Category: Parenting

Summer screen time

Posted on by Suki

We’ve always been pretty restrictive of screen time for our kids. The first studies showing the ill effects of screen time were just coming out when my son was a baby, and TV has never become a part of our family’s life. We simply forget to turn it on.

Computers, however, are another thing altogether. My husband and I both work on computers, and our son was interested in programming from quite a young age. Our daughter mostly used the computer to send e-mail to Grandma and to watch Magic School Bus videos.

But this summer, something new happened: Minecraft.

For those of you not in the know, Minecraft is a cooperative game in which users get together in a “world” they build. The world is made of blocks, and after that, the rules and the point of the game are wholly determined by the players. I would never have given in except for the social aspect of it: the kids who were playing it were not only creating their own little society within the game — they were actually talking to each other outside of the game world.

This is a big thing, given that our son was having trouble connecting with other kids once he started homeschooling. All of a sudden he had a way in to their conversations.

Then the connection spread: Our daughter wanted to play, and for the first time in their lives, our kids were spending extended time playing — not fighting — together. It was really quite extraordinary.

But then we came right back to the screentime issue. My kids would have been happy spending their lovely summer inside, in a world where they can build houses from diamonds and if it becomes nighttime when they don’t want it to, they can just bring the sun back up.

I, however, would not have been happy. So I sat down with the kids, a bunch of colored markers, and a sheet of nice paper. At the top I wrote “To earn computer time, choose two.”

Then, I had the kids suggest non-computer activities that could earn them computer time. Here’s what they came up with (with just a few suggestions from me):

Computer time poster
Note the final annotation, which is what makes this work so well!

Playing piano
Play outside
Gardening
Clean room (requires parent sign-off)
Ride bike/scooter
Read
Cook
Hike to stream
Paint/art
Learn something new
Sing 4 songs (in a nice voice, with words, not to anger anyone, no poopie words)
Touch typing practice
1 full board game (no shortcuts)
Non-screen activity out of house
*Complaints cancel activity

Now, perhaps you don’t have a household that resembles the Supreme Court. Ours, however, makes the Supreme Court look like child’s play. So we had to add little notes and reasonable amounts of time to each activity to forestall the inevitable arguments.

The amazing thing is that it’s working. The other day, my son played piano in order to buy computer time. Afterwards he said to me with this amazed expression on his face, “That was fun!” Yeah, kids. You can have fun in the real world, not just in Minecraft. What a concept!

The great part of this is that along with the “Our Fun Summer” poster we always make, which has all of our summer goals on it, we can make sure that we get out and do things in the real world.

This week we had some of the kids they play Minecraft with online over for a party. One of the siblings professes to hate Minecraft, and I was commiserating with her that she didn’t have anyone to play with. “Why don’t you like Minecraft?” I asked her.

“Because it’s not real,” she said. “You spend all this time building something, but then it’s stuck inside the computer and you don’t have anything to show for all your work.”

Good point, kid. That’s why I like our contract. Along with Minecrafting, my kids have spent the summer playing with Legos, making music, taking photos, hiking in the woods, and helping me create a garden. Though not all of these activities has a tangible product, they are each valuable in their own way, and they balance the time my kids are spending inside their computer world, learning to get along.

Digital delights for the family

Posted on by Suki

I’ve been noticing lately not how the digital world has been intruding upon our lives, but rather, how it’s been helping. We recently went on a long trip and I definitely noticed how our lives have been changed by digital devices and media.

Connections

One way that digital devices and media have changed our lives is the manner and frequency of our contact with our family and friends. For many years now, I’ve been taking digital photos, which was probably the first significant change I made. It made quite a difference in how much money it took to send recent photos of the kids to Grandma!

For a long time, I maintained a website, where I uploaded photos and wrote narratives of our lives. More recently, I largely upload my photos to a photo-sharing site, and tell Grandma to choose the ones she wants prints of. Both kids e-mail with her on a regular basis. Because they see my parents more regularly, they are less likely to send e-mail, but it’s great that they can connect with Grandma, who is now in Florida.

I do also use Facebook, though I’m generally uncomfortable using it as a personal information-sharing tool. The reason for this is that because my business is so tied into my personal life, I have ended up with lots of Facebook “friends” who are not friends at all. I’m sure I would love them if our physical lives crossed, of course (I’m not dissing my “friends” or my friends!), but I know the difference between “friends” and friends, and I am more cautious in how I share our intimate details there.

Now that I have a phone that takes video, our video sharing has changed dramatically. I used to send Grandma VHS tapes, then DVDs. Now I send her shorter, single videos of something the kids have done. It’s more immediate, and less work for me. Grandma used to receive long tapes or DVDs on which I’d simply dump a month’s worth of video — I didn’t have time to edit! Now, because I can send things off immediately, I only send the stuff I know she’ll be interested in.

Communication

When my husband and I first bought the house where we live, my younger sister and I were in business together. So she and I inhabited the small bedroom downstairs which is now my daughter’s bedroom, and my husband worked upstairs in the small office that we later remodeled into a large shared office and our son’s bedroom. My sister thought it was funny that my husband and I would call each other on the phone to exchange information or just chat. We also e-mailed from one end of the house to the other.

But better than phones and e-mail have been two digital revolutions that have literally changed our family dynamic. The first was shared digital calendars. Early on, I had to e-mail my husband and ask him to put something on his calendar, such as an event we were going to or a time he had to pick up a child on his way home from work. Then I got a paid service where we could sync our calendars together. This seemed like a complete revolution in our lives. No longer did I have to e-mail him and did he have to put things on his calendar — my calendar would just automatically show up in his. But things got better: These days we use Google Calendar, a free service, which we both can edit and share. So we can now both make changes both to our household calendar and the kids’ “school” calendars. He and I seldom have to waste time talking about the functional aspects of our lives together, which is actually quite wonderful!

The second change was when I bit the bullet and invested in a phone that could get my e-mail. My husband had already done that (he’s in the industry so he’s a much earlier adopter than I am), and now we can assume that at some point during the day, even if I’m out and about or he’s in meetings, our e-mail will actually be read. Though I do have to be careful not to become one of those people who checks her e-mail when she should be having conversations with people (yeah, that’s you, Mom!), this is again a time- and energy-saving device. I call my husband because I actually want to talk to him, not to transmit information that is better transmitted when it’s convenient for him to get it.

Household matters

At my husband’s prodding I started using Evernote. This is the most amazing service if you have a web-capable cellphone. You create “notes” on your computer that magically appear on your phone, and vice versa. Why is that magic,  you ask?

Well, let’s see: I’m in a bookstore and I’m trying to remember that book I wanted that the library doesn’t have. Oh, I wish I had my book list with me… Hey, I do! Or I’m out and about and I need to record some information, and I just stick it into Evernote so it’s waiting for me on my computer when I get home. You can even e-mail things into your Evernote account. My most recent adaptation of it is that I have transferred all the recipes I have stored on my computer into Evernote. I can stick my phone into the clear plastic cookbook holder we have so it’s protected, and use it in the kitchen. Last night, I wanted to make a family favorite, spaetzle. The recipe I use is in The Joy of Cooking, which is way up on a high shelf in the kitchen because we don’t use it very often. This time, I got it down, and instead of using it to cook with, I took the time to input the few ingredients and their measures into a note. Now I’ve got it for future use and won’t need to keep that cookbook anywhere accessible.

I also keep tons of homeschooling information on there, such as the list of books upcoming for our book club, so I always have it with me. And I have theoretically set it up to keep information I need for my writing, though I haven’t used it for that purpose much yet.

Green living

I wrote some time ago about how we had bought a Nook (Barnes & Noble’s version of a book reader like the Kindle) as part of our family effort to use less stuff. We canceled our newspaper subscription and now I read the newspaper every morning digitally (and we still pay for it, which is important to me, given that I am part of a changing industry and I would still like to be paid!). This has been moderately successful. I have to say, I really hate the device itself: its touch screen doesn’t register my touches (for some reason, my fingers don’t seem conductive enough on touch screens and only really good ones work for me!), and the buttons you click to page through are actually quite hard to press for someone with tendonitis and carpal tunnel syndrome. However, here’s where the phone and the digital revolution come in: Though I’m not terribly happy with the Nook’s physical self, it comes with a Nook account. And now there is Android software for my phone. So even better than reading the newspaper on the Nook itself is having reading material with me wherever I go. Old books are free or very cheap, so I bought a cheap collection of everything the Bronte sisters ever wrote. That’ll keep me going for a while. I can also read the newspaper. And I don’t have to consume any paper to do these things. When before I might have bought a cheap paperback that wouldn’t survive through multiple readings, now I have a digital copy of the book that cost so little I don’t mind if I don’t read it again. And since the Nook also has an app for the iPhone, my son can read books on his iPod as well. Nifty! (And I still buy hardcover books if I want them on my shelves forever.)

Another innovation of the digital world is e-statements. We have pretty much stopped receiving paper statements from our various accounts, and this has been almost a seamless experience. With one exception, our e-statements and e-bills have successful come to our e-mail or Billpay system, and in many cases we pay with no paper, no postage, and no gasoline involved. Again, bad thing for the postal service, great thing for the earth. My husband has the job of filing what we need to keep, and once every few months the shredder would go for hours. These days, we hardly ever fill the shredder bin. I get e-statements with all those superfluous pages that they have to put in for legal reasons, and I can simply ignore them.

Homeschooling/Entertainment:

We love books on tape. We get every one the library has. We anxiously await more. The very best thing that has happened to audiobooks is e-audiobooks. No more changing CDs. No more wishing a book on tape could be played in our car. Either my phone or my son’s iPod gets plugged directly into our car’s audio system (it’s not a new car so we had to buy adapters for this, but it does work). And here’s the biggest plus: Both of my kids are literally pacified by words. If there are words coming in, somehow it almost always derails their fighting instincts. We have calm, fun, instructive car rides. Sometimes they beg to sit in the car a little bit longer when we get into the garage! And if we arrive early for something? We’re set.

Too much in touch?

So yes, I think there are drawbacks to this digital world. I have, a couple of times, found myself scanning my e-mail when I shouldn’t have been. I missed something important that was said or I spaced out when I was supposed to be engaged with other people. But I’m working hard to resist the temptation, especially because it so annoys me when other people do it. But I have to say that the digitally inspired changes in our lives lately have largely been positive. Unlike in the past, when installing new software or adopting a new system was a nail-biter, given how much could go wrong, these days I find that I can know within a short time whether someone’s new app is a life-changing innovation or just another thing vying for my attention. As long as I resist the temptations (Scrabble on the subway in NYC sure was fun), the benefits have been great.

More than just soccer

Posted on by Suki

I have written before about how much I love the folks at Santa Cruz Soccer Camp. This year, we’re at it again. Energy Girl, a.k.a. my 8-year-old, wouldn’t dream of  a summer without at least two weeks spent with Bill, Katie, and the rest of the gang out at Delaveaga Park. I don’t know what her reasons are, but I know my reasons for getting her there.

Last week she spent her first week at camp, and on Friday all the parents and kids assembled in the shade (or sun, depending on their relationship with our good friend Sol) to hear about their kids’ great accomplishments. Bill Trimpi, owner and resident drummer, welcomed us all with words of wisdom: “Less testing, more fun!”

Soccer camp
The kids get together at Santa Cruz Soccer Camp

Bill and his gang know kids. When they introduce themselves, they each state their real name, their camp nickname (last week, of course, everything was Harry Potter), and their “real” life job. These people are the educators and the educated. From kids in high school who have come back to their favorite camp to coach, to directors nurtured by the camp who have gone into education as their life and their passion, they each stand up proudly to state that their goal is for kids to have fun… and to learn.

There is no contradiction here: All of us learn when we have fun. None of us learn when we are working at it like we are pulling our own teeth out. The folks at Santa Cruz Soccer even made a DVD about their approach, “Learning through Enjoyment.” Their point is that when we are having fun, our brains are receptive to learning. This is when ideas become “sticky” — they stick in our heads long after the experience is over.

The lessons learned in Santa Cruz Soccer Camp are sometimes about soccer. No one on that field is half-hearted about soccer. They love the game, and they teach it well.

But the lessons are also about learning and life: The game means nothing unless you play it well and honestly. The game is not worthwhile if you win it through means that make you less of a good person. The game happens in the real world, where you are a person whose actions really do reflect on you as a person.

Most kids need this lesson because it’s just a lesson from life. Some kids need this lesson even more pointedly. I appreciate that Bill and his friends don’t want to leave out the kids who need their message most. In school, these kids are those difficult kids. You know the ones: you have wished more than once that they would just disappear and let your kid get on with learning. But those kids are part of us, all of us. And Santa Cruz Soccer Camp is as much for those kids as for your kids.

The amazing thing is that watching a day at camp, you probably wouldn’t be able to pick out those kids who make their classmates’  and teachers’ lives so difficult. They’re having fun. They’re learning, but they’re not being tortured by rules and tests. They are integrated into the whole. If you have a “normal” kid, this might not seem so important to you. But to those of us with kids outside the norm, it’s everything.

A friend of mine asked my daughter a question that her son had about the camp: “Is this a camp for kids who are really good at soccer, or can anyone come and enjoy it?”

My daughter answered quickly and assuredly: “Anyone!”

She is “anyone.” She is a girl who often seems to make the wrong choice of what to do in complicated social situations. She has her mother’s weak eyes, and when that soccer ball comes at her face, I bet she sees two of them, just as I did when I was a kid learning the sacred Midwestern sport, baseball.

But at Santa Cruz Soccer Camp, she’s a star, and so is everyone else. She leaves on Friday with no complaints. She leaves that much more able to negotiate the real world, where adults are not always there to help her. Some of those adults are out to trip her up, but the lessons she learns at soccer camp serve her well.

Life can’t be camp all year long. But when it is camp, I am thankful that Bill and his friends are there to teach us all.

Santa Cruz Soccer Camp is having a pretty good year despite the recession, but there is space in all the upcoming sessions. You can register online, or take a chance on it and turn up Monday morning. They are also offering Spanish immersion, which is pretty darn cool. I’m trying to think of something bad to say, in order to make this a balanced piece, but I’m coming up short. OK, here it is: Make sure to pack an icepack, because the lunchboxes sit out in the sun and get very hot. There it is, the skinny on Santa Cruz Soccer Camp…

Classmate envy

Posted on by Suki

I just responded to a come-on from my undergraduate university. I don’t usually do that. This time, it enticed me to sign up for the alumni magazine digitally. Well, why not? Sometimes I’m out with my kids, and I’m just feeling too good about myself. I get a few minutes to read, so I might as well bring myself down a few pegs. I read that my classmates are scaling mountains —

“Honey, please don’t spit at your friends!”

— curing cancer —

“I’m sorry guys, I just can’t be involved in your fight over who got to the swing first…”

— and advising the President, while I’m —

“Buddy, do you see that other children are playing? We’re at a playground to play, not to hang on your mother while she’s…”

…reading the alumni magazine. Now that I’m done, perhaps I’ll just toss my cellphone in the garbage and go live in a cave. That would be noteworthy, at least.

But maybe not. I log in to my account and see that they’ve enabled all sorts of new features. I can now be “friends” with people I never bothered to meet in the first place, or people I met and completely forgot about. Apparently, this is almost everyone. I got misty-eyed at seeing the name of a sweet young man who played piano beautifully, but largely, I got through the C’s and didn’t even recognize photos. Who are all these people? Is it possible that I only knew one person whose last name came before D? And some of them have signed on recently, as well. They’ve uploaded photos (so did I: at least I have a decent pub photo though it’s true that my son took it), listed their accomplishments, and connected with their friends on the site.

Friends, I thought. Well, most of my friends at school were in different years or in grad school, so I’m not going to find them on my class page. I could connect with the sweet young piano-playing man (who I can assume is now a middle-aged, sweet, piano-playing man), but it doesn’t look like he’s ever logged on. By the time I get to the C’s, my head is swimming with the names of all these people I spent so much time with — I may even have crashed my bike into them a few times! — and never got to know.

It also occurs to me that I could friend the famous people in my year, feigning ignorance of their accomplishments: “Hey, Po! So great to see you on here! Whatcha been up to all these years?”

But that would be crass, and besides, annoying famous people has never been my thing.

So instead, I retreat back to Facebook, where I actually know most of my friends, my blog, where I make new friends at an amazing rate, and to my kids. Right now they’re fighting about balloons —

“She dumped balloons ALL OVER MY ROOM!”

but I’m sure soon we’ll be a peaceful, happy family playing a boardgame and talking about how much we love each other.

And what bigger accomplishment is there than that?

Glutton at a smorgasbord

Posted on by Suki

I was trying to sum up to someone I had only just met what my life is like. How I am so busy, I feel like I’m running from the moment I get up to the second my head hits the pillow.

“I’m like a… like a… glutton at a smorgasbord!” I exclaimed.

In any given week, this is the sort of spread that greets this homeschooling family:

  • A homeschooling group we sometimes take part in is going to Lawrence Livermore Labs for a workshop designed just for their kids.
  • A mom we know offers to teach a group how to make soap from goat’s milk on her beautiful farm.
  • Santa Cruz Chamber Players offers a free noon concert at the library featuring the kids’ piano teacher playing music I’d love them to hear and get to know.
  • A group of homeschooling kids are putting on a performance of a play we want to see.
  • My son has a free class given by the CEO of a company that makes really expensive, amazing 3D modeling software, which he has given the kids at a deep discount.
  • Another homeschooling friend is hosting a math circle at her home with a mathematician who excels at getting kids fascinated with math concepts.
  • We’re preparing the kids’ films for our homeschool program’s film festival.
  • On any given day of the year, we can walk into a redwood forest and learn just by observing.
  • Like any family, we have access to “afterschool” lessons in pretty much everything: art, music, sports, theater…

And that’s on top of the things we are supposed to be doing, like starting algebra.

Then there are all of the things that I want to do without my kids: I sing in a chorus, attend workshops in skills I’d like to attain, meet up with other homeschooling parents to trade ideas, and sometimes I even stay home and attack the apparently infinite list of books I’d like to read, and less often, the movies I’d like to see.

I have a friend who started up an adult study group on teaching through multi-media. She asked if I wanted to join. This was my inner dialogue:

Yes! Yes, I want to join!

Hold up, now… Do you have time for this?

Yes — one thing I’ve learned as a parent is that time is infinitely expandable, much like a toddler-size disposable diaper. And this would be fun!

No, you have to be serious about this. You really don’t have enough time for this. You have other things you don’t do because you don’t have time.

Oh, I guess that’s right…

No, I told her. I just can’t. Although it would be fascinating, it’s just not my “thing.”

It’s so easy in this world to get taken in by all of the possibilities that tempt us. Just this morning, I wasted two minutes watching a video of an autistic homeschooled boy dancing on Youtube. My son walked in around the middle of it and looked at me quizzically. “Uh, you’re watching Britain’s Got Talent?”

“Well,” I whined, “He is homeschooled, and, uh, well, he is a good dancer…”

OK, so I was busted. A person as busy as I am has no business watching something she fundamentally doesn’t care about. Think about it: I could have wasted my time watching The Daily Show instead. I could have expanded my horizons!

Well, at least I could have put the breakfast dishes in the dishwasher.

It’s hard not to be a glutton in this world of endless opportunity, but we’re being more successful on that this summer. I spent the morning working on my presentations for the Homeschool Assn. of California conference, and working a bit on a picture book story I came up with. I resisted reading various e-mail lists that I follow, and did a little singing. Altogether a pretty successful day of not feasting on the smorgasbord.

But catch me tomorrow to find out if I’m still so smug when they bring out the chocolate crème brulée!

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