What "Good Parenting" Means

"It's the people we love the most who can make us feel the gladdest . . . and the maddest! 

Love and anger are such a puzzle! It's hard for us, as adults, to understand and manage our angry feelings toward parents, spouses, and children, or to keep their anger toward us in perspective. 

It's a different kind of anger from the kind we may feel toward strangers because it is so deeply intertwined with caring and attachment.

If the day ever came when we were able to accept ourselves and our children exactly as we and they are, then, I believe, we would have come very close to an ultimate understanding of what "good parenting" means. 

It's part of being human to fall short of that total acceptance -- and often far short. But one of the most important gifts a parent can give a child is the gift of accepting that child's uniqueness." ~Mister Rogers

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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!

What if Being Good at Things Wasn't the Point of Doing Them?

Our daughter played on a middle school soccer team in a league that didn't believe in keeping score. The kids, of course, simply kept score themselves, always knowing in the end who had won and who had lost. They knew that not keeping score wasn't part of the real world and they mocked the charade.

That said, her team was not very good, losing all of their matches, often by double digits. The girls were aware of this and mocked that too. I played on losing sports teams as a boy. Adults would try to buck us up, to assure us that today was our day, that we possessed the talent to win and we would win if we just stuck to it. They assumed that we must be down in the dumps from all the losing, but I don't recall feeling that way. Sure, I would have preferred to win, I suppose, but more important was getting together with my buddies and playing baseball or football or basketball. The camaraderie was everything and I saw that with our daughter and her friends. They loved playing bad soccer together, even as we adults worried about their self-esteem.

We ought not to have worried, of course, but it's hard. We live in a culture that emphasizes winning. It's not enough to be good at something, let alone to merely dabble in it. One must strive to be best and when someone falls short, we think, it must have shame attached to it. In school, we grade our children, ranking them according to how well they do some on some arbitrary thing like math or spelling or self-control. Indeed, our schools are in many ways set up as judgement factories. What else is this fear of "falling behind" all about if not winning and losing? Why else is failing the worst thing you can do? How else to you explain adults telling children, "You can do better." It's so embedded in our mentality that many of us can't imagine education without the competition.

Author Kurt Vonnegut told this story: "When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archeological dig. I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of 'getting to know you' questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What's your favorite subject? And I told him, 'No, I don't play any sports. I do theater, I'm in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes.'

"And he went, 'Wow, that's amazing!' And I said, 'Oh no, but I'm not good at any of them.'

"And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: 'I don't think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you've got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.'"

What if, as educators, we were all free to take this approach? What if the point wasn't being good at things and rather simply doing them? What if we stopped keeping score? What if the goal wasn't creating winners, but rather interesting people? 

"And that honestly changed my life. Because I went from a failure, someone who hadn't been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them. I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with the myth of Talent, that I thought it was only worth doing things if you could 'win' at them."

What if we understood education this way?

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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!

I Watched Her Start from Not Knowing and Work Her Way to Mastery

Classic jigsaw puzzles hold a special place in our classroom. They stand out as uniquely directive in that there is, in the end, only one right way assemble them. Yes, of course, a child might have other ideas. Someone might, say, build a tower with the pieces. Once a group of children used puzzle pieces as a kind of currency in the game they were playing, but for the overwhelming majority of children I've known, puzzles, be they on table tops or on the floor, say to children, "sit down, concentrate, and solve me." 

Certain toys tell children how to play with them. Balls can be used for all sorts of things, but among the things they say most loudly is "throw me," which is why, if we don't want balls flying around the classroom, we only make balls available outdoors. Puzzles are not usually the most "glamorous" thing in the room and they are often overlooked. Frequently, a child engaged in more active play will simply cruise by, dump all the pieces out their frames, then walk away, leaving a jumbled pile of pieces from several puzzles in a messy heap. It's one of the most common ways children use puzzles towards something other than the "right answers" that are built into them.

I like sitting with children as they sort through puzzles. For one thing, it's a great exercise in non-intervention. As children turn pieces around and around trying to find the piece that fits, it can take every ounce of willpower to restrain myself from offering unsolicited advice. For another, especially in a busy classroom, a child bent over a puzzle is a study in focus, their thoughts revealing themselves in the movements of their little fingers as they study shape and pattern, as they seek out the perfect fit. For most children, it's a silent, solo activity, although they might team up with friends, talking their way through a process. There is a lot for an adult to learn from overhearing those conversations. And some children especially like to have someone listening as they talk their way through it: "Like this . . . No, maybe like this . . . Turn it around and around . . . No . . . no . . . no . . ."

Puzzles are about perseverance in the face of repeated failure. They are a cycle that moves from chaos to order and back again. Many children will work the same puzzle over and over. Some years ago, I sat with a girl who was exploring this cycle, repeatedly assembling the same puzzle over and over until she had mastered it. Only after a dozen or so repetitions would she then push it aside and move on to the next puzzle. Again and again, I watched her start from not knowing and work her way to mastery. Her process was methodical and calm. There was no hurry to her careful method of trail and error as she noodled her way through one puzzle after another. As she started in on a new puzzle she would say, "This one looks hard." After mastering it, she would say, "This one is easy."

I finally couldn't help myself, saying to her, "You said that one was hard a few minutes ago, but now you said it's easy."

"Yes," she answered matter-of-factly, "First puzzles are hard, then you turn them easy." She surveyed the table where four wooden puzzles were neatly assembled. "I turned all of these easy."

I asked her if she wanted me to get her some more puzzles that she could "turn easy." 

"No, that's enough."

"How about I get out some different puzzles for tomorrow?"

"No, keep these same ones. I want to see if they stay easy." Then she opened her eyes wide at me, "Sometimes they don't!" And off she went into a world of chaos.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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 Agreements We Make With One Another

There was no reason for me to be close, so I kept my distance. There was no reason for me to be a part of their game, so I remained invisible.

It probably began days, if not weeks, before I understood it was a game, but it came to my attention in the form of a girl filling a plastic witch's cauldron with things she had scavenged from around the playground.

A friend said some words to her. Maybe he asked, "Can I play with you?" but it was more likely something along the lines of "What are you doing?" which is typically a better playground question if the goal is to be invited in. So then they were filling the cauldron together, discussing each item, coming to agreements over what went into the mix and what was cast aside.

A decision was made to add water to the cauldron. By now it was heavy with the debris they had purposely, even meticulously collected. But it wasn't too heavy so it only took one of them to carry it over to the cast iron hand pump. While the girl held the cauldron, her friend began filling a smaller bucket, which they then poured over their collection. As they worked together, another child joined them. After a discussion that may or may not have included the phrase, "I've got an idea," they agreed they would forego the unnecessary step of the bucket and slide the cauldron itself under the flow of water.

Agreement, however it is arrived at, stands at the center of our preschool, as it does in life itself. Conflict, all conflict, emerges from the inability to agree. These children were not playing a game; they were living.

The children took turns pumping until the cauldron was full, or at least as full as they collectively agreed it needed to be. Now it was too heavy for a single carrier, so they circled around the cauldron and lifted it together. Walking with it was a complicated matter: they had to agree about where they were going, at what speed, and who would have to walk backwards or sideways. Maybe it was still too heavy. They staggered a bit under its weight before another friend joined them, dashing in to slide his arms under cauldron. It was still too heavy, but when another playmate tried to squeeze her body in amongst them, it became clear that they could lift it, but not effectively carry the heavy thing, even when they all worked together.

They agreed they would need to put it down, which they did, carefully, not spilling more than a drop or two.

As they discussed their next steps, someone said, clearly enough for me to hear it, "I've got an idea! Let's use the wagon!" This was met with approval, with the exception of one girl, the girl who had tried to squeeze in. She objected. "I'm using it." I had previously noted her idly pulling the wagon, alone, watching the cauldron situation from afar. She had abandoned it briefly to help.

"Please!" the other children begged. "We just need it for a second." The girl stood with her back to the group, apparently considering what to do. It wasn't long before she relented, "Okay, but I want it back when you're done." Another agreement.

Now the challenge was how to get the wagon to where the cauldron sat on the ground. It sat on the other side of the row of tree stumps that line the upper level of the sand pit. One child attempted to lift it, but when the others didn't join his effort, he gave it up in favor of what the group decided was a better idea, which was to pull it around to the side with the slope. It appeared to be the work of a single child, so the others stood around watching as he wheeled the wagon the long way around. He struggled, however, when it came to the steep part of the slope, so other children, spontaneously, pushed from behind.

Then, the wagon in place, a small miracle happened. The girl who had started it all, easily lifted the heavy cauldron all on her own, placing into the bed of the wagon. As it turns out, it could have been carried by a single child, but they had collectively agreed that together was better, even if that made things more complicated, perhaps even more difficult. The agreement, not the project, was clearly the important thing.

The project, this project of life itself, continued to play out for some time as the wagon, propelled over difficult terrain made its way in stops and starts around the space, eventually winding up back where the whole thing had started. The cauldron hadn't, after all, mattered. The debris and water it held didn't matter. Whether it was a witch's brew or a soup didn't matter. Indeed, even where they were going with it didn't matter. All that mattered, all that ever matters really, in the end, are the agreements we make with one another.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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!

How We Grow in Emotional Intelligence and Agility

Being a preschool teacher (or the parent of young children for that matter) is exhausting, largely because at any given moment, someone is experiencing a big emotion and letting the rest of us know about it. I doubt there is any less anger, sadness, fear, or frustration in a typical workplace, but there's an expectation that adults should have already learned the cultural "display rules," those unspoken rules by which we know what emotions a person may express in a given place and time. Adults who are regularly "out of control" emotionally are generally not tolerated for long, whereas with preschoolers, a great deal of the developmentally appropriate learning they are doing is focused on figuring out their culture's display rules, and that begins with expressing your emotions.

Our job is exhausting because it calls for us to support young children in this vital aspect of early learning, requiring the often heavy lift of what psychologists call "emotional labor" on everyone's part. We are with them as they feel their emotion, often empathetically feeling it right along with them; we help them name it; we join them as in trying to understand it; and remain shoulder-to-shoulder and heart-to-heart with them until they've emerged on the other side. 

This is the job and this is the way young children learn the emotional display rules that most of us take for granted. Too many of us mistakenly believe that we can simply "teach" these rules by shaming (e.g., "Don't be such a baby"), dismissing (e.g., "Oh, that's nothing to get angry about"), commanding (e.g., "Stop that nonsense at once!), scolding (e.g.,"You're driving me crazy!"), and punishing (e.g., "If you don't pull yourself together, you can forget about ice cream"). This behaviorist approach, may produce temporary results in terms of children who have been bullied into compliance, but what children wind up learning is to be ashamed or afraid of their big emotions. Instead of figuring out healthy ways to feel and express, they learn to replace that with obedience to authority figures. Indeed, the behaviorist approach seeks to exchange authority figures for self-regulation, which means that all bets are off when the authority figure isn't present.

Not only that, but the behaviorist approach requires the psychologically unhealthy practice of "stuffing" emotions on command. And everyone knows that you can only stuff emotions for so long before they force their way out, usually in destructive ways.

As an early childhood educator, I strive to avoid imposing emotional display rules on children, drawing the line at physical violence. That means there's going to be some bawling, screaming, and shouting, often a great deal of it, as the children do the difficult, exhausting work of figuring it out, with me there, not as their leader or teacher, but as their colleague and guide. Simply put, if the goal is self-regulation, then we must create safe environments in which young children are free to practice self-regulation.

In many ways, this is the core work of the early years because ultimately it doesn't matter how academically precocious a person is, if they aren't capable of getting along with others, their life, and life of people around them, will be miserable. A big part of this, is learning to understand and obey any given culture's emotional display rules. But equally important is coming to recognize when toxic display rules (i.e., the ones imposed by behaviorists) must be broken, because at the end of the day, that is how we grow in emotional intelligence and agility.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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!

A Full, Rich, and Complex Life

I recently heard a researcher interviewed on the radio about her team's amazing discovery regarding a certain species of animal. At one point, she qualified her enthusiasm by saying that, of course, humans are much more "complex" than this particular animal, but that her team's discovery indicated that it was nevertheless "more complex than previously thought."

I can't recall the specifics of her research, but this knee-jerk need to rank species (more complex, less complex) with humans at the top, struck me a startlingly unscientific, if understandable, mindset.

I mean, my own life is definitely full and complex, it fills up every moment of every day, and I feel I can assume that this is true of you as well. I might not know the specifics of the rich fullness of your material-social-intellectual-emotional life, but I imagine, as a fellow human, it's there, like mine, all the time. So what makes us think the same complexity isn't true for, say, our pets? The prejudice is that other animals are simpler than us in that they are primarily motivated by baser instincts: food, procreation, and fight-or-flight survival type things. If we imagine that our dogs experience humanlike emotions, however, scientists caution us about anthropomorphizing, which is to attribute human characteristics to non-human things. 

But we know our dogs love us. I know that my dog experiences a full range of emotions, from joy and excitement to depression and despair. I know this, even as scientists might mock me for claiming to know it.

Dogs "see" the world through scent and sound in ways I cannot comprehend. There are spiders whose entire experience of the world is vibration; in fact, it could be said that they think with their web. Bats echolocate. Songbirds orient themselves according to the earth's electromagnetic fields. If any human possessed these abilities we would call them superhuman. I'm sure the radio scientist knows all of this, yet she still casually ranks humans ahead of other species, in part because it's an aspect of the scientific tradition to assume that humans are the apex of evolution and any effort to suggest that another species -- animal, plant, bacteria, or fungi -- is equally complex, is a kind of sacrilege. What's lost in this urge to rank is that every species that exists is the apex of evolution . . . so far. 

Indeed, animals, and especially humans, are new kids on the block. Plants, bacteria and fungi are our elders by billions of years. They haven't merely adapted to the environment, they've in many ways created the environment in which we, for a brief time, have been enabled to thrive.  The more you know, the more you see our species as no more or less complex than any other, it just feels more complex because we're inescapably inside of it, just as my dog, or that grapefruit tree outside my window, is inescapably inside inside its own rich, complex life.

The same goes for young children, even newborns. Our adult-centric world tempts us to view them as "simpler" humans, driven by random urges, and irrational responses. In our most light-hearted moods we find them cute, even precocious, but like that scientist, we often rank our own intelligence, our own sensibilities, our own concerns and consciousness as somehow above theirs. In our less charitable moments, we become frustrated by their "ignorance" or "immaturity." We dismiss their concerns as childish and their passions as simplistic, yet every child, every day, at every moment is living a life that is as full, rich, and complex as our own adult lives. 

When a child cries over something, or demands something, or eagerly anticipates something that we find simple or silly, rest assured, that the child doesn't find it simple or silly at all. As important adults in the lives of young children, we may know things they don't, but we ought not confuse that with superiority.

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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.

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The More Perspectives We Collect, the Better Educated We Become

While on one of our regular trips to New York City to visit our daughter, my wife and I went with her to the world premiere of our friend Rob Epstein's new documentary about the 2016 Pulitzer Prize finalist live performance of Taylor Mac's 24-Decade History of Popular Music.

The biggest challenge for Rob and his co-director Jeffery Friedman was to take the hundreds of hours of footage from this one-time-only 24-hour performance during which Mac sang 246 songs, covering the span of American history from 1776 to 2016, and somehow condense it into two hours while still conveying the thought-provoking beauty of this unique performance. The film is currently wrapping up a short tour of large screens before premiering in its permanent home on HBO Max where it will be available for streaming as of June 27.

Going in, all I knew about Taylor Mac was that he is a well-regarded NYC actor, playwright, performance artist, director, producer, and singer-songwriter who has won numerous prizes and honors throughout his career including a MacArthur Genius Grant. Most people, however, would probably first and foremost label him as a drag queen. I also knew going in that he uses the word judy as a gender pronoun. I was going to have the opportunity to meet him after the premier and even practiced using judy, but found that everyone else, including his spouse, was using the traditional male pronouns, so that's what I did.

If what you've read so far plugs you in, I'm assuming you'll skip the documentary, although I urge you not to because you'll miss out on something extraordinary. 

History, they say, is told by the winners. And it's true to the extent that most of us learn the stories as told from the perspective of the majority, which in the case of American history tends to be white, male, and straight. As a straight, white male, I've seen myself at the center of the American story for most of my life, but for the past few decades I've found myself craving every alternative perspective I can get my hands on. American history as told from the perspective of a Native American tells different stories in different ways than the ones I grew up with. Black and brown people show me stories through perspectives that have always been there but are new to me. The stories told by women bring yet more depth and, again, perspective. The perspective presented by Taylor Mac is an unapologetically queer one. His choice to present it through the history of popular music, starting with Yankee Doodle Dandy (which we learn was originally sung by the British as an gay-slur insult to American soldiers), shows us that much of our history's beauty and horror has always hidden in plain sight (or sound) through songs we've known and loved.

As Mac sang a popular sea chanty from the early 1800's, a song about the teamwork of hoisting a sail, we see the beauty of Americans pulling together to get things done. When he pauses to explain that the lyrics tell us that when they are done they will go together to rape enslaved women, we are crushed by the causal horror with which many of our fellow Americans have always lived. I was reminded of the song Jump Jim Joe that we sang for years in preschool, not knowing its history in racist minstrel shows during the 1820's. When I learned this historical fact about our beloved song, one that I'd sometimes referred to as our school's anthem, I was at first reluctant to stop singing it. After all, the children didn't know. But now I knew and knowing meant it had to go. Mac says to his audience that he understands why someone might not want to give up something, anything, that builds community and brings people together. "I get it," he says. But when the core of that unity is "evil" we are morally obliged to rid ourselves of it.

This is exactly why I crave new perspectives, not just on history, but everything. The older I get, the more I understand that my understanding of the world, even things that I felt were firmly established, is always incomplete. There is always another perspective. As an Ojibwe educator named Hopi Martin once told me, even if you've talked with all the humans, you then have to start asking the animals and plants.

I was recently accused of "indoctrinating" children: first by an insulting neighbor, then, after posting here about it, by "readers" who may or may not have actually read my post about it. The basic gist of their collective objections was that, as parents, they and only they had the right to decide what, when, and how their children should be exposed to history, gender, sexuality, and race. In other words, they objected to the very idea of offering their children any perspective other than their own.

I get it. 

The perspectives of people who experience the world in ways other than we do force us to rethink everything, even some of the things we hold sacred. That can be upsetting, frightening, and, perhaps most importantly, it can make us feel that the things that hold our beloved community together are being threatened. It's upsetting to learn that our anthems are rooted in evil. The state song of Kentucky, as Mac tells us, originally included the racial slur "darkies." It was only changed, after a great deal of controversy, to "people" in the 1970's. People of Kentucky, that cosmetic change does not erase the evil.

But I get it. Allowing ourselves to see through the eyes of others always contains the prospect of transforming our world in both large and small ways. That can obviously be upsetting. No one wants to be shown their own evil, but true evil, I've found, comes from knowing better and not doing better. My discovery, however, is that most of what I learn from exposing myself to new perspectives does not take anything away from me, but rather adds to, and even multiplies, me. To put it selfishly, the more perspectives I collect, the bigger I become.

Viewing Taylor Mac's masterpiece as condensed for the screen in this documentary, caused me to squirm at times. I didn't always like how it made me feel. But it did make me bigger, which is what education is always all about. As the author Doris Lessing wrote, "People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself." In other words, our strongest defense against being indoctrinated, which is to say avoid being trapped by one narrow perspective, is to get out there, collect perspectives, and think for ourselves. The more perspectives we've understood, the easier it is to think for ourselves. No one possesses the whole truth, but together, sharing and listening, we might be able to come close.

I cried during my viewing of the documentary of Taylor Mac's 24-Decade History of Popular Music. It overwhelmed me as Mac urged the entire live audience of some 600 people to engage in a slow-motion fist fight with one another. It was both painful and joyful to see all those people, strangers brought together for a 24-hour theater experience, going through the motions of a fistfight, slapping, punching, and kicking, while simultaneously smiling, laughing, and creating. Together. 

To quote Lessing again, "That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way."

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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!