Look at my nostrils, world, and despair

I’ve been noticing how M, now 7, has become more and more social as time has gone on.  Socialization is, of course, one of the hot button issues when it comes to learning outside of school.  Why people think learning to be social with 30 other kids who are also learning to be social makes sense – especially when the main lessons are to sit down, be quiet and do what you’re told – is beyond me.  (If recess were 6 hours long, I could see school as a place to learn social skills, but not in a classroom.)

I wouldn’t have noticed his social skills much if it weren’t for other parents noting repeatedly that he is/was quiet, or adults who talked to him and tried to force the conversation along by noting how quiet he was.  Sometimes they were genuinely nice about making gentle jokes, but often it came across as a bit rude and judgmental.

To me, he was just himself.  I would know, since I was a quiet, shy kid with memories of being forced to be social.  I recalled feeling angry and embarrassed.  I was ok to let M be and not embarrass him needlessly.

It wasn’t always easy – sometimes people would say Hi to him and ask his name and he wouldn’t respond.  Or sometimes he would turn around and walk away.  I felt embarrassed on occasion and had to remind myself that it was about him, not me.  Once we had some privacy, I’d talk to him about politeness and why responding to questions about his name may be a nice thing to do.  He’d listen, and sometimes he’d respond to me, sometimes he wouldn’t.  That’s just him and how he felt at the time.

But from time to time, there would be glimpses of his growth and self-confidence.  When he was comfortable, he would often not stop talking.  He was like that at home, of course, and with family.  But one day he spent well over an hour talking to a neighbor’s relative visiting from Mexico.  An almost stranger, yet he was yabbering away.  We have no clue what they were talking about, but that doesn’t matter.  What matters is that he was confident and comfortable in that moment, with that person.

In the past year he’s finally started to make polite responses when strangers say Hi or ask his name.  Ever since we moved to the beach, he’s shown a much greater interest in meeting and playing with new kids at the beach.  We’ve given him suggestions on how to break the ice – smile, say Hola, offer a toy to play with.  He rarely takes the suggestion immediately, but he remembers (he’s always been like that – we can explain something and he’ll know it months later).

Yesterday he saw a kid on the beach, a younger kid with his parents.  The mother was familiar as she works in a store we’ve been in a few times.  He went over to where they were and the next thing we knew, he was yabbering away with the mom.  I realized then that he had the confidence in himself to just go and do it, and I felt happy for him – and a bit sad that the little boy isn’t so little anymore.

I should have seen it coming – he’s been more likely to ask strangers questions, like when looking for something in a store.  I wonder if it’s osmosis as I’ve found myself starting conversations with strangers everywhere I go – which was not common at all in the US.

I feel so privileged to witness this growth.  It’s a natural, wonderful progression – and it’s just him being himself.  We could have pushed him to be like this or that, but as we trusted, he grew at his own time and pace.  I believe the long-term benefits of self-confidence are well worth a couple of short years of not conforming to social expectations.

It not a big deal in our house, but I’m sometimes caught off guard when other people question it. The most frequent reaction when people hear is one of wide eyes, and then the inevitable, “Why do your kids call you by your first names?”  I’m usually caught off guard because I frankly don’t think about it much.  But when I do think about it, it doesn’t bother me in the least.  In fact, I think I actually prefer it.  I feel it actually takes some of the hierarchy issues out of the family equation, and that is very much preferred by Arp and I in this unschooling family.

The other day, I was again confronted with the familiar question when I was at a friend’s house.  When I talked a little about how I thought that M calling me by my first name took away some of the hierarchy in our relationship, this friend/mother told me something along the lines of that she wouldn’t really like it very much if her kids called her by her given name.  So I got to thinking – why do people insist children call their parents by “mom” and “dad”?

Here’s why I think some people insist on kids calling parents by a title (mom or dad), and why I don’t think these reasons work for us:

• To show respect or honor. This is definitely not something I’m concerned with.  I don’t need the title of Mom to know that my kids respect me.  That’s because, in our family, respect is not generally based on age, power, or role.  Respect is based on our own individual human identity.  I treat my kids with respect, and they respect me because of that, and because I love and honor them for who they are.  It has nothing to do with the fact that I happened to give birth to them.

I like how this blogger puts it:

If anything, you honor your parents more by calling them by their first names — by acknowledging them as individuals with complex identities, histories, hopes and dreams of their own, not just the ones centered around you. Calling them ‘Mom’ or ‘Dad’ exclusively is reducing them to only the role they play in relation to you, just as if they were to call you ‘Son’ or ‘Daughter’ exclusively.

Words are hypnotic. You are lulling each other into the familiar comfort of habitual roles and behavior patterns. You are one-dimensionalizing each other, type-casting each other. You are reinforcing limits around your relationships (some of which, I realize, are there for good reason, but not all) and the identities of each individual involved.

• To reinforce hierarchy and enforce discipline. Again, this is nothing that I’m concerned about.  In a traditional (read, archaic) family, discipline may be based on power and hierarchy.  Not in our family.  In our family, we all respect each other and learn from each other.  Discipline is about learning.  Learning how to survive in the world, how to set your own goals and achieve them.  I don’t want my children to do things just because someone in power told them to do them.  I want them to think critically and act with kindness.  They are learning to do that by our example, not just because I told them to do it.  So if I don’t need the power, why do I need the title?
• Social Custom. No doubt about it – calling your parents by “mom” and “dad” is a social custom in some cultures.  But interestingly, it’s not a custom in all cultures.  I googled this issue and came to find that kids in the Tongan culture, for example, call their parents by given name.  I’m not sure, but I have a feeling that I could probably dig up a few more cultures that do the same if I had the time.  Now, customs can be useful, but some customs are not.  I’ve never been one to keep useless or objectionable customs just for the sake of the custom.  For example, when Arp and I got married, together we chose a new last name.  The custom of a woman taking her husband’s name wasn’t working for me for several reasons, but I wanted our family to all have the same name.  So we broke with custom and both chose a new name.
• “Mom” and “Dad” as a term of endearment. I can kind of understand this one.  When you first hear your baby say “ma” or “da”, you can’t help but feel love.  Likewise, sometime when I’m spending time with my kids, I say things like, “you are the best son/daughter in the whole world!”  It’s a way of saying, “I love you!”  But I see signs of love all the time in our family, and they are mostly not based on whether my kids call me mom.  When M started calling me Trish, I looked deep and realized that he still loved me exactly as he did before.  And he still knows I’m his mom, he just doesn’t always have to declare it.

So there you have it.  No “mom” and “dad” needed.  We still love each other and know how we are related, and my kids are still pretty polite and well-behaved.  Is that really that shocking?

No big shock here.  You can pick & choose the basic reasons why – all work & no play makes Jose a dull boy?  Or perhaps that punishment doesn’t work?  (see Alfie Kohn’s Punished by Rewards)  Or, as many critics of homeschooling say, that kids need school to be ‘socialized’ – then perhaps they should be allowed to be social instead of cooped up in a classroom being trained for a cubefarm.

2. Too Many Online Friends? Time to Delete

I’ve never quite gotten the whole concept of ‘friending’ online.  Peeps with thousands of friends?  It’s some version of reality that I know nothing about.  Peeps seem to agonize about over defriending/unfriending someone, in case someone is offended or if they themselves regret it.  I’ve culled my list 3 times in the past 6 months, and gone are the people I haven’t seen or spoken to in the past couple of years.  Or the high school peeps I added during my first couple of weeks on Facebook who I don’t even recall speaking to.  I don’t know how people have hundreds of people as ‘friends’ as the status updates and this and that all become annoying, time-wasting noise.

How am I doing with it? I think I’m having some culture shock. I’ve spent most of the time, in the last 6 months, going to LLL meetings, attending unschooling support groups, and attending events with a local attachment parenting group. I guess I sometimes forget how the rest of the world lives.

At the first gymnastics class, at the end of the class, M got a gift of some sort of eraser at the end of class. He also got a hand-stamp that was supposed to be tied to good behavior. Lovely. Coming from our non-rewards based, Alfie Kohn-esque home, this was a shock to my system. M walked into gymnastics class totally happy about doing gymnastics – he had a personal interest, and sought to satisfy it. When he got home and told me about the class, this is what he had to say: “Mom! You know what the best thing about gymnastics class is? You get a stamp and eraser at the end of class!” I say, “I thought you went because you wanted to enjoy gymnastics?” Him: “Well, maybe there are two good things about the class. The gymnastics and the stamps.” I’m not sure if the rewards served to impact the intrinsic joy M got over gymnastics, or whether he was just being distracted by the fun cheap toys. Either way, I was not thrilled. Can’t kids just take joy in an activity they want to be involved with? Apparently many adults think they need rewards left and right. If it isn’t a “good job!” for going down a freakin’ slide (you know that no child would want to go down a slide without a reward, right?), then it’s stamps at gymnastics class. Idiots.

Luckily, the rewards at the end of gymnastics class did not continue for the next month. The first class was done by a different teacher, so M’s regular teacher just focuses on gymnastics. But then Arp and I, with J in tow go to the last class of the regular season the other day. It’s sort of set up for all the parents to observe their kids. The first horror of the day was watching another of the mothers totally castigate her 3 year old for not “behaving” in the seating area (e.g. not sitting still in a seat for an hour). It was irritating to watch. Arp and I had brought 3-year-old J to the event because we don’t generally have or use babysitters. But I knew walking in that she would most likely not sit still for more than 5 minutes at a time, like any 3 year old. I had a plan walking in. Arp and I basically traded off as to whether we were watching the performance or walking J around, or taking her to the car to read a book. This other mother with the 3 year old spent most of her time yelling at her kid and physically yanking him around. When we met once outside (she finally had the sense to take her child for a walk, although still with that yanking going on), she says to me in the nastiest voice possible, “I just love this age!” Later, Arp tells me that she told him, “I can’t wait until he turns 5!” So does she mean that she can’t wait until she can put him in kindergarten? Well, in this case kindergarten might be a more welcoming place than the arms of his own mother. Why do people have kids if they can’t stand to spend time with them?

And the final straw that broke my culture-shocked back? The lovely speech made by the owner of the school at the end of the performance. It was all about how, “studies have shown that it only takes 2 months for kids to forget all their reading and math skills over the summer, so keep your kids reading and doing math this summer!” And the worst comment of the day? “We have to keep up, because all those Chinese and Indian kids are going to catch us!” I was on my feet in a second and it was on the tip of my tongue to blurt out that M was Indian, so was he going to catch someone? But I didn’t. If M hadn’t been there, I might have. I know – I have a bad temper. But that comment made my blood boil. First of all, why would I raise my child with an eye for competitive patriotism? I do everything for M because I love him, not because I’m worried about other countries. Do people really think about that stuff? Plus, it was a culturally insensitive comment. We’ve tried to remind out children how they are Indian too, just like Daddy is, at least partly. M wasn’t paying attention to the comment, but how might he have felt if he thought that his teacher resented India, and wanted our country to be better than it? Well, I guess that would have been an opportunity for learning too, but I was just hoping that that particular topic might be put off a few years more. I guess what bothers me is that I sensed an undertone of racism. It was more than just the sorts of patriotism that I dislike, it’s the racism, the resentment of “the other”, that I really dislike. Is it wrong to want to protect M from that attitude for a little bit longer?

I got an email from a friend recently asking about unschooling. Her concern was whether it was really possible that her 2-3 year old would ever become interested in all the amazing things there are in the world (besides the current interest: animals). For parents of two-year olds, it may indeed be hard to imagine how a child can move on to naturally becoming curious about the all the wonderfully complex things in the world, especially when we are used to the idea that most children go to school and are fed the information, all in huge chunks, by planned instruction and textbooks. So I related, to my friend, just a few of the conversations I had had with M in the last few days. As I wrote out the email, even I was amazed at all the wonderful things we had discussed, and all coming from M’s interests and everyday life. It didn’t come in the form of a unit plan, but I’d bet it was more meaningful than most of the “learning” going on in little desks in school buildings across the world. Here’s an excerpt of what I wrote to my friend:

But M (now age 5) has made some amazing leaps in the last year, and he is starting to ask all sorts of complicated questions. Just this morning he asked about how electricity is made. I can’t remember how that came up. But I was doing the laundry and he asked that, and we moved on to talking about hydroelectric power in both Costa Rica and Niagra Falls. He wanted to know how they could put a spinning thing at the bottom of a waterfall and make it not flow away, and how it could make electricity. So then I started talking about dams. But then he had had enough. When I suggested going to the computer to look at a picture of Niagra Falls, he asked that we do that some other time. (which really means, I’ve come to know about him, “that’s enough mom. I’ve learned enough about that for now”). So I dropped it. But we learned a lot. Now, if I was a typical homeschooling parent, I might have made a big mistake. I might have gone to the computer anyway and printed out a whole unit plan about electricity and shoved it down his throat. He might have learned more, true. But it would not have meant as much, and it could have backfired by really turning him off, or making him think that I wouldn’t accept him if he didn’t learn this, or that he was stupid if it was over his head. So I took his lead. Next time we go to the library, though, I might just happily ask him if he wants me to find him a book on hydroelectric power. He might say yes or he might say no, but I’ll make no judgment.

The other week we were sitting in the yard looking at the clouds on a rather warm day and noticing the different shapes. I told him how each kind of cloud has a name, but that I had forgotten which one is which. I also told him that certain kinds of clouds make thunderstorms, and some don’t. We both agreed that we’d like to know which ones. We went to the library the next day and got out several books on the weather. We both learned a lot. We even read a book that described how to make a home-made barometer, and M was fascinated by how that could predict the weather. So we spent the next 3 days gathering the bottles to make it, and we made one and observed it for a few days. I’m not sure if it is actually working, or if the results are just confusing me, but we tried. He always looks with me at the radar maps on the computer when I check the weather too. He’s been interested in that for the last year, as am I. I never trust the weather report unless I actually see the radar and view whether the rain clouds are heading our way.

And then that very same night that I wrote the above letter, M and I were talking about the planets and the universe, and he asked how big the universe is. And so I explained that we really don’t know. In fact, it could go on forever. He was fascinated by that. So I explained about how we could travel in a spaceship, in one direction, or any direction, and we might just be able to keep going for ever without the universe ever ending. I’m reaching my arms up and out further from my body, and saying that we are coming upon a planet, and now maybe a star, and then another planet, and then a comet, and we just keep going….forever. And then I remembered how he is always quoting Buzz lightyear: “To infinity, and beyond!” So told him that there is a special word we use for things that keep going, without an end. Infinity. And I reminded him about Buzz Lightyear and his quote. So there, in 10 minutes, we learned infinity. And he was riveted the whole time. Can this compare to what goes on at a desk?

And even later that night: M was doing his typical thing at bedtime where he wildly leaps across the bed, throwing himself in the air and landing on his stomach with arms out. In our bedroom, we have a toddler bed next to a queen-size. He was jumping across both the toddler and the queen, cross-wise. Then he would go from different directions. I wasn’t even really paying attention, just changing and getting ready for bedtime. But he suddenly says:

M: “Hey Trish! I learned something!”

Me: “What honey?”

M: “If I jump from here to here (showing me the path across both beds together) it is the same distance as when I jump from here to here (showing me one corner of the queen going to the opposite corner).”

Me: (Doing a quick estimate in my brain) “I think you are right!”

M: “I know it’s the same!”

Me: “I’m sure you do!”

M: “Cool.”

Me: (Ok, here’s where I get a little heavy handed…but not too heavy, IMO). “Hey M….I think I have another idea. I think if you jumped from here to here (corner to opposite corner of queen again) it would be the same distance as if you jumped from here to here (the other set of opposite corners of the queen).”

M: “Hmmmm…I think you’re right!”

And he tries it.

So there you go. Geometry at bedtime from jumping on the bed. And I meet parents all the time who refuse to let their kids jump on the bed. And to those parents, I say: Bedtime jumping teaches geometry!