Bicycles are Always Better Than Money

When we're little, people tell us we can be whatever we want to be so we imagine ourselves to be princesses and superheroes. We don't aspire to become these things, we embody them. 

Then we're taught we're just pretending so we start to aspire. We believe that we can one day be ballerinas and baseball players.

A precious few are never taught the long odds and go on to the stage or the diamond, while the rest learn that we must be more realistic. People still tell us we can be anything we want to be, but already our choices have been limited. We assert, "But I am an artist!" or "I am an actor!" or "I am an entrepreneur!" or "I am an inventor!" while the world, with a pat on the head, says, "Of course you are," while advising us that we still might want to consider back up plans in case that doesn't "work out."

"Work out," of course, means to result in sufficient income. And that from the start has been the bottom line. We've never been free to be whatever we want.

We don't often tell our children the truth about money in our culture. Oh sure, we scold them that this longed for item is too expensive or that we go to the office most days only so we can put food on the table. But when we tell them they can be anything they want to be, we know we are speaking the language of fairy tales. We don't mean to lie, of course. We do it in the spirit of bucking them up, of inspiring them, of demonstrating our belief in their capabilities, but at bottom we know the odds are too long and that money will eventually claim them. 

That said, it would be a cruelty to tell our four-year-olds that they will never fly to the moon, so we let them dream. We even encourage them to dream. Many of us join them in their bubble for a time, temporarily convincing ourselves that they will one day fly a space ship, but we ourselves have learned the hard truth about money, even as we try, for these precious years, to protect them from it. Barring extraordinary luck or talent, we know that even hard work is unlikely to set them free from money's incessant demand that it be earned and managed and grudgingly spent. We've absorbed the dubious lessons of thrift. Some of us even believe that the entire purpose of childhood is to be shaped into an employee. 

Money is nothing but an idea. It is a story we collectively tell ourselves. 

Children who grow up in poverty begin to learn the story much earlier than those born to families that are well off. These children learn it because there is nowhere to hide from it. Their parents run themselves ragged in minimum wage, dead-end work. Any money that does come their way is converted directly into the food on their plates, a reality that is hidden from the children of wealthier families. Any dreams they might have are exposed as chimera beside the reality of money in a household in which money is scarce. It takes longer for a middle class child to learn the story of money because it can survive longer as an abstraction, but even those of us who try to protect our children from it for as long as possible, can't help ourselves. We buy them piggybanks in which they are to "save" each precious coin. We discourage them from "wasting" it. We even forbid them things that we can afford under the guise of teaching them that "money doesn't grow on trees." 

Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg writes in her essay The Little Virtues: "If we deny him a bicycle which he wants and which we could buy him we only prevent him from having something that it is reasonable a boy should have, we only make his childhood less happy in the name of an abstract principle and without any real justification. And we are tacitly saying to him that money is better than a bicycle; on the contrary he should learn that a bicycle is always better than money."

Ginzburg suggests that our goal should not be to teach children the value of money, but rather "an indifference to money." After all, for most of us money is something that comes and goes all through life. If we overvalue it, when it goes it's such a blow that it tends to destroy everything else on the way out the door. We can hardly think any more. It makes people jump from tall buildings. It even threatens our most important relationships. If we overvalue it, when it does finally come, it's a boon that it ascends to a pedestal. We then cling to it to the exclusion of all else, praying that it never leaves us again, as if it is our savior or a loved one who can never love us back. 

Being indifferent to money is such a shocking idea for many of us because it flies in the face of the story we tell about money. To be indifferent to money is to risk not having money, after all, and of all the things one might dream about being or doing, money is the one that we must never give up on. At the same time, isn't it objectively true that a bicycle is always better than money? It certainly should be for a child. Perhaps it should be for all of us.

People who think about money more than I do, tell me that money is simply a tool. When we drop a coin in our piggy bank it is the equivalent of hanging our hammer on a hook in our tool shed or storing our spatula away in a kitchen drawer so we can find them when there is a nail to be driven or a pancake to be flipped. But from a very young age, when we go to our piggy banks to use the money we've collected, say for a piece of candy, our parents caution us. "Are you sure you really want to waste your money on that?" "Didn't you say you were saving up for that bicycle?" And even when we've scrimped and saved enough to purchase the bicycle, it isn't long before the newness wears off and we begin to miss the money. Indeed, the empty piggy bank taunts us with its emptiness, sneering, You see, money is better than a bicycle. No one ever regrets using their hammers and spatulas, but there is always loss attached to the use of money. If money is a tool, it is a tool unlike any other.

These same money experts tell me to think of money as blood. It's meant to flow through the system, carrying the fiscal equivalents of oxygen and nutrients. Then doesn't that mean that when it stops flowing, like it does when left to sit in a piggy bank, it has clotted? Don't billionaires represent the ultimate blood clot? Blood clots kill. No, money is not anything like blood because if it were we would all understand it to be a sin to impede its flow by saving it. We would all know the very idea of accumulated wealth as pure evil. No, money is nothing like blood.

As we learn the story our culture tells about money our dreams begin to disappear to be replaced by years of striving at things we would rather not do in service to money. No wonder so many of us feel disillusioned and exhausted. This is what the pursuit of money instead of dreams does to us. We rationalize, telling ourselves that we will live life at the grindstone until we have enough and then, finally, in the few years we have left, we will pursue our dreams. Or as the character David Howard says in Albert Brooks' movie Lost in America, "I've finally reached a level of responsibility. Now I can afford to be irresponsible!" 

And that's exactly the worst thing that our story of money does to all of us: it casts our dreams, the best of ourselves, as irresponsible. This, I assert, is why so many of us look back on childhood with so much sepia toned fondness or why we believe that young children live ideal lives compared to our own. That is the one place that the stories we tell about money have not yet penetrated. It's the one place where bicycles really are always better than money.

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Hi, I'm Teacher Tom and this is my podcast! If you're an early childhood educator, parent of preschoolers, or otherwise have young children in your life, I think you'll find my conversations with early childhood experts and thought-leaders useful, inspiring, and eye-opening. You might even come away transformed by the ideas and perspectives we share. Please give us a listen. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you download your podcasts.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Pro Tanto Death

As I entered first grade, the buzz amongst the kids was that Mrs. Dunn was mean. We all hoped for Miss McCutcheon as our homeroom teacher, who was rumored to be the nice one. I celebrated when I learned I was to be in "good" teacher's class. Two years later, my brother was assigned to the "bad" teacher's class, who, as it turned out, he adored.

Looking back, I'm quite certain that we gossiping children were responding to gender and age prejudices. Mrs Dunn was older than our mothers, a veteran teacher, or at least more seasoned than Miss McCutcheon who was a stereotypically pretty young woman in her first job out of teacher's college. It was the classic Disney juxtaposition of a young, innocent princess with a crone bearing a basket of poisoned apples. I doubt any of us were conscious of the connection, but it was there in our superficial judgements. 

I recall this because it's one of my earliest memories of seeing behind my own prejudices. It was, in my life, one of those shocks of recognition after which everything, including myself was transformed. 

The novelist Samuel Butler in his novel The Way of All Flesh writes, "Every change is a shock; every shock is a pro tanto death. What we call death is only a shock great enough to destroy our power to recognize a past and a present as resembling one another." In this case, my belief in the possibility of judging good and bad teachers through stereotypes and superficialities was left in the past, where it belongs, leaving me with a present, not free of prejudice, of course, but rather one in which the person I had become knew to be more open-minded, and less susceptible to gossip.

Another 20th century literary giant, Iris Murdoch put these words into the mouth of a character in her book An Unofficial Rose: "People don't grow old. Old age in that sense is an illusion of the young." I recently saw pictures of Mrs. Dunn and Miss McCutcheon posing with their respective classes. From the perspective of a 62 year old man, they are both young and pretty, hardly distinguishable from one another.

Nothing is new, yet any life worth living is one that is constantly renewed by these pro tanto deaths, these dramatic or subtle shifts in perspective that make it impossible to ever again be the person we once were, for the world to ever again be what it once was. This is what learning and growing is all about, but we must work harder at it as we do what the young might view as growing old.

Murdoch's character, later, when caught out in a contradiction says, "I've told you I'm not a continuous being. My words cannot be used as evidence against me."

As adults in the lives of young children -- parents, educators, caretakers -- we must know that no one, and especially these children, are likewise not continuous beings. From day to day, they experience these pro tanto deaths, emerging on the other side a new person in a new world with new ideas and passions. We can be tempted to label children things like "shy" or "aggressive" or "behind." We can be blinded by those ugly marks we call grades or those assessed deficits we use as evidence "against" them. Tomorrow they will be transformed and it will all be moot unless we make the mistake of staying in the past they have left behind.

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Hi, I'm Teacher Tom and this is my podcast! If you're an early childhood educator, parent of preschoolers, or otherwise have young children in your life, I think you'll find my conversations with early childhood experts and thought-leaders useful, inspiring, and eye-opening. You might even come away transformed by the ideas and perspectives we share. Please give us a listen. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you download your podcasts.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Am I Allowed to Be Who I Am?

"I'm painting out of my mouth"

In the world of play-based learning, when we think about young children making art, we generally say "process over product." Like a mantra.

In fact, for many of us, this statement – process over product – is the gateway through which we enter play-based learning. 

The idea is that when preschoolers make art, the creative process is where the learning happens. "Process over product," is a reaction to the all-too-common practice of marching kids obediently through step-by-step craft projects that produce cookie cutter results. If we want children to be creative, critical thinkers instead of rote rule followers, we must value their process over all else, we say. When you see a preschool wall full of matching teddy bear art, we tell parents, run like the wind.

On the most recent episode of Teacher Tom's Podcast, I talk with pedagogical consultant Suzanne Axelsson, the author of the book The Original Learning Approach and the blog Interaction Imagination. Over the years, Suzanne and I have had dozens of deep, wide-ranging, and often profound conversations, both online and in person.

A couple years ago, for instance, she called into question this bedrock idea of “process over product.” I was at first dumbfounded. I mean “process over product” is central to the play-based approach! But Suzanne asserted that product is every bit as important as process. 

“Children are often very proud of their products,” she said. “They are often deeply connected to them.” It was this perspective, as simple as that, that allowed me to realize that “process over product” was an oversimplification that can lead us to be unintentionally dismissive of what children produce. The final product – be it art or anything – is as important as the child deems it.

And when working with young children it’s important that we steer clear of the temptation to oversimplify things just because they’re young.

Indeed, when it comes to preschool art – or anything preschoolers do, in fact – we must consider not just play, not just process , and not just product, but, as Suzanne and I discuss on the podcast, we can’t neglect the fourth P: permission.

Just at it took me a while to accept the notion that a child’s product can be as important as their process, I was at first taken aback by the idea of permission. I mean, after all, children shouldn’t need my permission to play, it’s their right to play. Who am I to give permission?

But the truth is that whether we like it or not, there are hierarchies in this world, which makes permission necessary, especially when adults and children are together. As I’ve come to understand it, permission is an experience between two people, or between two aspects of one's self, characterized by allowing, accepting, and belonging. We ask ourselves, "Am I allowed to be who I am? If the answer is 'yes,' that’s permission." 

It doesn’t have to be a formal thing. In fact, it is usually as simple as a facial expression. In our conversation, Suzanne talks about her own experience as a child playing on the slide and how an adult’s frown let her know she definitely didn't have permission.

To give another example, imagine a toddler who discovers a beetle. If she turns to smile at her grandfather and he smiles back at the child, even without saying anything, this is permission for her to be who she is. The toddler now knows that they are in an environment of permission. Not only that, but it is a place where the child is also giving permission to the adult.

It is only within the environment of permission, a place where we know we are welcome to be ourselves, that we can fully and honestly engage in the playful process of producing art . . . Or anything else that is personally meaningful. It is in this context that we can share our unique individual potential with society. “You can't truly be yourself without community," Suzanne once told me, "You can only try to be your unique self together with others." This is why permission is essential.

This conversation about permission is part of a wider discussion about what Suzanne calls “the original learning approach.” Essential to her approach is a thoughtful adult, one who does not oversimplify, but rather embraces all the beautiful complexity of human relationships. It means understanding that we serve multiple roles in the lives of young children. It means being open to change. And it means listening with our whole selves.

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Hi, I'm Teacher Tom and this is my podcast! My interview with Suzanne Axelsson has just dropped. Please give us a listen. And while there, you might also want to listen to my conversations with other early childhood and parenting thought-leaders like director of Defending the Early Years Dr. Denisha Jones, "Queen of Common Sense" Maggie Dent, and founder of Free Range Kids Lenore Skenazy. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you download your podcasts.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

The Magic Word

When I was a boy the word "please" was said to be the magic word, and I suppose it was when we were performing for adults in order to get something we wanted, but "let's" is the word with real magic in it. "Let's" is, of course, really two words that we speak as one, meaning "let us." It's not a command nor a question, but rather an invitation and in the mouths of children it's most often used as an invitation to play.

"Let's play trains."

"Let's be princesses."

"Let's pretend we're pirates and I fall off the boat into the water and you have to rescue me." Without the word "let's" cooperative dramatic play would hardly be possible.

It's not so common in our 2's class, but by the time the children are 4 and 5 you hear it a lot as they play together, often at the beginning of every sentence.

And that would be enough, if this magic word could do only this, but it's a real magic word. You can use it for almost anything you need to do with the other people.

"Let's take turns."

"Let's make a rule."

"Let's try using a rock to open it."

Of course, there's always a dark side to every kind of magic, a way to misuse it.

"Let's take all the balls."

"Let's keep the girls out."

"Let's pretend we're pirates who push everybody else into the water."

But even so, even when we use it to experiment with the misuse of our collective power, there's no denying it's a magic word, one that brings us together, that creates room for other people, that makes our play better and our lives bigger. "Let's" is always an invitation, one that contains all of the open-ended possibilities of human beings together.

I don't worry about children who've learned the power of "Let's . . ."

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Hi, I'm Teacher Tom and this is my podcast! In these first three episodes of Teacher Tom's Podcast, I talk with director of Defending the Early Years Dr. Denisha Jones, "Queen of Common Sense" Maggie Dent, and founder of Free Range Kids Lenore Skenazy. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you download your podcasts.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Beautiful Moments

Let’s take a moment to think about our own childhoods.

I want you to recall a beautiful moment. A time when you were young. Go back as far as you can. Most people, they tell us, don’t have many memories from before they were six-years-old, but maybe you’re one of the lucky ones. Spend a little time with that memory.

Where were you?

Who, if anyone, was with you?

What were you doing?

What were you feeling?

The memory that comes up for me was playing with my neighborhood friend Pheobe Azar. I was probably 5. It was summer time. Neither of us were wearing shoes.

We would meet up every morning after breakfast in John Sain’s front yard because it was halfway between our houses.

The adults were all indoors, busy, off to work, so it was just us kids outside. Sometimes other kids would join us. Her brother John. My brother Sam. The Beale kids, the Weible kids, the Cozart kids. Inside belonged to the adults. When we were inside, they were always telling us what to do, but outside . . . That was the place where we felt free.

I’ve done this exercise dozens of times with groups of adults, then asked them to share their beautiful moments.

Most of the time, those beautiful moments came while playing outdoors.

Usually, like in my memory, the adults were somewhere else. We were unsupervised, or at least not directly supervised.

Another common characteristic is the sense that we had all the time in the world. In a just-released conversation with "The Queen of Common Sense" Maggie Dent on Teacher Tom's Podcast, she tells the story of how she recently rediscovered this feeling while killing time under a pine tree with her grandchild where they had ducked to escape a sudden rain storm.

People rarely mention toys, but they often talk about playing in nature, with sticks and rocks and hills and water.

Usually, these beautiful memories involve other children, of all ages.

And finally, a huge percentage of our beautiful moments involve us doing things that our parents would probably have forbidden. This is what we adults call risk, but as children it was just play.

Outdoors, unsupervised, lots of time, few toys, other children, and risk: that's the stuff of our beautiful memories. That's the stuff of an authentic childhood.

Being a parent today is much more difficult, I think, than it was when Maggie Dent and I were kids. We don't have the freedom to simply let our children roam our neighborhoods. Even the very nature of what it means to be a parent has changed.

In her book, The Gardener and the Carpenter, psychology professor, researcher Alison Gopnik discusses an academic literature search she performed using the key word “parenting." What she found was stunning. She says that the word barely appeared in the literature before about 1962, but since that time, the use of the word has exploded into the millions.

She sees this as significant. As she puts it, we’ve taken a relationship – being a parent – and turned it into a verb – parenting. She points out that this is the only foundational relationship we’ve done this to. We don’t do wifing. We don’t do husbanding. We don't do childing. We don’t do friending. No, we are a wife. We are a husband. We are a child. We are a friend.

The central metaphor in Gopnik's book is that we’ve made parenting into a job, like being a carpenter. And as carpenters, we will now be judged by the quality of our work. The table is too wobbly. It’s not level. It’s made from the wrong kind of wood. Except now, we’re being judged by the quality of our parenting, which fundamentally changes the relationship we have with our children. Now, we can’t just let them play, outside, unsupervised, with lots of time, few toys, and other children, even if we were allow to. Now, we have to manufacture our children, or else.

Gopnik agrees with Maggie Dent that play is central to early learning – it is foundational. She urges us to try to ignore the cultural push to make us carpenters and instead consider our role more along the lines of gardeners. We plant and water the seed. We protect it. We make sure it gets enough sun and other nutrients, but beyond that it’s the seed's job to do the growing, to become what is meant to be.

This is how most children throughout most of human history have grown up. It’s how evolution designed us to learn and thrive. It's what we re-discover when we step back and allow our children to engage the world through their own curiosity. We may not be able to, or even want to, recreate our own childhood's for today's children, but when we remember our own beautiful moments it reminds of what an authentic childhood feels like, and inspires us to set the children in our lives as free as we can, and then perhaps a little more, so that they will grow up to have their own beautiful moments upon which to reflect.

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Check out my full conversation with Maggie Dent on Teacher Tom's Podcast. In these first three episodes I talk with Maggie, as well as director of Defending the Early Years Dr. Den, and the founder of Free-Range Parenting Lenore Skenazy. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you find your podcasts.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Play is Liberation

I didn’t start out my adult life as a teacher. I have a degree in journalism with a minor in English. I’ve been a junior business executive, a freelance writer, and a baseball coach. It wasn’t until I was close to 40-years-old that I found myself with my own preschool classroom full of 3-5 year olds.

I didn’t know much that first year, but one thing I did know was that I didn’t want to spend my days bossing kids around. So I decided that, in the spirit of the grand experiment of democracy, these children were going to make their own rules.

So, on that first day of class, we started in an official state of anarchy.

And sure enough, within the first 15 minutes of class, a child complained to me: “I was playing with that doll and she took it from me.” In a standard school, I would have had to trundle over to the offending party and, in the role of cop, say something like, “No taking things from other people.” She then would have been faced with the choice: obey or disobey. 

If she chose to obey, then the lesson taught was compliance to rules passed down from on high.

If she chose to disobey, I would have had to insist, or resort to force, or threaten her with a punishment.

I didn’t want to be teaching either lesson. Unbeknownst to me, I was taking a stand on behalf of liberation pedagogy.

Instead, I was left with saying, “Oh no. I can tell you didn’t like that.” And then to the whole group, I asked, “Does anyone want other people to take things from them?” There were shouts of “No!” and lots of shaking heads.

I said, “Nobody likes that. Why don’t we all agree to not take things from other people?”

And we all agreed so I ripped a sheet of paper from an art paper roller, taped it to the wall, and wrote at the top: Agreements. Then under that I wrote: “No taking things from other people.”

Then a child called out, “Unless you ask them first.”

Everyone agreed to that as well.

Then right there, in the matter of a few minutes, these free children in an anarchistic society, agreed, by consensus, to a dozen other things.

No hitting people

No kicking people

No yelling in people’s ears

No throwing hard things at people

No dumping water on people’s heads . . .

And to each of them, they added, “Unless you ask them first.”

We weren’t, as a society, talking about consent in the 90’s, but these free children were.

There are so many reasons that young children should be free to play. It is the way nature has designed us to develop and learn: cognitively, socially, emotionally, and physically. 

We don’t often talk about play in the context of democracy, but that's exactly what I did recently with director of the non-profit Defending the Early Years, professor, and author Dr. Denisha Jones on Teacher Tom's Podcast. As she told me, when the adults are able to step back to become co-learners with the children, to see children as full-formed citizens with both rights and responsibilities, we see that play is equality. Play is equity. Play is justice. And, ultimately, play is liberation.

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Check out my full conversation with Dr. Denisha Jones on Teacher Tom's Podcast. In these first three episodes I talk with Dr. Jones, as well as "Queen of Common Sense" Maggie Dent, and the founder of Free-Range Parenting Lenore Skenazy. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you find your podcasts.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

In a World of Bubble-Wrapped Children

As a boy, even as young as 4, mom would say, “Tom, you're driving me crazy. Go outside.” And then she would close the door behind me, not expecting to see me again until she rang the dinner bell – and she had a literal dinner bell as did all the other moms in the neighborhood.

Most of my childhood memories involve being outdoors, with other children, unsupervised.

I interviewed Lenore Skenazy for a just released episode of Teacher Tom's Podcast. She tells us that in stark contrast to my childhood, there is today an "expectation" that virtually every minute of a child’s life must be supervised by a responsible adult. The result is that today’s preschoolers will spend their entire childhood’s under adult supervision. 

You may know Lenore as the founder of the Free-Range Parenting Movement and all-round advocate for childhood independence. Among her work is the Free-Range Parenting blog and book. She is the creator of “Take Our Children to the Park & Leave Them There Day” and hosted the reality TV show “America’s Worst Mom." She is also more recently the founder and face of Let Grow, a non-profit that promotes Free Range Parenting and childhood independence.

Today, my mom – and all the other moms on my block – would receive a visit from child protective services . . . Or worse!

Is the world more dangerous now than it was 50 years ago? Not according to crime statistics. Today, our violent crime and property crimes rates are about the same as they were when I was a boy, after a spike during the 80s and 90s. 

But we definitely perceive that the crime rate is higher. And as Lenore points out, we are definitely more fearful.

Whatever the case, childhood independence is becoming increasingly rare and unless we take proactive measures, it is only going to become rarer.

I have no illusion that we are about to dramatically change our world or our fears any time soon. That means that it is on us – early childhood educators and parents of young children – to make our schools and homes places in which children can, as Lenore and I discuss, try a few “stupid things.”

It was Lenore's work that inspired me – and gave me the courage – to start putting woodworking tools into the hands of young children. 

As you think about the important children in your life, what are some things you can do? 

Perhaps the most difficult thing to do is to resist the urge to intervene or caution children over every little thing. As my friend and playworker Meynell Aimes jokes, “I have a three step approach to deciding what to do when a child is playing: take one step back, then take another step back, and then another.”

Obviously, we step in when life and limb are at stake, or when real bullying is happening, but much of the time, it’s our catastrophic imaginations that cause us to act when its entirely unnecessary.

A childhood is incomplete without a few scrapes and bruises . . . maybe even a broken bone or two.

When I first had the courage to bring real hammers and real nails onto the playground, I did it with the utmost of caution. We started with an old tree stump. I set up a ring of caution cones around it, then invited children in one at a time, with eye protection, to take a few swings at a nail that I had started for them. 

That’s all I felt comfortable with at first, but slowly, as I began to see, with my own eyes, the incredible competence of young children . . . .

As I began to see the care and caution that they took on their own . . .

As I realized that my worst fears were very unlikely to be realized . . .

As we all gained experience, we added more hammers – along with other tools – until we had created a full-on woodworking experience for 2-5 year olds. Yes, there were some sore thumbs, but hitting your thumb with a hammer is an inescapable part of the process of learning to use a hammer. I’ll be 63 next week. If I picked up a hammer for the first time today, I assure you I would have to learn the lesson of hitting my thumb.

My point is that we don’t have to put our kids, alone, on a New York City subway (the way Lenore did) or let them run around the neighborhood all day unsupervised in order to give them the experience of childhood independence that everyone needs. We can all start small . . .

Stepping back . . .

Letting them use the stapler . . .

Letting them make their own snacks . . .

Letting them fail a few times in order to learn the lessons of perseverance . . .

We will never go back to the 1970’s, nor should we want to, but with the help of people like Lenore and organizations like Let Grow, it’s not too late for childhood independence.

We can do it in our schools and our homes. 

In a world of bubble-wrapped children, helicopter parenting, and the fear of kidnappers lurking behind every tree, Lenore is the voice of reason we need.

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Check out my full conversation with Lenore Skenazy on Teacher Tom's Podcast. In these first three episodes I talk with Dr. Denisha Jones, "Queen of Common Sense" Maggie Dent, in addition to Lenore. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you find your podcasts.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!