The First Year

Just look:

pictures of the first year.

We’re not sure what will happen next, but in this house we still have hope.

For the Birds

One of the things we love to do here is birdwatch and we do it with some frequency. I first heard about birding as a serious thing that real people did back in college from a friend, who since walked across Cuba and wrote a great book about it (in which the birding bits are among the best). He’s traveled all over the world for work and birding, and you should read his blog, which these days is full of urgent, important information on Haiti, where he has spent a goodly amount time.

We’re lucky enough to have a superb wetlands preserve near our house that is home to numerous species of birds. Some are migratory, some make their home year round.Some are common, some are very rare and draw birders from many miles around.   There’s an amazing hatchery/nesting ground for blue herons, and Snowy Egrets are so common that the kids are no longer startled to see one of these beautiful creatures. It’s an amazing place to take the kids, and each trip reveals something different.

We are not experts at birdwatching, and we do it in a kind of haphazard way.  We don’t always (often?) even know what we’re looking, but we’ve found that birders can be a friendly lot, and are eager to name or point out new species or give us advice, especially when they realize we’re are serious as one can be with a 5 & 7 year old, and always respectful.

For some years now, we’ve been trying to see a Clapper Rail, an endangered and elusive bird that makes its home in the pickelweed of these wetlands. It has eluded us, trip after trip.  But on our last visit we saw something nearly as good:  the Virginia Rail.  Over the space of 2 hours, we spotted 3 (three!) darting in and out of the weeds and grasses at the edge of the path at high tide. They were very quick and very well-camouflaged, which made it all the more satisfying. Ella, who has been the one driving our mission for 2+ years now was thrilled and snapped this picture. If you look very closely, you can see the rail’s orange beak hidden in the dark patch at the bottom of the frame.

really, it’s there, the Virginia Rail

And then we got a great look at a hawk, that might just be the opposite of the Rail in terms of obviousness.

And what, you are wondering by now, does birding and the Virginia Rail and 7-year-old’s birding life list have to do with Raising Generation O?

Exactly this, from Rachel Carson:

The pleasures, the values of contact with the natural world, are not reserved for scientists.  They are available to anyone who will place himself under the influence of a lonely mountain top–or the sea–or the stillness of a forest; or who will stop to think about so small a thing as the mystery of a growing seed.  I am not afraid of being thought a sentimentalist when I stand here tonight and tell you that I believe natural beauty has a necessary place in the spiritual development of any individual or any society. I believe that whenever we destroy beauty, or whenever we substitute something man-made and artificial for a natural feature of the earth, we have retarded some part of man’s spiritual growth.

Or, I would add, the elusive, playful, mysterious nature of a Rail.  When we take our kids “birding” they absorb something elemental about their world, and they begin to understand and observe that habitat change, tides influence land and animals. They begin to see that they share the earth with many, fragile species.  They know first hand just what endangered means.  They are forced to slow down and to look closely, on their bellies, and wait and wait and watch and listen and see how the world is alive in so very many ways.  They move deeper toward an understanding of natural beauty and order.

Carson wrote, presciently, in the middle of last century:

For there is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of birds; in the ebb and flow of the tides; in the folded bud ready for spring. THere is something infinitely healing in these repeated refrains of nature–the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.

Mankind has gone very far into an artificial world of his own creation. He has sought to insulate himself, with steel and concrete, from the realities of earth and water. … For this unhappy trend there is no single remedy–no panacea.

But turning off the screens, and getting out of the house and looking at a few birds. Well, that’s definitely a start.

A Sense of Wonder

In the Rainforest at the Academy of Sciences, San Francisco

Much is said and written these days about how children, American children especially, need to be educated in the sciences. If we are to innovate our way out of global climate change, world hunger, species extinction, global epidemic etc. we need our children to be strong and innovative scientific thinkers.   No argument from me there.

However, I’d argue one of the very best ways to ensure that kids become and remain interested in the sciences is to cultivate a fundamental interest in the natural, biological world.  Steeping your child in the mystery, beauty, and sheer, expanding complexity of the natural world is one to cultivate a love of science. Sure, you can read them romantic poetry, or leave your National Geographics lying around in their rooms, or put a periodic table and make them memorize it….but at bottom, if they have a love for the physical world, and a curiosity about how it works, they are also on their way to becoming scientifically minded problem solvers and creative thinkers.

The great nature writer, Rachel Carson, for me one of the great writers of the 20th century, wrote as much in her extraordinary book aimed at children and parents, The Sense of Wonder. In it, she argues that cultivating a child’s sense of the natural world and its beauty is the first thing you can do to culitvate a budding scientific mind.  That sense of play, of curiosity, and of wonder that a child has at the ocean’s shore, for instance, are the self same qualities that help mature scientists innovate their way into and out of important new discoveries. For young children, its often not so much about what they know, but about how they think. For Carson herself admits:  “My first impressions of the ocean were sensory and emotional, and that the intellectual response came later.”  In fact, although her great life’s work was about the sea, she never even saw the ocean until she was in college.

Carson believed that science was not separate from life:  “The material of science are the materials of life itself. Science is part of the reality of living; it is the what, the how, and the why of everything in our experience…The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history or fiction.”

And there is something life-sustaining in the truly science-minded individual too:  Carson also wrote “the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us the les taste we shall have for the destruction of the race.  Wonder and humility are wholesome emotions, and they do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction.”

What can you do for your children? Take them to great, interactive natural history and science museums and good zoos, sure.  But also just take them outside. Teach them to observe the world around them, the seasons, the particular wildlife that live in your region. Let them sketch, draw, take notes, get really muddy, turn over rocks, climb trees, find new kinds of birds…let them look at and wade in lakes, observe tides, take night walks. Attune them to what is happening in their enviroment, all the time, all the mystery and beauty and change that resides in the factness of the world.

Squanto’s Journey

A confession:  I love Pilgrims.

I think Pilgrims are underrated, misunderstood, and oversimplified.  “Pilgrims” by the way accurately refers only to those Puritans who sailed on the Mayflower and established a colony at Plymouth in 1620.  For instance, while Pilgrim chastity is the stuff of legend, you might be interested to know that all sexual deviance–from homosexuality to sex with turkeys and goats (which really is historically documented: in one incredible scene in which a young man accused of the latter actually points out the specific turkeys he had relation with…)–was considered the same order of sin.  And while they did believe that everything was Providential (according to God’s will) they knew one could never really, truly know that one was elect. You might be pretty certain, but you could never be positive.  This led to much study and scholarship, cultivated soul searching and personal responsibility. The rebelled against the corrupt Anglican church and thus cultivated, ironically, a kind of independent thinking.  They worked hard and were humble. All those stereotypical New England Puritan virtues are based in some interesting historical fact.

Moreover, their journey from grave persecution in England to Holland to the “New” World took over 13 years, and the passage and arrival was difficult and epic.  They arrived in winter, in Massachussets, to a wild and unforgiving coast. True, the Native Americans had survived there for a long time, and there were other colonies, but the Pilgrims were ill-equipped for the task.  Plus, nearly half of their 100 members died that first winter. It was a difficult and terrible time, and no one was certain of survival. But thanks to the help of the Wampanoag and especially the Pautaxet Squanto, they survived and even thrived. Thus, the first Thanksgiving really was a feast of plenty and of thanks, and it was attended by twice as many Native Americans as Pilgrims. Also, it lasted 3 days, at the end of which the Indians shot and offered 5 deer to the colonists, which no doubt helped them through the 2nd winter. And while this interval of good will between Pilgrims and Indians did not last, it was real and significant, and it marked a turning point in the colony’s success.

So one of my missions (in life? in my family?) is to translate what was incredible about their story in a meaningful and balanced (and, of course age appropriate) way. I think that if you consider the first Thanksgiving in the context of the Pilgrim’s really extraordinary exile, hardship, adventure, starvation, illness, compromise, and reliance on the Indians,  it becomes, truly, a kind of miraculous story of survival and success and a moment of peace and possibility.  Modern Thanksgiving is about none of this, and I think that’s kind of too bad.

For instance, how many of us celebrates Thanksgiving as a religious holiday? (Which was certainly part of the Pilgrim’s feast, since everything returned to God..)

And how many of us really, truly celebrates it as a feast of harvest or plenty?   How many of us shop exclusively at farmer’s markets for the season’s bounty for tables? How many go and shoot the abundant native fowl or deer in our regions? Or even bother to search out an heirloom bird? Or fish in local waters for the abundant catch available at harvest time? (there were a lot of lobsters in New England).  That we don’t is okay, of course. Traditions morph.  But I do think it’s important to remember what started all of this feasting anyway, and remember that simply being thankful for family and health and abundance in our middle class home is something we should do everyday of the year. It seems sort of empty to me to make this the only focus of the holiday. Then again, I do have a PhD in American literature. I love history. And Pilgrims.

In sum: I think the day is enriched for kids if it’s put into an accurate historical and sort of somber historical context.

Thus: every year, we make a Thanksgiving movie (See 2007 & 2008). This year, Ella, who is on the fast track to becoming a spy reporter and has a penchant for writing nonfiction decided we had to make an Historical & Fun movie.  Of course, I leapt at the chance in and in less time than it takes to Google Mayflower, I was parsing my grad school copy of William Bradford’s journal-turned-formal-account of Pilgrim History, Of Plymouth Plantation and reading her the juicy bits about the journey and the landing at Plymouth and the first Thanksgiving (but not, of course, the turkeys…)  The book became our primary source for the film (which should be released this weekend, God of the Pilgrims willing) and I never thought I’d see the day my 7-year-old parsed a footnote of a 17th century text looking for a detail.

Of course, I’m not recommending you all go read the entirety of Bradford’s account, which really is best studied in a PhD seminar, but the short DVD William Bradford: The First Thanksgiving in The Animated Hero classic series is excellent as far as Pilgrims go.  It’s historically accurate and gives children a good sense of their decades of hardship and deprivation as well as the absolute necessity of Squanto and the Wampanoag in their surivival.  Paired with the really excellent Squanto’s Journey by Joseph Bruchac, which details Squato’s kidnapping, the decimation of his tribe, his return to America and his providential meeting with the colonists,  your child can have a fuller, deeper, more balanced and accurate sense of what that first feast was all about and why any of us should give a damn about the Pilgrims and Indians and in the first place.

Next year, it’s Squanto’s turn.

WWYSD? (OR: What Would Your Saint Do?)

A confession:  we didn’t name our children with Catholic saints in mind. Ella is Ella in large part because of those 2 secular saints of modern jazz, Ella Fitzgerald and Ella Mae Morse (and if you don’t know Morse, you really, really should listen here & here).  Finley is Finley Patrick after my mother and her grandfather.

However, they go to Catholic school, so they are encouraged to know the story of their saint and to understand that they have a personal connection with their name saint. Every saint  has a feast day, and families are encouraged on their child’s saint’s day do something special in honor of that saint and the growing faith of the child: light the baptismal candle, say a special prayer, do an act of charity, etc.

While it’s hard to forget St. Patrick, it’s St. Isabella who has recently proven remarkable in our family.  St. Isabella (which is Ella’s full, given name) was a real princess (a fact which came in handy in preschool), who loved the poor. She married a man who did not so much love the poor, but she would sneak out of her castle to feed the poor and do acts of charity anyway. As her story goes,   once, when her very mean husband caught and confronted her, the bread she was hiding in her apron was miraculously transformed into flowers.

Usually, we forget St. Isabella’s feast day. This is disappointing to Ella, every year. But now that I have my new iPhone, complete with a calendar (that I use) and an alarm, St. Isabella’s feast day will be noted in perpetuity.

This year, to honor St. Isabella, Ella decided to donate to a local food bank, but on the way into the store to buy the food, we realized that Ella’s school was ending the drive for the food bank served directly by our parish/school, and we knew that this food bank and the families it serves were in great need.  Also, the mass to honor this group/food bank was the following day, so we decided to give the food directly to them.

Ella also decided to donate flowers in honor of St. Isabella, so we loaded up on tuna fish (she gave $2 from her savings, I gave $20), and she chose flowers which we wrapped, and Ella enclosed a very sweet note explaining who St. Isabella was and the story of her miracle, and the next day she offered the flowers during the offertory.

Of course, I am not suggesting that you become Catholic, or even Christian (my husband is neither) nor that you go find a Saint to imitate.  But what is instructional, generally speaking, is the way that the story of Isabella helps take Ella out of herself and think about how she can, quite literally help other children.  St. Isabella encourages Ella to think about how she can sacrifice (a little bit) to help others and also to bring beauty into other people’s lives. It was empowering and gratifying for her, though she would never admit these things.

I suspect there are very many role models to choose from in this respect. The point is to find a story that is meaningful for your child and then to encourage them to understand a role model in a personal way.   It’s an act of imagination, really, that can lead to real empathy and, ultimately, to action. It’s another way of understanding how even the smallest acts of children can matter on a much larger scale.

NO!

 

In light of the recent war toys debate, here, which has not faded in our house in spite of my son’s new addiction to LEGO (which does include lots of swords and whips and guns, accessories which I painstakingly pulled out of all his earlier sets but now wouldn’t think of editing out…), I wanted to share an anti-war book for kids.

NO! by David MchPhail is exactly the kind of book that can help define the difference the between real and imagined violence and further complicate the discussion about the consequences of aggression.

Dedicated “to teachers everywhere,” the near-textless book relates the story of a young boy living amidst war and occupation.  There are overtones of the Third Reich and, for me, of occupied cities of Belfast, where young children really did see, everyday, heavily armed solidiers and tanks on the streets of their neighborhoods. Many of the images are disturbing (soldiers kicking down a door, dogs chasing and biting a foot, billy clubs). On his way to mail a letter to “The President” the boy is bullied, and responds with an emphatic, “NO!”

In the wake of this powerful the bully relents, the dog is pacified, the soldiers lay down their guns, presents are exchanged on the street, a war plane parachutes a bicycle, the smoke from the bombed cities is transformed into clouds.

On the one hand, the book might be naive & sentimental dreaming. On the other hand, the poetry of the illustrations and the elemental narrative make this a profoundly moving book.  It demonstrates the visceral horror of war, which is something we actually do discuss with our oldest. I have not shied away from conversations about September 11, Osama Bin Laden, slavery and the Civil War, and, most recently, Adolf Hitler and the reasons for the Second World War.  I try not to frighten, but I do not shelter her.  This book presents war and violence as the reality for some young lives, and it shows clearly that violence and aggression against others might be a matter of degree more than of kind.

But most important, it shows the power of No, which is the refusal to participate in what is wrong, harmful, and unjust. This refusal might be as simple as standing up to a bully on the playground or as complicated as becoming a conscientious objector–or anywhere in between. It’s a book which gives children a voice and begins to show them how they might use it to make a real difference in their very own lives. And this, I would submit is the difference between teaching your children what is right and wrong and allowing them to play imaginatively with light saber on a ship bound for the high seas….

 

Ella & the Bears

Before Ella was born, a friend gave me/her  a small stuffed Polar Bear. It was one of those cute soft toys you throw in the crib and see which one the kid clings to. As it turned out, the Polar Bear became attached to her hip, arm, mouth, hand…you name it.  The bear was a part of her, and because it got so dirty, I bought 2 more to keep in rotation. But of course it didn’t take long before she sussed me out and all three took up residence in her crib.  Now, even though one has been around the world only to be returned, good as new, by Santa, Snowy, Icy, and (the one whose name I forget) are still the most essential bedtime companions. Snowy, the original and most loved it totally thread bare and flattish, but no matter.

But these beloved animals have actually made her care about real polar bears, and provided a nice way to talk about the bears, their habitat, the dangers of global warming and pollution.   When we talk about turning off lights and recycling and when she donates her lemonade money to saving the arctic funds, it’s sort of like taking care of Snowy’s relatives.   Let’s just say I try to make it real for my kids when I can, and sometime the real world is connected to the fantasy world by the most tenuous of threads.

So, in honor of Snowy and empathy inspired by endangered species plush toys I offer you this:

Email President Obama and see the World Wildlife Fund for more information on how you can help. They’re a terrific, kid-friendly group. Donate even a small amount for your favorite cause, and let your child write the letter.

War Toys for All

Not so long ago, my son, my daughter & I had one of those backseat of the car conversations that provide invaluable  fodder for growth.

As it transpired, we got into the usual discussion about boy colors and girl colors, boy toys and girl toys, boy backpacks and girl packpacks, boy jobs and girl jobs…you know how it goes.

Both parroted back the usual assumptions: Camouflage? Boy.  Blue? Boy? Army? Boy.

But when it came to Pink? I was roundly chastised: “MOM, NO ONE in my class likes pink anymore.”  And as for Princesses, well, they’re really embarrassing because of, well, the whole kissing thing.

(It has been true for us, that left to her own devices, and not oversaturated with licensed merchandise, Ella’s princess phase passed definitively, with no long-lived damage.)

But when I questioned more specifically, the foundation crumbled.  Ella’s favorite color? Blue.  Did women serve in the military? Yes.  Hilary Clinton? Nearly President.  Donald Trump? Pink ties.  I had a host of counter-examples at the ready, and it didn’t take much at all to untangle their knot of assumptions around gender-based bias. Which come in very large part from the Pottery Barn Kids catalogue.

Of course, there are clearly and scientifically measurable differences between boys and girls.  See the really excellent The Female Brain, which I think should be close to required reading for parents of girls.  Girls and boys do tend to play differently, to engage in slightly different play strategies, to gravitate toward different categories of toys. And yet, this tells us nothing about the individual.  My 5 year old boy colors for as many hours as he plays LEGOS. He absconds with his sister’s baby dolls almost as often as he attacks her with his light saber.  He has been known to cry over truly sad moments in his picture books.  He is as empathic as he is aggressive.  And his sister?  Ella loves LEGOS and K’NEX and unit blocks as much as her brother, and is as engaged in her club soccer team as she is in this year’s Nutcracker rehearsal. She packed a sword with her pirate costume this year, and did battle on the sidewalk with her friend, also a girl, also a pirate with a sword.  Girls and boys might tend to gravitate toward traditional gendered activities, but these in no way have defined my children or even governed their play life.

Most of all, while I actually do believe that gender based differences exist (whether we attribute them to nature or culture or both…) I don’t want my children to believe they are defined by these nor–and maybe this is more important–to define other people by gender-linked traits.  This is a more nuanced position than even a very intelligent 7-year-old can understand, so for now I stick with the old-school feminist position.

That said, Finn has taught me a lot about aggression and boys.  There is  a clear difference in his mind between real guns and swords, which hurt people, and the toy ones he plays with.   He has pointed this out to me over and over again since he was 3.

Still, the former peace activist in me resisted for a long time, for all the usual reasons, and although we still have a no gun policy in the house, I have roundly relented on swords and light sabers. I’m not at all sure, categorically speaking, that there’s a difference between a fake gun and fake light saber or a fake gun and fake sword.   I suspect the knee-jerk reaction we parents can have to toy guns is that we see so much real-world gun violence all around us, everday, that as a result fantasy play with guns is that much more disturbing than, say, Darth Vader chopping the head off of Obi Wan Kenobi in a Galaxy Far Far Away.  There’s a mythology of nobility and honor and old fashioned good vs. evil in the Star Wars universe, and most kid pirates have no idea of the real brutality of what’s happening off the Somali coast.  Such play appears to be at such a distance from reality that it is harmless.

I have been utterly compelled watching my daughter duel with light sabers and swords with her brother, her father, her friends. I like the confidence and sense of control it gives her. I like that it makes her feel powerful.  I realize this might be very, very wrong, but neither of my kids are violent or aggressive in real life social situations.  Their fantasy play can be a different story, and I like that it gives her space to safely act out and control her physical aggression, power, assertiveness.

So, on the one hand, while we are raising our kids to believe in and work for peace, to understand the devastating nature of war in precise and horrible ways, to protect the environment, and to protest unjust war, I am also no longer convinced that banning all war toys and all forms of “war” play is necessary to creating a culture of respect and peace in the home.  I, for instance, who had water guns etc. grew up to be a war tax resistor. And maybe we need to take a lesson from our kids and believe them when they tell us they know the difference between real and fantasy violence.

Moreover, whatever we believe about any given war or military service in general, I think now that I owe it to my daughter to teach them that women do serve, with honor and distinction, that women can and do handle guns and fight.  Some believe this is a dubious achievement in the fight for equality, but I am more pragmatic.   I want Ella to know that women can be very strong in more ways than one.  So I give her swords and light sabers and, this Christmas,  I suspect Santa will be stuff both my children’s stockings with atomic ray blasters.

I have no good pictures of Pirate Girl + sword, but I can leave you with the high point of our Halloween party, in which Finn and his Clone Trooper friend did endless battle with the Evil Fog Machine.

One Year Later

The need for involvement remains as strong as ever.

Child’s Play

This weekend the NYT Magazine ran a piece about the Obama marriage that quoted Obama on the significance of his election. When Michelle Obama asked him during the primary season what would distinguish his Presidency from that of other Democratic candidates Obama replied,

“When I take that oath of office, there will be kids all over this country who don’t really think that all paths are open to them, who will believe they can be anything they want to be,” Barack replied.  “And I think the world will look at America a little differently.”

Certainly, Obama’s Nobel Prize, controversial or not, has proven the latter part of his statement to be true.   I don’t think we’ve even begun to register in this country the profound shift in international attitudes and climates that will result from this Presidency.

But I was especially gratified to read the first part, because before I read this statement I wrote in an essay:

During the Primaries, I knew that whether we elected Clinton or Obama, either would signal a new order, one which concretized academic theorizing about diversity and identity politics.  In one historic ballot, many more children would be able to look at the person inhabiting the highest office in our country and say the President Looks Like Me.  And for them it really would mean that anything was possible.

So, when my daughter professed her single-minded Clinton love, I understood exactly what having a woman President would mean to the rest of her childhood (and probably the rest of her life).  If Clinton were to become President, not only could Ella play softball, or football, or run a Fortune 500 company or innovate a new technology, but Being President would become a Viable Career Option.  A Clinton Presidency would be, for my daughter, a revolutionary fact.  Perhaps not quite so revolutionary as getting the vote, but certainly it would signal a seachange in the national female psyche.  It would be a vision, a game changer, something akin to Phillipe Petit’s dance in the air.

And in the wake of the Clinton run and Obama’s victory, it has proven true that my privileged, middle-class white children do see politics differently and more importantly than they did before.  Mostly, since the election, we’ve had a long, quiet spell & a busy summer (no posts here you may have noticed).

But last week, Finley announced, “When I grow up I want to work for the President. I want to work for Obama.” Ella pointed out,  of course, that this would not be possible, but that he could work for a different President, a career which he roundly embraced.  Ella, too, announced that she shares this ambition, and this weekend, they set up a White House in the back yard, and played President. This didn’t involve much of all except imagining that they inhabited that space.

And that imagination, for both my boy and my girl, can be the beginning. It’s the beginning of being involved, of believing that democracy matters, of understanding a wide range of public service.

But most of all, it’s the beginning of possibility.