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The Law
of the Fleas: The Nature of Freedom
by Richard and Linda Eyre
Editor's
Note: Richard and Linda Eyre will be guest hosts along
with Dr. Joseph Allen on a "Book of Mormon Symposium at Sea"
leaving March 21. To learn more about this uplifting and exotic
Caribbean cruise click
here
 Well,
here is the ninth and final column in the "animal series".
We hope you have enjoyed the analogies from nature and the lessons
they teach us. This final installment is, of all things, about fleas.
Did you think the frogs we wrote about earlier were pretty amazing—broad-jumping
25 times their length? Then how about a flea high-jumping more than
200 times its height? Little 1/32-inch fleas can jump or hop seven
inches, and they jump up and down so quickly and with such endurance
that they can complete 1000 hops in an hour. They can pull an object
weighing 100,000 times as much as they do. No wonder “flea
circuses” became a popular form of entertainment in Europe
in the nineteenth century.
As a small boy,
when I (Richard) heard the term “flea circus,” I imagined
flea clowns, flea trapeze artists, flea tightrope walkers. And indeed
some of the turn-of-the-century European insect extravaganzas did
include elaborate “acts” like this. But then one day
I read, with some disappointment, that most common amateur flea
circuses were nothing more than a cigar box where fleas become conditioned
to jump only as high as the lid of the box. After a while, when
the lid is lifted, the fleas still hop up only to the exact height
where the lid used to be. The “circus” is watching the
pantomime of these little creatures bouncing around in the air as
though there was a piece of glass over the box.
While it’s
not as cool as a flea on a tightrope, the phenomenon is still pretty
interesting. The tiny fleas, with brains smaller than the point
of a pin, nonetheless learn that they can only jump within the two-
or three-inch vertical height of the inside of the cigar box. They
develop the habit of confining their hops to exactly that level,
and they hold to that habit and that perspective and that paradigm
even long after the lid has been removed.
Children, unfortunately,
often behave much the same. When there is a lid placed on their
lives by parents who expose them only to one narrow slice of reality,
they get used to that limited world, complete with its parochialism
and prejudices, until it becomes a confining little box in which
they live out the rest of their lives.
You might say,
“Well, but there’s media in that restricted space .
. . so there’s no way anyone today can grow up not knowing
about the bigger world.” And it is true that with all its
dangers and differences, media has shrunk our world and bridged
wide gulfs of prejudice and propaganda. But it’s not just
knowing about the world that frees our children to fly above the
box—it’s knowing that they have the potential of incredible
vertical leaps. It’s believing that the world and its possibilities
are accessible to them.
The final law
of nurturing is to let our children go, and to see that they go
as high and as far as their true potential allows! There’s
a time to nurture and to hold close and safe and secure, and there’s
a time to take off the lid and encourage independent flight.
We didn’t
do a chapter on eagles, but they provide an interesting counterpart
to the confined fleas. Mother eagles feather their nest with downy
materials to make it as comforting and soft as possible for the
eaglets, but when it is time for the young eagles to fly, Mom strips
out the soft padding, making the nest prickly and uncomfortable.
Then she pushes them out and makes them fly.
The Law of the
Fleas is: Don’t box them in for too long or to put the lid
too low.
This might seem
a rerun of the Law of the Crabs—boost a child up rather than
pulling him back, praise instead of criticize, encourage his dreams,
build his confidence and self-esteem. But that was about boosts;
and this is about potential, perspective, and long-range vision.
This is about faith. This is about thinking and believing “outside
the box.” It involves little things like putting a world globe
in a child’s room, or taking him to soup kitchens to feed
the homeless, or subscribing to National Geographic, or taking him
to the Holocaust Museum. It involves bigger things like taking him
to visit a variety of colleges while he’s still a sophomore
in high school, or going with him to talk to a guidance counselor
about emerging new professions of the next decade, or taking a trip
to a rural part of Mexico instead of to Disneyland. It involves
ongoing and intensely important things like helping him discover
his gifts and hidden potential and teaching him to think outside
the box by being creative and doing things differently than everyone
else is doing them.
This law might
appear contrary to the Law of the Redwoods, which is to stay in
your grove and to bloom where you’re planted. Actually, it’s
the perfect companion law and corollary. We want our children to
value and be protected by our home and our roots, but we also want
them to grow tall enough to see out over the rest of the world and
to sprout wings to get there.
There is also
a harmony between this last law and the first one—the Law
of the Geese. Become a citizen of the world so you can fly out far
and away, with no limits and yet always come home.
***
The Law of the
fleas is empowerment and freedom. None of us as parents know the
full, individual, and unique potential of any one of our children,
so it is our charge to do all we can to help each child discover
who he is, what she can do, and where he can go. There is an “inner”
and an “outer” aspect to this. We should help children
look inside themselves and figure out what they’re good at,
what they love, what they have passion for. And we should help them
look outside themselves to notice both needs and opportunities,
to see as big a picture as they can and to figure out where they
fit into it.
Unlike the fleas,
our children need to know that their childhood “box”
was their temporary home, where they were nurtured not so they would
stay, but so they could fly.
Unlike the fleas
in the circus, our children should perceive no roof or ceiling,
no artificial limits to their happiness or their potential.
Unlike the flea
keeper, we should set no barriers or fences to their possibilities.
(Behavioral limits—yes; barriers—no.)
Unlike the fleas,
we don’t want our children to conform and follow the same
pattern as all the others.
Unlike the fleas,
we want them to think outside the box and to dream and to believe.
Unlike the flea
keeper, we need to give them the awareness of options and opportunities
and the wide perspective that good dreams are made of.
Please visit
us at valuesparenting.com and join us for our upcoming column called
"Politics and the Family: Why the Family must be the Basic
Unit of Society."
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© 2004 Meridian
Magazine. All Rights Reserved.
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