Control

Control is something that I have been thinking a lot about recently. Not just in our practice working with young children, but our own personal lives as well. I don’t know about you, but I am definitely a person who likes to have control-I am working on that! I think that a lot of us are like that-at least a lot of us my age. This may be due to the fact that most of us had absolutely no control over things when we were children-no control over what we wanted to do, no control over our education, no control over our feelings (if we were even allowed to have them!). So now, as adults, we do all we can to feel some sort of control over our lives. This can lead to some not great consequences-I mean, not too many people enjoy being controlled or with a controlling person. A lot of the time, we may not even know we are doing it and when someone points it out to us, it can be jarring. We get defensive because it comes across as a negative trait. However, when we take the time to reflect on our lived experiences and figure out why we have this need to control and we can begin to recognize what this need to control is doing to us, we can begin to move away from that need to control. Now, those of us who are educators also deal with the idea of our need to control children and our classrooms. All of this comes from our lived experiences as children-both within our families and in our educational journey. Control is a cycle, like most things in life. We felt controlled when we were younger, and now we feel the need to control. But the thing about cycles is-they keep going. So if we are hell-bent on controlling our children or our students, then what else can we expect for them as they age but to have this same need for control? I think about it like this-I don’t want children to have the same struggles that I have had (and still do), so what is it that I need to do to ensure that they don’t? I need to do my own self-work and figure out where my issues come from and what I need to do to work through them not only for the betterment of my own children or the children that I am working with-but for the betterment of myself as well.