From Uber Facts: The average child wears down 720 crayons by their 10th birthday.
For those of you with small children, or expecting to have small children, you might consider heading to a discount store and buying all 720 right now.
Grandparents and future grandparents: want to be even more of a hero than you are already? Buy crayons. Can you believe each kid uses that many crayons? I hope there aren't more kids eating crayons than I remember. Maybe there are a lot of ‘shut up and color’ lesson plans we didn’t suspect.
I used to spend a lot of time with crayons when I was younger and when I was a new parent. In fact for those of you who are fascinated by my color-blindness, I learned I was color blind in kindergarten when I struggled with the blue and purple crayons.
In fact, for those of you who are fascinated by my color blindness, my son Joe is my official color-validator for all clothing and has been since he could talk. I won’t go shopping without him.
For no apparent reason, one day I started wondering about why there may not be a single Crayola in our house. Crayons are still easy to buy, I think they are inexpensive, and there are lots of books you can get to color, as well as walls to color. Why don’t I use crayons anymore? As a four year old, I couldn't live without them. Why don’t YOU use crayons anymore? (If you do, I'll keep your secret.)
Let me count the reasons for abandoning such colorful items.
FIRST: CRAYONS HAVE A VERY LIMITED USE: Crayons are not good tools for the type of communication or artistic efforts we engage in as we grow. They are not very precise, they leave a residue, they require a lot of paper for a small message. They are not renewable. Can you imagine how large your briefcase or backpack or handbag would need to be to hold all the crayons you'd need to get through the day?
SECOND: CRAYONS ARE VERY SLOW: Most parents might sometimes wish they were even slower so that pages would take more time to color. When we were younger, we weren’t in as much of a hurry because we didn’t have a next place to go or a next thing to do. I know I didn't have a wristwatch when I was four. Maybe five, but definitely not four. Most of our day was decided for us, so we went along for the ride. Can you imagine how long it would take to write ‘War and Peace’ in crayons? (Note, I have never read War and Peace, but I know it is a long book, anyone who has read it is welcome to correct me.)
THIRD: CRAYONS ARE VERY INEFFICIENT: Crayons have a doomed storage system. With the first stroke, capacity drops. While a crayon may start out fully wrapped at a robust three inches, it is misleading. You cannot use for all three inches. You have to stop with a minimum of about a half an inch remaining, and using it at that length takes work and super small hands and that is only if you are desperate.
Most crayons are tossed away with an inch or so left. Have you ever thought about all the 1" crayons that are perfectly usable but thrown away because they are unusable? Not to mention the ‘peeling the crayon’ hassle as it wears down. Once that peeling started and I couldn’t read the color, I was in real trouble.
FOURTH: CRAYONS ARE VERY FRAGILE: If the crayon breaks because of pressure, you are left with two pieces to work it out or to throw out and your loss is more significant than at first glance. Now you have two 1.5-inch crayons that you are going to pitch after using about 1/2 inch of wax. What a waste.
A classic book,
Who Moved My Cheese? (link provided) by Spencer Johnson is an allegory about changes in our world and clinging on to the past when they change.
To a four year old girl or boy, Who Took My Crayons? is a better allegory and similar because both questions are backward facing instead of forward looking.
If you told a four-year-old s/he couldn’t use crayons anymore, they might think it was the end of the world and throw a tantrum or two. Is that what you're going to do when everything isn't the same in your world moving forward? If so, let me know YOUR tantrum techniques and I'll write about them.
The truth is we don’t use crayons anymore because they have limited use, are slow, inefficient, and fragile. Just as we have ‘outgrown’ crayons, we all will be leaving some other things behind in the next year as/if the pandemic wears down. We have outgrown some things and some things have outgrown us.
Change isn’t always good, but without change, nothing grows. Not organizations, not people, not toddlers. Little did you know that life after crayons had pencils, pens, markers, typewriters (for me), keyboards, tablets, and hand-held devices. Imagine what you would have missed if you were still insisting on using crayons?
Guess what? The stark reality is that the pandemic not only moved your cheese, it took your crayons.
The more important question, in my mind, is not what was moved or taken, but rather what are you going to do about it? You have the rest of your life to figure out the cheese and crayons part, but time is passing you by if you spend it on those questions right now.
Optimistically, today's pandemic will probably create the same type of efficiency leaps we’ve have already experienced many times, and require everyone to repurpose skills, time and effort. You've done it before: your thumbs were critical at one time for holding crayons and you have successfully repurposed them to text on a smartphone.
So, as you go through the next year, as changes to your routine and lifestyle are made by you, for you and to you, as your cheese is moved and your crayons taken away, my suggestion is that you make your own choice: keyboard or crayon, stay the same or grow. And remember that as a four year old, you were probably very successful at dealing with a new, crayon-less, normal, and you turned out ok.
