Magic, Fairies, and Releasing the Full Potential of Humanity

Among the many honors I've had in my life, being present as a very young child discovers soap bubbles is right up there. They are magical things that we adults have forgotten how to see. They are there, we can see them, but when we try to touch them they are gone. They appear from out of no where, reflecting the world strangely in their convex surface as they fly without wings or motors, just going where the wind takes them. Then, like fairies, they are gone.

Another of these honors is being present as very young children discover birds and dandelion seed puffs, and the sound their own voice makes in an echoey place: all of it magic and fairies.

As we grow into adulthood, we stop experiencing magic and fairies. The world becomes increasingly predictable, mundane, and tick tock. If I do this, then that happens. I've always done it like this, and it always happens like that. Parents, if they aren't too busy to drop to their knees, which is the best vantage point for discovering magic and fairies, often spend a few years in this world, but as their children grow, they once more return to their upright adult stance, reducing the magic and fairies to memories that themselves evoke memories of their own childhoods. 

But the magic is gone. The fairies are gone.

Those of us who work with young children, however, if we remember that it is our honor to simply be present, can live in this place of magic and fairies. 

Today is the final day of Teacher Tom's Play Summit, an international online gathering of tens of thousands of early childhood educators and parents. We have been listening and sharing about all sorts of things, but behind it all, there is magic and there are fairies. Presenter Akilah Richards says that adults have "colonized childhood" and in the process we have popped all the bubbles, chased away the birds, pulled the dandelions, and installed acoustic tiles. We colonize childhood when we insist that magic and fairies only live in storybooks. We colonize childhood by insisting that we know what they need to know, how they need to know it, and by when.

And we are diminished by it, all of it, children and adults alike.