Toddlers' Free Zones

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Photo credit: online pic.

Born free. That’s how toddlers see themselves. That’s why they wiggle and cry wanting to be freed from feeding chairs or mothers’ backs. You put them down and voila! Big smiles. Precocious little things.

In an ideal world, they’ll have all the space they need to run around, and be with other kids. Toddlers love the chase. They crawl away to forbidden destinations like the door, and older kids chase them.

But the world is shrinking especially for kids born on the 20th floor of a one-bedroom apartment. Low income stand-alone houses don’t have breathing space even if they have three bedrooms. Smaller spaces get on toddlers’ nerves because they have restrictions.

However, there are some parents who have space, not like the White House but space nonetheless. They could have a free zone, an empty room with no furniture, no toys, no books, no cellphones, no shoes. Just eye contact. Toddlers would run around and bump into bodies: mama, papa or grandparents or aunties, sitting on the floor.

Toddlers ask a lot of questions with their eyes and hands.  For example, they don’t understand why women wear earrings, so they pull them. Reading glasses are also in danger.

Free zones can only be effective if parents have a lot of traffic, brothers or sisters, relatives and friends willing to sit on the floor and be laboratory rats for toddlers, on a mission to find the meaning of life.

This is another ‘written podcast’ from Nonqaba waka Msimang.

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