Raising Tango babies

The marvelous brains of babies

A few months ago I watched a documentary series on Netflix about babies and their development. What best can you do to pass some happy time? Watch babies, cats, and maybe then some stand-up comedy. Anyway, one of the most fascinating things that I learned from it, was the abilities that a baby’s mind has. As was discovered by recent research babies can understand the differences between different languages spoken, faces seen or even animal faces seen. Of course, they can’t tell you “You are now speaking English or Chinese, etc.”… but they can understand that when you speak English it’s a different thing from when you speak to them Greek, Chinese, or any other language.

As they grow up however these unbelievable abilities of their brain are lost. To be exact the term used was pruned. This is done because of the specialization that happens due to the environment. For example, a child who listens to Greek and no other language all the time develops abilities to mimic and learn the language but this is done at the expense of the ability to recognize and mimic other languages. Similarly, they learn to distinguish faces with Caucasian characteristics and lose the ability to distinguish between faces with Asian or African characteristics. There is a trade-off happening based on the environment a child is grown up.

Fear of creation

Scientists though identified that children who received a wide range of stimuli from their environment as babies have developed better abilities in learning and adapting and in general being more resilient in life. Therefore if there is a suggestion coming from scientists is to try and provide as many stimuli as possible to your child. Bring it in contact with people of other cultures, with different languages and characteristics, with different tastes and smells, with animals and nature, etc. The more they get the better equipped they will be for their future even if they never realize it at that moment.

Broken educational systems

At some point in the TED talk I shared last week from Sugata Mitra, he is explaining that when people are threatened they kind of shut down their brains. So getting our children and threatening them with exams and failure in them, is certainly not helping their brains open up and receive the information we bombard them with. As I already wrote there he suggests letting them explore and giving them some encouragement every now and then can make learning just happen on its own.

We do follow a similar paradigm in Tango too. We don’t know how else to teach. We bombard people with information, maybe provide a space for exploration and threaten them with the milonga. Yes. The milonga is a threat to a beginner and not only. Do you remember your first time on the dancefloor in a milonga? I certainly do remember mine! I was on a quite crowded floor, in between two couples turning round and round and with my fiancee as my dance partner. I only knew how to walk and maybe lead a front ocho or so. Every single step I made was a huge achievement. I will never forget it.

Apart from all the intimidation that the practical things on the dancefloor create after some point, there is social anxiety too. Will I be accepted by this or the other dancer? Will they enjoy dancing with me? Will they want to dance again with me? Am I boring to them? … the list goes on… And I can imagine that for ladies things can be even more difficult. All in all, you take classes and learn so much information when the threat of exclusion and rejection in the milonga is always in the back of your head. Your brain shuts down, stops being able to explore, stops being able to learn, and eventually… if you don’t struggle against it… you just quit.

Tango parents

I often hear from seasoned dancers “I am not going to dance with beginners or generally people who are not at my level because… I want to have fun in the milonga… because they need to prove themselves to me… because rejection will make them stronger… they will build character… learn to work to reach me…”… the list can go on forever. So if in a tango community, the experienced members are supposed to educate somehow the newer ones, these statements seem to me equal to the following behavior. Instead of providing a wide variety of stimuli… like tastes, smells, images, people, languages, etc. to your baby, you just allow them to eat only fruits, smell only the range of smells inside a house… see only faces of your larger family group… listen to only the same language you speak. Because that’s what you do when you decline your embrace… your touch… your unique style of movement… your musicality… your dance with them. You are saying… “No… You can’t experience what this flower smells like, or what other people of different characteristics look like, or how meat tastes like, etc. “

Add to this that you are threatening them with social exclusion and rejection if they don’t prove to be worthy of your expectations and you have yourself the perfect recipe for parenting! You can just wait (as a parent), that they will somehow find their way out of this shit hole and climb up and prove that they are worthy of your attention! Would you raise your children like that? I don’t know… maybe you like this style of parenting.

Well… you could always say… I didn’t come to Tango to be a parent and get more responsibilities. I didn’t want to have Tango-babies to take care of. If so… then you have to wait till next week.

Tonight’s Goodnight Tango

Tonight’s Goodnight Tango is a letter from a prisoner to his mother. He writes to confirm if his wife left their kid in an orphanage to live with her new partner and promises to take revenge with his knife when he is out of prison. Obviously, none of all this described in the song is good parenting advice… but… in the heart of it stands the love and care of a parent for his children.

So what about you? If you are an experienced dancer, have you ever considered yourself as a parent to other members of the community? If yes… would you say you are taking care of your Tango-babies? If you are new to the community… do you have members that you see as Tango-parents? Are they loving and caring or strict and tough? Which ones do you prefer? Let me know with a comment below, an email, or a PM on Facebook… oh… and if you liked it… don’t forget to share it with your friends.