I have been cleaning out the files on my computer and found this piece that I wrote when my daughter was in preschool…. she’s nine now. So it’s old news, but what’s amazing is how fresh it is. I still agree with all of it! I think I stopped writing because I’d called the piece “10 Pet Parenting Peeves” and just couldn’t find a 10th. So I publish it here in its original form.
1. Your child is in constant danger from strangers
A well-meaning friend of ours once expressed shock that we allowed our son to play alone in the front yard. “Aren’t you afraid of someone coming by and snatching him?” he asked. “Well…no!” we answered. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, about .01% of abductions “stereotypical” kidnappings, i.e. stranger abductions. That leaves us with the sad fact that if you want to take care of your children, you should be most suspicious of the people around you. Most children are kidnapped because of a messy divorce or by a mentally unstable relative or friend. According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, “The most important thing you can do to prevent abduction is to maintain healthy communication with your children and spouse.” None of this means that you shouldn’t be aware of your children’s surroundings and prepare them to take care of themselves if they need to. But a sensible family can come up with sensible rules that allow your children some freedom. Resources: missingkids.com
2. Anti-bacterial soaps keep us healthy
Study after study proves the same two facts: First, antibacterial soaps do not clean any better than normal soaps. As long as you wash with appropriate soap for the appropriate length of time, you will be just as clean. And toys treated with antibacterial coatings? Pretty much useless against the daily onslaught of little critters in our environment. The second reason is much more important: antibacterial soaps are contributing to resistant bacteria. How big of a problem is this? Well, you’ve probably read lots of scary front-page articles about bird flu, but most doctors are much more concerned about the fact that they can no longer cure some of the most common infections with anything but the strongest antibiotics. According to the FDA, “About 70 percent of bacteria that cause infections in hospitals are resistant to at least one of the drugs most commonly used to treat infections.” Resources: fda.gov, niaid.nih.gov
3. SUVs and bigger cars in general are safer for your family
Again, the information is there if you want it. In fact, the New Yorker ran a fabulous—and scary—article on this topic not too long ago. Bigger, heavier cars are not necessarily safer. I found myself biting my tongue one day when I heard a friend tell another person that his wife got their car because it was “safe”—when I knew it to be rated one of the more unsafe vehicles on the road. SUVs are top-heavy, which gives them a tendency to turn over. Also, they are generally harder to control, and more likely to be involved in accidents because defensive driving is more difficult. If you want to protect your kids, get a good ol’ safe and boring minivan, or even a smaller car that handles well and performs well on crash tests. Resources: consumerreports.org, The New Yorker
4. Watching TV can be good for your child
Let’s be clear about this. TV is entertainment. When we watch entertainment, most of our brain is turned off. We are experiencing pleasure. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t experience pleasure, but like most pleasurable activities, it’s best to do it in moderation. People try to defend their children’s TV-watching by saying that they try to get their kids to watch educational TV, or that they are afraid their kids will be social outcasts, or that their kids whine and scream if they aren’t allowed to watch. But none of that changes the facts. First, babies should never, ever watch TV. Children under two who watch regular TV score lower on IQ tests for a reason—researchers have found that their brains pretty much cease development while the TV’s on! Older kids who watch TV can absorb a fair amount of knowledge, but not any more than a kid given a choice of good books. And they are much more likely to be exposed to things that cause them anxiety, aggression, and depression. I remember reading about a study that showed that American kids who watch lots of TV show traumatic stress similar to kids living in war zones. (Wish I could find a citation for that study…) You need to turn on the TV in your house the way you should put out food. Look at it and decide if you really want it to become part of your child’s body, because they are sucking it all in. Resources: limitv.org, aap.org (ps: We do watch some TV in our house!)
5. If a package says “healthy,” you should feed it to your child
Parents are the second-best suckers in a field of gullible consumers. (Kids are the best, that’s why advertisers spend so much money on them.) We are so happy to buy things because they are easy—you can just throw a package into the lunchbox and you’re done. But we really can’t believe what labels say. A good rule of thumb is this: If something is marketed toward kids, it’s probably not a good idea to feed it to your kids too often. There are some healthy foods that are marketed to kids, but they aren’t the norm. The food issue ties into the TV issue. Without ever watching a single program, our daughter recently found out about Dora. Now when she sees things in the store with Dora on them, she must have them, regardless of whether I think they are appropriate things for her to buy. The cross-marketing of entertainment and foods is a huge business, and even PBS is in the act. Resources: commercialfreechildhood.org, kidshealth.org
6. A school’s test scores are important, and the corollary argument, private schools are by definition better
Even the best-educated people I know are starting to be worried about their school’s test scores. The campaign to make us fear our schools and second-guess our teachers is having success at the most fundamental level: it has started affecting how we think and make our decisions. We did “due diligence” when we chose a school for our son. We visited all the public and private schools that were an option for us. What we saw and heard from the many parents and educators that we talked to is exactly what we expected: test scores say very little about whether a school is the right place for your child. Anyone who has studied the theory of standardized tests knows that there are two qualities that standardized tests test most accurately: the socio-economic status of a child’s parents, and the child’s natural ability to think in the way that the test rewards. English language learners, tactile learners, physically active children, children with ADHD, children from homes without books, and even children whose families don’t sit down for regular family meals all score lower on standardized tests. None of these attributes is anything your school has any control over. Private schools can weed out the low test scorers, and public schools suffer when the parents of higher test scorers are suckered by the myth that their schools can’t serve them. But what it comes down to is this: is your child happy at his school? Does she want to go there and learn? Do his teachers know him and care for him? Are you involved with the school so that you can help to fix problems when they start? If we all ignored test scores and paid more attention to the schools themselves, our kids would be better off. Resources: alfiekohn.org, rethinkingschools.org
7. The age when your child starts to read reflects future success
Continuing from our current obsession with high test scores, we find the associated obsession with trying to “make” our children read at an earlier and earlier age. No matter that in the most literate country in the world, Finland, kids don’t start reading instruction till second grade. No matter that any parent of a normally intelligent child will tell you the same story: he resisted and resisted and suddenly, as if by magic, he started to read. Reading skills are developmental and thus come at different ages. The mother of a child in my son’s first grade class was infuriated that her child hadn’t started reading by December. But by May, she was doing just fine. Any parent knows that kids never do things on our schedule! There are many wonderful things we can do to support a child’s readiness to read, including having books in our homes, reading books to our children, reading books in the presence of our children so that we model the behavior, pointing out the letters they know on signs, playing reading readiness games with our preschoolers, and more. But nothing good is going to come of this mania to have “the earliest reader on the block.” The kids who are ready to read will read, and the kids who aren’t are going to be stuck with the stigma of being a slow reader right from the start. Don’t parenting books always tell us to set up our kids for success? Forcing kindergarteners who aren’t ready to start reading is setting many of them up for failure.
8. Active children are “hyper-active” and need to be medicated
I have a very active preschooler. I have to admit that recently she found a bottle of sunscreen and sprayed it on each and every article of her clothing, removing each piece from her drawers and reveling in a job well done. She had a great time. I was furious, of course. But what makes me even madder is that even I, someone dead set against medicating kids for normal behaviors, pondered the ease of putting her on a drug that would “calm her down.” Our society is into easy fixes, and this easy fix, I’m sure, will turn out to have some serious complications down the road. The ease with which people are choosing to medicate their kids these days makes a mockery of the pain and difficulty faced by parents with kids who actually have real problems, who aren’t just extreme examples of normal kids. As mad as I got at my daughter for the sunscreen incident, I could only be thankful that she hadn’t done many of the worse things that I know a child with a serious disorder might do.
9. Boys will be boys and girls will be girls
By chance we got one of each of them. And by chance, I can assure you that I have learned that sex stereotypes may be true for many kids, but they aren’t true for all of them. Our little boy loved pink and sequins and anything beautiful. He hated getting dirty and gravitated toward the girls in his play. Our little girl is feisty and headstrong. She’s one of the toughest kids in her preschool (following in the steps of another girl of our son’s class who was also the toughest kid). When you say things like, “aren’t little girls so sweet?” and “boys just never stop running,” you create a world in which kids who don’t fit generalizations are misfits rather than part of the lovely continuum of humanity. Our son could grow up to be a sports announcer and our daughter Miss America, but we’re going to give them the chance to be something else. And you should too.
I have a book, pages yellowed and stiff as if I’d been born much earlier than I was actually born, that my brother gave me when I graduated from college. He inscribed the front page, which is why I know when he gave it to me. Otherwise, I’d have to depend on my memory, which is a bit stiff and yellow about the edges, too.
The book is John Gardner’s On Moral Fiction. I don’t know if anyone reads Gardner much anymore. I know that men of a certain age, who were already stiff and yellow about the edges when they were my writing professors, loved John Gardner. I never had much use for his fiction, which seemed to be speaking to an audience much older and male than I was, but I did like this book. And I was touched that my brother would give it to me as I finished school and was about to embark on my life of art.
Fast-forward a few years, and my brother is in advertising, and I’m a homeschooling mom, but the book hasn’t lost its relevance. I skimmed it and found that my young self had helpfully underlined all sorts of important bits. Amazingly, they sound just as important to me now as they did then.
Gardner wrote, “Nothing could be more obvious, it seems to me, than that art should be moral and that the first business of criticism, at least some of the time, should be to judge works of literature (or painting or even music) on grounds of the production’s moral worth.”
He goes on to say a lot of things, but the main point I took from his argument, and have held onto ever since, is that whether you try to or not, any time you create a work of art you are making a moral statement. So since it’s unavoidable, you might as well think about what moral statement you’re making, just in case it turns out you’re making a statement that you don’t really want to stand behind.
This comes up now because my kids and I have spent the last two years – the time in which both kids have been homeschooling – listening to lots of audiobooks together in the car. When my son was in school, it was too hard to share books because his sister and I would want to listen while he was in school. But then our lives coincided a bit more and it became a project of sorts. We have listened to three series that I think Gardner would have had strong opinions about, had he lived to read them.
First, we listened to all of Harry Potter in the space of a few months. It was an interesting exercise – HP started to invade my thoughts about everything. It is clearly a series that has a lot of compelling content. But in the end, after all that build-up, I felt like we experienced an enormous group shrug. OK, well, good thing it’s over now so we can listen to something else.
It’s not that we didn’t enjoy it – we all did. But in the end, it seemed like there was so little to sink our teeth into. Harry, as a friend of mine pointed out, really didn’t “grow” that much as a character. He started out pretty good, he stayed pretty good, then in the end his goodness triumphed over evil, just as predicted.
It wasn’t an immoral tale, certainly. But I was left wondering, Does HP give us anything to aspire to? Have we learned anything? Do we feel better equipped to face the challenges of our lives? The answer was that resounding group shrug. It was a good tale, worth listening to, and I don’t think it damaged us to listen to it. But if Gardner is right, HP’s ambivalence is a statement in itself, a message where one was not really defined.
The second series we got into started simply because we found out that the author had published the first novel as a homeschooled teen. That sounded interesting, so we decided to check it out. The series, Inheritance, is all the rage with young teens I know. It certainly was a gripping tale, full of swashbuckling fighters, glorious dragons, lithe elves, and Icelandic-style scenery as a backdrop. Our hero, Eragon, is a farmboy who becomes a sort of accidental hero after he finds a dragon egg. Eragon has to grow immensely into this role. Nothing is ever easy for him. (Believe me – by the 50th time you read that Eragon felt some part of his body give way as he did some amazing deed… you get the point that he’s suffering!)
We were stymied in finishing the series, however, because I refused to buy the audiobook and the last book had a long waiting list at the library. So while we waited, we started on our third series, which we’re just finishing. This series, Tiffany Aching by Terry Pratchett, has a lot of surface similarities to Inheritance: made-up land, lots of magic, fairy folk. There the similarities end, however. Pratchett is a master writer with a slew of adult novels under his belt. His books not only feature a sly, intelligent humor that makes you sure this man knows what he’s doing—they are also firmly grounded in a moral universe of Pratchett’s making.
We finished Inheritance because we’d come so far and we needed to know how it ended. By the end, we were referring to it as “Blood and Guts” due to the enormous amount of violent imagery. The author would often pause to have his hero bemoan the amount of violence he was required to engage in—a nod toward morality—but then again he would rise up to drive his sword through an endless parade of bodies, telling us in gory detail about the sinews snapping, the fluids draining, the surprised looks on the doomed faces.
The other thing that hit me wrong about the series was indicated by the name: This series of books is all about how you can’t change your destiny. You are who you are, you are fated to be swordsman or victim, and you play your part no matter what. In the end, Eragon has learned many things, but the biggest lesson he’s learned is that none of his struggles changed anything. He’s on the white ship sailing off to his destiny.
I have to say that I found this a repugnant message to give young readers. As Gardner said, whether you mean to teach a lesson or not, what you choose to put into your fiction teaches a lesson. And the lesson learned from Eragon’s travails is that some of us are just born with great drama, and it doesn’t matter what we do to the little people on our rampage across history.
It’s so interesting that the end of Inheritance was sandwiched in between visits with Tiffany Aching. Tiffany is also a farm girl who gets caught up in something much bigger. But on every step of her journey, Tiffany pauses to think. She notices how her actions affect people. She makes decisions, and she takes responsibility for her decisions when they hurt other people.
The first three books are largely free of any gross violence. The fourth, I Shall Wear Midnight, starts with a shocking scene. A 13-year-old girl is beaten so viciously by her father that she loses the baby she’s carrying. Plenty for me to cringe at as the book opened and we listened in the car. However, by then I trusted Terry Pratchett, and he has not violated that trust. He is a writer who wields his pen with great assurance. There is no ambivalence about right and wrong, no sense that there’s no reason to fight, never a suggestion that someone can’t grow into being something more than they are today.
My kids had probably never heard anything so personally, horribly violent as they did at the beginning of Pratchett’s final book in the series. Nothing in HP or Inheritance was so personal and true to life. I wasn’t sure I wanted to get into discussions about just how and why a 13-year-old gets pregnant! But I don’t regret letting them listen to it. By the end of the book, Tiffany has unraveled the mess, not to make it perfect, but to make it as good as she can.
And that’s why she’s good, and why she’s moral, and why, if I wanted my kids to emulate any of the many people we’ve gotten to know in the last year—Harry, Ron, Hermione, Eragon, Arya, Roran, Rob Anything, or even Slightly Bigger Than Wee Jock Jock (gotta read Pratchett to understand!)—my vote is for Tiffany. She’s a hardworking, imperfect, thoughtful person. She’s not always nice, because she knows that nice is not always the most important thing.
My son and I went down to LA so he could attend the state science fair for the second time. It’s quite an exciting thing, to see so many kids who are into science and are willing to put their work out there to be judged. Unfortunately, the state science fair’s listings don’t include the kids’ schools, so I couldn’t count how many homeschoolers were there. I recognized at least four homeschoolers from Santa Cruz—the same three as last year plus a sibling who’s now old enough.
One of the fun things about the science fair is that science-minded families, whose kids are usually spread thinly throughout different schools, get to come together. Our kids don’t have to dumb themselves down for acceptance, and parents don’t feel the need to apologize for our kids’ abysmal social skills. (Though many of these kids have pretty impressive social skills, so there goes another stereotype.)
I also get to see a few other school parents I know, which is really fun because our paths don’t cross very often anymore. One conversation I had reminded me how our lives have diverged from school families’ lives. The mom I was talking to is someone I’ve known for a long time, and she was talking about how her daughter didn’t like to miss school. I joked that in our case, we miss school all the time!
Her answer was very interesting to me: She responded that it must be exciting for my son to get out, given that he’s homeschooled. Now, it’s possible she didn’t mean to be negative or critical – it’s the sort of thing people say in conversation. But when you say, “It must be fun for your son to get out” to a homeschooler, we hear, “We know you are an overprotective parent who isolates her kids by keeping them home from school.”
As I posted a month ago, the things that people say to homeschoolers don’t always get received as they might imagine. It’s possible this person didn’t mean to imply that my kids are somehow deprived, but since this is the sort of thing we hear a lot, we can’t help but hear implicit (and many times explicit) criticism in statements like these. The other thing we can’t help but do is laugh to ourselves about their naiveté—about how little school families seem to understand our lives.
The state science fair is very exciting for my son, that’s true. But it’s not exciting because it’s such a contrast to his usual life. For us, getting out and about is the ordinary state of things. Staying home a lot is something he and I only dream of.
I look at my son’s last few weeks and wonder if the general public could really continue to think of homeschoolers as deprived of appropriate interaction with the world if they had to tag along with us for a few days. Here’s a short list of some of the things he did (and this is on top of doing all the “school” work that we do at home, plus all of his classes which take place outside the home, plus his online math tutor, plus…. well, you get the idea):
Fun in the snow with another homeschooling family
A stop at the most awesome museum: The Fossil Discovery Museum. [We saw a sign for it in Chowchilla, which is off Hwy 99, which goes to Fresno. It’s built around a huge cache of fossils they found in the garbage dump across the road (really!). The man who took us around the museum, it turns out, is an adult homeschooler. He got into helping out with the dig, self-educated himself, and is now ABD (all but degree) a paleontologist, and is about to go back to school to get the degree he already has all the knowledge for.]
When we got back my son had his art class with the most excellent Yvette Contois of the Art Factory. (OK, that’s an ongoing activity, but I thought I’d give her a shameless plug.)
A trip with me to the Makers Factory to do an interview. While I interviewed, they got a personal tour of the cool tools they have there.
Meeting friends at Pogonip (on a school day) and going for an excellent hike on which my daughter adopted her new pet, a darkling beetle named Abyss.
Creative writing club, which we organized for a really great group of highly creative, thoughtful homeschooled writers.
Planning with one of the teachers in our homeschool program about the upcoming student film festival, which was planned and run entirely by middle school kids.
I admit we were so dragged out with all the running around that week that we skipped a fabulous field trip on Friday so we could hang out together at home and garden, play, and work. We also skipped about four other really cool homeschooling activities (out of the house, with other kids) that we could have done that day.
Science camp up in Yosemite with his homeschool crew.
A homeschool Presentation Day where he presented his work in Minecraft to a bunch of other homeschooled kids and their parents.
More intense work on the film festival, meeting with students and teachers.
Having his Minecraft crew over to our house for Minecraft club (which means that the kids actually interact with each other and play outside in addition to playing online… and the moms get to drink tea and gab!).
A fabulous fieldtrip to Point Lobos, swim team, sister’s softball game….
All this headed into the weekend of the state science fair, which started with my son accompanying me to San Francisco for a concert I was singing in, eating really fabulous Thai food in SF, going to a party at the composer’s house, staying in a hotel, and getting up very early to get to LA and set up for the science fair.
So… back to what homeschoolers are thinking when you say things like you imagine our kids don’t get out much. From our perspective, it’s school kids who don’t get out! Your kids go to the same place every day with the same kids and the same teacher. Yes, they do fieldtrips. Yes, they can also take part in competitions and go on cool vacations. But on a day-to-day basis they stay in one place, interact with the same people, and have very few unplanned interactions with adults out in the real world.
Now, I’d like to point out that I’m not criticizing the choice to send kids to school. I did it for years and may do it again! But it is so interesting to contemplate how differently we can mean something from how it’s received. I think this is the case whenever there is a large difference of experience between the two speakers—the same thing happens between people of different races or nationalities, people of different professions, people of different educational backgrounds. Because homeschooling is still a rather unusual thing to do (even though they say it’s getting so much more popular), other parents make assumptions that they don’t question about what our lives are like.
Since we got home, we’ve been going nonstop again and even though I wrote this in a cafe in LA, I’m only now publishing it. So the next time you pity us poor homeschoolers for being deprived of social interaction, remember:
It’s all in a week’s play for a homeschooling family!
One of the cool things about homeschooling is that you can incorporate your life into your learning… and your learning into your life. This is a case of the first instance. My nine-year-old daughter insisted on picking up a large black beetle when we were hiking at Pogonip and bringing it back with us. She has always enjoyed keeping bugs captive and studying their behavior. This one, however, has worked out more longterm – she’s survived 5 weeks. We’ve all come to have quite an affection for the little creature, who eats oats, does tricks like walking a tightrope (though not on command), and seems to enjoy crawling all over my daughter’s arm.
Following is the “assignment” my daughter completed based on Abyss and research she did. Note that I didn’t have to “assign” this at all – I made a suggestion that she could do something with the research she’d done on Abyss, and this is what she came up with. It was the perfect homeschooling moment.
The LifeofAbyss, theDarklingBeetle
Abyss
Hello, my name is Abyss. I am a female darkling beetle. I was born in a grassy, rocky area of California called Pogonip. That was the place that I lived for a very long time, and there my story begins.
I am currently a larva, or wireworm. I hatched from an egg a day or two ago that my mother laid. It took me about 18 days to hatch. It was uncomfortable in the egg—I was all curled up.
I wriggle and squiggle underground where I have burrowed. I know that my time soon will come where I will turn into a pupa, which is my resting stage. I wait a few more weeks underground, and soon I start to transform. It happened suddenly to me one day when I woke up. It was kind of scary and I couldn’t move anymore. I had a hard shell-like thing where my head should be and it was very uncomfortable.
The life cycle of a darkling beetle
I wait like this for a few weeks. One day I feel that I might able to move again. I try. I come out of the awful shell I was in, except I’m not a larva! I’m a darkling beetle. I walk up above ground, and stare at the sun. It seems like a long time ago that I stared at the sun when I first hatched. I’m currently white, and I have wings except when I try to flap them, they’re all fused together. I can’t open them. I try every day of my life to open these wings, but they’ll never open. I guess they’ll just stay fused together.
Some of my friends and some of my brothers and sisters are also out there. They are also white and their wings are also fused together. We play for a while, then we grow bored.
In a couple of days’ time I have turned brown. I start having to forage for my own wild grains, grass, and other things like that. A couple days later I am completely black with a hard shell covering my back. I am about 2 centimeters long.
Hikers at Pogonip pass me and one nearly squashes me. I crawl out of the way just in time. One day, one particular large group of hikers appears. One of them notices me. It picks me up. I am brought back along the trail to a place I have never been before. There are lots of big gigantic metallic looking things, and some of them pull away and move. The person that found me walks over to one of these. So do some of the hikers it is with.
The thing starts moving. After a while it stops. It waits a few minutes. It starts again. After that it stops again except it doesn’t move. The door next to me opens. The person that found me walks out. It takes me into a strange, gigantic room and puts me in a jar. There is nothing to do in the jar. I try to escape but the walls are smooth and they are also clear.
Soon the person that found me returns with some forest bedding. It gives it to me. I find a particularly crunchy piece of forest matter and start working on it. In a few minutes, I am taken out of my jar and put in a new gigantic jar. This one has things to do in it. It’s a whole playground. It’s also got forest matter. I crunch on the forest matter.
A couple of days later I get back into one of those strange metallic things. I go to another strange place. [Editor’s note: She went to be shared at our homeschool program.] I have been there for a couple of hours when the top opens. Someone sticks their finger into it. On their finger is a grain. It looks like some of the wild grains that I used to eat when I was at Pogonip. I eat half of it before it is taken back out. I had already finished eating as much as my little teeny tiny tummy could hold, so I wasn’t very mad. Soon I get back into the first strange room. I had taken one of those metallic things again.
Soon I’ve been fed more of that strange, yummy grain. I eat most of it. About a week passed. I was taken out of my playground and put in a container again. Another different container, I’ve never seen this one before.
I try to get out like I did the first time I was put in that jar. It takes about a minute. Then I’m taken out and put back into my nice, cozy playground. They’ve taken out the forest matter. Maybe they’ve realized I’m not a foresty bug. I’ll eat the forest matter but that’s just because I had nothing else to eat. Now, it’s only got oats. They look like the wild oats I used to eat.
I go and play on the seesaw. I go and hang out there a few minutes.
That is the end of my story. That’s where I am right now.
Parents know nothing: When my daughter wanted to buy this "bug playground," I figured it would sit in her closet. She loves it, and so does Abyss.
