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I came across Richard A. Steele, Jr.'s story of a small boy who dropped by his grandparents in the farm. At the backyard, the boy saw a locust, struggling to break out from its shell. What surprised me from Steele's story was the intervention of the grandfather who prevented the boy from helping the poor locust to come out from its shell. The grandpa told the boy that he would "hurt the locust and did more harm than good", if he helped the poor insect. This is a wonderful insight for parenting. All too often, parents pamper their child by being so cautious and protective of their children that it is no longer has a chance to learn from its personal experiences. Oftentimes, we can do more help by leaving a child alone, which means allowing it sometimes to fall, get dirtied and fumble. The famous Brazilian pedagogue Paulo Freire calls this kind of upbringing of children as “co-intentional education” which lets a child work out its own problem and not allows it to acquiesce to the "culture of silence" and submission. Co-intentional, because parents learn also from doing the act of parenting. In fact, Europeans are quite particular about not forcing a child to do something. They put a high premium on individual freedom. In the scripture, we oftentimes encounter the Greek word “Kairos”, which means the right time, when salvation is revealed to us. The right time is not forced, it just flows like honey. Photo credit: Pixabay