The awkward age must be safeguarded, not skipped.
Both because skipping it causes all the damage from a skipped step in the future life of the individual, and consequently of society, and because it must be faced and resolved in order to become an adult.
What we must do, in addition to safeguarding it, is helping to face it.
To do this, one tool is responsibility, and these are some basic principles in this regard:
- Responsibility is not blame: it is acknowledging being cause.
- There is no minimum age limit for responsibility.
- Responsibility and playfulness are not mutually exclusive.
- Supervising does not mean bypassing: the goal is for the child to successfully exercise responsibility in the areas entrusted to him, so supervising means helping him to take on that responsibility, not bypassing him.
As and when the child is able to understand and take on responsibility, areas of responsibility can be entrusted to him.
All of an individual's abilities are proportional to their overall tone: spiritual, emotional and physical; a tone that has apathy at the bottom and cheerfulness and enthusiasm at the top. Consequently, the higher his tone, the more cheerful and enthusiastic he is, the more capable he is of successfully taking on responsibility.
Therefore, responsibility and playfulness are not mutually exclusive, but rather to the contrary they go hand in hand.
So there is no need to fear that giving him responsibility will prevent him from playing. Because both playfulness and responsibility depend on tone, and giving him responsibility raises it, because it allows him to demonstrate his worth to himself.
