ILX Parenting 5: I'm a big kid now

And while I too find easy generalizations like "video games makes our children psychotic" generally kinda lame, it is impossible to reconcile the current fad towards largely indoor, over-structured childhood with anything approaching good mental health.

Found this one:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/10/my-daughters-homework-is-killing-me/309514/?single_page=true

So does anyone on here homeschool or unschool?

I remember watching Wiseman's High School for the first time in a sociology class in college. The class stressed intrinsic motivation in education. It required us to take the final whenever we felt like it, if wanted too. We were provided with a schedule of lectures, quizzes and movies to attend, or not, and a list of books to read or not, in any order. I ended up reading more than I was assigned and attended everything. There were several combinations of exercises, essays, quizzes, books to read etc... to get grades. This all worked for me.

What's unschool? I wish I could homeschool my kids.

We homeschooled. For various reasons, it turned out to not be the right choice for us, but I'd still go to bat for it for other people. Maybe we'll try again someday, but he seems to be doing okay in public elementary school.

I wish we had been able to better stay on top of what the local school system is doing in terms of progress in the basics. I mean, when you get involved in discussions with other homeschooling families, there's so much "oh, little David never even started reading until he was 10, but now he's 14 reading Dostoevsky..." You know, these anecdotes which assure you that, yeah, your kid will develop those skills at the time that is right for them. Which is great and all, and one of the benefits is supposed to be learning at your own pace, but when we had to re-enroll him in public school, he had a lot of catching up to do. Think he's there finally, but honestly, it took a couple years.

Unschooling is when you follow the child's lead when it come to learning. It is the belief that children have a natural curiosity and will to learn so you facilitate that by providing experiences. My neighbor use to unschool her child, at home, but always corrected anyone who said she was homeschooling.

Even though it's basically child-led homeschooling (which is what a lot of non-parochial homeshooling is)... people make weird distinctions about these things.

I hope I don't offend anyone with this, but I find the idea of "child-led" schooling to be a little like tourist-led amazon rainforest trekking.

some friends of ours have this nanny who so fucking horrible, and they haven't fired her yet. it's crazy. she lost their toddler in the library and blamed it on the toddler

But so this is the thing, I sort of get where the friends are coming from here! I have often lost one or another of my kids in the library, the supermarket, an MLB game, whatever. And when I was a kid my parents lost me in the mall, and I'm sure their parents etc etc. If I had a nanny, and my nanny lost track of the kid (but then found them again, obv.) I think I would at first be mad, but then I would ask, why do I expect the nanny to be better at keeping track of the kid than I, his own parent, am? Because she's getting paid to take care of him and I volunteered?

Pretty much.

Re "play deficit" -- I sympathize at one level but feel that in the end articles like this are primarily part of the "shame middle-class parents into feeling like they're DOING IT RONG" industry which is so successful in generating clicks and tweets. (see also: "massage prejudices of middle-class parents so they can feel like OTHER PEOPLE ARE DOING IT RONG.") my kid is bookish and likes plopping in his chair and reading, i'm not gonna be the guy to say "you're going outside and having an unstructured activity because i read in a magazine that otherwise you might get an anxiety disorder, OUT THE DOOR THIS MINUTE buster and don't let me see you till dinnertime."

the proliferation of nanny-dom is pretty interesting to me. such a thing was completely unheard of in my generation - I didn't no any kid that had a nanny. but post-90s it seems to have become increasingly common. maybe it's just cuz of where I am compared to where I grew up (urban vs. suburban) but this seems like a major shift in parenting in this country.

Two-parent couples are common everywhere, but I do think nannying is more geographic -- here in the Midwest I know lots of two-earner couples with enough money to afford a nanny but it's much more common to have 8:30-5 daycare. (Though I certainly know people with nannies, and it's not considered weird or putting on airs.)

xp but that's not really the point. The point is more that the constant "sit here and do exactly as your told and learn exactly this and then take this test and oh by the way never go outside anymore cuz the school can't afford outside and then when you are done go home and do a mess more schoolwork" is incredibly messed up. There are plenty of ways of getting it right that don't involve going camping or marauding bands of kids with sticks.

I just don't get where this happens. At my kid's school, which is a pretty normal school as far as I can tell, they play on the playground before school starts, and then again at recess, and then afterschool he goes to an afterschool program where they play outside some more. Lots of kickball.

There's a pretty large amount of literature out there about the decline of recess time and the rise of testing. Your school may have bucked the trend though. A lot definitely depends on where you live.

eephus, though not play, your kid is still doing something he enjoys doing that is also edifying.

The woman who lived next door to us in OK had her kids out all day during the summer. I saw that they knew how to play and had great imaginations and fun. They went inside when the sun went down. Did they read before bad, or were read to? Don't know. For me, not being interested in reading isn't great. I personally think it is important to cultivate an interest in books.

Lol, K threw a tantrum on the subway this morning cuz we got stuck and I didn't have the kind of cheese she wanted. Various women were offering unsolicited (useless) advice on what to do (like "put her head on your shoulder" uh yeah that's going to work with my giant wriggly 19-month-old). I guess it's the one situation in which the term "momsplaining" might apply. But I was like "psh, I got this" and I started asking K what noises different animals make. Works every time.

free unsolicited parenting advice from strangers = always a winner

i dont understand why anyone would feel the need to say anything at all & do anything other than smile sympathetically

Women just assume dads on public transport have no fucking clue what we are doing. Like we just sort of accidently got on the bus and a kid happened to be there ("oh are you mine?") and now we're frantically trying to piece together how one deals with that quandary.

lol

"Wow, that family must have had a real emergency that the dad is actually bringing the kid on public transit alone"

"He must be babysitting."

"I know what guy needs right now! Unsolicited, unhelpful advice! On three ladies let's point out what he should be doing better!"

tbf my train has a lot of older russian and chinese ladies who might not be as used to the concept

I do like it when old people make funny faces at Dalton though. Not so much when they try to "steal his rosy cheeks". Probably lucky he doesn't have a weird complex at this point about shriveled old Russian ladies ripping his face off.

xp to be honest it is all well meaning.

it's almost like the last 60+ years of popular culture have reinforced that men are incompetent, bumbling idiots when it comes to anything related to parenting or relationships

WHEN WILL MEN GET A FAIR SHAKE?

I am quite conscious of that. I had J in a couple of restaurants and his behaviour was terrible - refusing to eat, off walkabout, feet on the seats - but he was too tired for it to be worth fighting him. It was a slight comfort that any condemnation would fall on men generally, rather than my individual lousy parenting.

In fairness it was the restaurant's fault in one instance. If a group has a child in it, surely good practice is to bring all the food together, and quickly, rather than the kid's meal immediately then the adults' half-an-hour later. What did they think he was going to do, sit quietly for 45 minutes?

Uh in general I find that having food for the kid immediately can be a real boon.

Yeah I was gonna say. The real question is why it took a half an hour for them to bring anything

When I waited tables I always brought out crackers or bread or whatever for the kid ASAP and then tried to get the kids food out early if I could.

We usually ask right away "what do you have that can come out quickly?"

I did insist they remove the service charge from the bill, so there's that.

had a crappy parenting night last night thanks to a very long, very very angry tantrum that took up most of our family time. she was angrier than i've ever seen her, fists clenched and shaking. she was actually hitting me with fists rather than just slap-hitting, and said a couple of surprisingly violent things (something about hitting me with a board with nails in it!??!). i think it was mostly a "normal" tantrum and we mostly handled it well but it's hard not to take it personally.

Whoa. That's pretty intense. Was there an impetus for it?

whoa indeed

it started bc sarah wouldn't take her to the playground after school but continued on from there. at one point it was resparked bc although i gave her a second serving of applesauce at dinner i didn't give her enough or do it the right way or something? so it was obviously "about" something else. we tried to talk to her to find out if something at school had upset her but she wouldn't really talk to us about it. could have just been really tired. i think it might be toddler control issues - she gets really mad when we say she can't do something, i think we need to rephrase our refusals to give her some kind of choice. but i'm going to try and snag her teacher this afternoon and see if she can shed any more light.

i blame the violent talk on her being one of just two girls in her day care class and also being one of the younger kids in her class. too much play time around older boys.

anyways i'm not really concerned but it was not fun and made me feel pretty shitty for a while.

I'm sorry. That would make me feel really bad, too.

Awww...bad day. It is hard not to take it personally.

August got really angry with us about two months ago. She was red and and made a fist with one tiny hand, then punched her other tiny hand with it a few times, all while babbling through tears and giving us a stink-eye. I just thought, ugh, is she going to have a bad temper? At the time, she was only 15 months old or so, more sad and adorable then offensive to me. However, if she did that to me now, I'd feel terrible.

*than

yeah sylvie had a pretty out of character tantrum having to do with hair washing a few weeks ago. the only time we've ever put her to bed in the midst of a crying jag, but she relaxed and was fine in the morning. i don't know, i felt like she was really testing how mad she could get, if that makes sense.

Been there, done that, n/a.

The frustration 47-month-old H lashes out because he still can't quite communicate what he wants or some minor aspect of his routine that we didn't know about got changed or his big sister egging him on about something. Dude just explodes sometimes and it's not pretty.

Not quite the same as the board of nails, but Beeps has been bring home some ghoulish talk. I heard her telling H a ghost story about blood being everywhere. She's a first-grader, so that kind of weird talk is going to become more common, but Good Lord is it tough hearing your little girl turn into Anne Rice.

My nose is all cut/scratched up right now because of multiple recent incidents in which K has tried to rip it off my face in anger. Usually the trigger is something pretty inconsequential -- she doesn't feel like having her diaper changed at that particular second, she wants you to immediately put on a particular song that you can't listen to anymore, etc. I do think it's partly the stress of H going back to work and all the change, and partly just her realizing she can get certain reactions from us.

When she recounts the accident (the child died and Ms. Halweil was not charged) you can really see her calm, philosophical and open demeanor.

Kids are so IA.

oh, xp, that was wrong thread

the italicized quote