On the Joyous Edge: Parenting Today's Children

Preparing Our Children for the World of Tomorrow

Scott McLeod, J.D., Ph.D., Associate Professor and Coordinator of the Educational Administration Program at Iowa State University, co-created the amazingly popular video Did You Know?, which asks the question - How do we best prepare our children for the rapidly changing and expanding world of tomorrow?

In this future world of rapidly evolving technological development and rapidly changing global demographics depicted in the video, our children will live in a profoundly different world than we live in today. What these changes mean to the future of individual children and societies is open to speculation.

There are, however, two general approaches we can take as parents, educators and as a society to guide and empower our children. One is to continue with more determination on the path we are currently on – pushing children to ever-higher standards of memorization, test-taking and compliance  to the demands of the state who determine our educational standards.

The traditional, standards-based approach to learning began during the industrial age when factories needed workers who could accurately follow instructions without thinking for themselves or challenging the status quo. These workers needed to tolerate mindless repetitive tasks without complaint.

The other approach to guiding our children requires an entirely new way of perceiving young people and what they need from us to prepare for the realities of tomorrow. The goal of this alternative approach is to empower our young people to think for themselves and to think out of the box from the way things have always been done.

The demands of the future require innovation. We will need leaders, visionaries, and free thinkers with the ingenuity to respond to the needs of a different world reality, one in which the old rules and ideals no longer apply.

Our young people will need to use their natural human talents of problem-solving, intuition, creativity, curiosity, exploration, the ability to think for themselves in the moment and then to respond powerfully and courageously to realities of their time.

This is not something we can teach them with textbooks or standards-based testing. We can’t even teach them entirely based on what we already know or the information we believe to be true.

We are preparing our children for a future that is so radically different from the present reality that we cannot even imagine what it will be like.

To help them develop these intrinsic skills, we must give them relevant opportunities to actually use these innovative, problem-solving skills in real-life situations during all of their growing up years. We cannot expect a young person to suddenly become creative and innovative upon graduation if he hasn’t continuously used and expanded these skills as he grows up.

One of the best ways to develop these intrinsic skills is through real life experiences in programs, such as San Francisco-based Spark , which creates real world experiences for youth through apprenticeships in the community.

Another option is an unschooling approach found in many home schooling families and democracy-based Sudbury Valley Schools.

Other options that encourage individual freedom, creativity and exploration include Montessori and Reggio Emilio schools.

These approaches also help children develop essential life values including empathy, authenticity, autonomy, personal responsibility and integrity and life skills such as communication, observation, and motivation.

As I ponder this new reality of the future, I recall the lines from The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran:

You may house their bodies but not their souls,

For their souls dwell in the house of to-morrow,

which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

As individual parents and educators and as a society, we must trust that our children already possess the ability to discover and learn, to think for themselves, and to create new possibilities based upon the unique circumstances of the moment.

Our children profoundly need for us, their parents, educators, and society-leaders, to act with courage to challenge the status quo and to make choices based on what is best for our children now, and not just on what has always been done or is easy.

We must provide meaningful opportunities for their learning, exploration, and growth.The healthy future of our children and our global community depends upon it.

If you haven’t watched the video, do it now. Then go to Scott’s blog at DangerouslyIrrelevent.org and learn more about his ground-breaking work in education.

What Happened to Their Humanity? Part 1

This is a question on everyone’s minds in Richmond, CA, where a group of approximately12 teens watched while several young men gang raped and beat a 15-year-old girl. This is truly a horrific story, shocking and disturbing to everyone that young men would violently injure and abuse this young girl.

The haunting question on everyone’s mind is, “What about the young people who stood around and watched? Why didn’t they do something to stop it? What happened to their humanity and their ability to take action to call authorities?”

When we hear stories like this, we believe once again that the next generation lacks basic human values. We feel judgmental of them and question their goodness.

But young people do not make these choices in a vacuum. Young people choose these actions based on many factors. It is not that they are inherently bad people. It is not that they didn’t know better.

We need to look to the emotional environments in which they have grown up.

If we want young people to act with humanity, we must treat them with humanity. We cannot yell at them, perceive them as failures, ignore their requests and ideas without damaging their natural moral values.

We must walk our talk as adults with children and everyone with whom we interact.

Children will never learn true humanity by being taught by a teacher or from a textbook.

True humanity comes from listening to the truth within their heart. We can help children use this natural ability by listening to the truth within their heart, no matter how insignificant or inappropriate it seems to us.

And by not unknowingly diminishing their humanity as people.

When we as educators, parents and society honor the goodness in children’s hearts, children will honor the goodness in their own hearts and in the hearts of others.

The Price of Violence to our Children

Paul Butler in his book Let’s Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice reports the U.S. has 5% of the world’s population and 25% of its prisoners. He adds that a prison opens in the U.S. every week.

He argues the U.S. has gone too far in its “lock ‘em up culture” and that “The freedom we save will be our own.”

Add to this that every state allows juveniles to be tried as adults and more than 20 states allow pre-adolescent children as young as 7 to be tried in adult courts.

These statistics are shocking and deeply troublesome. When children are treated harshly when they are young, whether it is by the justice system, our educational system or their parents, they are more likely to struggle for happiness and success in life and to become increasingly angry, isolated or violent in adulthood.

When children are born, they are extremely sensitive to the emotions of the people around them and to the way they are treated emotionally. They feel our unconscious feelings even when we do not. They are so easily influenced by the adults in their life.

As adults, most of us forget how sensitive we were as children and have unknowingly put up emotional walls between ourselves and those around us to keep us safe emotionally. We’ve learned to put up walls to keep us from feeling those painful, uncomfortable feelings that come with harsh treatment and lack of understanding about our emotional needs.

Every day as parents, educators, and a society, we make choices that either allow our children to feel safe emotionally or we make reactive choices in our words and actions that affect their Emotional Wholeness and well-being for the rest of their life.

This is one of the most important ideas for all of us to deeply understand. What happens in a child’s life emotionally colors and affects the rest of his life. There is simply so way around this.

Healing can happen when difficult environments are changed or children are put in new situations that support their healing. Nonetheless, the more severe the emotional hurting, the more long-lasting the pain and the greater impact in their life.

Children are a high priority to almost everyone in the U.S. and around the world. We care deeply about children. Yet emotional pain is often caused by unconscious behaviors by adults who don’t fully understand the impact of their words and actions in a child’s emotional experience.

When adults react from fear and anger, whether it’s in a child’s home, school, or in our country’s justice system, both children and adults pay a high price. It is essential that we become more conscious and committed to nurturing our children’s Emotional Wholeness if we are to see them be as happy and successful as we all desire.

When children are nurtured emotionally, our world becomes a more harmonious, joyous place for everyone.

What will you do today to emotionally nurture the children in your life?

Crisis in Kindergarten

The Alliance for Childhood recently announced their new major report Crisis in the Kindergarten: Why Children Need to Play in School, sounding the alarm bell on education in our schools. This is a must-read.

Their findings are profoundly alarming and need to be recognized by parents of young children and all of us who care about children. Here are some of the findings from their research.

Playtime in kindergarten is increasingly rare. Most of the teachers surveyed said they spend 2 to 3 hours per day teaching and testing children in literacy and math skills. Standardized testing and test prep, practices that most child development experts reject as inappropriate and harmful, are daily activities in most of the classrooms studied.

Teachers in Los Angeles mainly use curricula that require them to follow scripts for hours each day, despite research showing poor long-term results for this approach. In general, this type of early education is much less effective than play-based methods. Yet the academic drills and tests are winning out.

At the same time, kindergarten retention and serious behavioral problems are increasing, not to mention the dramatic increase in social and emotional challenges in children of all ages. Our children need for us to move in a play-based, whole-child direction!!

As parents, you may feel powerless to do anything to change your child’s kindergarten or preschool. This belief is exactly what allows something that is hurtful to your child to continue. As parents and as people who love children, we must boldly demand, yes demand, what we want for our children. An important part of being a parent is to be an advocate for your child. It’s in your job description. (Read the fine print.)

Your other options are to find a program that is in alignment with your values and the kind of learning environment that is best for your child or to start your own alternative.

Your first step is to go to the Alliance for Childhood website, and read their 8-page summary or the full report. Then choose your next step. My first step is to share this with you.

Choosing to do nothing is not an option when you care about the healthy emotional and intellectual development of your child. Share this information with others. Partner with people who share your views and priorities and create together. Then let me know what you’re doing so I can share this with others.

Enjoy your Child’s Gifts--Freshness

Ever notice as you age, you tend to dig a rut for yourself and put yourself in it. Sometimes it seems like part of the aging process. We have so many responsibilities and pressures we place on ourselves that we believe we have to do. Then the joy diminishes over time and we lose that sparkle of living each moment to its fullest. We begin to take life too seriously. We forget to play.

Enter your child: interested in new things, seeing the world differently, discovering new experiences, people, and perceptions. Your child has fewer internal rules, beliefs and structures. Your child is moving toward a future you cannot imagine and perhaps not understand.

Let your child remind you and teach you flexibility, courage, curiosity, exploration and discovery. Let your child give you a fresh perspective, a fresh approach to living, and fresh ways of doing things. It is one of their greatest gifts to us.

How to Teach Gullibility to Children

No one wants their child to be gullible. Yet parents and teachers unconsciously do things that encourage it. Webster defines gullible as “easily deceived or cheated, naive.”

What makes a child gullible? A tendency to go along with what someone is telling you without thinking for one’s self. Not trusting one’s self.

Psychologist Stephen Greenspan,  author of Annals of Gullibility: Why We Get Duped and How to Avoid It,  recently appeared on NPR’s Science Friday to talk about his being duped in the Bernard Madoff's money-making  scheme, which fooled many clever people.

He made two very revealing comments during the interview.

1.    His mom always told him,”Don’t be so willing to do what your friends tell you.”

2.    He described himself as having “a tendency to be a nice guy and to do what people tell me.”

To listen to his interview, go here.

One secret to lessen your child's or students' gullibility is to support her child to think for herself and to encourage individual discernment, both at home and at school. When parents and educators try to do the thinking for children, they unknowingly diminish a child’s self-trust, autonomy, and awareness.

Denise Clark Pope in her book “Doing School”: How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed Out, Materialistic, and Miseducated Students reports on a high-achieving sophomore in high school who explained “sincerely that, ideally, he wishes he could forget about the grades and just do the work the way he wants to do it. He wishes he could write papers the way he would like to see them written, instead of how the teachers want to see them.”

Kevin says with a sigh, “I wish I could say I’m an individual, and I am not going to sacrifice my individuality for a grade, you know…just write for writing’s sake.”

This is one place gullibility begins—when a young person feels they have to pay attention to others more than to herself. She becomes a people-pleaser and stops thinking for herself.. Then she is more easily prey for others who want take advantage of her naivete.

Vote Against No Child Left Behind

Jeanne Houston refers to No Child Left Behind as No Child Left Alive.  If you agree, you can act today to tell President-Elect Obama what you believe children need.

If you’re opposed to the pressure we place on children and educators to perform in the high-stakes testing of No Child Left Behind, go here to cast your vote.

We can guide and empower our new president to make dramatic, positive changes in the lives of children.

Parenting by Convention

In the most recent edition of Ode Magazine, there is an article about new trends in medicine and healing. Natural healer Victoria Maizes says, “Much of what we do in conventional medicine is just that—convention.”

This is also true in the parenting and educating of children. Much of what we do is simply convention and is not examined deeply for its true results in children’s lives. Most parents and educators were raised and taught in ways that is now assumed to be “the way it is done,” without any real questioning or evaluation of the process. Therefore, they tend to utilize similar principles, strategies and approaches with the children in their care.

It’s imperative that we as parents, educators and a society re-examine the ways in which we relate with children. Many adults unconsciously do things that undermine the very thing they are trying to accomplish, which is to help children be successful, happy, flourishing people both now and in the future. We need to step away from convention and explore what truly empowers children and brings out their natural gifts and talents.

As a society and a planet, we all need everyone’s human best as we live during these changing and challenging times.

 

Excellent Gift Idea for Children

I just bought three beautiful books for holiday gifts from the Global Fund for Children. The Global Fund for Children’s mission is to advance the dignity of children and youth around the world. GFC pursues its mission by making small grants to innovative community-based organizations working with some of the world’s most vulnerable children and youth.

One of the outstanding contributions GFC makes is by a dynamic media program that, through books, documentary photography, and film, highlights the issues affecting children and celebrates the global society in which we all live. Their books are BEAUTIFUL and inspiring!

The books are for children ages infant to early teens. I bought two copies of Global Babies, a boardbook for infants and toddlers with close-up photos of babies from several areas of the world. This book was recognized by Oprah as outstanding.

The other book I bought is Come Out and Play, which has full-color photos of children playing around the world. Photos include Playing a string game in Egypt, Riding a tricycle in the Dominican Republic, Flying a kite in China. These books make excellent conversation starters with children about different cultures and the lives of people around the world. Make sure you have a globe handy!

Plus the books are reasonably priced for these interesting economic times.

With a small investment of money, you have a beautiful book for a child, you support a non-profit that makes an important contribution to children who need it most, and you expand your child’s global awareness. What a delightful investment and way to share the joy of the season!

Nebraska’s Safe Haven Law—What Went Wrong?

A few weeks ago Nebraska limited its Safe Haven Law to infants 30 days old or younger. Previously they set no age limit and simply specified ‘child.’ Nothing happened for the first 2 months. Then in the next three months, 34 children were abandoned in hospitals throughout the state, none of whom were infants and 5 were from other states.

 Many people believe the problem is inadequate mental health services for children. Nebraska parents complained of not being able to get their child to take their medication and being turned away from programs because their child wasn’t bad enough, hadn’t committed a crime or his parents made too much money.

When a child fails to conform to parental and educational standards and expectations, on the surface this appears to be a problem of the child having a psychological – social disorder. In these situations, parents assume the problem is with the child and rush to get their child diagnosed and treated, often with medication.

What I’ve found is that not all children are willing to conform to adult expectations and standards. Those children who do conform to please adults compromise their own integrity and emotional wholeness. They try to be good rather than being themselves. In fact, a strong case can be made that those children who don’t fit are in better shape emotionally and socially than those who conform.

So what’s the answer? Children are hard-wired to lovingly connect with their parents and to succeed in life. It’s what every child desires. If we want to encourage this positive self-expression in children, then parents, educators and school systems need to evaluate their own behavior to find how they can empower the emotional wholeness in children.

When we pressure and demand that children conform, children have one of two choices—either they conform and do what they’re told or they resist and are labeled. Neither is a good option. Society, parents and educators need to re-think what children need from us and how we can best support them. We’re asking the wrong questions and going in the wrong direction.