A couple of weeks ago I got to chat with Rob Kimmel – a Brooklyn-based dad who has, for a couple of years running now, joined with his son to together create a sort of “daily sticky note drawing/story.” Rob probably explains the whole thing best:
Every day of school, from kindergarten through second grade, I have sent my son off with a sticky note fixed to the inside lid of his lunchbox. Each of these little pieces of colored paper bears a half-completed drawing and a half-written story. I anxiously await picking him up after school to see how he finishes these miniature comics.
Among the many comics Rob and Ben have co-authored, one can find the likes of Mr. Shamada, Doctor Who (who has, apparently, taken up fencing – actually, this one appears to be all Ben’s doing), Batman, a Yeti disguised as Yoda, and so many more. Needless to say, the whole thing’s a veritable treasure trove of awesome.
But what’s really intriguing, to me at least, is the basic idea: a father offering his kid a creative provocation, and his kid joining in and fulfilling it – both as artists on “equal” footing, more or less. It’s this last part which interests me, and which seems so challenging to conventional parenting ideologies. Think about it: when was the last time you saw a parent and a child working on something together, on equal terms and both fully engaged? When a child’s unique perspective was not only acknowledged, but eagerly embraced and transformed into a key defining part of the project? With a parent and a child both earnestly, mutually enjoying each other’s participation? Certainly, Rob and his son Ben’s relationship isn’t solely defined by their WanderMonster project, but I get the sense that it does illuminate a richer, more full realization of what a family can look like. I think above all, what I get from looking at their working together is a sense of how much a father and son can truly enjoy each other – and that’s just not something I think American parents are acculturated to expect of their relationship with their child.
Since we talked, Rob has had an article he authored come out in HOW Design magazine, where he talks about parents partaking in “creative play” together with their kids. He also explains the philosophy behind it:
Play has always been part of my design process. Just as scientists are kids who never forgot how to explore and ask questions, I think artists are kids who never stopped playing or drawing. My best work has come not from sweaty grid-building and pixel-pushing, but from experimentation. […] It wasn’t much of a leap to apply that way of creative brainstorming to parenting. Having a child has been an opportunity to share some of my methods on another level, to train a collaborator.
This is a great time to be a parent. We aren’t so hung up on old-school conventions of adult behavior and traditional roles (especially for fathers, who get to participate in our kids’ lives to an extent rarely seen in previous generations). Imaginative play is getting the respect it deserves, with ideas like “multiple intelligences” unlocking the potential of kids who may have been bored or ignored in the past. After a couple of generations when people forgot how to make things, many are rediscovering tool benches and sewing machines. Meanwhile, the economy has forced us to buy fewer things off the shelf, driving the DIY ethic into the mainstream. All these factors combine to validate creative parenting. Making stuff together—whether with a camera or clay, a stove top or power drill—bonds us in a visceral way.
Rob goes on to share a number of ideas for how parents can do this, creating opportunities to bond over mutually shared creative play activities. If you have a kid of your own, or work with them, you’ll want to give this a read: it’s terrific stuff. I’m excited to see how mainstream “creative parenting” is slowly becoming, and I’m intrigued even more by how the act of parents and children simply and freely “building and playing together” might ultimately help build a genuine appreciation and enjoyment of each other between them.
A feature in the Times about the booming ‘playhouse’ construction business, that’s taken off despite the recession:
Mr. Dwyer has installed playhouses that look like pirate ships, windmills and castles at the homes of several film and sports stars who asked not to be named to protect their children’s privacy.
“Only a certain kind of clientele can afford what we offer,” he said. And few have backyards big enough to hold it. Red Beard’s Revenge, for example, is a $52,000 playhouse in the shape of a 12-foot-tall, 18-foot-long pirate ship, complete with a crow’s nest, upper and lower decks made of mahogany and leather benches in the captain’s quarters that double as beds. […]
Barbara Butler, an artist and playhouse builder in San Francisco, said her sales are up 40 percent this year, and she has twice as many future commissions lined up as she did this time last year. Not only that, but the average price of the structures she is being hired to build has more than doubled, from $26,000 to $54,000.
It’s probably easy to see the ludicrousness in all of this – but let’s take a stab at it, shall we? Real imaginative play is almost directly antithetical to predesigned, adult-built structures, which lack all of the opportunities for a child’s agency and control over the environment that, say, a plain stack of scavenged wood, a bucket of nails, and a little paint might offer that child. In fact, while the obligatorily-quoted psychologist in the article, Dr. Steven Tuber of City University of New York, notes that “over-the-top playhouses may do something for the parent’s sense of grandeur, [but] certainly are irrelevant to the child’s needs and desires for a play space,” I’d go further and say they’re not just irrelevant but are directly obstructive to children’s play – adulterating it with preconceived expectations about what that play should be, to say nothing of shifting the control and maintenance of the environment over to adults.
What strikes me as more ludicrous, though, are the dominant reasons people seem to be buying – and builders seem to capitalize on while selling – these expensive playhouses:
“Childhood is a precious and finite thing,” Ms. Butler said. “And a special playhouse is not the sort of thing you can put off until the economy gets better.”
Not to go on an Old Sociologist Guy rant here, but – well, yes, to go on a rant… Let’s just be clear on something. “Childhood” = not about how fancy of stuff you had growing up, while “being a good parent” = not about simply outspending your neighbors on fancy playhouses and Baby Einstein DVDs. And there’s nothing “precious” about childhood; that’s just you being stupidly drunk with nostalgia. To the point: while some of these playhouses might look cute, and even be fun for children (for a while), they ultimately only undercut children’s independence, creativity, and control over their play – whereas these kids might just be better served with a bike and a summer of free afternoons where they can do whatever they like, and scavenge for spare materials and loose parts to build their own playhouses.
If there’s one silver lining to all of this, it’s that I think kids see through all this BS quite clearly. The kids from the families featured in the article might be too young now, but it won’t be long before they’re 10 or 11 years old and taking a hammer and saw to the playhouse because they know that can build something that’s better.
Some Thoughts on Boredom
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
I’ve been thinking a lot about boredom lately, after reading (and earlier today linking to) a thought-provoking blog entry on the topic by Douglas Adams – the famed creator of the ‘Dilbert’ comics trip.
In his piece, Adams brings up an old but important idea:
I read someplace that the brain needs some boredom during the day to process thoughts and generate creativity. That sounds right. My best ideas always bubble up when I’m bored. And my period of greatest creative output was during my corporate years when every meeting felt like a play date for coma patients.
Browsing back through the Danielsaurus archives, though, I came across this old piece I linked to and referenced more than a year ago: “Boredom Begins at School”. It highlights research which shows some of the physiological dangers of boredom, and shares how many scientists and education reformers are actually faulting it as one of the key reasons our education system fails.
I’ve linked to both perspectives, and I actually do believe there’s some truth in both perspectives even though they seem at odds with each other: On the one hand, boredom can be a breeding ground for creativity – and certainly, it is something I believe is vital for children to experience and have (a lot of) in their life as they grow up. On the other hands, boring places don’t make for good learning environments, at least if its inhabitants are expected to learn certain things and not how to doodle cartoons in class while ignoring the intended curriculum.
It leaves me to ask myself several, possibly overlapping questions. Wondering out loud right now:
Is boredom the same as disengagement? Is it possible, and maybe even good, to by physically bored (perhaps by a lack of intentioned activities or tasks you need to do) but mentally engaged and curious? Is there a difference between a “boring” geographic place (or person, or book, or…) and an individual person, child or adult, “being bored”? Could a boring place be the same, and perhaps more aptly described, as an “un-stimulating” place? And when we talk about “boring” classrooms and schools, are we perhaps really just talking about environments that force their users into a natural inclination toward disengagement?
This may seem like playing with semantics, but I wonder if there’s something there. Who knows, maybe there isn’t. But if there isn’t, how do we reconcile the boredom paradox? Is it simply a matter of saying “some boredom is good” but “constant boredom is bad”?
John Tierney, in the New York Times, reports on a new Norwegian research study about playground safety:
Even if children do suffer fewer physical injuries — and the evidence for that is debatable — the critics say that these playgrounds may stunt emotional development, leaving children with anxieties and fears that are ultimately worse than a broken bone.
“Children need to encounter risks and overcome fears on the playground,” said Ellen Sandseter, a professor of psychology at Queen Maud University in Norway. “I think monkey bars and tall slides are great. As playgrounds become more and more boring, these are some of the few features that still can give children thrilling experiences with heights and high speed.”
And:
By gradually exposing themselves to more and more dangers on the playground, children are using the same habituation techniques developed by therapists to help adults conquer phobias, according to Dr. Sandseter and a fellow psychologist, Leif Kennair, of the Norwegian University for Science and Technology.
“Risky play mirrors effective cognitive behavioral therapy of anxiety,” they write in the journal Evolutionary Psychology, concluding that this “anti-phobic effect” helps explain the evolution of children’s fondness for thrill-seeking. While a youthful zest for exploring heights might not seem adaptive — why would natural selection favor children who risk death before they have a chance to reproduce? — the dangers seemed to be outweighed by the benefits of conquering fear and developing a sense of mastery.
“Paradoxically,” the psychologists write, “we posit that our fear of children being harmed by mostly harmless injuries may result in more fearful children and increased levels of psychopathology.”
Certainly, Sandseter and Kennair’s new study is just one more to go onto a heap of past studies – heralding from all disciplines and dating back over the past several decades – that reinforce children’s need for risk-taking, and that acknowledge the paradoxical dangers of a too-safe childhood environment. It’s still good to see the issue once again pushed to the fore, though.
What’s perhaps more interesting, to me at least, is to see how popular Tierney’s article actually is right now; despite only being published yesterday, it currently ranks #3 in the Most Emailed articles on the NYTimes.com’s website – and just speaking personally, I’ve been forwarded a link to it from no less than a dozen different people, from varying and in many cases unexpected backgrounds. (Even for me that rate and the diversity of sources is unusual.) Likewise, I’ve noticed that Lori Gottlieb’s essay in the Atlantic, “How to Land Your Kid in Therapy”, has experienced a similar effect: it is still #2 in Most Popular articles there – despite being published nearly a month ago – and it has continued to maintain a similar ranking every time I check it every few days or so.
I’m not sure what this says about us adults, but it certainly appears that children’s lives and play are the vogue topics to discuss right now.
Hopefully, when people watch ‘I Am Eleven’, it will remind them of the influence, both positive and negative, we can have on kids and how we should be empowering them and encouraging them, because they are the future. Sounds like a cliche, but they are.
– Filmmaker Genevieve Bailey, discussing her upcoming documentary about the lives of a group of eleven-year-olds around the world.
The report, issued annually by the Children’s Defense Fund, paints an especially grim picture. Marian Wright Edelman shares more:
With rampant unemployment, housing foreclosures, homelessness, hunger, and massive looming federal and state budget cuts, children’s well-being is in great jeopardy. One in five children is poor and children are our nation’s poorest age group. Child poverty increased almost 10 percent between 2008 and 2009, the largest single year increase since data were first collected.
I’ve never been fond of the ‘child-saving’ attitude that organizations like the Children’s Defense Fund tack toward: they tend to portray children as a passive group without much individual agency, and their solutions to children’s problems almost solely tend to rely on adults stepping in to “protect” children and “childhood”. Nevertheless, it’s vital to acknowledge the larger systemic context America’s children live in – a context which is increasingly being defined by poverty. That the blight of poverty is inflicted disproportionately and mercilessly upon our nation’s children is a disgrace. That it has continued this way for so long without any glimmer of hope on the horizon, well, that’s just sickening.
Some thoughts on the slow decline of our American education system, from one of my favorite columnists, Nick Kristof:
My beloved old high school in Yamhill, Ore. — a plain brick building that was my rocket ship — is emblematic of that trend. There were only 167 school days in the last school year here (180 was typical until the recession hit), and the staff has been reduced by 9 percent over five years.
This school was where I embraced sports, became a journalist, encountered intellectual worlds, and got in trouble. These days, the 430 students still have opportunities to get into trouble, but the rest is harder.
For the next school year, freshman and junior varsity sports teams are at risk, and all students will have to pay $125 to participate on a team. The school newspaper, which once doubled as a biweekly newspaper for the entire town, has been terminated.
Business classes are gone. A music teacher has been eliminated. Class size is growing, with more than 40 students in freshman Spanish. “It’s like a long, slow bleed, watching things disappear,” says the school district’s business manager, Michelle Morrison.
Coming from Kristof, who’s spent much of his career reporting on developing countries around the world, it’s truly poignant and disappointing to see how far we’ve strayed from the values that once made us strong as a country. Certainly, the nature of ‘education’ has changed – the needs of our society have moved on from the turn-of-the-twentieth-century industrial demands which once pushed the American education system forward. We no longer need (if we ever did) schools to function as factories, to educate and deploy a stable and homogenous workforce. The nature of schools and the function of education is – and should be – undergoing a more fundamental, if conflicted, paradigmal shift. But this is different. What Kristof speaks of here is about how we simply, plainly no longer value education in general, regardless of form.
We treat teachers abysmally, pay them poorly, disparage their unions and blame them for the problems of a system which, at its root, is currently fundamentally flawed and problematic. We bind the hands of school principals and district administrators to bring about larger change, burying them with reports and regulations – done out of the call for “accountability”, a word for which we have neither a clear definition nor proper understanding – and we force schools into operating within whatever is the cheapest and most barebones model of education that will still deliver adequate results on fanciful, made-up tests which have little to do with real education. And the children themselves, those we uphold as “our future”, we’ve disregarded with a whiff of disdain – if we render them any attention at all. Schools have been shaped into concrete prisons, far removed from the centers of our community life; where once schools were integral places in our communities and neighborhoods, as Kristof for instance recalls about how his old school newspaper doubled as the town’s biweekly newspaper, their societal role now has been marginalized and relegated to simply “educating” (or more often just “protecting”, or worse, “containing”) “the children.” We’ve devalued children’s roles in society, no longer recognizing or welcoming what good they can bring as members to community life – and by extension, we’ve done the same to schools and education; we’ve turned the one last place left where children can interact with and contribute to the surrounding community into a static prison, lifeless and bound by burdensome worries and demands, a place where children’s own voices and contributions don’t matter.
Think about it: when was the last time you actually entered and spent a meaningful amount of time in a local school (one your own children didn’t attend)? How often today do you see a local school’s sport team treated like royalty, with the entire population showing to support them at games and players being known and congratulated outside of school? How often are you encouraged in your local community to actually know the children who live in your neighborhood, who aren’t yours or friends of yours? What level of expectations, if any, do you see your local community setting and holding of its schools – and of the children in those schools? What does your community ask of them, and in what ways are children really actually encouraged to contribute and participate? Have you ever read, or had a chance to read, an essay or opinion of a student in the community whom you didn’t know personally? When was the last time you saw a school or group of children really valued by the community, upheld as a prized part of its local community life, and supported with the necessary resources and attention?
We can ask if our schools and education system are in decline, but I think these are some of the more relevant and insightful questions for the moment. I think what matters now isn’t so much the quality of schools themselves, but their decreasing place and importance in our communities. What matters now is something far larger and more central to the whole of society.
I’ve strayed from Kristof’s column and his central point, but I will end with this: I think he’s right. We don’t value education and we don’t support our schools; if we did, our financial budgets and legislative priorities would look different. But I will go further and say that our schools crumble not only because they lack our financial support, and not only because we no longer value education – but because we no longer value children themselves.
We’ve become a society which has no place for children. We’ve slowly but steadily distanced them from our public life and discourse. We’ve removed them, psychologically and physically, from much of our society. And we stand by and let the schools we keep them in rot and fall away, with them inside.
Paige Johnson, author of the indispensable Playscapes blog, showcases seven great modern playscapes for Dwell Magazine:
From playgrounds that derive inspiration from nature to pop-up urban installations, spaces for play are transitioning away from traditional manufactured solutions—ie. the ubiquitous plastic and/or metal jungle gyms one spies at most playgrounds—and getting the attention they deserve as exciting design opportunities. I use the term playscapes to highlight sites that move beyond the playground fence to become total landscapes for play.
My (absolutely biased) favorite of the bunch is the last one – a Pop-Up Adventure Playground built by kids while provided for by a new organization I’m involved with, called Pop-Up Adventure Play. Paige captures what we try to do with a Pop-Up perfectly: “It lets kids do what they love: make their own spaces for play!”
Writing in an op-ed for the New York Times, Timothy Egan takes on a little sex and violence – with some mild dismemberment and naked boobs thrown in for good measure – as he considers one of the more peculiar double-standards held by American culture, one which only continued to be upheld by last month’s Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. EMA:
Ultimately, the back-and-forth by the high court reinforced the notion of a nation that will always be a little skittish about sex, while viewing violence as American as apple pie. If this ruling is indeed a triumph for the First Amendment, it continues a strange double standard. […]
Settling the law of the land on this latest iteration of age-old question, the court’s decision makes it clear that children are free to slice a clothed Godiva to bits — on screen — but should be shielded from seeing her as she was when she rode through the streets of Coventry.
I think Egan’s perspective falls apart a bit when he tries to poke holes in Scalia’s opinion on the effects of video game violence (the whole of the research clearly backs up Scalia on this, I believe), but Egan’s central premise is great: Why does America feel so uncomfortable with nudity, and yet not violence?
Beverly Cleary, the now 95-year-old author of the Ramona Quimby books, on why her stories have continued to remain popular with children over the years:
I think it is because I have stayed true to my own memories of childhood, which are not different in many ways from those of children today. Although their circumstances have changed, I don’t think children’s inner feelings have changed.
The whole conversation between Cleary and The Atlantic’s Benjamin Schwarz makes for quite a nice read. I think what always sticks with me, though, when I read about the lives of the few true legends in the children’s book world – like Cleary, and like Maurice Sendak, Shel Silverstein, Arnold Lobel, and others who were inspired and nurtured by the great Ursula Nordstrom – is how honest and connected they were with their own childhood. They didn’t write and illustrate for children out of pretense or agenda; they just wrote to remember, and to honor their own childhoods. They worked at time when books for children were regarded as illegitimate, throwaway materials – and most were either simple penny novels to preoccupy, or pedantic ‘Dick and Jane’ readers to educate. But Cleary, and those like her, did something different. They didn’t try to trick or outsmart or educate their child readers; they just put their own memories on the page, and trusted that children would find the truth in it.
The time is right to move beyond unproductive debates about the “blame culture” and instead to build momentum behind the idea of expanding children’s horizons. What is needed is nothing less than the wholesale rejection of the philosophy of protection. In its place, what we need to adopt is a philosophy of resilience that truly embraces risk, uncertainty and real challenge – even real danger – as essential ingredients of a rounded childhood.
The longer you live the funnier the sentence “You’re in BIG trouble!” becomes.
A very good analysis all around of the Supreme Court’s decision, but this bit especially stuck out:
Another key issue that is pervasive in all of the opinions is the role of parents. Parental rights—the right of parents to raise their children as they please free from interference from the state—is an issue that comes up frequently in discussions for the legal rights of minors. The California law at issue provides explicitly that parents (and aunts, uncles, grandparents, and legal guardians) can purchase or rent violent video games for their children. This is all that Justice Thomas needed to conclude that the law was constitutional. He drew on the historical record, starting with New England Puritan’s treatment of children, noting that in the 1800s parents would regulate what books their children would read and that parents could force their children to work for whomever they pleased (and parents could steal their children’s wages), and observing the strict degree of control Thomas Jefferson exerted on his daughters’ lives (via regular letters) to conclude that the framers of the constitution could not have believed that children have an independent right to be spoken to. Under Thomas’s view (as noted by Scalia), it would be constitutional to pass laws requiring parental permission to attend church, to attend political rallies, or to do just about anything.
