Free Children

Emotional resilience

May 192013

I want to help my kids to be the best they can be. It’s the reason I do the things I do. It seems to me that most parents do the same thing. We’re all trying to do what’s best, but we have different things that we think will be best for them.

I think that many people think that its important to push kids to do the things that they want them to do as adults, such as study and sit and do a lot of work. They feel that training kids early to do these adult things will help them be comfortable with and better able to do them when they become adults.

I, on the other hand, feel that the best way that I can prepare my kids to be good adults is to prepare their brains and emotional skills. I feel that many people get stuck and blocked due to emotional issues taking precedence. It’s so basic that it’s hard to move on if you’re stymied by emotional issues. Most other things can be dealt with when they become adults relatively easily except for these emotional issues.

I am working to bolster my kids’ most basic foundation with a high-level emotional foundation and skills so that they have the basics to take on whatever they want to.

Research shows that there are certain emotional things that provide resilience to children and adults. I can’t predict what my kids will want to do in life or what challenges they’ll encounter, but I feel that it’s important to give my kids the resilience and basic emotional skills they’ll always be able use in whatever situations they’re in. When I have to consider whether it’s more important that they learn how to write a 5 paragraph essay or know how to solve social problems I’m much more concerned with the latter. I feel like the is a far more difficult skill to master as well as more important in more arenas as an adult. It’s not that I don’t find essay writing to be a great skill. I have found great uses for it, but I find it to be a more narrow skill and one easier to pick up in a shorter amount of time when the need arises.

Screen Time

Trusting No Responses »

May 032013

Whenever I tell people that I don’t restrict “screen” time I get looks of pity from people. Some slowly explain to me how video games will rot my children’s brain and that children are not yet able to moderate their own “screen” time and provide balance and it’s not good for a growing brain and so on and so forth. I generally try to nod submissively and end the conversation there because I’ve heard this enough to know that since there’s been almost no research done on this, I won’t get anywhere. So I will try to make my argument here using a completely unscientific, non random sample of one child.

My children currently play an online game called Minecraft. At the time that I’m writing this it’s massively popular with people of all ages, all over the world. It’s considered a “sandbox” type of multiplayer game. It’s extremely complex where people can sign in to the game and build environments where they can interact with each other and form groups with people from anywhere in the world to work together or against each other to build fortresses or destroy them or do many other types of things that they choose. I, myself, have not gotten intrigued enough to spend enough time to find out everything out it. Suffice it to say, there is a lot to it, but there is building, destroying, killing, growing, stealing, and ducks involved. Anyway, it can clearly capture the attention of people for long periods of time, including my two sons who are eleven and twelve. From the distance I have from it, I can tell that it is developing a series of their skills from virtual team building, reading and writing, technical skills, concentration skills and many more, but the two skills I’ve been the most impressed with I’ve seen in my son who has fallen over the edge into the “dark side” of TOO MUCH SCREEN TIME.

I’ve heard people call it “Minecrack” when their kids’ eyes glaze over and they can’t get them to move away from the computer to eat or bathe themselves. My son started to do this and it is disconcerting to watch. After a two-day stint my son looked at me with a bit of panic in his eyes and said that he needed help. I didn’t quite know what to do so I said that I would restrict his computer the next day. That worked not-at-all since by the next day he wasn’t all that interested in my restricting him and I didn’t feel like he would learn to manage himself if I just imposed my will on him. Instead, I sat down and talked to him about the pull of something so engaging as a computer game and how he might have to figure out how to be stronger than the video game. Honestly, my son’s genetics suggest that he is strongly pulled towards addictive behavior and it seemed to me that learning how to manage the feelings now might be easier than when drugs are in his hands, instead of a computer game.

Then for days, instead of restricting the computer, I made sure he ate every necessary meal and bathed and of course the computer went to sleep at his bedtime. Other than that, he could play on his computer for the rest of the time. He basically glazed over for all his free time. I wasn’t completely sure he would come back to me. He continued like that for days. He would talk a little about the pull he felt at bedtime when I would come in to read to him and hang out and talk (our usual night time ritual).

Then, without my even realizing it, the spell was over. I hardly realized when it happened. He still plays Minecraft quite a bit, but without the glazed-over look. When his friends come over he gets up and goes out with them. Sometimes he just gets up and goes out and shoots hoops for no reason at all. He doesn’t miss any meals any more. It just doesn’t seem like a struggle any more. I asked him recently what changed and why the computer doesn’t seem to “own” him anymore and if he has any hints for other kids. He says he has no idea. He just doesn’t feel the need to be attached to his computer as much anymore. Granted, communicating through words is not this child’s greatest strength, but clearly my son felt the intensity of the pull of the screen and was able to find something inside of himself as well to regain his balance in the world. I can’t say I have a clue as to what happened or how my son seems to be in control now and still be comfortable with unlimited screen time, but I’m glad that he was able to rely on his own strength because that’s an experience he can remember when it comes time to fight bigger demons than animated pixels on a screen.

Exposure

Teaching 1 Response »

Apr 052013

License: Some rights reserved by Digital Internet

One of the biggest arguments I hear from people who are worried about taking their children out of some curriculum-led schooling situation is the fact that they are worried that their children will not know what is available to them in the world since they won’t be exposed to different things. I have to say that this never occurred to me when I was moving my children out of a traditional school system into an unschooling environment, perhaps because I was so excited to get my children away from the things that I didn’t want my children exposed to at traditional school.

I find, though, that it’s interesting that people feel that school, in any form, either homeschool or traditional school is the primary avenue for exposing children to new and different ideas and issues and that there’s something special about curriculum that provides that.

Whenever I think about whether school itself is providing something special or different than non-school I try to think about whether children from the age of 0-5 and people over the age of twenty-two have access to the quality being discussed. For example, when people talk about children only being able to learn in school, I ask them if two year olds are able to learn without formal schooling. They look at me like I have two heads. Of course two year olds learn just fine without formal schooling, as long as the people around them interact with them. So, now I ask, do two year olds, twenty-five year olds and even nine year olds, when not in school, get exposed to new and different things when not in a formal school? Of course. Certainly the more people and situations a child has access to, the more ideas and issues they’ll get exposed to, but that has little to do with being in or not being in school.

My children interact in an environment with over 100 people of many different ages, nature and a variety of wildlife all day long. The possibility that they’ll be exposed to different ideas and issues in a day is much higher than a child who sits in a room all day with 30 or so children his or her own age and just a few adults, in a particular environment run by a single person’s ideas.

What we might want to focus on is the fact that the ideas my children are going to run into are much less likely to be academic-focused and the children in the classroom are much more likely to be academic. My take on it is this, although academics are part of the world, they are a very specific and easily learned part, once someone is motivated to do so. Learning academics divorced from the real world can feel disconnected and don’t make much sense alone. If children learn all about the world and feel connected to it on a visceral sense and then later decide, as adults, to learn the academics of it, when their brains are ready to put it in order and digest it more easily, then it’ll be comfortable for them, but they certainly won’t have missed out on being exposed to anything if not forced to hear about it in school as a child.

Leave ‘em alone

Teaching, Trusting No Responses »

Apr 042013

Whenever I pick my kids up in the middle of a school day at the Sudbury Valley School I get to see the activity. There are kids all over the place, most in groups playing familiar or made up sports, others following each other doing various physical stunts, usually on wheeled vehicles. Others are indoors talking in groups or playing sit down games. I always see at least one student studying something with a book laid out in front of them. Each time I see this I feel more and more that adults’ intervention in children’s learning processes is neither a good idea, nor helpful. After reading the book Incognito which talks about how people’s brains take in a great deal of information consciously and subconsciously then put it together “behind the scenes” to be able to make better decisions than we can by using solely our conscious minds. I wonder why adults feel that they know what kids really need to learn better than kid’s bodies themselves.

I was listening to a podcast on the evidence about the benefits of play. The author, Stuart Brown, discussed how play is hard-wired into animals and humans in order for them to learn the skills they need to advance the species. The ability to play enables children to learn what they need to know to become adults of their species while staying capable of connecting new ideas and remaining flexible. Dr. Brown explained that most primates specialize early in adulthood and that reduces the neuroplasticity of the brain, whereas the fact that humans are capable of play throughout their life cycle helps keep our brains flexible and adaptable.

Specializing too early then reduces the ability of people to adapt to changes in their environment as flexibly as possible. By pushing children into an entirely academic focus so early we could be dampening their ability to develop all the skills that they are designed to. It seems to me that children between the ages of five and twenty-two are designed, just like most other creatures and humans under age five and over twenty-two, to seek out the experiences that will enhance their ability to survive and thrive. Humans bodies and brains seek out these experiences in the form of play. They are attracted to them because they are fun and feel good.

Basically I just think it’s a better idea to trust the eons of evolution that has instituted the drive to move towards the experiences that will help children grow into the adults they’re supposed to be, than to impose some consciously-made decisions on what we think they should learn.

How much do they need?

Pushing No Responses »

Nov 062012

Some rights reserved by aresauburn™

Everyone I know wants their children to be well set up for a great life as grown ups. This causes us to push them to get the preparation we think they will need to get all that is possible. Generally this means education and executive function skills, such as working hard, keeping organized, staying motivated and so forth. This often means we push and badger them to practice the skills we feel will bring them the success we want for them.

The problem, though, is what effect is all the pushing having plus are we necessarily right in what we think is necessary to get kids where we think they should go and third, how muck success do we need to envision for them? I mean if we think they should have every single advantage possible, that means an awful lot of work preparing them to climb to the top, whatever that means.

What is there at the top? Is it really worth all the work and sacrifice required to get there? Would it pay to stop a minute and think of what we, as parents really have? Are we all the top echelons of wealthy? Are we able to survive and even be comfortable without “everything”? What do we think our kids might miss out on if we don’t push them to their “full potential”? Is there a trade off to pushing so hard so that our children could get everything they possibly wanted?

Is if possible that pushing less, expecting less could lead to children who grow up to do well, but not be so disappointed in not getting everything? Maybe we instill an expectation of such greatness that almost any life, even a productive, well-off one seems disappointing. What benefits might we and our children get if were pushed them less and supported them more? Instead of standing in front of them and pulling, we could stand behind them and help?

Slipping under

Motivation, Trusting No Responses »

Oct 232012

Some rights reserved by Carlos Dufour

One of my children seemed to be slipping under. He behaved fine at school and at home, but seemed to have “checked out”. I noticed it as he started pre-teen years so it was a bit difficult to know whether it was simply developmental or something else. He didn’t seen to be excited about much, his room was a disaster, he didn’t put much effort onto school, etc. All of these could have been just normal parts of growing up, none screamed a problem, but I had a feeling that he was feeling more and more lost and getting behind.. Encouraged to work harder or get organized made for a slippery avoidance instead of any attempt to try harder. There was little direct defiance so it was difficult to find ways to help him to do things to help himself.

I didn’t really feel aware that there was a major problem, but I did a number of things that, in hindsight, made a big difference and that I will remember just in case something like this happens again.

I moved him out of the school that was spending many hours per day pushing him on activities that were very frustrating to him (reading) and I cleaned his room and reorganized it to make it easier to keep clean. I was amazed at the change in him. He had always been a quiet, somewhat distant child, but once he was acclimated to his new school which has no reading program at all, he seemed to brighten up and come alive. He certainly didn’t become as chatty as his extremely talkative brother, but he started telling me things about his day and smiling far more.

In addition, he started talking about how bad he felt about his reading. In his new school there are no reading groups or pressure to read. At night he wants to read for quite a while to me. He is clearly behind other kids his age, but without the pressure of being aware of it and just reading for his own enjoyment he will improve much faster than being pushed every day.

Perhaps the pressure put on kids is not something they can necessarily verbalize or even act out against. Some just do whatever they can to go along with what’s expected. If that starts to make them feel more and more powerless, though, is it a good idea? I am happy that my son feels more capable in the world now and doesn’t feel so overwhelmed.

Highly Motivated Students

Motivation No Responses »

May 292012

Some rights reserved by p2-r2

I went to a talk by four older students at the Sudbury Valley School. Two seemed to be graduating that year and two were not. Both the graduating students talked about starting to think seriously about their next step at around sixteen or seventeen years old. They were then a whirlwind of activity and preparation. They chose colleges, took the tests required, applied, created the necessary portfolios and were accepted.

They seemed more intense and driven than I had expected from kids who had been unschooled for a significant amount of time. I would have thought that kids pushed by high achieving parents would be like that, but not these kids. It made me wonder if perhaps it was normal for kids to be highly motivated and intense when preparing for life after childhood and for the kids who don’t do that the traditional school system is actually preventing it, instead of promoting it.

As a high school teacher,I saw so many kids demolished by the school experience and not at all focused on the feeling that they were capable and excited about moving onto the next step. Perhaps instead of traditional schools supporting and promoting competence and independence, perhaps it just doesn’t destroy it in everyone.

If kids are just naturally going to gravitate towards creating a productive future for themselves, why do we adults feel the need to interfere and impose our ideas of what they should do and exactly how? Could we be causing more harm than good? How do we really know that we know what’s best for someone else even if we’re older?

I certainly know better than my two year old that running into the street is not a safe thing to do and even better than my ten year old that jumping off a cliff into water when it’s dark is not safe, but do I really know much about how either should plan out the arc of their life for maximum fulfillment? Perhaps being able to understand certain imminent dangers doesn’t necessarily make a parent better at knowing everything for his or her child.

Teaching and Trusting

Teaching No Responses »

May 152012

As a child I remember being aware and confused by how grown ups treated children. All of the yelling and threatening and punishments didn’t make much sense to me. At the time I didn’t even understand why it seemed odd to me. Now, many years later, it seems to me that I was confounded because little of this felt necessary in order to get me or anyone else to grow up to be capable adults. Although I certainly had times that I wanted something different than the adults around me, there was never a time that I didn’t want to grow up to be an independent and productive adult. The idea of being permanently dependent and childlike forever was never of interest to me or anyone I knew.

After quite a few years I became an adult. I found that the beginning of being an adult was very difficult because I was learning so much and felt like I was constantly fighting against the remnants of being dismissed and disrespected and hurt as a child. I felt like my childhood not only didn’t prepare me for being a useful adult, but actually acted as an obstacle to my making good decisions and moving forward comfortably. I decided that when I had children I would do things differently. I would try not to assume that they were trying to avoid growing up and that teaching them the skills they would need as adults were taught to them in a supportive, educational way instead of with punishments for failure.

Of course when I had children, things were harder than I had predicted. I started parenting by being a foster parent then later adopting two of my foster children. Parenting children who have already been hurt is extra difficult because what you do to your children becomes a vicious cycle (or not so vicious if you’re generally kind). These kids came to me already harmed and a bit of respect and support doesn’t heal those kinds of hurts overnight.

In addition, a good deal of my career has involved teaching disabled children. Some of these children had minor obstacles and if those were addressed by finding some work around, they would grow very typically. Others had obstacles so severe that they were going to live a life significantly different than the range of typical that we think of. Important, though, is that all people, regardless of how typical their life path is, are respected for who they are and respected for what they are capable of.

The central issue then is how to manage the larger and smaller issues in a child’s life to support them in growing up as a productive member of the society they are in. Certainly the definition of what that is might vary, but what I’m concerned with is how do we get children there without hurting them.

I feel like there have been enough experiments done on strict and intrusive discipline so that we now know that some kids turn out fine, but many, many spend years recovering from childhood and can fall anywhere on the continuum of “productive adult,” from not at all productive to over-productive. I am working on experimenting (on my own children) on whether being kind and respectful to them while being highly interactive and teaching them the skills I think they need to know, will provide them with what they need to be whole adults.

I admit it’s an experiment. I have had many people tell me that I’m too lenient and my kids’ll “never learn.” I’m nowhere near perfect either in my experiment. I’m sure I am more punitive than I want to be sometimes. I lose my cool sometimes, and so on, but I work to find ways to teach my kids what they need to know instead of punishing them. I also trust that while I’m trying to “bring them up,” they also want to grow up to be productive and functioning adults so that we can basically work together.

So in a sentence, I’m working on the idea of teaching kids skills they need to know more like a teacher than a parent and trusting that their goal (of growing up) is the same as mine.

Trusting

Trusting No Responses »

May 022012

Some rights reserved by DNA Art Online

I am forty-five and a half years old and I still am not sure if I’ve completely figured out what I want to do when I’m a grown-up. Part of the problem I feel, is that so much of my early life was taken up with just getting prepared for a generalist life. The whole idea of being well-rounded was very important still. It wasn’t so important that I figured out something I wanted to do or focus on, but that I knew a little of everything just in case I need the information.

I find that it’s helpful to have a broad range of understanding and knowledge and experience because it helps a person create new ideas and connect ideas from different disciplines, but there’s a limit to how useful it is to know a little of lots of things. At some point you just have trivia and no framework within which to put it all together.

I feel like I am currently working to shake off all the crap that was piled on me in order to make sure I became a successful adult and try to figure what I want to do as that adult. I feel that the panic and fear that parents have in looking at their children and seeing that there’s no way that this person , who can’t even keep their socks in their room, remember to clear their plate from the table, or take enough showers to be appropriate in public could possibly become a functional adult.

Raising children who are developmentally children makes many people panic. They feel that they need to push these young people hard for them to become capable of taking on the responsibilities related to being an adult. People seem to have forgotten that children are developing, generally, at a typical and predictable pace and will be able to take on the appropriate degree of responsibility when the time comes. Although, research has found that the brain doesn’t fully complete its growth until aged 25ish, people are able to take care of themselves quite a bit earlier than that, generally between sixteen and twenty regardless of what kind of push they’ve been given.

Humans (okay all animals) are built to do what the adults around them do. They are built to basically replicate the people in their environment. It’s similar to genetic PASSING ON. Grownups make kids by passing on half of their DNA material. Parents then pass on their own cultural, value, life ways. Kids are basically soaked in this so they take it in by osmosis. It’s what they know and are comfortable with. They do not need to be directly taught any of it. In fact, kids will “ingest” this information in such a whole that even the parts that the parents are not happy about the kid will take in as well.

The best advice for parents is to become who you would like your child to be since that’s what your child is generally going for. Just like in DNA, though, there is both a mixture of two sets of DNA material and there is the possibility of mutations. Small things can be different than the parents and/or the combination of the two sets of DNA will make a child different than expected, the same happens with the cultural PASSING ON. A parent may want their child to follow this or that path that the parent has and not another one, but the child is their own person and may have picked up some other cultural or value material elsewhere or just the combination of who they are and the world they live in will cause a difference from their parents.

The take-away from this is that parents have all of the material to pass on, but little control over how it is expressed. It’s unlikely to have a set of parents who are extremely secular and nonreligious have a child who grows up to become a nun, although, not at all unheard of. It’s unlikely to have highly educated parents who have children who drop out of high school and pursue no further education. That is, though, if the children are not harmed in pursuit of the parents attempting to make the kids do what they think is best for them.

Often when parents get worried that their child is never, ever going to be an okay adult while viewing their lack of adult skills at ten years old, work to push the child as hard as possible to get those skills and actually succeed in putting up barriers for the child actually developing the way they would have and could have. Often all the work a parent puts into forcing their child to do and be what they want them to be causes them to be just the opposite.
It seems that we, as parents, can have such a profound and long-lasting effect on our children that we want to work hard to make sure it’s the right effect, but that’s not how it works. The child lives in the parents’ world. They breathe in the parents way of doing things and even thinking and communicating and treating others and the values they base decisions on. You can tell your children any other method, different from what you’re doing, but that’s not what they have been ingesting day and night for their entire lives. Basically, if you want your children to do something significantly differently than you do them then you will have to change yourself first.

Motivation

Motivation No Responses »

May 022012

Generally people are motivated to move ahead in positive ways with their lives. People want to do well. They want to have interesting, fulfilling and productive lives at all ages. I find, though, that many people feel that others, particularly children of a certain age don’t have any internal motivation and have to be pushed. Our culture supports the fact that humans between the ages of birth and five years old are highly motivated to learn and figure out how to do everything around them. It is naturally assumed that they will pick up the language and customs and physical abilities of the people around them without any external motivating factors. Similarly, after the age of about 18 or 22 we again assume that people are adults and will be motivated to earn enough money to get along in the world.

Between the ages of 5 and 22, though, we feel that children need to be pushed to learn anything that they will learn. There is an assumption that they will just do nothing supportive of their growth and development towards adulthood if not cajoled and coerced into it. We put them into schools where they are given a curriculum to learn that is based on what past generations may have needed to know.

When I went to school in the 1970s it was important to learn French. In generations past French was seen as the language of the upper classes so it was important. By the time I reached adulthood French was no more revered than many other languages. It would have been better to have taught me Chinese, but no one knew that at the time. We are always a generation or more behind in the particular curriculum.

Perhaps the most important skills, though, are generally timeless. Things like problem solving and adapting to changing technology and environments, self-understanding, creativity, social skills, inter and intra personal communication. Although during the Industrial Revolution these skills were consciously suppressed, but since then most of the world’s advances have come through people with these skills.

Do children need to be pushed or coerced into learning any of this? I doubt it. Instead they need a space to practice these and develop them as their age allows. I think it does a disservice to school-aged children to assume that they are unmotivated to pursue the skills necessary for their own success as adults. Perhaps the things schools are attempting to teach them are not the most important and they can tell that before long.

Motivation is what drives all of us, whether it be to eat every piece of junk food we can find or to go to school for many years to get a degree which might make us happy or a lot of money or both. Why do we assume that people aren’t motivated to do what’s best for them? It seems that there are many people who others feel aren’t motivated towards the right purposes and if we just could motivate them everything would be fine.