Category: Parenting

Little-c creativity in our lives

Posted on by Suki

I recently attended a talk by psychologist Susan Daniels, who lectures and writes about creativity. Her talk was based on a book she’d read, assigned to her college students, and followed herself. (The book, which she highly recommends, is The Creativity Cure by Carrie and Alton Barron. Susan’s book is Raising Creative Kids and I reviewed it here.)

Susan’s talk was about the importance of “everyday creativity” for everyone. Although some of us are involved in creative work for pay, and others of us think of ourselves as “not creative,” we all benefit from using our hands and bodies to do what’s called “little-c creativity.” This is the sort of creativity involved in improvising a new dish while cooking, playing a song on the piano, or making up a game with our kids. It’s pretty humble stuff—not meant to impress anyone else, done for enjoyment and only sometimes with a product that we use or enjoy.

Needle felting
This is a needle-felted landscape (with stormy sky) that I did at a recent homeschool retreat. It was just a simple project in a medium I’d never tried before (and won’t do often because of my propensity for carpal tunnel syndrome!), but it was extremely rewarding for me.

Susan suggests that we can all improve our well-being by not only pursuing little-c creativity, but incorporating it into our lives with intention. In her own life, despite her busy life as a psychologist, teacher, and lecturer, she intentionally returned to painting, which she had enjoyed when she was younger. This is not a career move for her. Although her photos showed that the results of her endeavor could certainly be called successful art, she’s not suggesting that we all drop our day jobs and become professional artists.

Instead, she’s suggesting that we can improve our lives by taking on tasks that we do with our hands only for the pleasure of doing them.

Susan’s talk reminded me of a huge change that I underwent when I started homeschooling. Although I’d done many projects at home with my children when they were little, it wasn’t until we were homeschooling that I initiated and took part in art projects that fed my own creativity as well as my children’s. My daughter loves videos by Vi Hart—Vi’s mathematical approach to art really inspires her. So for a while my kids and I were making scribble drawings and binary trees. Inspired by that, I bought Geometric Graphics, a wonderful book from Key Curriculum Press about mathematically based art, and we completed many projects in that book.

We also had more time for intentional art projects such as collaging gifts, decorating household items to send to their grandmother, making videos based on what they were learning (or just sheer silliness), and lots of creative cooking. We went to workshops run by other homeschoolers and did weaving, painting, sculpting, and other handwork that we would probably never have attempted on our own.

All the while I was thinking that these activities were for the children, but it often occurred to me that I enjoyed them even more. It’s not uncommon when homeschoolers get together to do a project with a group of younger children that the children finish their projects quickly and run off to play, while the moms sit for much longer, chatting together but also applying a lot more effort to their artwork than is necessary to model creative play to children. Clearly, we all felt the joy of incorporating that little-c creativity into our lives.

It occurs to me that this is one part of my life that has changed pretty dramatically for two reasons. One is that my younger and more artistically hands-on child has gone off to school. Although we still do projects together, our output is nowhere near what it was before. The other is that my older child, never strongly attracted to the physical arts, got to the age that he largely pursues his own creative projects, which are mostly independent of me and usually done on computers.

I was ready to feel bad about this as I sat listening to Susan’s talk, but then as I thought back on my year, I realized that after an initial slump of little-c creative activity, I have since started pursuing more independent activities. (Since my work is creative I pretty much daily partake in Big-C creativity, but not in the hands-on, personally fulfilling creative projects that Susan was encouraging.) This year, with some time freed up from homeschooling, I started to play guitar after many years of letting it slide. A friend and I made a list of songs that we started to learn and sing together. After pretty much ignoring what was on our walls and displayed on shelves for years, I have gone on a frenzy of home aesthetic improvement, a little-c creative project if ever I’ve seen one.

I haven’t read The Creativity Cure yet, but based on my own experience I encourage everyone to take a look at their lives and consider whether they are pursuing a healthy amount of little-c creativity on a daily basis. In our professionalized culture, we often feel bad about being an amateur at something that other people are compensated for. Especially in pursuits that can be highly rewarded in our culture, such as popular singing, I often hear people say, “Oh, I’m no good at that so you don’t want to hear me.” Well, heck, people might not want to hear me sing or see my artwork, but I’m going to do it anyway. Susan and my homeschooling role models taught me well that little-c creativity looms large in its ability to make life enjoyable and fulfilling.

Parenting and creativity

Posted on by Suki

When I was younger, I realized I had no interest in anything that wasn’t creative, and this could be a significant handicap. So if I wanted to learn how to do something, I would assign myself a task. For example, instead of using tutorials and classes to learn about graphic design software, I just started working for my brother and learned on the job.

Once I had kids, I noticed that they behaved similarly. They didn’t want to learn about anything—they wanted to dip their hands in and do things. Just like me, they tend to back into tasks. While other kids learned phonics, my kids refused to sound out words until one day they could read…pretty much anything. When my daughter was homeschooling, it was a duel to the death if I tried to teach her something. But then she’d come up with an idea for a project or a game, and teach herself more than I ever could have in the same amount of time.

Bloom's Taxonomy
Educators often use Bloom’s Taxonomy as a model for how people learn. However, Bloom put “creating” way at the top of the pyramid, which implies to many teachers that it is something to be put off until the other learning is taken care of. The problem is, creative people just don’t learn this way. They need to jump into creation first.

I’m not going to take a stand on nature vs. nurture here (and tend to agree with those who say that it’s not a valid classification of how people learn, anyway). But researchers are finding that when they watch people’s brains work, they see marked differences between people who do “creative” work and people whose work is purely technical or organizational. All of these people may have similar brainpower, but use their brains differently.

One researcher, Nancy Andreasen, studied creative writers and is now doing a wider study of people who are high achievers in creative fields (not only the arts but also science and math).

“For years, I had been asking myself what might be special or unique about the brains of the workshop writers I had studied,” she writes in ‘Secrets of the Creative Brain.’ “In my own version of a eureka moment, the answer finally came to me: creative people are better at recognizing relationships, making associations and connections, and seeing things in an original way—seeing things that others cannot see.”

When I got to this text I stopped and immediately highlighted it. It encapsulates both the joys and frustrations of parenting highly creative children. You parents know who you are: other kids use toy cars to play, well, toy cars. Your kids put their toy cars in a pot and cooked them into “drive soup” on their toy stove. Other kids largely accept that we never go up the slide backwards; your kids asked why and then argued a thousand reasons why the rule was wrong and unfair. Other kids make messes; “mess” is a state of being for your kid.

Last year I went to a talk about how to nurture creativity in children, but the question that pertained to my parenting life was quite the opposite: Is it OK if sometimes I really really want to stop the unbridled creativity that is driving me nuts? Can’t a child just set the darn table without building a case worthy of the Supreme Court for why it’s actually not her job?

The answer I came to is something like “yes” and also like “no.” Every time we nurture that independence of thought and randomness of connection that our young children show, we are supporting brains that will one day be able to apply novel approaches to artistic, engineering, and scientific endeavors. On the other hand, one of the jobs of parents is to help our kids become functional adults. Isn’t it part of good parenting to help a child learn where his “off” switch is? Our kids’ future coworkers and spouses will thank us.

Finding the balance between nurturing that little creative mind and shutting off the seemingly nonstop onslaught of free association is something I’ve always struggled with. My own creative brain definitely needs quiet and contemplation, something I had in excess before I had children. Now, sometimes I admit that I just have to say “please. stop. talking. please. stop. now!” to one or other of my kids. At the same time that I know I’m squashing their brains’ healthy bursts of association and originality, I also know that I need to stay sane.

I guess like every issue we face as parents, there’s no single right answer. I hope that I keep the balance tipped toward the nurturing of creativity, but I also know that sometimes the appropriate answer to a whiny “whyyyyyyyyyyyy do IIIIIII have to set the table?” is simply, “Because I said so.”

 

Focus on the positive

Posted on by Suki

I’ve been thinking lately about one lesson I learned through parenting a child with behavioral and learning differences. When you parent a child who falls somewhere within that wide field we call “typical,” lots of traditional parenting methods with incentives and consequences might work well enough. But it’s not until we have a child who falls far from the center of the field that we might discover the value of parenting—and teaching—to the positive.

I was most recently reminded of this when my daughter spent a week at her favorite summer camp, Santa Cruz Soccer Camp. The first time I brought her to camp, I was very nervous. I explained that there were various behavioral challenges and that I was willing to stay and help. Coach Bill, without hesitation, asked if she was liable to run off.

1406Soccer1“Well, no,” I answered. That was one challenge she’d never presented me with!

“Fine, then,” he said. “We can handle anything else. Go get some time for yourself.”

And that was the end of the idea that I might have to stay and supervise her at soccer camp. The reason Bill was so sure of his camp’s ability to handle my child was simply that they don’t focus on the problems—they focus on success. They call their approach “learning through enjoyment,” but it’s a variation on lots of approaches with different names that stem from one simple idea: kids learn when they enjoy something and are successful at it, not when they are set up to fail and are punished. Lots of kids have learned deep lessons from soccer, drama, writing, and science—I am willing to bet that few have learned from detention.

Kids learn when they feel a reason for learning: they’re having fun, they’re benefiting personally from what they’re doing, or even when they see that someone else is benefiting from what they’re doing. Kids do learn from failure, but only when it’s in the context of a challenge that makes sense to them. Kids don’t learn when they’re scared—or rather, they don’t learn the lesson we think they’ve learned. A student who is afraid of failing history doesn’t learn history because he’s afraid, but he may well learn how to search for plagiarized history papers online. A child who is afraid her parent will punish her if she’s rude doesn’t learn the value of being polite—she learns how to avoid punishment.

Now that my daughter is eleven, one of the things I’m looking forward to in the near future is leadership training at her soccer camp. This year when Bill asked all the coaches who had been through leadership training to step forward, all but one did (and the one who didn’t just simply didn’t grow up in Santa Cruz!). These wonderful people who spend their summers teaching soccer and success to kids are now adults or almost adults, and many of them started in this very camp when they were five or six. Leadership taught them the value of success, not just for themselves but the value of helping others achieve success.

I looked at a number of potential schools for my daughter to attend next year, and one thing that struck me now that I have this awareness of the value of success is how the staff view their jobs. At one school I visited, the staff—from principal on down—talked somewhat like jailers. They focused on the negative aspects of young teens, talked about all the problems that our kids would face, and warned us that our sweet children were about to turn into sullen, uncommunicative teens.

Guess where my daughter is not going?

Now that she’s a tween, she’s gotten past being a “troublemaker” in the classroom. I don’t expect her to have disciplinary problems, so why would I care how the staff treats these problems? The reason is that how we view the people we work with—whether they’re preschoolers or high schoolers—will affect their achievements. Schools with cultures that focus on success will find that they have fewer problems to begin with. They will find that when you focus on students’ positive qualities, those positive qualities will shine brighter. The students’ problems—their negative qualities—will not disappear, but they won’t be always in the spotlight.

Of course, no approach is 100% successful, so sure, you’ll be able to show me students who didn’t succeed in spite of a focus on the positive. But I’ve seen it with so many children—and the people at soccer camp can vouch for the approach with even more authority. Focusing on a student’s strengths and making sure they’re having fun while they’re working hard is a time-tested recipe for success.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I sure do wish there were some way to have summer camp all year round!

My essential children’s library

Posted on by Suki

School is out this week, and I am thinking toward next week: annual spring cleaning. Our spring cleaning usually happens in the summer and is largely a culling of clothing the kids have outgrown, homeschooling materials we don’t need and will pass on to others, and books.

Yes, my family is part of the rare set of humans who have: a) remodeled their whole upstairs after discussing the need for more bookshelves, and b) bought a house in large part because of the copious bookshelf space in the kitchen.

Despite our feeling that you can never have too many books, when you have kids who love to read, you can have too many books. Books they hated and will never read again, books they bought at their school book fair (hosted by a not-to-be-mentioned publisher of generally cheap and disposable literature), books someone gave them that they will never be interested in.

But there are some books that will stay on our shelves no matter what. I decided to write up a list of these books, the ones I brought with me from childhood as well as the ones we’ve discovered since. My personal list of desert island children’s literature, so to speak.

Personally, I love the old Alice woodcuts and wouldn’t buy a book with modern illustrations!

Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

I will admit, this book will always come first for me. I read this book over and over as a child and as a teen. There is nothing else like it in terms of the effect the tale had on our culture, the inventiveness of the language, and the incredible imagination married with observations of the real world.

Harry Potter by J.K.Rowling

This list was inspired a few minutes ago by my standing in front of my son’s bookshelves, musing about how worn out his copies are. He and his sister have read these books to shreds. And the most wonderful thing about these books is that they squeaked in right before the age of i-devices changed children forever. They are perhaps our last, innocent look at childhood before the iPad, the child without Google, the child who has to invent his own games and solve his own problems.

The New Way Things Work by David MacAulay

I wasn’t familiar with MacAulay before a friend bought the original version of this book for my son. This is the book that answers questions about the stuff we use every day in depth and with humor. Really, you could buy any of MacAulay’s books—his books Castle, City, Cathedral, The Way We Work, and many others do the same for more specific subjects. When I was a child we had the Time/Life series of books about the world, and this is like a modern take on those (which don’t make my list because, alas, our kids do have Google and Time/Life seems so quaint now).

The collected works of Dr. Seuss

Go ahead, splurge and get them all. Dr. Seuss was born when Theodor Geisel was issued the challenge of writing a children’s book with only the most common 50 words that a first-grader can read. He wrote The Cat in the Hat. Most of us would have written Dick and Jane Do Something Really Boring! Seuss’s books are so amazing because with so little he creates drama, tension, and irony, something often lacking in children’s early readers. Throw away the Bob books—read Seuss over and over!

The lines between good and bad, dark and light, friend and wild beast are all blurred in Sendak’s work.

Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak

Like Seuss, Sendak never worried about corrupting young minds—he knew that young minds love the dark and mysterious parts of life. Like Seuss and MacAulay, the illustrations are also a huge part of the story. Can you imagine someone issuing Where the Wild Things Are with new illustrations? How could any artist improve on Sendak’s dark and silly, scary and cute world?

Books about my part of the world

This, of course, would change with each reader’s location. I think having books set in and about the environment your children are growing up in is a wonderful part of the reading life. When I was a child, I don’t remember a single book covering anything remotely like the place I grew up in. But since I have been raising my children on California’s Central Coast, we have collected both fiction and nonfiction about our area. If you’re a local here, check out my book list of children’s books set in our area. We also have multiple books on redwood forests, a local mushroom guide, several books about the ecology of our seashore, and Tom Killion’s wonderful woodcuts.

The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S.Lewis

I found it fascinating to reread these books as an adult once my kids were ready for them. I had such intense, vivid recollections from the books and had read them multiple times as a child. As adults, both my husband and I found them disappointing, hardly the brilliant tales we remembered. But our children adored them. Just like me, my daughter went through a period where she read and reread them. I guess just as the children can’t go to Narnia once they were grown up, my grown-up self just can’t access the magic anymore. But they clearly still speak to kids.

Little House on the Prairie and sequels by Laura Ingalls Wilder

My adult enjoyment of these books is tempered by what I have read about Wilder and her manipulative daughter. But ignore all that—the Little House series, with all of its distortions and rose-colored glasses, is a deeply important part of American culture. I think all children should read these books, but somehow they seem to be most important to girls of a certain age. I was sure, when I was a girl, that I’d been born into the wrong time. I longed to get up with Laura on icy mornings, stoking up the fire and trudging to the well. Laura has been a trusted friend to American children for so many generations because her stories are so appealing, and so much a part of the history of this country.

My First series by DK

Encyclopedias for the toddler set—these books are wonderful to look at with small children. They are apparently not publishing the one my son loved the most. Simply called My First Word Book, it featured pictures of most of the things that a small child might encounter in daily life, arranged by category. We referred to this book as “the datz book” because whenever he saw something he liked, he would point at it and say “datz!” He did a lot of pointing with these books.

If you’d like to see other book lists I’ve written, click here!

This post is part of the Hoagies’ Gifted Blog Hop—click here to read other great blogs about summer reading.

This month, we focus on Summer Reading. Summer gives many of us extra opportunities for reading… the fiction we love but don’t usually have time for, the non-fiction that we wish we had time to study during the year, or the boundless free time to read on the beach, at the cabin, or on the boat… or in your own living room. Don’t miss the special reading (and Lego!) nook, or the struggle some kids have with reading. Summer Reading is more than just a school reading list.

The Snopes childhood

Posted on by Suki

The other day I was telling my son about the Loch Ness Monster. He’s fifteen and had perhaps heard of the thing somewhere, but it’s hardly a fixture in his childhood as it was in mine. Of course, there are various reasons for this: what is interesting to kids and popular culture changes over time so perhaps Nessie will come around again.

But the biggest reason, I think, is how childhood has changed in this time of the (Dis)Information Super Highway.

Loch Ness Monster
Nessie was a fixture in my 70s childhood.

The Loch Ness Monster was big for kids of my generation not just because it was a funny hoax and funny hoaxes are fun. (If you don’t agree with that, just visit Youtube and start watching.)

Nessie was also big because in the 70s, you had to be seriously dedicated to perpetuate a worldwide hoax. Even crop circles weren’t popularized until the late 70s, and I remember hearing about them in the Midwest only in the early 80s. The people who perpetuated the Loch Ness Monster hoax had to put in real energy and do it with purpose. They had to take photographs at the real site, then physically alter those photos to show the monster. Then they had to show those photos to many, many people, not just their drinking buddies at the local pub. They had to dupe people who were professional skeptics—newspaper editors most of all.

These days, the hoax is a part of our daily lives. Whenever someone posts something fishy on Facebook or forwards it to me in email, I hardly have to think before typing SNOPES.COM into my browser. If the Snopes people ever decide to get a sense of humor (and ditch their sense of ethics) I’m in big trouble!

Hoax me!

Today I fell for a hoax without hesitation. I saw this headline on Facebook:

Computer simulating 13-year-old boy 
becomes first to pass Turing test

To the wife and mother of computer dudes, this is big news (google “turing test” if you don’t know what that is). I clicked, skimmed, and forwarded.

Too bad it was a hoax perpetuated by a known hoaxster who is well-known in the technical world, but apparently not by the very well-educated and (I hope) sufficiently skeptical editors of The New York Times, Washington Post, NBC, Yahoo, ZDNet, Ars Technica… the list is so depressing I won’t go on. Sheesh, even the Santa Cruz Sentinel, our local bastion of fine journalism, didn’t fall for it. But the New York Times? Well, OK, they’re not always the most technically savvy publication, but well-known technology blogs?

So here’s my question:

Are our children growing up in a world in which the line between reality and fiction is no longer clear, in which, in fact, there may be no line?

Are they growing up a world in which reality can be manufactured—-google “truthiness“—-and dismissed just as easily? If so, how will this affect them as they grow older and need to make more and more serious decisions in their lives?

I just finished the last Hunger Games book, which, I agree with others who have said so, didn’t quite live up to the promise that the series had made. However, I really appreciate one of the themes in the series, one that I think really resonates with young readers growing up in this confusing world. Over and over, Katniss sees that what seems real turns out to be manufactured, and what she assumes is manufactured turns out to be real. She lives in a world where the earth under her feet shifts at the will of the government, and her distrust of reality and everyone in it is the most unsettling and meaningful part of the series.

We’re not that far gone yet, and in fact I doubt it’s “the government” that we should fear here. But we are slipping into that world. It’s so easy to be pulled into online hoaxes… how long until they slip into our real world?

For my part, a bit worried, I queried my son by email as to whether he thought that his parents were just an Internet hoax. His answer was somewhat comforting:

"I'm pretty sure you're real..."

…but what’s up with that final ellipsis? Perhaps he has his doubts… And if he does, what’s to say that the question can ever be answered conclusively?

So I have to admit, I’m not planning on asking my 11-year-old the same question anytime soon. I fear what her answer might be…

…

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