Is the Book at Death's Door?

People keep trying to tell me that the book, as a way to deliver information, edification, and entertainment, is doomed to extinction. Radio, then television, and now the internet were all going to supplant books. Not only were these more technologically advance media going to replace the kind of deep, committed reading demanded of books, but they were training us to have shorter and shorter attention spans creating a sort of self-perpetuating spiral.

TV programs run for 30-60 minutes. The commercials are 30 seconds. Pop music songs tend to top out at around two and a half minutes. Social media scrolling is a process of attending for fractions of seconds before moving on. The groundbreaking children's educational program Seasame Street was the first to give up on the long form, introducing us to a habit of quick cuts that, in part, formed us into what we at one time called "the MTV generation." No one had the time or attention span for books anymore. At least that's what they said. Marshall McLuhan created an entire critique of media and culture that saw this as not just inevitable, but natural and good.

Book stores, both large chains and mom-and-pop operations, have struggled in recent decades, although that seems to have more to do with the impact of Amazon because, despite the warnings, book sales have remained strong since the dawn of the 2000's, enjoying a significant resurgence during the pandemic. In fact, 2022 saw us buying a record number of books -- over 800 million -- and while 2023 saw a small dip, overall book sales remain higher than 2020.

If you've been a reader here for any length of time, you're likely aware that I'm an ardent book person. My wife shares my affinity for books, although she has largely shifted her book consumption to her Kindle. And that's part of how book publishing continues to thrive, finding alternative ways to deliver their product. I remember when paperbacks began changing the publishing game by offering books in a more portable and less expensive format. E-readers and audio books have done the same, making it possible for more and more of us to access books in more and more times and places. Instead of hurting book readership, these "rival" technologies have made it increasingly easy for book lovers to find books they love and one another, as book clubs (celebrity and otherwise), websites, and social media groups seem to be everywhere.

I'm a bit of a holdover in that I continue to prefer reading old-fashioned hardbacks. For my purposes, hardbacks are a mature technology, one upon which improvement is impossible, but you won't find me begrudging anything that makes reading books fit people's lives. Books, for me, are a pure good, like love or play, that need not be defended.

I'm writing about books because I recently read an article in The Atlantic (yes, I also read paper magazines!) written by Rose Horowitch entitled The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books (here's a link to the online version). She interviewed 33 literature and humanities professors who say that over the past decade students are landing in their classes who have never been expected to read an entire book. I've heard of this phenomenon before from another article in The Atlantic entitled Why Kids Aren't Falling in Love With Reading. 

Back then I wrote, "Today, children are being introduced to books and stories one paragraph at a time. They might be reading something as wonderful as Peggy Parish's Amelia Bedelia, but when you have to stop and answer questions, in detail, often word-for-word, about random paragraphs, there's no way you can learn to care about the characters or the stories. (Katherine) Marsh writes about a class in which the kids were reading Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, but they were told by the teacher that they would be doing it over the course of months, and probably wouldn't have time to finish it. What the hell? How can you read any book, and that book in particular, without reading it to the end? . . . No wonder children aren't growing up to love reading."

In this more recent article, Horowitch lays that blame squarely at the door of such governmental education policies as Bush's No Child Left Behind, Obama's Race to the Top, and Bill Gate's Common Core, all of which emphasize "informational texts and standardized tests. This has caused too many teachers to shift away from books to short informational passages, followed by questions about the author's main idea -- mimicking the format of standardized reading comprehension tests." As Antero Garcia, a Stanford education professor told her, "in doing so, we've sacrificed young people's ability to grapple with long-form texts in general. She quotes one teacher who has spent his career in New York and Boston public schools as saying, "There's no testing skill that can be related to . . . Can you sit down and read Tolstoy."

The word "sacrifice" is spot on here. I've long referred the academic regime that has taken over our schools in recent decades to "test score coal mines" in which corporations make money, and school districts receive money, and teachers get rewarded, off the backs of children's alienating labor. It doesn't matter how efficiently a child can analyze a paragraph if they have never been exposed to it in the much larger context in which it exists. I mean, Horowitch interviewed professors at the so-called "elite" universities which tend to attract the best test takers, and these students are increasingly unwilling and unable to read anything that requires the kind of persistence, focus, and, yes, ambition, required by whole books. We have specifically taught them that reading books is unimportant because it won't show up on the test. It is not the kids' fault: it is the fault of our schools.

Of course, schools have never been very good at encouraging book reading. The only books I've ever left unfinished were the boring ones assigned by a teacher. To truly "read" a book, I've found, my curiosity must be engaged. 

For my entire life, people have been warning about the death of the book, only to see it not just survive, but thrive, adapting itself to changing technologies and habits, bringing people into entire, fully-connected and satisfying worlds of both fiction and non-fiction. The book has taken on and survived every technological challenger -- radio and TV and the internet. Who would have guessed that it would be our schools that finally killed books?

Of course, they aren't dead yet. We are, after all, only two years beyond the book publishing industry's most profitable year on record and sales have continued to be strong, but I worry that the experiences of these university professors is a kind of canary-in-the-coal-mine phenomenon. After all, concerns about the demise of books has always proven to be unfounded. As Columbia professor Nicholas Dames says, "Part of me is always tempted to be very skeptical about the idea that this is something new . . . (And) yet I think there is a phenomenon that we're noticing that I'm also hesitant to ignore." So let's not ignore it.

I love reading books. Just holding one in my hand gives me a satisfying feeling of knowledge and wisdom. Maybe it's just me. Maybe they're right, the book is ultimately doomed, it's just taking its sweet time in finally succumbing.

If you're like me, however, and see value in books, whole books, all kinds of books, even and especially books that contain ideas and people with which and whom we disagree, then there is something we can do. It is as simple as continuing to read picture books with young children, cover-to-cover. Read the same one over and over. Read dozens of different books in a single setting. Let the children in your life catch you reading. Talk about the books you've loved, the stories that have shaped your life, changed your mind, or left you inspired. Talk about the books that made you sad, made you angry, and kept you awake at night. Leave books, all kinds of books, lying around to thumb through, to get curious about. 

I know that some of what I've written here might be alarming or depressing, and like I said, let's not ignore it, but the truth is that I have great confidence in books. Even the "science of reading" killjoys and charlatans won't be able to destroy books no matter how hard they try. In a cultural battle between books and schooling, I'll place my money on books every time. 

I've just started reading Rachel Carson's Silent Spring which was published in 1962, the year of my birth. I was inspired to finally read it by Jenn Shapland's new book of essays entitled Thin Skin. I've also just begun to read Usula LeGuin's Earthsea series. When I look across the room at my bookshelf (part of which is pictured above) I see worlds I've experienced, author's and character's heads in which I've been a privileged visitor. I see a vast, deep, and connected world in which I'm free to roam. So let's not ignore the concerning things, but let's also know that books are mighty. They are a perfected technology and plaything. And they are here to stay.

"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies," writes George RR Martin, "and one who doesn't read, lives just one." 

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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

Every Child Understands a Hero's Journey

Max is sent to his room for making mischief. His walls become the word all around and Max, a young boy, steps out into it, boarding a boat that sails on an ocean that tumbles by, sailing night and day, in and out of weeks, and almost over a year to where the wild things are. We don't know if he is afraid or not, but the wild things roar their terrible roars and gnash their terrible teeth. He doesn't fight, nor does he run away, but rather tames them with the magic trick of staring into their yellow eyes and commanding them to be still. He is now king of the wild things and they celebrate with a wild rumpus. But then Max finds he wants to be with those who love him best of all. So he sails back home over and through all those nights and days and weeks. And when he gets there, despite the passage of all that time, his dinner is still hot.

You will recognize this as a synopsis of Maurice Sendak's classic hero's story Where the Wild Things Are. It was first published in 1963 when I was a baby, not even a year old. My mother didn't read it to me, but I read it to my daughter. I wrote the above synopsis from memory, not because I read it again and again (although I have read it countless times to hundreds of young children), but because it is what the American mythologist Joseph Campbell calls a "hero journey," the story with which we are all familiar.

Children continue to love this story because they understand it is their own story. They wake each morning in their familiar home, surrounded by those who love them best of all, then venture out into a world of obstacles, mysteries, and even terrors. Sendak's text doesn't tell us that Max is afraid, nor does it mention his bravery. We don't know why Max sets out on his journey, nor what he expects to find there. The sparse text of the story, slightly over 300 words, leaves most of the emotional content to the reader to fill in, other than right there at the end when we find the word love. But we all know how he feels, even the youngest children, who by the time they are able to understand the story, have already lived it, over and over again.

Campbell's life's work was about demonstrating that stories of the hero's journey are common throughout all cultures and times: this going out into the world, overcoming obstacles, facing fears, having experiences, then returning home again. Are we better or wiser for the journey? Maybe, probably, but that's not the point. As Campbell saw it, the hero's journey is a metaphor, the metaphor, for a life will lived. 

"What I think is a good life is one hero journey after another," wrote Campbell. 

It would have been much easier and safer for Max to have remained at home in his room, even as a forest grew around him. But there is never a question of whether or not he will set out. Ease and safety are not options for a hero. He did not set out because he was a seeker. He did not set out because he was particularly brave. He had not lost anything that needed to be found. He was not after riches or glory (the destinations that we always feel compelled to append to our modern hero journey's, confusing the point). He was not after love: he already had that. In Campbell's words, he is doing nothing more or less than following his bliss. Max the hero is someone who is called to set out, not knowing when he will return. When a private boat comes tumbling by he steps into it, pursuing his purpose, which is, simply, to accept this journey that is his and his alone.

When I read Where the Wild Things Are to young children, I'm often moved by the eagerness with which they attend. They have never known a time when they did not understand, from experience, the hero journey. They've been out in this magical world, afraid and brave and curious and homesick, over and over again, through night and day, in and out of weeks, and almost over a year. They have tamed wild things. And they have returned home where they are loved. 

A good life is not one of having or being, but rather of doing. It's not made of goals and plans, but rather the setting out on the journey that beckons us to sally forth, to experience the wild things we find there, returning home again, maybe better, maybe worse, but always with the satisfaction of having lived. 

A good education, it seems to me, is one that does not let us forget that to truly live is to accept one hero journey after another, not for glory or gold, but because our hearts call us to the journey.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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

The Cynics are Wrong: Hope is Not Weak

Why do we call all our generous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truth? ~Edith Wharton

I love the show Ted Lasso. I find peace in The Great British Bakeoff. Of Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov, it's Alyosha, the one who looks for the best of everyone, with whom I most identify, although Prince Myshkin from the same author's novel The Idiot, best embodies the attitude that comes most naturally to me. Myshkin goes through life believing that humans are essentially good, worthy of both trust and, when they fail, forgiveness.

The book I recommend most often to others is Humankind, Rutger Bregman's well-supported argument for the essential goodness of people. I rarely lock my doors. If you want to insult me, you better make it obvious because otherwise I'm going to assume you're too preoccupied to consider how I might feel. When people break rules, my first thought is that they must have had a good reason.

I've been called naive more often than I can count. Well-intended people tell me I'm a perfect mark for a con, and it's true, I've been taken in more than once. People often tell me that with my attitude it's lucky I wound up in early childhood education because that's the only place where faith in humanity might pay off. And I suspect that many shake their head behind my back, while muttering something like, "What a sweet little puddin' head."

In most cases, people, even wicked people, are far more naive and simple-hearted than one generally assumes. And so are we. ~Fyodor Dostoevsky

Cynicism is generally defined as the belief that our fellow humans are motivated purely by self-interest and is characterized by skepticism, distrust, and suspicion. One of my college professors, a self-confessed cynic and all-around aggravating man, asserted that skepticism, distrust, and suspicions were the only rational responses because it was impossible for anyone to act in a way that is not selfish. When someone would challenge him with something like, “What about a stranger who runs into a burning building to save a child?” he would respond, “It was still a selfish act because he knew that otherwise he would be consumed with guilt.”

Maybe you can’t win an argument with a professor of rhetoric, a professional cynic, but that doesn’t mean he’s right.

Cynicism doesn’t come naturally to me, which has led many to call me idealistic. Indeed, those are words used as stand-alone critiques by those who are cynical about play-based or self-directed learning. If they are trying to be kind, they might use more positive words like “optimistic,” “trusting,” or “hopeful,” although in the mouth of a cynic they still come across as patronizing. When we are fighting on behalf of play-based learning, our instincts are often to assume that if we only provide enough evidence or information or science, we will ultimately be persuasive, and that would be the way to go if our adversary was mere ignorance. But it’s not – it’s cynicism.

I’ve always found it easy to expect the best of young children. Maybe it’s just my nature. Maybe it’s my upbringing. Whatever the case, it is my default position, and is probably why I gravitated into this profession. By the same token, I can’t abide the knee-jerk cynicism of adults, especially adults who work with young children, who are forever expressing suspicion about children’s motives. For these cynics, a child’s tears are always manipulation, freedom will only lead to them wasting time, and if they are not kept under constant adult control it will all devolve into a Lord of the Flies dystopia.

“Cynicism is not a neutral position,” writes musician Nick Cave on his site The Red Hand Files, “and it asks almost nothing of us. It is highly infectious and unbelievably destructive. In my view, it is the most common and easy of evils.”

The only antidote to cynicism is hope, which to a cynic will always, at least at first, sound naive. But at bottom, we all have vast experience with naivete. We know it's true with children, who are the definitions of it, but I find myself turning to the Dostoevsky quote as a regular reminder that it is true for everyone. The hard-boiled detective only exists in fiction. The hopelessness that stands at the heart of cynicism is a sign of brokenness. And it is a cruelty, even abusive, to infect others, especially young children with it.

Hope knows that cynicism is armor, worn by wounded people, disguised as a chic suit of sarcasm and reason. It’s tempting to use the word misanthropy here, but I don’t think it’s that as much as self-loathing and the fear that trusting others is just a set up for pain. Cynicism views hope as weak because, from where they sit, peeking out between the slits in their armor, those innocent children and foolish adults are just setting themselves up for heartbreak. Just wait and see. And they get to be right because heartbreak is as inevitable as the sunrise. See? I told you so.

When I stand amongst children who know they have permission to play, however, I have no need of any armor, so I’ve learned to shed it, to make myself as vulnerable as they are, opening myself to heartbreak, sure, because I’m exposing my naive and simple-heartedness. I can do this because I’m confident that these children, these original people, will be kind to me, even if they aren't always gentle. They will help me, even if they don’t always know what I need. They will be generous, only objecting when commanded to “share” or “take turns.” And they trust me, even if I don't trust them. 

When I left the work-a-day world of cynicism, of adults in their armor, to enter a world of children, I had no choice but to do so disarmed. They disarmed me. I let them disarm me. I hadn’t felt so free, so purposeful, so curious, since I myself was a child. It’s a world of hope. Hope is every bit as infectious as cynicism.

And the cynics are wrong: hope is not weak.

“Unlike cynicism,” writes Cave, “hopefulness is hard-earned, makes demands upon us, and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on Earth. Hopefulness is not a neutral position either. It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism. Each redemptive or loving act, as small as you like . . . such as reading to your little boy, or showing him a thing you love, or singing him a song, or putting on his shoes, keeps the devil down in the hole.”

I love that: it is hope, not anger or fear, that makes us warriors on behalf of young children who only want to live, disarmed, open to the world and all its experiences. 

My rhetoric professor was not right about human nature, but he wasn’t entirely wrong. The cynic predicts it will rain and, if they wait long enough, they will be proven right. And they will have lived a life of waiting for the worst. Hope, however, predicts nothing. It anticipates. It knows that life is not for waiting, but for doing, right now, disarmed, making the most of each present moment, naively and simple-mindedly perhaps, but with curiosity and even awe. Hope makes us get up when we fall. Hope makes us help others when they fall. When we look forward with hope, we play with the better angels of our nature.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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

The Only Ethical Approach to Education

More than twenty years ago, while touring kindergartens for our preschool-aged daughter, the head of one private school told the assembled parents, "Our community doesn't reflect how the world is, but rather how it ought to be." Specifically, he was referring to the racial and socio-economic make-up of their enrollment and teaching staff, but he could have been talking about their emergent, project-based curriculum as well.

I wasn't yet a teacher, although I believe I'd begun toying with the idea. I liked what I saw of the place, but this idea of creating a school around how we want the world to be rather than how it is intrigued me. After all, the calling card of most schools is that they prepare children for the real world or, sometimes, the future. At the same time, having spent most of my educational life in American public schools, I was aware that a great deal of what I was taught, perhaps most of it, turned out to have nothing to do with the real world I'd been living in since graduation.

Fran Leibowitz once quipped, "I assure you, in real life there is no such thing as algebra," something that has been true in my life. The only algebraic equations I've ever solved were in math classes, whereas cooking, a skill I use every day in real life, was only offered to me as a high school elective for a single quarter. If my school had been interested in preparing me for the real world, cooking would have been on the front burner. Was 15 years of math really necessary to prepare me to for the things I use math for today like managing my money, which really is just basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division? 

Or were they preparing me for how "they" want the world to be? I doubt it. Has anyone has ever sat down and envisioned a world in which we spent our days solving for x? The best rationale I've ever heard for requiring all that mathematics education is that it teaches "hard logic," something that can be useful, of course, but if that's the goal, I can think of far more efficient and direct ways to expose children to it. Indeed, as I watch preschoolers at play, I see them practicing the habits of logical thought as they go about their block building and risk assessments.

I've singled out mathematics here, but when passed through the filter of preparing children for the real world, be it for the concrete now or some idealized future, much of what gets explicitly taught in school fails to do either. I've written before about how a truly useful curriculum, one that gives children the opportunity to learn things they will definitely use in their lives would be one centered around cooking, personal finance, basic household maintenance and repairs, auto maintenance, personal relationships, health (including mental health), grooming, social skills, psychology, and philosophy. I'm sure there are other things that could be added to the list, but these are the things I've found to be necessary in the real world and in each of them I am largely self-taught. Certainly, there were adults who pointed me in certain directions, but the learning, the acquiring of the skills was all mine.

What if we, as a society, decided to prepare children for the world as we want it to be? In the case of that one, individual private school, I imagine the head of school, in consultation with his staff, determined what that would mean. But since this approach is one designed to engineer a new and better future through what and how we teach children, the stumbling block will always be the exact definition of "new and better." In a democratic society, this is meant to be the responsibility of all of us, not just the curriculum makers. Would public schools have leave our curricula up to a popular vote of the local community? What about educators who have different ideas about the way the world ought to be? And, at bottom, this approach is about "shaping" children into a particular form, one required for a future determined not by the children themselves, who will live in that future, but rather by adults, who won't. 

I know there is a lot of gray area here, but I'm repelled by both approaches. It seems to me that preparing children for the future, which is at bottom what we are attempting to do whatever our approach, is fundamentally unethical, perhaps even immoral. From where I sit, the only ethical approach to education is to support children as they prepare them for their future, and what that means can only be determined by the children themselves.

What if we adults spent less effort trying to manufacture the citizens of tomorrow based upon either the imperfect present or how we would fix it, and more on helping children in front of us learn and achieve what they themselves want to learn and achieve right now? After all, they are the ones responsible for creating the future. They are the ones who will be living in it. Who are we to tell them what will be useful? Who are we to tell them what is a waste of time? This is why I am on the side of self-directed learning, or what we in preschool call play-based learning. 

I assure you, in real life there is no such thing as the future. There is only a single, constantly emerging now, one that we are all creating together. If we are to be ethical educators, the only approach, to my mind, is one in which we stand beside our children as they are right now, leaving the future out of it and supporting our future elders as they learn to make the most of their ever-emerging present.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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

Normal School is How We Kill Curiosity, Awe, and Wonder

"Teacher Tom, grandma and grandpa slept in my house last night!"

She'd raised her hand the moment we sat down for circle time. I knew she had something exciting and important to say even if I had no idea what it was going to be. "They're going to be here a whole week!"

Her enthusiasm was genuine and, judging by the forest of hands that shot up in response to her words, inspirational. 

"My grandma slept at my house too!"

"They slept in my room and my brother and me got to camp in the living room."

"I flew on an airplane to go to my grandparents house in Iowa."

It was a perfect circle time as the children tag-teamed their collective story for the next 30 minutes, about grandparents, flying, travel, sleepovers, excitement, and love. Even as I followed the flow, however, I was aware that in many school environments, this entire conversation would be considered a distraction. The teacher would have sat down with an agenda for this group session -- self-imposed or otherwise -- and that girl's excitement and curiosity would have been chirpily dismissed: "That's nice, but today we're talking about fall leaves." 

Of course, it's possible that fall leaves will capture a child or twos fancy. It's also possible that the teacher is talented enough to inspire interest in fall leaves. But more often than not, the lesson learned by the children in normal school is that the things they are organically excited and curious about are immaterial, so why waste time wondering about things on your own? In this process, we teach children to replace self-motivated curiosity with paying attention to what the adult is saying for the purpose of securing grades. It's a sure way to kill curiosity.

Earlier this month, education/parenting author Alfie Kohn posted a piece on his blog entitled Less and Less Curious, in which he writes about researcher Susan Engel's attempts to study variations in children's curiosity rates in suburban elementary school students. What she found, however, was "an astonishingly low rate of curiosity in any of the classrooms we visited." 

As depressing as this is, it's not surprising. From the outside, we imagine schools as a place to get questions answered, to feed curiosity, to inspire excitement about learning, but in practice, the true legacy of normal schools is that we teach our children that their own curiosity is, at best, a distraction. Engel reports that in one instance a teacher actually told a genuinely curious child, "I can't answer questions right now. Now it's time for learning."

As Kohn puts it, the children "had learned not to bother wondering." He goes on: "For more than half a century, researchers have studied our desire to explore just for the sake of exploring, our itch to make sense of the unexpected. The eminent educator Seymour Sarason argued that education should be dedicated, above all else, to stimulating the "intellectual curiosity, awe, and wonder that a child possesses when he or she begins schooling." Or at least avoid killing it."

I propose that this be our profession's most sacred oath: "Do not kill curiosity, awe, and wonder." Yet that is exactly what happens every time a teacher steers the conversation back to fall leaves. 

It shouldn't surprise anyone that curiosity is associated with higher academic achievement, but that's almost beside the point. When I'm with children excitedly raising their hands to talk about grandmas and sleepovers, I know that my job is done. I know that I've created an environment in which curiosity, awe, and wonder are stimulated. And that's not just the secret to success in school, it's the ultimate secret to a successful life: one full of curiosity, awe, and wonder.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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

"At Least it's Better Than a Sharp Stick in the Eye"

Our three year old was complaining that something hadn't gone exactly as she'd hoped. At some point I said, "At least it's better than a sharp stick in the eye."

She paused in thought for a moment, then replied, "Everything is better than a sharp stick in the eye!"

My wife and I, over our decades together, have developed a collection of "jokes" that may not exactly make us guffaw any longer, but that we nevertheless return to again and again because, well, they allow us to feel more in control. This is "sharp stick" joke is one of those. I guess it's sort of our version of the advice to "look on the bright side."

Another of our jokes, the one I often call the best joke ever told, is one evoked whenever the pressure is on. All it takes is for one of us to say, "This is the critical phase." We've been telling this joke for some 40 years and it never gets old. We laugh because it reminds us that life is a never-ending series of critical phases, each looming large when resolution is in the future, but appearing as no big deal in hindsight.

I can't tell you how many times a marital spat has been nipped in the bud by one of us having the comedic chops to say, "I'm sure you're right." Try it sometime.

The ability to make light of a bad situation, even cynically or sarcastically or ironically, stands as an unappreciated, but vital social-emotional skill. Obviously, there are often times when a joke is unwelcome or an attempt to deflect the truth, but laughter (or at least a knowing smirk) is often the only thing that prevents us from crying all day. It's, in a way, an extension or corallary to the advice to "pick your battles." 

When a child responds to, say, spilled water with "Oh brother, not again!" or "I did that on purpose," I identify it as this kind of coping device, one I know they've learned from me because those are among the "jokes" I intentionally role model by telling them on myself when I publicly fail or flub. I once pinched my fingertip in a door hinge. When a kid asked me if it hurt, I replied, through the pain, "It's only a flesh wound." Moments later, she repeated the line after a fall on the pavement: "It's only a flesh wound." It didn't change the fact that she needed some first aid, but it did transform the immediate story, in a flash, from tragedy to comedy, because the only real difference between the two is the ending.

I replied our daughter's epiphany about our family joke by saying, "Exactly!" She then proceeded to set her complaint aside for the moment as she joyfully listed all the bad things in life that we're, nevertheless, still better than a sharp stick in the eye: lima beans, spiders, Cruella . . .

Humor in charged moments can be tricky in that it's often perceived as insensitive or dismissive, and it certainly can be, but it also has the power to diffuse, divert, and snap things into perspective in a way that furrowed brows and earnest words often cannot. When we role model humorful responses to our own flaws and flubs, we allow children to see that there are times when it can be an empowering choice to laugh through our tears. When we respond to our own minor set-backs with humor we show children that we can, even in times of difficulty, remain the masters of our own fate, and that with a few words, we can transform ourselves and the moment.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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The Secret to a Happy and Satisfactory Marriage

"This was a happy and satisfactory marriage," writes Doris Lessing in her novel The Summer Before the Dark, "because both she and Michael had understood, and very early on, the core of discontent, or of hunger, if you like, which is unfailingly part of every modern marriage -- of everything, and that was the point -- had nothing to do with either partner. Or with marriage. It was fed and heightened by what people were educated to expect of marriage, which was a very great deal because the texture of ordinary life . . . was thin and unsatisfactory. Marriage has had a load heaped on it which it could not sustain."

When the subject comes up, I often say, "My wife and I have been married for 38 years . . ." I pause there to let the listener respond, usually with something like, "Congratulations." When I say it in front of an audience, it typically gets a cheer. I then turn it into a joke, "And let me tell you, it only feels like 37."

When I'm with newlyweds, I both envy and pity them. The envy is for the giddy present with all its hopes and plans. The pity is because, as Lessing puts it, "marriage has had a load heaped on it" and if the two of them don't find outside interests and relationships, and support one another in their outside interests and relationships, they will invariably come to blame their discontent on one another.

Obviously, some marriages suck, especially when one of the partners is abusive, neglectful, or dishonest, but most of the time, as marriage guru John Gottman's research finds, "69% of conflict in a relationship is perpetual. It has no resolution because it is based on lasting differences in personalities and needs. Couples can either dialogue about these issues or feel stuck." 

I've heard people say that they don't plan to get married because they don't like bickering, and that's exactly what marriage can be, 69 percent of the time, unless your up to doing the work. I've never seen research on this, but I would assert that Gottman's 69 percent applies to any important, enduring relationship, including that of a parent and child. I mean, there's a lot of bickering there as well, the difference being that in a marriage, if one person regularly resorts to "Because I said so!" that's grounds for divorce. Ideally, in a marriage there is no ongoing, my-way-or-the-highway power differential, but for many of us the power of a parent over a child stands at the core of the relationship. I imagine that this is why so many of us grow up to either resent our parents (even as we love them) or seek to create a distance (even as we love them).

Weddings are the happy ending to our novels and movies. Our little girls, especially, are raised on this idea. But as anyone who has been married for any length of time will tell you, weddings are easy, marriage takes work. Perhaps, as many assert, marriage, especially long term ones like ours, is unnatural. I can see that marriage might feel like a cage. And I understand the hope that maybe the next wedding or the next will result in a happy marriage. 

My mother-in-law remarried shortly before Jennifer and I did. We were all newlyweds together. Some years into her second marriage, she confessed, "I have all the same problems in this marriage that I had in my first one. I guess I have to face the fact that the problem is me." I think about my mother-in-law and Gottman's 69 percent every time Jennifer and I bicker. When I do that, I see that much of the time, if I were to win the argument, it would mean somehow changing who Jennifer is . . . And, of all the things I want, I don't want that. Indeed, it's the aspects of her that aren't like me that ensures our life together will not be thin or unsatisfactory. I do, however, have an abiding and lifelong interest in changing me, hopefully for the better.

The parent-child relationship has had a load heaped on it as well. It's unlike marriage in that it's one of blood and instinct. But like marriage, it's meant to be a lifelong commitment. That's the beauty of both. That's why we celebrate weddings and births, even as we all know, make no mistake, that there is bickering (and probably worse) ahead. The other important difference is that parents know, from the very start, that the goal is to set their children free. What I've learned from 40 years together, more than anything else, is that this is also the goal of marriage. That, to me at least, is the secret to a happy and satisfactory marriage.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

 

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