It used to be a normal question: how are you? To a modern parent you now have to ask a different question: how are your children? The answer to that question tells you how old the child is. The order is something like this: first the child can walk unnaturally early, then it learns to read and write at an exceptionally young age, then the selection for the selection team of the sports association follows, followed by admission to the gymnasium or, if that fails, at least the atheneum and eventually, when they leave the parental home, they go to a highly regarded university – preferably, temporarily or otherwise, in the United Kingdom, France or the United States.
Rule #1: The answer to the question of the children’s well-being should never be about how they are really doing. Their well-being should always be expressed in measurable performance. But what if there aren’t any?
When do you first see that things are going differently than according to the rules of the modern parent? With our youngest son, Samuel, this happened in group 3. In groups 1 and 2 it is nice to play, in group 3 achievements are expected: progress in reading and writing. Samuel did not participate in what was expected of him at school.
As a modern parent you have to have an investigation carried out, at a scientific level. The result: Samuel falls into the autism spectrum disorder category. You can’t tell by his appearance and it’s not that he isn’t smart, just his way of thinking doesn’t fit into the system. At his primary school, they first tried to put the euphemism ‘gifted’ on him – the sticker used for children who are not doing well at school.
Other modern parents asked: autism, are you already participating in that game with all those words that did not exist in our youth? They wanted to be quite modern, but that had to be done within the limits of what was considered comfortable. We had to explain to those modern parents: we know that nowadays all kinds of names have been coined that we did not know before and we can sometimes laugh about that, but this does not mean that nothing is wrong with Samuel.
How is he doing? Good. Samuel is cheerful, sweet and loves to tell stories
He went to another school, for special education, among other kids who don’t look like anything and who are smart enough, just not in a way that fits the mainstream school system.
For modern parents, including some of my closest friends, this was the signal: the safest thing to do is to stop asking how Samuel is. First brag about your own children, then perhaps inquire about Samuel’s brother and then keep quiet, knowing that by modern standards there is no bragging material available about Samuel.
How is he doing? Good. Samuel is cheerful, sweet and loves to tell stories. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of cartoons and studies in great detail how they are made. He wants to become a filmmaker in the future. The title of the first story he wrote is: Egg Wiebel Underpants has the blues† Throughout the day, Samuel asks questions such as, “Is nothingness a word? Then why isn’t everything a word?” He likes to dance, just not in front of other people. “I’m a lone dancer.”
But he’s also going to high school in a while and he doesn’t know what his birthday is because Samuel isn’t interested in days of the week or names of months. 2022 means nothing to him, he does not want to tell the time or know what you can buy for 5 euros. In contrast, by watching YouTube, he taught himself accent-free American English and a year later can quote word for word what it said on page 248 of part 3 of The crazy tree house†
Every night before I go to sleep, I walk to his room to kiss his cheek. Samuel lies there so nice and safe and says that he wants to live in this house forever. But as a modern parent I also think: how can that be, if first his grandfathers and grandmothers and later his father and mother are no longer there, who is going to take care of him? Can he do that himself?