Here’s today’s Zits comic strip. It pretty much sums up how to crush your child’s dreams: just say no.

[Click here for a larger image.]

I would hate it if I turned out to be the mother in this strip, the one who just gives an automatic no. No thinking, no sharing of the child’s excitement, only flat-out no. I’m not thrilled that mothers take the blame — don’t dads ever put the kibosh on things? — but it still speaks the truth about parenting in general. So I see the strip as an example of what not to do: Don’t just say no. Turn off the “automatic no” switch and instead support my kids’ dreams. Over the past two years or so, I’ve come to see myself as my children’s partner in dream fulfillment. We’ve still got to get through the day-to-day realities of life, but I’ve learned to say yes more and more, and it makes all the difference.

So instead of saying no to some of their wackier-sounding (to me) ideas, Mr. Enigma and I say yes a lot. And then we try to figure out how we can make whatever they’re asking for happen. Maybe we can do it right then and there. Often, we have to work together on a plan to make it happen down the road. Sometimes we tweak the details. But the answer is still, “Yes, we can. Let’s figure out how.” Our kids still think we say no too often, but I know that we’ve made a shift and that we’ll continue to work on saying yes more.

In May, a 13-year-old friend of ours was telling us about a trip to Paris she’s planning with friends for when they’re 18. My daughter, age 10, immediately asked if she could go too. I said, “Sure!” She can go, even though she’ll be younger than the other kids. We might have to delay the trip until she’s 16 and the others are 19. And we’ll have to plan very carefully to make sure we can ensure her safety. If we can figure out how to make the trip safe (within reason), she can go. Maybe I’ll fly over there with them to get them situated. Maybe my brother, who lived in Paris for 10 years, can hook the kids up with some local friends to help make sure they’re safe and have a decent meal once or twice. He might even be living in Paris again by then. Who knows? The specifics are irrelevant right now. The key is that I wasn’t going to say no to that trip. Why would I crush the dream?

Within a couple of days, my daughter and I started to figure out we could make the trip happen. To estimate the cost, we researched current airfares, Eurorail, and youth hostel rates, as well as what other young, cash-strapped travelers have said about food and related travel expenses. We calculated what a 2-week trip would cost in today’s money. And then we figured out how much she’d have to earn and save each year for the next 5.5 years. It came to a few hundred dollars per year. To her, the money seems almost impossible. We’re talking about a young kid with very few opportunities to earn significant amounts of cash. But I explained to my daughter that as she gets older, she’ll have more opportunities to earn money. She also has a savings account she can tap into for the trip. Financially, it’s very doable, and I want her to believe that it’s doable. If she wants it, she can do it.

Will my daughter ever take that trip? I don’t have a crystal ball. Five+ years is a long time. But if she doesn’t, it won’t be because her father and I just gave her an automatic no. We’re not going crush her hopes and dreams.

Link: Zits, 08/02/09

Tags: automatic no, parenting, saying yes, Paris, crushing dreams,

Holly over at Unschool Days asked if we could describe, in ten words or less, why we homeschool. My answer: So my kids can grow from the inside out.

It’s so good, it deserves a trademark, doesn’t it?

Too bad it’s not my phrase. I plagiarized it from an acquaintance who was explaining why she enrolled her daughter in a Friends school: she wanted her daughter to grow from the inside out, and not the other way around. That’s it, isn’t it? This mother felt, as many homeschoolers and parents who chose nontraditional schools for their kids do, that conventional schools don’t allow children to grow naturally, that they spend essentially all of their energy trying to squeeze all those young, excited, unique individuals into the same small box. It’s not that the people in the schools are big, bad, kid-loathing meanies; obviously most of them love kids and love teaching. It’s that the system itself is designed for just this purpose, to turn out legions of young people who think alike, behave alike, and know the same body of information (which they often quickly forget).

Our family came to homeschooling after a few years of thinking and learning about what homeschooling really means. We ended up with a laundry list of reasons for taking the plunge, some more pressing than others. But I can honestly say that “growing from the inside out” perfectly encapsulates the entire list. Each item points back to respecting and loving our children for who they are today and for giving them the space and time to grow and develop with as little outside/institutional pressure as possible — especially while they’re still so young.

My hope is that my kids will never feel pressure to give up an interest because it’s not considered “cool” enough, that they’ll never have to spend time on meaningless assignments just to pass a class (I’m all for meaningful assignments, if there has to be an assignment at all), that they’ll never care more about a letter grade than about what they’re doing/learning and why. I want them to follow every interest to see where it leads them, regardless of what other kids their age and/or gender are doing. And I want them to be happy, content kids (and later, adults) who feel loved and respected and free to follow their hearts.

Jeez, this is getting high and mighty, isn’t it?

But it’s true. That’s really what I want for them. And it’s happening. Yesterday, The Duke (son, 8.5 years) said to me, “I really like my life. I get to do so many cool things.”

Growing from the Inside Out™. That’s why we homeschool.

Tags: homeschooling, why homeschool,

In case you haven’t heard, we had an election here in the U.S. last week, a historic one. Either we were going to have the first female vice president in our history, or we were going to have the first African-American president in our history. Some thought the outcome had a larger significance than either of those two firsts, though, given the state of our economy and foreign policy.

We were among the people who saw all the layers of meaning as equally significant. So we invited some friends over with their 11-year-old son, and we set up our living room to track the results as they came in.

How do you unschool an election?

First, you need a map of the United States. A big one. Then you need some red and blue markers.

Next, a TV. And some kids to mark off the states as they get called. When Pennsylvania goes blue, you need kids to celebrate.

And when your blue markers start running out of ink, you get some blue tape.

We marked off the red states, too; we just didn’t jump around the living room.

Of course, you also need pizza, wine, and champagne to have a proper party.

Champagne is for celebrating. We were happy that we were able to open our bottle when the West was won.

The final results — well, except for three states — told the whole story.

Our friends agreed that last week’s election was too important to watch alone. We wanted our kids to understand that we don’t just go to parties and hover around the TV on Super Bowl Sunday, that once in a while we get our priorities in order and commemorate contests that have true lasting effects on our country.

Here’s to Barack Obama, the first African-American elected to the highest office in the land, who promises to point our country in a new direction. What an night for our children to witness.

Tags: 2008 presidential election, U.S. election, Barack Obama, unschooling

And who am I to argue with the eloquent, hard-working Pioneer Woman?

I think part of being a homeschooler is being somewhat of a nonconformist, somewhat of an anarchist, with a healthy amount of “freak” thrown in there somewhere, as well as an overall absence of good sense.

The rest of the post is, as usual, funny. With photos.

Today isYesterday was National SpankOut Day. I don’t usually care for these kinds of days of observance — mostly because there’s a day for everything, including the unbelievably trivial, but also because I don’t see much of a purpose to making the days official in some way — but if SpankOut Day helps just one parent stop spanking his/her kids, then it’s worth it.

Chris O’Donnell has collected some posts on his Evolved Homeschooler Wiki.

Tags: SpankOut Day, Evolved Homeschooler

Check this out: a study by Vanderbilt University indirectly supports the value of homeschooling. It concludes that kids learn best when they explain what they’re learning to their mom. Previous studies (if not oodles of personal experience) have shown that people learn more when they generate explanations of what they’ve learned. The Vanderbilt study examined whether it’s important if the explanation is for oneself or for a listener, and also if the specific listener mattered.

In other words, do children learn better when they explain something to someone else?

Don’t we all?

And does it matter if that someone else is one of the most important people in a child’s life?

Shouldn’t it?

From “Learning from explaining: Does it matter if mom is listening?”
The goal of the current study was to examine whether explaining to another person improves learning and transfer. In the study, 4- and 5-year-olds (N = 54) solved multiple classification problems, received accuracy feedback, and were prompted to explain the correct solutions to their moms, to explain the correct solutions to themselves, or to repeat the solutions. Generating explanations (to selves or moms) improved problem-solving accuracy at posttest, and explaining to mom led to the greatest problem-solving transfer. The study indicates that explanation prompts can facilitate transfer in children as young as 5 years and reveals that it matters if mom is listening. [emphasis mine]

Well, DUH. It always matters if mom is listening. And she usually is, as is dad. Most parents naturally help their babies and young children learn new things by talking to them (even when they’re too young to “talk back”), answering their questions (even the thousandth “why?” for the day), and listening and otherwise showing genuine interest when their kids say, “Hey, Mom, look at this!” or “Hey, Dad, guess what?” This is the natural state of early exploration and learning for all humans raised by other loving humans.

Should this relationship be any different as kids get older? Would a parent’s genuine, natural interest in what’s going on in his/her child’s mind (and life) not continue to exist and nurture the child’s learning? It seems obvious to me that if a parent doesn’t drastically change the way s/he interacts with and listens to his/her kids, the benefits of having that parent as a “listener” would never dissipate. It also seems obvious that the more time a child spends with his/her parents actually learning and talking to them, the better.

Homeschooling, then, naturally provides a superb learning environment for children.
Keep reading… »

Tags: moms help kids learn, homeschooling, listening, learning

My family spent Saturday afternoon at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Family Day in Boston, where we saw all kinds of great stuff. I’ll post more about the expo a little later, but I want to tell you first about one particularly outstanding product we learned about while there: a free programming interface for kids called Alice.

I’m excited about this program because my 9-year-old has said she wants to learn how to make her own computer games, and we’ve been looking for a child-friendly application to help her learn how to do that. We couldn’t find anything that looked like a 9-year-old programming novice would be able to learn quickly and easily. Half the battle with helping young kids maintain their excitement is to enable them to complete a project in a short period of time (like two hours on the first try). Everything we looked at either had a huge learning curve or would have probably been too difficult for our daughter right now.

And then, Saturday, we just stumbled upon Alice by accident.

Carnegie Mellon developed Alice, a drag-and-drop programming interface that allows you to create 3D worlds in a Java-like language. Sometime this year, a new version (3.0) of Alice will be released which will enable actual Java programming, not Java-like programming.

In the meantime, two versions are available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, standard Alice, designed for high school and college-aged “kids” and Storytelling Alice, for middle school-aged kids. I think even some younger kids will be able to use Storytelling Alice, given that my 7-year-old son sat on my lap this morning and explained to me how he thought it worked. After watching me for a few minutes, he definitely understood the basic idea behind how to build a world and make the characters in it do what we wanted them to do.

Both versions of Alice come with a library of scenes and characters; each character has a handful (or more) of ready-to-use methods (actions), so that if you want your character to walk, run, talk, turn, smile, cry, think, etc., you can just drag that method from a list and drop it into your program. You can also create new methods.

I took the 30-minute tutorial for Storytelling Alice and then spent another 30 minutes playing with the software. In that hour, I learned how to create a new world, add characters to it, and program those characters to do what I wanted them to do. I also learned some programming terminology, like what a method is. I finished a brief movie in about 30 minutes. Not too shabby!

The Alice.org website also offers free instructional materials, a user forum, additional characters and scenes, and other helpful information. When I have time to play with the tool more, I’ll learn how to do programming loops, “while” statements, and other standard programming thingies (pardon my technical language) that will allow my characters to interact more naturally. Eventually, I suppose I’ll let my daughter have a turn. It was her idea to learn how to program, wasn’t it?

And did I mention that Alice is free?

My only disappointment thus far is with the publishing capability. The “publish as movie” function doesn’t work yet (at least not in Storytelling Alice). And if you publish as an HTML page, anyone who wants to view the page has to have Java, Java 3D, and Java Media Console installed on his/her computer.

Otherwise, Alice rocks. Check it out at Alice.org.

Tags: Alice.org, Java, Java programming for kids, Carnegie-Mellon, 3D programming, Java, free programming software