America's Best Mother

I'm trying to not be too much of a hype master, but I'm sure that anyone who reads here with any regularity knows that we're in the midst of The Play First Summit, a free online gathering of 70,000 early childhood educators and parents of preschoolers from around the world. Lenore Skenazy, founder of the Free Range Kids movement and Let Grow, is one of the experts on today's agenda. I'll leave Lenore to tell the full story, but in a nutshell, she stepped into her role as a leading anti-helicopter parenting crusader upon being labelled in the media as "America's Worst Mom" when she wrote about allowing her nine-year-old to ride the New York City subway alone. 

Lenore and her husband had discussed it and decided together that this was a "risk" worth taking. It was a joint parenting decision, but I'm sure it doesn't surprise anyone that her husband wasn't labelled "America's Worst Dad." When it comes to young children women are always held to a higher standard than men. I see it myself as a male teacher. I've often been praised simply for making the effort, for showing up, while my female counterparts have to actually demonstrate they are skilled educators in order to receive the same kind of attention. Indeed, even after nearly two decades as a preschool teacher, parents still tell me they picked our school simply because I am a man. As a stay-at-home father, people would regularly say, "Good for you" to me, patting me on the back for simply trying to fill the role of caretaker, letting me off the hook for my "failings," whereas no one says that sort of thing to stay-at-home mothers. Women have to actually demonstrate June Cleaver level parenting skills in order to be adjudged worthy of a compliment. 

Developmental psychologist and author Alison Gopnik, in her book The Carpenter and The Gardner, writes about how the word "parenting" is a relatively new phenomenon. She found that until about 1962, the word wasn't much used in the media, but from that time forward, its use exploded to the point that we now have an entire industry devoted to "parenting." Her point is that prior to that time, it was enough to simply be a parent, to have a loving relationship with your child, whereas today we've turned the relationship into a job that one must do to and for your children. She notes we've not done that with our other foundational relationships. We don't do wifing or friending or childing, but when it comes to being a parent, and especially a female parent, we've made it into a project. And not only that, it's a project upon which you're going to be judged. I don't think it's an accident that this happened right at the time that the Women's Liberation Movement was starting to take hold, making it possible for more and more women to consider assuming roles beyond wife and mother. It was the patriarchy asserting itself to keep women in their place by making them feel extra guilty for somehow neglecting their children. That's just my amateur assessment, but whatever the case, if fathers are judged as parents at all, they're given high marks just for making the effort. In other words, "parenting," as the concept is generally understood, applies to women far more than men.

Another of our presenters today, Maggie Dent, likes to say, "You don't have to be a perfect parent." I like to tell young parents that if they can do the things the parenting experts say 30 percent of the time, they'll be the best parent on earth. That percentage is based on nothing more than my assessment of my own performance as a parent: I made all the "mistakes" one can make, yet today our daughter is an intelligent, talented, self-confident, self-motivated young woman who has good friends and works well with others. The only credit I take is that I always make sure she knows I love and support her. Beyond that, I'm not sure any of the "parenting" I did made a lick of difference one way or another. Indeed, Gopnik writes:

"(I)t is very difficult to find any reliable, empirical relation between the small variations in what parents do . . . and the resulting adult traits of their children. There is very little evidence that conscious decisions about co-sleeping or not, letting your children "cry it out" or holding them till they fall asleep, or forcing them to do extra homework or letting them play have reliable and predictable long-term effects on who those children become."

In contrast, we know that when children know they are loved and supported by the important adults in their lives, it forms a foundation from which they can learn to live life on their own terms, knowing that they are free to explore, to make mistakes, and to try again. Children deserve parents of all genders who love and trusted him enough to let him make their own discoveries about themselves and the world around them. It's the relationship that matters, not the parenting, which is at best hit or miss even for the best of us.

Lenore tells us that when her son arrived home after his solo subway trip, he was alive with the glow of his independent accomplishment. I think that makes her "America's Best Mom" right alongside every other mother who loves her children and lets them know it.

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Today's the day! The first day of The Play First Summit is upon us. Please join us for this free event featuring twenty of the world's top early childhood and parenting thought leaders, including Janet Lansbury, Peter Gray, Lisa Murphy, Ijumaa Jordan, Maggie Dent, and Cheng Xuequin (Anji Play). This is not just another series of lectures, but rather a collection of conversations about our challenging times, how they are impacting young children and families, what we can do about it, and how we might seize this moment to transform the early years into what they ought to be for children everywhere. To see the full list of speakers and to register, click here.

Also, Teacher Tom's Second Book is now available in the UK, Iceland, and Europe thanks to my friends at Fafunia! It's also available in the US and Canada. If you want to go directly to the Fafunia page click here.  And if you missed it, Teacher Tom's First Book is back in print as well.

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 Summer of the Storm Sewer Trench

One summer, the city dug up the street in front of our house in order to lay down concrete storm sewer pipes. They used a digger to break through the asphalt, digging a trench several feet deeper than we were tall. I don't recall the workers or the work as much as the playground they left behind when they went home at the end of each day. My parents were okay with us playing the trench, but they warned us to stay off of the idle digger, which we did, even as we got as close as we could, studying every detail of the amazing machine that had turned up on our street.

All other games were on hold during the era of the trench. Initially, some of the other kids from Wembley Street were forbidden from clambering around on the broken rocks and clods of red clay soil, but after a few days their parents, for the most part, relented, and we all played in there. What could our parents do? Our street was our play yard. We were out there all day long, every day, out of our mothers' hair. Wembley Street was a spur of road lined with some 20 suburban houses, capped on one end by a cul-de-sac. We only had to dodge traffic in the mornings when our fathers left for work and the early evenings when they came home. The rest of the day it belonged to the kids of Wembley Street.

During the summer of the trench, our usual games of kickball and pinecone fights were set aside in favor of games of adventure and exploration. As they began to lay the segments of huge concrete pipe into the hole, we became spelunkers, daring one another to go deeper and deeper into the dark tunnel. We challenged one another to jump into the hole. We collected rocks from the "center of the earth." We pretended we were astronauts on the surface of the moon. Once, while playing atop the concrete pipe, we made it shift, causing a large seam to open up between two adjoining segments. Panicked, we stuffed it full of rocks and debris in the hopes of hiding the damage we had caused.

The trench was, in every way, a miracle.

Sometimes one of us would scrape a knee or something, which we would wash off with a garden hose, not wanting to alert any of the adults lest they decide it was too dangerous for us. Several of us began to pack adhesive bandages in our pockets just in case. By taking these precautions we kept our own parents at bay, but one adult, the father of the only three children who were not allowed to play in the trench, took it upon himself to scold us whenever he spotted us playing there. Like most of the fathers, he was gone during the day, but when we spied his car turn the corner we would scatter, hiding behind shrubbery in the ridiculous hope that he hadn't seen us. In hindsight, I'm sure he was simply a kindhearted man, trying to keep us safe, but in our minds he was the villain, a character that added savor to our play. Adults, even our own mothers and fathers, were often cast in that role.

You see, adults were fun stealers. We loved them, of course, but whenever they were around, arbitrary limits were imposed. We had to watch what we said, "settle down," and "be careful." There were so many things we couldn't do with adult eyes on us. It was Mr. Sain who banned tackle football when he saw his older, larger son barreling over us little kids. It was Mrs. Hodges who complained about the path we'd worn in her lawn by using it as a short cut to play with kids on Christopher Street. It was Mrs. Broom who shouted out her window at us when we tried watering her roses by putting water in the blossoms instead of around the roots. Killjoys all.

Today, I imagine we might be considered "wild" or "feral," bad influences, or rotten kids. Some would have likely blamed our parents, sternly insisting that we needed more "tough love," that we were out of control and destructive. Indeed, the authorities would probably be called on us for our petty acts of accidental vandalism, trespassing, or called on our parents for allowing us to be outdoors unsupervised. But then, in 1970, we were just considered regular kids, doing what kids do, growing up, playing together, and having good clean fun. 

I suppose I should now make a list of all the ways in which we were educating ourselves through this unsupervised play, but that's so beside the point that it's meaningless. 

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Today's the day! The first day of The Play First Summit is upon us. Please join us for this free event featuring twenty of the world's top early childhood and parenting thought leaders, including Janet Lansbury, Peter Gray, Lisa Murphy, Ijumaa Jordan, Maggie Dent, and Cheng Xuequin (Anji Play). This is not just another series of lectures, but rather a collection of conversations about our challenging times, how they are impacting young children and families, what we can do about it, and how we might seize this moment to transform the early years into what they ought to be for children everywhere. To see the full list of speakers and to register, click here.

Also, Teacher Tom's Second Book is now available in the UK, Iceland, and Europe thanks to my friends at Fafunia! It's also available in the US and Canada. If you want to go directly to the Fafunia page click here.  And if you missed it, Teacher Tom's First Book is back in print as well.

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!

And We Wonder Why Students Aren't "Motivated"

"Seize the day!" It's one of those idioms we use to motivate ourselves, simple enough to say, but not always so easy to do. "Smile!" "Look on the bright side!" "Think positive!" Most of us know not to say these things to other people. Not only is it unsolicited advice which is rarely welcome, but it's advice that's impossible to accept when you're feeling insecure, unhappy, or depressed. Indeed, it tends to sound like scolding when even the most well-intended persons says, "Make those lemons into lemonade!" 

These idioms are perhaps somewhat more effectively applied too oneself. At least once a day, I urge myself to, "Buck up!" or remind myself, "This is the day you've been waiting for!" I'm not always capable of sparking the desired motivation, but every now and then I'll hit myself at just the right moment, typically one of privileged self-pity, and it gets me going for an hour or a day. But I've come to realize that if I'm counting on cliches to get me through, there is either something fundamentally wrong with what I'm trying to do or with myself. And more often than not, the thing I'm trying to cajole myself through is "necessary" work that is, for me, devoid of meaning.

One of the bits of common wisdom that is trotted out for those who would defend traditional schooling is that children need to learn to do things they don't want to do, which is why "desk work" is so important, why remaining still and quiet for long periods of time is essential, and why play should be kept to a minimum in favor of "instructional time." This is what life is like, or so their reasoning goes, and the kids need to get used to it. It's a harsh, unnecessary lesson, because in the end, no one ever "gets used to" being forced to labor at work that is devoid of meaning: we either rebel or we fall into behavior patterns that look from the outside a lot like depression, a mental illness that has, not incidentally, risen sharply among children in recent decades as we've aggressively stripped our schools of more and more meaning, replacing it with tests and grades and desk time.

And we wonder why students aren't "motivated." It's an entire sub-industry. I recall school hallways lined with motivational posters, "Hang in there!" and "Be your best!" and the like. The internet is full of advice for motivating students, workshops about it, even entire books. If only we could get the kids motivated then they will consume this curriculum with the relish it deserves. The curriculum is rarely questioned, after all it was developed by big brain adults who certainly know what all kids need. It's these damn kids these days who have a motivation problem.

The problem is never the kids. The problem is a curriculum that is devoid of meaning, and it's devoid of meaning because the children have no choice in the matter: this is the crap we've decided you need to learn, or rather, this is the work you have to do so get motivated. 

I'll never forget randomly meeting a teacher of one of my friend's kids. I knew him be a boy of passions. Whenever I saw him, he would enthuse about outer space or his electric trains. As he got older he became a collector of knives and loved nothing more than to set out a careful display of his hardware, complete with a lecture on the proper use and care of each. He went deeply into music for a time, teaching himself the guitar. As he got older, he got into bicycles, building new ones from old parts. He always had something going on in that wonderful, curious brain of his. When I told this teacher I knew his student, he said to me, with a worried look on his face, "That kid has motivation problems." I then argued the boy's case, telling this teacher about the kid I know. The teacher brightened, "I had no idea. I wish he'd open up to me!"

Some weeks later, I shared this story with the boy. He grimaced. I said in defense of the teacher, "I just think he doesn't know the real you." The boy answered, "I don't want my teachers to know anything about me. If they know what I like, they'll use it against me." He explained, "Whenever teachers know what a kid likes, they try to take it away and use it as, like, a reward for good grades or something." 

Like I said, he is a smart kid. Teachers stuck with curricula that is devoid of meaning are forever seeking ways to motivate children. The most ham-fisted of them resort to things like withholding recess or extracurriculars or art or music in an attempt to use them as carrots in their never-ending quest for motivation.

It's a cruel game we play with children who are born motivated, who don't need sloganeering or tricks or threats in order to find this world full of meaning and worthy of their passionate interest. When children are free to choose, to pursue what genuinely interests them, what is meaningful to them, motivation is never a problem.

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The countdown has begun for The Play First Summit! Please join us for this free event featuring twenty of the world's top early childhood and parenting thought leaders, including Janet Lansbury, Peter Gray, Lisa Murphy, Ijumaa Jordan, Maggie Dent, and Cheng Xuequin (Anji Play). This is not just another series of lectures, but rather a collection of conversations about our challenging times, how they are impacting young children and families, what we can do about it, and how we might seize this moment to transform the early years into what they ought to be for children everywhere. To see the full list of speakers and to register, click here.

Also, Teacher Tom's Second Book is now available in the UK, Iceland, and Europe thanks to my friends at Fafunia! It's also available in the US and Canada. If you want to go directly to the Fafunia page click here.  And if you missed it, Teacher Tom's First Book is back in print as well.

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!

How to Persuade Another Person

When I was young I held the simple idea that there were good guys and bad guys. We played cops and robbers, Americans and Nazis, Batman and this week's Gotham City underworld villain. One day, as we were playing cowboys and Indians, an older child said to us, "You know, the Indians didn't think they were bad. They thought they were good." We ignored him in the moment, continuing our game, but it was never again the same.

I didn't know it at the time, of course, but this was the beginning of the end for my whole good guy-bad guy dichotomy. The older child, having not long ago been our age, fully understood where we were coming from on the subject and had introduced an idea that caused me to recognize that my ideas were in conflict with themselves. As I stewed on the notion over the following days, it was painful to realize that even the Nazis had probably thought they were good, that even the robbers had more to their story.

The only thing left of this old worldview were superheroes, fully fictional characters, who live in a less complex fantasy universe, which is the only place the simple idea of good and bad could survive.

This was an era in which we played together outdoors with minimal supervision, so I doubt our parents were more than passingly aware of the specifics of any game we played, but I'm certain that had our adults known we were portraying Indians as "bad" they would have told us were wrong and forbidden us from playing our game. Indeed, we would have likely been lectured, and the lesson we would have learned was to not play that game in front of the adults again.

The way to move a person's thoughts and feelings is not by trying to excise them and replace them with other thoughts and feelings. Rather, it first requires us to fully understand that persons' thoughts and feelings, which the older boy already did with with us, having only recently been a devotee of the good guy-bad guy dichotomy. Most of the time, however, this means creating a space for the person to articulate his or her own thoughts as we listen, asking honest questions with the goal of fully understanding their point of view from every angle until their ideas begin to conflict with themselves. This is the opportunity. This is when complexity shows itself. In turn, complexity invites us to think and it's while we think that learning happens.

If we are going to move a person's thoughts and feelings, which is what we try to do when we seek to persuade another person, we rarely succeed through argument, no matter how rational. And no mind has ever been changed through scolding, shaming, or lecturing. No, if we are going to move a person's thoughts and feelings, we need them to think, and that will only happen when we strive to understand that other person through actively listening and earnestly questioning until complexities emerge. The rest is up to them.

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The countdown has begun for The Play First Summit! Please join us for this free event featuring twenty of the world's top early childhood and parenting thought leaders, including Janet Lansbury, Peter Gray, Lisa Murphy, Ijumaa Jordan, Maggie Dent, and Cheng Xuequin (Anji Play). This is not just another series of lectures, but rather a collection of conversations about our challenging times, how they are impacting young children and families, what we can do about it, and how we might seize this moment to transform the early years into what they ought to be for children everywhere. To see the full list of speakers and to register, click here.

Also, Teacher Tom's Second Book is now available in the UK, Iceland, and Europe thanks to my friends at Fafunia! It's also available in the US and Canada. If you want to go directly to the Fafunia page click here.  And if you missed it, Teacher Tom's First Book is back in print as well.

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!

What Mrs. Jennings Understood: Why Standardization is Always the Enemy of Learning

I went to kindergarten back in the 1960's. We played outdoors, built with blocks, pretended, and made some art. I don't think there was any particular curriculum or ideology behind the program offered by Mrs. Jennings and Mrs. Ruiz. We mostly played, much like the kids do at Woodland Park, although I remember one classroom project in which we sat around tables, each responsible for coloring in a part of a train -- box cars, coal cars, passenger cars. I got the engine. Mrs. Jennings gave very specific instructions about how to color our pictures. We were to strive to color side-to-side, using only horizontal motions, and to stay within the lines.

It was the kind of project I always enjoyed. To this day I love the challenge of creating artwork that requires fine motor deftness and precision. I chose to make my engine mostly red and was quite impressed with how wonderful the finished product looked. I'd already learned to take aesthetic pleasure in staying within the lines, but the whole horizontal coloring concept was an epiphany to me, a concept I employed in coloring projects throughout the rest of my youth.

The following day we arrived at school to find that Mrs. Jennings had taped our individual pictures to the wall to create a train, my red engine at the front. I was proud of that engine, but man was I appalled at my classmates' work. Most of them had failed to stay within the lines, and from what I could tell only I had adhered to the horizontal coloring method. Yet there was Mrs. Jennings, not scolding anyone, not correcting anyone, not making anyone do it over, but rather enthusing about the beautiful train we had made together.

Of course, today I can see that the problem was not with the other kids, but rather with my own expectations. You see, I was apparently a coloring within the lines prodigy, much in the way some four-year-olds prodigiously teach themselves to read in preschool, while most of their classmates are still years away from being developmentally ready for it. Mrs. Jennings' instructions had hit the five-year-old me right where I lived, while it went right over the heads of most of my classmates: she knew this, which is why she didn't scold or correct. It's why she saw beauty.

The development of human beings, especially in the early years, is notoriously spiky. My own daughter began to speak at three months, but didn't crawl until her first birthday, and wasn't walking until she was closer to two. Some kids are capable of reading at an early age, some are genius climbers, others have advanced social or artistic or musical skills. Every parent knows their own child is a genius: every preschool teacher knows that every child is a genius. And we all know that every child is also "behind" in some areas. This is all normal and it's not something that needs to be "fixed."

Indeed, the range of "normal" is enormous. This is one of the most powerful aspects of a cooperative preschool. As parents work with me in the classroom as my assistant teachers, they come to appreciate this, and even, as Mrs. Jennings did, find it beautiful. And this is why a play-based curriculum is ideal for young children, it allows each child to focus like a laser her own personalized educational objectives in a way that meshes perfectly with her developmental stage.

Sadly, kindergarten, at least the public school variety, no longer accommodates this wide range of "normal." Over the past decade or so, kindergarten has transformed dramatically, and not for the better:

A new University of Virginia study found that kindergarten changed in disturbing ways . . . There was a marked decline in exposure to social studies, science, music, art and physical education and an increased emphasis on reading instruction. Teachers reported spending as much time on reading as all other subjects combined . . . The time spent in child-selected activity dropped by more than one-third. Direct instruction and testing increased. Moreover, more teachers reported holding all children to the same standard.

The whole idea of standardization runs counter to what we know about how young children learn and develop, yet that has been the focus of the corporate education "reform" movement, which spawned this era of the federally mandated Common Core State Standards and high stakes standardized testing. The cabal that created this pedagogically indefensible mess, lead by Bill Gates through his foundation, have ignored what professionals know about how children actually learn:

To make matters worse, the drafters of the Common Core ignored the research on child development. In 2010, 500 child development experts warned the drafters that the standards called for exactly the kind of damaging practices that inhibit learning: direct instruction, inappropriate content and testing . . . These warnings went unheeded . . . Consequently, the Common Core exacerbates the developmentally inappropriate practices on the rise since NCLB (No Child Left Behind).

No, the goal of these "reformers" was never to meet the children where they were developmentally, nor to shape a curriculum around the way children learn, but rather, as Bill Gates famously said in an interview with the Washington Post: "(T)o unleash powerful market forces on education." You see, standardization makes it easier for businesspeople to develop products to sell to schools. The dehumanizing metaphor Gates used was to compare it to standardizing electrical outlets.

Mrs. Jennings understood, as all professional early childhood educators do, that children cannot be standardized like computers or washing machines or electrical outlets. Some of us can stay within the lines, but most of us can't, and that's what makes us beautiful.

Standardization is always the enemy of learning.

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The Play First Summit is just around the corner! Please join us for this free event featuring twenty of the world's top early childhood and parenting thought leaders, including Janet Lansbury, Peter Gray, Lisa Murphy, Ijumaa Jordan, Maggie Dent, and Cheng Xuequin (Anji Play). This is not just another series of lectures, but rather a collection of conversations about our challenging times, how they are impacting young children and families, what we can do about it, and how we might seize this moment to transform the early years into what they ought to be for children everywhere. To see the full list of speakers and to register, click here.

Also, Teacher Tom's Second Book is now available in the UK, Iceland, and Europe thanks to my friends at Fafunia! It's also available in the US and Canada. If you want to go directly to the Fafunia page click here.  And if you missed it, Teacher Tom's First Book is back in print as well.

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!

"Wait!"

If I had to guess, I'd say the boy was around 18 months old. He was walking ahead of his parents, pushing a baby doll stroller along the sidewalk, clearly enjoying himself. As he approached the corner of this downtown block his mother called out, "Wait!" Instantly, the boy began to run toward the street, giggling wildly, as if what he'd heard her say was "Go!" Both parents continued to shout "Wait!" as they sprinted, catching him up before he reached the curb.

It was a trafficless pandemic weekend, so there had been no actual danger, but I have no doubt that his parents could feel their hearts in their throats. I imagine they further frightened themselves with thoughts about what could have been and in that anxiety they scolded the boy who never stopped giggling, obviously having experienced it like a thrilling game of chase, something he would undoubtedly do again.

No harm, no foul I suppose. Every parent has had those moments, but it's interesting to think about that boy's reaction to his parents' command to "Wait!" He hadn't waited at all. He hadn't even hesitated. The moment he heard the word, it was off to the races. It's not the first time I've seen this, a child who has developed the habit of responding in joyful opposition to his parent's commands. I reckon there are those who would suggest that the boy needed, at minimum, a good put-the-fear-of-god in him scolding, or even a punishment, something to let him know that he was never to do that again, but that's not the way punishment works, especially for children this young. He could certainly be made to cry, but it's likely that the only lesson he would learn is that those who are bigger and stronger can use those advantages to inflict unpleasantness. 

After all, the boy was clearly incapable at this stage of his development of understanding the manifest danger of running out into traffic. If he had actually understood the pain and mayhem that would result from being hit by a car, he would have naturally stopped of his own accord. I'm sure he's been warned about the dangers of traffic, perhaps even lectured, but the fact that he nevertheless raced unheedingly toward the street is evidence that that particular lesson hasn't yet been learned, and no amount of punishment will make that any easier to comprehend. What it will take is for him to grow older, for his brain to develop to the point that he can engage in the sort of counterfactual thinking required to conceive of the pain and mayhem that could result from the rashness of running out into traffic.

But what about his disobedience? He defied his parents' command to "Wait!" thereby placing himself in danger. Certainly, a boy that young, a boy not developmentally equipped to understand the manifest danger of running into traffic, needs to at least be made to understand, one way or another, that he must obey his parents' commands for his own good. I can't tell you how many conversations I've had with young parents that start with the complaint, "My kid won't listen to me." And my response is always some version of, "I'm sure they're listening. They're just not obeying." In the case of this boy with the stroller he definitely heard his mother command him to "Wait!" Instead of obeying, however, he chose the only other option open to him. He listened and reacted. Researchers tell us that something like 80 percent of the sentences adults say to children are phrased as commands, which means that most of the time when we speak with children we leave them with this sort of stunted obey-or-disobey decision tree.

Thank god, this boy at least sometimes rebels against commands even if it frightens his parents. Obedient children grow into adults who can't make decisions for themselves, who are looking for others to do their thinking for them, and who, when lacking someone to obey, are likely to insist upon obedience from others. People who have learned the lessons of obedience tend to be a danger to themselves and others. No, the world doesn't need more obedience, it needs more thinking, and the language of command shuts down the possibility of thought, leaving children to simply react: obey or disobey.

So what should the parents have done about this boy who would run out into traffic? The immediate, simple answer is to hold his hand when near traffic, or to at least walk close enough to him so that he can be physically prevented him from impulsively dashing into the street. The longer term and more difficult answer is for his parents to strive to command less and inform more. No one, whatever our age, reacts well to being told what to do. It's part of our evolutionary heritage to want to think for ourselves rather than simply obey. It was evident from the boy's giggling joy that this was a game he had played with this parents before, a game of disobedience, of exerting what little control an 18-month-old can exert. In other words, his world, like the world of most young children, is full of commands, and he's made a game of defying them. If the commands disappear (or are at least reduced) so does the game. 

But in the meantime, those parents will want to hold their child's hand when around traffic.

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The Play First Summit is just around the corner! Please join us for this free event featuring twenty of the world's top early childhood and parenting thought leaders, including Janet Lansbury, Peter Gray, Lisa Murphy, Ijumaa Jordan, Maggie Dent, and Cheng Xuequin (Anji Play). This is not just another series of lectures, but rather a collection of conversations about our challenging times, how they are impacting young children and families, what we can do about it, and how we might seize this moment to transform the early years into what they ought to be for children everywhere. To see the full list of speakers and to register, click here.

Also, Teacher Tom's Second Book is now available in the UK, Iceland, and Europe thanks to my friends at Fafunia! It's also available in the US and Canada. If you want to go directly to the Fafunia page click here.  And if you missed it, Teacher Tom's First Book is back in print as well.

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!

Killing Ourselves With Kindness

I've met plenty of lawyers who I would classify as jerks. Same goes for doctors, engineers, and computer programmers, but I don't believe I've ever met an early childhood educator who would fall into that category. I'm sure they exist, but they are certainly few and far between. On the contrary, our profession tends to attract the kindest people.

We lead with our hearts. It is an essential part of our profession to love the children, all the children. That takes a special sort of person, one who is instinctively compassionate and constitutionally inclined to place the needs of others before their own. We have incredible patience with rants, rages, and other foibles. We live our life on our knees, hands dirty, and gunk in our hair. We don't take ourselves too seriously because the children, our co-workers, simply won't let us forget that we're all too human. No one empathsizes more strongly with the rollercoaster of being human: your pain is our pain, your fear is our fear, your joy is our joy. We finish each day drained, physically, intellectually, and emotionally, knowing full well that tomorrow will be the same. Only the most kindhearted survive.

This is our great superpower, I think, this kindness, but like all superpowers it is also the source of our greatest professional weakness. Around the world, early childhood educators are among the lowest paid professions. In the US, the median annual preschool teacher salary is under $30,000 with many earning closer to $20,000, which is below the poverty line, and few of us have jobs that come with health insurance, retirement funds, or paid leave of any kind. On top of that, policymakers and others with absolutely no classroom or early years experience are forever foisting curriculum, mandates, and regulations on us without soliciting input from actual educators, forcing us to forever choose between abandoning our professional integrity or sacrificing our jobs. This situation is due, at least in part, to the our kindness, our willingness to sacrifice, to get along, to not rock the boat.

This has never been more clear than right now as policymakers and others are agitating for the reopening of schools in the face of a pandemic that in our country is far from contained. They need us to get back to work so that parents have a place for their children as they return to their jobs. The Center for Disease Control has issued guidances for "safe" reopening, criteria that officials are calling "too expensive" and that many of us feel, even if we do spend the money necessary to make our workplaces safe, will force us to abandon developmentally appropriate practice, potentially harming young children during these vital early years. Some of us are pushing back, but many of our kindhearted colleagues are going along to get along, even as they worry about children and their families.

Some early years educators, of course, have never closed their doors, remaining open to serve the children of medical professionals, firefighters, and other essential workers. None believe they are offering the children an ideal experience, but they have, heroically and creatively, done the best they can in these trying times. There are others who have, if given the choice by their governors, remained open or opened early in order to serve those families who might not fit the criteria of "essential," but who must continue to work to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. And right now many preschool teachers and child care providers are making plans to reopen their doors despite health, safety, and pedagogical reservations because their fellow citizens need them. I honor our kind hearts, but worry that our kindness will come at a cost for our profession and the children we love.

Today, the pandemic in the US rages. It is far worse now than it was when we originally closed our schools. Economic pressures are mounting, and the spotlight has been turned on our low wage, low prestige profession, to sacrifice both our safety and professional integrity in order to get America back to work. They are counting upon our kindness. They are counting upon our instinct to pitch in where the need is the greatest. They are not offering us more money. They are not offering us healthcare or hazard pay or any sort of retirement benefits. They are not even pledging to ensure or safety. They aren't even offering us a seat at the decision making table. No, they are counting on us to passively do what we always do, which is to heroically and creatively care for, teach, and make a life for our youngest citizens, so that their precious economy can reap the benefits. 

I'm reminded of the US statesman Benjamin Franklin who once said, "We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately." One of the reasons it is so easy to take advantage our kindheartedness is that we tend to operate alone or in small schools, caring for children in our church basements, homes, and tiny schoolhouses, separated from the wider universe of colleagues. Our pubic school counterparts swim in larger ponds and are allied with one another through their unions which give them the collective bargaining power to secure higher wages, better benefits, and ensure that their voices are being heard, while we hang separately. 

But now is a time for us to figure out how to hang together, not just for ourselves, but for the children we love. We spend most of our time as the silent, unsung essential workers, the ones without whom the economy grinds to a halt, the ones actually performing the fundamental project of every civilization, which is to care for the youngest children. But right now, we are front and center. Right now we have the ears and eyes of a society reeling from a pandemic who are turning to us to save them. If we do not hang together, we go back to work with even fewer guarantees, with lower pay, without health coverage, and with greater danger. We go back knowing that we will not be able to provide everything young children need to thrive. If we fear rocking the boat or allow ourselves to once more sacrifice, we risk killing ourselves with our own kindness.

Kindness is the greatest virtue, but it is also one that the bullies of this world will manipulate to their own benefit if we are not strong. Our work conditions are the children's learning conditions. While our hearts go out in all directions, now is a time to come together on behalf of ourselves and the families who count on us. It is not unkind to stand up for ourselves, we are not being "jerks." Indeed, in coming together we are engaged in the greatest kindness.

This is why we've organized The Play First Summit with such urgency, pulling together in a couple months a worldwide event that would typically take a year or more to plan. This is why so many of the biggest names and thought leaders in our profession have joined us. It's a call to sisterhood, to brotherhood, to solidarity, to hanging together. We've issued our Declaration of Interdependence for Young Children, Parents, Caregivers, and Educators, which we urge you to sign. We don't know where this will go, that is for us to collectively decide, but it is definitely going somewhere. Tens of thousands of early childhood educators and our allies are coming together in just a few days. We have been flooded with people and organizations offering their help, their ideas, and their dreams. Individually, this might make us uncomfortable, it is not in our nature to rabble rouse, but our strength is in our unity. Please hang with us.

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The Play First Summit is just around the corner! Please join us for this free event featuring twenty of the world's top early childhood and parenting thought leaders, including Janet Lansbury, Peter Gray, Lisa Murphy, Ijumaa Jordan, Maggie Dent, and Cheng Xuequin (Anji Play). This is not just another series of lectures, but rather a collection of conversations about our challenging times, how they are impacting young children and families, what we can do about it, and how we might seize this moment to transform the early years into what they ought to be for children everywhere. To see the full list of speakers and to register, click here.

Also, Teacher Tom's Second Book is now available in the UK, Iceland, and Europe thanks to my friends at Fafunia! It's also available in the US and Canada. If you want to go directly to the Fafunia page click here.  And if you missed it, Teacher Tom's First Book is back in print as well.

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!

We Play So the World Will Make Sense

Newton's First Law of Motion:

Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it.

Newton's Second Law of Motion:

The relationship between an object's mass m, it's acceleration a, and the applied force F is F = ma.

Newton's Third Law of Motion:

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. 

Most of us were "taught" these laws in school, at some point, probably as teenagers, but the understanding of them started in preschool, even before, the academic teaching being a mere re-labeling, a re-wording, a re-contextualization, of something that already lives within us as experiences like rolling tires down a hill.

This is why the human animal must play, not just so that the formulas will make sense when we're older, but so the world will make sense. The children have no idea they are learning physics any more than they know they are learning to be self-motivated learners, practicing being sociable, and acquiring the skills and habits necessary to work well with others. That's because all of the foundational learning that results from children playing together amongst "beautiful" things is nothing but a byproduct of their play.

Play is a pure good and the moment we as adults forget that is the moment we taint it with our good intentions, rendering it something else, something lesser. That's why we're at our best as educators when we can be like the children and allow ourselves to be content with their games. It's the rolling of tires up and down hills in the company of others that matters. Our job is to provide the hill and the tires. The rest is a happy accident.

******

The Play First Summit is just around the corner! Please join us for this free event featuring twenty of the world's top early childhood and parenting thought leaders, including Janet Lansbury, Peter Gray, Lisa Murphy, Ijumaa Jordan, Maggie Dent, and Cheng Xuequin (Anji Play). This is not just another series of lectures, but rather a collection of conversations about our challenging times, how they are impacting young children and families, what we can do about it, and how we might seize this moment to transform the early years into what they ought to be for children everywhere. To see the full list of speakers and to register, click here.

Also, Teacher Tom's Second Book is now available in the UK, Iceland, and Europe thanks to my friends at Fafunia! It's also available in the US and Canada. If you want to go directly to the Fafunia page click here.  And if you missed it, Teacher Tom's First Book is back in print as well.

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!