on the joys of sending my children to public school

Oh, the joy...
The learning support teacher at my son's school just called to ask for my help in trying to motivate him to do his work... he just doesn't want to do it. I am at a loss, I "motivate" him through our attachment bond, I'm not supervising between 10 to 20 other kids at the same time.

Meanwhile, my stepson's teacher, who corresponds via email with all the parents of her students, shared some information she learned at a talk during a professional development day in October. The speaker was a "brain based learning facilitator" She shared some of her notes, including the following gem:

Children have to be constantly learning.  If they are not learning their brain is not growing. Give them chores. Penitentiaries are full of people who never had chores. 

Perhaps it's time to review my text and notes from that 2nd year Psych class I took on Cognition, but aren't we ALL always learning? Isn't that just the way our brains work?
Another lovely gem was the following:

Never allow children more than one hour of t.v. or video games a day, it "rots the brain" with electronic sedation.  The flashing pictures take away your "captain", your thinking brain and cause mental passivity and lack of creativity.

So, I'm imagining the "captain" she is referring to is our frontal cortex, home of "executive functioning" (to use medical and psychological lingo). From what I've learned through my university studies, executive functioning is a part of "meta cognition" i.e. thinking about one's thinking, or even just a mental awareness of one's own thoughts. She offered to share the resources he provided, and I'm all over that. I'd like to see the studies/experiments that came to these conclusions - because I don't buy the hypothesis.

From my own experience, the "flashing pictures" on the tv screen don't really prevent ME from thinking. Why, just the other day I was watching the 'boob tube' (as my mother called it while I was growing up), and I saw a commercial protesting an upcoming 'tax' on local tv by the big American networks. My immediate thought was, "why is this important news to us mainstream North Americans? Why don't we care about 4th world (a term taken from George Manuel's 1974 book on the realities of being a stateless nation within a colonial country bound on assimilation and cultural extinction) issues, Indigenous issues? Why are we protesting the rising cost of tv, rather than America's Imperial wars, or the political hypocrisies in many African nations? I could go on, but my point is, I kept thinking, despite those flashing lights. Maybe that's because I have a mature brain, and kids are incapable of this because their brains are still developing, but I certainly watched a lot of tv growing up, and my brain works...

And I really fail to see how the "flashing pictures" of video games prevents my children from thinking. Don't they need to utilize problem solving skills to get past each obstacle? They can't continue to do the same thing over and over and expect different results... and, of course, they don't. They try something else, or they ask my husband for help.

In reply to my email requesting the references she had offered, the teacher wrote the following:

He said that they use very fast moving stimulus to cause the thinking brain to shut down. He said any child watching/using more than an hour a day was also susceptible to depression.  I also saw the good things many children miss when they spend great amounts of time at the t.v. or computer, developing oral language, problem skills, socializing.

I recently posted some unschooling resources on video games being GOOD for your brain on my Facebook page, starting with Sandra Dodd's website. (The first link no longer seems to take you to the article, unfortunately). A good friend commented, saying that her son, who attends a French school, learned to read English in kindergarten by playing video games. As well, most kids I know use video games to socialize. They play the games together, they talk about the games together, they help each other out when they get stuck.

And the point about being susceptible to depression... yeah, I think depression is a BIT more complex than that.

Regardless, she writes that I am doing a good job with my stepson, and she is really enjoying having him in her class this year. However, I let that kid play his Nintendo DS for hours all weekend long, simply because they want to.

on "random"

My son has lately been having a love affair with the word "random." He's not really sure of what it means, but he mostly uses it in context, and I haven't been able to clarify it any better, as "random number generation" is a little beyond his conceptual abilities. But, he has been "randomly" choosing chocolate bars from his Hallowe'en stash, and I'd say that's a pretty accurate usage :)
I must say that word more than I realize.
I love precocity.

on resentment

I am reading an amazing thread on the Radical Unschoolers Network that started out as a discussion called "children 'need you to make choices for them'" and quickly morphed into some fantastic insights by some extremely articulate individuals on moms resenting doing chores. Also discussed are conventional parenting and subsequent 'withdrawals' by the parent, used later to 'bargain' for a behavioural change in the child. Below are the excerpts that speak to me the most:

"Conventional parenting wisdom -- which is the parenting most of us are familiar with -- leans toward getting the child to see the error of his ways. To the child that feels like the parent saying "I don't care what you want [the reason for hitting]. I only care what I want [to make you stop being bad].

Unschooling wisdom would, of course, stop the hitting, but focus on finding a better approach to help the child get what they wanted that caused them to hit. (Even better is being present to reroute situations before they get to the hitting point.)

Most people reading don't know that. Most people are reading to find ways to control an action. (Because, without realizing it, that's the foundation of the parenting they've always known.) It's not easy to turn thinking around. It's hard to let go of the need to punish a child for wrong behavior. It just feels wrong.

We can work at understanding how our kids see the world so that we avoid acting in ways that feel different than what we intend. We can't be perfect, but we can be better and better with awareness. So a lot of discussion has a foundation of helping parents see that kids are reacting rationally to the situation the child perceives, even if the parent thinks the child is being totally unreasonable."


"How do people perceive love? That's an important question to think about. Specifically, how do the other members of your family perceive love? That's more important, in terms of you showing them love, than how you perceive love. One way to communicate love is by doing things for others. When my partner brings me a cup of coffee first thing in the morning, or cleans the kitchen right before I come home from work, he's expressing love to me. For awhile he was all wrapped up in a recording project and stopped bringing me coffee in the morning - I had to consciously remind myself that it wasn't a deliberate act of love-withdrawal on his part, but it hurt my feelings a little, anyway.

I don't expect my kids to have that kind of understanding, yet, though. Heck, some adults don't have that kind of understanding (one of my coworkers suggested I withhold sex in retribution, for instance). So I try to be very careful of things that could seem, from another's perspective, to be acts of love withdrawal. Today, for instance, is the day of my dd's birthday party. She's 8, her actual birthday was yesterday. But she wanted everyone in the family to say: "Happy second day of your birthday" today. We all did (some with prompting) because that's important to her. It helps her feel loved. If one of us refused to say it, for whatever reason, she'd feel less loved today, regardless of any of our actual feelings."

I've found myself feeling very resentful of late. Much of it is tied up with money, specifically our lack of it, due to our recent (mid-September) wedding which included approximately 100 guests and cost a 'pretty penny.' However, much of it is also cultural, and I have been feeling this resentment for 7 years, now. I am an individualistic white North American. I often feel constrained by the role of a parent, the need to continually give and give and give to my kids. The words, above, often help with this. These writers points of view soothe me, make me feel like it is all manageable.

But then I compare my husband to the second writer's partner, and I feel jealous and angry and resentful again. My husband works 40 hours a week in retail. He is constantly on his feet, he does a lot of heavy lifting, and he is constantly having to cater to the demands of a public who believes that "the customer is always right," despite the fact that corporate law suggests corporations have far more power than people in our society. He commutes by bus, which often takes an hour and a half to travel what is normally a 30 minute drive.

I, on the other hand, do not have a regular job. I am a student. I commute twice a week, in my car, to a campus about 45 minutes away. There, I participate in stimulating courses of my own choosing, and I work minimally as a research assistant, less than 10 hours a week. The rest of the time I spend at home, reading, writing papers, and researching interesting ideas. Still this is draining work. As well, it is expected by my professors and the institution that I will spend 2 to 3 hours studying per hour of class time. That puts me to about 30 hours a week, all of which is extremely draining. Intellectual work is still work.

Plus, I am primarily responsible for the children, for all driving (my husband doesn't know how to drive), errands, grocery shopping, cooking, bill paying. I am responsible for most of the cleaning. My husband is responsible for doing the laundry, yet every week I have to ask him to do this, and then I have to remind him to take the clothes out of the washing machine and put them in the dryer. If I don't remind him to take them out of the dryer, they will sit there for days.

I feel like a domestic slave, and thus I feel angry and resentful. I feel that my academic pursuits are not considered as valuable as a "real" job. I feel that my real value is tied up in the domestic, unpaid labour I provide for my family.

I want to be able to approach this without anger and resentment. I want to come from nothing, so as to create a solution that isn't transactional, that isn't based on bargaining and withdrawals. So far, the only thing that works is to express my frustration and resentment and leave it with the kids or my husband. I usually see a difference for a very short period of time (a week with my husband, maybe an hour or so with my kids). They get it in the moment, however, they seem unable to maintain this.

This is an uncomfortable place for me. I want to be valued, and I want compassion. I want my family to demonstrate their love for me. Instead, I have to operate from the knowledge that, despite their actions, they do love me.

Still, I wish I could go on strike.

The "third shift" of parenting

I've been thinking a lot about my experiences of public school as a parent. In that process, I remembered a piece of writing I did for my "Sociology of Families" class last fall and decided I wanted to post it here. It is academic writing, and so it refers to a few textbooks we used during the course, and to several academic sociological theories, however, I think it's still quite understandable to the average reader:

October-28-08 The "third shift" of parenting

My first grader is having problems at school. He disrupts the class. He doesn't complete his assignments. He lies down regularly on the floor. He has a great difficulty when required to attend to lessons. His teacher communicates with me through penciled notes in his planner. She asked me to speak with him before today's field trip. After the field trip, she wrote he "wandered from the group many times." As well, he's "still having difficulty with writing" and she will "be keeping him in at recess to see if this helps to motivate him." She then wrote that he was under his desk, which, when we discussed her note, he adamantly denied and then began to cry.

The teacher is quite experienced and, during a conference we had three weeks ago, stressed positive interactions and multiple modes of learning. However, my son is young for his grade; his birthday is in mid-November. I am concerned that this teacher has expectations for his behaviour that are developmentally beyond his mastery. I also think that recess, and running around, will improve his executive functioning, and therefore his control over his own behaviour. I want to be able to teach him some self-managing techniques, such as twiddling his thumbs while sitting in a group on the rug (which he reports she vetoed), but I have been unable to observe the situation, and thus to suggest appropriate interventions.

As a result, I've been spending time researching children's behavioural issues at the expense of my university studies. As well, I've added a half-hour on to our morning routine to wake up earlier to chat in bed and to be less rushed when getting out the door. This is after altering his bedtime last month, at the teacher's request. Now, I will be spending an hour and a half at my son's school tomorrow, in the middle of the morning. As well, I suspect I will be instituting a half-hour of study time in the evenings. Finally, I am looking into piano lessons for my son, as my research suggests this may contribute to the development of attention span.

These are excellent examples of Hothschild's "third shift" of emotional work to compensate for the time crunch of the first and second shifts of work and household and family labour (1989, 1997, cited in Ranson, 2007:77). Hothschild argues parents must manage their home lives as efficiently as their work lives, but by doing so, something is lost, and must be compensated for. This is the “third shift” of nurturing modern parents take on to compensate children for the time crunch.

My experience as a working mother reflects this, but it also reflects Lareu's middle class pattern of "concerted cultivation," which involves promotion of children's talents and abilities, but usually through “financially expensive” and “labour-intensive” means (2002, cited in Ranson, 2007:76). This middle class pattern, however, is not, for me, matched by a middle class income, as I am a student and a single mother. Thus, my financial resources are strained, and I take on the burden of providing such cultivation less through participation in paid activities like lessons and sports teams, more through my own, individual efforts. This requires efficient time management, as in the “second shift” of family labour, which then leads to the compensatory “third shift” in order to maintain the experience of myself as a “good mother” in an ideological sense.

It is a year later, and I am no longer the single parent of an only child, but rather the married mother of two. However, not much has changed in my experience of the public school system, and the need to experience myself as a "good mother." Despite this, I have discovered the concepts of radical unschooling and non-coercive parenting, so I waffle back and forth between "concerted cultivation" and "deschooling," where I let my kids spend their weekends doing whatever they like, without trying to direct their activities or limit their choices. If they want to play DS all day, I let them. After all, my husband spends his days off from work parked in front of the tv, why should there be a double standard? My husband, not quite understanding the philosophical underpinnings of my new parenting attitude, attempts to set limits on their video game playing time, to which I suggest he's being somewhat hypocritical. He's getting there. As am I. This is not an easy transition! We are working against generations of conditioning, where children are to "be seen and not heard." Bizarre. Developmentally inappropriate.