Educating children

This topic may be where i am the most unconventional, but by the end of this post, hopefully i'll be able to present my case in such a way that you'll think its perfectly reasonable, and could be a new convention sometime in the near future.

Today, the vast majority of people, whether rich or poor, will have a baby and within a few months return to work, leaving their babies at daycare for most of the day. The child will stay in daycare until age 3, at which point they'll enter pre-school, where they learn shapes, numbers, the alphabet, colors, sing some songs, and spend the most productive part of their day running around the playground, but will be called in for more classroom time. At age 5 they enter school and begin to learn spelling, reading, addition, subtraction, natural science, and social studies or historical stories, mostly falsely patriotic or heroic or in some way misleading. The children sit in rows indoors, and listen to their teacher. As the years progress, the teachers teach increasingly complicated intellectual matters that sometimes they themselves have to review out of a textbook.

My understanding of child development is that the first five years are most significant for building the foundation off of which they learn. Children imitate their parents and people in their surroundings, so its important to be really conscientious about whose care your putting your baby under. They will definitely absorb that energy in some way and considering the possibilities of People in General, that can be a terrifying prospect!

Anyway, fear aside, here is my alternative approach to educating children in the first formative years. Since their brains are growing and they are sucking up knowledge like a sponge, it is easy to teach reading to a pre-5 year old child while they are still learning to speak. Speaking and reading can go hand in hand and need not be separated! There's a video called 'your baby can read' and i'm formulating a video myself that isn't as random and jumpy as that tutorial, but the basic idea can be applied to every day life, since written language is everywhere. The only problem with reading Everything is that a Camera might become Canon and a computer might become Macbook.... But that can be remedied with tape and a marker.

Before the age of 3, which is when they can be expected to be able to verbally express themselves sufficiently, they are completely musical, tonal, and energetic. If the caregiver is conscious of this tidbit, that musical start will blossom into further creativity later. After 3 until maybe 5 or 7, the child becomes very materially oriented, and sculpting and taking things apart and putting them back together will help them become empowered project-finishers, unlike myself, who was intellectually stimulated and materially deprived (!!) After that, the child wants to participate more in the adult world and is beginning to want to be welcomed into the adult world. They also begin to question the authority that they naturally imitated earlier, and now need more substantial evidence of the caregivers competence. If the caregiver is unworthy of their respect and imitation, this will most certainly lead to problems in the teens, but if the caregiver is worthy of respect and imitation, the child will be inspired to follow and reenlist their trust in the elder.

What does all this child development shit mean for education?
Well, since its not compatible with public school systems, it makes things very complicated for me if i want to do what i 'know' is best. Maybe i'll have to start a home-schooling group or a cooperative school and create a lesson plan revolving around sculpting, music, movement, and exploration of the natural world. My son is 15 months old. in 9 months he'll be nursery-aged, and in a year and 9 months he'll be pre-school age... can i get my shit together?

I think if my son gets through the first 7 years unscathed from the ordinary way of doing things, i may be able to put him in public school after that. I think it can be valuable in itself to simply be in that system, to compare and contrast it with his previous way of existence. That way, as he grows into adolescence, he'll be able to say what he thinks of the system and if he'd like to choose another method of school for middle or high school. Middle school can probably be completely avoided. Maybe i'll go out on a long roadtrip for two years during those years.

Who liked middle school, anyway? A roadtrip seems in order, with lots of unsheltering and experiencing the world, and growing into adulthood and maturity and understanding of the universe in all its abstract and concrete forms. Oooo that will be an exciting time!!!

And high school? Oh gosh... Besides the intense socialization that most people encounter, of being in such close proximity with so many people their own age and getting involved in meaningless, existentially questionable dramas, i think high school and clumping all those teens together like that is detrimental to their sense of belonging to society. High school creates its own mini-society with practically no relation to elders or youngers unless as an extracurricular volunteer activity. This may be a really great time to live in some form of community of all ages and really experiencing the different seasons.

Did i just plan out my sons life? It looks like i did. But plans get knocked off course by various effects and i'm open to that.

This was a really long post, and my initial intention of convincing the reader of my reasonable point of view went missing along the way of my fantasizing of the ultimate life-span for my growing teen. But maybe the point came across somehow... I need to test this on someone. Reader?

the mother i thought i'd be

A few days ago a girl asked me if i was the mother i thought i'd be. I couldn't answer. I suppose, in general, i am. I am mostly present, let nature do its thing without intervening much, and am creative about how we communicate.

But to answer that question is difficult because mostly i couldn't have accounted for all the decisions i had to make, or all the situations i had to think through. I've been thinking about how to parent since i was a little girl, and many of the situations i've imagined still lie ahead. But certainly i could never imagine all the things that are to happen and how i'd respond!

And i have much to learn about psychology and emotional development and social interactions.

I have daydreamed about sustainable harmonious living since I was a child dreaming of green pastures. As I aged it began to take on new meanings. I often though about dropping put of civilization somehow, somewhere, but the idea only had partial appeal and left me wanting. At times, sustainability came to mean cutting back on meat, partially or altogether. It also came to mean Not buying a car and taking public transportation even though it takes twice as long and requires bus And metro.

But sustainability surprisingly even came to mean living with my parents! The choice was between finding roommates in berkeley, receiving welfare until I was ready to separate from my newly born to go to school or get paid conventionally... Or move out of the bay area to the suburbs of dc and live with my folks in their new oversized home and have the freedom to do what I love (gardening) and be with my babe in his first years. Sustainable, because living with family and sharing resources naturally (without spreadsheets or post-it notes) is more conscious than pushing through the other choice. But living with parents after five years of freedom and distance was daunting. Its easy to say our problems are most deeply rooted in our issues with our parents. A yogi also said "if you think you are enlightened go spend a week with your parents." so living with them?!

Sustainability inadvertently came to also mean working through old issues. For the last hundred hears, families have gotten smaller, more nuclear, more dispersed globally, and individuals tend to live removed from the older generations, isolated in a city hub of peers who have also left their families elsewhere. I am not saying that is the Wrong Choice. People don't always think about sustainability, and even so, it's possible to be relatively sustainably conscious. In fact, I think the city structure has great potential for sustainability. But my point was going towards how in the last century the structure of life ha changes dramatically from a system that was in place doe thousands of years. I don't know why, exactly... Maybe it's because the need was gone (and now for my personal situation it reappeared to grant me this perspective).

Ok my initial Point is a no-go. There are millions of people, and each situation calls for a best solution, and I was trying to come up with a generalizeble theory on sustainability and connecting it to family affairs.

But what I can say for certain is that, in terms of sustainability, community is paramount, whether it's a community of three or hundreds, whether it's a household, a commune, a neighborhood, or a city. The individuation of civilization has been a step away from harmonious sustainability. The cooperative mentality is paramount to sustainability, above competition. Drive for improvement must not disappear but competition against individuals could be left out of it, in place of cooperative co creation.

What does this have to do with unconventional mothering? No idea. Co op nurseries? Just a general mindset I guess.

I just felt like writing. My son is smiling in his sleep. Very sweet.

men are sons, too

since having a son, my relationship with men has changed dramatically. I accept my child for who he is, completely. And this compassion has extended to all other men. With women it comes more naturally. i don't expect perfection from them. but with men i had a tendency to shun their weakness and expect more of them, and it wasn't really... fair.

now i can be a loving, nurturing presence for men in my life without judging them negatively and unfairly for the inevitable character traits that could be deemed as imperfections. but on a certain level, i can see that everyone is perfect as is, all is well as is.

self acceptance and acceptance of others go hand-in-hand. the more we forgive ourselves the more we accept others, and vice versa... the more we accept others, the more we forgive ourselves and are freed from any sort of guilt or lack of feeling worthy of anything...

Time out

Today in the playground a nanny gave a twin a time out. She counted to three, and he backed off right after, testing her resolve. It was strong, she pulled him off the gym and held him in a hug for a one minute time out while he cried and screamed and she explained what was going on.

I'm sure he'll grow up to be fine and untraumatized by the event, but i disagree with time-out. Its an unnatural consequence.

I have noticed parents and babysitters and caregivers exercising power over children in subtle ways. "no" and currently i am seeing it arise within myself as my 'toddler' (officially, soon) explores the space around him, in public, freely. I find creative ways to distract him from the "no" situation, until we can go through the process of Reason together.

I like to think of mother-dogs, or wolves, how they raise their young. They generally allow their pups to play together, no matter how rough it is, and the pups work it out naturally amongst themselves. The mother pup will correct aberrant behavior with a quick, easy growl or a nip in the butt, and that will be that. There's certainly no "time out" or lengthy explanations of reasoning, and the pups grow up fine.

I know humans are more complex than dogs, but... is a 3 year old? hehe but seriously... When does reason really kick in? And what sort of reason can you honestly give for 'time out?'

One negative potential side effect of time-out is a distaste for authority figures. It seems to me that this is the first case of authrotiy ruling over the less capable, smaller humans. She literally pulled him off the gym, as he grabbed on to the bars, and against his will was taken away. Like i said, he'll probably grow up to be fine, but i love to 'over'analyze and be an optimal mother down to the most subtle aspects of it all.

I only get one chance at raising this little one, and i hate to call him the 'first trial experiment" like so many first children have jokingly been called.

but thats another story for another day.

Presence... fluctuations... re-connecting.

Oh dear, i have always heard 'children make you present' and aint it the truth!? But now, my son is almost a year old, which means he's trying to walk. He has evolved from a blob into a vegetable into a rehabilitating old man learning to walk. Talk about presence! He's learning to talk and communicate, too, so there's an extra interaction that i'm being tuned into.

I think this is about the age ("toddler") where most parents start getting stressed. I got stressed a few days ago (and was tapping on my issues) and fears around chasing a toddler around, teaching him boundaries while allowing him freedom. He was crawling around whole foods and i found myself unsure of what was socially acceptable. ("out of control!")

But since then, I've also evolved and... the difficult part is really to re-connect over and over again. We're together LITERALLY 24/7!! Sometimes i leave him to go to the bathroom or to do my own thing while he does his own thing, but we're still together. And when that happens in any relationship, its of utmost importance to really laugh and cry together when the need arises!

He's been frustrated, hitting his head on various objects and clamping his fingers in various drawers, and just in general, not being able to fully move and communicate as he feels he needs to. So i find myself balancing between "ignoring" him, or rather, not responding wholly to his vocalizations, and then responding and getting it out. I mean, i can't ACTUALLY be eye-to-eye with him 24/7. Its impossible and i would go nuts and lose touch with the adult world (which is boring and largely un-magical, but nevertheless important ground to keep my feet on.)

Some connections are deeper than others and depend entirely upon my own ability. Sure, sometimes when i'm wanting to connect in a certain way, he's more interested in something else, but I'd say that i'm distracted by tiredness or 'needing to do something' more than he's distracted by fascinating objects.

Some moments are truly profound communicative moments, beyond superficialities, really deeply emotional and wise to the core. Other times, its a physical connection, a massage, or a healing touch received from the child on my sore back or a belly massage making up for the 9 months of expansion and resettlements. Sometimes its a kiss, or a bite on the nose, or a face-to-face wet connection that comes about so organically it is easy to see how kissing really evolved.

Well... i don't know what the point of this post was, but there it is.

poop and acupuncture

Yeap, i'm writing about poop. *sigh*

It was some time ago that i googled pooping, constipation, and baby, to see if i should expect regular bowel movements. The consensus was to 'not worry about it.' So i didn't. But a little later i thought about it more intuitively, and realized that I prefer a regular poop and know i am in balance when i'm regularly pooping. So why should it be different for a new person? Ah~ another case of my health standard being diminished for a pre-verbal human! shame on me.

So last night i pressed my fingers around his belly button, in meridian points that are effective for relieving constipation. This morning he gave a good, healthy, cathartic poop.

This is on my list of 'things i could/should be doing.' Preventive care is like that. You forget to do it until something is out of balance.