Some parts of parenting are as old as the hills

     One of the great joys of parenting is helping your child explore and learn.  Children are creative when encouraged and a great deal of mental acuity is acquired through play. 

    When I was growing up my parents had a big house and a big family.  They also had a small budget.  We did not have a lot of the toys other kids had, but we had plenty to do with my parent's help.  We had big sheets of paper to draw on and paint on, courtesy of my father's newspaper.  We had mounds of Playdough- like stuff my mother made in the kitchen with corn starch and food colouring.  We read and wrote poetry and we played a lot outdoors.

     As a child I never thought of us as having less than anyone else.  What we did have was parents who engaged us in creative pursuits and helped guide us in them.  I can to this day still hear the echoes of my mother and father's comments and encouragements that were murmured in my ear as I worked on creating.

     I never thought of my upbringing as being unique.  But to tell you the truth, I never thought of it as being universal either.

     The Rouffignac caves in the Dordogne area of France have been known since the 16th century.  In 1956 archeologists discovered that the art that adorns the walls of these caves was prehistoric.  Recently, they have discerned that much of it was done by children, guided by adults.

     The walls of the caves are soft and by pressing your fingers into the surface and dragging them channels can be cut into the face of the walls and ceiling.  These lines were first termed "finger flutings" by the Australian archeologist Robert G. Bednarik in 1986 in his study of prehistoric art found in caves throughout Europe and Australia.  For years it was thought that adults had created these images and designs.

     While there are a great many differences in the male and female anatomy, one predominate feature is finger length.  Males have longer ring fingers than females.  In studying the depth of the finger flutings these researchers determined that many of the designs were made by females.  The width of the depressions also told them that the flutings were made by a child's hand. 

     Many of the designs are on the ceiling of the cave and some are on walls six feet or more above the floor.  Researchers believe the parents of the children either held them or perhaps allowed them to ride on their shoulders to create their art.  Some designs are more precise, deeper and made with shorter strokes that indicate that an adult was guiding the young hand.  The majority of the rest are more free form lines and squiggles.  And there are some representing specific animals, obviously done by an adult.

     The researchers determined the age of the children involved by the width of the fingers that made the designs and correlated that to human development.  One budding artist from this family that lived over 13,000 years ago was a five-year-old girl. Her designs proliferate throught the caves.  There is evidence that another child, a two-year-old girl, also enjoyed creating lines.

     We will never know their names, or even if either had one.  We will never know their life stories or how long they lived.  But we do know that when they were a little girls they had at least one parent who encouraged them to play and create.  Like the millenia of children since their time, they were cared for and nurtured by a parent who loved them.

     Some things, gratefully, do not change.