Posts
24 Simple Truths.
1. Fifteen minutes of reading on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday is better than one hour’s worth on Friday.
2. Positive discipline is a learning opportunity; punishment, on the other hand, is merely retribution.
3. Words can and do hurt more than bump and bruises.
4. Spanking is never an option.
5. The worrying never stops.
6. Learning takes time, patience.
7. Laughter heals all.
8. Everyone forgets what it is like to have small children.
9. Those without children have no idea what it means to have children.
10. It, and everything that “it” pertains to, seemingly never stops.
11. We love our kids. And we’ll do anything to help them become the adults they deserve to be.
12. There’s no turning back the clock; you will reap what you sow.
13. Before you know it, they’re already doing that!
14. Consistency is more important than exuberance; routines make the world work.
15. Learned behavior is not innate.
16. Not all boo boo’s can be avoided, but many avoidable accidents can.
17. If parenting were easy, the world would be a much different place.
18. If you don’t show them and then ask them to do it, they won’t– and that’s your fault.
19. Yelling accomplishes nothing– even if makes you feel better in the short run.
20. Potty training sucks!
21. If you’re downstairs changing the laundry from the washer into the dryer and you hear a loud bump, followed by silence and crying, that’s never a good sign that things are well upstairs.
22. When you ask your eldest, “What did you do?” don’t forget to praise her for her honesty somewhere in-between reminding her “I don’t want you to hit your brother, again” and “time out is over. You can play now.”
23. Time is our family’s most valuable commodity.
24. Creativity is messy; the more creative one is the more of a mess they make.
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Socializing and Censorship at an Early Age.
There is a difference between socializing and socialization. Socializing (verb) means “to mix socially with others.” While the noun socialization means “to make someone behave in a way that is acceptable to their society.” In other words, besides being mistakenly and incorrectly transposed by many to conveniently refer to the later of the two definitions, the one has little to do with the other.
I’ve been socializing the kids more and more often these last few months: going to the park later in the morning when organized playgroups and daycare center providers bring their kids to run, roam, and beat each other up; going to the beach later in the day and on the weekends, and making frequent visits to the “fish store,” a.k.a. PetSmart, after 3 pm or on the weekends to expose the kids to youths, usually a couple of years older, to help them become more comfortable around large and noisy groups of people. I would rather not do this. By preference, I would rather get my kids to the park early in the morning, between 8:30 and 9 a.m., before the droves of brats push and pull their way onto the same ride my kids had been riding before hell’s doors opened to horde of size 3s so that we can do other things together throughout the remainder of our mornings; and, I would rather not be sandwiched between four fourteen-member families speaking Spanish and chain-smoking Parliament’s at the beach, but we do it. It’s important to us that our children are at ease in a number of environments and conditions– even at the greatest inconveniences to us.
What we do NOT do is pretend our kids are being socialized or obtaining some sort of socialization among the throngs of human bodies on a crowded playground, in store aisles, or packed in like sardines along the waterfront. No. Providing my children with the skills and habits necessary for acting and participating within our diverse society is my job. It takes work. It takes time. It takes patience. And if left for society to handle, like so many of the other children we run into, daily, I’m afraid our beautiful children would slowly turn into the incorrigible imps we vainly try to avoid every other day at those same “exposure” spots.
What amazes me, and upsets me to the highest degree, are the number of parents whom allow their latchkey kids to ramble throughout the playground and beach we frequently visit without a care or concern for their child’s welfare or the safety of other children around their kids. Today, for example, Taylor and Simon were playing on one end of a long wooden park Jungle Jim type construction. On the other end were several older children, all around six years old, playing, climbing, and jumping rather roughly on and around each other. Sooner or later the gaggle inched their way closer to where my kids were playing. Now, Taylor and Simon are finally at the point where they are interested in playing near, side-by-side, and even interacting a little bit with other children. For their ages, this is normal behavior. I’ve encouraged this. It’s good for them. For the most part, I kept quiet and allowed the kids to intermingle as I stood off on the sidelines and finished my third cup of coffee. However, far more than a dozen times, I had to gently speak to these kids and remind them to be careful around the younger children and to even leave our toys and food– packed off to the side of the playground and away from the rides– alone. Sadly, the mothers to these little fairies were less than 25 feet away, about the same distance I was, and they said nothing. Nothing! Not one cautionary word, direction, or interaction. Talk about teachable moments slipping through one’s fingers. Since when was it okay to eat someone else’s food without asking? Ironically, more than once was I on the receiving end of a perturbed look of indignation by one of the two women– the one, of course, paying more attention to her incoming text messages than her three darling delinquent’s behaviors. The second woman, while at least playing with her youngest, an infant, had no control over her elder three and five-year-old as they commingled with the roughest of boys. Silence is condoning.
I’m begrudgingly at the point of joining a playgroup so that fewer of these days occur. It gets real tiring being the playground “police officer” and surrogate father figure to the worst of someone else’s neglected offspring. My reluctance is weakened knowing the primary reasons for not wanting to join or start a playgroup is because I do not want to give up my freedom to choose when or if we go to the park or some other outing event. Once I commit to something, I commit. But hey, when was the last time I did something purely for myself, anyways?
I’ve been socializing the kids more and more often these last few months: going to the park later in the morning when organized playgroups and daycare center providers bring their kids to run, roam, and beat each other up; going to the beach later in the day and on the weekends, and making frequent visits to the “fish store,” a.k.a. PetSmart, after 3 pm or on the weekends to expose the kids to youths, usually a couple of years older, to help them become more comfortable around large and noisy groups of people. I would rather not do this. By preference, I would rather get my kids to the park early in the morning, between 8:30 and 9 a.m., before the droves of brats push and pull their way onto the same ride my kids had been riding before hell’s doors opened to horde of size 3s so that we can do other things together throughout the remainder of our mornings; and, I would rather not be sandwiched between four fourteen-member families speaking Spanish and chain-smoking Parliament’s at the beach, but we do it. It’s important to us that our children are at ease in a number of environments and conditions– even at the greatest inconveniences to us.
What we do NOT do is pretend our kids are being socialized or obtaining some sort of socialization among the throngs of human bodies on a crowded playground, in store aisles, or packed in like sardines along the waterfront. No. Providing my children with the skills and habits necessary for acting and participating within our diverse society is my job. It takes work. It takes time. It takes patience. And if left for society to handle, like so many of the other children we run into, daily, I’m afraid our beautiful children would slowly turn into the incorrigible imps we vainly try to avoid every other day at those same “exposure” spots.
What amazes me, and upsets me to the highest degree, are the number of parents whom allow their latchkey kids to ramble throughout the playground and beach we frequently visit without a care or concern for their child’s welfare or the safety of other children around their kids. Today, for example, Taylor and Simon were playing on one end of a long wooden park Jungle Jim type construction. On the other end were several older children, all around six years old, playing, climbing, and jumping rather roughly on and around each other. Sooner or later the gaggle inched their way closer to where my kids were playing. Now, Taylor and Simon are finally at the point where they are interested in playing near, side-by-side, and even interacting a little bit with other children. For their ages, this is normal behavior. I’ve encouraged this. It’s good for them. For the most part, I kept quiet and allowed the kids to intermingle as I stood off on the sidelines and finished my third cup of coffee. However, far more than a dozen times, I had to gently speak to these kids and remind them to be careful around the younger children and to even leave our toys and food– packed off to the side of the playground and away from the rides– alone. Sadly, the mothers to these little fairies were less than 25 feet away, about the same distance I was, and they said nothing. Nothing! Not one cautionary word, direction, or interaction. Talk about teachable moments slipping through one’s fingers. Since when was it okay to eat someone else’s food without asking? Ironically, more than once was I on the receiving end of a perturbed look of indignation by one of the two women– the one, of course, paying more attention to her incoming text messages than her three darling delinquent’s behaviors. The second woman, while at least playing with her youngest, an infant, had no control over her elder three and five-year-old as they commingled with the roughest of boys. Silence is condoning.
I’m begrudgingly at the point of joining a playgroup so that fewer of these days occur. It gets real tiring being the playground “police officer” and surrogate father figure to the worst of someone else’s neglected offspring. My reluctance is weakened knowing the primary reasons for not wanting to join or start a playgroup is because I do not want to give up my freedom to choose when or if we go to the park or some other outing event. Once I commit to something, I commit. But hey, when was the last time I did something purely for myself, anyways?
Sunday, September 13, 2009
The Big Question, Which is Not Going to be Answered Today.
I am a stay-at-home father of two toddlers. I chose to walk away from public school teaching for, at the time, our first child’s welfare; daycare just didn’t work out! I do plan to return to teaching, however, I cannot help but question the unfairness and inconsistencies of public education, all of the problems associated with public schools, and how those problems will eventually affect my children’s education. I’ve seen too many beautiful children from good homes ruined by the beatings of the school drum as every child, ready or not, is shuffled from one lesson to another, one subject to another, and one grade to another. And down the road, little attention, it seems, is paid to making sure skills are taught or learned. The focus is on getting the kids through school rather than on ensuring they’ve actually learned something and can prove they’ve learned it. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve seen or heard stories of kids being pushed, willingly or not, through the backdoor of a high school with a cheap paper diploma and a handful of prayers from his or her teachers and administrators who know those students are gigantic milestones behind their peers. Or, more importantly, I’ve seen too many smart, articulate, and naturally curious kids placed alongside lower-performing students and suffer interminably for it. Kids are brutal to one another. There, it seems, is nothing worse than for an impressionable child to be placed in a classroom littered with behavioral problems. Learning cannot happen when the teacher, expert in his or her subject area or not, is too busy making sure Johnny isn’t inappropriately touching Jill, beating the snot out of Billy, or starting fires under his desk with your child’s homework with Daddy’s Budweiser lighter. Why should the good kids suffer from the antics of feral children?
I, maybe arrogantly so, believe that I could teach just as well or better than an elementary or middle school teacher could with a classroom of unruly children. That’s not to say that there are not excellent school systems out there, there are. I worked in one. I doubt, however, that we’ll be able to afford to live in one of those communities where the housing market is 140% higher than in the surrounding communities. Education does have a price; and the better the education offered the higher the price. Having worked in two lower-income level, rural school districts, I’ve seen what kind of kids they produce. It’s not pretty. When tenth graders have never heard of the Holocaust and upper-level eleventh graders would rather sit through summer school than turn in their homework, that’s not good for anyone.
I do believe in public education. I also know that my wife and I will give our kids the tools they need to weather the storms of an undisciplined in class, or years of undisciplined classes. I wonder, though, if, knowing what I know about public education, if choosing not to homeschool our kids will be a decision we would live to regret?
I, maybe arrogantly so, believe that I could teach just as well or better than an elementary or middle school teacher could with a classroom of unruly children. That’s not to say that there are not excellent school systems out there, there are. I worked in one. I doubt, however, that we’ll be able to afford to live in one of those communities where the housing market is 140% higher than in the surrounding communities. Education does have a price; and the better the education offered the higher the price. Having worked in two lower-income level, rural school districts, I’ve seen what kind of kids they produce. It’s not pretty. When tenth graders have never heard of the Holocaust and upper-level eleventh graders would rather sit through summer school than turn in their homework, that’s not good for anyone.
I do believe in public education. I also know that my wife and I will give our kids the tools they need to weather the storms of an undisciplined in class, or years of undisciplined classes. I wonder, though, if, knowing what I know about public education, if choosing not to homeschool our kids will be a decision we would live to regret?
Sunday, September 6, 2009
Manual Labor.
Hesiod, the other famous eighth century Greek orating philosopher most students rarely read about because of all the fuss with Odysseus, Achilles, and that other guy who liked to fight, Hector, the author of Works and Days and Theogony, suggested that idleness, not work or manual labor is shameful; and, more definitively, he believed that the idler is a parasite. Four hundred years later, Plato, that wide-shouldered wrestler and ancient Greek contemporary of Hesiod, in The Republic, compared an idle person to a honeybee drone: “And God has made the flying drones … all without stings, whereas of the walking drones he has made some without stings but others have dreadful stings; of the stingless class are those who in their old age end as paupers; of the stingers come all the criminal class, as they are termed.” Contrary to earlier beliefs about the Greeks, they did, generally speaking, respected certain members of society whom practiced “mean employment and manual arts” when, and only when, those professions were willfully chosen and not thrust upon them (i.e. slaves, paupers, or criminals). Over the last couple of days I’ve had some interesting conversations with two manual laborers whom were hired to complete work around the property we live on. One of the workers I’ve come to ideologically admire. The other became the impetus for this blog entry.
The first gentleman is the elder of two loggers hired to cut down a one hundred plus year-old Maple tree, rotting and partially leaning over our home. In his late fifties, he’s been a logger off and on for the last 40 years. He has tried his hand at other employments over the years, but those jobs rarely satiated his tastes for the hands-on, rugged, and intensely gratifying manual craft needed to successfully cut down trees of all sizes, shapes, and leaning in precarious positions. Basically, he loves doing what others fear to do. About five years ago he learned how to “boon” cut treetops dangling near or over 50,000 volts power lines. Standing in a boon, a cherry-picker type of device, like the ones phone companies use to hoist workers up to fix phone lines, he learned how to trim trees utilizing a long pole with a string and a hook in one hand and a light, extremely powerful chainsaw in his other hand. After the first few days on his new post, he told his boss that the work was taking too long and costing his boss’s company too much money and, if the boss wanted him to, he would return to his old job of cutting trees down at ground level. The boss thanked him for his honesty and told him that it’ll take at least 1,000 trees of practice before the elder was going to feel comfortable cutting in a boon. Thousands of trees later, the elder mastered the job. He is now learning how to be a tree-climbing cutter– the act of climbing up a tree and cutting it from the top down. He expects it will take him 10,000 trees to master this new skill and he cannot wait to begin training from guys even older than he is.
His partner, on the other hand, also a nice person and pleasant to speak with, does not have the elder’s enthusiasm for logging. He, through a short lifetime of choices and circumstances, much of which I admit I am not privy to, works as a manual laborer in the tree cutting business because he does not possess other marketable skills or intelligences in other fields of expertise. He is not allowed to cut trees from boons nor is he allowed to work alone or even choose which trees to cut. In other words, he does a lot of hauling, lifting, and dragging. He has not tried his hands in other businesses or professions, like his partner, nor does he intend to– accumulated debt and a nasty divorce has put him so far in the financial hole that he is trapped working in one of the few jobs in the area that still pays well and does not require a liberal education and specialized training to obtain. The primary difference between the two men, though, is that the elder wants to be a logger. He wants to improve himself, not for more money, but because he has pride in his craft. The younger logger, however, logs because he has to. He’s trapped.
So where am I going with this? My kids, of course.
I, like most parents, want the best for my children. I love performing manual labor about as much as the next guy: cutting the grass, stacking wood or changing the oil in my car, but I wouldn’t want to do it to pay the bills; or find myself in a position where I was repetitively lifting heavy loads with a bad back or fused spine in order to put dinner on the table. I have options. I can choose to dig ditches or choose to teach in a classroom. I can choose to drive truck or I can choose to drive a patrol car. I want my kids to have the same option, the same power to choose how they make their livelihoods. I want them to be happy in their work, sure; and take pride in physical labor, not becoming stingless drones through lack of want, dire, or pride, but also to have the option to choose to whittle their bodies to the bone lifting heavy loads or choose to sit behind a desk, stand in front of a classroom, or work in an office building.
Choices.
The first gentleman is the elder of two loggers hired to cut down a one hundred plus year-old Maple tree, rotting and partially leaning over our home. In his late fifties, he’s been a logger off and on for the last 40 years. He has tried his hand at other employments over the years, but those jobs rarely satiated his tastes for the hands-on, rugged, and intensely gratifying manual craft needed to successfully cut down trees of all sizes, shapes, and leaning in precarious positions. Basically, he loves doing what others fear to do. About five years ago he learned how to “boon” cut treetops dangling near or over 50,000 volts power lines. Standing in a boon, a cherry-picker type of device, like the ones phone companies use to hoist workers up to fix phone lines, he learned how to trim trees utilizing a long pole with a string and a hook in one hand and a light, extremely powerful chainsaw in his other hand. After the first few days on his new post, he told his boss that the work was taking too long and costing his boss’s company too much money and, if the boss wanted him to, he would return to his old job of cutting trees down at ground level. The boss thanked him for his honesty and told him that it’ll take at least 1,000 trees of practice before the elder was going to feel comfortable cutting in a boon. Thousands of trees later, the elder mastered the job. He is now learning how to be a tree-climbing cutter– the act of climbing up a tree and cutting it from the top down. He expects it will take him 10,000 trees to master this new skill and he cannot wait to begin training from guys even older than he is.
His partner, on the other hand, also a nice person and pleasant to speak with, does not have the elder’s enthusiasm for logging. He, through a short lifetime of choices and circumstances, much of which I admit I am not privy to, works as a manual laborer in the tree cutting business because he does not possess other marketable skills or intelligences in other fields of expertise. He is not allowed to cut trees from boons nor is he allowed to work alone or even choose which trees to cut. In other words, he does a lot of hauling, lifting, and dragging. He has not tried his hands in other businesses or professions, like his partner, nor does he intend to– accumulated debt and a nasty divorce has put him so far in the financial hole that he is trapped working in one of the few jobs in the area that still pays well and does not require a liberal education and specialized training to obtain. The primary difference between the two men, though, is that the elder wants to be a logger. He wants to improve himself, not for more money, but because he has pride in his craft. The younger logger, however, logs because he has to. He’s trapped.
So where am I going with this? My kids, of course.
I, like most parents, want the best for my children. I love performing manual labor about as much as the next guy: cutting the grass, stacking wood or changing the oil in my car, but I wouldn’t want to do it to pay the bills; or find myself in a position where I was repetitively lifting heavy loads with a bad back or fused spine in order to put dinner on the table. I have options. I can choose to dig ditches or choose to teach in a classroom. I can choose to drive truck or I can choose to drive a patrol car. I want my kids to have the same option, the same power to choose how they make their livelihoods. I want them to be happy in their work, sure; and take pride in physical labor, not becoming stingless drones through lack of want, dire, or pride, but also to have the option to choose to whittle their bodies to the bone lifting heavy loads or choose to sit behind a desk, stand in front of a classroom, or work in an office building.
Choices.
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