with Caution

Forming friendship with children feels like really tricky ground to tread. Adults have a lot of bad habits when it comes to interacting with kids. One of these pitfalls is forming connections to get something from them: compliance, entertainment, self-fulfillment, or even darker, more insidious things. Such reasons do not recognize a child’s full personhood, therefore refusing them the respect and dignity due any human being. Culturally, we have an unfortunate habit of viewing kids as partial beings who haven’t yet “arrived”—as if the matured form of a plant is all that matters just because it is its final version. In fact, every adult owes their current self to all the child-selves that came before, who thankfully chose to interact with the world, persevering through the pain of growth, in order to form who we are today.

Even for adults who honor the image of God in a child, friendship with children proves illusive. Another bad habit I have observed and practiced myself is a tendency to approach kids like wild animals. Does this sound familiar? We don’t want to scare them off, so we approach cautiously, talk slowly, and act nice so that they will like us. Unfortunately, adults can work so hard at making friends with kids, the result ends up being fake friendship (not fake love, mind you, they are different things). What is the risk of being our real self with kids rather than a person we think they will like? I wonder if we are scared of kids’ inherent honesty. For the adult who is concerned about appearances, who has crafted a persona in the world in order to be safe, liked, respected etc. (there are a great many reasons), kids can pose a real threat: it doesn’t take long with them before the inner self is exposed, in both good ways and bad. But if we are carefully zipped up around kids in order to self-protect, friendship will most certainly not happen. Kids can do many things, but for the youngest and most innocent among them, being fake is not one of them.

Built on Mutual Love

How on earth do we go about making friends with kids, then? One of the many things C.S. Lewis so beautifully articulated about friendship in his book The Four Loves, is that it is a bond established over mutual interest and love for something beyond us. This is a huge advantage of the environment of the atrium. That part of caregiving that takes up so much mental and physical energy—our responsibility for kids’ environments and needs—is gifted in the form and method of CGS, allowing the catechists’s energy to be otherwise directed.

In the early days of our atrium, I was so trapped by my own anxiety and self-protection that I wasn’t standing side-by-side with the kids, gazing together at a common trajectory: the Good Shepherd. Rather, I was facing them, analyzing and interpreting their interactions with the materials, and usually from a self-elevated position instead of on equal footing with them. Friendship wasn’t possible from that angle. There was too much distance between us. And our focal point wasn’t the same! I was focused on order and compliance and knowledge for the mind, rather than the heart.

As God has called me deeper into this work, I have begun to enter the atrium on its terms, not mine. The atrium’s invitation is the same for children and adults alike, not to different postures, but to the very same posture, next to one another, gazing at the very same object of affection. The children’s gaze was always settled on the Good Shepherd. I had to be willing to watch, listen, and learn from them to correct my focus.

This mutuality of affection is what allows actual friendship to form in the atrium, in a way that eliminates the self so that the foundation of connection is dignity and respect.

It’s a Place to Start

One of the reasons I find myself so resistant to innovation of the atrium’s materials and processes is because of the freedom offered by the well thought-out, pre-set logistics that allow more time and energy for exploring that mutual love alongside the children. This is not to say adjustments aren’t made in the atrium. It does happen from time to time, to address unique needs of each atrium’s particular kids, but such changes can only be done if the catechists truly know the kids. And they must be known inside out—for who they are, not our interpretation of who they are. The child alone knows what is within them, and they will only share it in an environment of trust.

Such trust, as I have tried to outline here, is build on mutual respect, recognition of full personhood, and the willingness to be both vulnerable and to listen without pre-conceived interpretations. There is much to gain from a proper and healthy friendship with children, and although it can be done in other environments than the atrium, I am grateful to have had the opportunity to grow friendship with my children and my friends’ children by its safe guidance.

Practicing friendship with children in the atrium has been healing to my own inner child, and it’s been a window through which to better see God’s love for me.