What are Your Goals for Your Child?

I've asked thousands of parents the question, "What are your goals for your child?" It's something a lot of us ask at the beginning of a school year or when we are first getting to know a family. Far and away, the top answers are some version of, "I just want my child to be happy," or "I just want my child to love learning." These are the answers I expect, especially from first time parents. 

The good news is that their children already love learning, they were born that way, so no problem there. Our only job, and it's made far simpler by a play-based curriculum, is to do no harm.

Happiness is, of course, another matter. It's the only emotion that tends to disappear the moment you become aware of it. It's a tricky, personal, and ephemeral thing, something we spot in others, but when we ourselves are happy we daren't look directly at it. It's like those phantom movements in our peripheral vision that Icelanders say are the "hidden people," elves and fairies and whatnot, who flee when you turn their way. Because of this phenomenon, Aristotle asserted that the only way humans can ever know if they've lived a happy life is in hindsight, from the perspective of our death beds, looking back over it all. This, of course, doesn't mean that we ought not pursue happiness, only that we have to accept that the pursuit is the most important part of that project, which is, at bottom, what self-directed learning is all about: the pursuit of happiness.

So I have no problem assuring parents that their preschool goals will be met. Their children will continue to love learning because they will be free to pursue happiness within the context of a community. The problem is that we too often fail to understand that the love of learning and the pursuit of happiness must be ends unto themselves, not means to an end. It's when we attempt to wrangle these highest of goods into the service of some more prosaic result, like a grade or a score or a certificate or a job, that we begin to undermine the joy of learning, replacing it with the avoidance of corrective sticks. It's when we begin to make the pursuit of happiness into a hopeless chase after carrots that are always dangled just out of reach.

No wonder so many children wind up finding school to be a disappointment: it is the place where they are taught that learning is a chore and something like happiness must be found in the praise of adults.

"I just want my child to be happy." "I just want my child to love learning." Laudable goals, indeed, the highest. My goal for these parents is that they come to see that the only way to get there is to set their children free and to trust them to know what to do with their freedom.

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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 "Disrespectful" and "Destructive" Children are Telling Us

Not long ago, I was tagged in a Facebook thread of teachers complaining about the behavior of their students. I only spent a few minutes scrolling through the comments, but most of them seemed to be coming from middle school teachers in public schools who were accusing the kids of being disrespectful and destructive. Some even provided photographic evidence of vandalism and general disregard for property.

"Uncaring" and "disconnected" parents seemed to be receiving most of the blame with the Covid pandemic coming in a close and intertwined second. Unaddressed mental health challenges were mentioned as a cause as was our namby-pamby society in which adults are no longer allowed to hit children to "teach them respect." In fairness, there were a few commenters who pointed their fingers at modern schooling itself, but they were few and far between. A huge percentage of these teachers asserted that they were quitting their jobs as soon as possible.

I clicked away after a minute or two, however, in part because I've been trying to remain conscious of my online scrolling behavior, but mostly because my personal focus is preschool-aged children, not middle schoolers.

In my conversation with author, educator, and parenting and resilience specialist Maggie Dent for Teacher Tom's Podcast she made the off-hand comment, "Teenagers are preschoolers on steroids." (There's a reason she's called the "Queen of Common Sense.")

In preschool, we say that behavior is communication. If a preschooler behaves disrespectfully or destructively we would immediately assume that they were trying to tell us that they're sad, afraid, confused, overwhelmed, frustrated, angry, or otherwise dysregulated, and it's our job, as the adults, to try to figure out what it is they are telling us. Their family life might well have something to do with it. For instance, it's quite common for a formerly single child to engage in selfish behavior while adjusting to a new baby at home. Maybe someone in the family has lost their job. Maybe there are marital problems. These kinds of things impact teenagers as well. 

In my experience, most troubling behaviors have their roots in something going on at home, but it would never occur to me as a preschool teacher to blame parents. 

When I think of the behavior of these young teenagers, most of whom are at an age that traditional cultures consider to be adults, I wonder if maybe they're the proverbial canaries in the coal mine. These teachers seemed to be insisting that this kind of behavior is relatively new, that it didn't used to be this way. These teachers seem to be reporting from all corners of the country. Now, granted, this Facebook thread, like all gripe-fests, is a self-selected group which is not inclusive of those who are not experiencing challenging behaviors or who feel on top of things, but this isn't the first time I've heard about rising disrespect and destructiveness. 

Maybe these children's behavior is the tip of a much larger iceberg. Maybe the disrespect and destructiveness isn't isolated to middle school classrooms. Indeed, it's quite clear that it isn't. Some days it feels as if the entire world is behaving like these middle schoolers.

Young children who behave disrespectfully, I've found, are the children who are treated disrespectfully by the adults in their lives. Young children who behave destructively, I've found, are the children who feel they have little choice in their lives, who feel trapped or caged or otherwise un-free to engage the world in personally meaningful ways.

One of the reasons I strive to stop scrolling is because too much of what I find there is disrespect, destruction and finger-pointing. It's not just middle schoolers, it's all of us. Perhaps not you or me, but our behavior as a culture is communicating, and what I hear it saying is "I am human, too!"

What I've found with preschoolers is that disrespect and destructiveness tends to disappear when I stop trying to control them and instead make the effort to listen to what their behavior is communicating. Often, all it takes is that: listening. When I listen, I understand that these children are only asking for the same thing all of us are asking for: to be allowed to pursue a life of meaning and purpose in a reasonably safe environment of respect. When we don't get that, we often respond with disrespect and destruction.

When I listen to young children, more often than not, I hear myself, and that is where understanding begins.

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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 Four Angry Ship Builders

Charlotte said, "I'm going to build a ship," and got to work arranging the blocks.

Ships have always been a popular way for the kids to use our large wooden blocks. It's a simple build which normally involves arranging the blocks into a deck, flat on the floor. Each time Charlotte would place a block, however, one of her classmates would step on it, which frustrated her. 

"Hey, I'm building a ship!"

There was a lot of action in the block area and it got so she was chasing someone off her ship every few seconds. She responded by upping the intensity of her objections.

It didn't seem like anyone was intentionally provoking Charlotte. The situation was more a result of attempting to work on a solo project in a crowded, active area. After having been reprimanded several times by Charlotte, Henry paused for a moment to survey this corner of the rug, and in doing so he seemed to suddenly see the world from Charlotte's perspective. "I'm going to help build the ship." And with that he began arranging blocks.

Without directly acknowledging Henry, Charlotte began to chase the other kids off, still angrily, by saying, "Hey, we're building a ship!"

And Henry took on the tone as well, "Hey, we're building a ship!" Now we had two intense ship builders. 

Soon Audrey joined them, pushing large blocks into place. She said nothing, but wore a fierce, tight-jawed expression as she worked.

"Hey, we're building a ship!" "Hey, that's our ship!"

As the three angry builders made their herky jerky progress, Lilyanna, who had been dancing about the block area to the beat of some internal rhythm, and therefore largely oblivious to the builders, had as a consequence been chased off the burgeoning ship more times than I could count. As she turned a sort of pirouette on the ship deck, the builders said once more, loudly, "Hey, we're building a ship!"

Lilyanna was offended, putting her hands on her hips defiantly, commanding, "Stop!" Saying "stop" forcefully is a technique we teach the children for when someone is hurting them, frightening them, or taking their things. Some kids, however, find it so powerful that they try it out in any circumstance in which they find themselves at odds with others.

This lead to a silent stand-off, with the three builders standing face-to-face with Lilyanna, angry faces all around. Finally, Charlotte said, as if castigating the world, "This is our ship! Mine, Henry's, Audrey's and Lilyanna's!"

Then the four angry ship builders got back to work.

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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!

It Works Every Time

Einar Jónsson

The two-year-old was standing at the gate, his fingers through the slats, crying after his mommy who had left. The grandmother of another child was sitting with him. I wanted to go take her place, not because she was doing anything wrong, but because it was the first day of a summer session. I imagined the grandma was there to enjoy it with her own grandchild, and I saw it as a big part of my job to be with the kids when they struggled with the transition into their time with us. That said, there were some 30 other kids to be welcomed, along with their parents, and I had several other things to do to get things launched, so I left them there, knowing that at least the poor boy wasn't abandoned, even if he was feeling that way.

It took about 10 minutes in order to carve out the time to get to them. He was still crying. This was the first time we had spoken, other than my "I'm happy to see you" greeting when he first arrived in his mother's arms. I sat beside him on the steps, used his name, and asked by way of confirmation, "Are you sad because your mommy left?"

He nodded.

Several of my old friends had followed me, excited to see me after a break, wanting to be in my sphere for a bit to start their days. "Why is he crying?" "What's wrong?" "Teacher Tom, I want to show you that I learned to pump myself on the swings." I told them that I was going to talk to this boy for awhile, using his name again, letting them know that I would be with them shortly, saying, "We'll come find you when he's finished with his cry."

As I'd managed our space in this way, he had turned away from the gate, still whimpering, but obviously listening. When they had gone he turned his face back to the gate and resumed his cry.

I said, "You're sad your mommy left. It's okay to be sad about that. I'm going to be with you while you're sad, but I want you to know that mommies always come back. Your mommy will come back." I then verbally walked him through our daily schedule, ending with, "Then I'll read a story and mommy will come back." I had a passing thought about what I would do if this didn't "work," before remembering that the goal is not to end his crying, but rather to create a space in which he could finish his cry. Of course, it would "work," it always "works" when one person sits with another like this, calmly making statements of fact.

I asked if he wanted me to hold him. He nodded yes, but when I touched him, the recoil of his body said no. I asked if he wanted to sit beside me. He wanted to keep standing. I said, "Okay, then I'll sit here with you while you're sad about mommy leaving." After a couple minutes, one of my old friends raced up, demanding excitedly, "Teacher Tom, you have to come see our major overflow." "Major overflow" is the term the kids had coined for when they filled a 20 gallon tub with water using the the cast iron hand pump, then dumped it down the hill, creating a river with a waterfall as it plunges from the upper level of the sandpit to the lower. I answered that I couldn't come right away because I was sitting with this boy who was missing his mommy. The older girl widened her eyes, looked at him, then said insistently, "He can come watch it too!"

I asked him if he wanted to see the major overflow. Still weeping, he nodded. I stood and said, "I will go with you. I can hold your hand." He took my proffered hand, and slowly we walked to the sandpit where we witnessed the promised event, which was accompanied by big kids cheering with the kind of joy that can only come from a collective accomplishment. "Did you see it, Teacher Tom?"

I answered that we had seen it, referring of course to the two-year-old who had, it seemed finished his cry. Soon, he was engaged with the water, probably still missing mommy, but no longer incapacitated by the feelings it evoked.

This is the job. We're not here to make things better, to end the crying, or to distract them from missing their mommies. We're not even there to soothe them any more than we're there to "good job" them. Becoming soothed is their job. Cheering for their own accomplishments is their job. Our job is to be with them when they're crying and when they're cheering, speaking truth, and creating space for them to feel exactly how they feel for as long as they need to feel it. It "works" every time.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 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!

"Children Do Not Like Being Incompetent Any More Than They Like Being Ignorant"

As a child, there were certain adults who I instantly liked, whereas there were others for whom I would take an immediate dislike. It generally came down to how they treated me. If they looked me in the eye, spoke in their normal voice, laughed at my jokes, not my mistakes, and refrained from such intrusive things as patting me on the head, pinching my cheeks, or picking me up without my consent, then they were one of the "good guys."

Most adults in mixed-age social settings would just ignore me, which was fine, because I would likewise ignore them, preferring the company of my fellow children, but there were always some who would loom at me, smiling too widely, speaking too loudly, sometimes even descending into a kind of baby talk. They might have been well-intended, but I resented their insipid, prying questions, questions they would never dare ask an adult they didn't know: "What are you going to be when you grow up?" or "Are you a good boy for your teacher?" They would look around at the other adults as I obediently replied beaming condescendingly as if they were a confederacy of superior beings deigning to include the cute, precious, innocent child for a moment.

To this day, there are few things more certain to set this early childhood educator's teeth on edge than adults who condescend to children. As a boy, the irritation was with their obvious phoniness and their clear, insulting assumption that I was some kind of baby. Now, however, I understand that it is even worse. These are adults, and there are more of them now than ever, who see children not as an individual humans, but rather as an idea, a stereotype. They don't see actual people, but rather their concept of children as incomplete adults -- simple, unformed, incompetent, and so so so charmingly innocent. It's okay to command or control them, to even lie to them, just so long as they can convince themselves that it's "for their own good."

Many of these people are in charge of schools and curriculum. Many are teachers. There are even parents who start off with this attitude only to spend the next couple decades mourning the loss of their vision of what a child is as their own child proves to be an actual human being. These are the parents who think they are doing their child a service by protecting them from learning about sex, gender, or racism because they are too tender and dear to be exposed to such things.

John Holt writes, "It is condescending when we respond to qualities that enable us to feel superior to the child. It is sentimental when we respond to qualities that do not exist in the child but only in some vision or theory that we have about children . . . Children do not like being incompetent any more than they like being ignorant. They want to learn to do, and do well, the things they see being done by bigger people around them. This is why they soon find school such a disappointment; they so seldom get a chance to learn anything important or do anything real. But many of the defenders of childhood, in or out of school, seem to have this vested interest in the children's incompetence, which they often call 'letting the child be a child.'"

We are born into the shock of light, cold, and sound, then must spend our first days learning to live with it. From the moment we come into this world, we are fully aware that there is pain, fear, and that life is often unfair. We are never innocent in this life: the idea of childhood innocence is really just adults romanticizing ignorance. Our children do not need to be protected from the hard lessons of life, even if that were possible. They do not benefit from our theories about what children are and are not. They are here on this earth, like all of us, to learn what it means to be alive and our responsibility as important adults in their lives is to be fellow travelers, consoling them when the lessons are hard, helping them when the tasks are difficult, but most of all loving them as the capable, competent humans they are.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 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!

They are a Head Taller Than Themselves

I was at Archie McPhee's in Seattle, the best store in the world, when I suddenly found an impossibly tiny boy at my knees. He said, eyes wide, "You're here."

It took me a moment, but I finally recognized him as one of my two-year old students. Seeing him out of context had thrown me a bit. Here, out in the world, he stuck me as so much younger than he did at school, not just smaller, but less mature, less assured. At school, he was a leader amongst his peers, always the first to try new things, bold, even a bit cocky, but here was, well, wee in every way.

This has happened to me before -- in parks, restaurants, and on the street -- running into children who seem physically, intellectually, socially, and emotionally younger than they do at school. 

Psychologist Lev Vygotsky wrote, "In play a child always behaves beyond their average age, above their daily behavior; in play it is as though they were a head taller than themself."

This is what happens when we get to know children in an environment where they have permission to play. 

When we play, we are our emergent selves. When we play we are in a state of becoming, of learning, of leaving old ideas behind, of toppling the status quo. When we play, we are making way for the new ideas, for the new status quo we are discovering, exploring, and creating through our self-selected course of study.

Parents often remark that their children are so much better "behaved" at school, more "cooperative," and more "mature." That's because at our school, they are a head taller than themselves. 

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 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!

Learning to Be Alone With Your Thoughts and Reveries

I spent most of my free time outdoors as a boy. I'd like to say that's where I chose to be, and I certainly have a lot of fond memories of playing outdoors, but it's also where Mom wanted us kids to be. She might let us watch a single TV program, but then we were shooed outside so that our eyes wouldn't "turn square." Any running or rowdiness was to be taken outside. For our own good, and her own, we were turned outdoors as long as there was still light in the sky.

Usually, we didn't object, especially since outside was where the other kids were, but I also have memories of long afternoons alone in my room. I could spend hours building a fort with my blocks, then populating it with toy soldiers, good guys and bad guys. When it was finally time for the shooting to begin, I would track the path of each individual bullet from the barrel of the gun to its target which I would knock over, dead or wounded, sometimes causing them to fall dramatically from the top of a tower. In the end, the entire fort would be destroyed in slow motion, one block at a time.

Sometimes I would set up one of our family board games -- like Monopoly -- then play all the pawns as my own.

My stuffed animals had personalities, social relationships, even entire communities, complete with families, friendships and rivalries.

As I got a little older I would sort, order, and rank my baseball cards based on statistics or the poses of the pictured athletes.

And then there was always drawing, hours and hours of drawing with pencils and pens, often detailed war scenes. Echoing my block play, I would take the time to track the path of each bullet with dotted lines, making sure every Nazi got what was coming to him. (I wasn't war obsessed, but we lived near Ft. Jackson and it played a role in my imaginary life.) One of these pictures was even selected to be hung at the South Carolina State Fair.

I'm fully capable of being a social and active person, but I'm also inclined to lose myself in my thoughts and reveries. In fact, writing this blog each morning is part of that. I get up at 5 a.m. for the quiet, for the solitude, to recapture that feeling I had as a boy sorting his bottle cap collection. It's not about limiting distractions because the early morning is full of them -- the mocking bird songs, the rumble of garbage trucks, the slow, sure rising of the sun -- but maybe it is a little bit about curating them. 

I love the unmitigated rambling of my thoughts, the stewing over things, the wondering and wishing. Few things delight me more than to imagine how I would distribute a financial windfall. My wife and I call it "spending Yugoslavian dollars."

You know that I'm fully comfortable with you when I start surfacing my internal dialog in your presence. When I first started doing this with my wife she would say, "Stop obsessing!" as if my mind were plaguing me, but she now understands that I take great and (usually) private joy in letting my mind gallop to no purpose other than because it is a nice way to pass the time.

I know a lot of people who wish they could turn their minds off, who want to stop obsessing. Often they attempt to do this with distraction: watch a program, go to a museum, exercise, socialize, anything to avoid being alone with their thoughts and reveries. And, of course, smartphones have become the go-to distraction. 

A few days ago, we attended a 40th anniversary screening of the Academy Award winning documentary The Times of Harvey Milk. The director, Robert Epstein, is a friend and neighbor and the theater was full of fellow friends and neighbors. We greeted one another with hugs and handshakes, but then most settled into their seats and turned on their private screens to await the opening credits. I've stopped carrying my phone with me when I go out, so I found myself alone in a crowd. I was instantly transported to being a boy in church during a dull sermon when I would imagine the heroism I would display should we suddenly be rocked by an earthquake, or the adventure we would have if the entire building revealed itself to be a space ship sent to carry us all off to another planet, or simply the satisfaction I would experience from calculating the number of people in the pews, hymnals in the racks, or panes of stained glass in the windows.

This is a skill I learned as a boy, this comfort with, and even craving for, being alone with my thoughts and reveries. I know I'm not the only one worried about what we are losing in this era of ubiquitous screens. It really is possible to never be alone with yourself. Maybe this is a skill that can be acquired as an adult, but it's not the same thing as meditation which seeks to quiet the "chattering monkeys." I'm talking about listening to those monkeys, taking pleasure in their voices, and letting them carry me where they will, or where I will. 

Maybe it's because I learned to enjoy my quiet time as a boy that it feels to me that this is the only time to learn it, but I can say that when I look back over the arc of my life, I've spent many of my most enjoyable hours alone amongst my thoughts and reveries. Maybe I've just made friends with my obsessiveness. I don't know. But I do know that many adults, and increasingly many children, have no idea what to do with their quiet time. Ready access to screens as a boy would have likely meant that I would not have learned it at all. Maybe I wouldn't even know enough to miss it.

This is not just about smartphones, however. Most young children today are spending the bulk of their waking hours in preschools and day cares, always amidst a crowd, always stimulated and distracted, always on schedule, never alone in their room, or any room. Indeed, we've come to a point where we believe it's a danger to leave a child unsupervised in a room. When do they get to track the path of individual bullets or make an entire world from stuffies? 

Yet, at the same time, we are facing a national crisis of loneliness. I can't help but think they are connected.

Maybe one of the antidotes to loneliness is learning how to be alone with our thoughts and reveries, to know how to embrace the monkeys. We focus on the smartphones, but maybe they aren't the cause, but rather a symptom.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 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!

That is Respect

The four-year-old boy was in full on tantrum. He had lost his temper with another child, punching him in the neck, then picked up a wooden block as if to throw it at him. I grabbed his wrist, then with the other hand took the block from his grasp. He fought against me, trying to get away, yelling, crying, outraged. There were other children nearby, not to mention furniture and other objects on which he could potentially hurt himself. I took hold of his other arm, holding both wrists firmly.

He was fighting against me as I gently pulled him away from the crowd, toward a corner of the room where I sat on a bench, drawing him into me, my arms and legs encircling him. He continued to lash about. My arm would show a bruise for a few days. 

I said, "I don't like it when you hit me." 

I said, "My job is to keep people safe and when you hit people it's not safe." 

I said, "I can't let you hurt people."

This is perhaps the most fundamental aspect of our job: to keep the children safe. And that is what I was doing.

He called me "stupid." He spit. He continued to fight against my arms. I didn't take any of it personally. I said, "I can't let you go until I know you won't hit other people."

To his credit, he was honest, "I will hit them."

"Then I'll hold you," I said, "until you're ready to not hit them.

He continued to wrestle against me, but I could feel in my arms and in my chest that his full-body tension was beginning to ebb, so I loosened my grip slightly. He began to talk more coherently as he threw his body against mine, explaining himself, telling me what had happened. I said, "That would make me mad too."

Before long, I was holding my arms in a loose circle, his body between my legs. If he had wanted to, he could have easily ducked away, but instead he rolled around in my arms, still crying, still telling me what he wanted to tell me. 

I asked, "If I let you go will you hurt other people?" He said, "Yes," so we stayed there.

When another child came up to ask me a question, his body tensed once more as he shouted, "I need Teacher Tom now! You can have him later!"

Soon he was just leaning up against me, between my legs, my arms around his shoulders, the last of spasms of whimpering faded. I wasn't holding him at all any more. He said, "I'm ready for you to let me go now. I won't hurt anybody."

There are a lot of adult who would tell me I did it all wrong, that what this boy needed was to be taught a little respect.

All too often, adult people talking about young children use the word "respect" or "disrespect" when what they mean is "obey" or "disobey." There are even those who assert, against all evidence, that parents teach respect through punishment, even through hitting children in the barbaric practice of spanking. What they are teaching is fear. What they are teaching is that the powerful have the right to abuse and bully those over whom they have power so long as they mitigate it with the caveat, "for their own good."

I've known far too many adults who claim to respect children, but who wield their physical, intellectual, social, and cultural power over them like a cudgel.

"I'm the adult!" they insist, as if that's a valid argument. 

None of this has anything to do with respect. Indeed, exerting power over another person is the height of disrespect. 

Becoming a play-based educator begins and ends with respecting young children and that is where it began for me with this boy.

Respect means that we know that this person before us, no matter how small, is a fully formed human being. Indeed, respect for young children, or anyone for that matter, is the opposite of having the right of power over others: respect demands that we assume a slew of obligations and responsibilities toward them. It's not a tit-for-tat transaction. They owe us no respect in return. But rather, if we are to be respected by our children, we must earn it. And the only way to earn respect from our children is by first respecting them. 

There is no love without respect. As bell hooks writes in her book All About Love, "Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust" (italics are mine). Any relationship that does not include respect is not one of love, but rather, one of power.

And power corrupts, a cliché that is borne out time and again through research.

"One of the effects of power," writes Rutger Bregman in his book Humankind, "is that it makes you see others in a negative light. If you're powerful you're more likely to think most people are lazy and unreliable. That they need to be supervised and monitored, managed and regulated, censored and told what to do." Sounds a lot like how our schools operate, doesn't it? It might even corrupt us so much that we feel that we have the right to hit them . . . for their own good.

Play-based education only works when the adults respect the children. It means knowing that their needs, desires, and opinions stand on an equal footing with our own. It doesn't mean that we let them do whatever they want. Those obligations and responsibilities require us to, at minimum, keep them and others safe. We say, "I can't let you do that," then proceed to not let them do it, not because we say so, not because we are the adult, but because we are honoring our responsibility to keep them safe. 

There are likewise times when our responsibilities require us to keep them on schedule, maintain a certain level of hygiene, or otherwise do things they don't want to do, but that doesn't mean we must command them in the fashion of "my way or the highway." It means that we are obliged to explain ourselves, to be transparent about our responsibilities, and to sympathize with their feelings about it.

We say, "I know you don't want to." 

We say, "I don't want to either." 

We say, "I can't let you." 

If it's not negotiable, we don't negotiate. 

And sometimes that means that we take their hands or pick them up and carry them, crying, even yelling. When this happens, no one is showing anyone disrespect: one person is fulfilling their responsibility, while the other is raging at the fates. We might even tell them, "I feel the same way."

It's a nuance many adults don't get. They hear tantrums as rebellion and it is rebellion if it's a reaction to an abuse of power. That is, after all, what rebellion always is. When respect is present, however, when love is present, we can see their tears as the most human thing in the world. There is nothing to rebel against. They simply aren't getting what they want, not because the powerful are keeping it from them, but because life is imperfect. And sometimes that makes us cry. When respect is present, the adult is then there, not as a punitive force, but rather as a loving support, a fellow traveler in disappointment. And to keep everyone safe.

Every play-based educator has experienced that moment when a child in tantrum, relaxes into our shoulder, taking comfort from us even as, only moments before, it might have looked to outsiders that they were fighting against us. Only now are we ready to begin to make things right again.

That is respect.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 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!

Every Child is Born a Genius

On the short list of history's geniuses, most of us would include Leonardo da Vinci. He is perhaps the most famous polymath to ever live -- a painter, sculptor, architect, scientist, engineer, technologist, and mathematician of the highest order. He is the embodiment of the High Renaissance. Today, he is best known for his painting the Mona Lisa, a masterpiece that to this day defines what a masterpiece is all about. But his other existing works like The Last Supper are every bit as sublime not to mention the volumes of notebooks he left behind detailing everything from helicopters and nautical innovations to adding machines, anatomical studies, and optical discoveries.

I think it's safe to say that most of us would be pretty proud if our kid grew up to be the new da Vinci, right? I mean, he represents the pinnacle of the much ballyhooed STEM (or STEAM) schooling that we hear so much about. Although, to be honest, Leonardo himself never went to school. He was a "studio boy" in an artist's workshop, eventually becoming an apprentice. It's unknown whether he chose that particular career path or if he just fell into it by way of relieving his lower-class single mother of the burden of his upkeep.

All told, the great genius da Vinci produced fewer than 25 paintings, most of which were unfinished and still in his possession upon his death. The Mona Lisa remained one of those unfinished works, even after some 15 years of fiddling with it. Of the works he actually "finished" most only saw the light of day in his lifetime because his patrons threatened to stop funding him. Indeed, he spent much of his life dodging debtors. His notebooks full of innovations, inventions, and discoveries were exactly that, notebooks in which he doodled his ideas, never intended for the public eye. It's likely that he would today have been diagnosed with ADHD, so scattered and varied were his interests and activities.

What a deadbeat! At least if judged by today's productivity standards, da Vinci was a classic failure-to-launch dreamer, full of high falutin ideas, but obviously without the grit or rigor to pull himself up by his own bootstraps or whatever. Just imagine what he could have accomplished had he only been more motivated.

It's a sucker's game, of course, to play 'what if' with history, but what if Leonardo had had the benefits of modern schooling?

I think it's safe to say that he would not have be Leonard da Vinci. Certainly, he might have found a vocation that kept the debtors off his back. Maybe he would have become a painter with his own commercial studio, cranking out above average allegorical motifs and portraits to decorate the hallways and mantles of the wealthy, perhaps even developing a line of budget paintings for more humble households. Or maybe he would have joined the military or become an engineer or an architect or a botanist, all vocations for which he showed an aptitude. But I think it's safe to say that he would not have become the great genius Leonardo. His school masters would have seen to that. He might have been more productive, but it's quite clear that fiddling, perfecting, and doodling were the methods behind his unique and world-changing genius. 

Without that, he would not have been the wonderfully fallible Leonardo da Vinci, but rather just another promising young man who made a decent living.

It's tempting to say, Oh, but that's just Leonardo the genius. He's the exception. Most kids left to their fiddling, perfecting, and doodling would just waste their time on video games. Maybe. It's also possible that our educational system that focuses on productivity and paying the bills as the key measures of success has created mass mediocrity from the raw material of genius. 

What if that other iconic genius Albert Einstein was right: "Every child is born a genius." What if the real trick of education is to not waste it on productivity and paying the bills?

******

I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 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!