Marylhurst Early Childhood Center

Archive for the ‘Ann Brown Column’ Category

Actually, I was going to begin this column by listing the rockin’ snacks we had down there this month, but maybe I am the only one who got so excited about it. Let me just say, however, that great conversation, stellar people, good coffee, home baked goodies, sandwiches, cheese and cracker plates and mimosas is a totally perfect combination for a weekday morning. I have the best job in the world. You might want to consider getting yourselves or borrowing a two-year-old so you can join us next year. S’all good downstairs…. Read the rest of this entry »

I once had a four-year old in my preschool class who went around to every child on the yard, telling them over and over again, “You are weird,” until they cried.

You know how four-year olds can be, right? They glom onto a new word, assess its cache and power and then commit to using it in every possible way until they tire of it and find a new word with which to torment their peers and siblings.

Being a brand newly minted preschool teacher at the time (and a year away from being a parent myself), I tried all the textbook responses and consequences I could think of. Which were about two. And they both failed. This four-year old was hugely infatuated with the word “weird” and continued to bestow it upon every other child in the school for the entire day.

Finally, at a loss for anything else to say about it, I asked her: “So, are you weird?”

She looked at me with great disdain, as if I had peed myself or something.

“No,” she said, rolling her eyes at me, “I am a duck.”

This sounds like a Zen parable or an ancient Talmudic allegory, I know, but it’s not. There is no deeper meaning to the story, only this:

Sometimes we just gotta accept the random quirkiness around us.

Quirky is a word that evokes strong feelings in us. We either embrace it or we work hard to avoid it. Often, we proclaim to embrace it but secretly avoid it.

To be quirky is to be different. We might stand out from everyone else, and not always in a good way. We might not be popular in middle school if we are quirky. We might not get invited to every birthday party, or go to the prom. Well-meaning friends and family members might want to “help” us not be so odd; we might suffer years of “helpful” suggestions as to how to best blend in, to not be so weird.

Working with your two and three year olds, I live in a world where quirky is king. Walk into our classroom any day, observe the children in there and imagine them to be, say, thirty or forty year olds. You’d be looking at a scene out of “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest”. Someone is talking to himself. Someone is laughing at nothing. Someone is arguing with a spoon. Someone is gesticulating to herself as she looks into a mirror. Someone is hoarding golf tees. Someone is eating another person’s snack. Someone is rattling the baby gate to get out.

It’s all surreal, it’s all weird, they’re all quirky and we all dig it. Some mornings, honestly, I cannot wait to get to work to see what bizarre things your kids are going to do or say in class.

* a loosely related, but actually, mostly tangential anecdote:

There was a kid last week; I think he was in Kindergarten, outside my classroom with another child and a teacher. The teacher needed to go get something so I offered to hang out with the two Kindy kids until she got back. I introduced myself to them, asked them their names, etc. After a short awkward silence, one of the kids said to me in a shaky voice, “I don’t think we are supposed to be here in the hallway without a grownup.”

I said to him, “I am a grownup, did you know that?”

He studied me for a moment and turned to his friend as if I had said nothing.

“I really don’t think she is a grown-up,” he whispered to his friend.

Now, frankly, this is a hugely interesting topic to me, begging all sorts of discussion topics on what, exactly, is a grownup but I could see that this little boy needed real answers.

“Yes, I am a grownup,” I told him. “And I am teacher here, too. And a mom.”  I was ready to show him my turkey neck, liver spots and crow’s feet, just to assure him that I am, indeed, a safe person to be caring for him.

Thankfully, at that moment, his teacher returned, the little boy heaved a big sigh of relief and I went back to my classroom.

Okay, back to my point…..

As our kids get older, of course, we hope that they develop the social skills and emotional intelligence to be successful in the world. But do we still value the individualism, the slight oddness, the things that make them uniquely them?

It’s easy to see our children as a never-ending “to do” list of stuff we think we have to change about them. And, to be sure, there are things that we need to be aware of, areas in which our kids will need our guidance and redirection. But I think we have to not lose sight of the fact that the goal isn’t necessarily to match, or fit in line, or not make waves. The goal is to know ourselves, accept ourselves, and strive to be authentic without offending or repelling those around us.

Our kids need to hear it from us because they are not going to hear it from their peers or from mainstream media: Be yourself!

Because sometimes everyone around you is weird and you are just a lone duck, calling it as you see it.

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Ann Brown is available for private parenting consults. Please contact the school for her fees and schedules.

I’ve been trying to catch up on my professional reading. I tend to get waaay behind, and wind up trying to tell everyone about a book they read, like, ten years ago. The problem is that….. well, no, the problem is that I am just plain lazy, but the other problem is that I have this rule about not buying any more books.

About seven or eight years ago I decided that not only are my bookshelves crammed to the top, my house has no more room for new bookshelves. Plus, the whole cutting down trees for paper was bothering me, so I gave myself an edict: no more buying books. Only borrowing library books.

I am very happy with my policy, but the downside is that I often put off reading a library book until my renewal times have been exceeded and I have to return it, unread.

So I broke the rule and bought a book. I had a list of parenting books I wanted to read and I literally just closed my eyes and pointed to one on the shelf at Powell’s:

The Way of Boys, by Anthony Rao and Michelle Seaton. Yeah, I know, you’ve all read it. Years ago.

Still, I believe I will share my thoughts on it.

Boys are odd. There, I said it. I mean, I love them; I’ve had hundreds of them in my classroom over the years, I even married a grown up one and gave birth to two of them, whom I adore. But I really do not get them. I have a sister. We had a very female-y household. We never once thought about breaking our toys over each other’s heads or running into the street, or organizing a neighborhood contest to see whose pee could reach the furthest. My mom kept the cookies on the top shelf in the kitchen, knowing that my sister and I would never consider climbing up there to get them. That could be dangerous. Granted, my sister and I were pretty much on the whimpy, nervous, hand-wringing side, as kids go, but still. Our moxie emerged later, in the teenage years, when – coincidentally – my father had the first of his many heart attacks.

As a parenting instructor and consultant for almost thirty years, I came of age as a teacher when the nature vs nurture debate weighed heavily (if not wholly) on the nurture theory. I recall, now with more than a modicum of cringing, spouting off my blah blah blah to parents about merely sitting their little boys down and explaining to them why a behavior was unacceptable, and voila! – the behavior will cease if the little boy is a good little boy. Explain and talk; talk and explain. It’s very simple to raise an obedient child, I told them.

Every once in a while, I wonder if I should try to find all the parents from those classes, and refund their money. I kinda stunk at my job.

I wish The Way of Boys had been written back then. I could have understood that sitting a little boy down, putting my face close to his, and talking, talking, talking about an issue is not going to get us anywhere. And when the little boy squirmed to get away or (as once happened in my class) continued to slug his friend while I was talking to him as though I wasn’t there, I could have realized that it was my strategy that was off-target, not the reaction of the kid.

It can be hard to remember this. Especially for moms. As women, we pretty much trust that if we have a problem with a friend, we can call her up, ask her to meet us at, say, Starbucks, and talk it out. In fact, we will probably stay at Starbucks for hours, whatever it takes, until we have talked out the problem. We will leave satisfied, maybe having cried a little bit, inviting all of the room to join in on a chorus of “Kumbayah”, and buying a round of soy lattes for the house. Talking, especially talking about feelings for long periods of time, works.

And we bring that talent to raising our kids. But kids, especially boy kids, are not able to sit for hours, dissecting the minutiae of every interaction they’ve had for the last week, analyzing, reframing and concluding. They pretty much cannot sit and do that for three minutes. Which pisses us off even more because we read that behavior as, “he just doesn’t care” or “he likes to be naughty”. And then we make them sit for three more minutes, just to make our point.

It’s not particularly effective.

The theme of power runs throughout the book (as it does throughout our parenting journey, yes?) I found a new, perhaps inside-out way to look at it while reading the chapter, He Runs The Household. Dr. Rao writes:

As a parent, you have to earn your power. When your get overwhelmed, it’s easy to feel sorry for yourself. You begin to tell youself, “He’s doing this on purpose. He’s trying to make me angry.”

Yes, he is trying to make you angry. He wants to see what happens next. You can take the upper hand here by refusing to take his….behavior…personally.

Choosing to see our child’s tantrum as an experiment in cause and effect allows us to let go of the need to find the solution. An experiment, by definition, does not set out with a known solution (at least, that’s what I presume. As an ethnomusicology major in college, I only took one science class and even then, well, I may as well just spit it out here – I paid a friend to take the final for me. So the fact is, I have no idea what the definition of an experiment is. I probably have no business using any sort of science terms in my writing but, frankly, if I avoided writing stuff about which I have no knowledge I’d pretty be looking at a lot of blank paper.)

The concept of young boys not reading social cues in the same way young girls do should be reassuring to parents, especially parents who have active young boys and who are friends with parents who have docile, obedient young girls. This leads me to a tangential moment where I must offer my suggestion that after you have children, never befriend anyone with children who:

1) are better in any way than your children

It just makes life easier for you. Trust me. I spent most of the years my boys were little, either alone or making new friends through prison pen pal programs. Who needs the pressure of having friends with perfect children?

My only disagreement with the book is that I don’t really feel it is the way of boys. I think the observations in the book are just as meaningful for girls, at least in the early preschool years.

Let’s end with a thought from Elvis:

A little less conversation, a little more action.

Yup, that about sums it up.

See you at the library.

Ann Brown is available for private parenting consults. Please contact the school for her fees and schedules.

People seem to be stressed lately. By February, there is often a lull in my classes at discussion time, a time when I bring in my own topics because everyone is pretty much talked out from the past months. But this year I’ve rarely had to rely on my own topics; Read the rest of this entry »