"The Children Who Want to Fly"

Children are great observers and imitators while they are growing up. They don't yet have the experience to understand the world around them, so they use their eyes, ears, smell, and touch to acquaint themselves with it. This attentive connection between their internal and external reality is part of how they learn to belong.

It is very much the same for an artist.

The horse and buggy is moving forward, the adult driver facing the road ahead, while the children ride in the open storage space at the back, looking toward us. One girl smiles. The other looks uncertain.

Perhaps they were simply waving to someone they knew. But when I first saw the photograph, I was struck by the strange reversal of direction: the adults were moving forward while the children were looking back.

It made me wonder what it means for a child to move into a future that has been largely defined by the generation before them. What do we give children to carry forward—and what do we leave them free to discover for themselves?

Art can help human beings inhabit their own moment in time. The photograph made me think about something I've been asking myself for a long time:

How do we fully belong to the world we're actually living in?

An artist observes. We look closely at what is in front of us before we know what it means. We notice the surface of a stone, the way light falls on an object, the shape of a tree, the sound of a place, the gestures of people. Through that attention, the external world begins to enter our internal one.

Anthropologist Ellen Dissanayake's writing about art and her idea of "making special" helped me think about this. Making art, listening to stories, participating in music, and the many ways human beings make and notice meaning are not merely decorative activities. They are ways we learn to inhabit the world. 

Every child has the right to belong to their own generation. That means more than simply being born in a particular year. It means receiving the knowledge, skills, and freedom necessary to participate meaningfully in the world into which they were born.

But what happens when protecting a child's culture also limits that child's access to the world beyond it?

Observing Culture

I encountered that question years ago during an internship with the Belize Audubon Society. I was building an educational exhibit, and the Audubon arranged for me to live with Miss Norma and her older daughters in Crooked Tree.

Belize is a place where many cultures meet. Mayan, Kriol, Mestizo, Garifuna, Mennonite, and other communities are part of the country's history and daily life. Each has contributed to the larger culture of Belize while retaining traditions of its own.

Crooked Tree Village, about thirty-five miles from Belize City, is known not only for its bird sanctuary but also for its mango and cashew trees and its logwood..

Miss Norma had a sweet-looking little house with red translucent curtains billowing in the breeze from her windows. My room contained only a small bed and a side table, but a local Mennonite community was making a dresser for me. We had to pick it up.

So we drove to Shipyard Colony, a highly conservative, Plautdietsch-speaking Mennonite settlement in the Orange Walk District of Belize, where people used tractors with steel wheels as well as horses and buggies.

Life seemed caught in amber. Yet even there, change was already present.

The furniture builder lamented that the old-growth timber was nearly gone. They had to travel far south for wood now, and it wasn't as beautiful.

I asked him what the difference was between the old-growth wood and the newer timber he was using. He took me upstairs to see a masterpiece his father had built from some of the remaining old-growth wood.

The old piece practically glowed with an incredible depth of time and workmanship beside a newer armoire. There was no comparison. I was looking at more than furniture. I was looking at inheritance.

The wood had come from another time. His father had worked with it. The son was now working with what remained. Even the material itself was changing.

That is one of the things I have always understood through art: materials carry time. We don't receive them exactly as they were. We encounter them where we find them, and then we make something from them.

As I admired the wood, a teenage girl walked into the room dressed in traditional clothing, wearing a sweet handmade lace bonnet over a kapp tied beneath her chin. She had seemingly just returned from church.

I greeted her and complimented her bonnet and her family's craftsmanship.

Her father stepped between us.

"Don't talk to her. She doesn't understand a word you're saying."

I was stunned.

He explained that only some of the boys were taught the local languages and English. The girls spoke only German.

I looked at him and said, "Well, that doesn't seem fair."

He ignored me completely. We walked out of the room. They loaded the dresser, and we drove back to Crooked Tree.

As we left, I wondered:

Could we preserve the beauty of a culture without trapping the next generation inside it?

That question occupied my mind for many years.

What We Inherit

I never forgot the Mennonite girl's story, partly because I had seen something beautiful there.

The workmanship was beautiful. The materials were beautiful. The care given to the traditions of making things was beautiful.

But culture is not a museum.

It is lived by people.

And people change.

Education changes a culture. Language changes a culture. Technology changes a culture. Art changes a culture. Even the materials available to a community change a culture.

Perhaps culture is always in the process of becoming something slightly different from what it was before. But change does not mean abandoning the past or forgetting our heritage. We carry what we inherit forward, allowing our understanding and our beliefs to grow and become more inclusive.

That does not make the inheritance less valuable. It makes the question of inheritance more important.

Parents don't own culture.

Teachers don't own knowledge.

Religious communities don't own truth.

They are custodians.

Each of us receives information, cares for it, and passes it on. That's a very different way of imagining our place in the world. I love history, but I don't want to live in it.

Margaret Mead observed that in a rapidly changing world, adults are, in a sense, immigrants to a future in which children are native citizens. Rather than forcing children to live by the map of our past, we can give them a firm foundation from which to navigate their own frontier. 

Perhaps it is someone who protects the conversation between them.

An Open Future

Later on, another girl's story made this dilemma vivid for me—the story of a girl who wanted to fly.

Torah Bontrager grew up in an isolated Amish community. As a young girl, she looked up at airplanes tracing lines across the sky, desperately wanting to know how they worked. But her formal education ended at the eighth grade. There was no science curriculum, no library, and no one permitted to answer her questions.

At eleven, she began planning her escape. Her first attempt brought harsh punishment, but at fifteen she finally succeeded, slipping through a bathroom window into the dark.

Yet when she stepped into the modern world, she had almost none of the tools required to navigate it. Lacking basic knowledge of finance and the social systems around her, she was vulnerable to people who took advantage of her lack of preparation.

Simply leaving one world does not automatically equip a child to survive in another.

Her story forced me back to the question:

What does a child need in order to genuinely belong to the world?

Perhaps the answer begins with how we think about inheritance.

Real inheritance isn't a mandate; it is access to possibilities.

Children are not puppets.

Culture is not property.

Knowledge is not a family heirloom to be locked in a cabinet.

Joel Feinberg's idea of a child's right to an "open future" helped me articulate something I had already been thinking: a child's future choices shouldn't be prematurely closed off before they are old enough to decide for themselves.

Children should inherit the full breadth of what human history has uncovered, not just a curated list approved by their caretakers.

Inheritance doesn't force agreement.

It grants options.

A child may eventually walk away from calculus, opera, quantum physics, abstract painting, or computers—but they should at least know those worlds exist.

Making a World Large Enough

This is where art becomes essential.

A child needs more than raw information about the world; they need ways of truly encountering it. Making art, listening to stories, singing, dancing, drawing, and observing nature give children a doorway into direct experience rather than simply a lesson about what that experience is supposed to mean.

Maria Montessori understood the importance of structured choices—giving children room to follow their curiosity within an environment designed for learning.

John Dewey imagined education as a living community rather than a museum where traditions are frozen. That distinction matters to me.

A museum can preserve the past beautifully.

But a child needs to live.

A family can pass down its ancestral language while encouraging a child to learn another. 

A community can teach its traditions alongside contemporary science. 

Traditional ways of caring for the land can exist alongside modern environmental knowledge.

None of this has to replace culture.

It can expand it.

The goal isn't assimilation. It is the ability to move between worlds without being helpless in either one.

Perhaps this is what artists have always done.

We inherit materials, techniques, images, stories, and gestures. We don't simply preserve them. We encounter them in our own time, seek to understand them, and find new ways to make them meaningful in our lives.

We can protect the roots and open the door.

Custodianship

I think the attitude we have toward our lives and the things entrusted to us carries more weight than people realize.

Ownership says: "This belongs to me."

Custodianship says: "This has been placed in my care for the time being."  A tiny shift in language changes almost everything.

A museum curator doesn't own the painting.

A librarian doesn't own the books.

A gardener doesn't own spring.

As elders, we don't own the clay of human heritage. We are temporary stewards of it. Our responsibility is to make sure every child enters adulthood ready to work with that material themselves.

How do we preserve cultural memory without confiscating a child's future?

I don't think there are easy answers.

But I do think there is a false choice we can reject.

We don't have to confine children to keep them pure, and we don't have to abandon them to a world without boundaries.

We can protect the roots and open the door.

Inheritance is never complete until it is received, questioned, and passed forward again.

I think about this every time I add my own marks before passing something on. Perhaps childhood is like that.

Children are not blocks of marble to be carved into replicas of ourselves.

They're human beings who inherit a world already in motion.

Every generation receives that world under guardianship.

Every child deserves the chance to experience it too.

Every child deserves the chance to move it forward.

Children are full of curiosity. They dream of being all sorts of things that may seem impractical or even impossible to the adults around them. Our responsibility is not to decide where that dream should take them, but to make sure they have the books, resources, encouragement, and freedom to pursue it. We can provide the ground from which they take off, but the child must navigate their own path into adulthood.

Children have not yet accumulated our long list of reasons why something cannot be done. They are naturally looking toward tomorrow. Their work is to discover what they can and cannot be. Ours is to make sure they have enough knowledge, opportunity, and room to try.

A child standing beneath an open sky doesn't yet know whether they'll become a pilot, a sculptor, a teacher, a scientist, or a poet.

They don't need to.

They simply deserve to know that the sky belongs to their time,

as much as it belonged to anyone else's.

Sherburn LaBelle

Published on Medium 

August 2026

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