Category: Parenting

Making it up as we go along

Posted on by Suki

When I think back to cultural trends that happened during my kids’ early years, there are a few that stand out as important. Both kids were born after the Web but before the iPhone, and my fellow parents and I have watched as our children’s lives took on explorations and dangers literally not dreamt of in our childhoods.

We’re Makers

But there were other trends running counter to this relentless pull into the digital future. In our lives, the Maker movement was perhaps the most prominent. In a time when you can buy anything you want with the click of a mouse, people started to value making again. And when people started to value making again, they didn’t just value professionally made, “artisanal” goods, though those of course have gained prominence at the same time. People started to value the role of the amateur in our cultural and commercial lives.

Amateur means you do it out of love

As a musician, I see this through the lens of what has happened in music. Before the second half of the 20th century, music was in the hands, and voice, of anyone who wanted it. Americans banged on cans, strung strings over cigar boxes, or just yelled out a tune as best they could. Varying by income, culture of origin, and social status, everyone had a piano, a fiddle, an accordion, a steel drum, or a recorder in their house. We had a shared national treasury of folk music, and regional and ethnic music as well. We had our most important American art form, jazz. We had well-funded symphonies in small towns and music in every school.

My father has been an amateur winemaker my whole live, so Making was a part of my childhood.

Then something happened: People started thinking that music was something that professionals did. Music was something you paid a ticket for, bought a disk of, or listened to on the radio. We became consumers. Fewer children had music lessons; fewer families had instruments in their houses.

Enter technology

I have to admit that I never expected to see this trend turn around. But technology, that thing that is turning our kids into zombies by some accounts, has revived music in an unexpected way. While music instruction is still down, folk music—and by that, I mean music that any folk can pick up with the tools available around them—seems to be busting out of its old confines.

Have you ever watched a kid play with Garage Band? How about a simple music app on their phone? Do your kids seek out amateur Youtube videos the way you used to go to the record store to flip through albums?

It’s not just music

To me, this is all part of the growing Maker ethic in our culture, a return to the belief that the act of making something has intrinsic worth, even if the product isn’t worth anything (monetarily speaking). Take a look at Etsy, at local craft fairs, and at open mics if you want to find passionate amateurs doing something out of love. Read any teaching blog and you’ll find discussion of project-based learning (otherwise known as Making).

Oh, yeah, I could be pessimistic

Not everyone is Making. Some kids have turned into zombies controlled by their little devices. Heck, I’ve had students complain that their parents have turned into zombies while the kids are just fine. Most schools no longer have healthy programs in music, art, home ec, shop—all those places where Making used to happen.

But instead…

When in doubt of what to make, slime is always a good option.

I haven’t yet visited a local Mini Maker Faire, but this weekend I plan to. My 15-year-old saw a sign and his eyes lit up. “Can we go?” Nothing  like a Maker Faire sign to make a teenager forget to be snarky (at least for a short time)! I’m looking forward to seeing all the stuff that people are getting into these days, along with some presentations by local corporations. From people with graduate degrees down to a kid who made something cool in his garage, we’ll celebrate people getting into it and enjoying Making for the process.

amateur (n.)
1784, “one who has a taste for some art, study, or pursuit, but does not practice it [professionally],” from French amateur “one who loves, lover” (16c., restored from Old French ameour), from Latin amatorem (nominative amator) “lover, friend.”

Related:

5 reasons why homeschooling is a vital educational option

Posted on by Suki

Homeschooling is in the news again because of a sensational story: one homeschooling family severely neglected their children.The knee-jerk response to a problem like this is to restrict, regulate, or abolish.

But have no doubt about it, homeschooling is an educational choice that is a vital one for families. Here are five reasons why homeschooling needs to remain an option for all families:

1. Different people, different educational needs

Our schools, whether mainstream public schools or elite private schools, are largely set up to offer one-size-fits-all education. The few schools that actually serve the needs of kids on the fringes are generally too expensive for most families. That leaves an enormous gap that is filled by homeschooling.

Although I know many people who homeschool largely because of their family values, a good percentage of families come to homeschooling originally because of educational needs that aren’t being served. Gifted children, twice-exceptional children, children with learning disabilities, children with specialized academic interests—it’s hard to find a single school that serves their needs. When it works for the family, homeschooling is uniquely suited to these students. Most homeschoolers in this category do “go to school”—just not one school. Their education is patched together using trained educators, therapists, and schools to meet their unusual mix of needs.

2. Promotion of family values

Back in the 80’s when “family values” became a code phrase for right-wing Christian, I would have recoiled at using the phrase for myself. However, I believe that “values” has now been reclaimed and redefined. Although many homeschoolers choose it for religious reasons, many others choose it because of family values that come from another religion or are not religious in nature.

Every time yet another article about toxic school environments hits the Internet, homeschoolers trade them around with comments such as “this is why we homeschool.” Some families value non-violence and homeschool to maintain a peaceful, vegetarian lifestyle. Other families value cross-cultural communication, and they homeschool so that they can travel, learn other languages, and provide service work in needy areas. Some families homeschool because their unusual child was bullied. Some families homeschool simply because they value education, and their children’s schools seem not to.

3. Pushing innovation and choice

Over the time since I started homeschooling, it’s happened over and over: I learn about a new educational idea from homeschoolers, and then I watch as it trickles into mainstream education. Does your school have a STEM program? No schools I knew of had one when I started homeschooling, but homeschoolers were all over it. Now it’s become a staple of more progressive schools. Does your child have a teacher who is integrating project-based and child-led learning into the classroom? Homeschoolers have been doing that forever.

When a culture allows educational choice, it encourages innovation.

4. Resisting groupthink

Yep, this sounds pretty lefty-liberal, but it’s part of homeschooling on all parts of the political spectrum. Homeschoolers of various types have their own problems with groupthink, of course—it’s only human to want to be part of the flock. But the choice to homeschool is a choice to forge your own path, no matter what your political direction is. The parents who choose homeschooling “because all my friends are doing it” are generally the least successful. It’s the parents who resist groupthink who find their home in homeschooling.

5. It’s a free world

This is something people used to say a lot when I was a kid in the Midwest, and I have mixed feelings about it because it was often used to justify bigotry. But the fact is, living in a society that controls every aspect of the citizen’s lives isn’t good for anyone. In order to take the good we get with freedom, we also have to accept the risks. Granting freedom to our citizens comes with the responsibility to maintain a delicate balance between free rights and social responsibility. Every time we face a new issue in our society, from vaccination to teaching evolution, we have the obligation to weigh the freedom to live as we wish with our responsibility to maintain a healthy, safe society for everyone.

Homeschooling, to me, is one of the risks we have to allow. We don’t require education, training, or any sort of license for parents. It’s the most dangerous occupation we allow people to practice without regulation. Yes, there are bad parents. And some bad parents inevitably choose homeschooling. But the good that we get as a society from allowing this choice is worth the risk.

The ‘Mama Instinct’ answer: They’ll do fine.

Posted on by Suki

The things we do as parents.

We want our children to do well. We want them to succeed. We want them to say the right thing. To be respected by adults in their lives.

And sometimes that leads us to act in rather silly ways.

Last week that lesson hit home for me. I was teaching an online course at Athena’s Advanced Academy, a provider of online classes for gifted kids. We don’t test for the “gifted” part of it—our approach is that if kids can’t keep up, they figure out that they’re not in the right place.

For the most part, this approach works great. Research shows the the most reliable predictor of whether a child is gifted is the parent. Parents are keen observers of their children, and they notice when their kids are different.

“Trust your mama instinct” is something I heard often when my kids were young.

But sometimes we go a little past that. Sometimes, after trusting our instincts, we feel compelled to go beyond and, perhaps, do a little extra work to insure that our instincts were correct.

In a class last week, one of my new students turned on her microphone three times to answer questions. I always love hearing my students’ voices, and love waiting to find out the surprising and insightful things they will say.

But in this case, once, then twice, then three times, I heard the mother’s voice in the background prompting the child on what to say.

“Really?” I thought. “Who signed up for this class, the kid or the mom?”

I had a mix of feelings.

I was affronted as a teacher that a parent would invade our space this way.

As a parent, I was horrified that a fellow parent wouldn’t know how damaging this was.

As this child’s teacher, I felt that I was sharing in her mortification.

Just to be clear: All the other students could hear the mother. As far as I know, none of the other students was being fed answers by a parent. They were taking part in the class in good faith, being who they were: complex bundles of gifts, deficits, inconsistencies, and contradictions.

But this is a story with a happy ending, or at least, a funny one.

The last time my student turned on her mic to answer a question, you could clearly hear the mother’s answer in the background first, and then the daughter’s.

But the answers didn’t match. The girl ignored her helicoptering parent and used her own mind.

I almost cheered.

Parents, please understand:

  You have your life; your children have theirs

      Your children will make mistakes, and this is how they learn

          Your children will sometimes be brilliant

and yes…

    Your children will say things that are not brilliant

         Your children will sometimes be wrong!

Here we are, complex bundles of gifts, deficits, inconsistencies, and contradictions. Get used to it. Let your kids go, and let them make mistakes. If you can’t trust your own “mama instinct,” trust mine:

They’ll do fine.

Home for the holidays

Posted on by Suki

21 years ago I moved a couple hours south from San Francisco to live with my then boyfriend, now husband. I also coincidentally ended up living a 15-minute drive from my parents’ farm, which they had just purchased after looking at properties many miles apart from Central to Northern California.

A typical scene at a family gathering: A glass of wine, conversation, kids, and at least a couple of dogs!

This was the start of a family life that I never envisioned when I left my parents’ home in Michigan at the age of 17, moved out to California, and expected to be the adult child furthest from my family seat. I ended up raising my two children within a short drive of a farm that became the center of an extended family of cousins, aunts and uncles, and my two healthy, active parents.

My mother never gave me much parenting advice, feeling that she and my father had pretty much been dumped into the middle of the hardest job they ever had with no preparation. However, she did tell me one thing that she and my father had made a decision about before they had children. They made a conscious decision that their family was going to get along.

Maybe this sounds like a little thing. But it wasn’t to them, coming from families who bickered, fought, and kept their distance as adults.

I’m not saying that my siblings and I, our children who are cousins, and spouses and other extensions of our family don’t ever have disagreements. But my parents did see success in their approach.

I wish I could offer a formula for other families, whom I often see suffering during the holidays because of the pain that they carry as a group. But there is no formula that we follow except that simple decision that our parents made: No matter what it takes, we get along.

Sometimes it’s not easy. I know that everyone in our family has things that they don’t say, that it might actually feel good to say in the moment. But there are many things in a family that simply don’t need to be said. We are not each other’s therapists, friends, or supervisors. All of the other categories of relationships amongst humans are severable.

No matter whether you see your family or not, they are family. They are by definition, not by choice.

I know people, adults now, who have chosen to take this tactic within their complex extended families though it means that they bite their tongues when other family members don’t.  I can’t tell you that this is the right thing to do, though they assure me that they get some benefit from it.

Others I know have chosen to sever their relationships, even to the point of denying their children a relationship with grandparents. And they have just as good reasons.

I am looking forward to our last holiday celebration on the family farm, which my parents are now leaving after maintaining it on their own for 21 years. When I was 17, I had no appreciation for what my parents had given us. But now with teenagers of my own, I completely understand.

To have an extended family that can come together as a family and get along is a gift that my parents created consciously and without precedent in their own families. I hope that it is a gift that my own children and their cousins will also inherit and cherish.

Thanksgiving at the farm

Further reading: 

How to raise boys who respect women

Posted on by Suki

I hope you didn’t come here looking for answers, because this will be a column full of questions.

How is it that we’ve come so far, but we haven’t come far at all?

Before feminism, men gave women a bad deal: You stay home, forego most opportunities for self-fulfillment, have no financial or physical independence, and put up with whatever life deals you, and we’ll take care of you. It was imperfectly enforced: poor women still had to work though with little pay and no status; all women had to risk that there were men who weren’t interested in holding up the we’ll take care of you part of the bargain.

Then we got feminism, we got some basic civil rights (though they’re still not guaranteed in the US Constitution), and we got the sexual revolution. That pact between men and women was thrown out: women were then expected to work, expected to do both the jobs they used to be confined to and also their new jobs, and expected to be sexually free. Men no longer had the responsibility of taking care of women; we were supposed to be strong and take care of ourselves.

Then we got third wave feminism or post-feminism (depending on who’s defining it), and we realized that we still hadn’t quite got it right. Men were still preying on women but women weren’t being protected. Women could get jobs, but with no guarantee that they’d be treated equally once they were there. Women were supposed to be sexually available but were also supposed to take care of themselves when they didn’t want to be sexually available. No one had clearly defined the line between “flirting” and “harassing.”

How do we raise sons in this world?

I don’t know. Men are now being called out publicly for behavior they committed which was excused under the first pact (any woman not in the care of a man is fair game), and which was encouraged by the second pact (women who go out in the world are sexually available to all men).

I haven’t asked them, but I’m guessing that the moms of these men didn’t raise their sons to behave this way. Heck, maybe even their dads didn’t. (Being a dad was different 50+ years ago.)

But I’m speaking here from the perspective of being a mom. I’ve always hoped that if you are a woman who expects and receives respect from the men in her own life, and if you model that behavior in front of your sons, it will eventually take root.

Here’s the problem: It’s not like you can enforce respectful private behavior the way you do, say, manners. When your child doesn’t say please, you prompt him, right? And eventually he turns out to be a polite person (when he’s not at home, that is).

What do you do when your child starts laying the roots of private disrespect for girls in his life? Will you even see it happening? How much more influence does what your son sees in media and out amongst his friends have on his behavior? We can do our best at home, but these things don’t happen at home.

If men’s private behavior is so different from their public behavior, how can we prevent it?

Is this actually a question about raising girls?

I am in no way a believer in the men-are-victims-of-their-own-biology line of reasoning. Men can, and do, control themselves.

All humans control ourselves: We learn not to defecate in the backyard. We learn to eat in a socially acceptable manner. We learn how not to throw fits at the DMV.

None of these behaviors follows our biological programming.

So the argument that men will be men and thus women have all the responsibility for protecting themselves is b.s., pure and simple.

How can we parents make sure that our kids’ experiences are different?

Boys that sees girls as friends and people first are less likely to treat women as targets later…or so we hope!

Humans will always be complicated, and no human system is perfect. But there’s just got to be a better way.

Men should know when they are harassing a woman.

Women should feel empowered to deal with it publicly.

As a society, we’ve been in a place where any woman not directly under the care of a man was fair game. We’ve been in a place where women were assumed to have full agency and were expected to stop victimization at the hands of men. But we’ve got to get to a place where men take a responsibility for their own and other men’s actions, and where women are able to get the support they need when they can’t handle something on their own.

But what is the path from here to there?

Sorry, just questions today.

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