Monday, May 31, 2010
Maybe we have to tell our kids they're winners...
Perhaps because we're borrowing so much from our kids (in the form of massive public debt), we have no choice but to tell them "you're all winners" all the time: if we don't, they might cut us off.
Friday, April 30, 2010
That's one small step...
Our first model rocket launch together was a success. So were the next 4.
Rocketry seems like a pretty good use of time:
- She may learn a bit of physics and aerodynamics.
- She may gain some appreciation for precision and attention to detail, e.g., as flight patterns are affected by the alignment of the fins.
- This might point her in a direction of a career path she should pursue.
- It may become a hobby.
Of course, it may turn out to be something we do a few times before she loses interest completely.
However it turns out, building things that we can launch a thousand feet up in the sky, recover, and launch again is a whole lot of fun for us both right now. But it's more than a way to kill time. It's got her wheels turning. It's got her thinking about things she'd never thought of before: she created a launch vehicle that goes high in the sky and returns for another round. It's a spark.
It's one small step for a little girl, one giant leap for her imagination.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
The Parent-Advocate
Parents are a child's best - and often only - advocate.
There are times when a child stands accused of something and their voice isn't heard. Accusations tend to carry more weight than facts. A little person who stands accused of something is less likely to get a fair hearing, especially in the face of heinous or hysterical charges. A child on the defensive needs an advocate to level the playing field.
There are also times when a child's situation is misdiagnosed. Children are subjected to all sorts of mechanical social processes, most prominently the education system. The machinery of "the system" doesn't handle exceptions all that well. For example, a child that appears to be struggling with a subject may actually have mastered it. Lackluster performance may be a result of the fact that they're bored to tears, and subsequently not engaged. Unfortunately, those administrating "the system" know only to assess performance in a few set patterns: the kids studied this subject, then took this exam, so that exam score is the true barometer of their subject mastery. These mechanical processes aren't designed to recognize, let alone deal, with exception cases.
When an authority presents you with a conclusion about your child, you can't take it at face value. You have to interrogate everybody involved to get all the relevant facts, consider alternative conclusions that the data might be trying to tell you, find ways to test for the truth, and engage everybody in ferreting out the truth. It can be laborious. Advocating for a single person runs counter to an educational-industrial complex designed to mass-educate large volumes of children. Also, enabling those who drive a mechanical process every day to be meta-aware is no small task. No surprise, flying directly into the headwinds is emotionally trying. But the parent-advocate must be prepared to do this and keep a level head in the process.
There is a dark side of advocacy, of course: the parent who, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, asserts their child can do no wrong, is perfect in every subject, is the greatest athlete, is the most talented musician, etc. Delusional advocacy is quite damaging. It creates a false floor of performance, a sense of entitlement, and a wildly distorted sense of self-awareness. That doesn't build self-esteem; it creates a recursive pattern of denial.
But that aside, a child has no better and no more important an advocate than a parent. An attorney is a hired gun, there to argue points of law interspersed with selected facts to win an argument. A parent is invested not in winning the argument of the moment on behalf of a child, but in championing a child's cause in life-impacting events.
There are times when a child stands accused of something and their voice isn't heard. Accusations tend to carry more weight than facts. A little person who stands accused of something is less likely to get a fair hearing, especially in the face of heinous or hysterical charges. A child on the defensive needs an advocate to level the playing field.
There are also times when a child's situation is misdiagnosed. Children are subjected to all sorts of mechanical social processes, most prominently the education system. The machinery of "the system" doesn't handle exceptions all that well. For example, a child that appears to be struggling with a subject may actually have mastered it. Lackluster performance may be a result of the fact that they're bored to tears, and subsequently not engaged. Unfortunately, those administrating "the system" know only to assess performance in a few set patterns: the kids studied this subject, then took this exam, so that exam score is the true barometer of their subject mastery. These mechanical processes aren't designed to recognize, let alone deal, with exception cases.
When an authority presents you with a conclusion about your child, you can't take it at face value. You have to interrogate everybody involved to get all the relevant facts, consider alternative conclusions that the data might be trying to tell you, find ways to test for the truth, and engage everybody in ferreting out the truth. It can be laborious. Advocating for a single person runs counter to an educational-industrial complex designed to mass-educate large volumes of children. Also, enabling those who drive a mechanical process every day to be meta-aware is no small task. No surprise, flying directly into the headwinds is emotionally trying. But the parent-advocate must be prepared to do this and keep a level head in the process.
There is a dark side of advocacy, of course: the parent who, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, asserts their child can do no wrong, is perfect in every subject, is the greatest athlete, is the most talented musician, etc. Delusional advocacy is quite damaging. It creates a false floor of performance, a sense of entitlement, and a wildly distorted sense of self-awareness. That doesn't build self-esteem; it creates a recursive pattern of denial.
But that aside, a child has no better and no more important an advocate than a parent. An attorney is a hired gun, there to argue points of law interspersed with selected facts to win an argument. A parent is invested not in winning the argument of the moment on behalf of a child, but in championing a child's cause in life-impacting events.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
On My Honor
I just finished reading Legacy of Honor, by Alvin Townley. It’s about Eagle Scouts and Eagle Scouting. (Yes, being an Eagle Scout is a lifelong thing, hence the use of the gerund “Scouting”.)
Mr. Townley uses the word “honor” a great deal throughout the book. That’s no surprise as it’s the third word of the book’s title as well as the Scout Oath:
On my honor, I will do my best
to do my duty
to God and my country
and to obey the Scout Laws
To help other people at all times
To keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight
We project a lot of integrity into other people, earned or otherwise. Still, we constantly (if only subconsciously) ask if the people around us - colleagues, employers, friends, elected officials - behave in an honorable fashion; e.g., are they honest, are they worthy of our trust. We also question our own honor a fair bit, especially when (well, usually after) we’re put to the test in a personal or professional situation. Did I do the right thing? Is that how I would have wanted somebody else to act if I were on the receiving end of what I just did?
The Scout Oath gives us a standard of honorable conduct. It’s not written in the negative, i.e., as a collection of “thou shall not” expressions. Negative statements attempt to define what we should aspire not to be. The Oath is written in the affirmative. It defines what a person should aspire to be.
Affirmative statements are more inclusive, allowing us to invoke the “spirit” or the “intent” to guide our decision making. That is, we can ask, “is something I am about to do consistent with my definition of the kind of person I wish to be?” That’s radically different from reconciling our conduct to a collection of expressions written in the negative. Guidance from negative statements usually leads to conclusions such as, “well, nobody told me I can’t do what I’m about to do.”
The Oath also points out that sometimes we'll come up short. We say that we will do our best, not that we will always and without fail. Now, that isn’t a “get out of jail free” card because we’re still responsible for our actions. However, it is an acknowledgement that sometimes we end up in situations that are completely new to us, where the facts – particularly the motivations of other people – aren’t immediately clear. In circumstances like this where we are compelled to act, we must be certain that above all else we do our best. And if we conduct ourselves consistently with this code, we’ve nothing to be afraid of should we be called to account for our actions, regardless the outcome.
Our honor, our integrity, is challenged every day. ‘Twas ever thus. The only difference is that today, media amplifies a lapse of honor with a broad and persistent exposure of the person caught out in a compromising situation. At the same time, the tools of obfuscation are much more sophisticated than ever before. The sad result is that plausible deniability is not just a matter of policy that guides people through troubled situations, it defines entire career paths.
Which brings attention to an unpleasant, self-reinforcing combination of societal norms. Society stresses winning above all else: we’ve all heard the phrase “nobody remembers who finished in second place” and the famous Al Davis quote, “Just win, baby.” At the same time, we’ve incubated a cultural norm that nobody should lose: "we’re all winners” pervades our society. So we see people managing the appearances of being right, be it in business, or politics, or science, or even our personal interactions. We are increasingly conditioned to be afraid to fail. We are afraid to be wrong.
The shame of it is, we shouldn’t be afraid to fail at what we set out to do. We should be afraid to fail at how we go about doing it. Conducting ourselves with honor tends to have a direct bearing on both the probability of success and sustainability of what we set out to do. Climate scientists are only the latest in a long line of people as wide and varied as Nixon's 1972 election team and McLaren Formula One race engineers to discover this.
Instilling a sense of honor in our children is a tremendous responsibility. Think about how past generations instilled it in us. It was done by example, by the words people used, by the stories we were told, by how we were coached and taught. We learned it from our family and all those people with whom we came into contact: teachers, babysitters, camp counselors, older and younger kids, and many others in our extended family and community.
And it didn't hurt to recite a code of conduct week after week for 6 years.
I hope the Girl Scouts have a similar code of conduct. It's about time for my daughter and I to find out.
Mr. Townley uses the word “honor” a great deal throughout the book. That’s no surprise as it’s the third word of the book’s title as well as the Scout Oath:
On my honor, I will do my best
to do my duty
to God and my country
and to obey the Scout Laws
To help other people at all times
To keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight
We project a lot of integrity into other people, earned or otherwise. Still, we constantly (if only subconsciously) ask if the people around us - colleagues, employers, friends, elected officials - behave in an honorable fashion; e.g., are they honest, are they worthy of our trust. We also question our own honor a fair bit, especially when (well, usually after) we’re put to the test in a personal or professional situation. Did I do the right thing? Is that how I would have wanted somebody else to act if I were on the receiving end of what I just did?
The Scout Oath gives us a standard of honorable conduct. It’s not written in the negative, i.e., as a collection of “thou shall not” expressions. Negative statements attempt to define what we should aspire not to be. The Oath is written in the affirmative. It defines what a person should aspire to be.
Affirmative statements are more inclusive, allowing us to invoke the “spirit” or the “intent” to guide our decision making. That is, we can ask, “is something I am about to do consistent with my definition of the kind of person I wish to be?” That’s radically different from reconciling our conduct to a collection of expressions written in the negative. Guidance from negative statements usually leads to conclusions such as, “well, nobody told me I can’t do what I’m about to do.”
The Oath also points out that sometimes we'll come up short. We say that we will do our best, not that we will always and without fail. Now, that isn’t a “get out of jail free” card because we’re still responsible for our actions. However, it is an acknowledgement that sometimes we end up in situations that are completely new to us, where the facts – particularly the motivations of other people – aren’t immediately clear. In circumstances like this where we are compelled to act, we must be certain that above all else we do our best. And if we conduct ourselves consistently with this code, we’ve nothing to be afraid of should we be called to account for our actions, regardless the outcome.
Our honor, our integrity, is challenged every day. ‘Twas ever thus. The only difference is that today, media amplifies a lapse of honor with a broad and persistent exposure of the person caught out in a compromising situation. At the same time, the tools of obfuscation are much more sophisticated than ever before. The sad result is that plausible deniability is not just a matter of policy that guides people through troubled situations, it defines entire career paths.
Which brings attention to an unpleasant, self-reinforcing combination of societal norms. Society stresses winning above all else: we’ve all heard the phrase “nobody remembers who finished in second place” and the famous Al Davis quote, “Just win, baby.” At the same time, we’ve incubated a cultural norm that nobody should lose: "we’re all winners” pervades our society. So we see people managing the appearances of being right, be it in business, or politics, or science, or even our personal interactions. We are increasingly conditioned to be afraid to fail. We are afraid to be wrong.
The shame of it is, we shouldn’t be afraid to fail at what we set out to do. We should be afraid to fail at how we go about doing it. Conducting ourselves with honor tends to have a direct bearing on both the probability of success and sustainability of what we set out to do. Climate scientists are only the latest in a long line of people as wide and varied as Nixon's 1972 election team and McLaren Formula One race engineers to discover this.
Instilling a sense of honor in our children is a tremendous responsibility. Think about how past generations instilled it in us. It was done by example, by the words people used, by the stories we were told, by how we were coached and taught. We learned it from our family and all those people with whom we came into contact: teachers, babysitters, camp counselors, older and younger kids, and many others in our extended family and community.
And it didn't hurt to recite a code of conduct week after week for 6 years.
I hope the Girl Scouts have a similar code of conduct. It's about time for my daughter and I to find out.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Crowding Out
Children's lives are highly scheduled, with school and extra-curricular activities dictating where they need to be and what they need to be doing at pretty much any given moment in time.
The amount of homework a child has each week is, not surprisingly, directly proportional to the amount of programmed activities in which they participate. In an effort to get parents more involved, just about everything children are involved with involves some form of homework.
All this homework is well intentioned. It's too easy to put a kid in a bunch of extra-curricular activities to make them "somebody else's problem" for a few hours each day so a parent can pursue some other interest. And it's fair to say that many parents are practicing a form of "outsourcing," expecting that their child's education, spiritual development, or musical training is fully the responsibility of a contracted party. Clearly, that is an irresponsible expectation, and homework helps to reset the balance.
All told, when we sign our children up for things, we're committing them for both time they'll spend in an activity, and time they'll spend on the activity.
Independently of this, the days are short in the winter months, so there's only small windows of time each day to enjoy the season.
The net effect is that spontaneity is crowded out. The ability to do something like ski or sled is constrained by the need to keep pace with everything else they're signed up to do. What initially seemed a sustainable pace of activities quickly becomes what runners call fartlek training: sudden sprints in the middle of a sustained run.
In a highly scheduled life, the conspiracy of convergence is inevitable. The rescheduled music lesson, the irregularly scheduled basketball game, the religious education study, the choir lesson, a birthday party and a school project will all need to fit in the same weekend. Add to this a travel schedule that has you away from home several days a week, and you soon discover that your interactions with your child are substantially framed, if not outright dictated, by somebody else.
Compound this with extraordinarily beautiful weather for ice skating, and the sense of constraint is overwhelming. You're left lamenting the lost opportunity to do something unique during the season, more than feeling a sense of accomplishment for having executed so many things in a pre-programmed schedule.
A profound sense of loss may be merited. Harry Eyres, writing in the Weekend FT, commented on how his earliest memories of winter shaped his expectation for what winter is like. As Mr. Eyres points out, the experiences of the season are critical moments of our experience of life, be it walking on a frozen river Thames, moving about in snow as deep as you are tall, or self- and community-reliance to share food and shelter when transportation and technology fail in the face of the elements.
These experiences are, in a highly-programmed world, exception to the rule. Indeed, a significant cold snap or heavy snowfall is seen more as an encumbrance than a reason for celebration. But just as banking had rules that mattered not when the governing principles no longer held true with the onset of the credit crunch, so, too, is the fragility of this programmed existence exposed in the face of a hostile yet still curiously sustaining world. Our programming functions only in this bubble, and the bubble doesn't provide for our needs.
The more we program our lives, the further and fewer between the opportunities to connect with and embrace the world outside our bubbles. We have to always remember that our children may not truly fathom the fundamental subservience we have to the Earth. The Earth sustains us far more than we impose any form of management over it. Helping our children develop that appreciation - even at the expense of their programming - is an obligation we have as parents.
And on perfect winter days, it's a highly liberating one at that.
The amount of homework a child has each week is, not surprisingly, directly proportional to the amount of programmed activities in which they participate. In an effort to get parents more involved, just about everything children are involved with involves some form of homework.
All this homework is well intentioned. It's too easy to put a kid in a bunch of extra-curricular activities to make them "somebody else's problem" for a few hours each day so a parent can pursue some other interest. And it's fair to say that many parents are practicing a form of "outsourcing," expecting that their child's education, spiritual development, or musical training is fully the responsibility of a contracted party. Clearly, that is an irresponsible expectation, and homework helps to reset the balance.
All told, when we sign our children up for things, we're committing them for both time they'll spend in an activity, and time they'll spend on the activity.
Independently of this, the days are short in the winter months, so there's only small windows of time each day to enjoy the season.
The net effect is that spontaneity is crowded out. The ability to do something like ski or sled is constrained by the need to keep pace with everything else they're signed up to do. What initially seemed a sustainable pace of activities quickly becomes what runners call fartlek training: sudden sprints in the middle of a sustained run.
In a highly scheduled life, the conspiracy of convergence is inevitable. The rescheduled music lesson, the irregularly scheduled basketball game, the religious education study, the choir lesson, a birthday party and a school project will all need to fit in the same weekend. Add to this a travel schedule that has you away from home several days a week, and you soon discover that your interactions with your child are substantially framed, if not outright dictated, by somebody else.
Compound this with extraordinarily beautiful weather for ice skating, and the sense of constraint is overwhelming. You're left lamenting the lost opportunity to do something unique during the season, more than feeling a sense of accomplishment for having executed so many things in a pre-programmed schedule.
A profound sense of loss may be merited. Harry Eyres, writing in the Weekend FT, commented on how his earliest memories of winter shaped his expectation for what winter is like. As Mr. Eyres points out, the experiences of the season are critical moments of our experience of life, be it walking on a frozen river Thames, moving about in snow as deep as you are tall, or self- and community-reliance to share food and shelter when transportation and technology fail in the face of the elements.
These experiences are, in a highly-programmed world, exception to the rule. Indeed, a significant cold snap or heavy snowfall is seen more as an encumbrance than a reason for celebration. But just as banking had rules that mattered not when the governing principles no longer held true with the onset of the credit crunch, so, too, is the fragility of this programmed existence exposed in the face of a hostile yet still curiously sustaining world. Our programming functions only in this bubble, and the bubble doesn't provide for our needs.
The more we program our lives, the further and fewer between the opportunities to connect with and embrace the world outside our bubbles. We have to always remember that our children may not truly fathom the fundamental subservience we have to the Earth. The Earth sustains us far more than we impose any form of management over it. Helping our children develop that appreciation - even at the expense of their programming - is an obligation we have as parents.
And on perfect winter days, it's a highly liberating one at that.
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Frequently Flying
I'm fortunate to have the opportunity to travel with my family from time to time. Travel opens up new horizons for a child. They get direct exposure to different cultures, and places of historical significance are brought to life. And there's nothing like first hand experience of different languages, diets, climates and so forth to realize how big and diverse the world really is. Having been to 15 countries (and counting), my daughter has some appreciation for this.
But travel quickly goes from "opportunity" to "burden" when I go without them. The phone call where she relays the daily digest of her life's events is nice, but being apart means I'm not able to share in those events with her. And while we can innovate our way through this to some extent - it was fun to watch The Grinch together while on speakerphone last month - it's still low-bandwidth interaction. And all-in-all, these work-arounds introduce their own set of disruptions on all of our lives.
It's great being a dad who can introduce his daughter to vastly different parts of the world. But at the moment that's the exception, not the rule. There's little consolation in being a dad who delivers trinkets of travel: they don't replace what was missed, the joy of receiving is short lived, and they're just reminders of time spent apart. Besides, how many city-themed t-shirts from airport shops can one little girl have?
I'd rather just be the dad who is there.
Monday, November 30, 2009
Missing a First
There are a lot of firsts that you want to be there for as a parent, such as your child's first word and first step. My daughter just ran her first 5k, and unfortunately I wasn't there to run with her or cheer her on.
She didn't run to be competitive. She didn't run to get a time. She just wanted to run a race.
With things like television and video games competing for our time and attention, it takes a lot of motivation to start exercising. But as hard as it is to get started, it takes a lot of will power to sustain an exercise program.
So while I'm disappointed to have missed her first, I'll be there to encourage and remind, run and ride wtih her.
She didn't run to be competitive. She didn't run to get a time. She just wanted to run a race.
With things like television and video games competing for our time and attention, it takes a lot of motivation to start exercising. But as hard as it is to get started, it takes a lot of will power to sustain an exercise program.
So while I'm disappointed to have missed her first, I'll be there to encourage and remind, run and ride wtih her.
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