Category: parenting

Caitlyn, parenting

Ah ha! I mean, Duh!

Everyone I encounter has a certain base package of knowledge, right? People generally eat with a fork, wait their turn before speaking, can approximate their feelings in words. Only with a mature brain, apparently. Which has been simultaneously both an “Ah-ha!” moment and a “Duh!” moment. Humans are born unfinished; it’s something about the angle needed by a pelvis for walking upright being incompatible with the size of a head with a completed brain. I knew that already. But what I didn’t know was how the brain was unfinished. And now that I think about it, of course, it makes …

Caitlyn, parenting

Gratitude and Learning to Share

Kids like things and people like themselves. Caitlyn has a marked preference for me based mostly, I think, on the fact that we are both female. At 5 1/2, she seems to view boys her age as bizarre creatures with strange tastes while girls are vastly superior. Perhaps it’s that the boys all want to play Clone Wars and the girls will pretend they are flying horses with starry coats and silver manes. Perhaps it’s only human nature, given how most people I know, myself included, seem to prefer spending time with people who have similar tastes and opinions. I …

Caitlyn, parenting

Learning by Doing

In the week or so before Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, I received a flurry of messages about making the day one of service, a “day on, not a day off.” Not many of the service projects, though, seemed appropriate for kindergartners. When we have P-Patch work parties, Caitlyn comes, but her actions there are more Caitlyn-staying-out-of-the-way (ie, climbing on large dirt piles or digging randomly in an open plot) than Caitlyn-doing-community-projects. It’s possible she’ll learn about the importance of participation and community involvement by watching me do it, but I think there’s benefit to her being more hands-on sometimes. …

Caitlyn, parenting

Evenings can be kind of stressful for me. There’s the getting dinner together (which sometimes starts right after lunch), getting Caitlyn home and doing the after-school routine, then eating and cleaning and prepping lunch for the next day, all before bedtime. I’m wearing down at this point and want nothing more than quiet and maybe a cup of tea; Caitlyn is getting increasingly crazy as the evening goes on, babbling and dancing and interrupting and fidgeting. She interprets things as narrowly as possible, so that telling her to stop sitting on the radiator also requires telling her to stop leaning …

Caitlyn, education, parenting
 

I am uncertain of my relationship with the notion of “childhood”. There seems to be this pervasive contemporary cultural sense that children should be protected and sheltered from all sorts of things, and that childhood is a time of magical, blissful ignorance. And while it’s certainly too true that there are American children (and others, too) who face too much too soon – hunger, poverty, abuse, homelessness, disease, etc – there are plenty who are indulged and coddled and sheltered from the burden of Responsibility for far too long. I have no problem with kids believing in the Tooth Fairy, …

current events, parenting

Until the Industrial Revolution came along and turned children into cheap labor, children were the opposite: valuable labor. Either they helped out on the farm… or they helped their masters, and in turn their masters taught them a skill by which they could eventually make a living… Adults and children worked together, and there wasn’t such a huge gulf between them. Not that children were considered mini-adults, unloved and exploited. Just that children were expected to rise to the adulthood all around them, not stew in adorable incompetence. – Free-Range Kids: Giving our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going …