When you plant the seed of a Chinese bamboo tree, you see nothing, absolutely nothing for four years except for a tiny shoot coming out of a bulb. During those four years, all the growth is underground in a massive, fibrous root structure that spreads deep and wide in the earth. But then in the fifth year, the Chinese bamboo tree grows up to eighty feet!
If we extrapolate this out to humans, the first four years are the single digit years in a child’s life and the fifth year of the bamboo tree represents the teenage years. All the hard work you’ve put into nurturing those little people are now the roots holding firm and grounding them as they sway and bend and adapt to the stresses of the world and their environment.
When you have little children, you are in control of what they eat, when they sleep (once they’ve got the memo on that), how much screen time they get, how much outdoor playtime they get, who they get to spend time with and you get to plant the seeds of how you would like them to think about the world and their place in it. Those formative years are so important – all that foundational conditioning is pretty much done by the time they are seven.
My children are practically 80 feet tall. They are loud, rambunctious, tower over me and eat enough food to feed a small country. They are also swaying in the wind and I am cognisant that apart from throwing them the odd lifeline and shouting encouragement from the sidelines, their roots are what are holding them firm in the ground.
Laying the foundations means teaching them how to be resilient, how to make good choices, how to create and strive for goals, how to learn, how to be curious and how to be a good human. It’s all important. I would suggest that teaching them how to think about their health is also important; teaching them that their bodies are smart and intelligent.
