by Maren Stark Schmidt | Infant-Toddler (0 to 3), MFA, Montessori Education, Montessori Family Life, Montessori Parenting
An effective, yet, counter-intuitive teaching and parenting suggestion took me a while to understand and put into use. The idea? “Don’t just do something – stand there.”
Our first inclination when we see things that we think we need to stop is to jump right in and fix it. One of the interesting discoveries of not doing something and watching, instead, is that usually within two to five minutes, the child will figure out the situation, and self-correction will begin without us having to say a word or lift a finger. (Of course, I’m talking about things other than running into oncoming traffic or jumping into the river.) Sometimes that self-correction begins as the child’s realizes that perhaps there was a reason for “don’t get into the cookie jar.” The lid may be too heavy to get back on, or you might be perched on the countertop with no easy way to get down, among many other reasons.
If we stop, look, and listen when we find our child into the proverbial cookie jar, versus resorting to punishment or lecturing, we might gain some insight into our child’s actions.
Susan looked out her kitchen window and found most of the bricks gone from her new flowerbed. Around the corner of the house came four-year-old Caleb, running to get a brick and then disappearing around the corner again. Susan calmed her initial reaction to run out of the house, yelling and making Caleb stop destroying her new border that she had spent the past Saturday building. Instead, she walked to the living room window on that side of the house to see what Caleb was doing.
What she saw was that Caleb had built some steps up a trunk of a tree and was now climbing in the fork of the tree, a tree that his father usually gave him a hands-up to reach these limbs. Caleb was now eye-to-eye with a robin’s nest. From his shirt pocket, he delicately took out a blue egg and placed it in the nest. Caleb sat in the fork of the tree for a few minutes until a robin flew up and squawked.
Caleb made his way back down the tree. As soon as his foot touched the last step, Caleb picked up a brick and headed back to the flowerbed. For 20 minutes, Caleb carried each brick back to the border, lining up the bricks in the same manner he had watched Susan place them on Saturday. Not perfectly, but he worked with effort.
What did Susan discover by using stop, look, and listen? Susan saw her four-year-old son as a problem solver, a bird lover, a respecter of life, and a worker who would finish a job he began.
That night at dinner Susan made a comment about how many birds were in the yard since it was spring. She settled in to listen as she asked, “Caleb, what do you think about the birds?” Remember, don’t just do something – stand there.
Tomorrow’s Child / April 2013 / p. 26
by Maren Stark Schmidt | Brain Development, Family Resources, Health / Nutrition, MFA, Montessori Education, Montessori Family Life, Montessori Parenting, Psychology
Boy watchng tv from the bed.
All man’s miseries derive from not being able to sit quietly in a room alone.—Blaise Pascal (1623 -1662)
“I can tell you exactly the year that my students changed,” my college professor told our class in the 1970’s. “I’d ask a question and nobody made any attempt to answer it. They thought they were watching TV. My students expected me to give them the answer.”
And so it goes.
Today our children are more tuned in than ever to TV, DVD’s, video games, computers, text messaging cell phones, and personal music devices. With so many devices turned on, what have our children tuned out?
Silence and the ability to listen to themselves. During our children’s day, when do they have quiet time to think their own thoughts and reflect on their own lives?
How can we help our children unplug from other people’s voices and dramas, and tap into listening to their own voices?
Be the adult in charge. Use common sense rules and keep television and computers out of bedrooms. Keep computers in common areas so that the screens are easy to monitor. Make rules limiting phone and other devices. Recently I have seen children as young as five with personal cell phones and computer pads. The Kaiser Family Foundation found that American children and adolescents devote an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes to using entertainment media across a typical day, which is more than 53 hours a week. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends limiting screen time to two hours or less for children over the age of two. For children under two years they recommended no screen time.
Use low-tech devices to engage your children. Jig-saw puzzles, reading books out loud, cooking, after dinner walks, model building, crossword puzzles, sudoku—all these can help your child and you unplug and engage in interpersonal and intrapersonal communication.
Take a vacation from electronics. Have a “power outage” at your house one evening a month. Sit around the fire or in the yard to watch fireflies. Play charades, board games or cards games by candlelight. Fix a special snack and enjoy each other’s company.
Turn off your electronic media for a week. If your power outage night was a success, think about unplugging for a week. Coordinate with few friends or neighbors to plan some group activities that don’t involve television, computers, or video games.
A twenty-year study on the qualities associated with success suggests that certain personal attributes contribute to one’s sense of achievement. Success was defined as having positive family relations, good friends, being loved, self-approval, job satisfaction, physical and mental health, financial comfort, spiritual contentment and an overall sense of meaning to one’s life.
The qualities that contribute to the richness of life were self-awareness, being proactive, perseverance, goal-setting, effective support systems, and emotional coping strategies. Do our children’s plugged in devices contributing to the building of these qualities?
The research also suggests that these characteristics may influence success and self-fulfillment more than such factors as academic performance, gender, socio-economic status, ethnicity, and intelligence quotient.
Our children need peace and quiet to think their own thoughts and to learn to enjoy being with the person they’ll live with all their lives—the person in the mirror. Our children need time with family and friends to build life-long positive relationships. Let’s be sure our children, tempted with a variety of electronic media, are not tuning out the ability to love their lives.
For more information about unplugging from media, visit www.turnoffyourtv.com.
Tomorrow’s Child / January 2012 / p. 13
by Maren Stark Schmidt | Family Resources, MFA, Montessori Education, Montessori Family Life, Montessori Parenting
As parents, we now have a choice to make regarding how we approach this paradox in our own household. How do we balance freedom and limits? When do we give a choice and when do we just make the choice? How much stuff do we have readily available in our homes, and how much more should we bring in? Gosh, with the selection of choices available to us, we might be a little bit overwhelmed and unsure of how to choose. Now just imagine being a two-year-old trying to negotiate the choices that confront us daily in this world.
Failure is not an option; neither is success. An interesting idea. But isn’t it true that we learn most effectively when we’ve had to figure out a problem through trial and error?
On my typewriter (remember those things?) during my early 20s, I had a saying taped to it that read: “Babe Ruth struck out 1,330 times.”
Goodness, was I afraid of failure. Somehow I had snuffed out any risk taking in my life or looking like I didn’t know something. The quest for the good grade or the recognition for a job well done created a sickening feeling of fear in the pit of my stomach. A highly critical boss, who today we would say was verbally abusive, didn’t ease my situation. I was terrified of making a mistake.
Luckily, I had friends who could fall flat on their faces doing something new, laugh, and get right back up. I admired their verve and I tried to model some of their unflappability.
When I started looking for and believing in ways to be friendly with error for myself, I began to see an imperfect world that struggled towards perfection, but never actually arrived to that point. Everybody made mistakes.
The important work I learned through my trials and errors was to engage in new activities with new ideas and new people. I discovered that learning and growth occurred at the leading edge of my experimenting.
As we experiment with the new we should try to minimize risk, control variables as well as understand the consequences and opportunities of our endeavors. I think we used to call this common sense.
Of course when we are trying something new, we want to minimize the risk for failure or injury. We want to ensure success. Want to learn how to climb a hundred foot rock wall? First, learn to tie a bowline, how to put on a climbing harness, and find an experienced teacher. In short, learn to play safe and the next step seems challenging but headed in the right direction – up!
We also need to control the variables when we are learning so that we can focus and maximize what is put in our brain. This is one of the reasons for the advice to study with the radio/tv/computer/music off. Memory works differently in every person, and what may seem like background noise to one person may be the main attraction for another. Studying for an algebra test with Lady Gaga in the background? You might learn more lyrics than linear regressions.
Clarity supports positive learning experiences. If we know what we are supposed to be learning and why, the variables for learning can be addressed.
To be friendly with error means understanding the consequences of our actions. In Montessori classrooms, we show three-year-olds how to use glassware and other fragile items. Yes, objects get broken, but the child who breaks a glass learns to self-correct by moving more carefully. The child who witnesses a breakage also learns about consequences. As adults, we realize that the crystal bowl may break but recognize that when an accident occurs important learning follows.
True learning occurs at the edge of experimentation, and we should create opportunities for children’s investigation and exploration in a wide variety of situations that includes tools, people, ideas and nature. We prepare a place for this experimentation (aka learning) that can be directed through minimizing risk, controlling variables, and understanding consequences. We want to create places where ideas, tools, people and the outdoors can be explored, experienced and evaluated. We want to create places where everyone wants to be in the game of life, even if they’ve struck out 1,330 times.
Life is a ball. Play ball!
by Maren Stark Schmidt | Family Resources, MFA, Montessori Family Life, Montessori Parenting, Montessori students
Guess what the number one stressor is in our families today?
It doesn’t take a wild guess. Financial decisions are creating the most pressure in our homes right now. The economic changes in the past two years have affected most everyone on this planet — from the goat herder in Kashmir to the knitted-goods manufacturers around the world, to the person wealthy enough to purchase a cashmere sweater. In the United States, 59 percent of women and 38 percent of men say their financial situation is worse than a year ago.
As a country, we are going through the five stages of grief when dealing with our changed circumstance. Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance.
Perhaps, when we get to the point of acceptance, this financial situation can help us restore and renew some of the values that created the cornucopia enjoyed by the United States (and other countries) from its inception.
Nathan Dungan, a longtime financial advisor, founder of the organization, Share, Save and Spend, and author of the book Prodigal Sons and Materials Girls: How Not to Be Your Childs’ ATM (sold online at stage.montessori.org), suggests that we need to see money as more than a way of making financial transactions. We need to see money as a way to interact with others to express our values and culture, both as an individual and as a multi-generational family.
We can share our values through stories and modeling in a way that Dungan calls Share, Save, Spend. These three basic actions are where we need to focus when using our money and our time. When we begin to shift our thinking from money as only a transaction and begin to view our relationship with money as an interaction, the share, save, and spend approach acts as a roadmap on how to live our lives.
We must be intentional about our values regarding money. Intentionality will help us develop healthy money habits, which will bring us financial success. Financial success in this meaning is not necessarily about getting rich. It is about being successful in reaching personal goals.
The habit of sharing helps us consider the needs of others and instills in us a sense of gratitude. The habit of saving creates patience and inner discipline. The habit of spending can help us discern between a need and a want. Habits will serve us well in reaching personal goals.
Dungan gives five steps to healthy money habits:
- Understand your personal money values and make a plan.
- Be a share-save-spend money mentor.
- Understand that money mistakes are okay. It’s part of the learning process.
- Engage in experiential philanthropy, which is a combination of giving time and money
- Initiate a process and system for success.
Share. Save. Spend. Because the choices we make with our money can change the world, our families, and ourselves for the better. Visit www.sharesavespend.com for more information.
Tomorrow’s Child / March 2010
by Maren Stark Schmidt | Challenging Behaviors, Family Resources, Infant-Toddler (0 to 3), Later Adolescence (15-18), Lower Elementary (6-9), MFA, Montessori Family Life, Montessori Parenting, Parenting on the Same Page, Primary (3-6), Upper Elementary (9-12), Webinars / MFA
Guest – Maren Schmidt, Montessori teacher, Montessori school owner and administrator, parenting coach and workshop leader. Explore ideas and strategies to help parents meet children’s needs and minimize sibling rivalry. Provide ways to help children work through disagreements and squabbles.
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