One of the things I enjoy most in life is spending time with my 7 year old son drawing. We draw everywhere and anywhere. For him, it's an extension of this fantasy world in stories that he creates with my wife and I, where each of us acts out different characters. Sometimes we do it with action figures, other times with character cards (Pokemon), with drawings we create, or just walking around telling stories out loud.
I love the story telling, but what I really enjoy most is when we create these characters on paper. One thing I've always done with him is to show him characters in different states of emotion, sometimes putting them in comic strips. The simple way is through the eyes and mouth. A drawing teacher I once had, who taught Manga cartooning illustrated this clearly to me, and I passed it to my son.
One day, he was telling stories with this Ugly Doll, named Chuckanucka, and through the story the character went through several emotions. He started showing them by doing the lines we use over the eyes using his fingers. I thought that was pretty cool.
Storyboarding and games
My son, has been asking us to tell stories about various characters he likes from TV or from video games. In recent months he's also been making up his own stories, so I've been helping him to record them in story board form. This story board is the latest evolution of a story he's telling about a character from a game on my T-Mobile Sidekick phone called Bob. Bob is a ball that bounces around from world to world trying to avoid sharp things that can pop him. His goal is to find his little girl friend.
It's a lot of fun for me to do this because it helps him visualize the stories he creates with his imagination. In the beginning he was asking us to tell him stories, but it's really nice to hear his stories, especially for the games. They're often very different, but simple worlds that would be fun to play if they were ever realized. He still does ask us to tell him stories, but somehow I find his to be much more exciting.
Story telling, game playing and literacy
We did a variation of this kind of story recording a few months ago where he would make up sentences and I would type them on my Mac. Then we would have the Mac speak the sentences for us. We mostly got to laugh at the way the computer spoke, but he also got to type letters. He's actually been able to type his name for a few months now. It's funny that the first time I saw him write a word was to type it rather than to write it. He does write letters on his Magnadoodle, but since games are his thing, it's not surprising that he learned to memorize words while playing a game.
Banner ads are good for something
Another interesting technology-related story has to do with how L is starting to recognize letter forms. Last summer he was picking out the word "pizza", I think because of the occurrence of the double z in the middle of the word. We had been playing a game by Living Books called "Arthur's Reading Race" and pizza comes up there often. But he had read it in another context, so I could only guess that he remembered it from that game.
Another funny example happened last week when we were in my home office. I had this screen up on my Mac because I was browsing Moviefone for movie listings in the neighborhood.
When he was playing he was looking at the screen and said, "That says, 'No'". I looked up to see the big word No in the banner ad on the right. I guess banner ads are good for something. I think that one is easy to recognize because on games you are presented with a dialog window asking you to answer yes or no.
The article e
Last funny tech-related reading bit is that inexplicably, L started substituting the letter E for the words A and The. So he'll say something like "here's e toy for you". Hearing "e" after all of the words, I feel like he would have been a good person to go to during those .com days, because he's come up with some interesting e words. Though, it seems nowadays, the only "e" brand that sticks in my mind is eBay. Anyway, that's enough for now.
Yesterday we were sitting on some steps eating a popsicle when Lorenzo noticed the FedEx logo on a truck across the street.
He remarked, "They look like they're dancing -- those letters -- because they're sticking together."
:)
Lorenzo has been doing this thing where he picks up on pieces of conversations we have and repeats part of it. Yesterday Lorenzo overheard me saying, "I have my doubts" and then stated, "No, I have your doubts". Later he came up to me and grabbed at my belly, telling me, "I caught your doubts," as you would do when you grab at a child's face and say "I got your nose!" So we ran around, taking each other's doubts. If only it were that easy to get rid of one's doubts!
I recently read a passage on education referring to John Holt's ideas about parenting. I thought it might be a good idea to capture this quote, in which Holt says:
"If I had to make a general rule for living and working with children, it might be this: be wary of saying or doing anything to a child that you would not do to another adult, whose good opinion and affection you valued."
This is the golden rule of reciprocity applied to parenting. I wanted to quote the above because it continues the theme from the compassion entry I wrote last week. Once you hold to this belief, it becomes extremely difficult to justify any kind of coerciveness over behaviors that simply do not harm the child or another person.
Wayne Dunn's article on "progressive education" in the school systems discusses the origin and obsession of school educators with socialization as the primary goal of grade school education. Dunn writes, "the socialization mongers are busily sacrificing kids' minds for the sake of society." I cannot agree more with this. After spending a good deal of time reading through the arguments over home schooling in an Internet Infidels forum -- and finding great pleasure in the articulate postings of Lisa Pea (Elisabeth Higgins) -- I find myself more and more turned off with people citing socialization as the key benefit to conventional public schooling.
Dunn provides some background information on progressive education to help readers understand why and how educators have become obsessed with using this idea as the central focus of grade school education.
The shortage of factual content in public schools is no accident. It's a consequence of a doctrine of education teachers themselves learn in the universities, called "socialization."
The socialization approach, known by the innocuous title "Progressive education," has dominated the educational establishment ever since philosopher John Dewey ushered it in early last century. According to Dewey, the purpose of school is to encourage "the child's own social activities."
"The mere absorbing of facts and truths," Dewey maintained, "is so exclusively individual an affair that it...tends toward selfishness. There is no obvious social motive for...mere learning, there is no clear social gain in success thereat."
Imagine if Galileo had spurned the "mere" truths of astronomy in order to bow to his era's social standard, Church dogma.
I'm glad to finally know where this "socialization" idea as it refers to education comes from because it gets thrown around liberaly by people who argue that home schoolers will fail to benefit from the great socialization lessons learned in school. It's difficult to avoid the "What about socialization" question when you talk to someone about homeschooling. But, being people who favor ideas that are viewed as fringe, such as home schooling and even attachment parenting, we're used to these types of questions. The people who ask them, on the other hand, have read very little about what they question and, it appears, have thought just as little about the issues as well. Martha Ransom provides an interesting response to people who ask the question, "What about socialization?"
Oh, I think the word you are looking for is socializing. Socialization is actually defined as the process by which the norms and standards of our society are passed from one generation to the next. I've never really thought that a complete strangers six-year old child would be a good source of information on the correct standards of behavior in our family and in society as a whole.
Harsh! Not what I would choose to say. In general, I think, people refer to socialization as the process of learning to engage in social activities. Socializing is quite precise, but people refer to socialization as if it were meant to convey some different meaning. In the final analysis, I take the meaning of socialization to be teaching children for 12 or so years to conform rather than to be individuals.
Groups of people who riff on the socialization and education aspect of Dewey summon the "S word" in arguments about home schooling, calling it the key benefit of school and one of the main reasons why home schooling is a bad idea. Socialization is the most important aspect of education? Wow. I agree with those people who thought that learning would be the most important aspect of education. To prounounce the importance of only one aspect of childhood development, very often misses the fact that the imparting of knowledge to students is as important if not more important than learning to be socially adept. Why is it so difficult to try to take a holistic view of education and not deem one approach to learning as right and another wrong?
In the Internet Infidels thread, a few people have actually claimed to prefer to be socially adept and stupid than to be smart and socially inept. Wow! I find that sad. I personally don't see why one can't become both, especially as someone who lives in a busy and culturally diverse city that offers social opportunities every time we walk out our apartment door. But besides the fact that I refuse to generalize here about what works best for whom, I know that what some kids learn from school socializing is how to be treated like a social outcast, how to deal with cliques (avoiding them or trying to join them), and how to supress individuality to become more accepted. Some kids learn how to overpower others and use power to be cruel. Some kids experience this. Other kids escape unscathed and are able to survive the social life of school.
The thing that I find particularly irksome is that when people talk to you about school and you mention your interest in home schooling, without knowing your child and his needs, they are very often quick to try and pursuade you away from it because of this socialization issue. It's truly amazing, the amount of unsolicited advice you begin to get when you become a parent. Such generalizations with an ignorance to individual needs don't interest me, but a well-rounded education on my part of what our options are does. With every piece of literature or email discussion that I read that informs my growing capability to parent, I become more and more equipped to debate in public the ideas we are forming and the decisions we are trying to make to support our child without conforming to conventional practice.
(Thanks, Daryl Cobranchi for the link.)
Jaime O'Neill's article in SFGate discusses the "dumbing down" of education in America. The title, "Nearing the 'claps of civilization'", refers to the kinds of spelling errors the author/teacher sees regularly in student writing. O'Neill provides us with some interesting anecdotes illustrating the kind of education many high school and college students have been getting in the U.S. these days. In one story, a student makes it through a college anthropology course, but thinks she's been studying "anthology". If you believe the kids he's talking to represent average American students, then their level of ignorance and apathy should cause some concern. It seems, in general, that O'Neill's students regularly fail to identify what we might consider very important basic historical and present day facts and have extrememly limited vocabularies. But more importantly for me, it calls into question the kind of attention that is being paid to children's education.
I shouldn't be too surprised at all of this, however. Just last week, I heard someone say she wasn't good at geology when asking where a country was located. She, of course, was referring to geography. In a senior art history seminar in my undergraduate program, one of the students was presenting a paper on the French illuminated manuscript, Les très riches heures du Duc de Berry. A book of hours is a prayer book that is painted with religious images. Anyway, she kept referring to the book as the "Three richest hours". I guess she was thinking this was a Spanish manuscript and that she could somehow get away with guessing a Spanglish translation. In French, it's actually translated as "the very rich hours". What never happened during the course of this uncomfortable lecture was that the professor never corrected her. Perhaps the prof. didn't want to embarass her, but this was a senior seminar! Wasn't she paying tens of thousands of dollars a year to be guided in her education? She probably still thinks the book is about the "3 richest hours" of prayer.
If what O'Neill describes is the general state of literacy and education with a large portion of American kids, I can't help believing that too many public schools are failing our children. I wonder how much this implied epidemic of poorly read and unlearned kids has to do with a laissez faire approach on the part of parents and educators to being involved in their children's lives.
Homeschooling parent, Sarah, reminds of a very important point when it comes to parenting:
You can't play games with readiness. That's been my one of my Most Important Parenting Lessons (and one which I, apparently, need to learn over and over again). Kids are, or are not, ready.
...
Readiness simply comes of its own accord. You can lay the foundation, but no game, no trick, no bribe can make an unready child ready. Those things are approaches or motivators; they don't flip the switch inside their brain, or body, or heart. They'll be ready when they're ready. And because we're impatient, or we believe we know better, or that we're more powerful/ influential than we are, we struggle to learn this lesson. But go ahead and learn it. You're ready.
This is another one of those key ideas in parenting that I always need reminding of and is also related to compassion and respect. Thankfully, Robin does a good job of reminding me. If you let your child lead, s/he will always be more comfortable with whatever it is that s/he is beginning to learn to do or undo. If *you* lead, there is always the possibility of unseen consequences or repurcussions. The above is also quite true with regard to readiness in adults.
I recently read a short interview with author and kirtan chanter Bhagavan Das, in which Das was quoted as saying, "The only religion is compassion". I like this quote because it cuts to the essence of what many religions are truly about in spirit, although, sadly, this is often lost in practice. Reacting to this interview, I started imagining what it would be like if the idea of compassion as the guiding principle could be applied to different belief systems. Religion seems like a good belief system to test, but more interesting to me would be to see how one could put to test the conventional Western parenting I experienced and still see children experiencing today. How does compassion figure into the belief system that guides our relationships with children? How does conventional Western parenting test against this principle?
One of the most important relationships I have where compassion plays a large part is with my son. In the playground recently I was watching my son approach another child that was crying, trying to console him. I said to my wife, "if compassion were the only religion, then maybe the best teachers would be children". At the moment I was thinking about how easy it can be for kids to openly express compassion. But, perhaps the main reason our son can be compassionate is because he's been treated respectfully and we've taken all of his emotional expressions seriously. I believe one of the biggest things I can do as a parent is to acknowledge the seriousness of every childhood drama and help our little one to talk through his feelings. By being compassionate towards him, we are helping him learn compassion by example and by experience. If all you have experienced is compassionate treatment, empathy and respect, then it is likely that you will treat others in this way. The same might be true on the opposite side of the coin. Treating children cruelly or being indifferent to their emotional needs may certainly lead to cruel behavior or an insensitivity to others' needs.
As people that were raised during a time when most conventional parenting seemed to consist of coerciveness (crying it out, etc.) and corporal punishment (spanking, time outs, etc.) in the guise of "doing what's best" and "not spoiling", my wife and I worked hard to talk about what we believe before our son was born and continue to refine these beliefs as we care for him. Our beliefs have been influenced by many writers, parents and communities whose ideas break cleanly with the practices used in the conventional Western parenting we grew up with. It's been important to us that we break the cycle of unfeeling, uncompassionate parenting that is still the convention today. Among the beliefs guiding the style of parenting we and many enlightened parents today espouse, compassion is one of the most important principles, with non-coercion and respect being some of the supporting practices.
So how can we put compassion to the test with regard to parenting philosophies? What if the book of conventional Western parenting wisdom were revised to only contain the word "Compassion". How would this type of parenting be affected? Well, perhaps you'd then have to throw out all coerciveness, all punishment, all manipulation of truth. Perhaps you'd have to begin treating children as respectfully as you treat other adults or as you would like to be treated yourself. And you may have to scrap that book of conventional Western parenting all together and start over, because compassion doesn't seem to be what guides a lot of its practices.
What I began to realize while caring for my son in this way was that much of the parenting style that I experienced and still witness has to do with making the lives of parents easier or with adhering to convention, rather than with taking seriously the feelings and needs of children. Realizing this, it is easy to say to one's self, "I'm going to be different and take what my child says seriously". But, in practice, it can be difficult. Maybe it will help to examine daily practice in compassionate reflection of your child's expressed needs while parenting and comparing these with your beliefs and common sense. This is something I need to do individually and with my wife to understand how we are doing.
We're used to being told all of the things we can and cannot do, but how often are these things driven by parents' or society's conventions rather than on acceptance of the expressed needs of the child? This is where compassion comes into play. There are so many times that I've had to go back and revise what I've said could or could not be done because, when I stop to question, "Why?" or "Why not?", the answer is almost always about me trying to fit us into society's mold rather than considering the acceptability of a situation and simply saying, "OK, why not? There's no reason you can't". After all, if a child really wants to, why can't he eat ice cream before dinner, or go outside without a coat on? Eventually their bodies will get hungry for better nourishment and will tell them when they're too cold. There are of course behaviors that we may have to coercively stop from time to time for the safety of our children, including stopping your when they're in imminent danger, e.g. when a child is runs into a street. Marshall Rosenberg talks a bit about the protective use of force in a chapter of his book "NonViolent Communication". Some of these issues should be obvious and is perhaps one of the few exceptions you might make with regard to coercion. But it's also important to be aware that situations that you may think are dangerous can be learning experiences that you can help your child with. For example, my wife's gotten good at helping our son climb onto her shoulders so that he stands on them like a little circus performer. This makes me nervous to no end, but when done safely, he gets to express his need to be physical, to have fun and maybe to get a different perspective.
I will admit that following through with a belief system based on compassion can be difficult in practice. It is difficult to break the cycle of even mildly coercive parenting styles. At times it is hard, and we often get judgement and unsolicited advice in the observation of our parenting style. But even in the face of this judgement, we continue to work at making our child's expression of his needs the important focus before considering anything anyone tells us. Even ideas that seem to be accepted truths can be broken down under scrutiny. So we scrutinize. When someone challenges us, because we've spent to much time looking closely at, researching and breaking down old ideas, we're more able to come back with a kindly worded, yet confident and educated retort. At other times, especially when confroted by unsolicited advice from strangers, we simply ignore the people, for their snap judgements and ignorance.
I think as long as compassion and the expressed needs of the child are always considered, you can't go wrong, and in the end parenting is a process -- an evolving learning experience that is particular to you and your child. But there is no reason to accept convention. We need to test conventions against common sense and to consider what the foundations for our beliefs are. The goal is providing a safe and supportive environment for your children that will help them to discover and express their needs, to become a naturally healthy child. Compassion provides one of the strongest components of your parenting foundation.
"Plick" is a cute computer mouse-related word that Lorenzo has been using. It's a combination of "pick" and "click", as in, "I'm going to plick this one". It's similar to "da-mee", another combination word he sometimes uses when he starts to say daddy, but is talking to mommy. He repeats it once he realizes the mistake, because he knows it makes us laugh.