After reading this article published in Time Magazine last month, I discovered there’s a name for what I’ve been doing. Turns out it’s called “slow parenting.” One can imagine all kinds of definitions of what “slow parenting” might imply, most of them unflattering. But as defined in Nancy Gibbs’ article, it’s the opposite of helicopter parenting: just letting kids be.
And I thought I was merely lazy.
In our circles, we hear a lot about helicopter parenting, but I can’t say it’s something I witness a great deal, even though it would seem we’d be squarely in the midst of the demographic most often charged with it: highly educated professional parents in academically competitive, high-income suburbs. Perhaps it’s more of an issue with high school aged kids, since the term “helicopter parenting” seems to be a favorite of college deans describing the parents who appear at registration to advise their children on what classes to take, or call professors directly to complain about grades.
My husband and I have a large cohort with kids in the same general age group as ours, but unlike the people in the article, we don’t know any parents who take a photo of their kids on the way out the door every morning in case they have to file a missing persons report later the same day, nor has my husband, who coaches boys’ baseball three seasons a year, ever had to contend with a parent instructing him on what position a particular child should be allowed to play or protected from playing. While it’s true that we know some kids with tutors, it’s just as common in our community for our public school to contact a parent and invite a child to attend an early-morning math tutorial than vice versa.
But sometimes I feel like we’re getting a mixed message. The media loves the term helicopter parenting and loves articles in which human resources executives describe parents who help their newly graduated children negotiate the salary at their first job, but at the same time, my kids come home with a somewhat unsettling number of assignments deemed “family homework.” Not every week – most of their regular homework can be done independently – but several times a year. There are some school projects that involve family discussion, such as the one the first graders do on their country of origin; children are instructed to spend time with their parents exploring their heritage. There are others that would be logistically impossible for kids to do without parental help, such as the one the third graders do in which they have to locate and describe various landmarks around town: there’s simply no way to do that one without a parent driving the child around or, at the very least, accompanying them by bicycle. It’s frustrating to me to be reading an article about the scourge of over-involved parents one day and then have my child come home with yet another “family homework” assignment the next.
On the other hand, it’s possible to develop a sense of judgment about levels of involvement. Tim’s fifth grade teacher sends a long e-mail home every week detailing what the kids’ special assignments are for the week and how we can help them. I skim those e-mails and then file them in a folder, figuring if Tim comes to me with questions about his homework I’ll have a resource to fall back on. But we’re three months into the school year and other than quizzing Tim on spelling words and multiplication facts occasionally, I have yet to help him with his homework. Is he falling behind the other fifth graders as a result? Not as far as I know, but I’ll find out next week when we get his first report card. It’s possible that I really should have been studying those e-mails and following through on their recommendations all along, but my guess is that they are more of a safeguard measure against those parents who complain they never know what their kids are supposed to be doing.
Maybe it’s partly because I’m self-employed and spend so much time pursuing my own assignments, but I’m really not that interested in my children’s homework. I check with them most evenings to be sure they’ve done it, and usually by the time I ask, they have, because they know it comes before other privileges like TV or computer games. I try to be helpful with the occasional project that requires significant extra research or materials. My parents had a hands-off attitude toward my work when I was in school, which was typical of that time, and in retrospect I feel like a little bit more guidance would have nipped some of my organizational problems in the bud: for example, asking me whether I’d checked the supply of typing paper so that I didn’t run out the night before a term paper was due wouldn’t have been the worst thing. On the other hand, I learned from the experience. It took me all the way through college to become really proficient at the more organizational, as opposed to academic, side of homework, but I eventually got there. And I tend to think my kids will too.
Showing posts with label homework. Show all posts
Showing posts with label homework. Show all posts
Thursday, December 3, 2009
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
End of daylight saving time
The end of daylight saving time receives a mixed welcome in our household.
My husband Rick considers the day in April when we turn the clocks ahead to be the best day of the year. He loves the extra daylight after dinner. For him, it means the start of warm sunlit evenings at the baseball field, even though we often have chilly weather and plenty of rain right into early May and beyond. So he scowls every year when I remind him about turning the clocks back. He sees no advantage to early nightfall.
Tim doesn’t like the end of daylight saving time either, although he won’t (or can’t) articulate it the way Rick does. For years, Rick and I have suspected that Tim suffers from a mild form of Seasonal Affective Disorder. His reaction to the diminishing daylight is that strong. Every year, as the dusky late afternoons arrive, he seems to melt into the arm of the playroom couch as if becoming invisible, pale as the couch’s grayish-white upholstery. The onset of winter incites crankiness and a morose bearing in Tim. One reason I coaxed him to try running daily with me three years ago was to see if we could offset the response he had annually to the dwindling sunlight. It didn’t help much in that regard, though. It’s still early this year to judge his response to turning the clocks back, but so far I don’t notice as much of a setback as usual. Maybe he’s starting to outgrow his sunlight-dependent mood swings.
I fall toward, though not all the way at, the other end of the spectrum from Rick and Tim when it comes to the end of daylight saving time. True, the late-autumn and early-winter nights can seem very dark around here. But I also find something helpful in the early darkness: it seems to cue us into early-evening mode a little earlier and a little more naturally. When the daylight lasts well into the evening, it’s always harder to ramp down at the end of the day: hard to make fast rules about bedtime or quiet time when the sun is still high in the sky at eight o’clock.
In the fall, we have the opposite effect. Seeing the daylight start to fade at 4:30
reminds me that it’s time for homework and dinner preparation. Yesterday, though Tim complained briefly about the early sunset, it worked out well for us; from about 4:30until dinner, Holly played school and Tim did his homework while I thought about what to make for dinner. At other times of year, although Holly would probably still be playing school at that hour (other kids come home from second grade and tell their parents about their day; Holly reenacts the whole thing in a fictional version, and in real time), Tim would likely be at a baseball practice and I’d be having trouble focusing on end-of-day responsibilities as well.
The extra daylight in the early morning helps me, too, though I know it won’t last long. For weeks, I’d been getting up in total darkness at 5:45 AM, turning on the outside lights to let the dog out, turning on Tim’s bedside lamp at 7 to wake him up for school. Now it’s already starting to brighten outside when I get up before 6, and the kids don’t need extra cues to know it’s time to get up when I go to wake them; they can see the broad daylight.
Of course, the best part of the end of daylight saving time is the extra hour. I treasure that, and this year more than ever before because it was found-time in its purest form this time around. All day Saturday, with the excitement of Halloween, I forgot about turning the clocks back. Not until I crawled under the covers at 11 PM on Saturday night did I remember about resetting the clocks. And by then it was too late to get out of bed. If I’d remembered a half-hour earlier, at 10:30, I would have said “Oh good, it’s only nine-thirty” and squandered the extra hour on Twitter or folding laundry, not using it for extra sleep at all, which was what I most needed this weekend. Because I forgot about it until I was in bed, sleep was the only way to use it.
So I started the post-daylight saving season this year with an extra hour of much-needed sleep. Rick is dealing with it, and Tim hasn’t gone into too much of a seasonal slump yet. Holly doesn’t notice daylight saving time either way; she carries her sunshine internally and doesn’t seem to have much of a relationship with the natural world. So come five o’clock, we’ll turn on the lights, start making dinner and hunker down together like hibernating bears, ready for cold weather and the approaching winter with its long, dark nights, and us cozy and warm in our well-lit home.
My husband Rick considers the day in April when we turn the clocks ahead to be the best day of the year. He loves the extra daylight after dinner. For him, it means the start of warm sunlit evenings at the baseball field, even though we often have chilly weather and plenty of rain right into early May and beyond. So he scowls every year when I remind him about turning the clocks back. He sees no advantage to early nightfall.
Tim doesn’t like the end of daylight saving time either, although he won’t (or can’t) articulate it the way Rick does. For years, Rick and I have suspected that Tim suffers from a mild form of Seasonal Affective Disorder. His reaction to the diminishing daylight is that strong. Every year, as the dusky late afternoons arrive, he seems to melt into the arm of the playroom couch as if becoming invisible, pale as the couch’s grayish-white upholstery. The onset of winter incites crankiness and a morose bearing in Tim. One reason I coaxed him to try running daily with me three years ago was to see if we could offset the response he had annually to the dwindling sunlight. It didn’t help much in that regard, though. It’s still early this year to judge his response to turning the clocks back, but so far I don’t notice as much of a setback as usual. Maybe he’s starting to outgrow his sunlight-dependent mood swings.
I fall toward, though not all the way at, the other end of the spectrum from Rick and Tim when it comes to the end of daylight saving time. True, the late-autumn and early-winter nights can seem very dark around here. But I also find something helpful in the early darkness: it seems to cue us into early-evening mode a little earlier and a little more naturally. When the daylight lasts well into the evening, it’s always harder to ramp down at the end of the day: hard to make fast rules about bedtime or quiet time when the sun is still high in the sky at eight o’clock.
In the fall, we have the opposite effect. Seeing the daylight start to fade at 4:30
reminds me that it’s time for homework and dinner preparation. Yesterday, though Tim complained briefly about the early sunset, it worked out well for us; from about 4:30until dinner, Holly played school and Tim did his homework while I thought about what to make for dinner. At other times of year, although Holly would probably still be playing school at that hour (other kids come home from second grade and tell their parents about their day; Holly reenacts the whole thing in a fictional version, and in real time), Tim would likely be at a baseball practice and I’d be having trouble focusing on end-of-day responsibilities as well.
The extra daylight in the early morning helps me, too, though I know it won’t last long. For weeks, I’d been getting up in total darkness at 5:45 AM, turning on the outside lights to let the dog out, turning on Tim’s bedside lamp at 7 to wake him up for school. Now it’s already starting to brighten outside when I get up before 6, and the kids don’t need extra cues to know it’s time to get up when I go to wake them; they can see the broad daylight.
Of course, the best part of the end of daylight saving time is the extra hour. I treasure that, and this year more than ever before because it was found-time in its purest form this time around. All day Saturday, with the excitement of Halloween, I forgot about turning the clocks back. Not until I crawled under the covers at 11 PM on Saturday night did I remember about resetting the clocks. And by then it was too late to get out of bed. If I’d remembered a half-hour earlier, at 10:30, I would have said “Oh good, it’s only nine-thirty” and squandered the extra hour on Twitter or folding laundry, not using it for extra sleep at all, which was what I most needed this weekend. Because I forgot about it until I was in bed, sleep was the only way to use it.
So I started the post-daylight saving season this year with an extra hour of much-needed sleep. Rick is dealing with it, and Tim hasn’t gone into too much of a seasonal slump yet. Holly doesn’t notice daylight saving time either way; she carries her sunshine internally and doesn’t seem to have much of a relationship with the natural world. So come five o’clock, we’ll turn on the lights, start making dinner and hunker down together like hibernating bears, ready for cold weather and the approaching winter with its long, dark nights, and us cozy and warm in our well-lit home.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Biking to school
Two weeks into the school year, Tim has fallen into a very satisfying routine of riding his bike to school. Fifth grade is the first year the kids are, as I like to say, “released on their own recognizance.” In the earlier grades they have to be either on a bus or met by an adult at the end of the day; starting in fifth grade they simply walk out the door once class is dismissed. Tim likes to ride his bike the short distance into the town center, pick up a snack at Ferns Country Store using his new Ferns charge card -- which he has to earn the money to refill -- and then settle in at the library to start his homework and, though I might wish it otherwise, play a computer game or two.
I love this routine because it gives him such a sense of independence, and that’s one thing about Carlisle that has not changed since I was his age thirty years ago. In such a small town, there are so few ways for kids to develop their independence in the way city kids do, by going places on their own or making any plans at all that don’t involve adults. Back in the 1970s, when I was in fifth grade, the middle schoolers queueing up after school at the country store – which had a different name then, and no charge cards – was a daily tradition, and it still is. Tim tells me in the morning what time he’ll be home, and he’s on his honor to leave the library at the right time to make that happen. He doesn’t have a cell phone; he just has to use good judgment and keep track of the clock, like I did back in the 1970s. (And I actually think he has better judgment about snack choices than I ever did at his age.) When he gets home, he’s buoyed by the independence and invigorated by the biking, and he has also usually finished most of his homework.
My pleasure in seeing Tim ride his bike reminds me of something that came up in an article I wrote three years ago about a family who categorically decided to give up use of their car. They live in a community near Cambridge that is much more mixed-use than ours; halfway between the suburbs and the city geographically as well as infrastructurally, it has sidewalks, neighborhood schools, and public buses. So they decided that they would rely on walking, biking or public transportation, even though their two children were under the age of ten at the time.
What interested me most in the interview was when the mom, Sarah, talked about how the family dynamic had changed somewhat once they gave up the car and rode their bikes to school, lessons and playdates instead. And it wasn’t exactly a matter of physical independence: at the age of about 8, her elder child still wasn’t old enough to pedal around town by himself. She still accompanied him, on her own bike, to his various activities. But dropping him off by bike was different. Merely by giving up the role of mom-as-chauffeur, she found that things had changed. Her children didn’t seem to have quite the same perspective on her as their means of conveyance. Even when she went with them, if they were on their own bikes doing their own pedaling, it lent a sort of egalitarianism to the relationship.
I found that insight so interesting, and that, more than environmental or financial reasons, has influenced me to try to cut back on driving the kids around. Even if I’m still with them when they bike or walk – as in Holly’s case I always am – I want them to see that kids don’t need to rely on grown-ups to orchestrate every activity and plan. As the children in the article about going car-free learned very early, kids do have the power to get where they want to go. Literally, and in some ways figuratively too.
I love this routine because it gives him such a sense of independence, and that’s one thing about Carlisle that has not changed since I was his age thirty years ago. In such a small town, there are so few ways for kids to develop their independence in the way city kids do, by going places on their own or making any plans at all that don’t involve adults. Back in the 1970s, when I was in fifth grade, the middle schoolers queueing up after school at the country store – which had a different name then, and no charge cards – was a daily tradition, and it still is. Tim tells me in the morning what time he’ll be home, and he’s on his honor to leave the library at the right time to make that happen. He doesn’t have a cell phone; he just has to use good judgment and keep track of the clock, like I did back in the 1970s. (And I actually think he has better judgment about snack choices than I ever did at his age.) When he gets home, he’s buoyed by the independence and invigorated by the biking, and he has also usually finished most of his homework.
My pleasure in seeing Tim ride his bike reminds me of something that came up in an article I wrote three years ago about a family who categorically decided to give up use of their car. They live in a community near Cambridge that is much more mixed-use than ours; halfway between the suburbs and the city geographically as well as infrastructurally, it has sidewalks, neighborhood schools, and public buses. So they decided that they would rely on walking, biking or public transportation, even though their two children were under the age of ten at the time.
What interested me most in the interview was when the mom, Sarah, talked about how the family dynamic had changed somewhat once they gave up the car and rode their bikes to school, lessons and playdates instead. And it wasn’t exactly a matter of physical independence: at the age of about 8, her elder child still wasn’t old enough to pedal around town by himself. She still accompanied him, on her own bike, to his various activities. But dropping him off by bike was different. Merely by giving up the role of mom-as-chauffeur, she found that things had changed. Her children didn’t seem to have quite the same perspective on her as their means of conveyance. Even when she went with them, if they were on their own bikes doing their own pedaling, it lent a sort of egalitarianism to the relationship.
I found that insight so interesting, and that, more than environmental or financial reasons, has influenced me to try to cut back on driving the kids around. Even if I’m still with them when they bike or walk – as in Holly’s case I always am – I want them to see that kids don’t need to rely on grown-ups to orchestrate every activity and plan. As the children in the article about going car-free learned very early, kids do have the power to get where they want to go. Literally, and in some ways figuratively too.
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