My five-year-old son walks into the living room, his arms flailing above his head, his eyes closed, as he loudly shouts “yeah, yeah, yeah!”. I ask him what he’s doing. “It’s my intro,” he says. I have no idea how he knows what an intro is or if in fact I understand his meaning of intro. “Intro,” he repeats. “For when I walk into a room.”
“Of course,” I say. “Of course.” If anyone would have an intro to announce their entrance into a room, it would be my youngest child.
My husband and I often talk about how for the first year of his life my son was very quiet. He was your typical third child - having to go with the flow meant he adapted himself to everyone else’s routine. He was a chilled out kind of baby and didn’t make much of a fuss. He would sit there quietly and take it all in, observing the lay of the land. And then he learned how to talk.
“He’s making up for it now,” we’ll say to each other, as we try to get a word in edgeways over my son’s constant patter. From the moment he wakes up until the time he goes to sleep my son has a lot of words he needs to get out. There is so much to say, so much to verbalise about the world, and so many people to meet.
This tiny extrovert is off to talk to people. Source: Supplied
This child loves interacting with people. It doesn’t matter how old they are or where they come from, my son will find a topic to chat to them about. And often the people he will talk to will be strangers.
Not everyone is receptive to a chatty little boy enquiring about their day or telling them his thoughts on the baked goods on display at a café. And I often find myself smiling and saying on his behalf that he likes a chat.
My husband who in contrast to my son, is an introvert, found it particularly hard at first. He would take our then toddler son grocery shopping and find himself drawn into multiple conversations with strangers that our son had instigated, often just by saying ‘hi!’ to people he saw.
Talking to people is my son’s favourite thing.
Talking to people is my son’s favourite thing. These days when I smile apologetically at a stranger he has started speaking to, he’ll pipe in before me and say “I like to talk!” Often the response from the stranger will be “I can see!” Other times it hurts me when people ignore him altogether. Like they can’t hear a small boy who is trying to break up their day with some chatter. That’s when I’ll apologise on their behalf to my son, “some people don’t want to chat,” I’ll say.
It’s at these moments I’ll notice how not long from now my son will see the reality of the world. How very soon he’ll come to notice that not everyone is nice and not everything is bright and happy and full of rainbows.
As my youngest and last child I want him to still see the world as a magical place, at least while he still can. I’ve seen in my older children how they’ve changed themselves to fit into a bustling city life – knowing to not talk much in public because some people in our cities don’t like the sounds of small children and to not even make eye contact with people on the street. These adjustments came over time as they moulded themselves fit into big city life. But they weren’t as extroverted as my youngest to start with.
I don’t consider myself to be particularly extroverted – though I have my moments.
I don’t consider myself to be particularly extroverted – though I have my moments. I would say I sit somewhere in the middle like most people. But seeing my son, I can say I don’t get nearly as much enjoyment from socialising as he does.
I’m particularly thankful however, to strangers who actively participate in keeping the magic alive for my son. The other day as I was looking through my bag for something, I looked up to see my son had scooted over to a sushi place and was having a nice chat with the owner who proceeded to make him a box of baby sushi rolls. Then there was the barista who invited my son behind the counter to help him pour milk into our coffees. And the construction worker who stopped to have a chat with him before rushing into the site and bringing back my son his very own pair of safety glasses that my son plays with to this day.
As a family we aren’t particularly loud so we never expected that our youngest child would turn out to be such a 'people person'. Watching him interact with people without any expectations or any pre-formed biases has helped me too, because I see now that there is still magic in the world. And that even though I fear one day he will see the world for what it is, I hope that a part of him retains the belief that everyone is nice, if you only give them a chance to be.
