Can we label children?

During the first few weeks at Navakriti, Lakshmi turned rebellious at home.
"I'm not a good girl" she told me once when I requested her to do something.

I was having a tough time. She usually understood if we reasoned with her unless she was very hungry or tired. But now she seemed to burst into tears if we mildly suggested that doing something may not be a good idea. I had been leaving her at day care too. I told the teachers at Navakriti and they assured me that she was fine at school.

One day I came early to day care. The children were around the table and were going to paint. Lakshmi was standing on the table and thumping. One or more children joined in.

"Kaun achhe bache neeche aayenge?" the facilitator chimed.
"Lakshmi Gandhi bachi hai" joined in Chinmoy because she had not got down.

I saw the now familiar rebelliousness on the face. The thumping increased and she was doing something vigourously. Because I was familiar with she reads I realised what was going on.

"What are you trying to do Lakshmi?" I asked gently.

"I'm trying to put the fire out. This is water" she piped in making hosing actions with some prop she had picked up.

"But when there is a fire, you have to put water from below up" I offered. She got down from the table.

After a while, when she wanted to get on to the table again I asked her if she wanted to dance and I took her out to the cement ledge in courtyard and I sat a level below. That was her stage.

"But see, it doesn't thump!" she complained.

We searched for all high places but none of them thumped but now the game had shifted to look for thumping.

The problem here was that she was dancing on the table because an African American girl called Tumpie learns to dance by observing people in jazz bars and listening to music and one day she dances on a table. This is the biography of Josephine Baker who went on to become a famous dancer.

The book has extremely moving paintings and the one where Tumpie dances on a table spontaneously in a crowd, where a jazz band is playing, and is discovered is particulary engaging and we have been looking at it for many weeks. Tumpie could not do anything wrong for Lakshmi.

When she tries to dance on our dining table I have been telling her that our round table has only one leg and it will become wobbly. It is not strong enough.

It has been nearly a year now and Lakshmi still remembers what had happened. We were watching "Taare Zameen Par" for the nth time and the song Bum Bum bole.
the children are dancing on the table and Aamir Khan, the teacher is around and urging the orderly kids to loosen up...
"See, they are dancing on the table..." she pointed out. "But they are not Gandhe bache..."
A huge lesson for me. I am never going to call something wrong or right but figure out what a child is trying to do.