The Barre is Low.

Parenting in a performative culture and ballet as a backdrop for what we've so clearly disconnected from.

I walked hand-in-hand with my four year old daughter toward the plastic folding table where a woman I’ve never seen before sat with a paper in one hand, pen in the other, and said to my daughter robotically, “Name, please?”.

My daughter froze. There were a hundred other kids behind the lady-we’ve-never-met-before, each of them moving through various stages of dysregulation. Some crying. Some yelling. Some laughing. Some clinging tight to their mothers. All disguised as some character or creature.

Mice.

Cupcakes.

Snowflakes.

Reindeer.

“Say goodbye to your mom now, sweetie.” The woman barked half-heartedly at my child, still tethered to my hand, now holding on a bit tighter.

“No”, I said curtly. “I’ll be staying with her.”

She rolled her eyes and gestured while muttering something about bringing her to an orange blanket strewn across the ground.

Unbeknownst to the-lady-I’ve-never-met-before, I had preemptively signed up to volunteer backstage for this supposedly low-stakes, family-friendly, shortened version of The Nutcracker.

I volunteered knowing that my highly sensitive daughter – like most HSP kids – would crumble at worst, freeze at best in a very foreign, very overwhelming environment without an attachment figure in sight.

I walked with my bewildered daughter to her color-coded blanket square where 10 other mice sat cross-legged under harsh fluorescent lighting.

The snowflakes on the neighboring blanket were equally bewildered – and also three and four years old – but the cupcakes and reindeer a few blankets down seemed to be enjoying themselves.

A booming voice broke through the buzz.

“MICE! DANCERS! THIS WAY! FOLLOW ME! RIGHT NOW! LET’S GO!”.

Eleven three-and-four year olds looked around in an attempt to contextualize the commanding voice and the bright lights and the shiny costumes…and the absence of most of their parents.

(I’m aware this isn’t going to be a popular post. I’m writing this in the midst of modernity, in a cultural context where scenarios like this happen every single day in school and sports. Kids are filed into line, coerced and cajoled, and in situations that are way outside of their developmental readiness. If you’re a parent and you’re reading this, it isn’t your fault that this is the norm. It’s a cultural failing.)

I’m not writing for popularity. I’m writing for truth. And sometimes the truth is exceedingly uncomfortable. Especially when the truth threatens the status quo. Especially when the truth coexists with oppressive realities and tangible constraints.

---

We arrived backstage to the sound of more ladies-with-clipboards giving commands and girls ranging from three to seventeen hopping, twirling, spinning, and primping.

The mice – including my daughter – looked up (from their three-foot-something vantage point) at me and the two other moms who had survived the summons and made it backstage with eyes that plead, “Is this okay? Are we okay? Is this supposed to be fun?”

They landed on yet another brightly colored blanket and were told to sit and wait for further instruction. Eight out of the eleven girls were now completely frozen. Some started to ask for their moms. Others gnawed on their nails. Every single one of them looked at the adults for cues of safety. Their eyes darted around vigilantly.

Here’s the thing about the developing brain: it doesn’t function like a mini-adult brain. The orbitofrontal cortex – the seat of logical reasoning and self-regulation – isn’t fully online. Three and four year olds are operating predominately from their survival and emotional brains; relying on a secure base (in the form of an adult attachment figure) to feel safe.

And in the absence of safety, kids move quickly into dysregulation. Fight, flight, or freeze.

Once in the throes of sympathetic overload, kids can’t “follow directions”. They can’t “learn”. And they most certainly can’t have fun.

It’s not defiance. It’s not shyness. It’s ancient wiring. It’s biology.

To move back into a safety state, most three-and-four year olds need the presence of a calm, connected adult to coregulate with.

And so I stayed. I stayed with my daughter.

Everywhere the mice and I shuffled together I fielded side-eyes and questions.

“Did you register to be a backstage mom?”

“Parents must move to the audience now!”

“Moms behind the white line, dancers over here”

“They’ll be fine, moms, you can go enjoy the show now”

THEY’LL BE FINE.

The perennial, dismissive trope of industrialized parents, it seems.

THEY’LL BE FINE screams a society in crisis.

THEY’LL BE FINE screams a generation with unprecedented rates of anxiety and depression.

THEY’LL BE FINE says the woman who is so clearly not fine – so clearly disconnected from her heartspace – that she can’t see the terror on the faces of three-year-olds.

Somewhere in our evolution (another post on exactly where in our evolution another day) we started saying silly things like this to parents. Silly tropes that help us feel better about our cognitive dissonance. About our cultural crisis.

Somewhere in our evolution (okay, I can’t resist calling out colonization here) we started disconnecting from ourselves. From each other. From our babies.

Instead of scaffolding and supporting, we started shouting and separating.

Instead of validating and connecting, we started dismissing and downplaying.

Somewhere along the way, we set the bar(re) so low that most of us have completely forgotten that three-and-four-year-olds are practically babies. In neuroscience, infancy lasts three years. These girls – some three and others four – had just moved out of infancy.

Practically babies.

The mice continued to scan the environment for cues. Were they safe? Was all of this okay?

Like mothers and grandmothers and wise women everywhere have done since the dawn of time, we – the mothers and I – began to answer with our bodies.

I got the girls giggling and moving to shake up their energy and move them out of what was, for most of them, a deep freeze response.

The other mother – who I later found out was a perinatal psychologist – enveloped the girls in storytelling, settling their bodies and distracting their minds.

And the third mother stared at us poised and perplexed, occasionally fixing a mouse's misplaced ear or straightening a bow (without any consent, of course) or beckoning someone to “stay behind the white line”.

One-by-one the mice calmed. Settled. Their pupils went back to a normal size. Their frenetic energy dropped into their tails and little space of the room we occupied suddenly felt more rooted.

Safety. Security. The mice had found their “base” – not on the orange blanket, but in the connection and coregulation of two mothers who could find their calm amidst the chaos.

And this is how it goes. This is kinship. This is what it looks like to be a social species.

This is also just kind of fundamentally…daring to do things different.

Daring to feel difficult emotions. Daring to sit in discomfort with the BIG FEELINGS of little people. Daring to do something other than dismiss or downplay or coerce or control. Daring to go directly against the grain. Daring to take up space in a crowded space where you are so clearly not welcome.

The mice stayed on their blanket listening to our stories and playing hand-games until it was their turn to step on stage.

My daughter, a highly sensitive kid with accompanying sensory sensitivities, whispered to me right as she was about to walk on, “I’m scared, mom. It’s loud”.

“It is loud. And it’s okay to be scared. I’m right here. You can do hard things, girl”.

She smiled. Then she whispered with awe, “The music is so beautiful.”

I cried. I cried for the little girl inside of me whose mother never went backstage with her, who never let her move slow and stay cautious, and for all the kids who needed their mothers but couldn’t find them amidst the sea of shimmering suits.

My daughter looked back at me one more time before she walked on stage. One more check-in. One more signal of safety.

She walked on stage and skittered with her 10 mice-mates. Her four-minute-performance might’ve been four generations or forty in the making – I’m really not sure how many centuries of women in my maternal line were told to “suck it up” and “figure it out” even at three or four.

But not my daughter. She was supported. She had appropriate scaffolding via my presence and her practices so that she could do the hard thing. She had just enough stress that it felt triumphant but not so much that it felt traumatic.

This is the balancing act of childhood. To honor their developmental readiness. To honor their individuality.

Not to push. Not to shove. Not to rush to independence or performance or whatever other “milestone” we have in our mind’s eye as critical and important.

I walked stage left (whatever that means) to receive my daughter and the other mice as they shuffled their feet around swaths of giant velvet curtains, looking desperately for someone they knew amidst the towering tall dancers.

Her eyes met mine. She leapt into my arms, ignoring the commands of the woman-with-the-clipboard who sounded more like a sergeant than a stage-manager.

“YOU DID IT, BABE!!!”

She said nothing. I set her back down to continue to walk with her mice-mates to their next destination: the de-robing line.

The mice stood one-by-one as the woman-with-the-clipboard started tugging on their costumes, undressing them without consent.

The bar(re) is low, I thought to myself.

The bar(re) is so f*cking low.

Babies in an assembly line – bewildered and not yet even celebrated – treated like inanimate objects. Like dolls in a factory.

Would it really have been too much to say, “Can I help you take your costume off now?” or “I’m going to remove your headband now”?

Would it really have been too much to spend even a second checking in with the tiny trail of humans who just walked off a 60 foot stage with strobe lights and screaming speakers to maybe, I don’t know, see how they’re doing?

The bar(re) is low.

And it’s not because we’re cruel. It’s not because we don’t care.

It’s because we’re disconnected.

It’s because we have no idea who we are anymore.

It’s because we have completely and entirely lost the forest for the trees.

It’s because we are so preoccupied with appearance and acceptability that everything has turned into a performance, even when there’s no audience.

So there’s no room anymore for little brains and big feelings.

We’ve turned all of childhood into a series of commands: Go here, do this, wear this, say this, think this, don’t do that, come here, eat this, go to bed.

There’s such little remaining room for connection. Such little remaining room for companionship.

We’ve forgotten that we are actually in relationship with our children. We are not superior. We do not have dominion over our children.

Dr. Gabor Maté is famous for highlighting how the parent-child relationship is the most important relationship we experience in our lives; how it is the lens through which we see the world.

But he also highlights that the loss of parental attachment has been so normalized in our culture that it is even celebrated, even though it is detrimental to a child’s thriving.

We are so obsessed with independence that we’ve forgotten we actually require interdependence.

We are so obsessed with “preparing our kids for the future” that we’ve forgotten we need to parent them through presence, attunement, connection, and coregulation right here, right now.

We are so obsessed with self-reliance that we’ve forgotten that independence is born through deep dependence and developmental readiness.

Our kids need us.

---

I walked with the girls back to their orange blanket where it all began – back to the ‘holding pen’ where the mice waited for their parents to pick them up.

Their parents - who dropped them off an hour ago - had absolutely no clue what happened in their sixty minutes of separation.

For some parents and kids, this is just the norm. And for some parents and kids, it’s not weird, traumatizing, or tragic. Temperament has a bigger role than Clara in a scenario like this.

But for others, what was intended to be a sweet scene of swirling ballerinas was more like a shock to the system. A series of commands from mere strangers that sent baby mice into a spiral of disassociation.

I couldn’t help but wonder – is this where we learn not to listen to our bodies? Is this where we begin to blindly obey ‘authority’?

Is this – repeated rounds of childism – where we learn to please, perform, and perfect instead of sharing our whole-selves with the people around us?

Is this where we begin to abandon our bodies because being in them is too scary?

---

The parents picked up their mice with jubilation. Dads brought flowers while moms kissed cheeks. Grandparents snapped photos.

And most of the mice hadn’t dropped back in their bodies.

Some did, surely. The neurotypical kids, the older kids, the kids whose temperaments seek the input of chaos and crowds.

But others – at least half – stayed frozen as the adults around them exclaimed things like, “you were amazing!” and “I’m so proud of you!”.

Proud for…performing?

I hold no contempt for my fellow mice-mamas. I hold no judgment. It is not the mice mothers who need to read these words.

It’s everyone else. Because my fellow mice moms – if given the choice to listen to their bodies and their ‘practically babies’ – likely would’ve scaffolded support so that it wasn’t so scary.

But each week in ballet we’re encouraged to sit outside, go next door to grab a coffee, or drop and run.

We’re encouraged to disconnect from early infancy when we’re told to ignore cries, punish with time-outs, and shut the door even if our heart breaks.

It’s the dominant culture of childism and disconnection that’s the problem. Not the parents.

The bar(re) is so low.

Do we really need three and four year olds dressed in skirts standing on stage like pawns in a play? Could we wait until they’re five, maybe? When brain volume reaches 90% of its adult size and the social-emotional abilities required to enter into complex situations without a secure attachment figure becomes slightly more tenable?

I looked around at the tiny dancers and the parents and wondered who this was actually for.

The parents or the kids? The dance studio? The community?

Performative people-pleasing. Standardized separation.

We have normalized our numbing to the point that the prevailing paradigm would read my words and likely think of phrases like “coddling” or “helicoptering”.

We are so confused – so entrenched in obedience and hierarchy – that we forgot that three and four year olds are just children. Babies, in many ways. Babies, whose brains don’t have the circuitry and capacity to remain composed in costume.

The theater fell silent as the last few mice exited the doors. I was still there to hear the silence as I sat with my daughter on an old wooden bench, debriefing on the lady-with-the-clipboard, the lights, the older dancers, and why she preferred daisies to the bouquet of roses she was handed.

We sat there – together – and I held her tiny little body as she integrated her morning.

“What did you think?” I asked, open-ended, not wanting to influence her response. My face was neutral.

She jumped up from the bench, threw her arms in the air, and said, “IT WAS SO MUCH FUN, MOM! CAN WE DO IT EVERY YEAR?!”

And just like that, the cycle was broken.

The little girl inside of me who quit ballet and jazz because she was shoved into far-too-stressful environments without scaffolding and support nodded in gratitude to me.

I held back tears as I answered the little girl in front of me:

“Sure, of course. You can do it as long as you’d like!”.

---

Here’s to hoping we remember that even (especially!) our sensitive kids – our neurodivergent kids – can do hard things, big things, and even scary things through connection and coregulation.

And here’s to hoping we remember that it is always okay to nurture. You never need to choose disconnection. Not even if there’s a lady-with-a-clipboard demanding you drop and run.

You can stay. You won’t be needed like this forever.

But for now, you can stay.