Why Hold On?

The Lost Children: A review of Hold On To Your Kids by Jen at Et Tu?
HT: The Cates at Why Homeschool?

She quotes the authors of the book:

As children grow, they have an increasing need to orient: to have a sense of who they are, of what is real, why things happen, what is good, what things mean. To fail to orient is to...be lost psychologically -- a state our brains our programmed to do almost anything to avoid. [...]

What children fear more than anything, including physical harm, is getting lost. To them, being lost means losing contact with their compass point. Orienting voids, situations where we find nothing or no one to orient by, are absolutely intolerable to the human brain.

We discussed the topic of teenage mutation at Real Learning a couple of weeks ago. Another book that is interesting to read in this regard is A Tribe Apart. I wrote a tiny review of it here. The book starts by describing several kids in about 5th or 6th grade -- pretty much normal kids interested in baseball and Barbies -- and traces their lives until their graduation from highschool. The transition is remarkable. Generally speaking, the kids "come through" on the other side, but there are tragic exceptions, and even the survivors have battle wounds.

Some homeschoolers "mutate" (for lack of a better word), and some kids who go to school don't, of course. My thought is that peer dependency is much more the source than simply the fact of homeschooling or not -- you can have peer dependency AND homeschooling, and you can have schooled kids who stay away from peer dependency, whether because their families are strong, or their interests are bigger than the system, or perhaps the school itself has a strong healthy culture of its own that counteracts the tribalism. Temperament plays a part too.

Plus, there are kids who take on some of the trappings of the tribe, but only as a sort of game or adaptive trait. It is part of their natural development to try out new things, to explore and experiment and grow in understanding of different ways of life. This is not the same thing as peer dependency itself. To me, dependency means what Catholic doctrine calls "attachment" -- something that has the symptoms of an addiction.

Homeschooling can preserve a culture, though, that works against peer dependency. By taking the kids away from the age ghetto, spending time with them, discussing things with them and allowing them time and space to develop talents and skills, you give them opportunity to develop longterm qualities and skills, not the transitory ones generally valued by the peer culture. I wrote about this once before, in Enculturation, not Indoctrination.

There is still a sort of dependency, I suppose. As Neufeld says above in the quote, kids have a need to orient themselves; they are not able to develop in a void. This is his very case for developing a family culture. An imperfect family is better than an immature peer culture, though of course most dysfunctional families are so precisely because they share the competitiveness, co-dependency and immaturity of the peer culture.

I think sometimes the State and those who believe in the effectiveness of "experts" cringe a bit when they think of parents actually being allowed to influence their kids. Isn't that a sort of child abuse? What if they mess up? What if they inculcate doctrine that I happen not to agree with? What if they raise young adults that thrive outside of the cultural mainstream, who have a strong ethnic or religious identity? Doesn't that mean the society will be fragmented?

One of the victories of the state over the parents has been a rhetorical one; accusing the parents of indoctrination so that school becomes "freeing".

"Every child in America entering school at the age of five is insane because he comes to school with certain allegiances to our founding fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, and toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It's up to you as teachers to make all these sick children well--by creating the international child of the future." Dr. Chester M. Pierce in an address to the Childhood International Education Seminar in 1973

HT Dana at Simple Pleasures.

Reading stories like this one give me a further sense of WHY kids form peer dependent bonds -- for they don't do it arbitrarily, of course. They do it because their psychic survival seems to depend on it in some way; it seems like a solution. When the grownups seem crazy, weak, fearful and arbitrary; and the peers seem to have strength and talent and offer some hope of a kind of safety, no matter how contingent.... well, there it is. And I think that the more the system tries to take over the function of parenting, the more stupid decisions like this will crop up, because parenting is essentially personal and organic, while systems are not.

To quote Jen's quotes of the authors of Hold On TO Your Kids, again:

No wonder, then, that "cool" is the governing ethic in peer culture, the ultimate virtue...It connotates an air of invulnerability. Where peer orientation is intense, there is no sign of vulnerability in the talk, in the walk, in the dress, or in the attitudes. [...]

Peer-oriented kids will do anything to avoid the human feelings of aloneness, suffering, and pain, and to escape feeling hurt, exposed, alarmed, insecure, inadequate, or self-conscious. ...

Cat's in the Crade, and Silver Spoons

Well, he came home from college just the other day
So much like a man I just had to say
"Son, I'm proud of you, can you sit for a while?""
He shook his head and then said with a smile
"What I'd really like, Dad, is to borrow the car keys"
"See you later, can I have them please?"

Quite a long time ago now, the DHM at the Common Room and Cindy at Dominion Family brought up this article which coincidentally, my husband had mentioned the same week during one of our morning conversations. My kids get a lot of their political and civic context information from my husband's habit of coming out of his office in the morning and discussing whatever's going on in the news that has struck his interest. This kind of study goes to the heart of our interests as parents, of course, because we are raising our own members of the next generation, plus the ones out in society are the ones our children will be working with and living with to at least some extent.

Here are my thoughts on this for what it's worth:

1. Statistics are Simply Data.

Statistics are a bit like computer programs.... or like oracles. They tell you what you ask them, and what they are set up to tell you. How you interpret them is a whole different field, and more like an art than a science. It is a judgment, which involves a different kind of thinking than simple empirical information-gathering and -crunching.

I'm sure it's been said before, but I think statistics, or rather the use of statistics, are the myths of our time. I am not using the word "myth" as a euphemism for fiction or delusion. Rather, myths are stories created and/or distributed to evoke an idea or explain some curious event. Myths may be true or false; they may be interpreted in varying ways, and that is part of their resonance. Statistical studies are designed, implemented and reported to deal with the concerns of our time. The particularly resonant ones are often resonant just because they put a finger on something that troubles us or baffles us.

Obviously, we are troubled and baffled about our young people. In the first place, we are troubled because often we don't really know them. Sometimes, we haven't seen them except in spare minutes here and there almost since they were infants. In the second place, we are baffled because we don't know what we have done or failed to do that has made them this way. The Greeks have many stories about children being exposed on hillsides and then coming back in some way to be the ruin of those who exposed them; we have our studies about how children are failing in education and in life. There is more than science here.... there is almost a kind of poetry and prophesy.

2. I am Not Really Special, Therefore Nobody Is

The article puts the blame on preschool songs like "I am Special" and parental habits like permissiveness. But these seem more like symptoms than an actual disease to me.

Think about where the children -- presumably 3-5 year olds -- are actually SINGING these songs like "I am special." The answer would probably be: (1) At preschools. (2)Along with Barney or whoever they are watching as they park in front of the educational preschool TV shows in the morning while their older siblings, if they have any, are bunkered in the schools.

Isn't there a deeper problem than twaddly, self-centered songs here? These children need individualized, responsive love and attention. They need bread, and are getting pebbles.

The obvious fact is that every child is special. Definition: particular; unique or specific. "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you" Jeremiah 1:5. Every child knows this instinctively about himself from his first dawning of awareness. If he is fortunate, he moderates and refines the impression as he gets older. He learns that everyone is created with this loving solicitude, not just himself. He learns that he is formed for a purpose, and that an essential key to his identity is to be of help to others. .... that "no man is an island, entire of himself." He learns that he reaches his fullest potential as part of a family, a community working for a higher purpose. (Which is, of course, the overriding message of The Incredibles whence the famous line comes: If everyone is special, then no one is. Our "specialness" is an asset to the wider society, not a debit or a polite fiction)

But just as Al Gore doesn't actually make his lifestyle ecologically friendly by marketing environmental movies or purchasing carbon off-sets, we don't make children recognize their unique potential by ignoring them, shuttling them off, putting them in situations where their uniqueness is a weak point, and then telling them they are special. Children are not stupid; they can recognize the ambivalence just as well as anyone else.

You acquire a sense of uniqueness and particularity by being loved passionately and individually and being brought up in a particular family culture with all its richness of enculturation into our society's heritage. I am not saying that preschool and kiddie TV is always and everywhere bad. I am saying that the silly songs are just one element of a bigger problem; changing the silly song to "You are NOT special" is only going to worsen the basic problem.

3. Don't Hate Them Because They are Learning From Us Too Well.

I think permissiveness, where it exists, usually exists with arbitrariness, and the arbitrariness is a bigger problem than the permissiveness itself. We are allowed to give good things to our children. -- in fact, if we don't, we are not doing what God wrote in our heart in His image even though we are weak and concupiscent. But what we do if we are careless and neglectful (and who isn't at times -- it's our job to get up each day and try to do better) is give our children poor substitutes for good things. Our children ask for bread and we give them Twinkies. Our children ask for time and attention and we give them TVs in their room and Ipods with earbuds so we don't have to listen to their music. They ask for a childhood and preparation for adulthood and we give them scheduled and over-structured substitutes for playtime, and trashy pre-teen clothes and toys.

They want love, which includes personalized discipline and instruction, and we are detached and/or anxious and thereby and exasperate, despise, offend and hinder them. We run to the experts too easily. We hand off our responsibilities too readily. We ourselves were usually taught that we can't trust our own heritage and our own principles and that we should wait for the experts to tell us if we got the answer right or wrong. So it isn't entirely our fault, but we can't absolve ourselves completely, either.

Read The Hurried Child and Hold On To Your Kids, and look at life from the point of view of those "entitled" kids. Where are they getting the attitude that bling-things, status, self-aggrandizement and novelty are more important than genuine commitment and achievement? Why do they think that scorpions, snakes and stones substitute for bread, eggs and fish? We're teaching it to them daily, when we make Paris Hilton or Brittney Spears into a news spectacle, and Simon Cowell and Donald Trump into the arbitrars of our standards, when we isolate them in their peer group as if it were some kind of ghetto or warehouse. Meanwhile, the vast majority of these children know that they are the disposable generation; that many of their peers didn't make it through the filter of their parents' decision process. How bitter that must be for them.

4. The Silver Spoon that Doesn't Feed Them

We give them entitlements that are merely inadequate substitutes, and then we wonder why they are attached to the substitutes and no longer have a taste for the real things. The cat is in the cradle -- the child who is shuffled aside becomes the shuffler himself.

And as I hung up the phone it occurred to me
He'd grown up just like me
....my boy was just like me

The Conversation Charism

Atypical Homeschool post on The Value of Expression:

For all of the talking that I’ve done, what I’m really trying to encourage you to do is to provide your children with avenues of expression. Talk to them as though they were another person. Debate and discuss issues with them. Allow them to disagree with you on those issues. Assume that they things they say to you are serious and legitimate and important from their perspective. Your children will benefit from this far more than any instruction/training you will provide them with.

The Bookworm on Family Charisms:

One aspect of blogging I particularly enjoy is the insight into how families develop their own special gifts - what you might call their family charism. This may be a common love of a particular subject, a shared hobby or talent, a special character given to a homeschool by the family's circumstances or location, or a style of homeschooling with which both the family as a whole and the individual children bloom and flourish. Families that develop their own charism play to their strengths. The enthusiasm that shines through in these blogs often inspires me to add a dash of their special ingredient to our own lives -

I have been thinking about these posts and how the simple art of the conversation has developed as a mainstay of the unschooling "curriculum" in our home. Sort of funny, because we are a family of introverts and a large part of our conversation is the silences in between the conversation! One teenage son admits to being drained by conversation and I quite often feel the same way, especially with an at-home husband plus seven children of all ages and intellectual levels and interests. But I don't think this is contradictory -- something doesn't have to be continual in order to be deeply meaningful in one's life.

Conversation is a uniquely powerful way to share understanding. Think of how the talkers have to fit their communication to their audience, to make clear their thoughts so that others can understand it, to listen and attend. Conversations are natural practicums of the art of "dialectic", the give and take of thought.

What do we generally converse about? All sorts of things. Probably amusing things are closest to the top. Often poetry and philosophy and religion and football. These things are what our family has naturally gravitated towards when left in freedom. We are Celtics on both sides -- Irish on my husband's, Scottish on mine as well as a bit of Dutch and Danish. Poetry and pondering are close to the surface, with the laughter and a bit of competitive fire.

I am using the terms Poetry and Philosophy broadly. Some of my boys would tell you they don't even LIKE poetry. Maybe Story would be a better word. But I know they are poets when they write stories or act them out, when they come with eyes flashing to tell me of some unjust act told in the pages of a book or played out on the football field, when they comment on some real life event with all the vividness of an epic, when they get deeply fascinated with the beauty and diversity of some aspect of nature or of a math or physics idea.

These same things give me an insight into their understanding of Philosophy, which is the love of wisdom and is many times, according to thinkers like John Senior and James Taylor (not to mention Albert Einstein) embedded in the tradition of Poetry. All the big poetic questions are related to the philosophical and religious ones: What is our place in the universe? How do we best live? What are the implications of our actions? Why and how do we come to be?

Talking gives us a chance to pull this in without heaviness and with humanity. You must not imagine us standing around discursively all the time, looking for opportunities to expound. The conversations are more like the mortar that binds the building blocks of our lives and relationships. Through our words, we make connections and forge relationships.