The Ice Cream Was Always Just Out of Reach

The two-year-old said to me, "If you eat this food you can have ice cream." She placed a plate in front of me on which she had positioned a glob of purple play dough. 

I said, "What is it?"

"It's healthy food."

"What kind of healthy food?"

"You just have to eat it."

"I'll need a fork."

"I'll get one for you, Teacher Tom." She dug around on the shelf until she found a plastic one. "Here's your fork, now eat your food."

I pretended to take a bite. Sometimes when kids want me to taste their imaginary food, I make a comical face and say, "It's yucky" or "It's too hot!" but this time I said, "That is so good! I'm going to eat it all!" I stabbed the play dough with my fork pretending to shove the whole thing in my mouth, then hid it on my lap while mimicking chewing and swallowing. "Now I'm ready for my ice cream."

The "ice cream" was more play dough she held in a container. For a moment I thought she was going to serve it to me, but then she said, "First you have to take your bath, then you can have some ice cream."

"I don't want to take a bath."

"You have to take a bath if you want to have some ice cream."

"I'll need a wash cloth."

"I'll get one for you, Teacher Tom." She found a small blanket in our cradle of baby dolls. "Here's your wash cloth."

I mimed bathing, then said, "All clean and fresh, now I'm ready for that ice cream."

"No, first you have to put on your jammies."

"I don't want to put on my jammies."

"You have to put on your jammies, then you can have some ice cream."

It went a couple more rounds like this. It was clear that I wasn't going to get any ice cream.

It was all pretend. The food wasn't real, the bath wasn't real, the pajamas weren't real. Even the ice cream wasn't real. Nothing about this was real, it was all a child's game, yet as she dangled that reward always just out of reach, I found a thread of growing annoyance and helplessness underneath my play. I felt manipulated and controlled. I'd jumped through her hoops, yet there was always another one. The game was pretend, but the emotions it evoked were real.

Just think how much stronger those emotions would be if I were the child, she the adult, and it was not a game, but rather a part of my day-to-day reality. 

******

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!

Maybe . . .

As a boy, we heard a lot about the so-called "population bomb," a term used to describe apocalyptic predictions that without drastic action to curtail birthrates around the world, we would face mass starvation by the mid-80s. 

It was a bomb that didn't explode according to predictions as birthrates then declined in what some identify as one of the most significant demographic developments in human history. From the perspective of today, we can see that global population growth peaked at about 2.1 percent annually in the late 60s, then began a rapid decline, falling to 1.08 percent by 2019.

There are many reasons that this happened, including the empowerment of girls and women, better access to contraception, declining infant mortality rates, urbanization, rising prosperity, changing cultural expectations, government policies, and, probably, to a certain degree, the apocalyptic predictions themselves, which likely caused at least some people to not want to bring children into a world of starvation. We see a similar response to apocalyptic predictions about climate change today as some young people are opting out of parenthood explicitly because they see a grim future for humanity.

The philosopher Alan Watts popularized a version of an ancient Chinese parable that seems particularly apt:

A farmer's horse ran away. His neighbors came to console him. "What terrible luck!" they said.

"Maybe," replied the farmer.

The next day, the horse returned, bringing several wild horses with it. "What wonderful luck!" exclaimed the neighbors.

"Maybe," said the farmer.

The following day, the farmer's son was thrown while trying to ride one of the wild horses, breaking his leg. "What terrible luck!" the neighbors said.

"Maybe," replied the farmer.

Soon afterward, war broke out and the army came to conscript the village's young men. Because of his broken leg, the farmer's son was spared. "What wonderful luck!" said the neighbors.

"Maybe," replied the farmer.

In his book How the World Really Works, scientist and author Vaclav Smil discusses the challenge of making predictions about any complex system, offering dozens of examples of how even seemingly well-supported predictive models typically miss the mark, often dramatically.

"(E)ven short-term projections involving complex systems . . . remain highly uncertain, and even near-term outlooks result in a broad range of possible outcomes." He even shows how today's sophisticated computer models are built on assumptions which can, and do, lead our predictions about the future astray, perhaps even more so than "pen-and-paper" calculations.

As it happens, I'm posting this on the morning of Election Day, when we will discover how closely the results align with the predictions of pollsters and pundits. Whatever happens, the story will continue, and tomorrow we'll all be making new predictions.

Of course, we all would like to know the future, and we can't help but anticipate and plan for it, but when the rubber meets the road, the most intellectually defensible response to confident predictions about our collective future, no matter how apocalyptic or Pollyannaish, is "Maybe."

The story continues and we, ourselves, stand within the complex system of life.

In his masterpiece War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy takes a similar view of how we view the past. So often, our history books focus on stories of individuals exerting their will, making it happen. As Tolstoy tells it, Napoleon imagines that he is directing events, but he is caught up in a complex system of circumstances, individual decisions, accidents, misunderstandings, and forces beyond anyone's comprehension. His generals issue orders, but by the time these orders reach the battlefield, the circumstances have changed. Soldiers must respond to what is immediately in front of them. Battles unfold through countless interactions, none of which can be understood in isolation. History doesn't go according to anyone's plan; it is simply what happens . . . Maybe.

Smil shows us the limits of our ability to predict the future, while Tolstoy is concerned with the limits of our ability to explain the past. We naively assert that hindsight gives us 20/20 vision, but the narratives we create after the fact, inevitably lead us to favor one set of individuals and events over others, while overlooking the countless other "reasons."

Yesterday, I wrote about a couple of boys who were disrupting the classroom with their game of "bad guys." These two "sweet" boys had created a relationship that produced a behavior that no one could have predicted by observing either child individually. Indeed, it confounded their parents who insisted that the "fault" must lie with the other boy. But their relationship wasn't something that just happened between the two of them. It included their parents, the rest of the children, me, a wider world in which "bad guys" were a thing, and countless other factors. As an active part of this system, I managed to bring their relationship into conversation with the larger community, and in doing so, new possibilities emerged that no one could have predicted.

The solution was not to correct their collective mind, but to expand it.

This is, I think, what the Chinese farmer does. Each new development expands the story, making moot the previous judgments of "good luck" or "bad luck." What seemed certain becomes uncertain. 

At the end of the day, perhaps we are no better at being able to explain why the past happened than we are at knowing what the future holds.

As adults who work with young children, we concern ourselves with their futures. Our schools strive to make children "school ready" or "college ready" or "career ready." Our policymakers are forever talking about those mythological "jobs of tomorrow." We worry what this or that behavior portends for their future prospects, worrying that their "bad guy" games will lead them to some sort of apocalyptic future; or that learning to read earlier than their peers portends glory. 

"Maybe." It is neither a statement of pessimism nor optimism, but rather an acknowledgment that the only thing we can ever really know is right now. Of course, we still try to learn from the past and prepare for the future, but at the end of the day, we can only act according to the moment that is emerging in front of us.

This is the great opportunity of the early years. Young children are neither cornucopians nor catastrophists. They are more firmly fixed in the present than we adults with our vast experience with pasts and futures that preoccupy us as life itself emerges before us. They are less committed than we are to the stories they've constructed about the past and future. A block becomes a telephone, then a jet, then a slice of cake. The meaning of an object remains open. The next moment can change everything.

Young children are especially adept at keeping possibilities open, which is precisely what the Chinese farmer does.

Folk singer and storyteller Utah Phillips quoted Mark Twain as saying, "Those of you who are inclined to worry have the widest selection in history." 

It's one of those lines that remains evergreen as our predictions and interpretations come and go. The opportunity, however, is for us to strive to approach our work with children, recognizing that they offer us a perspective of the emerging present that we struggle to grasp. It's a perspective in which there is no "ahead" or "behind," in which the past is never fully explainable and the future is unpredictable, so why not live right now and remain open to what happens next?

Our word apocalypse, which has come to signify the end of the world, comes from the Ancient Greek word apokálypsis, which originally meant "unveiling" or "revelation." That is the ultimate power of "Maybe."

******

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

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Not to Correct, But to Expand

Separately, individually, the two boys were sweet, but together they took joy in tormenting their classmates. They called themselves "bad guys." They knocked over block constructions. They gleefully upset games of domesticity. They called names, snatched objects from hands, and roared, all the while giggling together, then running off whenever an adult approached.

They never physically harmed anyone. They definitely frighten some, but mostly. They left a trail of frustration and anger behind them. When one of the boys was not at school, the "bad guys" were likewise absent. It was a behavior that emerged only as a collaboration. Every now and then, I'd find myself alone with one of the boys. When I broached the subject of "bad guys," they would both insist that it was "fun." They also acknowledged that they frightened and frustrated the other kids and knew that their game was "just pretend." Neither felt they were really bad guys. Based on my separate conversations with them, I knew that they recognized that some of their classmates might not know it was pretend, and they even seemed to regret that the "bad guys" made other people afraid or angry.

Together, however, this recognition either disappeared or was ignored as they giddily returned to their challenging behaviors.

I didn't see it as bullying behavior. They didn't target the weak the way bullies do. Indeed, they generally preferred being "bad guys" to the children who responded with most fervor, the ones who fought back, who yelled, who matched, or even fed, their energy. 

Then, irritatingly, they giggled together and ran off to scheme their next act of bad guy-ism.

There's a concept in psychology called distributed cognition, which studies how thinking can extend beyond an individual into interactions with other people, objects, and environments. A related idea called participatory sense-making explores how meaning can emerge through interaction rather than simply being exchanged between separate minds.

We see examples of both of these things in preschool all the time. Most often we celebrate the idea that together we're smarter, more capable, more creative. We imagine collective cognition like this as an improvement on individual cognition. I often express this concept as together we're a genius. 

This is often one of the most exciting discoveries of early childhood.

And it's not wrong to see it this way. After all, as historian Yuval Noah Harari discusses in his book Sapiens, much of the success of our species is our ability to cooperate and work together. Alone we are rather frail, naked apes, easy prey for apex predators like tigers, sharks, and bears, but together we build cities, dominate continents, and make the world new through our collective imaginations.

But this capacity for creating meaning through interaction can also, obviously, take a more ominous turn. We can, in fact, behave collectively as "bad guys." Distributed cognition and participatory sense-making can create something like a single mind that carries us into the kind of morally ambiguous territory that we would avoid as individuals. It can cause us to be less capable of recognizing certain truths that are obvious when we're on our own.

I spent a lot of time talking with these boys, both separately and together. Individually, they committed themselves to taking more care of their classmates, but the mind that emerged when they were together continued to cause problems. It wasn't until we began to discuss the "bad guy" situation at circle time that things began to change.

It started with one girl proposing we make a classroom rule: "No bad guys." The children make their own rules (or agreements). I often discuss this process in terms of self-governance and democracy, but I've also come to understand it in terms of psychology as well. 

The boys, of course, immediately objected to a rule against their favorite game, and it was clear from the start that they would never agree to it, but that doesn't mean that a circle time conversation about "bad guys" wouldn't be productive. I asked the girl to explain why she thought we needed that rule, to which she replied, "They scare me." This confession caused the boys to giggle, but as classmate after classmate shared their anger, frustration, and fear, that disappeared. The bad guys had some defenders, as well, but there was the overriding sentiment was against them. 

By the end of that day's discussion, you could feel the collective mind had grown, which is what happens as we add perspectives. 

This wasn't the end of the "bad guys." Nor was it the end of our collective mind-expanding circle time discussions. The concept of "good guys" emerged as a natural counterbalance. Likewise the notion that this was all "just pretend" began to be included. Pretend fear and pretend anger began to replace some of what had been real. "Powers" were created, like invisible shields or magic wands that could stop "bad guys." But more importantly, the antagonists found their own perceptions expanded in ways that allowed them to include the impact their behaviors had on others.

And slowly, over weeks, the bad guy mind evolved into something bigger, even if it never lost the high energy, connection, and giggling.

A common approach to "bad guy" play is for the adults to quash it one way or another. We start with an attempt to show the baddies how their behavior negatively impacts others and when that doesn't work, we tend to ban or constrain the game, often under threat of punishment. It's a short cut that relies on teaching the lesson that those with power get to tell others what to do, a fundamentally anti-democratic concept, and often just succeeds in pushing the behaviors underground.

The alternative is to trust that the same collective intelligence that creates the problem can also be part of the solution. The two boys had discovered something powerful in their relationship, something that neither could have created alone. My job wasn't to break the relationship or extinguish their joy, but to help bring it into conversation with the larger community. The solution was not to correct their collective mind, but to expand it. And as more perspectives became part of it, new possibilities emerged, possibilities that none of us, certainly not me, could have imagined on our own.

******

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 Ability to Forget and Be Forgotten

In her book Monsters Claire Dederer considers the question of what to do about artists who have created beloved works of art, but who have also been revealed to be, well, monsters. Woody Allen is one of her prime examples. At one point she uses the metaphor of a beautiful piece of lace that has been stained. It still might be a beautiful piece of lace, but it’s nearly impossible to not notice the stain. 

Dederer points out that many, too many, of our artistic icons have turned out to be monsters. We all know about Allen, Roman Polanski, and Bill Cosby because their transgressions are relatively recent. Maybe we’ve even taken part in “canceling” them. But even if we don’t approve of so-called “cancel culture” I doubt that any of us can fully enjoy their work the way we once did – the stain is always right there. But many of us are unaware, or have forgotten, that Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, and even William Shaespeare have left stains on their masterpieces. Do we forgive them because it happened so long ago? Or did we, collectively, just forget? And is forgetting okay? And if so, how long ago does it have to be for that forgetting to be okay?

As people who work with and care for young children, we are in the business of forgiving and forgetting. Of course, we don’t let a preschooler's missteps stain them. Even our teenagers get to leave most of their transgressions in the past, or at least they did until the advent of the internet where nothing is forgotten. 

Reflecting on my own teenage years, I'm happy that the internet didn't exist in those days. I don't know if I would be the man I am today if I wasn't free to leave my mistakes behind. Much of therapy involves dredging up those old memories and that will always be a part of social-emotional healing and growth, but there is a growing body of psychological research that finds that forgetting negative experiences is perhaps just as important to our social identity development because to remember every shameful or humiliating experience would be immobilizing. 

In her book The End of Forgetting, Kate Eichhorn writes, "I understand that forgetting can . . . be incredibly dangerous but there are times when the ability to forget and be forgotten is integral to social transformation."

I worry about our young people who are, increasingly, living in a world that never forgets. Growing up, we were often warned about how our behaviors would wind up on our "permanent record," but that was a boogyman compared to today. I can't imagine the pressure young people must feel to manage their reputations because a single slip-up can genuinely have lifelong ramifications. Risk taking is essential to cognitive and social development, but today, the stakes of failure are so much higher than for past generations that it's no wonder we are seeing what Jonathan Haight calls "the anxious generation." He lays the blame largely on a loss of childhood autonomy and smart phones, and I don't think he's wrong, but the prospect of a permanent record on steroids certainly plays a part in the rise in anxiety in our youngest citizens. The impact of "celebrity" on young people is well documented. Today, we have an entire generation that is faced with life "in the public eye."

One of the benefits of being allowed to forget our shameful and humiliating moments is that it creates the freedom necessary to transform ourselves into new and better people. That's nearly impossible if there are those out there who continually remind us about that one time we behaved like a "monster."

It’s been decades since Woody Allen was accused of his crimes. Has the stain faded? Should it? If we still enjoy his movies, are we condoning his past behavior? Are we forgetting about his victims and justice?

It’s easier to forgive preschoolers, of course, because they’re so young. Their brains aren’t fully developed. Even if they hit or bite or abuse a classmate, we don’t let that stain them. They’re not monsters; they just made a bad choice. They didn’t know any better. But when should they know better? There are teens who are tried in court as adults. I guess we assume that they should have known better. On the other hand, we commonly expunge crimes from the records of teens under the assumption that they have learned their lesson and they don’t deserve to start life with a stain. But today, courts may forgive and forget, but there is no undo button for the internet.

I don't think I'll ever forgive Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, or Bill Cosby. I remember what they did. Youthful indiscretions are a far cry from using one's position of power prey on the weak and vulnerable. That's a stain I can't not see. Perhaps future generations will be able to enjoy their art without condoning their monstrous behaviors the way I do with Picasso, Hemingway, and Shakespeare. Maybe I'll feel differently when they are in their graves. In the end, perhaps it's only then, when they can do no more harm, that we are able to start separating monsters from their art.

But no child is a monster. As preschool teachers and parents of young children we forgive and forget every day. Indeed, it's our responsibility to help young children move beyond their impulses, their mistakes, and their "monstrous" behaviors. From day-to-day we forget and forgive, setting our children free to live today anew as better people. 

******

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!

Humans Are Ultra Social Learning Machines

Most of us take it for granted that human beings are smarter than other animals. After all, we have exceptionally large brains for our body size, comprising, on average, about two percent of our body weight. But when scientists in Germany used a series of thirty-eight tests designed to compare our innate intelligence with animals we assume are pretty smart, such as orangutans and chimpanzees, on things like spatial awareness, calculation, and causality, we performed about the same. This doesn't surprise me, actually. Having lived with a series of dogs over the course of the past three decades, I'm convinced there are times that they've pitied me as a sweet little puddin' head, lovable, but not that bright, especially when it comes to things like being aware of a rabbit hiding in the shrubbery or understanding what they want or need when they could not be communicating more clearly. 

The only area of intelligence in which the researchers found that humans surpass our ape cousins is when it comes to social learning: the ability to learn from others. As Rutger Bregman writes in his book Humankind:

Human beings, it turns out, are ultra social learning machines. We're born to learn, to bond and to play. Maybe it's not so strange, then, that blushing is the only human expression that's uniquely human. blushing, after all, is quintessentially social -- it's people showing they care what others think, which fosters trust and enables cooperation. 

That we need one another in order to take advantage of our great big brains shouldn't surprise any early childhood educators. 

Other research, and most significantly, the Perry School Project, the longest running study of the impact of high quality preschool on the lives of children, finds that far more important than anything that can be measured by standardized testing, the traits most linked to children going on to live "successful" lives are the development of traits like "self-motivation, the ability to work well with others, and sociability." And the key thing that makes a preschool "high quality" is programs that foster trust and enable cooperation.

Too much of what passes for education today is about the individual, about shoehorning various kinds of trivia into their brains, then patting ourselves on the back when they can regurgitate it on a test. During the pandemic, when schools were closed and children were forced to learn remotely, we got a glimpse of what happens when we strip education of its social dimension. There were those who insisted that this was an opportunity to really figure out what kinds of shoehorning worked "best" without the data being "tainted" by the distractions of social interactions.

But without one another, without being able to see other people blush, without the ability to look into one another's eyes, without the information embedded in our subtle smiles, flared nostrils, or tensed muscles, we learn no better than apes. Screens are very limited in what they can convey. They make trust and cooperation far more difficult. The same for physical distancing. No wonder we were all so tired. We were working overtime to gather the social information we need in order to learn at full capacity.

Whether we know it or not, this is why "school" isn't working very well right now. We tend to think of our schools as places for shoehorning the old reading, writing, and 'rithmatic into their little heads, but its real value (beyond the economic value of child care) has always been the opportunity for children simply be together, to learn from one another, to practice being sociable, to cooperate, to develop the habits of working with others, to play, and to grow the trust necessary for their brains to develop to their highest potential. This is where or focus ought to be..

******

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

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

It's a Pretty Good Joke

There is no evidence that Albert Einstein said, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results," although he often gets credit for it. Novelist Rita Mae Brown was the first to use it in print, although she probably learned it from Alcoholics Anonymous.

The Woodland Park Cooperative Preschool is housed in the lower level of the Fremont Baptist Church, a congregation that serves its community by providing space for several 12-step programs. There was one very early morning group that met in a room adjacent to the school rooms and shared our kitchen space. As I prepared for the children, I tried to honor their privacy, but I couldn't help but overhear much of what was said. Over the years, I got to know several of the regulars quite well and, to some extent, I was considered an "honorary" member of the group.

That quote about insanity punctuated many of the stories people told of their struggles, usually expressed as an if-I-didn't-laugh-I'd-cry-all-day joke. It never failed to raise a chuckle of recognition.

I'm grateful for that unique experience of preparing for the children against the background of these stories of former children. I couldn't help but think of it that way. Obviously, I strive to "teach" or help raise the kids in my care to avoid the trap of addiction, to protect them, to equip them with the coping skills and self-esteem that I hoped would allow them to not fall into this particular brand of "insanity." At the same time, I found myself chuckling along as well. This isn't just a caution for addicts . . . Or maybe we just need to expand our definition of what addiction means because I don't know any adult who can't identify with the sentiment, who hasn't found themselves once more digging themselves out of a familiar deep hole.

Recently, my wife and I went to an open mic event to support a friend. There were a couple dozen performers, one of whom recited a poem by Portia Nelson called "There's a Hole in My Sidewalk." It made us laugh. It sounded familiar and not just because its message was universal. This morning I awoke knowing where I'd heard it before. Years ago, one of the AA regulars read it to the group. It made me chuckle back then as well.

Chapter One

I walk down the street.

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.

I fall in.

I am lost . . . I am helpless.

It isn't my fault.

It takes forever to find a way out.

Chapter Two

I walk down the same street.

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.

I pretend I don't see it.

I fall in again.

I can't believe I am in the same place.

But it isn't my fault.

It still takes a long time to get out.

Chapter Three

I walk down the same street.

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.

I see it is there.

I still fall in . . . it's a habit.

My eyes are open.

I know where I am.

It is my fault . . . I get out immediately.

Chapter Four

I walk down the same street.

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.

I walk around it.

Chapter Five

I walk down another street.

When we see this story playing out in the lives of others, as we so often do as adults who work with young children, it's so painfully easy to see it coming. We might even shout, "Watch out for that hole!" but they fall in anyway. We're frustrated. It would save them so much pain if they would've just listened to us. We're the adults and they're the children so we, of course, pull them out of that hole, dust them off, bandage their wounds, and hope that they now know what they need to know about that hole in the sidewalk. But more often than not, there are more chapters to come.

This is one of the most difficult parts of working with young children. On the one hand, we know that experience is our best teacher. As Oscar Wilde wrote: "Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes." At the same time, we're there to help and most of us can't bear sitting by as a child suffers and struggles, so of course we help them. We dust them off and bandage their wounds as best we can, then worry if we've somehow, in our solicitude, prevented them from learning what they needed to learn.

One of the things I know from my years of being AA adjacent is that none of us can do it alone. Indeed, that's what 12-step programs are all about. Of course, I want the children in my care to grow into adults who can "stand on their own two feet," but at the same time none of us are capable of doing that. Not all the time. We all have our sidewalks. We all have our holes. We all live our chapters. If we always steer them around the holes in their sidewalk, how will they ever learn to recognize the holes for themselves? But at the same time, who's going to let a child fall into a hole? It's tempting to want to help by skipping ahead to Chapter Five, but that isn't the way stories or learning works. Without those middle chapters the ending is meaningless. 

It's a tricky balance that we walk as important adults in the lives of children. Most of the time, I find it in viewing my role as a colleague or fellow traveller: two people learning together. I share my own experience as we go along by pointing out the holes that I can see, but I'm aware that there are an infinite number of holes that I can't see. Life is about falling into them and climbing back out: that's where the learning is. It's hard, sure, and painful, but it's rendered a little less so if we don't have to do it alone. If nothing else, that gives us someone with whom to chuckle as we start digging ourselves out, because, you know, it's a pretty good joke.

******

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

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Cobbling Together a Perfectly Age-Appropriate Curriculum

Rog was in love with Marian, who loved him back. It was one of those cute preschool romances where children were exploring the loving adult relationships they see in their lives by acting out one of their own. But one day, Rog arrived to find that Marian had changed her mind. She was, she informed him, going to marry Titus instead.

Rog was frantic. He spent his morning gamely drawing pictures for Marian, offering her snack foods, and otherwise striving to convince her to change her mind. By midday, however, the reality had set in. In despair he threw himself onto the floor amidst the costumes, his head pressed into a corner. I went to console him, but he sent me away. When his friends then tried, he ran from the classroom and down the hallway. I found him in tears behind a door.

It wasn't so cute any more. The emotions he was feeling were real. I sat near him until he had calmed himself enough to say, "I want to marry her, but she only wants to marry Titus!" which cast him back into despair.

As he finally emerged into the initial pain of acceptance, I listened to him. At one point he had the idea of talking about it with the whole group at circle time.

This immediately struck me as a bad idea. Certainly, no one wants to share their broken heart with the world, but he was insistent so I told him that if he still wanted to talk about it when we gathered together on the checkerboard rug, he should raise his hand and I'd call on him. I assumed that after some time to reflect he would think better of it. After all, these aren't the sorts of things one wants discussed in public.

His hand, however, was up before we had even all assembled. When I called on him, he declared, "I love Marian but she doesn't love me any more. She loves Titus." I realized even as he said it that he wasn't telling anyone anything they didn't already know. Everything about their preschool relationship had been public knowledge from the start.

Marian confirmed Rog's assessment matter-of-factly from where she sat beside Titus.

One of Rog's buddies said, "That's okay, you can just marry somebody else!"

"Yeah," said another, "Marian gets to marry whoever she wants and you get to marry somebody else."

Rog made some comment about how he didn't want to marry any of the other girls in the class and his friend responded, "Well then just marry one of the boys. I'll marry you if you want."

Someone else chimed in that they were going to wait until they were a grown-up to get married and the conversation took off from there. We discussed love and divorce and how babies are made. We shared what we knew about body parts and their functions. Before long I realized that these children, in many ways, understood more than I had at 18.

You see, I grew up in places and in an era in which talking about relationships and particularly sexual ones was taboo. It wasn't a topic of conversation in my home, my church, or my school. Or rather, it wasn't discussed when adults were present, because we kids tended to share what we knew in whispers, which wasn't a lot, and even that was largely, and often profoundly, inaccurate. Pregnancy, sexually transmitted disease, and toxic relationships were hidden away in the dark corners where we discussed them, in our ignorance, not knowing what to believe.  So we were left alone in the dark with one another.

There are still large swaths of the US where we leave our children to learn about sex and relationships in this way, but for the past couple decades, I've been a part of a community in which most of the preschool-aged children in my life come from families who are striving to normalize these conversations.

These children consoled their friend through frank, honest, philosophical talk, cobbling together a perfectly age-appropriate curriculum, supported by adults who corrected misinformation and refrained from judgment. Children don't need us to make their lives into lessons. Their lives already contain the lessons. I saw clearly that not talking about sex certainly stands among the worst ideas humans have ever had.

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