Soap and teenagers

The soap has cured! We've wrapped it up in salvaged tissue paper and ribbon, to keep it protected until use by us or others. While the lavender buds turned a less-than-fetching brown in the alkaline environment, the basic marbled green of the soap is nice to look at, and the mixture of lavender and rosemary scent is just right.

The power was out most of today and this is one of the things Fiona and I did to fill the time.

Today we also enjoyed having three teenagers in the family for the first time.  Sophie has joined Noah and Erin on the far side of twelve. Plans for birthday dinner and coconut cream pie were almost foiled by the power failure, but the electricity came on just in time for us to squeeze the cooking in.

I would wager that Sophie has felt thirteen for a while now. She joined Corazón (nominally for 13 through 25-year-olds) in September. She's been one of the youngest students enrolled in the local public high school this fall, through school-wide multi-day field trips and multi-grade workshops. Her social affinities have always tended to run a little 'old.' And she's a well-grounded, mature kid, with a solid sense of what's right for her and of what she likes.

Now it's official. She's a teenager. As always any nostalgia I might feel for the little-kid days is far outweighed by the excitement and pride I feel watching my children grow into such interesting and capable young people, ready for adventure, quirky as heck but as loveable than ever.

Mix-and-match schooling logistics

Okay, I know it's not going to continue to be this challenging, but can I just complain for a moment about the organizational challenges of having all these kids doing all these extremely different but fairly rigorously scheduled things?

My Yesterday
7:15 up and make lunches
7:45 awaken Sophie, make and drink my coffee
8:30 run Sophie to school
8:55 dash home to awaken Noah and Fiona
9:40 run Noah to school
10:00 - 11:00 Fiona's violin lesson
11:40 pick Noah up from school
12:00 make lunch, talk to Erin on the phone
12:30 homeschooling time with Fiona
1:45 drive to school with Noah and Fiona to pick up Sophie and two other teens
2:00 - 3:30 drive to Nelson for choir rehearsal
3:45-5:30 grocery shopping and many other errands
5:45 pick up six choir members for ride home
6:00 ensure choir members have munchies for ride home
6:15-7:45 drive home, dropping choir members off on the way
8:00-8:30 help Erin trouble-shoot various logistical issues on the phone from Montreal
8:30-9:00 supper
9:00-9:45 bedtime readaloud
9:45-10:30 computer / email time
10:30 bedtime

Today (Wednesday) isn't quite as bad, but included two sessions of coaching / teaching group violin classes, some private violin lesson teaching, all the to-and-from-school driving mentioned above, and additional time helping Erin with chemistry equations over the phone.

I'm just not used to it. I suppose it will get easier. But gosh, now I understand. For years I've heard homeschooling moms complain about the time constraints and hassles of having kids both within and out of school. Yes, I get it.

Tantrums and meltdowns

"How can you tell the difference between an emotional meltdown due to neurological over-excitabilities and a bratty tantrum the child is using to get what they want?"

I don't believe it's as simple as saying "either the child is subjected to neuro-behavioural storm totally beyond her control, or else she's being calculatingly evil and trying to manipulate me by purposely creating the behaviour." I think it's something in between, with elements of both -- the child is communicating, with inappropriate behaviour, something that she feels deeply. My job is to find out what she's trying to communicate, the root cause of feelings behind the behaviour, and help her de-escalate and find other more acceptable ways to communicate both now and in the future.

I dislike the term brattiness. I think that kids generally do the best they can with the communication tools, maturity and impulse control they've got at their disposal. If they're being "naughty" it's because they've got unmet needs somewhere. That doesn't mean you let them get away with the misbehaviour, but the onus is on you to stretch your empathy and figure out where the misdirected behaviour is coming from.

Stranded stringless

Erin is possessed of the type of independence her mother has -- the ability to tough things out on her own. The type her mother lacks, the ability to approach people and ask for help, she also lacks. Especially on the phone. It's a generational affliction; my mother is scarcely better at it than I am.

She's on a school trip to the Banff Writers Festival this weekend. She has a performance of the Mendelssohn 1st movement next weekend; the piece is very recent for her and she's brought it up to speed in very short order, but she does need to be practicing. So she took her violin along on the trip.

She called last night to whine -- her A-string was unravelling, and she hadn't brought a spare. She was so mad about her predicament. Banff has no music store. She knew I couldn't do anything to fix things. I guess she just called to share the misery.

It turned out that the guy who runs the home-based fine instrument dealership where we bought her violin two years ago had moved to Banff, though, so I gave her his number. Oh, the agony! She knew she would have to call him, introduce herself, explain her predicament, talk to the trip chaperones and ask one of them to take her to his place to pick up a string. It was probably one of the hardest things she'd ever had to do -- harder than performing the Mendelssohn, harder than travelling to Asia for two months without her family. She knew she had the option of just waiting two days until she got home, where we have plenty of spare strings. But she wasn't willing to forgo the practicing. (This is the kid who played her violin for six hours straight through the night earlier this week, because she really felt like practicing.)

So she called him. And there was no answer.

So she looked up the number of a friendly Banff Suzuki teacher, someone she knows a little bit through summer workshops but doesn't have any sort of personal relationship with. And called her, and explained. And was rewarded with caring generosity. Wrote down directions, found a map, asked one of the chaperones for a ride, found the place, picked up the Evah Pirazzi A-string, and got back to the hotel suite to start practicing, all by 10:30 in the morning. She was very proud of herself. Very proud. I asked her if this signified that she was now ready to move out and live independently. She laughed and said yes.

I have a deep personal understanding of how difficult this was for her. As I say, I share many of the same hangups, though maturity and experience allow me to cope pretty easily these days. It may be seem like a small thing compared to her many other accomplishments, but I am at least as proud of her as she is of herself, which is saying a lot.

Techniques

Dear parent who is asking about the latest and greatest disciplinary techniques:

Discpline (which really means "teaching") isn't about techniques, IMO. Techniques tend to be about finding ways to make your child do what you want and not do what she wants. Disciplinary techniques tend to put behaviour ahead of relationship, correction ahead of understanding, authority ahead of empathy.

True discipline is helping your child internalize the desire to behave compassionately, respectfully, empathetically, responsibly and in accordance with social customs so that she wants to behave well and has the tools she needs to do so. As I see it this desire to behave well is built upon a strong respectful relationship with parents who walk the talk. In other words parents who behave with compassion, empathy, responsibility and respect, who treat the child with the understanding and grace that should be accorded any fellow human being, young or old.

No techniques required.

The race that is childhood

Message board copy & paste:

"One of the bragging points is 'My little Johnny doesn't watch those shows anymore. He's much too mature for Barney and Dora. He much prefers watching Arthur and Spiderman.' "

My, everything has got so competitive, hasn't it? Even child-rearing is a race.

It breeds something I call pseudo-maturity -- the adoption of pop-culture affinities, behaviours and attitudes of people who are older than you. Kids are considered "ahead" of their peers if they like the pop icons, clothing, music and friendship of kids older than they are. And so we have 4-year-olds who are too cool for Treehouse, thongs for 8-year-olds, and Grade 5 classes where everyone has a "crush" on someone.

But none of this real maturity, which I would define as a strong sense of values, a secure sense of self, and the impulse control and sense of responsibility required to act on those core values. I've noticed that often it's the kids who exhibit relatively "young" likes, meaning they still play with stuffies at age 10 or admit to enjoying Treehouse at age 6, are the ones who end up demonstrating the most real maturity.

(Do I dare admit that my kids have occasionally vegged in front of "Treehouse" up to the age of 10?)

Naughty Stool Memory

I was about eight years old. I had done something deemed wrong or inappropriate. I have absolutely no recollection what it was. That part of the memory faded very fast, and it was really beside the point. There had been some conflict and I had lost and was now subject to my parents' authority. I was sentenced to what was in 1972 a fairly progressive form of punishment. Not a spanking, but a ten-minute time-out on the Naughty Stool. It was bar-stool height, wooden and painted bright orange with many chips out of the paint, and while it had other uses around the house most of the time, when placed in the laundry room beneath a misbehaving child it was the Naughty Stool.

What did my parents think the time-out would accomplish? They no doubt believed it would give me time to cool down, to think through my misbehaviour, to internalize their behavioural expectations and to emerge contrite and apologetic, less likely to misbehave in the future. And if I perceived the time-out as harsh and punitive, well, a little negative reinforcement for poor behaviour isn't a bad thing, is it?

As an adult I now understand all this about my parents' choice to utilize time-outs. As a child, though, I remember having a very strong sense that a time-out was to try to make a child feel rotten and cry, a kind of tit for tat. "You were mean to your brother, so now we're going to be mean to you. You will endure this humiliating acquiescence to our control over you. And it will make you feel powerless, indignantly angry and hurt. Exactly as it should."

Truly. That's what I thought they were doing. Trying to hurt me back.

So there I was, sitting angrily on that painted orange stool in the laundry room when I had my eight-year-old's epiphany. Since the point of the time-out was to make me feel hurt and angry, I could trump the whole thing by sheer force of will. I would not become angry. I would not feel hurt. I would breathe deeply and remind myself that I was right, that my parents were idiots, that they could not control me. I would matter-of-factly continue to believe that I was justified in my (mis)behaviour and I would jolly well not feel contrite. And then I would feel cheerful and I would have won! They would have failed to hurt me!

I sat. I did not cry. I breathed calmly and deeply and smirked quietly to myself. And I basked in the newfound knowledge that they could not control my feelings, nor could they ever truly control me. I was too smart and determined.

It's one of my clearest childhood memories. As a young adult I pondered it plenty; I was beginning to sense how badly I had misinterpreted my parents' intent with this relatively benign punishment, but I was also beginning to believe that this memory of my 8-year-old thought processes was something important I wanted to hang on to so that I would understand my own children and how punishment would affect them.

It is no wonder I have chosen the path of positive discipline as a parent.

Adolescent responsibility

Somewhere I read that the shift to night-owl-dom in adolescence once had a biological imperative. Young teens in tribal times were the ones who were given spears and left to guard the encampment from enemies and predators by the fire all night long. Now that's meaningful responsibility -- life and death stuff! By contrast today's young teens are given the responsibility of finishing their social studies essay on time.

People often ask me how I am handling having Erin off on the opposite side of the earth, having adventures I know next to nothing of, travelling with a loose itinerary I can't possibly keep track of, out of reach of telephone and internet. Honestly, I don't find it hard. Partly because my parental pride at her courage and adventurousness offsets the worry. But mostly because I think this sort of independence, responsibility, self-sufficiency and risk is an absolutely crucial part of maturing towards adulthood. I did a lot of really stupid things as a teen, trying to test my mettle. I hope that as they grow through adolescence all my kids will find smart ways to test their mettle. Erin is having her turn now.

Adolescence rant

Copied & pasted from a discussion board where it was being argued that young adults from 18-25 ought to be cut a little slack by the justice system when they do stupid things like engage in credit card fraud -- because science has shown that their frontal cortexes are still developing. "There is good reason why we now consider adolescence to last a dozen or more years," it was argued. "It's because the brain is still maturing all that time."

The prolongation of adolescence has nothing to do with knowledge of brain maturity and everything to do with keeping inexpensive pools of labour out of the workforce by maximizing educational and economic dependency. As we expect less and less of our young people, they live down to our expectations. Yes, most 18-year-olds are immature and irresponsible -- because we haven't given them to fodder of life experiences, freedom, autonomy, meaningful involvement in family and community life and other forms of responsibility that they need as catalysts for the development of maturity. We treat them like children far too long. I'm not putting the blame on parents here so much as on society. We don't let teens make decisions for themselves, live self-sufficiently, drive, sign legal documents, travel, get married, leave school, drink alcohol, have sex, work during certain hours of the day, vote ...

Robert Epstein and John Taylor Gatto have a lot of interesting historical perspectives on adolescence. It is indeed a relatively recent invention -- and they make a very good case that it is an ill-conceived social construct that contributes to the problem it purports to solve, that of immaturity.

The real agenda is economic, as it is for most things. The business world has traditionally wanted compliant willing workers who have been trained through years of schooling to conform. Trade unions have traditionally sought to prevent young people from entering the work force because they put a downward pressure on wages. On this one issue they have been united -- keep young people out of the work force and apart from the real workings of society.

I agree that the brain continues to develop into adulthood. But it continues to develop and change throughout adulthood as well. At some point we have to afford our citizens freedom and responsibility as full members of society. Shifting that age of majority later in the teens and well up into the 20's will save a few immature individuals from the consequences of their irresponsible choices for a few more years. Is it worth the cost to the rest of our young people -- infantilizing them far beyond the age when it is healthy for them.

Neurophysiological development is not the explanation for immaturity. No doubt my 10-year-old has the neurophysiology of a 10-year-old -- but she's not stealing, engaging in reckless behaviour or making other stupid choices. Neither are my 12 or 15-year-olds. Maturity is something rather different from neurophysiology, and in my opinion we're setting kids up for arrested moral development if we assume they're the same thing. At some point we have to start giving young people responsibility -- including the responsibility of living with the repercussions of their mistakes. They need responsibility as a catalyst for the development of maturity -- and a few more years of pre-frontal-cortex synapse development alone won't give it to them.

Small but significant conversation

Fiona: Mommy, I wish I had an organization to my day. You know, like, 'practicing: 10:30, math: 2 o'clock.'

Me [chuckling]: Oh my, Fiona, that's a really good idea. Unfortunately I think you have the wrong mom.

I'll try, I really will. Sort of. When I remember. When it fits.

Oh, my poor children.

Anger

In Buddhism anger is held to be one of the three roots of evil. Dr. Suzuki felt that anger was unnecessary and for a long time practiced not being angry. Our own family is a little shy on anger. The kids express hurt, but rarely anger. When they do, it's an anomaly and usually leads to a serious discussion about how things escalated that far. For a long time I thought that my inability to feel and express anger was a personal deficiency, that it meant I was a repressed person who couldn't deal with her own feelings. I'm not so sure now. Not all of my coping mechanisms are healthy, but I'm not sure anger is any healthier. What is clear, though, is that my kids are growing up in an environment where expressions of anger are very unusual.

Today Fiona and I went to Nelson to attend a Passport Clinic. One of the trickle-down repercussions of 9/11. Because the U.S. wants to be seen to be tightening border security, Canadians will soon need passports to cross the border in their cars, something half a million people do every day. And so there's been an incredible bottleneck in the passport application process. Waits of over 4 months were occurring with predictions of worse to come, though recent efforts like travelling Passport Clinics have cut the backlog.

But with Erin travelling at the end of December, we decided to use the Passport Clinic to be on the safe side and expedite the process as best we could. Fiona and I drove down to Nelson prepared to wait a few hours in line. As it turned out our arrival was well-timed and we had only an hour to wait on the street, and another 45 minutes inside.

It all went well. Except there was a man at the desk next to the one where we were being served who had waited the same 90 minutes as us. He was applying for a passport for his son, and not only was his signed Guarantor ineligible to be so according to the [new] clearly-stated rules, but his son had been the subject of an oft-revised custody agreement. The application clearly said that if this was the case the applicant was to bring "all documents" pertaining to the custody situation. He had brought nothing. And so he was angry. And while he did not explode with vicious language and vitriol, his anger was palpable. He raised his voice, he expressed loud incredulity, repeatedly proclaiming the procedure a "joke" and asking the clerk what the heck he was supposed to do now after spending almost two hours in a queue for nothing?

Fiona was not happy about overhearing this, about being within earshot of his anger. It probably didn't help that the man in question was an imposing physical presence as well. It was probably the most traumatic thing she's experienced in recent memory. And really, it was fairly benign in the grand scheme of things. If she hadn't been there I would have felt some sympathy for the clerk and then forgotten about the incident within the hour.

We talked a bit about how sometimes people feel things differently that we're used to, and sometimes they express their feelings in ways that sort of forget about other people's feelings. And I explained that I thought the clerk responded exactly the right way ... she was polite and firm and didn't get her back up and just reassured the man about what his options were.

So I think Fiona recovered. But is this a good thing, to raise children so far outside the realm of anger that they are traumatized by an irate man in a passport queue?

Contracting out parenting

Dear parent who asking for help finding bike-riding lessons for your 7-year-old:

There's a tendency these days to think that by contracting out what used to be basic childhood learning to 'professionals' who specialize in it we're giving our kids a better experience. Learning to swim, cook, sew, stay home alone, ride a bike, throw and catch a ball, grow a garden, develop empathy, build a go-kart, you name it and there are 'experts' offering classes and parents willing to sign their kids up.

I think this trend is a sad one, because it undermines confidence and interrupts the flow of knowledge through the generations. It undermines both parental confidence ("how can I possibly teach my child to do ____ if it's so complicated that people are paying experts to do it?") and child confidence ("mom and dad don't believe I can learn this without specialized help"). It produces a new generation of people who believe they won't be able to pass these skills onto their own kids, because they were taught by specialists themselves. And also, of course, it contributes to the rat-race of over-scheduled kids and double-income cash-strapped parents, all of which reduces the amount of time parents and kids have to spend together.

So here's my plea -- teach your own kid to ride a bike. I know you've tried. You're not done yet. Keep trying. Draw on the wisdom of other parents rather than the supposed expertise of experts. Trust that he will learn. Trust that you can help him. Spend the time with him. Make it a family event to go off to the schoolyard three evenings a week with daddy in tow so that you have the manpower to help the trike-sibling too. Stop for popsicles on the way home to make a special ritual. Create a memory of "that summer when you learned to ride a two-wheeler -- remember all those popsicles! Wasn't that fun!?" Do it with joy, trust, confidence, pleasure and time together with your child.