Nasty, Uncontrollable, Hopelessly Feral

"I really can't stand children." 

It's a sentiment I occasionally encounter upon informing a stranger of the work I do. It always rocks me back on my heels a bit, given that I'm most often surrounded by adults who find the company of young children to be preferable to that of their peers.

All adults have theories about children, even those who spend little time with them. After all, we were all once children, so, at a minimum we have those years of experience from which to cobble together our theories about what a child is, does, wants, and needs. And some consider children to be nasty, uncontrollable, hopelessly feral things that will one day, fingers crossed, outgrow it. It's as if they conceive childhood as some sort of larval stage during which these pre-humans feed themselves voraciously of the precious leaves of life before they pupate (perhaps within the chrysalis of university) emerging finally as adults.

As long as they are not cruel to children, I tend to respect these people even as I disagree with them. Their theories cause them to largely avoid children, especially young children, standing aloof in their presence, ignoring them if at all possible. They tend to choose professions and habitations far removed from where children play and when they're compelled to interact with them they do so as if they are little adults, not speaking down to them, employing their full vocabulary, not caring really if these ignorant children comprehend, not even expecting them to respond, at least not in a "rational" manner. Children confound them and, because of their theories, they lack the prying curiosity that attends so many of the interactions children have with other adults.

In most circumstances, children ignore and avoid these adults in return, not out of any sort of animosity, but simply because the indifference is mutual. Sometimes, however, young children love, from afar, these adults, not only because they don't pepper them with the usual questions about what they want to be when they grow up and their favorite subject in school. They appreciate that they aren't talked down to or coddled. Their cheeks are not pinched and their heads are not patted. In other words, they perceive they are not being treated as children, but rather as people. And so long as this adult with the mis-guided theory about children isn't outright mean to them, they often find this treatment refreshing. 

It should also be mentioned that adults who harbor this brand of theory about children, should they be offended or harmed by a child, are unlikely to punish, correct, or scold them, but rather respond by giving them, at most, a few pointed words of disapproval, before turning their backs, the way they would with a wayward adult over whom they have no authority other than their dignity. 

These adults don't "understand" children and so their interactions with them tend to be free of the urge that so many of us have to help or teach or otherwise better them. This is why I respect their opinions.

You see, most children, most of the time, spend their days among adults whose theories about children are constructed on cuteness, naiveté, and ignorance. These adults, with the best of intentions, tend to talk down to children in high-pitched sing-song voices reserved only for children and pets. These adults loooooove children, petting and pampering them, which is all well and good, but it too often comes with these notions of helping, teaching, correcting, and generally behaving as if this theoretical child cannot function without constant intervention from loving adults.

John Holt wrote: "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." 

In his book Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior, anthropologist Christopher Boehm, based on 339 fieldwork studies, concluded that our hunter-gatherer ancestors "are universally -- and all but obsessively -- concerned with being free from the authority of others." Indeed, we have evolved as a species to resist the imposition of hierarchy, even when it comes to interactions between adults and children. Too often, those of us who claim to love children do so, at least in part, because we like the feeling of being superior. We help, teach, and correct these theoretical children "for their own good," not because they have asked us to help, teach or correct them, but because we feel it is our right (which is often mis-framed as a responsibility).

The truth is that children are nasty, uncontrollable, and feral. They are also cute, naive, and ignorant. All of us are. None of these traits proposed by our theories are the exclusive domain of childhood or adulthood. In the end, there is no such thing as a theoretical child and none of our theories are correct. Or rather, none of them are entirely correct which is why I often prefer the approach taken by the "I really can't stand children" crowd. There may be something horribly broken within these adults, but to the degree it allows them to leave the kids alone, to not not impose their unsolicited help, teaching, or correction upon them, and to not assume the posture of superiority, is the degree to which their seemingly stance really is for the children's own good. 

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Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in ways that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, click here.

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 First Thing Preschoolers Ever Taught Me

I first started running regular preschooler circle times as a 14-year-old baseball coach. It was an experiment by the Corvallis, Oregon Parks & Rec Department. They called it Snoopy League and I, along with another young colleague, were to "coach" four- and five-year-old baseball players.

They gave us oversized plastic bats, tennis balls and a spare field in one of the parks. It was summer so they also gave us a plastic tarp and told us that we could use a garden hose to make a "slip-and-slide" on especially hot days. That was pretty much all the instruction.

I was hired, I think, because I had experience with baseball, but also because I had a fairly extensive babysitting resume due to a dearth of willing 12-16 year-old girls in our immediate neighborhood. That had paid $1 per hour while this baseball gig was going to fill my pockets at the rate of $3.15 per hour. Woo hoo!

I'd never coached before, but I had been coached since I was eight, so I had an idea of how it worked. Within the first five minutes, however, I learned a lesson that has stood me in good stead for over half a century, especially when it comes to young children: man plans and god laughs. 

When I commanded my 20 or so players to warm up by running around the bases, they pretty much scattered all over the field. It took quite a bit of time and effort to round them back up. They had interpreted my instruction as some version of "run around amidst the bases."

From this I learned that four- and five-year-olds, with a few exceptions, might not understand the finer points of baseball, but they very much enjoyed running around on a grassy field.

When I told them to play catch, few of them could throw with any kind of accuracy and even fewer were capable of catching. From this I learned that most 4-5 year-olds, with a few exceptions, were not developmentally ready for the kind of throwing and catching necessary to actually play the game.

When I called them in to gather around for a little instructional or inspirational coach talk, they talked back, asked questions, changed the subject, and, with a few exceptions, didn't seem to really care about baseball as much as they did just being outdoors with other kids, in a park, on a warm, sunny day.

My colleague was likewise a 14-year-old, but she had no experience in either coaching or babysitting, so, by default I was the unofficial leader of the Snoopy League.

In today's world, this program would never fly. Not only would the Parks & Rec Department be sued for the use of the "Snoopy" trademark, but we 14-year-olds would likely require adult supervision ourselves. 

There were no fences or walls to mark the boundaries around the field. Had a child wanted to, they could have easily dashed into the street or down the block, an eventuality that never occurred to anyone, even the children, as far as I could tell. A few parents lingered around in the nearby playground with their even younger children, but they didn't really interact with us except during drop-off and pick-up.

With my plans and dreams for this coaching job dashed, I decided that I would just get paid to have fun with the kids.

We would start our days by taking a run, which was basically the children chasing me around the field. Then I might show off how far I could throw a tennis ball, which would result in a race to fetch it, while others showed off how far they could throw balls. 

For the kids who wanted to try out batting, I'd lob balls. 

My colleague and I demonstrated how to play catch. Some of them tried it out. Others invented their own ball games.

We often invented baseball-esque games using the equipment.

We talked about the names of the bases and the various player positions, but we also, and equally, talked about grandmas, ice cream, spiders, cuts and bruises, TV programs, and whatever else was on their collective minds. 

And, of course, that impromptu slip-and-slide featured prominently, although on most days they were happy with me just spraying them with the hose.

There were, as you can imagine, tears. I don't really recall how I dealt with injuries or emotional situations. I'd been given a first aid kit, but no training. I know I used quite a few bandages. No one scolded or blamed me about these minor childhood injuries. I likewise had no training in psychology, so I have no idea what I did about hurt feelings or broken hearts other than to let them cry until they were done. 

Our supervisor stopped by occasionally to check on us, but they stayed out of the way.

In essence, Snoopy League evolved that summer into a baseball-themed play group, with 20 preschoolers and a couple of young teenagers in charge.

Of course, what I didn't know at the time, was that since long before William Shakespeare invented the "teenager" (the concept, not the word) in Hamlet, this was one of the key roles of teens: to play with, and care for, the younger children. This is part of what is meant by the expression, It takes a village to raise a child. Young adults (and 12-13 is considered the beginning of adulthood in many traditions) along with grandparents, served as extra arms, legs, and hearts to provide relief and support for parents. Looking back, I realize that this daily two-hour session provided exactly that for 20 young mothers in Corvallis.

Not only that, it gave young adults a crash course in what young children are really all about. It gave them the opportunity to develop the skills and knowledge that they would need to be parents themselves. It gave them experience with genuine responsibility. And I know, for me, it felt good to be trusted by not only my bosses, but also the parents who entrusted me for two hours a day with their precious children.

And Snoopy League succeeded precisely when we stopped trying to make the children ready for baseball and started making baseball ready for the children.

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Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in ways that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, click here.

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 are Not Nouns. They are Verbs.

"To garden," writes Ferris Jabr in his book Becoming Earth, "is to engage in a form of coevolution -- not just with plants and pollinators but also with roots and fungi, microbes and microfauna, sun and soil."

Our garden in the center of our preschool playground is a place to play. The plants are there to explore with our fingers, our eyes, our noses, and our tongues. We discovered one year that we enjoyed eating radish seed pods more than the radishes themselves, which we had neglected to harvest, making it possible to experience those pods. 

We tend to think of farmers as people who "work" the soil, who tend and harvest radishes and other plants as food, ripping them by the roots, leaving only a few to serve as seed stock for the next crop. But "to garden," I think, is a wholly different thing: it is a process of existing with these plants, pollinators, fungi, microbes, microfauna, sun and soil. That is to say, to play with them, or put another way, to co-evolve.

When children play together we see them adapt to one another through an ever-moving process of agreement, negotiation, and bickering. Sometimes it all erupts in a kind of supernova of impossibility, everyone scattered, everyone briefly on their own as they seek others with which to play. Other times it dwindles to an end. But if the game is to continue, everyone must find a way to get their own needs and desires met while creating the space for others to get their needs and desires met. This means it must change, must evolve, or die, like everything.

We tend to talk about evolution as something that happened over millennia, or as a competition, or as a climb toward some higher state. When children play, however, they are simply doing it.

They are not nouns, but rather verbs. They are both shaping the process and being shaped by it. They are in the midst of the process that connects us with one another, and with everything. It's a process without beginning or end or purpose other than to sustain itself by becoming something else.

A game of chase becomes a game of fighting becomes a game of "let's pretend" becomes . . . And so on. Play, like learning, like gardening, like living, is a process that interacts with other processes. Children too are processes, not products. 

So much of conventional education treats childhood as a manufacturing operation whose product is a particular kind of adult. School readiness. Kindergarten readiness. College readiness. Career readiness. We're forever evaluating children according to what they're going to become rather than attending to what's happening right now. It's like we see ourselves as farmers producing a crop rather than gardeners tending a garden.

When we're gardeners -- to garden -- we don't have to teach children to understand the assignment. We don't have to get them ready. When they are playing, making art, wondering, talking, building, destroying, rebuilding, running, pretending, they aren't producing things, they are making connections. They are engaged in co-evolution.

Maybe our greatest mistake isn't that we've failed to teach children how the universe works, but rather that we persist in interrupting them while they're already doing it.

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Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in ways that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, click here.

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 Recurrent Problem of Civilization

 

"The recurrent problem of civilization is to define the male role satisfactorily enough . . ." ~Margaret Mead

"Man's role is uncertain, undefined, and perhaps unnecessary." ~Margaret Mead

As a man in a field that is overwhelmingly women, I've often been asked, "Why aren't there more men in early childhood education?"

My knee-jerk answer has typically been that it's about money. 

It's a defensible surmise given that preschool teachers are notoriously low paid ($38,140 a year/$18.34 an hour) and men (in heterosexual couples at least) are still the primary breadwinners. Indeed, the only reason I've been able to work in this profession all these years is because my wife has out earned me. 

That said, the pay gap has closed dramatically in recent decades. Today husbands are the primary income earner in barely over half of all marriages (52%), so that means my answer is shakier than it once was. 

For one thing, there's the chicken-or-egg question of what came first? After all, every profession in which women dominate, tends toward the lower end of the pay scale. And there are few professions with more of a gender imbalance than those that involve working with young children. In other words, do men stay away because the pay is low or because it's "women's work"?

I'm thinking about this because I recently came across Celeste Davis' piece on her Substack: "Why aren't we talking about the real reason male college enrollment is dropping?" It's a short, thought-provoking piece about the startling fact that 60 percent of today's college students are women. When I was a boy, men enrolled in college at double the rate of women. Davis writes, "Scholars, journalists, college presidents and reddit thread philosophers have all come to the table to add their particular offering to the buffet of reasons why fewer boy are going to college," but the thing they all "skirt around" is the one thing that has actually changed: "an increase in girls."

She argues that across the board, when the presence of women reaches 60 percent in any profession the men "make a swift exit and other men stop joining." Among the professions in which this has happened are veterinary medicine, biology, interior design, psychology, social work and, of course, teaching, all of which were not so long ago were predominately "male" professions. 

The medical profession is currently 60 percent men, but 55 percent of all medical students for the past seven years are women. In 2024-25, over half of all new residents were women. Will medicine be the next profession to reach the 60 percent tipping point? And even more interesting will be watching to see if this historically well-paid profession becomes less so as women fill the ranks. 

Clearly there is more at work here than mere economics. It seems that many men and boys (especially heterosexual men and boys, although gay men aren't immune) don't want to be associated with "girly" jobs, often even when it means taking lower pay to work in a "boy" job.

Davis calls it "male flight," comparing the phenomenon to the "white flight" that tends to take place when Black and Brown people move into the neighborhood. As an institution becomes associated with women and femininity, men increasingly avoid it. Her larger argument is that the modern idea of masculinity teaches boys to avoid anything coded feminine. 

In other words, the answer is not the sort of glib, easy answer of "low pay," but rather something more complex and important. I don't think this is as simple as boys being afraid of getting girl "cooties," although I wouldn't dismiss that entirely. The deeper question, I think, is why and how are we socializing young boys to believe that to be masculine, they must reject nurturing, caring for others, and teaching?

In her book How to Raise a Feminist Son, Sonora Jha writes, "In many cultures, we rob boys of the range of human emotions and connection . . . And how are boys often trained in "masculinity"? By distancing themselves from femininity." The irony, she points out, is that what boys most want is to "fit in, and to connect" and they do that by showing that they don't care for connection." "Stoic" and "aloof" isn't what boys are made of but what they are made into."

Poet, essayist, and controversial founder of the so-called "mythopoetic men's movement" echoed Margaret Mead by asserting that the "fundamental problem in the continuation of a decent life everywhere in the world is the question of the socialization of young males." He went on to say, "It is not women's job to socialize young males. That is the job the older men."

In his view, we've entered a vicious cycle in which modern men find themselves "half-adults," who never fully mature, making it impossible to take on those traditionally "masculine" roles, including being a father, which has become a kind of vicious cycle. Essentially, Bly asks, How do we properly socialize boys into masculinity? 

We continue to hear this argument today, but I think that's the wrong question.

In her book, Jha cites the "Man Box" study, an ongoing, multi-country research effort looking at rigid societal expectations of manhood, its effect on young men, and the people around them. This "Man Box" is a collective set of beliefs and pressure society places on men to conform to rigid, traditional standards of masculinity, including such things as self-sufficiency, acting tough, physical attractiveness, adherence to rigid gender roles, heterosexuality, sexual prowess, and aggression used for conflict resolution. I have certainly had to deal with all of these pressures.

But the real question this study raises for me is, Why are we so determined to socialize boys into this definition of masculinity in the first place? It's not a particularly attractive set of traits. I mean, at first blush "self-sufficiency" sounds good, but to a young boy, it often sounds like "Don't ask for help" or "You're on your own" or "It's weakness to need others." Acting tough? That's just another way to drive people away. And ultimately, it's acting. Attractiveness? I mean, who doesn't want to be attractive, but at what cost? And we all know that gender roles, sexual shaming, and sexual conquest all deny ourselves and others their essential and unique humanity. And aggression and violence are simply not valid tools in the modern world. 

The mother of one of my students once told me, "I've never told my father that his granddaughter has a male preschool teacher. He would assume you're a pedophile." This is part of the "Man Box." I know there are many people, both men and women, who make this assumption about any man who would choose to work with young children. Indeed, before accepting my first job, I consulted with a mentor, a man, and asked him point-blank, "What do I do if someone accuses me?" He shook his head, "You would have to move to Bimini." Stepping outside the box can have real, harsh, and unfair consequences.

And as controversial as Bly is, he makes a point. “How can we expect boys to understand nurturing, connection, and non-violence as masculine possibilities if they so rarely encounter men performing those roles in the institutions where they grow up?” I know for a fact, that many parents chose to come to our school because I was a male teacher, just as some stayed away. When I asked why, the answer was typically something like, "I want my child to have a male influence," or "Men just have a different energy than women." It's the same sentiment behind the question, "How can we get more men in early childhood education?"

And we're back to another chicken-and-egg problem: We want more men in nurturing roles but without men in nurturing roles, many men will never imagine it for themselves. And so it goes.

When our daughter was born our circumstances made it logical and possible for me to be a stay-at-home parent. I worried about those "Man Box" pressures. I was concerned that I, along with our daughter, might find ourselves outsiders among all those women. I wondered if I was going to be judged and diminished as a man.

As a young man my father was focused on his career, which involved long hours and lots of travel. He was, however, an involved father. He played with us. He volunteered in his community. He tried new things. He was even our Cub Scout leader. But one day he said to me, "Tom, I think you're the luckiest man alive. I feel like I missed a lot of your growing up. You get to be there with your daughter." He was a conscientious, competent, curious, and caring man. I know that he sometimes felt trapped by the box, but what he taught me was that masculinity was ours to define. (Maybe that's the advantage of being "unnecessary.") And that's the man I still try to be. 

Mead asserts that "the recurrent problem of civilization" is what to do with the men? Maybe the problem is simply that civilization insists on trying to define what that is.

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Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in ways that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, click here.

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!