"But When You Hit Him, It Hurts Him."

I think this story beautifully illustrates why we should make no assumptions when a 2-year-old hits another child. I hope it also shows how taking a lazy short cut, like spanking or scolding, would have only served to further bewilder a child who was already confused about hitting.

My first day teaching the Pre-3 class was an eye-opener. A boy was crying, probably because someone was playing with a toy he wanted. Ellie rushed over and started pummeling the poor kid. She rained blows down upon his head and shoulders like no body’s business. There was absolutely no malice in Ellie’s face as she did this. In fact, she looked almost like she was just taking care of a necessary piece of business.

Over the next few weeks, I found Ellie to be a happy, loving, very verbal little girl, but whenever a classmate cried her response was to start beating on him. I tried repeatedly to get her to tell me something that would give me insight into what she was thinking before she finally said, “I want him to stop crying.”

I answered, “But when you hit him, it hurts him.”

The blank stare followed by a quick change of subjects was enough to tell me that as delightful and articulate as she was, Ellie was not ready to comprehend the concept. Clearly, she knew there was a connection between hitting, hurting and crying, but the wires in that connection were crossed.

After that, when a child cried I let another adult tend to him, while my first order of business was to find Ellie, shadow her, and grab her wrists just before the fisticuffs. I would then help her to gently pat her crying friend by guiding her hands with my own, kind of like she was my own personal soothing puppet. She soon got the hang of it, eventually turning those gentle strokes into hugs. Of course, at first, the hugs were overly enthusiastic and tended to wind up with both kids falling to the floor, but once again, employing the time-tested scientific method of trial and error she figured that one out too.

This is real work, even if it sometimes just looks like mayhem. We expect every child to learn these basic lessons. Thankfully they don’t all have to learn it the hard way.

But some do.

(Reprinted, with revisions, from 8/12/09)

More Golden Oldies (And Airline Update)

Two quick things today . . .

Yesterday, a parent of a couple of our alumni who have outgrown some of their old things swung by at the end of class to donate some very cool toys to the school. I told her that I think of Woodland Park as a great place to "use up" the rest of what's left in old toys.

The same goes for toys from my own childhood, about which I've written before. I stopped being a professional football fan decades ago, but with all the NFL playoff action on TV these past few weeks, I thought it would be time to break out these oldies:

If you don't recognize some of the helmets it's because they've changed so dramatically since I was a boy, although many are still similar. I don't recall how I acquired this set. I must have ordered it from somewhere, but it was intended simply as a collection that you could display on these goal post displays:

By brother and I did, however, invent a game to play with them that involved flicking them at one another with our fingers, but mostly it was all about sorting and organizing, which is what the kids did with them yesterday.

*****

And as a follow up to yesterday's post about our classroom airline, I thought I'd share a picture of our baby airplane:

I know, I thought I always flew on Screaming Baby Airlines, but now I know it could be worse . . . Yes, I am an old fuddy-duddy.

Am I An Old Fuddy-Duddy?

When in doubt, flip a table over. When we added a few suitcases, this one became an airplane. It's been a train before, a boat, a fire truck. We've painted on the bottoms of other tables using a variety of techniques, applied glitter, bounced ping pong balls, and played tic-tac-toe. Flipping a table is easier than actually rearranging furniture and achieves the same result of altering perspectives. Besides, I may be getting to be too much of an old fuddy-duddy to change the whole room. I like it just the way it is, thank you very much. (I don't feel the same way about our outdoor classroom, however, but that's probably because it's less than a year old.)

I know at one point they were flying to the beach. They all came over to the block area carrying their suit cases, calling it the beach, but then went right back to the airplane. Remember when flying was sometimes more fun than the destination? These days, to me at least, flying feels like this:

Some of them sat in those chairs on the bottom of the table for the better part of a half hour. It kind of made me wish we had some need for them all to sit so still for so long in a single place, but we never do. 

I'm also old enough to remember when people used to dress up a little when they flew, respecting their fellow passengers with something other than sweats, shorts and flip flops.

Does that make me sound like too much of an old fuddy-duddy? I suppose it had to happen sometime. And then there's always that guy who insists on getting thing in and out of his carry-on. I'm ashamed to admit I find it annoying even when he's not sitting next to me. Yes, at least when it comes to flying, I'm an old fuddy-duddy.

It was a long flight and I don't think any of them cared where they were going. It was all about the journey, a lesson for this old fuddy-duddy to keep in mind.

Baggage

Our greatest strength as an important adult in the life of a child, and our greatest weakness, is the number of years we've spent on the planet. On our good days we call it experience; on our bad it's baggage. Whatever we're calling it in this moment, it often makes it impossible to see the world the way it really is for young children.

When our daughter Josephine was a preschooler, one of these vastly wiser beings read a book about the nastiness of middle school girls, the back-stabbing, the ostracizing, the cliques, reflected on her own girlhood, and concluded that my daughter and her clutch of 3 friends were destined to a life of meanness based upon their experimentations with excluding others.

She was wrong. Today, Josephine is an 8th grader, and while I'm sure she's been far from perfect in her relationships with others, I'm proud of how inclusive she is in her friendships. In my 12 years in preschool classrooms, I can't think of a girl who hasn't at some point played the game of choosing who is in and who is out -- it's a way to feel powerful in the world and the only way to learn about it is through experience, from both sides. I suspect that those middle school mean girls are the very ones who didn't have the chance to adequately learn about the dynamics and emotions of exclusion when they were young, so now they're catching up.

Preschool is the natural time to learn about these things and just as the only way to learn about a hammer is to hit your own thumb a few times, the only way to learn about relationships is to experience the sting of rejection from both sides, often over and over until it sinks in. Young children have short memories and resilient emotions for the same reason they have bodies that heal quickly: they are designed to learn this way. And when these lessons are somehow saved until middle school, those broken thumbs and broken hearts take much, much longer to heal, and often leave more lasting scars.

A child psychiatrist once told me that when treating victims of sexual abuse, some of the worst damage is caused by the overreactions of the loving adults in their lives; those who bring their "baggage" to bear on what for the child is often just another "owie" inflicted by a bigger, stronger other.

Responding to yesterday's post about "violent play" among boys, Sylvia and Zachary's mom Toby commented:

In general . . . I think there's a lot of judgement and fretting over this sort of play. Adults tend to bring their baggage and read it as if the children are fully aware of the implications of their play . . . which, at four, they're simply not.

Even using the label "violent play" is an unfair, inaccurate judgement on my part. It's more like "fantasy action" play -- at least that's how I remember it feeling as a boy. That is the truth of it. The "violent" aspect is something we as adults lay over it.

In a very real sense, young children live in a different world than the one in which we do. It's part of what makes childhood a magical place. They are still forming their judgments, exploring all the angles, and thinking about those questions that we, in our wisdom, consider settled law.

It's natural, of course, that we with our broader perspective would see behaviors in our children and worry about what that portends for their future. But the better part of wisdom can be found in the phrase so often on the lips of grandparents, "Oh, it's just a phase." Everything passes. Chubby kids become thin. Shy children blossom. Hitters grow into gentle giants. Cryers become philosophers.

Naturally, we steer and warn and teach. Our experience, after all, does have value. We don't leave children entirely to their own devices because we do have the ability to look forward to anticipate the dangers ahead. But at the same time, we have to remain aware of our own "baggage" and how much that hinders our ability to see the world through our children's eyes.

Last night, Josephine and her friends went to a party wearing their short shorts. My first reaction was to warn them that they'd be cold, but the next was the urge to blurt the classic line, "You're going out dressed like that?" Oh my head was full of all kinds of judgments, from the perspectives of both father and former teenaged boy, neither of whom could see the world the way she did. Fortunately, I think, I kept my mouth shut, instead reflecting that it must feel pretty good to be able to turn heads, especially within the relatively safe confines of a like-aged, chaperoned dance party. Just because she's trying out the power of sex-appeal as a 14-year-old, that doesn't mean she's destined for a life of . . . (insert derogatory term for a sexually assertive woman here). In fact, as hard as it is for a father, I have to know that, developmentally, this is the time to start experimenting with that whole thing, like dramatic play, to learn some skills before it all becomes real.

Ah, it's such a muddy, impossible thing this looking at the world as it is, not just for ourselves, but for the children we love.

We know so much more than they do that it's easy to take the wrong path, to run ahead, to get everyone lost.

It's tempting to want to put them in a box and only let them out when they're older, but if we did, of course, we know they'd have to run out and make all those mistakes, learn all those lessons anyway, because after all, everyone of us has baggage. And looking forward in all honesty, we know they will too. It'll just be different baggage than yours.

This Is A Complicated Thing

I've written about this before, but I really do want to know why male primates show a strong preference for toy cars when it comes to choosing with what to play, but no one knows. I haven't even seen a credible sounding theory. Why wheeled vehicles? It doesn't make sense. What did caveman boys play with before the invention of the wheel? Whatever the case, I'm sure the wheel was invented by a tinkering child long before it was adapted for "useful" purposes. 

The universality of play among children across all cultures throughout human history, and indeed across mammal and bird species, indicates that a period of play is adaptive and necessary. That it's the primary way by which we learn in our youth is really, ultimately, why the so-called "education reformers" will fail in their efforts to turn learning into work (although that doesn't mean they can't damage an entire generation of children if parents and teachers don't continue to push back). As the great psychologist Karl Groos wrote:

The very existence of youth is due in part to the necessity for play; the animal does not play because he is young, he has a period of youth because he must play.

Through a quirk of demographics, I've wound up this year with a Pre-K class (my oldest group) of all boys: nine of them. Some are more motivated by cars than others, but they all share to one degree or another their vervet and rheus brothers' preference for playing with cars. If play is essential and cars are universal, then the boys are clearly learning something very important from this kind of play. I can only assume that the survival of our species is dependent upon these boys learning the basic concepts of motion, density, gravity, friction, and momentum, and naturally, they are learning important social skills when they play together, practicing for adult roles when they engage in dramatic play, and bonding as friends over their shared passion, all of which are clearly important.

In the series of photos with which I've illustrated this post, you can see I've used their interest in cars to extend our MLK color mixing experiments from the prior week. Boys aren't always interested in sit-down art projects, but this wasn't one of those times. (I buy a lot of these plain wooden cars from Discount School supply. I find them useful for all kinds of purposes.)

I don't need to know why, but do want to know.

What I really need to know these days, however, is why boys are so prone to be attracted to violent play. The standard explanation is that they are socialized into it, although I've seen surveys and studies that show gun play and other forms of violet play among boys is pretty universal (although I know of nothing that shows it crossing into the animal kingdom). I'm also not generally disturbed by boys who play superheroes, or soldiers, or pirates, but our 9 boys together, our oldest students, the guys who are looked up to, have begun to feed off one another in a way that is starting to make even me feel like we need to take some action to re-direct their play. It can get pretty intense and, at times, overwhelm some of the younger children who find themselves caught up in it.

It's a delicate balance we need to walk, I think. None of these boys, of course, are actually violent. They are not doing anything "bad" or wrong. In fact, it reminds me very much of my own boyhood when we used to play the same games, big and little boys together, "shooting" and "punching" and saving the world. I also remember it becoming too intense for me at times. I'd come home scared, nervous, and full of disturbing ideas. I'd revert for a few days of playing with my cars or stuffed animals or coloring books, but ultimately I'd always go back.

On Tuesday, we revisited MLK, the great man of peace. I retold them the story, going back to slavery, emphasizing how angry it made people feel and how many of them turned to violence. Then, as I showed them a particularly heroic and patriotic illustration of MLK, I explained how he taught us to fight with words not fists, with love not hate. I then brought up my concerns, emphasizing that some of the younger children, sometimes, were feeling afraid at preschool. They all agreed that they didn't want their friends to feel afraid.

I tried to let them direct the conversation from there as we discussed ways to deal with "bad guys" which quickly became a discussion of Batman, Star Wars, and other fictional depictions of good vs. evil. I responded, each time, "But that's not real, Martin Luther King was real," pointing to the picture I still held. "In the real world," I said, "Words are better than fists."

I'm not sharing this as an example of the right thing to do, but it is what came to me in the moment. And some of the boys even pushed back, insisting that indeed "Star Wars is real. I saw it." (The media is clearly a very potent drug in this question; one we as adults in children's lives must strive to counteract.) But they were engaged. They were sitting together, eyes forward, hands off one another. Most of them said, "Pretend," when I listed examples of popular heros, asking, "Is that real or pretend?" Charlie L. suggested that we could hug or stroke people instead of hitting them. 

I don't want to lecture kids -- that never works -- and I certainly don't want to make them ashamed. It's about empathy, I guess, a notoriously challenging thing to teach young children. I don't want them to stop fantasizing about these heroic figures, but rather to be aware of how their play, especially when it's all 9 of these virtual brothers together, is impacting others. I don't expect them to suddenly become a classroom full of MLKs, but I do want them to understand that in the real world we don't solve our problems with fists or guns.

I suspect that this tendency toward what we label violent play, like the proneness of males to choose to play with cars, is an adaptive trait with roots deeply sunk into our evolutionary past. And just like we don't really know the source of the attraction to wheels, we don't understand the source of the attraction to "violent" play. I know I barely made a dent last Tuesday, but we have 4 more months together. This is a time when they need our adult helping hands.

At the end of the day on Tuesday, about 15 minutes after we'd wrapped up our conversation, I sang our "goodbye song." As parents chatted, some of the boys began to thrust their hands at one another, violently, shouting, "Shock!" They were excited, beaming, alive. It looked like a lot of fun. I've known these boys for a long time. They don't want their classmates to feel afraid. They are gentle, loving boys. They are going to grow into gentle, loving men. 

This is a complicated thing.

It Raises The Same Questions

I wrote yesterday about how our school is operating during the week I've taken off to help manage my family's move, but yesterday I was in there for our Pre-3 class' parent meeting.

The first thing that caught my eye was this interesting composition on the bench in our boat:

Man, I want to know how this happened. Was it just one kid who did this? Two? A whole a gang?

Was there a shared story that went along with it or was it a silent, cooperative construction project like the one that broke out last week in the Pre-3 class?

It uses loose parts that I've not seen touched for months. Was my absence the cause of this or was it the different presence of Teacher Terry or Teacher Brooke, the parent-teachers in our cooperative who've been filling my role? Maybe an adult made it? 

I don't need to know the how of it, of course, the fact that it's there at all is enough to be assured that children are learning and the school lives with our without me. 

Inside, I found this, a sorting of the cutlery unlike anything I'd ever seen before. Usually it's all just tossed in there.

It raises the same mystifying questions and provides the same satisfying answers. This is the place I want to spend the rest of my life.

(Personal note: Today is the final day of my family's move. I'm sitting in my new living room surrounded by boxes, but the internet is already up and running so no more excuses!)