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Blog Archives - June, 2011
Passing it On – June 26, 2011
Well, no. If the usual “bedtime rituals” aren’t working, frustration and fantasies of swearing and yelling could be replaced by rethinking why the kid has to have a bedtime and the accompanying rituals in the first place. Kids don’t need an adult to tell them when they’re tired. I suppose they do need an adult to explain why they should make their annoying little selves scarce and leave the adults to themselves. And, no again: I don’t think that I need to lighten up and get a sense of humor. If somebody wrote a book telling a disenfranchised adult to “Go the F**k ___” would we be comfortable laughing at it? Or would we be jumping up and down demanding that person’s rights? And yes, I think all parents have memories of being
exhausted. I certainly do; it goes with the territory. However, I eventually
discovered that when I began to respect my daughters and stopped thinking that
they had to go to bed on
my schedule, I was more accepting of
their needs and wants, and life became less exhausting
and more enjoyable. And now, almost forty years later, I’ve
caught up on my sleep.
Risk Taking and Learning –
June 16, 2011 Actually, my risk aversion resulted from a combination of my schooling experiences and my nervous parents. And when I became a parent myself, I made sure not to pass along that unfortunate trait to my unschooled daughters. Unlike both school and my childhood home, our home was a place that supported the questioning, risk taking, and mistake making processes by providing physical, intellectual, and emotional security. Take learning to read, for example. The typical classroom – with prescribed books, other children ready to correct or laugh at every mistake, and the teacher all too eagerly hovering, prompting, correcting, labeling, and marking – is the worst possible place for a child to begin the reading adventure. On the other hand, by allowing our children to learn to read on their own, away from those pressures, the process can be just as effortless and fun as learning to walk or talk was. Some kids will conduct their learning to read activity in your presence and out loud – possibly needing the physical security of sitting close. And you will respond with encouraging approval, just the way you did when she started putting sounds together to make speech, and answering questions when asked. Other kids learn to read in relative silence, mostly working it out within their own head. Parents can respect that by not interfering with demands of regular demonstrations of what the child prefers to keep private. You’ll still notice that the child is making more and more sense out of printed language, that she is reading road signs, for example. And you still will do your part by reading to her and by surrounding her with print materials of all sorts. But the biggest support life learning parents can provide
is to create a non-threatening, secure environment in which your child’s
self-esteem can flourish. Then your child will be comfortable enough to take the
risks and make the mistakes that are the foundation of growth. I’m currently
working on an article that will be published in
Life Learning Magazine’s
July/August issue that will elaborate on ways to support risk taking.
Spanking Parents Create Childhood Bullies –
June 12, 2011 This morning, sitting at a sidewalk café, I watched a young woman intervene when her friend began to spank her toddler for crying. Unfortunately, the child responded by crying more loudly and hitting her mother’s friend, the intervener. And then the mother and her poor friend got into a shouting match. And the vicious circle gets more vicious. The fact is that if you hit your kid, you give them a message that it’s okay to hit others. A study published in 2010 in the journal Pediatrics examining the case histories of almost 2,500 American children confirms that spanking breeds bullies. The study used respondents to the Fragile Families and Child Well-being Study, conducted in 20 U.S. cities between 1998 and 2005. Lead author Dr. Catherine Taylor of Tulane University and her team factored out the influences such as maternal mental health and use of drugs, domestic violence, neglect, income, age, race and education. And spanking emerged as the most important factor in determining which three-year-old children developed into aggressive five-year-olds. More than half of the three-year-olds spanked more than twice in the previous month by their mothers turned into aggressive five-year-olds, even when accounting for the child's level of “natural” aggression at age three. Forty percent of the kids spanked only once or twice in the previous month turned into bullies by age five. Previous studies have connected spanking and aggression in children, although this is the first and one of the largest and demonstrates just how powerful the link is. In 2002, psychologist Elizabeth Thompson Gershoff of Columbia University’s National Center for Children in Poverty analyzed sixty-two years of data and found spanking leads not only to childhood aggression but other antisocial behaviors such as lying and cheating, and other types of misbehaviors behind their parent’s backs. Unfortunately, spanking is legal in many countries,
including both Canada and the U.S., and most parents say they approve of and
have used spanking as a form of child discipline. In fact, according to the
American Academy of Pediatrics, spanking happens at least once a week in
twenty-five percent of two-parent, middle-class families. At
least twenty-four countries
ban spanking, including Sweden, New Zealand and Spain.
Walking Our Talk Along a Different Path –
June 7, 2011 However, I believe that if I promote alternative ways of
thinking, being, and doing, then I should try to walk that talk. Years ago,
someone told me that she wanted to nominate me for a woman entrepreneur award. I
said, “Thanks for thinking of me, but no thanks; one of the foundations of my
work has been cooperation, not competition, so to participate in such a contest
would be a conflict. I wish we could all be appreciated for our work without
creating an elite and arbitrary group of achievers.” Since then, my work has
been recognized in a number of ways, even with a few awards for which I didn’t
know I’d been nominated. But I don’t particularly value that recognition; what
rewards me are the changes I’ve been able to help manifest in people’s lives and
in the world, while keeping my integrity intact and practicing the values of
collaboration, cooperation, environmental responsibility, mindfulness, and
civility. As we’ve attempted to walk our talk over the years, Rolf –
my partner in life and business – and I have built the socially entrepreneurial
partnership that publishes our magazines and book. Along the way, we have
created and participated in a variety of collaborative marketing initiatives
that avoid the more mainstream style of competitive awards, contests, and
giveaways. That allows us to avoid the practice of attracting “traffic” to our
websites by running competitions where you are named the best in your category
because you were able to get the most people to vote for you day after day after
day (meanwhile driving lots of otherwise uninterested people to the sites). It
means we don’t beg or bribe people with “gifts” of unnecessary stuff to
subscribe to our magazines so that our circulation is inflated enough to attract
corporate advertisers that value quantity over quality of readership. Instead,
we prefer to let our content quietly and sustainably speak for itself (even
though sometimes we are in danger of being drowned out by the noise from
everyone else’s awards, contests, and giveaways). As a reader-supported
publishers, we craft our editorial to inform readers; when we review books,
films and other media in our magazines, for instance, you get our honest
appreciation for quality materials, rather than copy written to attract
advertisers. (This is a good place to say that we appreciate the advertisers we
do have, who clearly “get” that what integrity we’ve built up inevitably rubs
off on them....) Unfortunately, we’re in the minority in the publishing
world, as are those who understand and live by the principle of
interconnectedness in general. Competition is taken for granted in our society –
even by many supposedly progressive people and businesses. Why? I believe it
starts in school. Parents are encouraged to send their babies to institutions at
earlier and earlier ages so they will be better prepared to win the competitions
for college spots and prestigious jobs. Kids are always jockeying for position,
for the best marks, for supremacy on tests, for awards and high achievement
relative to their peers. This not only impedes real learning, but it undermines
families and communities, and creates a legacy of white knuckle competition that
undervalues collaboration. We are on a different path, one that emphasizes
"unschooling," social
entrepreneurship, co-operatives and local businesses;
respectful, non-coercive parenting; cohousing and rooftop renewable energy; mindfulness; Fair Trade and
organics; and many other sorts of ways of redefining how we live and work
together. When we can all walk our talk, we will have created the
changes in our personal lives that will allow us to proceed with the
larger transformation that a
sustainable future requires.
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