Monthly Archives: June 2009

The Birds and the Boys

June 23, 2009nature, Parenting, summerKirsetin

This morning the peonies are blooming and the birds are chirping and those @#$ squirrels are eating my birdseed again. Overgrown rats, that’s what they are.

Moving on from the squirrels…there are many other enjoyable aspects of being an early bird today. No, it’s not my nature to be up and at ‘em like this—you know I like to milk the morning for all I can—but today I’m here, tea in hand, listening to the outside world. As always happens on mornings like this, I’m surprised by the volume of sound the birds and frogs and other creatures out there produce. They’re small, but not silent. Amidst the daily cacophony of football and capture the flag, these sounds are drowned out, and it’s lovely, just now, to sit and listen to them in their loud glory.

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Yesterday morning, the boys rode their bikes to the library while I got organized. They returned, books secured, and, still on bikes, we headed to the Farmer’s Market. The boys headed straight for the bakery stall – the cinnamon rolls were calling them. Then we bought what turned out to be the best strawberries I’ve had in years. It makes me want to move to a tropical climate, where fresh fruit can be in season, locally, all year long. Think that will happen? Yeah, me neither.

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As the boys played at the beach the other day, I had such a sense of their similarities and differences. I watched them brave the cold water (68°), one tiptoeing, one running full on, one torn between the two. I watched them splash and dive and laugh. And later, when they’d had their fill, they quietly went their own ways. One settled down with a warm towel and a book; another stayed in the water, challenging himself, as always, to brave more; the third dug with the little metal shovel for hours, hours!, until he completed his lengthy river through the sand. I love these moments: boys together, boys alone, everyone content. They come too infrequently for me, never often enough, and they remind me of the pure joy of raising these boys.

Homework in Kindergarten?

June 22, 2009academics, NY TimesKirsetin

In her recent New York Times article, Kindergarten Cram, Peggy Orenstein says this:

“Jean Piaget famously referred to “the American question,” which arose when he lectured in this country: how, his audiences wanted to know, could a child’s development be sped up? The better question may be: Why are we so hellbent on doing so?”

I second the question.

Ms. Orenstein described searching for the right kindergarten for her daughter, and being disappointed that the vast majority of them assigned nightly homework to 5- and 6-year olds. Eventually found the right fit; she chose a school that doesn’t assign homework until the 4^th grade. Still early, she feels, but it’s better than kindergarten.

I have to agree. As a parent, I am a strong believer in a solid education. Our kids should understand our country’s history and it’s place in world history. They should have a solid grasp of mathematical concepts and know the difference between a noun and a verb. If they can also learn not to turn nouns INTO verbs, I’d love it, but that might be asking a bit much these days, when words like ‘journaling’ are acceptable parts of the vernacular. So, noun vs. verb, I’ll take it.

But I’m also a strong believer in letting kids be kids. I’m a proponent of downtime and family time and not keeping up with Joneses, who are probably up to their eyeballs in debt anyway. There’s an upside, I think, to kids being bored and unscheduled some of the time. Give creativity a chance—kids come up with all sorts of interesting things to do when “there’s nothing to do.”

It also seems to me that this desire to get ahead, to teach our 4-year olds to read and multiply, is directly related to another article I read in the in the NY Times. Two years ago, in For Girls, It’s Be Yourself, and Be Perfect, Too, Sara Rimer discussed the excruciatingly high expectations girls face today. It pained me to read it. If you haven’t read it already, you should. All parents should, because although this article specifically focuses on the pressures for girls, many of them apply to boys as well.

In myriad ways, we are pushing our kids to learn more, be more, do more sooner. Faster. Better.

And why?

It’s a complicated question with complicated answers. We’re all driven by different experiences and desires that influence our parenting. I think it’s a question we should stop to ask ourselves. And then we should be brave enough to let our kids be kids even when their peers are light years ahead, in more ways than one.

And I’m hanging onto the hope that when they’re older, much older, they’ll thank us.

What do you think?

A Few Things We Can Learn From Military Couples

June 19, 2009marriage, Wedded BlissKirsetin

My mother’s right hand rested on the large panes of the airport windows. I watched silently as she choked back her tears and dabbed her eyes. I saw her tuck her fear and worry away, in a place deep inside where we couldn’t see. She straightened up, turned to face us with a small smile, and drove us home.

As a military pilot, my dad spent his share of time on deployments–living away from home, most often on an aircraft carrier practicing maneuvers. These were usually 6-months stints, but occasionally lasted as long as a year. As a child, this meant that I missed my dad, sure, but I was blessed with the naïveté of childhood: I always knew he’d come home. He’d miss some basketball games, we wouldn’t go to the golf course for awhile, and his easy-to-open wallet would be MIA for a time, but eventually he’d return and life would get back to normal.

And for us, it did. He returned safely every single time, and our family weathered the small storms of re-adjusting to life as a family of 4 under the same roof. As I think about those adjustments, I realize how well the rest of us would be served to apply some of the same ideas. Click here to read my post at Wedded Bliss about 4 ways we can learn from military couples.

photo credit: larryzou