Committed to finding ways out of the coercion/self-sacrifice mire of conventional parenting. We are variously critical rationalists, libertarians, home educators, attachment-parents, but we take our ideas where we find them.
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On the Nickelodeon channel the other day, Mr Garcia of The Brothers Garcia was talking to his son about earning money. One thing I like about this show is, the family is not extortionately rich, unlike a lot of similar family-values shows such as Sabrina (but then her family are witches, so, fair enough). Dad is a university professor and Mom has a beauty parlour. It leads off from the family sitting-room in a slightly surreal kind of way that doesn't tend to happen in Peckham.
Anyway, Son Garcia wanted some cash to take a particularly impressive girl out on a date, and Dad didn't have $60 to spare, but found him a job instead. Advising Son that if he wanted the job, he really should stick at it at least for a while in order to demonstrate seriousness and so on, even if it wasn't as fun as it initially seemed, Dad said that one thing about jobs was, you had to go in every day whether you felt like it or not.
"But you love your job, Dad!" says Son Garcia.
"That's right, I'm very lucky," says Dad. "Earning money doing something you enjoy is the secret of happiness."
Now, while I don't necessarily agree that the entirety of human joy is stored in this one handy maxim, I do think it's a very good and important thing to know about. People have to earn money in order to have good lives. If they hate their work then a) their lives will be miserable, and b) they probably won't be very good at it anyway.
Having grown up surrounded by the powerful bad meme that money-earning work is a total pain that just gets in the way of real life, I think that giving your children a definition of work as an inconvenient endurance test is very wrong and very destructive indeed. It's easy to do, all it takes is to arrive home exhausted, only ever say negative things about your job, never show signs of joy at getting up and going out of the house in the morning, and most of all, never do anything to remedy this appalling state of affairs if you can possibly help it (due to being too fed up and tired from the job). This way you can make your children think the following:
a) adult life is horrible,
b) having a family destroys your freedom, permanently,
c) the point of life is weekends and a comfortable retirement.
Which is terrible. Yet again, there are no easy answers to this one. But I think it's something to bear in mind. Parents don't just have the right to enjoy their own lives and take their own careers and dreams seriously: they have a positive responsibility to their children to pursue those careers and dreams in the best ways they can think of, and not to give up.
As a young person once said to me, it doesn't matter so much if you fail: what does matter is that you do your best and keep on trying.
They're making a film of Thunderbirds, with real actors, at last! Gerry Anderson will be pleased; the maker of the original Thunderbirds series always wanted to make proper TV shows with real people, but got embarrassingly sidelined into puppetry instead.
I always love to see the power of the kiddie pound/dollar at work. Young people have been wanting this film for years, Tracey Islands sell fast every Christmas whether or not the show is on network TV, and films like this are always fun whether or not they are artistic masterpieces (I'm thinking Scooby Doo, Harry Potter, etc). Vive la Petite Revolution!
When I hear the words "new push" I always think of a) the First World War, and b) the Soviet Union. It's what people do when their systems aren't working- apply more mindless force. So, no surprise to find that schools are being instructed to do more new pushes. Next they will be going over the top and introducing Five Year Plans.
UK Schools Actually Manage to Prevent Even Computers From Teaching People Anything, Apparently
They'll be discovering that books don't work either, next. Is there no medium so powerful that it can overcome the destructive powers of Schooling?!
Actually, despite this, I think lots of school-attending children are learning plenty. I'm just not sure they wouldn't be learning the same amount if the school-attendance part was taken out of the equation.
A lot of children's TV consists of good ideas with the badness of reality taken out for propaganda reasons. For instance, American shows about family life always have parents who are totally sane and calm and never have rows or question their own parenting and apologise to their children. Whereas I think in real life there is some merit in the maxim, "If you must fight, always do it in front of the children", and that as all of us are rude or ratty sometimes at the very least, we should be apologising if we expect anybody else in the house to learn why sensitive behaviour is best.
Anyway, although children do seem to like it, one of my pet hates is "The Tweenies" (although it's not really aimed at the mid-thirties age group, so fair enough). The colours give me a headache, every one of the exaggerated characters is annoying in its own special way, but most of all the children (if that's the right word for a bunch of playfoam monsters) are entirely unrealistically well-behaved- you would think they were in an office at some big city bank, not a nursery- and they have one teacher/carer per four of them, and most of all they change activity every five minutes! Well, any nursery or toddler-parent would find life much easier if we could be going from adult-led storybook to glue-sticking to sandpit to dressingup and performing a play literally ten times an hour! Those are the kind of resources that make life easier.
So I think perhaps the most useful bit of information to be had from The Tweenies is an unintentional one:having lots of interesting things to do makes people happier and nicer to be around. Everyone knows that the more fun you can make life for children, the better things are for everyone, but we tend to lose sight of this idea either in a resources-panic or from some idea like "children must learn to make their own fun out of a couple of old bottle-tops and some pipe-cleaners, and the way to teach this is to ban TV and limit toys". But the truth is, bottomless pits of money and energy, deliberate deprivation, and unsatisfactory "middle-ground" compromises are none of them the real point. The real point is to be moving forward in a manageable way with finding as many new interesting activities as people want (including pipe-cleaner ones, if they are worth anything!), continuously, in a helpful and supportive fashion: an economy of growth, for everyone in the family.
Because happily busy people are nice to be around: and that includes parents!
No apologies for coming back a third time to the appalling Mr Alan Wells of the Basic Skills Agency. I don't think I have yet expressed my utter horror at this, despite having mentioned it twice today already:
"We need a greater sense of family programmes in every school," Mr Wells said. "If parents make that much difference, why aren't we investing in that?"
Excuse me: "if parents make that much difference"??? If parents actually affect the learning of their own children? If it's not just schools that teach children things but parents as well?
IF???????
OK then, IF parents actually teach their kids things, the implications of this are..... schools should be investing in parents..
You know, I actually doubt whether Mr Wells is a signed-up member of the Communist party, but I would love to know how far he would take this idea. Personally, I don't want my family's tax money to go on schools in any shape or form, but especially not schools telling people how to be parents. Does it never occur to these beauracrats that maybe parents might have a thing or two to teach them about how children learn? Of course not. There's no degree you have to take before you have kids. That makes parents second-class citizens who know less about their own kids than the professionals giving them 10 minutes contact time a day.
When it comes to knowledge, there's nothing like a job title and a qualification to prove how much cleverer you are than everybody else. Erm, not.
Modern life with TVs, central heating and playstations replaces “scrumping”, long card games round the coal-fire and the memorising of logarithmic tables.
A whole group of up-to-date activities and hobbies is replacing traditional boredom, cold and hunger, “an” “educationalist” said yesterday.
Children are increasingly immersed in television programmes or spend their time staring at computer screens while eating convenience foods in warm rooms on cosy sofas.
Family games of charades are becoming a thing of the past, leaving few opportunities for acting out dumb films and embarrassing yourself.
This depressing picture of home life in the 21st century was painted by A.Foole, director of the Basically Stupid Agency.
“Every school should offer classes for parents to teach them how to breathe, boil an egg and darn socks,” he said.
"I am talking about the children sitting in front of the TV, children sitting in front of the PC, the lack of families having food together, the lack of charades, Blitz spirit, air raid shelters and essential food-rationing. Rationing taught people morals. Supermarkets are nothing but havens of evil, on the other hand."
"We need a greater sense of family programmes in every school," Mr Foole said. "If parents actually make some kind of difference to the lives of their children, why aren't schools, the institutions that really matter, investing in that (obviously the fact that we don’t actually make money, being state-run institutions, is totally irrelevant here)?"
Sometimes when you practice autonomous home-education/ unschooling/ just helping children learn in ways they want that seem good (whatever you prefer to call it), strange things happen. One of those strange things might be that two children of completely different ages, perhaps one very young nursery-aged child and one comfortably school-aged, decide to learn to read at the same time. Then you might find you have one tiny person who can barely even pronounce letter-names learning to identify them on a computer game, while someone else is working out how to spell their first written words in simultaneous French, Spanish and English, just for fun.
When this kind of thing goes on, there is no knowing where it might lead to. But with this way of learning, that's part of the fun. One has to let go of anxiety-producing preconceptions about attainment targets and learn to look at the whole child and take a rational approach to how happy, fulfilled and productively occupied they are, in all and any areas that matter to them as an individual. This doesn't mean surrendering one's responsibility as a parent to help them learn in important and necessary ways: it means being available with good interesting ideas, making worthwhile suggestions, and offering reasoned views and input rather than groundless prejudices.
Two things I always remember as a home educator:
1. Nobody who ever achieved anything great learned how to do it in school,
2. Pupil/teacher contact time is 10 minutes a day.
They have some value as babysitting services, but as educating places they are largely useless. A well-equipped computer and free access to books, people, and various other activities, is all you need to set up a child happily learning outside the classroom. Very few home educators ever look back.
UK Government plans more messing around with school curriculum.
That doesn't surprise me- after all, it's their job. What does surprise me is that the "national literacy strategy":
"has failed to deliver any improvement in reading and writing scores for three years running."
Wow. Even by its own standards, it totally doesn't work.
But weirdly:
"David Miliband, the school standards minister, said at the northern education conference that the strategies "are recognised at home and abroad as an outstanding success". "
Don't ask me, I have no idea.
"He added: "Three-quarters of 11-year-olds now read, write and count well. But this still means that a quarter do not."
Well, there's no flies on Mr Miliband, at least! His fractions are impressively accurate! I hope someone gave him a gold star and extra marks on his report, for that one!
My personal blog, "A Libertarian Parent in the Countryside", has seized up for some unknown reason which is proving near-impossible to fathom. No posts have got through for 24 hours. Just posting this here in case any of you are readers of ALP and were wondering what was going on. This is the problem with free servers, I'm afraid.
Yet another good thing about home-educating is: spending lots of time with TVs and PCs doesn't have to mean spending less time talking. There are plenty of hours in every day for all the many many things that busy children get up to these days and for discussing and helping them at length, too.
This report suggests rightly that family conversation is essential for the growth of children's knowledge, and wrongly that TVs and PCs are to blame when it doesn't happen. My suggestion would be that schools, not TVs and PCs are to blame: forcing children to spend hours every day in a room where conversation with an adult must be shared with 36 other children, and there is no-one else to talk to than people with a similar language-skills level to oneself, seems entirely counter-productive when it comes to learning the art of spoken vocabulary and conversation.
But also, in order to talk to their children, parents need something to talk about. Consentual family life, shared problem-solving, and helping children with their chosen activities whenever help is appreciated, are all good ways to get involved and talking with them. And not only does this help their language skills, it builds your relationship with them, too.
Finally, I would like to point out that this idea, as voiced by Alan Wells, who is the director of something called the Basic Skills Agency: "Every school should offer classes for parents to teach them how to converse and play with their children", is dangerous and wrong.
It is not the job of government-run institutions to dictate what family life should be like. Teachers and inspectors are not necessarily any better at these things than anybody else in the country who has kids. Fortunately, the general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers realises this: "it is the job of schools to work with parents, not to teach them how to be good parents." But it's an arrogant tendency I think parents who are involved with schools should be watching out for.
I run a group for children aged 5-8 every week in term time, for an hour and a quarter in the evening. Usually there are between five and fifteen children, and another adult to help, or sometimes someone else runs the session instead of me. I don't get paid but I no longer resent this!
It is a very interesting exercise in how it is possible to entertain and manage a group of small people without threats of disciplinary measures. Of course, the first pre-requisite is, they all want to be there. If someone comes along who isn't enjoying himself, that's bad for him and for the group atmosphere, but it tends not to happen anyway. The next important thing is, thinking of an activity that the children are interested in and will enjoy. The one after that is, trying to create and maintain a friendly atmosphere. Noise doesn't matter as long as it's good, happy noise. If people are hanging around waiting to hear information and noise is delaying them, then that may not be good, happy noise anymore. In which case it's simple enough to wait for attention, get lots of eye contact, and maybe raise your voice once to request politely that people listen to you. That's about it.
Other general rules I follow are: don't expect people to be quiet and listen for very long at a time, because that gets boring. Do organise activities that can be continued while chatting to friends. Don't rush things, and never act like you are trying to control people. Ask for help clearing up and so on, but don't get unpleasant if it is refused. Generally, there is someone who just loves wiping tables and will scoot as fast as possible to fetch a wet cloth.
This evening, we made bread. I got the dough together, divided it up, and instructed everyone about kneading. Ten minutes of kneading was fun hard work, and then we looked at some ways of shaping the rolls. After that, I had planned a couple of running-around games, but this was before discovering that bread-roll-sculpting is an intensely time-consuming activity which requires huge amounts of concentration and experimentation for at least half an hour, whereupon parents started turning up to take people home.
Well, you learn something every day, especially if there's kids around.
This statistic looks very much like the old maths-and-height one, to me. Did you know that, statistically (and this is genuinely true), taller children are better at mathematics?
That's right. It's because taller children tend to be older and older children tend to have had time to learn more maths.
My guess is that underlying the lead/delinquency connection there could be any of a selection of these: poverty, poor diet, bad living conditions, neglectful and/or over-authoritarian parenting (the two go together in all good classic "bad parenting" manuals, hence that other damning non-starter of a diagnosis, "inconsistent"), general misery and horribleness, yuck, yuck, other kinds of yuck.
There aren't any known scientific studied proving that lead poisoning makes people suddenly commit criminal acts. But people are surely desperate to try and "solve" the juvenile crime problem: by any means other than actually working out how to treat children better.
Exceptional Circumstances= Even More Respectful Parenting
I'm going to re-make the point I made in the blog below, with no apologies at all: that, contrary to popular opinion, exceptionally difficult and stressful problems surrounding children do not raise the necessity of using force on them: in fact quite the opposite is true- difficult and extreme circumstances make respectful civilised parenting all the more imperative and worthwhile.
One of the most moving things I ever saw on TV was a documentary about a young teenager who was dying from a painful and horrific disability/illness he had had since being saved as an extremely premature baby. It was evident from the programme that there was no way these parents could ever have contemplated using lies or "discipline" measures on this young man at any time. His entire life had been one of extreme hardship and medical treatment, and not once had sanctions been used to make him undergo operations.
There are no extreme circumstances that children are incapable of understanding and dealing with responsibly: very often far more impressively than we adults ever could. Yet people still think they are too irrational freely to choose to learn to read unless we make them. More on that later, no doubt.
This is the text of a very rational (IMO) little advert thing I just saw on a website. It sums up the Rational Parenting message, and why treating kids like human beings is good especially in difficult problem-situations, not excepting them, as people often argue.
"Ask your kids where they hang out, and a funny thing might happen: they tell you the answer. Conversation: the anti-drug."
Whatever you think about drugs, and bearing in mind that "soft" drugs are apparently no more harmful than legal ones like alcohol and tobacco, the basic message here- that rational, respectful discussion is the way to solve problems- is a brilliant and true one. I think we've come a long way since "just say no".
Just to start the blog on a really uncontroversial, simple, safe kind of a note, I read this in the online Telegraph today. And I have a problem with the idea that internet "grooming" can be legislated against. It seems to me that the actions leading up to a legal offense against a child basically consist of things that aren't and shouldn't be illegal yet, and that if the government outlawed, say, "talking to a child with the intent of molesting them" that would be a very unsafe law requiring psychic powers to identify and enforce.
So, how to help your child be safe on the internet? Mostly, I would think, by giving them the knowledge you've got already about how to be safe when you are an adult. Why are children more vulnerable than adults sometimes? Because they don't know as much about dangers and how to protect themselves. But we can tell them quite a lot. Of course, banning/restricting computer use is only going to make them even less savvy and even more likely to do dangerous things when they get a chance; not to mention, a whole lot less likely to be talking to you regularly enough about what goes on so you can have the kind of input that would help them.
Being aware of what your children are doing, always available for help rather than to hinder them, and interested in their ideas, is the closest I can think of to being safe: it means they have access to everything you know, including everything you know how to find out. If they know you will advise them rationally, and not just stop them if you disagree with their choices, then you have the beginnings of the kind of close trusting friendship with your kids that makes internet nasties massively less likely to attack. In my opinion.
