Grasshopper New Media Presents...

My husband is working toward a doctorate, and the nature vs. nurture debate is a hot topic among his particular academic set. Are we programed from birth to be a musician? An artist? An actuary? Or are we tabula rasa, wating to be molded by our environment?

Debates like this leave me thankful I am not pursuing a career in such ephemera. It would drive me mad to argue a point all day, only to be left with the notion that it is all as yet unexplained. I don’t fancy the idea that the Universe is inexplicable.

Nonetheless, I look at The Poo and I wonder - who are you? Where did you come from? And how are we influencing your future?

The child is smart (I’m sorry, I can’t be modest) and she is crazy confident. Her ease among strangers is foreign to me. I chose writing as an avocation because it was easy to hide behind a keyboard, the wry observer. Working as a reporter was terrifying. I spent the first year overcoming a paralyzing desire to do all my reportage over the phone. I eventually learned to don the required outgoing persona of a journalist, like an itchy sweater, and off it came at night when I got home. Never a social butterfly, I eventually found love through a familiar faceless medium and met my husband via a newspaper personal ad.

But my daughter is comfortable in her skin, and a trip to the library nets new friends in a matter of minutes. By the time I get down the steps and make my way to the play area, she is clasping some little person’s hand and shouting, “C’mon! Follow me! Let’s play, hurry!”

At restaurants she flirts outrageously with the server and adjacent diners, even going so far as to bat her eyelashes. She never seems to forget the faces of relatives who live far away, and even the teacher at the drop-in babysitting service called her “independent and social” after just 25 minutes.

“She’s already knows everybody’s name!” the young woman told me.

My husband is more extroverted than I, but he chooses to labor in the closed community of academia and that speaks volumes about his personality. He prefers the company of books, and of the bookish.

After all this, where do I stand on the debate? Do I believe The Poo came to us fully formed and ready to make friends and influence people? Do I believe that our determination to open her world as wide as possible and our unconditional love gives her the confidence to leave herself vulnerable to new experiences and friends?

I just don’t know.

Where do you stand? How is your child different than you, and do you ever marvel at the mysteries of the universe that make it so?

Photo courtesy of Eris23, used under a Creative Commons License.

[tags]nature versus nurture, child, parent, husband, wife[/tags]