Five

Jasmine turned five yesterday.

How do you know when your kid is five? That's the question I put up in the Facebook on my daughter's birthday.

What's so eerie about this question is that I don't quite know how to answer it.

Many parents have trouble with telling how five-year-olds should be different from those below five - some kids, too. I have no problem with the grey zone. What's wrong, I believe, is to prescribe the milestones and be obsessed with the yardstick.

What could be luckier for a five-year-old than to make the strides at one's own pace? I went to my daughter's school on her birthday, and found all those different traits. Some kids are mastering the monkey bar skills at a level that is supposed to be attained by gorillas. A few of them are even more skillful than great apes.

So what? We're not supposed to compare children to each other. And not even to our closest evolutionary cousin.