Sippican Cottage's......................

 

..........................reading list for kids of all ages.

Appropriate advice for....................

 

....................................kids of all ages:

When my kids were growing up we used to try to teach our kids “practice ignore” where they would just ignore a sibling or another kid who was annoying them. 

For kids of all ages................

The most damaging idea in modern parenting might be the phrase “screen time” itself.

Treating “screen time” as one thing is like treating “food time” as one thing. A grilled salmon and a Pop-Tart are both “food.” A kid using an adaptive math app for 20 minutes and a kid mainlining TikTok for 20 minutes are both on “screens.” In both cases, lumping them together makes it impossible to think clearly about what’s actually happening to your kid’s brain.

-From this episode of the Austin Scholar substack

Ouch....................

 

Ladies and gentlemen of the class of 2005 at Emory, real life is not college; real life is not high school. Here is a secret that no one has told you: Real life is junior high. The world that you’re about to enter is filled with junior high adolescent pettiness, pubescent rivalries, the insecurities of 13-year-olds, and the false bravado of 14-year-olds.

-Tom Brokaw, Emory University Commencement Address (2005) 

as found in this week's edition of Tim Ferriss's Five-Bullet Friday

One.....................

 

On Saturday, he ate through one piece of chocolate cake, one ice-cream cone, one pickle, one slice of Swiss cheese, one slice of salami, one lollipop, one piece of cherry pie, one sausage, one cupcake, and one slice of watermelon. That night he had a stomach ache.

-Eric Carle, The Very Hungry Caterpillar

A love of reading often begins at home....

    Although filling our homes with books might be a start, psychologists find that it's not enough.  If we want our kids to enjoy reading, we need to make books part of their lives.  That involves talking about books during meals and car rides, visiting libraries or bookstores, giving books as gifts, and letting them see us read.  Children pay attention to our attention: where we focus tells them what we prize.

-Adam Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

On the benefits of risk taking......

 Over time, however, beginning in the 1960s and accelerating in the 1980s, the implicit understanding shifted from that of children as competent, responsible, and resilient to the opposite, as advice focused increasingly on children’s needs for supervision and protection. Rutherford noted, as have other reviewers, that in some respects—such as freedom to choose what they wear or eat—children have gained autonomy over the decades. What has declined specifically is children’s freedom to engage in activities that involve some degree of risk and personal responsibility away from adults.

My thesis is that it’s not just the kids. 

-from this Riskophilia essay

full of years.........................

The opinions of a young boy

     Without much experience in life,

May arise from thoughts that an old man,

     Full of years, might never comprehend.

-Rumi

processes.........................

 Success in education seems to mean only that a child leaves the classroom with more information in his or her head than when he or she walked in.  That crude way of thinking about what teachers do is exemplified in the (comprehensively misleading) documentary Waiting for "Superman," where learning is visualized as a teacher simply opening the brains of students and pouring knowledge in.  This is a ridiculous way to portray the work of schooling, even setting aside the fact that sharing knowledge is in fact a very small part of teaching.  (Facts can be Googled; it's learning processes, skills, that make education valuable.)  No one who has ever taught would agree that teaching children is a straightforward affair, or that all children are equally easy to teach.  

-Fredrik deBoer, The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice

a metaphor............................

 

In the game of bowling, your score depends on where you roll the ball. You either knock the pins down or you don’t.

For toddlers, bowling alleys invented bumper bowling.. If you roll a ball that would have landed in the gutter, scoring zero, it instead hits a bumper and ricochets toward the center of the lane. You get points every time, whether you are good at aiming the ball or not. I see bumper bowling as a metaphor for what our culture is looking like nowadays.

-Arnold Kling, from here

image via

Aging like a fine wine...............

 Age will only be respected if it fights for itself, maintains its own rights, avoids dependence, and asserts control over its own sphere as long as life lasts.  For just as I like a young man to have something old about him, so I approve of an old man who has a touch of youth.  If that is his aim, whatever the age of the body, in spirit he will never be old.

-Cicero, from his 44 B.C. essay, Cato the Elder On Old Age

rites of passage.................

      The youth culture prides itself on its inclusiveness.  That is to say, it removes all barriers to membership—all obstacles in the form of learning, expertise, allusion, doctrine, or moral discipline. For these would be rites of passage, constituting a tacit admission that to be young is not enough, that the world expects something, and that there is a higher stage of existence to which we all must eventually proceed.  This very inclusiveness, however, deprives the youth culture of human purpose.  It remains locked in the present tense, looking for good causes, spiritual icons, ways of representing itself as legitimate, but without crossing the fatal barrier into responsible adulthood.

-Roger Scruton, An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture (1998)

the important need to clarify..........

The opposite of "true" is not always "false".  Sometimes, the opposite of one kind of truth is truth of a different kind, most clearly seen in the difference between literal and metaphoric truth.  Fairy tales dwell in the latter world; they are true but unreal.  To children, this distinction is important and they need no help in understanding it, although this is a complex idea.

     Many adults know the situation, when they are telling (not reading) a story of the fairy-tale kind and the child interrupts to ask: "Is it true?" (If the adult is reading, it is clear to the child that it is from the story world and they don't ask.)

     Is it true? the adult wonders, thinking about his goblin neighbors, troll boss, and the princess he has been secretly in love with for years, and answers thoughtfully, "Well, yes, it is true, in a way.  In its own way it is true." 

     "But is it true like in real life?" the child persists.

     "No," the adult will say, the distinction clear. "Not like in real life."

     The child's question is not one of disbelief, but rather comes from the important need to clarify what kind of truth it is and therefore what kind of belief to give to it.

 -Jay Griffiths, A Country Called Childhood: Children and the Exuberant World

that makes sense....................

 A Kiowa child's learning "is begun only after becoming aware of the mystery of all that is around him, strictly from a feeling point of view", says Kiowa spokesperson Allen Quetone.  This is common to all children: to learn feelingly, the mind and body walking hand in hand.  We say "it makes sense," meaning that a thought is coherent, as language itself remembers that mind is inheld in the body, skeined into an intricate kinship with the body which is itself catscradled in nature.  Thoughts are interlinked in feeling.  For feeling is not only a sense of touch but a form of knowing, the psyche dispersed, sensitive in skin, muscle and gut, perceiving the messages of a speaking world: the mind sensitive as the strings of a harp struck softly by an unlying wind, an Aeolian harp with a quality of ceaseless potential music sung into sound with breath, the lightest inspiration of a million, million messages.

-Jay Griffiths, A Country Called Childhood: Children and the Exuberant World

a resurgent romantic revolution....

      Childhood itself is the quintessential Romanticism, and every child needs to be allowed to live in that state of grace, but wider society also needs the romance of childhood for its very creativity, requiring the reckless rapture of the puer* figure, the eternal child within culture, whose incandescence must be tended and attended to, so that its light can flare in the storyteller or dancer, so that the risk-taking, anarchic and flame-like quality, the eternal return of the great romance of childhood which exists within us all, can flame in a resurgent romantic revolution.  The chill of our utilitarian age needs that fire.

-Jay Griffiths, A Country Called Childhood

*in case you are wondering about the choice of this word, go here.

The adventure-monitor creeps up .......

      The risk-averse society denies the very idea of freedom's role, it stops chance throwing a wild card, it kills the free play of luck.  The adventure-monitor creeps up. pouring cold water on every fire-pit, banning people from bringing home-made cakes to school fetes.  In the otherwise important UNICEF report into childhood well-being in 2007, the authors comment that health and safety "did not feature highly in children's priorities".  Who knew?

-Jay Griffiths, A Country Called Childhood

unceasing care.............................

 For in every adult there lurks a child - an eternal child, something that is always becoming, is never completed, and calls for unceasing care, attention, and education.  That is the part of the human personality which wants to develop and become whole.  But the man of today is far indeed from this wholeness. . . .

     If there is anything that we wish to change in our children, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.  Take our enthusiasm for pedagogics.  It may be the boot is on the other leg.  It may be that we misplace the pedagogical need because it would be an uncomfortable reminder that we ourselves are still children in many respects and still need a vast amount of education.

-C. G. Jung, from his essay, The Development of Personality found here.

Seems true...................

 via

The wisdom of children....................

". . . In fact, they were so unperturbed that 58 percent said they pretended to believe in Santa after realizing the truth—so as not to disappoint their parents."

-as culled from here

No limits.........................

via