Here is how to make a child bored: first and foremost, keep him indoors so that the infinitude of nature, its endless variation and chaotic messiness is replaced by a finite, orderly, predictable realm. Second, through television and video games, habituate him to intense stimuli so that everything else seems boring by comparison. Third, eliminate as much as possible any unstructured time with other children, so that he loses his capacity for creative play and needs entertainment instead. Fourth, shorten his attention span with fast-paced programming, dumbed-down books, and frequent interruptions of his play. Fifth, hover over him whenever possible to stunt his self-trust and make him dependent on outside stimulation. Sixth, hurry him from activity to activity to create anxiety about time and eliminate the easy sense of timelessness native to the young.
A somewhat needlessly anti-media piece, but it makes for nice musing. Plus, it introduces a new phrase I think I really like: “the primal self-sufficiency of play.”
John Boehner and Barack Obama engage in a very public battle over the timing of a speech, each side aiming thinly-veiled vitriol at the other, and the New York Times editorial board (rightly) decries it as political spectacle. But under what headline does the newspaper title and run the piece?
“Oh, grow up.”
The subtle, even unintentional implication here is that this type of petulant behavior is only and naturally the purview of children – whom you by definition incriminate when you suggest something isn’t “grown up.” I have known and worked with many children, my friend, and not one of them has been nearly as petty and arrogant as John Boehner. One simply does not just act like he does by virtue of being a child.
So, to the New York Times: instead of labeling this behavior as “childish” or ascribing it to those who need to “grow up” or “act their age,” let’s stop demeaning kids and label this behavior what it really is – plain immaturity. It’s as simple as that.
Maturity and age are two very separate, independent things.
When we engage in restoring childhood to some place in our thinking and recognize that childhood has significance in the development of the adult, it’s all right to talk generally about “childhood” and “the child.” But as a theoretical concept, “the Child” is a fiction. We do not know enough about what children, as biologically given creatures, will do at different stages in development or under different cultural circumstances. […] We will not develop a useful theory of child development until we recognize that “the Child” doesn’t exist. Only children exist; children in a particular context; children who are different from each other; children with different senses.
“Calvin and Hobbes” creator Bill Watterson, in a rare Q&A exchange that took place in 2005:
Q: What attributes do you wish were seen more commonly among children?
A: Good parents!
Typical for Bill Watterson: a quietly direct, even mousy, but unexpectedly truthful response. I was caught off guard by it at first, actually, thinking about how most people might answer the question. Of course Watterson would see it from the kids’ side, though; leave it him to recognize that many of the problems of children – and the deficiencies we like to find in them – actually have their roots in the failings and indifference of the adults around children instead.
Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum, speaking to a crowd in Iowa about preschool programs like Head Start:
“Of course, the government wants their hands on your children as fast as they can. That is why I opposed all these early starts and pre-early starts, and early-early starts. They want your children from the womb so they can indoctrinate your children as to what they want them to be. I am against that.”
My wonderful friend Morgan Leichter-Saxby recently wrote what I feel is a brilliant summation of the spirit that drives Playwork and adventure playgrounds in the UK. Framed as five basic lessons she learned from her experiences as a playworker, they appear simple enough, at least at first glance – but having spent countless afternoons in adventure playgrounds myself, I can tell you there is a treasure trove of truth here.
Please do go off and read her full post, pip pip, but for now here are Morgan’s five lessons – they’re honestly all you really need, I believe, to help guide you to having rich and wonderful relationships with children:
Notice everything. Appreciate how the world around you looks, feels and smells. Think about what else you could do with the things that surround you, what else they could become.
Be brave, in your own time. Different things are hard for different people. It’s okay – you can decide what’s right for you when you’re ready.
Be good to people. They’ll generally be good back, and when you meet some who aren’t you’re more likely to have friends to help you out!
Be yourself. Everything’s more fun if you stop worrying about whether you look silly or might get it wrong. It’s too tiring to try and be what you think other people expect, and frankly not worth the effort.
Be flexible. Stay light on your feet and keep your eyes open. Unexpected and wonderful things happen all the time, and you don’t want to miss a moment.
Lisa Bloom deconstructs the prototypical “Oh, look at the cute little girl!” icebreaker talk that at least many (usually North American) adults engage in when interacting with young children, and suggests something different:
Try this the next time you meet a little girl. She may be surprised and unsure at first, because few ask her about her mind, but be patient and stick with it. Ask her what she’s reading. What does she like and dislike, and why? There are no wrong answers. You’re just generating an intelligent conversation that respects her brain. For older girls, ask her about current events issues: pollution, wars, school budgets slashed. What bothers her out there in the world? How would she fix it if she had a magic wand? You may get some intriguing answers. Tell her about your ideas and accomplishments and your favorite books. Model for her what a thinking woman says and does.
Al Franken, ‘Nuclear’ Families, and the Needs of Children
Several days ago, in a hearing about the U.S. Defense of Marriage Act, Senator Al Franken disputed the testimony of a witness from the fundamentalist Christian organization Focus on the Family. ThinkProgress shares more about the encounter:
During this morning’s Senate DOMA hearings, Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) destroyed Focus on the Family’s Tom Minnery’s argument that children are better off with opposite-sex parents by demonstrating how Minnery misrepresented an HHS study. The study — which Minnery cited to oppose marriage equality — actually found that children do best in two-parent households, regardless of the parents’ gender.
You can watch it below:
Normally I’d avoid linking to something so potentially partisan, but this incident – which has been well-popularized around the Internet since it happened – seems to be a prime opportunity to take a look at a very complicated issue: that of what families should look like, what children’s needs are, and what parenting really is all about.
First, it almost goes without saying that this is a fine example of how research findings can easily be abused and misused. But second, and arguably more interestingly, this incident also highlights how swiftly ‘parenting’ can be co-opted by cultural beliefs and dogma – and, getting to the heart of the matter, how far our society’s concepts and public discussions of ‘parenting’ and ‘families’ have been removed from where I believe they should really lie: with children themselves. Ideally, I believe we should view ‘Parenting’ as as a responsibility taken on by an adult, whether through the birth or adoption of a child, to meet and provide for that child’s needs; while ‘Families’ can be viewed simply as whoever comes together around children to help in that task of meeting their needs. Unfortunately, such a focus on children themselves and their needs is often far from the true center of public discussions about families – so if I may, I’d like to try to reframe things here, in these different terms.
Reconsidering Families and Parenting through the Lens of Children’s Needs
Parenting can be seen through several different frames of reference. First there is a societal perspective – where parenting can be seen as a way to either perpetuate current social traditions and ways of life, or to prepare ‘future members of society’ for continued adaptation and the ability to meet the challenges of the future. Parenting can also be seen from a parent’s perspective – where the act of parenting provides some sort of meaning, gratification or change in the life of the parent. Finally, we can view parenting from the child’s perspective – where a parent is typically the primary person in their lives through whom that child’s needs are met.
It’s likely fair to say that all these frames of reference are valid, and can potentially be complementary to each other. Yet often, Western cultures like ours get too wrapped up in the first two perspectives, at the neglect or even exploitation of the third.
Yes, parenting is largely a cultural and philosophical act: how you interact with your children, and the environments and experiences you establish for them, is I think a profound statement on the way you see the world and how you want it to be. And Mr. Minnery and the Focus on the Family organization have every right to work toward a family subculture of their own, that matches their vision of the world. But, first, it is a problem when you try to press this subculture on others; second, and more disturbing, it is malicious and exploitative to intentionally misuse the researched evidence around children’s lives – to in essence use children themselves – to justify your own way of life, while persecuting others for theirs.
In this particular case, the research around children and their well-being proves that children are undeniably resilient and accommodating of many different family structures – and contrary to Mr. Minnery’s fervent belief, can absolutely still thrive while having two parents of the same sex, so long as their needs are still being met.
The Real Needs of Children
Since we raise the topic of children’s needs – and since we bandy about the term so freely in our discussions, often using it to justify our own prejudices and beliefs – it stands to question: what are these actual needs of children? Interestingly, they appear to be fewer and far more basic than one might imagine, according to eminent psychologist Jerome Kagan. After conducting decades of longitudinal studies globally, Kagan established that children, across all cultures, have only four essential, universal needs that have to be met in order for them to grow up emotionally and physically strong and socially well-adapted. They are:
Environmental variability;
Predictability;
Caretaking by adult(s) (as opposed to other children);
Both history and cultural anthropology bear out that children can and have had these needs met in an infinitely rich and diverse number of ways. And everything else surrounding children and childrearing, everything outside of these needs, is either ultimately unnecessary or some culturally defined variant of these needs.
What the study by the Health and Human Services department (link goes to full PDF of the study), which Minnery unsuccessfully tried to use, clearly shows – and any number of other recent studies can corroborate – is that children need to grow up in a predictable family structure, where they are reassured that their needs will be met… but how and by whom those needs are met simply just doesn’t matter that much, provided that predictability is there.
To quote another important study which examined the significance of gender in parenting: “The family type that is best for children is one that has responsible, committed, stable parenting… The gender of parents only matters in ways that don’t matter.”
What about Single Parent Families?
An inevitable question soon arises about whether two-parent (or ‘nuclear’) households are better for children than single-parent households, and can offer more stability, commitment, and so on. To continue to quote the same study from earlier, though: “One really good parent is better than two not-so-good ones.” Predictability also comes in an emotional form, and one committed parent can provide this relationally to children just as well as two might.
One area where single parents do have the deck stacked against them, though, is the simple matter of practicalities. With single parents raising children on their own, you can statistically expect for their household’s family income (in a North American context) to be half, or often less than half, that of a typical two-parent (usually dual-earning) household’s family income. You can also generally expect for a single parent to have far fewer available hours in the week to devote to childcare and to attending to children’s needs, compared to two parents in a household who together can have more hours to devote to the children. So the question isn’t whether single parents are inherently worse parents, or whether children inherently need two parents, but whether a single parent has as equal an ability as a two-parent household practically and financially to meet the children’s needs. This is not to say that single parents can’t make it all work out, just that statistically it is simply harder for them, at least without an established social network of help.
But I don’t see this as an argument against single-parent family arrangements – or any type of other family arrangement. I simply see this as a sign that we as a society should increase the support we offer to all parents and families – politically, with better family leave policies, universal healthcare, and more accommodating employers and work schedules; and culturally, with supportive neighborhoods and community programs, a positive and caring collective attitude toward children, and a better understanding and openness in our culture of the struggles parents face every day.
Nuclear families, mothers and fathers, homosexual parents… It’s too easy to fall into the trap of blindly upholding and believing in particular family and social structures around children. What we need to realize are that these structures are cultural and, ultimately, don’t matter as much as we think they do. Meanwhile, the one thing that is truly important – making sure children’s needs are met – can be realized in any number of infinitely rich and diverse ways.
For kids, at least, there is no one right way to have a ‘family’.
Kagan, J. (1978). The Growth of the Child: Reflections on Human Development. W. W. Norton & Company Limited. ↩
Children learn what they live. Put kids in a class and they will live out their lives in an invisible cage, isolated from their chance at community; interrupt kids with bells and horns all the time and they will learn that nothing is important; force them to plead for their natural right to the toilet and they will become liars and toadies; ridicule them and they will retreat from human association; shame them and they will find a hundred ways to get even.
A feature in the Times about the booming ‘playhouse’ construction business, that’s taken off despite the recession:
Mr. Dwyer has installed playhouses that look like pirate ships, windmills and castles at the homes of several film and sports stars who asked not to be named to protect their children’s privacy.
“Only a certain kind of clientele can afford what we offer,” he said. And few have backyards big enough to hold it. Red Beard’s Revenge, for example, is a $52,000 playhouse in the shape of a 12-foot-tall, 18-foot-long pirate ship, complete with a crow’s nest, upper and lower decks made of mahogany and leather benches in the captain’s quarters that double as beds. […]
Barbara Butler, an artist and playhouse builder in San Francisco, said her sales are up 40 percent this year, and she has twice as many future commissions lined up as she did this time last year. Not only that, but the average price of the structures she is being hired to build has more than doubled, from $26,000 to $54,000.
It’s probably easy to see the ludicrousness in all of this – but let’s take a stab at it, shall we? Real imaginative play is almost directly antithetical to predesigned, adult-built structures, which lack all of the opportunities for a child’s agency and control over the environment that, say, a plain stack of scavenged wood, a bucket of nails, and a little paint might offer that child. In fact, while the obligatorily-quoted psychologist in the article, Dr. Steven Tuber of City University of New York, notes that “over-the-top playhouses may do something for the parent’s sense of grandeur, [but] certainly are irrelevant to the child’s needs and desires for a play space,” I’d go further and say they’re not just irrelevant but are directly obstructive to children’s play – adulterating it with preconceived expectations about what that play should be, to say nothing of shifting the control and maintenance of the environment over to adults.
What strikes me as more ludicrous, though, are the dominant reasons people seem to be buying – and builders seem to capitalize on while selling – these expensive playhouses:
“Childhood is a precious and finite thing,” Ms. Butler said. “And a special playhouse is not the sort of thing you can put off until the economy gets better.”
Not to go on an Old Sociologist Guy rant here, but – well, yes, to go on a rant… Let’s just be clear on something. “Childhood” = not about how fancy of stuff you had growing up, while “being a good parent” = not about simply outspending your neighbors on fancy playhouses and Baby Einstein DVDs. And there’s nothing “precious” about childhood; that’s just you being stupidly drunk with nostalgia. To the point: while some of these playhouses might look cute, and even be fun for children (for a while), they ultimately only undercut children’s independence, creativity, and control over their play – whereas these kids might just be better served with a bike and a summer of free afternoons where they can do whatever they like, and scavenge for spare materials and loose parts to build their own playhouses.
If there’s one silver lining to all of this, it’s that I think kids see through all this BS quite clearly. The kids from the families featured in the article might be too young now, but it won’t be long before they’re 10 or 11 years old and taking a hammer and saw to the playhouse because they know that can build something that’s better.
Some Thoughts on Boredom
I’ve been thinking a lot about boredom lately, after reading (and earlier today linking to) a thought-provoking blog entry on the topic by Douglas Adams – the famed creator of the ‘Dilbert’ comics trip.
In his piece, Adams brings up an old but important idea:
I read someplace that the brain needs some boredom during the day to process thoughts and generate creativity. That sounds right. My best ideas always bubble up when I’m bored. And my period of greatest creative output was during my corporate years when every meeting felt like a play date for coma patients.
Browsing back through the Danielsaurus archives, though, I came across this old piece I linked to and referenced more than a year ago: “Boredom Begins at School”. It highlights research which shows some of the physiological dangers of boredom, and shares how many scientists and education reformers are actually faulting it as one of the key reasons our education system fails.
I’ve linked to both perspectives, and I actually do believe there’s some truth in both perspectives even though they seem at odds with each other: On the one hand, boredom can be a breeding ground for creativity – and certainly, it is something I believe is vital for children to experience and have (a lot of) in their life as they grow up. On the other hands, boring places don’t make for good learning environments, at least if its inhabitants are expected to learn certain things and not how to doodle cartoons in class while ignoring the intended curriculum.
It leaves me to ask myself several, possibly overlapping questions. Wondering out loud right now:
Is boredom the same as disengagement? Is it possible, and maybe even good, to by physically bored (perhaps by a lack of intentioned activities or tasks you need to do) but mentally engaged and curious? Is there a difference between a “boring” geographic place (or person, or book, or…) and an individual person, child or adult, “being bored”? Could a boring place be the same, and perhaps more aptly described, as an “un-stimulating” place? And when we talk about “boring” classrooms and schools, are we perhaps really just talking about environments that force their users into a natural inclination toward disengagement?
This may seem like playing with semantics, but I wonder if there’s something there. Who knows, maybe there isn’t. But if there isn’t, how do we reconcile the boredom paradox? Is it simply a matter of saying “some boredom is good” but “constant boredom is bad”?
Some thoughts on the slow decline of our American education system, from one of my favorite columnists, Nick Kristof:
My beloved old high school in Yamhill, Ore. — a plain brick building that was my rocket ship — is emblematic of that trend. There were only 167 school days in the last school year here (180 was typical until the recession hit), and the staff has been reduced by 9 percent over five years.
This school was where I embraced sports, became a journalist, encountered intellectual worlds, and got in trouble. These days, the 430 students still have opportunities to get into trouble, but the rest is harder.
For the next school year, freshman and junior varsity sports teams are at risk, and all students will have to pay $125 to participate on a team. The school newspaper, which once doubled as a biweekly newspaper for the entire town, has been terminated.
Business classes are gone. A music teacher has been eliminated. Class size is growing, with more than 40 students in freshman Spanish. “It’s like a long, slow bleed, watching things disappear,” says the school district’s business manager, Michelle Morrison.
Coming from Kristof, who’s spent much of his career reporting on developing countries around the world, it’s truly poignant and disappointing to see how far we’ve strayed from the values that once made us strong as a country. Certainly, the nature of ‘education’ has changed – the needs of our society have moved on from the turn-of-the-twentieth-century industrial demands which once pushed the American education system forward. We no longer need (if we ever did) schools to function as factories, to educate and deploy a stable and homogenous workforce. The nature of schools and the function of education is – and should be – undergoing a more fundamental, if conflicted, paradigmal shift. But this is different. What Kristof speaks of here is about how we simply, plainly no longer value education in general, regardless of form.
We treat teachers abysmally, pay them poorly, disparage their unions and blame them for the problems of a system which, at its root, is currently fundamentally flawed and problematic. We bind the hands of school principals and district administrators to bring about larger change, burying them with reports and regulations – done out of the call for “accountability”, a word for which we have neither a clear definition nor proper understanding – and we force schools into operating within whatever is the cheapest and most barebones model of education that will still deliver adequate results on fanciful, made-up tests which have little to do with real education. And the children themselves, those we uphold as “our future”, we’ve disregarded with a whiff of disdain – if we render them any attention at all. Schools have been shaped into concrete prisons, far removed from the centers of our community life; where once schools were integral places in our communities and neighborhoods, as Kristof for instance recalls about how his old school newspaper doubled as the town’s biweekly newspaper, their societal role now has been marginalized and relegated to simply “educating” (or more often just “protecting”, or worse, “containing”) “the children.” We’ve devalued children’s roles in society, no longer recognizing or welcoming what good they can bring as members to community life – and by extension, we’ve done the same to schools and education; we’ve turned the one last place left where children can interact with and contribute to the surrounding community into a static prison, lifeless and bound by burdensome worries and demands, a place where children’s own voices and contributions don’t matter.
Think about it: when was the last time you actually entered and spent a meaningful amount of time in a local school (one your own children didn’t attend)? How often today do you see a local school’s sport team treated like royalty, with the entire population showing to support them at games and players being known and congratulated outside of school? How often are you encouraged in your local community to actually know the children who live in your neighborhood, who aren’t yours or friends of yours? What level of expectations, if any, do you see your local community setting and holding of its schools – and of the children in those schools? What does your community ask of them, and in what ways are children really actually encouraged to contribute and participate? Have you ever read, or had a chance to read, an essay or opinion of a student in the community whom you didn’t know personally? When was the last time you saw a school or group of children really valued by the community, upheld as a prized part of its local community life, and supported with the necessary resources and attention?
We can ask if our schools and education system are in decline, but I think these are some of the more relevant and insightful questions for the moment. I think what matters now isn’t so much the quality of schools themselves, but their decreasing place and importance in our communities. What matters now is something far larger and more central to the whole of society.
I’ve strayed from Kristof’s column and his central point, but I will end with this: I think he’s right. We don’t value education and we don’t support our schools; if we did, our financial budgets and legislative priorities would look different. But I will go further and say that our schools crumble not only because they lack our financial support, and not only because we no longer value education – but because we no longer value children themselves.
We’ve become a society which has no place for children. We’ve slowly but steadily distanced them from our public life and discourse. We’ve removed them, psychologically and physically, from much of our society. And we stand by and let the schools we keep them in rot and fall away, with them inside.
The time is right to move beyond unproductive debates about the “blame culture” and instead to build momentum behind the idea of expanding children’s horizons. What is needed is nothing less than the wholesale rejection of the philosophy of protection. In its place, what we need to adopt is a philosophy of resilience that truly embraces risk, uncertainty and real challenge – even real danger – as essential ingredients of a rounded childhood.
It’s this connection to community — again, on- and offline — that may be most one of the greatest benefits of virtual worlds. Despite fears about predators, virtual worlds do offer kids a place to experiment and expand socially. Virtual worlds give children an opportunity to participate in a large social environment, with people from all over the world, often unsupervised by their parents. That may sound scary to parents, but for kids, it can be very liberating.
Another recent win for children’s and teenagers’ First Amendment rights – though it is unfortunate many might see the case, too simply I’d maintain, as encouraging uncivil behavior.
Last October, a group of sixth-graders in Sweden filed an official complaint with their country’s advertising regulatory agency against the Toys”R”Us corporation. The reason for the complaint? Because the kids felt the toy company’s catalogue was gender-discriminatory.
According to the youngsters, the Toys”R”Us Christmas catalogue featured “outdated gender roles because boys and girls were shown playing with different types of toys, whereby the boys were portrayed as active and the girls as passive”, according to a statement from Ro [Sweden’s regulatory agency].
The group’s teacher explained to the local Smålandsposten newspaper that filing the complaint was the culmination of more than two years of “long-term work” by the students on gender roles.
Thumbing through the catalogue, 13-year-old Hannes Psajd explained that he and his twin sister had always shared the same toys and that he was concerned about the message sent by the Toys”R”Us publication. “Small girls in princess stuff…and here are boys dressed as super heroes. It’s obvious that you get affected by this,” he told the newspaper. “When I see that only girls play with certain things then, as a guy, I don’t want it.”
Classmate Moa Averin emphasized the importance of children being able to be who they want even if “guys want to be princesses sometimes”.
Two thoughts here, if I may…
First, how absolutely great is this? That a group of young kids not only took a big political step to advocate for an issue they cared about, but that the issue itself is what they felt was gender discrimination? I see what these kids did as many great things, but most important it was a bold declaration against adults trying to put them into a box – against a corporation trying to exploit them, by playing into and contributing to culturally defined childhood gender roles, all for the purpose of selling cheap toy products. If you don’t think kids are cognizant of the ways society tries to transmit cultural expectations like gender roles, and are fully active in questioning and challenging those expectations, then think again. Kids see the world in a whole new way, one that’s uniquely their own – and they won’t let anyone else dictate it.
Second, leave it to a country like Sweden to not only hear a complaint filed by a group of children but also eagerly embrace and encourage the children’s activism while doing so. Following a review of the case, Sweden’s regulatory agency chose to agree with the children, and they issued Toys”R”Us a public reprimand – echoing the children’s sentiments in it by declaring that the toy company’s catalogue “discriminates based on gender and counteracts positive social behaviour, lifestyles, and attitudes.” Apparently the kids aren’t the only ones who understand and value the importance of them having the freedom culturally to be whomever they want to be.
I’d say that deserves at least two big cheers – one for the group of children themselves and their hard work in making their voice on a topic known, and another for Sweden’s government for taking that voice so seriously.
Katie Roiphe, on the unusual cultural phenomenon of Go the Fuck to Sleep – the new “children’s picture book for adults” by Adam Mansbach:
The odd, rageful, beautiful little book’s inspiration lies in the commingling of insipid bedtime story rhymes with the inner monologue of the wildly irritated parent: “The owls fly forth from the treetops./ Through the air, they soar and they sweep./ A hot crimson rage fills my heart, love. / For real, shut the fuck up and sleep.” The stylish parody relies for its humor and frisson on a certain level of frustration, an over- the- top, pent-up fury toward one’s children, because without that fury, it’s simply not that funny. […]
Here of course, that anger or hostility is aimed at children, at big-eyed toddlers padding around in their strawberry pajamas, and that is what is both exhilarating and disturbing about the book. There is a nastiness in Go the Fuck to Sleep, an undercurrent of resentment that is comic, or “cathartic,” as another Amazon reviewer put it, only to parents who are pretty radically subjugating themselves to a certain kind of kid-centered drabness, and judging from the book’s runaway success, that would be a lot of parents. […]
One wonders if this hostility toward the child, who is naturally and rightfully manipulative, is just a tiny bit misplaced. If we are raising a generation that sees the whole world as an expanse of devoted maids and butlers, if we ourselves are overly beholden or enslaved to our children’s anxieties and desires, isn’t it our own fault? Likewise, if we can’t manage to hire a baby sitter and get out of the house, if we have made of the conventional nuclear family structure something stifling, airless, it can’t really be the fault of a 4-year-old, resourceful and mischievous as he may be. We are, after all, to blame for our own self-sacrifice, and if we are being honest and precise, it’s not exactly self-sacrifice, tinged as it is with vanity, with pride in our good behavior, with a certain showiness in our parenting, with self-congratulation.
Whether it’s in the service of cathartic relief or something else, Go the Fuck to Sleep seems to demonstrate an almost violent antipathy toward children – and an ‘Othering’ of them that seems to claim they are far removed from the human (implicitly, ‘adult’) experience. As much as the book might act as a token of a solidarity in modern parents’ collective tribulations of dealing with children, this empathy with parents comes at the direct expense of empathy with children and their experiences. As Ben Delaney tweets, Go the Fuck to Sleep almost seems to be “a strange celebration of our culture’s lack of empathy toward kids.”
Roiphe does begin to unravel the roots of this antipathy in her article, when she begins to examine the dogged, often self-sacrificing efforts across a particular segment of society and parents – well, she rather unflatteringly calls them “yuppie parents” – to be ‘child-centered’ in our actions and parenting. Go the Fuck to Sleep is simply the point where it all erupts, the point of backlash where the cultural burden to be the ‘perfect parent’, with all the “enlightened, engaged, sensitive parenting practices” that go along with the role, as Roiphe elaborates, causes them to go unhinged and unleash all the built-up repressed rage.
What we don’t regularly realize is that in focusing so intently on (what we presume are) children’s particular needs and characteristics, we’re ultimately doing them harm by moving them farther and farther from the center of our society – from the society they exist in both currently and as future members of society. A separate, conceptual ‘Land of Childhood’, one which inevitably emerges alongside the increased societal expectations and burdens of ‘Parenthood’ and good parenting practice, serves no one – not least of whom the parents themselves. But it’s vital to know that becoming a parent does not mean your life is now a forsaken one, a now desolate bond of servitude toward your child. Nor, indeed, does the arrival of kids in your life mean that your child might not appreciate and wish to participate in aspects of the life you had before, or that the world of children is ultimately incompatible with the world of adults. Mansbach’s book may portray the life of a parent as one of “Sartre-like bleakness and claustraphobia” – but it need not be that way. I propose that by embracing children themselves, by listening and empathizing with their experiences, and embracing them in the folds of all of life – and ultimately society at its whole, not just relegating them to the far-removed ‘Land of Childhood’ – children can be the greatest joy of all in life.
Is It Really That Bad to Let Our Kids Do ‘Big Things’?
Just as one thirteen-year-old sets out to scale Mount Everest and another prepares to sail around the globe, one columnist at the London Times questions whether letting kids do ‘big things’ like this is actually the height of “parental indulgence” and neglect:
It does not seem intrusive to wonder about the Romeros’ and Dekkers’ exact understanding of the notion of parental responsibility. Moreover, we would point out that being young is not, in itself, an achievement.
Not to give the London Times the short shrift, but it is just unfathomable to me that someone could claim this point of view. How is having faith in kids and trusting in their capacities really some grievous form of parental irresponsibility? Nonetheless, the Times’ columnist apparently does honestly believe this, and very much defends it (in the most bitter and snarky of manners, if I might say). Unfortunately she’s not alone: you can also behold a whole raft of complaints in the column’s comments about the clearly “tantamount” physical risk and psychological harm these high-achieving children are surely now burdened by.
It all just leaves me puzzled and saddened, and ultimately left to question: Why are we so begrudging our children that sense of the awesome wonder and achievement possible in life? What do we actually do to them when we say that their dreams are too dangerous, too unrealistic, or even plain impossible? How can it be a bad thing to believe in them, and know along with them that anything is possible? I can’t help but believe that everyone needs a little adventure – most especially, I would say, kids. Going out bravely into the fog to meet the unknown head-on and tame it… why, that’s the very essence of what growing up is about.
Publishing expert Michael Norris, editor of the Book Publishing Report, is now releasing the findings from a full year’s worth of surveys he conducted about the children’s publishing industry – and the answer his research led him to regarding that question might come as a surprise to many.
The Guardian shares more about Norris’s conclusions:
[D]espite the best intentions, it is well-meaning mothers and fathers who often stop their sons and daughters from picking up the reading habit. “Parents have too much of a role in deciding which books their child is going to read,” said Norris. “It is turning children off. They should let them choose.”
Norris’s research found that it is parental attitudes and pressure – not the allure of technology – that keeps children from reading more. (Whoops. There goes that scapegoat.) He also found, unsurprisingly, that children buy and read books only based on personal suitability and taste. As he summarizes, in a line which good librarians and booksellers are sure to enjoy:
“It should all be about patience and believing that books are sold to one person, one at a time,” said Norris.
It’s an interesting overview of children’s reading habits and the children’s book industry as a whole, from a well-placed, authoritative perspective. Norris also later shares some truly useful tips within the article about how to encourage children’s love of reading – to which I can only add, for reference, Daniel Pennac’s The Rules of the Reader. It’s all well worth a look.
UPDATE: Publisher Kate Wilson kindly points out in a comment on the piece that, while of course children’s own reading independence is an admirable and desirable pursuit, there is also a real joy in the shared act of parents and children reading together. It’s a fair point – and I think it’s worth saying that, naturally, one form of reading doesn’t have to necessarily come at the expense of the other. All of this also goes to show, though, that parents who themselves enjoy reading – and create a pleasurable culture around reading, whether it is as an individual or shared activity – will likely also have kids who enjoy reading. It really is a cultural thing.
Columnist Andrew Sullivan also recently decided to weigh in on Melvin Konner’s new book, entitled “The Evolution of Childhood” – which discusses the evolutionary nature and need for play. Sullivan’s response to it is almost equally enchanting and poetic (as it’s so short I’ve included it in full):
Well, yes, maybe [play is a rooted function of evolution]. But once one leaves the reductionism of evolutionary biology, can we not see play as also, well, play? And play is defined by its uselessness, its freedom, its ability to resist productivity. It is a form of ultimate freedom - in my view, the freest human beings can be. Because a game has no known winner in advance, if it has any winner at all. It is about being together and engaging together without an ulterior purpose.
That’s why I see play as something close to the divine. That’s why I believe Jesus loved children. Because, in play, they had found a way to be with each other without any other over-arching purpose.
Sullivan’s understanding and opinion of play reminds me very much of Howard Chudacoff, who lays forth a similar philosophy in his brilliant book “Children at Play: An American History”.
Benjamin Schwarz reviews a new book by Melvin Konner called “The Evolution of Childhood.” In short, it sounds really, really good.
A particular passage from Schwarz’s review which stuck out at me was this one:
Konner is especially interested in play, which is not unique to humans and, indeed, seems to have been present, like the mother-offspring bond, from the dawn of mammals. The smartest mammals are the most playful, so these traits have apparently evolved together. Play, Konner says, “combining as it does great energy expenditure and risk with apparent pointlessness, is a central paradox of evolutionary biology.” It seems to have multiple functions—exercise, learning, sharpening skills—and the positive emotions it invokes may be an adaptation that encourages us to try new things and learn with more flexibility. In fact, it may be the primary means nature has found to develop our brains.
I was recently reminded of this wonderful essay by the ever-cogent Alfie Kohn, and I think it says it all beautifully – about every part of how we approach children, not just education:
I never understood all the fuss about that old riddle – “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear, does it still make a sound?” Isn’t it just a question of how we choose to define the word sound? If we mean “vibrations of a certain frequency transmitted through the air,” then the answer is yes. If we mean “vibrations that stimulate an organism’s auditory system,” then the answer is no.
More challenging, perhaps, is the following conundrum sometimes attributed to defiant educators: “I taught a good lesson even though the students didn’t learn it.” Again, everything turns on definition. If teaching is conceived as an interactive activity, a process of facilitating learning, then the sentence is incoherent. It makes no more sense than “I had a big dinner even though I didn’t eat anything.” But what if teaching is defined solely in terms of what the teacher says and does? In that case, the statement isn’t oxymoronic – it’s just moronic. Wouldn’t an unsuccessful lesson lead whoever taught it to ask, “So what could I have done that might have been more successful?”
That question would indeed occur to educators who regard learning – as opposed to just teaching – as the point of what they do for a living. More generally, they’re apt to realize that what we do doesn’t matter nearly as much as how kids experience what we do.
To be honest – and to indulge in a bit of selfish reflection – I think this is the common thing, the feeling that has attracted me professionally and personally to both storytelling and education (in the Alfie Kohn sense). It’s all about sharing experiences. Later on, Kohn writes about how the experiences of teachers matters, too, and I think it’s a fitting conclusion:
Finally, as teachers are to students, so administrators are to teachers. Successful school leadership doesn’t depend on what principals and superintendents do, but on how their actions are regarded by their audience – notably, classroom teachers. Those on the receiving end may be older, but the moral is the same: It’s best to see what we do through the eyes of those to whom it’s done.
And I think that’s the crux of it. That’s the crux of everything in life: “It’s best to see what we do through the eyes of those to whom it’s done.”
About That Whole Gender-Differences-in-Children Thing
Just in time (given a recent headline), the Scientific American’s latest issue is all about the research concerning the potentially innate differences between males and females. (Hint: they don’t start out so different after all.)
If there is a neurological disparity between the genders, it could explain important behavioral differences. But surprisingly, researchers have found very few large-scale differences between boys and girls in brain structure or function. Yes, boys have larger brains (and heads) than girls—from birth through old age. And girls’ brains finish growing earlier than boys’. But neither of these findings explains why boys are more active and girls more verbal or reveals a plausible basis for the consistent gaps in their reading, writing and science test scores that have parents and teachers up in arms.
They go on to illuminate how experience – or nurture, if you feel compelled to put it in terms of that age-old argument – plays a much more important role in establishing gender: “Most sex differences start out small—as mere biases in temperament and play style—but are amplified as children’s pink- or blue-tinted brains meet our gender-infused culture.”
I’ll chime in to say it’s important to remember that children’s brains are quite malleable, especially in early childhood. In practical terms, this means that our own cultural ideas and subtle gender-based biases present within our interactions with boys and girls actually impact and help shape our children’s physical brains – with the potential to magnify the originally small sex-based neurological differences that a child may start out with. As much as there may be real neurological differences between older boys and girls, those neurological differences, to a large degree, have been a result of the brain’s own self-shaping responses to culturally informed experiences.
This has been perhaps one of the largest faults present in past scientific research about children and gender: much of the research simply never acknowledged that there is no fixed, neurological standard in brain development, or that the brain itself grows and shapes itself based on experiences. In effect, studying the neurological roots of gender is like trying to pin down a fast-moving target, and then trying to tell others how to do the same thing with other fast-moving targets. It just can’t be done.
Little girls are saying goodbye to their dollies and hello to tech gadgets and computer games. Does this mean they’re missing out on imaginative play?
Wow. If that’s not a patronizing thing to say, I don’t know what is. Girls, boys, dolls, and computers and cell phones everywhere should feel highly begrudged right now. (Yes, I’m including inanimate objects in that list. Hush now.)
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Just to be clear: I do actually get that the author is attempting to make a point about the supposed ‘disappearance’ of children’s imaginative play, and unconsciously presuming this is linked with children’s increasing use of mediated toys and technology instead of physical toys. I’m alright with being concerned about that, even if I think that fear is overplayed. Rather, it’s the wrapping that she surrounds her point in which is just presumptuous and sexist, while unconsciously reinforcing potentially harmful gender stereotypes.
First, there’s nothing necessarily “bad” with girls being interested in technology, nor is imaginative play necessarily inhibited by it. It’s a different topic, but one that should be considered: why is computer literacy still thought of as a predominantly male trait? As far as linking technology with the downfall of imaginative play – that’s a stretch, by far, and doesn’t actually consider the unique benefits that technology may offer to imaginative play. ‘Tis a topic worth it’s own discussion, and the research just ain’t there to make blanket statements at this point.
Second, while the prevalence of dolls has perhaps led us to accept that they’re necessary and beneficial, why should we assume that dolls are really all that important a thing in order for a girl to have a rich, imaginative playlife? As one commenter to the piece mentioned: If you’re concerned about a girl’s creativity and imagination, why not give her a tub of LEGO bricks in response? I should also probably not leave out the other begrudged party here – boys. What? Boys can’t play with dolls? History has shown that children (and adults) of all ages and genders have played with dolls in the past (see Howard Chudacoff’s book, “Children at Play: An American History”), so why have dolls become such a regimented part of the ‘girl’ gender
stereotype?
I don’t mean to hate on dolls – there’s definitely a lot of play value in them, and I know a lot of little girls (and boys) who play with them. Even as the author recounts her own daughter’s doll play, you can get a picture of the richness dolls often add to play. But the real issues with this type of hypothesizing are the underlying assumptions made in the process: first with conflating doll play as a given and natural part of an imaginative girlhood (introducing gender stereotypes in doing so), and then with unnecessarily dichotomising technology against imaginative play (and undermining children’s potential in the process).
Those are some pretty big holes to be standing on when you’re asking about otherwise good topics.
From Walker Lamond, a list of 1001 rules about life for his yet-to-get-here son. (As he puts it, “Let’s get some things straight before I get old and uncool.”) He’s got a new book based on the idea coming out soon, too, which – inevitably – will probably be handed out at every baby shower on the planet. But you know what? That might just be an alright thing.
A few of my favorites of Lamond’s rules:
Rule #369. “You don’t get to pick your nickname.” (Just ask “Sluggy” Bogart.)
Rule #365. “Sadly, some things we love will never come back. The fedora is one of them.”
