Up through the significant ages

I'll shortly be heading off overseas for a month's holiday and three significant birthdays.

The first will be a 7-year-old's: significant because, by 7, many character traits he will exhibit as an adult will have been formed by his life experience to date.

Partly shaped by the school system for two of those years, but shaped at home with Mum and Dad for all seven.

There's a great deal of truth in the Jesuit maxim, ''Give me a child until he is 7 and I will give you the man''.

I'm looking forward to spending some time with this young man as he begins his journey towards adolescence and away from ''childish things'' over the next seven years.

The second will be a 21st birthday celebration.

While ''coming of age'' is a term with no great meaning these days and the ''key of the door'' has usually been issued many years previously, what does have meaning is the celebration of a young person's life to date.

The acknowledgement of their growing up and of the hard work of their parents over those years.

It's the key to their future that is now fully in their hands.

It's a time for both celebration and reflection: for Mum and Dad to sit back and look at what they have produced and for the young adult to reflect on the input and sacrifices that their parents have made.

As parents, we're preparing for this day from the moment our children are conceived.

The words of Kahlil Gibran, read at another 21st I attended, sum this up so well:

''Your children are not your children.

They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.

They come through you but not from you.

And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,For they have their own thoughts.

You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.

For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.''

It's not a severance that's being celebrated but an independence within the caring love of the family unit.

It's through the love you have given them that the connection remains for the rest of your life and theirs.

At times the child-rearing years may seem endless, but 21 years go very fast when you start looking back.

Make the best of the good times; enjoy your children.

Regularly take some time to stand and look at them when they're asleep, just to remind yourself that you do love them.

And the third birthday?

It's a 40th. Forty years.

One, two, seven, 14, 21, 30, 40.

Just where did they go?

Ian Munro 

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