children – Page 3

Love what you do in front of the kids in your life

Tuesday, February 5, 2019

“Your kids… They don’t remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are.”
—Jim Henson

“Attitudes are caught, not taught.”
—Fred Rogers

Fiona Apple once admitted that she doesn’t want kids, but she spends a lot of time buying and reading parenting books. The interviewer said, “So you’re the parent and the child.” Apple replied, “Well, I mean, you always have to be.”

Every time I read a piece like Pamela Paul’s “Let Children Get Bored Again,” I want to cross out the word “children” and write “us.”

Let ~~children~~ us get bored again.
Let ~~children~~ us play.
Let ~~children~~ us go outside.

Etc.

The problem with parenting tips is that the best way to help your children become the kind of person you want them to be is by surrounding them with the kinds of people you want them to be. This includes you.

You can’t tell kids anything. Kids want to be like adults. They want to do what the adults are doing. You have to let them see adults behaving like the whole, human beings you’d like them to be.

If we want to raise whole human beings, we have to become whole human beings ourselves.

This is the really, really hard work.

Want your kids to read more? Let them see you reading every day.

Want your kids to practice an instrument? Let them see you practicing an instrument.

Want your kids to spend more time outside? Let them see you without your phone.

There’s no guarantee that your kids will copy your modeling, but they’ll get a glimpse of an engaged human. As my twitter pal, Lori Pickert, author of Project-Based Homeschooling, tweeted a few years ago:

parents keep trying to push their kids toward certain interests when it works so much better to just dig into those interests yourself

oh, wait .. those aren’t YOUR interests? so you don’t want to dig into them? they aren’t your child’s interests either; why would THEY?

joyfully dig into your own interests and share all the ensuing wins, frustrations, struggles, successes

let your kids love what they love

when you share your learning and doing, you don’t make them also love (whatever); you DO show them how great it is to do meaningful work

If you spend more time in your life doing the things that you love and that you feel are worthwhile, the kids in your life will get hip to what that looks like.

“If adults can show what they love in front of kids, there’ll be some child who says, ‘I’d like to be like that!’ or ‘I’d like to do that!’” said Fred Rogers. He told a story about a sculptor in a nursery school he was working in when he was getting his master’s degree in child development:

There was a man who would come every week to sculpt in front of the kids. The director said, “I don’t want you to teach sculpting, I want you to do what you do and love it in front of the children.” During that year, clay was never used more imaginatively, before or after…. A great gift of any adult to a child, it seems to me, is to love what you do in front of the child. I mean, if you love to bicycle, if you love to repair things, do that in front of the children. Let them catch the attitude that that’s fun. Because you know, attitudes are caught, not taught.”

It’s like a Show Your Work! lesson for parenting: Show the kids in your life the work that you love.

Harry and his monster hat

Tuesday, October 9, 2018

“One cannot open a newspaper without being disgusted by new records of shame…. the house and land we occupy, have lost their best value, and a man looks gloomily at his children, and thinks, ‘What have I done that you should begin life in dishonor?’”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1851

A devastating image by photographer Brook Mitchell in the NYTimes. Nails the stakes of climate change: It is our children who will have to sift through the wreckage.

I was particularly affected by the photo, as I have a towheaded almost-six-year-old who looks a lot like Harry. (“Where have you been my blue-eyed son?” Dylan sings in “A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall,” a song that now destroys me.)

A little googling led me to the original Guardian piece about Australian farm families battling the draught. You can see more photos of Harry and his family there, including this one, of him wearing what he calls his “monster hat”:

That one brings the slightest smile: Children are resilient, and no matter how bad it gets, there will still be moments of humor. Even if it’s gallows humor.

The distance I can be from my son

Monday, July 9, 2018

We took the 5-year-old docent and his brother back to the Blanton Museum this afternoon. My favorite piece was Lenka Clayton’s The Distance I Can Be From My Son (2013). In three short videos, Clayton films her son walking away from her until she can’t stand it anymore and runs after him. The videos were part of Clayton’s “Artist Residency in Motherhood:” an attempt to “allow [motherhood] to shape the direction of my work, rather than try to work ‘despite it’.”

In Hannah Gadsby’s devastating Netflix special, Nanette, she deconstructs how jokes work on a system of tension and release — the setup is “artificially inseminated with tension” and the punchline releases it. Each of these videos is structured like a joke: You see the son toddling away, and at the very end of the video, the mother bolts after him. Tension and release. Setup and punchline.

There are interesting layers here: Clayton is setting herself up to see how far she can let her son go, and she’s setting us up, too. (Gadsby points out that her job as a comedian is to build tension and release it and do that over and over again. “This is an abusive relationship!”) We watched the videos with our kids after spending an exhausting 30 minutes in the museum trying to keep them close, my wife restraining the 3-year-old from leaping onto the paintings. (Unfortunately, art museums do require “helicopter parenting.”) The joke, I think, is not on the kid, or the kid viewers: my sons laughed out loud during the videos — I think they were rooting for him to get away!

Then, you remember the news and the fact that our government has split thousands of families apart at the border. Suddenly, The Distance I Can Be From My Son takes on a completely different meaning. You laughed and now you want to scream.

Advertising play well

Tuesday, July 3, 2018

I read about this 1966 LEGO ad in Alexandra Lange’s The Design of Childhood. In case you can’t read the copy:

Let somebody else’s child get his kicks tracking a little kid through a gun sight. Let somebody else’s child build a bomb shelter in the hollow of an old tree. Remember when the hollow of an old tree was just fun? Heck, war isn’t very adventurous anymore. We think there’s lots more adventure in a medical lab, or at the U.N.

A half century later, it seems remarkably progressive . I was reminded of this pamphlet from a 1974 LEGO set:

The urge to create is equally strong in all children. Boys and girls.

It’s the imagination that counts. Not skill. You build whatever comes into your head, the way you want it. A bed or a truck. A dolls house or a spaceship.

A lot of boys like dolls houses. They’re more human than spaceships. A lot of girls prefer spaceships. They’re more exciting than dolls houses.

The most important thing is to put the right material in their hands and let them create whatever appeals to them.

Again, it seems remarkably progressive, as does this 1981 ad, written by creative director Judy Lotas, who was inspired by the Equal Rights Amendment and her own daughters:

Have you ever seen anything like it? Not just what she’s made, but how proud it’s made her. It’s a look you’ll see whenever children build something all by themselves. No matter what they’ve created.

That ad went viral in 2012 when LEGO started marketing LEGO Friends.

The response, when we see these ads, is often, “Why on Earth don’t they do it like this anymore?”

Many parents, including myself, lament the fact that there used to be more emphasis on free play and building from imagination, rather than pre-determined kits. Here’s Raul Gutierrez, of Tiny Bop:

The best toys — Tinkertoys, Lego, Play-Doh, Lincoln Logs — allowed us to build and rebuild almost endlessly. With my kids, I noticed that these kinds of toys have become increasingly rare. Lego bricks are sold primarily as branded kits. Instead of a pile of blocks that could become anything, they are now essentially disassembled toys. Instead of starting with a child’s imagination of what could be, play is now fixed on a single endpoint, predetermined by Lego’s designers.

But Lange points out that this golden age that we think of was actually just that: a golden age, a product of the specific time:

Today, the LEGO Group is often criticized for stoking the cycle of consumer desire, sequestering LEGO bricks in individual branded universes, and launching new sets on a fashion cycle, but this has been part of the company’s sales strategy for longer than people realize. The free play celebrated in their ads of the 1970s and early 1980s reflects a brief moment in American culture when the kindergarten values — embedded in wooden blocks — returned to the forefront…

We also lament the loss of that wonderful gender-neutral tone, which, according to this NYTimes article on how Disney has branded Frozen, was way more prevalent in the 1970s than today:

Princesses may seem like a permanent feature of the toyscape, but they were less common before the 1990s. “The idea that pink princess fantasy dream dolls have always been a part of girlhood is false,” says Elizabeth Sweet, a lecturer at the University of California, Davis, who studies the cultural history of toys. Sweet has found that the popularity of gender-neutral toys reached a peak in the mid-1970s. Since then, toy makers have embraced the market-doubling effect of pushing certain toys to boys and other toys to girls. Sweet says the level of gender segregation has never been higher. A typical big-box store might have four aisles of blue toys and four aisles of pink toys with an aisle of yellow toys in between. “Separate but equal,” she says. Legos, for example, evolved from simple packs of building blocks into play sets mostly sold to boys, often with brand tie-ins. In 2012, the company introduced Lego Friends, which are basically Legos for girls.

Here’s another NYTimes article from 2012 on gender-based toy marketing:

Gender was remarkably absent from the toy ads at the turn of the 20th century but played a much more prominent role in toy marketing during the pre- and post-World War II years. However, by the early 1970s, the split between “boys’ toys” and “girls’ toys” seemed to be eroding…

But by 1995, the gendered advertising of toys had crept back to midcentury levels, and it’s even more extreme today. In fact, finding a toy that is not marketed either explicitly or subtly (through use of color, for example) by gender has become incredibly difficult.

There are several reasons gender-based marketing has become so prevalent. On a practical level, toy makers know that by segmenting the market into narrow demographic groups, they can sell more versions of the same toy.

We want, so badly, for companies to stand for something good, and some companies do, but at the end of the day, advertising is about moving product, and while it can be idealistic and a force for good, is always the product of people trying to sell things to other people in a particular time and place. If you want better, more progressive advertising, build a better, more progressive world. Best not to get too caught up in nostalgia, but look back, see what’s worth stealing, and more forward.

A note on the post title, from Lange’s book: “LEGO” is a contraction of the Danish leg godt, or “play well.”

Feeling blocked? Play with blocks!

Tuesday, February 6, 2018

One handy thing about having young children is that it’s given me a good excuse to knock off work and play with blocks. I love building blocks. I could spend hours just building towers and letting my 2-year-old knock them down. It’s one of the purest delights I know.

For writer Lawrence Weschler, playing with blocks is a big part of his writing process, particularly when he’s working out the structure for a piece:

I procrastinate. I play with blocks. I have lots and lots of blocks, wooden blocks, and you should see the palaces I construct. Not giving the subject the slightest thought. Awash in pure formfulness. Puzzles and revelations surrounding structure. Days pass. Weeks, (Obviously somewhere in the back of my mind, I am sorting out structural issues regarding my writing as well, but not consciously.) At length, palace-building all the while, I begin to thrum around about structural questions in the piece: what if I led instead with X? And, hey, wait, it’s weird, but that P section rhymes with the T, S could go before P, and we could flip M and N. Hmmm. And this sort of thing becomes more and more interesting to me. Presently compellingly interesting. (The polarities reverse, and now the empty page is magnetized north and the rest of the world south: The house is burning down? Who cares.)

In The New New Journalism, he makes a point that his blocks are his own:

These blocks belong to your daughter?
No, my daughter is not allowed to play with these blocks. They are mine.

And what do you do with these blocks?
Well, my wife, who is an important human rights monitor, and my daughter, who has been off at school, will come home and see the elaborate cathedral I’ve built on the kitchen table. And they’ll say, “We see you’ve been busy today.” And I have!

Later, he’s asked how the block palaces he builds actually get translated into writing:

I tape large one-by-three-foot blank sheets together to create a kind of a blotter. I doodle and sketch a lot on the blotter. I make little diagrams to connect things. The point is to lay out and visualize the structures I’ve been thinking through when I was playing with the blocks.

There is something magical that happens when you move things around with your hands — it frees up your mind to think. (Just now I was doing the dishes and came up with the images for a talk I am working on.)

Weschler is not the only creative adult who plays with blocks — so does the designer Tucker Viemiester. When he found out his mom donated his old blocks to Head Start, he made her get them back so that he could have them for himself:

What Mr. Viemeister, who has brought the spirit of fun and practicality to a wealth of products, most famously the Oxo kitchen utensils, values most about the blocks is how plastic they are, even though they are made of wood. With Legos, he said, the play process is more tilted toward a goal: the house or ship or castle that you build and are finished with. The Unit Blocks — with nothing to hold them together, and difficult to move when assembled — encourage a more fluid, open-ended process that is never quite finished and easily started anew.

What’s interesting about building blocks is that they were not always such a commonplace item in the lives of young children. As Norman Brosterman writes in his fantastic book, Inventing Kindergarten, “it is something of a surprise to discover that, like kindergarten itself, they have not been with us forever.”

The kind of children’s blocks we think of today can be traced back to kindergarten’s inventor, Friedrich Fröbel, who included blocks as one of his “gifts” to students. He specifically designed them to be “plastic” in the way that Tucker Viemeister points out makes them so great. Froebel hated the way most kids’ toys and models in the nineteenth century were basically like the packaged pre-destined LEGO kits of today, where there is a “right” way to put them together, a final shape to build step-by-step towards, so he made his block sets pure geometry, “Nonspecific, open-ended, and symbolic.” Here’s a picture of some of the block sets from Inventing Kindergarten:

Later, Caroline Pratt, founder of City and Country School, and author of the great book I Learn From Children, developed the “Unit blocks” we know best today from preschool and kindergarten. She was trying to figure out a good way to bring the world into the classroom. She wanted to help children discover the world by re-building it in miniature.

The Unit blocks were her solution. In Ian Franzier’s introduction to I Learn From Children, he writes:

She had taught manual arts and knew hot to work with wood. From pieces of maple she made sets of building blocks in basic shapes, each shape in proportion with the others so they could adjoin each other in simple multiples…. [They] became the most widely used elementary-level playtime blocks in the country… She couldn’t patent her Unit Blocks — in them she had discovered something too basic to claim, as if she had invented water—but their acceptance by day care centers and nursery and elementary schools is by now close to unanimous.

Frazier points out that the blocks, which were designed to mimic architecture, ended up influencing architecture itself. This is exactly Brosterman’s thesis in Inventing Kindergarten: that kindergarten’s emphasis on geometry and abstraction had a part to play in the beginning of abstract art and modern architecture. (Frank Lloyd Wright, for example, was one of the first generation of students in Froebel-style kindergarten, and fondly remembered his Froebel blocks.)

So, if you’re feeling blocked… buy yourself a set of blocks!