Transforming How We Speak With Children

"No climbing to the top!"

When our daughter was in kindergarten, her school installed an amazing rope-and-steel climbing structure. The kindergartners were forbidden from climbing to the very top, which meant that adults were always hovering around the thing, "reminding" the children when they got too high. 

One day, I asked her if she was loving the new climber. She replied, "It's kind of in the way. No one plays on it." When I asked her why, she just shrugged, "It's just not fun."

Awhile back, I posted some thoughts on The Theory of Loose Parts. Appropriately, it is an idea that has emerged from the field of architecture about how the best learning environments are those in which we have permission to shape and manipulate our surroundings, and the things found within our surroundings, to suit our needs, ideas and curiosity.

It's a theory that's generally thought of in terms of the physical environment, but no matter how loose the parts, no matter how flexible the space, if the environment does not grant permission to engage freely, then the children, as loose parts theorist Simon Nicholson puts it, will still be cheated.

That's what happened at our daughter's school. The adults, in their concern about safety (or perhaps liability), had sucked the joy out of it. They would have been better off not installing the thing at all. Or installing a shorter one. Or, the way we did it at Woodland Park, not have a climbing structure at all, but rather provide the materials -- scraps of wood, shipping pallets, car tires, ropes -- from which the children could build their own "climbers."

And at our preschool, that's what the children did. None so high as the one on our daughter's kindergarten playground, of course, but always just the right height for the children creating it. Not only that, these impromptu structures were never in the way because the moment the kids were done with it, the parts were on the move, being put to other uses. 

But this didn't happen just because we provided the parts. It wasn't even just because they were "loose." This kind of self-motivated play can only happen when children know they have permission to follow their curiosity.

At our daughter's school, the adults specifically forbid a certain type of exploration, but much of the time we let children know they don't have permission in more subtle ways. 

For instance, if you listen to the things adults are saying to children at play -- "Come here!" "Slow down!" "Be careful!" -- we hear mostly commands. Research finds that 80 percent of the sentences adults speak to young children are commands. And an environment full of commands is not an environment of permission.

We also hear a lot of school-ish questions, "What color is that?" "How many marbles do I have in my hand?" "Do you know what letter that is?" Implied in these types of questions is the idea that the adults know better than the children what to think about. But even more open-ended questions like, "What do you think will happen if you put one more block on your tower?" tend to steer children into adult approved "places" in which the parts are no longer loose. When we ask questions, we compel children to divert from their own course and onto the one we've chosen for them.

There are times for commands and questions, but if our goal is to create the kind of loose parts environments that allow children to learn at full-capacity, then we are well served to consider even our words as loose parts. When we strive to replace our commands and questions with informational statements -- "That color is red," "I have marbles in my hand," "This is the letter R" -- we are offering children information, facts, that they, like with any loose part, can use or not use.

Instead of the command "Get in the car," we might state the fact, "It's time to go" and let them do their own thinking. Instead of the command "Be careful!" we might say, "The ground below you is concrete and it will hurt if you fall on it." Instead of school-ish questions to which we already know the answers we might instead simply speculate aloud, "I wonder why the sky is blue," leaving it there for the children to consider . . . or not. 

Of course, we might also choose to just not say anything at all which is when our "third teacher," the environment, often does her best work.

We will be discussing this and much more around the virtual campfire at our upcoming one week summer camp (see below). It will be a deep dive for educators, parents, and other caregivers who want to transform their relationship with young children by transforming how we speak with them . . . Or sometimes by not speaking at all! 

******

If you want to learn how to transform your own words into the kind of loose parts that allow children to think for themselves, the this summer camp is the place for you! The Technology of Speaking With Children So They Can Think is a one-week exploration of how the language we use with children creates reality . . . for better or worse! We will explore how the way we speak with children creates an environment in which cooperation and peacefulness are the norm, where children take the initiative, solve their own problems, and, most importantly, think for themselves. Group discounts are available, but hurry because registration closes soon. Click here for more information and to register.

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!

"Look What We Did"

As a play-based preschool teacher, I make sure, every day, to have at least two opportunities for making art available to the kids, one indoors and one outdoors. Typically, the outdoor provocation offers the opportunity to get good and messy, although it can get messy indoors as well. Sometimes I go to great effort in preparing things, such as when we do pendulum painting or are melting crayons to pour into play dough molds, but most of the time, I keep it simple.

For instance, I'll roll out a sheet of butcher paper on a table and provide something with which to apply pigment -- crayons, tempera, pastels, water color, makers, pencils, bingo dotters, powdered paint, and so on. And, when appropriate, tools for applying and manipulating the pigment -- brushes of various types and sizes, kitchen tools, stampers, sponges, pipettes, stencils, brayers, cutlery, and so on. 

These are group projects, something to gather around and discuss as you work in creative collaboration. When the paper is full, we take a moment to admire it, then shift it out of the way to make room for another sheet of butcher paper, or cardboard, or a bed sheet, or other communal canvas. These finished products are not signed by any individual. They are not taken home to display on the refrigerator door. No one says, "I made that," but they often say, "Look what we did."

I've recently been revisiting the theories and predictions of philosopher Marshall McLuhan, he of "The medium is the message" fame. In his book The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan points out that the concept of copyright, the idea that an individual could "own" the work they had produced, emerged alongside the transformative technology of the printing press. Looking at the arc of history from the perspective of 1962, the year of my birth, he felt that our emerging electronic media (radio and television specifically) marked the beginning of the end of the reign of print media. 

Print media had made ours into a predominately visual culture, one that both read, and therefore tended to think, in a linear manner. Electronic media was to return us to a kind of "global village" in which oral storytelling came to dominate once more, freeing us of the linearity and shaping us into a people with more in common with pre-printing press cultures and their oral traditions.

And with the death of print culture would come the death of the concept of copyright, which is to say individual ownership of a creative work. 

Up through medieval times, great works of "literature" were certainly created. The Odyssey is showing in theaters right now. Someone named Homer is credited with it, but it's far more likely that "Homer" is a name given to a collective effort over generations. Perhaps it originated with an individual bard who was particularly gifted in retelling these evergreen tales, but the stories themselves are the product of an oral tradition going back over centuries, making it a collective work. 

"Look what we did."

Our concept of copyright, or individual ownership of stories, has extended well into our electronic age. Until the internet arrived, this concept continued to be tenable, but now in the era of AI, it's becoming increasingly clear that the age of copyright, along with the age of print, is coming to an end. It won't happen all at once, there will be plenty of death throes, but pride of authorship is already dissolving. Much of the music we listen to is cobbled together from samples of other people's music. Social media is fueled by re-mixes of memes and clips and reimaginings. And our movies and programs are increasingly erasing the lines between what it proprietary and what is available for common usage. 

I have no doubt that we'll create a leaky dyke of laws to protect copyright for a time, but the writing is on the wall, pun intended. Anonymous graffiti, I believe, has more of a future -- in the long run -- than, say, the collected works of Marshall McLuhan.

And what will we be left with? Something like these children crowding around a table, shoulder-to-shoulder, creating collective works of culture, rather than proprietary works of individual genius.

As Albert Einstein, one of the most iconic individual geniuses of modern times, once complained, "(T)he cult of individual personalities is always, in my view, unjustified . . . It strikes me as unfair, and even in bad taste, to select a few individuals for boundless admiration and to attribute superhuman powers of mind and character to them. This has been my fate."

As historian Darrin McMahon wonders in his book on the history of genius, The Divine Fury, in a world in which Supermen are not needed, in which genius is becoming a group activity, "are we returning to the era in which we are closer to god?"

As I watch these young children crowd around, shoulder-to-shoulder, creating together, I see a through-line hearkening back to pre-printing press times when community meant creating together and remembering together; when a rambling troubadour might come through to sing songs and spin yarns, leaving them behind, not as works of proprietary genius, but as commonly held material to be used by the people, just as the children use crayons and paper to make their own stories.

"Look what we did." Our culture may be generations away from McLuhan's predicted transformation, but preschool classrooms, as pre-literate cultures, are already there. Just look at that crowd around the art table practicing the literacy of the future.

******

Who do you want to be when the children arrive? The countdown for Teacher Tom's Summer Camp has begun. In this course you will learn how even seemingly small changes in how you speak with children can transform even the most challenging behaviors without the need for rewards and punishments. This is especially effective when the whole team is on board. And there's nothing like coming together with like-minded educators to get you ready for when the children arrive. To learn more and to register, click here. I hope to see you around the campfire!

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!

This is Why We Never Assigned Chores to Our Child

We never gave our daughter chores to do around the house when she still lived with us. 

This runs against the current of most of the parenting counsel out there. Her school officially recommended it for all families. Even our pediatrician suggested, when she was still a baby, that we would want her to do chores. "It's good for them." "It teaches them about responsibility." "It's how they pull their weight in the family."

But I couldn't assign her tasks any more than I can assign tasks to my wife. Our family is not a business, nor a system of government. It is a relationship between fully-formed, autonomous people.

Our culture grants parents the right to command particular children based upon the accident of their birth. We have the right to yoke them to work that they didn't choose and to saddle them with rules in which they had no voice in making. We can, if we are cruel or angry enough, beat them with our hands, imprison them, and rob them of every freedom. Stripped down like this, exposing the raw authoritarian power of it, isn't something we often do, and I've learned that when I do it makes many people quite angry.

Please know that I'm not writing to tell you what to do. I'm sharing what we've done.

In refusing to exercise these parental "rights," I understand that I am, in this, outside the mainstream. People assure me that they can exercise their parental rights with love, and I'm sure they do, but we must have very different ideas about love. Love, for me, cannot exist within structures of hierarchy and control. As groundbreaking psychologist Carl Jung wrote, "Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is lacking." Love, if it is to mean anything, is a relationship between fully-formed, autonomous humans. It is a relationship of choice, one that we must continually reaffirm or it stops being love and becomes something else.

Our child did not ask to be born. That decision was made on her behalf, one that places all the weight of responsibility on me, not her. It's a responsibility I assumed. I do not own my child, but I am responsible for her. She was born not owing me anything, not even gratitude. Indeed, I don't own anyone, nor does anyone owe me anything except when it is an obligation or relationship we've both entered into willingly. 

I don't buy this idea that children can be taught to be responsible through the coercive assignment of tasks, although many, many people seem to believe this. Indeed, for the better part of the first two decades of their lives, we assign children responsibilities "for their own good," at home and throughout their schooling. But that is simply not how responsibility works. Responsibility is always something we assume of our own accord. In the workplace we agree to assume certain responsibilities in exchange for money. In our relationships we make agreements about who is to do what. We might, at times feel as if we have no choice in the matter, but as autonomous humans we always have a choice. And if we truly don't, then we are not autonomous, which means we come to resent it, to rebel against it, to stew and anguish and despair. Is that what we feel we must teach children? To simply do what others tell them to do and call it being responsible?

Our child is an adult now. She is a valued employee. She cooks and shops and tidies up. She pays her bills. If being assigned chores is the path to these little virtues, then she managed to get there by other means. And whenever there was real work to be done, as opposed to the "make work" that comprises most chores we assign to children, she always pitched in because that's what fully-formed, autonomous humans usually do when they see the opportunity to help others.

Utah Philips sang, "I will not obey, but I'm always ready to agree." That is the larger virtue that I choose for myself, even when it comes to the fully-formed, autonomous humans we call children.

******

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!

Living a Meaningful Life is the Only Real Success

More often than not in our culture, when someone is talking about "success" we assume they are referring to either material wealth or the result of someone having achieved some sort of victory or prize. And often they are. Most of us are less superficial in how we define our own successes. Oh, we'll take the cash and the laurels, but our drive to success tends to be motivated by more personally meaningful measures like a sense of satisfaction about a job well-done or having good relationships with family and friends or an overall feeling of contentment. 

As educators, we're widely viewed as agents for the success of the children in our care. A parent of one of my former preschool students wrote to me about how her daughter, now a second grader, had boldly stood up to a child who had been excluding her from a game. "She told her how it made her feel and said, 'I don't like that.' And the other girl apologized and started including her. That's all because of you Teacher Tom." Success! 

Parents want their children to be successful and most want to see us as allies in making their children successful. Taking a step back, we see that our policymakers have similar ideas about our role in society in that most of them cast us in the role of getting children "college and career ready," which is widely viewed as the surest pathway to worldly success. 

The problem is that our obsession with success too often clashes with the far more important goal of education, which is to support children in creating a meaningful life.

In her book The Power of Meaning, Emily Esfahani Smith proposes four pillars of meaning: belonging, purpose, storytelling and transcendence. The more connected we feel to our family, friends, and community (belonging), the more we are motivated by positive long-term goals (purpose), the more adeptly we can make a narrative from the threads of our life (storytelling) and the more we concentrate our energies on something larger than ourselves (transcendent), the more meaningful our lives are.

It all begins with belonging, which is the only curriculum with which I've ever really concerned myself. It's within the context of community that we flourish. Community is an active living thing, something that requires the contributions of everyone. Success is inclusion. When that girl stood up for herself, she was asserting her place in her community. When the other girl listened, apologized, then included her, she was likewise doing the work of belonging. In many ways, this is the only work there is. It's not easy. And it's almost impossible in an educational system that focuses on individual achievement and competition, which is to say, division. The world doesn't need more division.

Living a meaningful life is the only real success. The only way to get there is through belonging. 

******

Today is the final day of the Preschool Autism Summit! There are still many more free sessions to make it worth your while . . . Including a live discussion panel with me at 2 p.m. PST. Our understanding of autism and educating autistic children is changing almost daily. I've learned a lot the past two days. Looking forward for more of the same today. And it's FREE . . . So why not join us for some outstanding summer PD? Get your free pass right 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!

Playing With Social Arrangements

When the two boys played alone, they tended toward the art table where they would chatter their way through works of art that involved action -- superheroes mostly. Or maybe they would claim a corner of the rug where they built a fort or parking garage together. When they played this way, it was as equals, almost in the spirit of improvisational comedy, building their play one "Yes, and . . ." at a time.

They were also part of a larger group of boys that often played together. You would find four of them forming a team of some sort, usually involving costumes or carrying "blasters" they had made from Legos. These games were full of "C'mon everybody!" and "Let's go over there." Although at times they had to pause things in order to negotiate the exact nature of what they were doing, usually culminating a Eureka! moment of democratic synthesis with someone saying, "I've got an idea!" 

And sometimes they played in even larger groups, with up to a dozen kids, boys and girls, engaged in, say, digging ditches and holes in the sand, then flooding the area from the uphill side with water to see where it would flow. These games could involve a great deal of bickering, sometimes breaking up into factions, but usually coalescing around one or two children who directed while the rest set their own agendas aside, at least temporarily, for the greater good.

You could find these boys engaged in each kind of social arrangement over the course of any given week -- sometimes even over the course of a day. In fact, most of the children ebbed and flowed in this way, sometimes playing alone, sometimes in small groups, sometimes massing together. 

Of course, it was rarely quite this clear-cut. At any given moment, someone was getting frustrated that their ideas aren't being considered. Or there was someone on the outside biding their time for their bestie to break away and join them in something more intimate. There might be someone trying to figure out how they could fit in with the glamorous team that was swooping about the classroom, or someone else who had broken away for solo play that was destined to become the next great fad.

In many ways, this sort of experimentation with social arrangements, the question of what is the "best" way for humans to live together, stands at the heart of what makes our species unlike any other. In their book The Dawn of Everything, the Davids Graeber and Wengrow, an anthropologist and archeologist respectively, point out that a fish or a hedgehog exist in a "state beyond good and evil" and therefore have no need to ask such questions. They organize themselves as their instincts guide them. But humans have evolved the capacity to be moral and social beings, which makes us unique in the animal kingdom. We can choose how we are going to organize ourselves.

Not everyone believes this, of course, there are many who insist that we are evolutionarily hierarchical and that civilizations always progress from the "primitive" to "civilized" in a predictable way. But Graeber and Wengrow beg to differ:

"(A)rcheological evidence is piling up to suggest that . . . our remote ancestors . . . shifted back and forth between alternative social arrangements, building monuments and then closing them down again, allowing the rise of authoritarian structures during certain times of the year then dismantling them -- all, it would seem, on the understanding that no particular social order was ever fixed or immutable. The same individual could experience life in what looks to us sometimes like a band, sometimes a tribe, and sometimes like something with at least some of the characteristics we now identify with states . . . our remote forager ancestors were much bolder experimenters in social form, breaking apart and reassembling their societies at different scales, often in radically different forms, with different value systems, from one time of year to the next."

Graeber and Wengrow have re-interpreted the anthropological and archeological record of our species, finding this phenomenon on every continent (with the obvious exception of Antarctica) across millennia. They show that many Indigenous societies deliberately shifted social forms, often on a seasonal basis. A community might be relatively egalitarian during one season and highly hierarchical during another, depending on what they were trying to accomplish. Hierarchy was never an inevitable or permanent state, but rather a tool, adopted for a time, to get certain things done. 

Our habit of considering our ancestors to be "primitive" in comparison to us tends to blind us to the fact that they were not just our cognitive equals, but our intellectual peers too. "Likely as not, they grappled with the paradoxes of social order and creativity just as much as we do; and understood them -- at least the most reflexive among them -- just as much, which also means just as little. They were perhaps more aware of some things and less aware of others . . . equally perceptive, equally confused."

In a similar way, I sometimes think, our habit of considering young children as less cognitively capable, likewise blinds us. When they engage in these kinds of social experiments, these ebbs and flows, they are following in these same footsteps, grappling with the paradoxes of social order, creativity, and what it means to be both free and connected. The Davids argue that our present social order where we see nation-states and hierarchy as inevitable, is unnatural, that we have become "stuck," and that this is the source of many of the world's most pressing challenges. There is no room for the natural ebb, flow, and experiment.

In her Canopus in Argos pentology (five book series), Doris Lessing explores a similar theme, but at the level of consciousness rather than political organization. She creates a mythology based on Sufi philosophy, in which there are six zones, each representing a specific level of consciousness. As moderns, our habit is to rank these zones, ranging from the most earthy to the most Devine, but she shows us that healthy development requires movement and exchange, like the circulation of blood, between the zones, or levels, or ways of being with regard to the other people. 

Otherwise we stagnate. Otherwise the blood clots.

As moderns, we've come to understand freedom as freedom from the control of others, but maybe, as our Indigenous ancestors seemed to understand, freedom is the ability to move between social arrangements, not the obligation to live perpetually under one "ideal" system or another. 

When children are moving like this, between self-created social arrangements, I see a healthy classroom. I see children moving fluidly between moments of complete autonomy, collaborative negotiation, and, hopefully rarely, situations in which an adult must temporarily take charge because the moment calls for it (like when safety is at stake). This may be one of the biggest challenges for us adults: remembering that our moments of authority must be temporary.

The health of any community lies not in its commitment to one governing principle or other, but rather in its flexibility. That is what the children are playing with as they circulate and move, enjoying the fruits of one way of being together, bumping up against the paradoxes, and then trying something else again and again and again. Perhaps it's only when we become stuck that we have a problem.

******

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!

"Since We're Neighbors, Let's Be Friends"

For the past several years, I've been limiting my news consumption to about 5 hours of local news a week, usually "watched" while I'm preparing dinner. 

Yesterday, there was a story about a nearby town's preparations for the nation's oldest continually running July 4 parade. From the looks of it, the parade is mostly local groups, marching through the streets, making their music, performing their dances, and waving their flags, while the rest of the town comes out to wave their own flags and cheer. The key figure in the story was an older woman who has been part of organizing the festivities for the past several decades. The story concluded with her saying, "We're just as excited today as they were back then."

There was another "World Cup" adjacent story about a young teen whose health issues have made it impossible for her to play her beloved soccer. She has now started a drive to raise money to help others in her situation. The concluding thought from this girl, "I'm just happy I can help others."

There were more stories, of course, but I'm going to stop there because I'm tearing up as I write this. I often find myself tearing up as I watch my local news. There are, of course, darker stories. There was, for instance, the frozen food warehouse that recently burned down. That story was mostly interviews with the people who live around the facility. The smoke was bad, but some of the people say that the stench of tons of rotting food is worse.

But compared to national news, the overall slant of my local news is much more positive, probably because it's always about my "neighbors." Even national news stories are offered from a local perspective featuring interviews with local people whose lives are directly impacted. This is so much more elevating than professional pontificators who seethe and shout based on some sort of abstract political theory or other. As you know, national news tends to thrive on setting up everything as conflict and performative debate between partisans. It raises your blood pressure, but otherwise goes no where. 

What I enjoy about my small doses of local interviews is that the people on my screen aren't shy about not having all the answers, of being internally conflicted between this or that approach, and overall showing their genuine emotion and concern. Even when I suspect they don't vote the way I do, I still get to see their fuller humanity on display, which naturally allows me to better understand where they're coming from. This is what it means to me to be well-informed about the issues.

This is why I get teary. I get teary because these are the actual people amidst whom I live. And I like them. I like that they're my neighbors. Every year, right around the 4th of July holiday, I find myself getting teary. I know our great "experiment" in democracy is far from perfect. I know that people continue to be poor, oppressed, and left out. I feel for them and strive to use my own political agency to rise them up, set them free, and bring them in. I've shared many of these actions here on the blog over the years, for what it's worth.

I get teary because despite our ongoing failures, I'm moved and even amazed by this audacious thing we are trying to do as a nation. For 250 years, a relatively short time in the scheme of human existence, we have, in our way, as a nation of we the people, attempted to self-govern. It's messy, even ugly at times. And the way our media, politics, and technology has evolved makes it even messier and uglier. But when I turn to my neighbors, when I turn to the people amidst whom I actually live, I continue to be inspired by what we're capable of striving toward, who we are capable of being. Democracy will always be an experiment. It will never be perfect. The promise isn't happiness, but rather the collective pursuit of happiness.

This weekend, I'll be celebrating, not with family, not with old friends, but with my neighbors. 

Among my greatest inspirations is Mister Rogers' whose work with young children was rooted in the metaphor of the neighborhood. In his daily program Mister Roger's Neighborhood, he gave us a blueprint of how the medium of television could be used to pull people together rather than divide them. "Since we're neighbors, let's be friends." It's both a simple and breathtaking aspiration.

It's the neighborhood, the people amidst whom we live, the people we see at the local coffee shop, grocery store, out walking the dog, for which we are made. When I think of democracy, that's who I think about. When I get teary, these are the people, these every day people full of doubts, emotions, fears, and passions, that touch me the most. 

I worry that so many of us don't have the privilege that so many people my age had of growing up in real neighborhoods. They still exist, but they're much harder to find these days.

This is why I believe that the central purpose of every preschool is to be that local community for this generation of young children. To be a place where we learn about and from real people, rather than the cartoon cutouts that come to us through a media that thrives on stereotype and division. Our preschools can be the place where young children first learn that the messiness of self-government need not turn ugly; where empathy and compassion grow best; where real people come together to talk about their concerns, their ideas, and their needs; where negotiation, compromise, and ultimately agreement stand at the center of our relationships with one another. Our preschools can be places in which young children are marinated in community.

I've always approached preschool as an experiment, both for me, and for the children, because that's what our democracy is: an experiment in living together. It's an experiment in which the beaker sometimes blows up in our faces, in which the results are not always what we expected, and in which we the people are the only ones who have the power to do something about it. It's from this foundation of being good neighbors that we can hope for a better tomorrow.

******

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 way 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!

"A Deep Sense of Who You Are"

As a child, my family moved around a lot. I'd called four places home before my first day of kindergarten. I attended three different elementary schools and three different middle schools. My parents, themselves, had grown up in a small, tightly-knit farming community in which everyone knew everyone. To this day, they are still in touch with some of their childhood friends. In contrast, I'm in touch with none of mine. In fact, I can't even remember the names of some of the kids I once called "best friend."

I sometimes wonder if I've missed out on something, especially when my wife gets together with her lifelong besties, but the experience of being the "new kid" is so much a part of who I am that I can't really imagine what it would be like to share such a long history with anyone other than family members. My greatest life lesson, I think, was how to make new friends wherever I go.

For this I credit my mother. Mom was determined that we would have friends wherever we went. If the new neighbors didn't show up on the front porch with casseroles, she would make her own casseroles and show up on theirs. She went out of her way to connect with other families with kids. As we got older, she signed us up for team sports wherever we moved, not as a way to learn the dubious lessons of competition, but rather so that we would have the opportunity to make friends. 

Not everyone enjoys sports, but fortunately we did, and throughout my childhood, my social life tended to emerge not through school, but rather through baseball, soccer, football, basketball, and swimming. Of course, there was competition when another team would come to play, but the core of the experience was daily practice where we built relationships with one another around the cooperation of teamwork. There was never any expectation that we would go on to become professional athletes, nor were we graded or tested. The idea was to have fun with friends.

Some time ago, before I began my journey as an educator, in the spirit of paying it forward, I volunteered to coach what is called a "select" baseball team comprised of middle schoolers only to find that youth sports have changed in horrible ways. These kids and their parents already had their eyes on the big leagues, or missing that, at least college scholarships. It was an unpleasant experience for me, but even more so for the kids who, frankly, demonstrated very little joy, and even less friendship. This wasn't the baseball I grew up knowing. When I tried to lighten things up, parents would pull me aside to let me know that they appreciated the sentiment, but really, they didn't want their child to "miss the opportunity," so, you know, knuckle down. Ugh.

One of the foundations upon which our educational system is built is the myth that we live in a "competitive society" so we must get the kids ready for that. Now, I've never been a stock market day trader, nor have I had the misfortune of being part of a corporate hierarchy. I've never been a professional athlete or a contestant on RuPaul's Drag Race. Indeed, the only time that I found myself in genuine, ongoing competition with my fellow humans was during my time in school and only then when I began to understand that I was being judged (graded, tested) in comparison to my classmates. But outside of school, I've found that competition beyond the occasional friendly board game, is not a meaningful part of my life.

Mister Rogers once said, "You rarely have time for everything you want in this life, so you need to make choices. And hopefully your choices can come from a deep sense of who you are."

Competition only gives us, at best, a superficial sense of who we are. It teaches us that if we aren't a winner then we're a loser. But even more harmful is competition's lesson that our fellow humans are impediments, stepping stones, and rivals. It makes "things" of them, it dehumanizes them, and it ultimately prevents and perverts our relationships. What my mother knew was that the only way one can ever discover the key to that deeper sense of self is through relationships.

For the most part, those of us who work with young children understand what my mother understood: relationships are the foundation for any life worth living. When we observe children at play, we see that they are driven, not to competition, but rather to cooperation and teamwork. That is where they find joy. When competition emerges, it always does so as both a threat to their games as well as their relationships. In these cases, when we allow the children to solve their own problems, the unpleasantly competitive games either come to an end as children exercise their freedom to quit, or, impressively, they scramble to remove the prospect of winners and losers, restoring the cooperative balance to their game. 

This, not competition, is the reality I've discovered everywhere I've gone in life. It's inhuman systems, like conventional schooling, that create the illusion that competition is everywhere. When it's just us humans playing together, the only thing that matters are our relationships, built through cooperation and teamwork. And through that our deep sense of self emerges as the only guide we will ever need to make choices that will bring us joy.

******

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 way 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!

Dear Grown-Ups

The 5-6 year olds Abby works with in Bellingham, Washington wrote this wonderful letter:

Dear Grown-Ups,

Kids need you to know:

We can jump off tiny waterfalls.

We can use shovels and real tools.

We can help you

We can do hard things

We can make breakfast in the morning

You can trust us more than you think

We need time to play

We need playdates

We need time to slow down

Please stop hydrating us all the time

Please stop talking so much sometimes

We can hear you

Our ideas matter

We have cool ideas

We deserve to make some of our own decisions

Please listen when we say no

Please treat us properly not just boss us

Sometimes we don't want help

Sometimes we want to picture it ourselves

We can touch thorns without getting spiked

We can find a way to reach things high up

Magic is real

We love you

And also:

Say yes more!

Love,

The Kids

******

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 way 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!