"Comparison is the Thief of Joy"

I recently met a parent "in the wild," who, when she learned what I do for a living, began telling me why her son is perfectly normal. In other words, she, like many parents, had some doubts about it.

"Normal" is not a useful concept when it comes to human beings, and most especially young children. In recent decades, we've attempted replace it with the word "typical" -- as in neurotypical -- but in the minds of nervous parents I'm not sure there's much difference between the two.

Theodore Roosevelt once said, "Comparison is the thief of joy." Normal and typical are terms of comparison that run so deep in modern education that it can be hard to conceive of institutionalized learning without them. We grade and rank children, we expect them to meet or exceed arbitrary "standards" and "developmental milestones," we fret about reading above or below "grade level." Not so long ago, our youngest citizens weren't victims of these ham-fisted comparisons until well into elementary school, but today they are being analyzed and assessed from the moment they're born, always having hoops placed before them to prove they are "normal."

No wonder our children are so depressed, stressed, fragile, and joyless. The process of normalization in normal schools is crushing. It plays out as a relentless focus on each child's deficits, which means a search for ways in which they do not fully measure up. Oh sure, we celebrate those who exceed the standards, but when children are extraordinary in any way that the system does not measure, their unique traits are deemed to be challenging behaviors. Their extraordinariness is evidence of an inability to focus. Or a waste of time. They are then tutored, punished, pathologized, and even drugged in order to bring them in line with normal.

I've never met a normal or typical child. They are all extraordinary. This is not an empty platitude. I've spent my professional career refusing to engage in the violence of comparison. This is often frustrating to parents who have been brainwashed into worrying about how their kid measure up to normal, but when I'm asked to assess any child, I only talk about their superpowers. I talk about what spurs their curiosity and what sparks their joy. I delight in their quirks, eccentricities, and passions. This is my job: to figure out what gives them joy, then to do whatever I can to make it possible for them to be joyful. 

The flaw in a school system (or child rearing) based on normal is that the focus on deficits presumes there is some process or method by which we can somehow get all the kids to measure up, to toe the line, to be like everybody else. It defines "extraordinary" in a very narrow and, frankly, arbitrary range, which, of course, leaves most kids out.

Play-based preschool is the only educational method I know that fully embraces the extraordinary in every child. It should never be about comparison, but rather the joy of learning what it means for each child to come fully alive. 

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Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in 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.

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