"I Often Lose My Patience and Even Scream at My Children"

Parents and others have often complimented my "patience" with young children. It makes me feel good, although I'm certainly not patient all the time, and I've been known to lose my temper, just ask my family.

Everyone knows I hold Mister Rogers in high esteem -- the poster child for patience. Here's something he had to say on the topic:

I received a letter from a parent who wrote: "Mister Rogers, how do you do it? I wish I were like you. I want to be patient and quiet and even-tempered, and always speak respectfully to my children. But that just isn't my personality. I often lose my patience and even scream at my children. I want to change from an impatient person into a patient person, from an angry person into a gentle one."

Just as it takes time for children to understand what real love is, it takes time for parents to understand that being always patient, quiet, even-tempered, and respectful isn't necessarily what "good" parents are. In fact, parents help children by expressing a wide range of feelings -- including appropriate anger. All children need to see that the adults in their lives can feel anger and not hurt themselves or anyone else when they feel that way.

Amen.

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Surely, You Want Your Kid to Be a Part of This!

As clean up time approached, I began to survey the two-year-olds, "I'm thinking that it might be clean-up time." Some agreed while others informed me that they wanted to wait "Three minutes" or "Five minutes." They all knew by now that after we tidy up we go outside. I've never instructed the children to participate in cleaning up, but I have instructed the parent-teachers in this cooperative class to practice stepping back, to leave space for the children who choose to participate to do so in a meaningful way.

After three or five minutes, I retrieved the hand drum we use as a transition signal. Children were engaged in their play all around the room, although a couple of them stopped what they were doing to notice me. I said, "I'm getting the clean-up time banjo," and proceeded to "play" it like a banjo.

A few more kids noticed me. "It's not a banjo," I said, "It's a flute," and I played the drumstick like a flute.

"It's not a flute, it's a trumpet," and I played the stick like a trumpet. Now several more children were watching me. One of them laughed, saying, "It's a drum!"

"It's not a trumpet," I continued, "It's a trombone," and I pantomimed playing the stick as a trombone.

"It's not a trombone, Teacher Tom! It's a drum!" By now about half the kids had dropped what they were doing to watch me.

"It's not a trombone, it's a tuba." I used the drumstick for the mouthpiece and held the drum over my head to represent the large, flared tuba bell.

By now, most of the kids were paying attention, and most of them had come over to where I stood on our checker board rug to stand amidst the Duplos that were scattered there. Several of them shouted at me, "It's a drum!" and "It's not a tuba!"

I said, "It's not a tuba, it's a harp."

"It's not a harp!" they shouted. "It's a drum!" Some were so full of anticipation that they demanded, "Bang it!"

"It's not a harp, it's a piano."

"It's a drum!" "Bang it!"

"It's not a piano, it's a drum and I'm going to bang it so loud that your brains are going to shoot out of your ears and splat on the wall."

By now everyone was focused on my silly little show and they were demanding that I bang the drum. They were demanding the transition. It's not the first time I've done this, indeed, it's part of my regular teacher repertoire. After a couple of goofs where I pretended to miss the drum, I finally made contact, playing it gently with three soft beats because they were all so focused with anticipation that that was all I needed.

As I said, I've never suggested that these two-year-olds participate in clean-up, although they had by now been coming to class for months and most had been pitching in of their own accord. On this day, the sound of Duplos being dropped into boxes was almost deafening, as they all, as one, leapt to the task. There were a couple visitors in the room at the time, mothers touring the school with an eye toward enrolling for next year. The response was so dramatic, so instantaneous, so opposite of the stereotype we have of young children, that I couldn't help making eye-contact with one of the prospective parents boastfully, as if to non-verbally say, Surely, you want your kid to be a part of this!

I then continued to make informational statements like, "That box needs to go over here," and "Phillip is putting away lots of blocks," and "We need help at the red table," until everything was packed away. None of them complained. None of them hid. None of them sought to avoid the "work." They simply did what we were doing until it was done, then we put on our coats and went outside.

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If There is Any Single Thing I Want Parents to Know, It's This

I once had a three-year-old in my class who taught himself the Periodic Table of the Elements, including the atomic numbers. I didn't teach it to him. His parents swore they hadn't taught it to him. And his grandfather, who was his day-to-day caretaker, found it amusing, but otherwise barely worthy of notice, just as he hadn't been particularly impressed when his grandson taught himself to read as a two-year-old.

The boy's parents felt pressure from friends and society at large to place the boy in some sort of program for gifted children. But, as his mother told me, "He's happy here, so we're happy here. Besides, he seems to be learning just fine as it is. Why would we mess with that?"

Of course, the word "happy" in this context was used to mean something more along the lines of "motivated," because he wasn't always happy at school. In fact, at school his primary project was making friends, a notoriously fraught field of study. As a two-year-old he had been primarily focused on "the ABCs." If he couldn't find an alphabet themed puzzle or book, he would begin to shape letters from play dough or paint them at the easel. Sometimes he would cry until we helped him discover some kind of alphabet-based activity. And even though he continued his "academic" pursuits on his own time, as he grew older, his main focus of study at school became the other people in the room.

He found this kind of learning far more difficult than chemistry or literacy. He was often confused to the point of tears by the behaviors of these children with whom he sought connection. Yet, each day he arrived curious and motivated to figure things out, even if these social-emotional pursuits remained complex and unpredictable. In a world that tends to elevate children like him above the hoi polloi, he wanted, more than anything else, to fit in, to be one of the guys. Sometimes he sought to lead, but most of the time his strategy was to fawn, follow, and befriend. It left him vulnerable, but time and again he bounced back. By the time he was four, he spent most of his days at school in the midst of a pack of children playing classic preschool games of pretend and adventure. He was still interested in things like the solar system (he was upset that "some picky scientists" had demoted Pluto), presidential history (he knew every President, their Vice Presidents, and First Ladies), and reading (well above his so-called "grade level"), but at school he didn't have time for those things.

The last time I saw him was as a fifth grader performing in a public school production of Shakespeare's The Tempest, one of a cast of dozens. He was happy, which is to say, motivated.

By now, he's in high school. I'm sure that he and his family are feeling pressure to "accelerate" his learning, to separate him from his average classmates in the name of his obvious intellectual gifts, to make all his learning more focused and "useful." To do that to the boy I know, would be the equivalent of depriving him of oxygen. Self-motivation is what he breathes. I've not spoken with the family for a few years now, but I have no doubt that he is feeling no pressure from them to do anything other than follow his curiosity because, at the end of the day, that is the only way any of us will ever truly live a "happy" life. If there is any single thing I want parents to know, it's this.

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"The Perfect Uselessness of Knowing the Answer to the Wrong Question"

In Ursula LeGuin's novel The Left Hand of Darkness the people of the planet Gethen have a tradition of predicting the future called Foretelling. Individuals selected to ask their question of the Foretellers only get one chance, so it's essential to be careful and thoughtful in framing the question. If not precisely asked, the answers will be in the vein of the ancient Oracle of Delphi, impossibly vague and open to interpretation. As far as we can tell as readers, no one ever gets a workable, straight-forward answer.

This, of course, is true of fortune-telling here on Earth as well. The "art form" of seeing the future, for those of us who do not believe, is easily seen as a practice of telling the questioner what they want to hear (or what they are inclined to believe) while keeping the answer doughy enough that whatever the future actually holds it can be shaped, in hindsight, into evidence of foresight.

Growing up, we asked one another, "If you could have any one superpower in real life, what would you choose?" As a kid, I fantasized about flying or great strength, but today I would seriously consider the ability to accurately predict the future. If nothing else, it would allow me to enrich myself by knowing exactly what stocks to buy. I couldn't go wrong. I would never again make a mistake.

In one of the key moments of the book, an envoy from another planet (who the locals misname as Henry) is asked, "You don't see yet, Henry, why we perfected and practice Foretelling? To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question . . . There is really only one question that can be answered, Henry, and we already know the answer . . . The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next."

As a species, we are doomed-blessed to experience life from a perspective that makes us believe in the "arrow of time," that our lives flow from one moment to the next. The math tells us (or at least tells physicists who can understand it) that the past, present, and future don't flow from one to another, but rather all exist simultaneously. We will never be able to see the future, however, because it exists for each of us, from our perspective, as a cloud of infinite possibilities. All we will ever be able to see with any clarity is the ever-emerging present.

LeGuin writes of "intolerable uncertainty," but absolute certainty would be equally intolerable. Knowing what comes next would squeeze every ounce of meaning from life as we know it. We would never learn anything because without questions, without doubt, without hope, without mistakes, there would be nothing to learn. And with nothing to learn, life would be impossible.

Our babies are born, to use LeGuin's terminology, "in the Center of Time." Only the present exists. This is what I find most awe-inspiring about working with young children. They already know the question and the answer. Even as our babies get older, when we allow ourselves to simply observe them at play (without giving in to the busybody urge to burden them with our fortuneteller's fears and hopes) we glimpse what it means to live in the universe as it is. Life itself will eventually bring them round, but for this short span the unsolvable mystery of "What's next?" is far less important than "What is?"

Schooling, as we tend to conceive of it, is really a kind of attempt at fortune-telling. In its most ideal form, we attempt to predict what knowledge and skills our children will need for their futures, then create curricula that we hope will deliver that knowledge and those skills. We are largely unconcerned with who or what they are right now, at the center of time, but rather who we foretell they will be. We try to motivate them with fears of "falling behind" or visions of glory and prosperity, telling them that if they behave this way or that way today, they will fulfill this or that prediction about tomorrow. 

We do it with the best of intentions. We want them to be happy. But as is the case with all fortune-telling what we mostly do is exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question. There are, of course, exceptions, but far too many of us emerge from our decades of schooling no longer knowing how to live in the present. Instead we've learned to keep our eyes forward and our legs churning, racing into the future that may or may not be the one that was foretold.

When we allow children to play, when we allow people to direct their own learning, we give them the opportunity to embrace living at the center of time. This is a proper preparation for intolerable uncertainty, because it invites us to ask and answer our own questions, not because they prepare us for anything, but because we are curious, or even passionate, about the answers. 

The past informs us, of course, it tells the story of what we and the world have been. The future is a never-sated fantasy that, if we aren't careful, devours our present. It's only in the center of time that we discover how to flourish. And that, for me, is the only goal worth pursuing, to live the life we have today with passion and purpose, not because of where we're going, but because it makes us feel alive.

"Happiness," LeGuin writes in discussing her masterpiece, "has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can't earn, and can't keep, and often don't even recognize at the time; I mean joy."

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Technology is Destroying Our Minds

It feels like everyone has their hot take on 1) smartphones and 2) AI, most of which fall into the category of "they're destroying our minds."

I have no doubt they're destroying our minds. That's what technology does. It enhances our lives by taking over some aspect of what our minds (or bodies) once did for themselves.

For most of human history no one knew what time it was. Around 1275 mechanical clocks were invented that could chime to let people know the hour. That's as precise as it got. The minute hand didn't appear until the 15th century with in-home grandfather clocks becoming widespread around 1675. And personal clocks -- pocket watches -- didn't really become widespread for another 200 years . . . Followed by the second hand.

The clock with its relentless tick-tock-tick divided up our days into smaller and smaller units, externalizing the pace of our days from our minds to machines, making us slaves to efficiency and punctuality. They disconnected us from the natural rhythms of life, the arc of the sun, the phases of the moon, the cycle of the seasons. Clocks destroyed the easy, individual pace of routines with standardized schedules, making us more machine and less human.

Today, just 250 years into the mechanical clock experiment, most of us can't conceive of life without clocks. And we definitely don't see how they've destroyed our minds. We wear them on our wrists, carry them in our pockets; they're on our microwaves, computer screens, car dashboards, and beside our beds. There's hardly a moment of our lives when a clock isn't measuring our progress, prodding us, chiding us, making us products of the Industrial Revolution.

But it's not just clocks.

The phonetic alphabet destroyed our minds.

The printing press destroyed our minds.

Television destroyed our minds.

Smartphones are destroying our minds.

And it's only a matter of time before AI destroys our minds.

I'm not saying I want to get rid of or stop any of it, only that the entire point of technology is to externalize something that was previously a function of our minds and bodies, theoretically freeing us up for "more important things." We no longer have to use our minds to memorize Homer because it's been written down and printed onto pages and bound into books . . . Where few of us ever read it. We no longer have to waste our time going out in public because we can bring "the public" into our homes. We no longer have to navigate our way around the world, look things up in the library, or write our own essays.

In his book Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, Douglas Adams conceived of the Electric Monk: "The Electric Monk was a labor-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe."

The real question isn't what technology is doing to us, but rather what we are going to do with our minds and bodies now that they are freed up to do other more important things. 

That's the cruel joke of it, of course. It typically only takes a generation for us to forget what things were like before our minds were destroyed because we fill up our minds and occupy our bodies with things that aren't really that important. Anthropologists estimate that our hunter-forager ancestors worked 20 hour weeks. They spent the rest of their time inventing things like dance, music, art, storytelling, community, and yes, technology. What they did with their free time is, in the words of Kurt Vonnegut, fart around. Today, the average American works more than twice that, and most of us aren't farting around at all in our free time, let alone inventing anything. We let our technology do our farting around for us as we scroll and veg out.

This is something those of us who work with young children see more clearly than the rest of the world. We spend our days with humans whose minds have not yet been destroyed by literacy, clocks, smartphones, or AI. They spend most of their time doing what comes most naturally to humans whose basic physical, social, and emotional needs are met, which is to say fart around by exploring, experimenting, discovering, and inventing. That's what play-based learning is all about and it's why most people simply can't grasp it: their minds are too far gone to comprehend the world in which our youngest citizens exist, a world without all those technologies that have usurped parts of the human mind.

The encroachment of the technology of "academics" into preschool is destroying our children's minds. When we drill two-year-olds on phonics, we are destroying their minds far more completely than any smartphone. Am I exaggerating? I don't think so. One of the main things we moderns use our "freed up" minds for is to fret and worry. Mental disorders are at crisis levels. But most disturbing to me is that we are today experiencing anxiety and depression in preschoolers at rates never before seen. Nearly 10 percent of our children are on medications to treat their mental illnesses. I'm not exaggerating.

We're not going to stop technology, but we can fortify our youngest children, these original humans, with a time during which we allow them to know what it means to fart around, which is to say, to play.

The antidote to childhood anxiety, indeed, the antidote for anxiety in general, is to be free to fart around. It's when we're farting around -- exploring, experimenting, discovering, and inventing -- that we are truly free to be ourselves, to follow our curiosity, and, most importantly, to make our lives personally meaningful; to find our own, unique, and wonderful purpose, to witness wonder and awe in our lives. This is the foundation of what it means to be human.

The unfulfilled promise of every technology is to free us up for more play, which is to say, to come alive. The world needs more people who have come alive. And if they have any hope of ever coming alive, our youngest children need us to protect them from technologies that will destroy their minds, including the technology of academics.

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The Secret to Freedom is Courage

The children had set up a "diving board" by sliding one end of a plank of wood under the gate, leaving the long end cantilevered out over the short flight of stairs leading down to the playground.

They waited in a self-managed queue, taking turns without any adult intervention. When it was William's turn, he slow-walked out to the end, then stood there for a long time, summoning the courage to leap. The other children grew impatient, urging him to jump. When one of them tried to spur him to action by bouncing the board, he shouted at them to stop. The decision to jump or not jump is one that each of us ultimately must make for ourselves. A few children before him had already backed away from taking the plunge, a two foot drop to the ground. For the longest time, it seemed like he was destined to join them, but then, suddenly, he launched himself.

When we talk about risky play in preschool, more often than not we discuss it in terms of the development of the prefrontal cortex or as the way we practice keeping ourselves safe. We argue that risky play helps us develop resilience, executive functioning skills, and self-confidence. We defend risky play by asserting that it allows children -- through what is essentially trial and error science -- to learn their own limits. 

And this is all true, but what I found myself contemplating as the children after William plunged willy nilly off their jerry-rigged "diving board", was the classical virtue of courage.

We don’t talk much about courage today, maybe because of the excesses of the “don’t be a wimp” and “tough it out” style of parenting all too common when I was growing up. Courage and bravery and toughness were too often used to shame children for expressing perfectly natural responses to pain, fear, and anxiety . . . That's nothing to cry about. Snap out of it!

But that was always a gross misunderstanding of courage. William displayed courage exactly because he was afraid. The children who came after him were acting without fear, which is an entirely different thing. It's the fear, the anxiety, and the concern about pain that defines any act as courageous.

The ancients, and Aristotle in particular, provide useful analysis of courage. Like all virtues, it lies between two vices, one of excess, and the other of lack. Foolhardiness is when someone, far from being courageous, doesn’t value their life very much and takes reckless risks with it. Cowardice is when someone is so fearful that they can’t do what a brave person would do. Courage, in contrast, involves recognizing the dangers, and the real physical risks, experiencing fear, but nevertheless having the inner strength to act. Like William.

This is perhaps the most important thing we learn through risky play, to find that balance between recklessness and cowardice.

The thing about courage is that it can really only be understood in practice. You can preach about courage until you’re blue in the face, but courage is far too personal for that.

I’ll never forget a moment with my own daughter Josephine who was probably 8 or 9 at the time. We were on a father-daughter camping trip with other fathers and daughters. The campground had what they called “the giant swing,” which was made from bungee cords that were attached to the branch of a tree some 30 feet in the air. Several of the girls were enthusiastic. Most were nervous, but willing. Josephine and a couple of other girls wanted nothing to do with it.

Honestly, I wanted her to try it, but I made a conscious effort to honor her feelings, although I guess I didn’t do a great job of it because at some point she said, “Maybe I'm not brave about physical things. But I am brave about other things: I go on stage and act and sing!” That is indeed courageous. 

A normally timid boy once called out to me “Teacher Tom! Look at me!” He had his arm around the trunk of a tree and he was standing on a root that was – at most – two inches off the ground. Again, courageous.

Risky play – and courage – are defined by the person engaged in the act. Most children, most of the time, if allowed the opportunity to engage in risk without adult intervention, will find their own “just right” level of risk, one that locates their own sweet spot of courage between foolhardiness and cowardice. Of course, mistakes will be made, but that's where the learning happens.

Courage isn’t just acting in the face of our fears, but also having the faith that we will be able to live with the consequences – good or bad. Risky play is how we practice our own personal courage. 

Courage is the antidote to this age of fear and anxiety in which we live. And, as the Ancient Greeks knew: the secret to happiness may be freedom, but the secret to freedom is courage.

Risky play is the way we practice setting ourselves free.

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Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

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 Hope That Others Will Find Me Worthy of Imitation

Peace Child, Sadako Sasaki

There are plenty of reasons to be dubious about the double-edged sword of punishments and rewards, but I've been living with Natalia Ginzburg's words for some time now and as much as I objected at first, I now find myself taking comfort, even strength, from them:

(I)n general I think we should be very cautious about promoting and providing rewards and punishments. Because life rarely has its rewards and punishments; usually sacrifices have no reward, and often evil deeds go unpunished, at times they are even richly rewarded with success and money. Therefore it is best that our children should know from infancy that good is not rewarded and that evil goes unpunished; yet they must love good and hate evil, and it is not possible to give any logical explanation for this. (From her essay The Little Virtues)

I don't want this to be true. I recoil at the idea of living in a world without natural justice, but Ginsburg's take explains a lot. I keep waiting for evil to be punished and good to be rewarded in this life, and sometimes it seems to be, but honestly, over the arc of my time on this planet, the distribution of punishments and rewards appears to be random. The evil thrive and the good suffer.

Of course, maybe the arc of justice, as MLK suggests, is so long that it's not possible for any one of us to see it through to the end. Maybe there are punishments and rewards in the afterlife. But here on this earth, in this lifetime, Ginzurg has peeked behind the story we tell ourselves about punishments and rewards and found no cosmic tit-for-tat at work.

The Eastern tradition's concept of karma is thrown around a lot these days, but it's a notion that we in the West have mostly co-opted and misunderstood. Karma, as I understand it, is more akin to Ginzburg's idea in that when translated from the ancient language of Sanskrit from whence it derives, it comes out as "action" or "deed," and it refers to the cycles of cause and effect. Karma really isn't about punishments or rewards as much as it's about consequences. Each religion or philosophy treats it differently, of course, but the basic idea is that we, through our behaviors, either add to or subtract from the collective karmic good or evil in the world.

"Good is not rewarded and . . . evil goes unpunished; yet they must love good and hate evil." In other words, we can't punish and reward our way to moral behavior. It is simply not something that can result from behaviorist concepts of "conditioning." Certainly, we can find carrots sweet enough and sticks painful enough to control the behavior of others, but at the end of the day, if the intention is simply to avoid punishments or receive rewards, or worse, the result of pure Pavlovian conditioning, then we are not talking about morality, but rather cynical manipulation.

I don't know how to "teach" anyone to love good and hate evil, but I do know that I can choose good over evil. I haven't always chosen good in my life and I've certainly at times mistaken evil for good, but I've learned over six decades, through those cycles of cause and effect, that I love good and hate evil. And there is no logical explanation for this.

I find comfort in Ginzburg's words because, in the end, my only real moral power is to reject evil with no fear of punishment and be an example by choosing good with no expectation of reward other than the hope that others, and especially children, will find me worthy of imitation.

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Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

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!

Now It's Our Children's Turn to Come to Know the World

The boy came to school every day in a cape, telling us all that he was a Transformer. His father assured us that they had never allowed their son to watch the TV shows or movies. In fact, they didn't even own a television. The internet likewise couldn't be blamed. This was the era during which Netflix was still mailing DVDs to its customers. The family didn't own any of the merchandise, although his father thought it was possible that his son had caught a glimpse of Transformers at the toy store or maybe a friend's house.

I think of this boy every time someone complains about "parents these days." It's tempting to blame parents for everything, even things that are relatively harmless, like imagining oneself with the powers of modern-day mythological heroes. They allow their children too much screen time. They don't teach them good dietary habits. They spoil them. They are simultaneously overly-protective and not protective enough. Whenever children do something we don't like, the parents are responsible.

I can't tell you how many parents I've known who did everything they could to raise their daughters in a gender-neutral way, including myself, only to have their girls insist on wearing the most sparkly princess dress, every day, from the moment they could express a preference. And still there are those who seek to place the blame on parents, because, after all, they should have refused to buy that sparkly princess dress, as if that would somehow convince their daughter that stereotypes of feminine beauty don't matter.

They matter, clearly. Just as stereotypes of masculinity matter. Our children, even very young children, can see these truths about society. The evidence is there at every turn, even if they've never seen a screen, and their parent's denials of capes and princess dresses, at best, push those worldly things off into the future because, one way or another, they must be dealt with.

Parents are, of course, influential, especially in the earliest years, but the world, in the long run, has far more to say in how our children "turn out" than any of the small things we do as parents.

There is what is often called our "categorical identity," the things that define us on government records or IDs -- things like race, sex, age, height, and place of birth. But when we put on a cape or a princess dress we are engaging in creating our "narrative identity." This is the story that each of us tells about ourselves in the world, the story that explains who we really are from our own perspective, but perhaps more importantly, how we've changed and continue to change. When we look back at our stories, we engage our memory, for what it's worth. When we cast our eyes forward from the present, we engage our imaginations, for better or worse.

When a child dons a cape or princess dress, they are seeking to tell an aspirational story about who they expect to become, how they see themselves fitting in with a world beyond the womb of family. Narrative identity is never a fixed thing so today's capes and dresses give way as children come to see that the world is more nuanced than the stereotypes. Not every young boy imagines himself soaring in to save the day, but every child who is categorically identified as male, must tell their own story around that worldly theme -- accepting, rejecting, or making it in some way a part of their own identity. Not every young girl wears a princess gown, but every child who is categorically identified as female, must shape a story around our worldly stereotypes of femininity. 

There are those who insist that if we change our young children, we will change the world, but that's nonsense, at best. If we want to change the world, that's our job. The job of our children is to understand the world in which they find themselves, not conform to the utopias we imagine for them.

This is what learning is. In order to truly understand anything, the world or ourselves, we must first embrace it fully, hold it in our hands, taste it with our tongues, hear it with our ears -- that is how we fully explore anything. We then take from it what we need, before leaping once more into the unknown: our future selves. 

Our narrative identities are stories that only we can tell and they are always, in the present, counter-instinctual in that they defy the categories as we've come to understand them. It can be uncomfortable at first, even frightening, because we are literally becoming someone else. 

That boy who was a Transformer learned that he couldn't stay a Transformer forever, even as he continued to transform himself. The following school year, he had moved on, although he still sometimes stood boldly. He still sometimes wore his cape. And he still possessed the urge to protect the "little kids." He was once a Transformer, he understood what that meant to him, and he was now something else . . . in the process of becoming yet something else.

Parents, unless they abuse or neglect, are not to blame for any of this. As parents, and as educators for that matter, our lasting legacy, the only thing that can stand up to the world is our love. Our job isn't to tell their stories for them, but rather to, stand boldly and protect them, as they grow and change and become. We have created our own narrative identities in the world as we've come to know it. Now it's our children's turn to come to know the world in their own way, a world that includes our unwavering love, and to tell their own stories about who they are and who they will become.

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Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

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!

"There is No Reality Except Action"

The two-year-old held a Hot Wheel in each fist while making his way through the classroom. He stopped at the sensory table where other two-year-olds were scooping and dumping flax seeds. He dropped the car, not even watching it fall, to grab a fistful of the seeds. It was a single act, the dropping and grabbing. There was no moment for indecision or regret, no thought for the car he was leaving behind. It was an act of pure commitment.

Moments before, he had wanted that car so much that he had wrestled it from another child, but now it lay forgotten at his feet as his full attention turned to the silky flow of massed flax seed. When the boy found that he wanted a scoop, the second car was likewise forgotten.

I admire the ability of very young children to just move on like this, from want to want without a sense of loss in between. In this case, his "storage" capacity was limited by his two hands. He didn't even try to keep the cars and play with the flax seed. The cars were treasures while he held them, each precious for a time, then left behind without a thought.

Someday, he will learn to mourn his losses, to regret, perhaps even to hoard or despair, What if I'd only kept hold of that Hot Wheel? 

This is an aspect of how we often attempt to somehow live our un-lived lives: by refusing to let go. We know it's an illusion, these lives we might have lived if only we'd made different choices, so we hold on even when life itself calls for us to grab hold with both hands. We would like to commit to a new future, but we find our fists are already full. For the longest time, I kept my baseball bat and glove, just in case. I still have them. They're in the garage, I think, taking up space, gathering dust, coming to my attention only when I happen across them while looking for something else. I know I should have long ago dropped them at my feet, but they have moved with me a dozen times, from garage to attic to cellar.

The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, "There is no reality except in action." This popped into my mind as I watched the boy grab-and-drop his way about the classroom, not aware that with each choice he made, each positive commitment he made to one option, be it a car or flax seed, meant he was simultaneously rejecting an infinite number of other possibilities. But he knew them for what they are: illusions. It's action, not possibilities, that creates our reality.

I'm inspired by a two-year-old's capacity to commit themselves wholly to each decision.

In his book Gut Feelings: Short Cuts to Better Decision Making, Gerd Gigerenzer writes, "Deliberate thinking about reasons seems to lead to decisions that make us less happy." Everyone has experienced "paralysis by analysis." Even highly trained athletes or actors can choke if they think too much. 

The past holds us because, whatever else it is, it's at least familiar, and therefore safe, even if it no longer serves us. We look to the future with our lists of pros and cons in the hope that we can control it by choosing the perfect life partner or university or career path or neighborhood or whatever. 

And all too often, we find that we're stuck in between clinging to both the Hot Wheels and the flax seed, committing to neither. It's not our decisions, but our commitment to them that determines whether or not we made the right one. A wedding isn't a marriage. A degree isn't a career.

The boy, untethered from the past and unaware of any future, epitomizes the creative force of the universe -- action -- moving through the classroom, through life, unafraid to commit and commit and commit again. I will never again be that boy, but man does he inspire me.

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Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

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!

Playing Math

The two-year-old had carried the plastic bears halfway across the room to show me. "Blue bears," he said, holding them in front of his own eyes.

I said, "Two blue bears."

He looked from one to the other, then pushed them a bit closer to me as if to say, Look at them. I said again, "Two blue bears." He looked from one to the other again, then held them closer together, right in front of his eyes. There was something else he wanted to say about these bears, but he was struggling to find the words.

"You are really looking at those bears."

He said, "Blue bears, " and pushed them toward my eyes as if asking me to really look as well. I really looked. I said, "You are showing me two blue bears. One of them is darker blue and one of them is lighter blue."

He looked at them, examining them, then shoved them toward me again. I said, "You are showing me two blue bears that are different shades of blue." That's when he smiled. "Different," he said, "Blue bears different." He then took them back with him halfway across the room.

I followed him to where the kids were playing with the little plastic bears, plastic baskets, and water. One boy held an empty basket. He picked up a bear as it floated past, putting it in his basket. He beamed at me as I knelt beside him, so I replied, "You put a bear in your basket." He put another bear in his basket, then another, each time, smiling at me. When he put the fourth bear in the basket he told me, "More." I answered, "You have more bears in your basket."

He then added another and another, each time telling me, "More," "More," "More."

Later, I was leaning over the top of some cabinets, watching the two-year-olds playing with our wooden trains. Children were queuing their train cars up, the way one does, one after another. A girl shouted, "Teacher Tom, look at my long train!" I looked at it. She connected another car and shouted, "Teacher Tom, my train is longer!" I nodded. She added another and another, each time proclaiming it longer until there were no more train cars in her immediate vicinity. She then announced, "It's the longest!"

I was still leaning across the shelves when another girl brought me one of the wooden trees that came with one of the intermixed train sets we own. She set it in front of me. I said, "You brought me a tree." She picked up another tree. I said, "Now I have two trees." Then another. "Now I have three threes." And another. "Now I have four trees." The trees were of different colors, shapes and manufactures, but they were all trees. Then she then added a small traffic sign. I looked at her in mock confusion and she laughed and laughed at the math prank she'd just pulled on me.

This is what preschool mathematics looks like in a play-based environment. It is not an academic pursuit, but rather a truly intellectual one, even a joyful one, something every child pursues as if it was coded into their genes. And indeed, it is.

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Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

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!