Tying Laces

Over the last few weeks or months I've noticed more and more headlines about the bad consequences for young children exposed excessively to smart phones. I might dare to suggest I've been inundated by the articles but I do not believe you can claim to be inundated by something so deftly avoided.

The theme of those articles is familiar, of course. They follow the template of the articles that have talked about the impacts of video games, heavy metal, excessive television, rock and roll and so on back through time. I give the litany not to diminish the validity of the current articles about the cell phone exposure. The one article I actually read said that kids were getting into less trouble because they were content to stay in their room texting or Snapchatting rather than getting into mischief. Actually, the barrage of headlines left me thinking that my son was not getting that much screen time. I suspect though it will escalate. A recent conversation about initiatives aimed at showing families how to eat together and converse enough to develop their children's language skills suggest that the articles are not as alarmist as I might think.

One thing I am conscious of with technology overall though is that kids are, essentially, getting nudged down the digital path at the expense of any other. There is a clamour to teach kids to code and while I'm not opposed to that I would like to see at least a bit of balance. In his 1979 book Teaching As a Conserving Activity, Neil Postman suggests school take, what he calls a thermostatic approach.  In theory it would be a scenario where educators, conscious and equipped with the barometers to see where society is trending at a certain time, act and educate in a way to strike a balance and avoid overemphasizing what society or the market is pushing for.  In this digital age, more exposure to the  analog would be welcome... (he tapped away on his keyboard.)

I'm conscious of my son's development of skills that I have taken for granted from my schooling. Cursive writing is no longer emphasized in schools and after a generation of velcro, I may be among the last to remember learning to tie shoes as a part of my primary education. In the fall of 1972 everybody in my class put in the time to work on the task.  I remember in later years one of my aunts, a primary school teacher, telling us how she had made it clear to the parents of the kids in a particularly large class that the students would need to know how to zip and tie before the start of the year. I doubt she was expecting 100% mastery before Labour Day, but enough to leave her with a manageable few.

I was still conscious of my experience in days of yore and chipped away at his reluctance to do it. There were struggles and frequent bouts of frustration punctuated by, "I can't do it." There was an hour where we got oh so close before he was truly fed up with the task and I relented. A few days ago, with his head clear of the frustration he encountered with the laces 10 days earlier, he nailed it.  He got it twice in a row, albeit rather loosely, did a single bow a few times and argued about how those single loops would count toward three successes I had requested and then got it.

Apart from saving my back and being a step toward getting him into the laced runners that he aspires to, there are other benefits.  I'm sure the fine work will be a step toward improved motor skills and there are also significant links between knot-tying and mathematics and the sciences.  It has quickly become a point of pride for my son, who asked me to watch him tie his shoes when I dropped him off in the morning and boasted to the nearest adult of his new prowess.  (She responded with the appropriate expression of surprise and approval.)

Cursive may be on my to do list a few years down the road and that, I assure you will be a long battle. Luring him into it with a stylus for a tablet is not the leverage I'll be seeking though.

Parental Guidance: With Authority or Upon Reflection?

I happened to read a pair of books, back-to-back, that provide a remarkable contrast to one another in their efforts to contribute to a conversation or the conversation about parenting. The first was a book by a father who wrote from a religious perspective. I bristled at first at the religious elements of the book, but decided to read the book anyway. It was short enough, there was no telling how strong a religious tone it would take and I was confident that I would get something out of the book. That was indeed the case. The complementary book of the two was Sue Klebold's A Mother's Reckoning -- a distinguished, moving and powerful book that will have a lasting impact on me.

Klebold, if the name rings a bell more faintly than you feel it should, is the mother of Dylan Klebold, one of the two young men who instigated the tragedy at Columbine High School in 1999. Her book is a detailed account of her efforts to come to terms with her son's actions, and her absolute bewilderment at not knowing that her son was preparing to do what he did as his last days of high school counted down. It has been easy over the years for outsiders to accuse Klebold and her husband, suburban affluence, adolescent disillusionment and the absence of gun control as factors in the tragedy at Columbine and I would count myself among those who opted for those simplicities in interpreting (and shelving) its meaning. The reality of Columbine, so many other tragedies of that nature and, to be honest, everyone of our lives, is that there are secrets that we all keep and ought find a safe ear to share them with in order to connect with one another and be the people that we have the potential to be if those secrets remain tightly wrapped in pride.

A Mother's Reckoning, however, poses a cathartic and detailed counterargument. It is not, by any means an attempt to recast her role in the tragedy. She does a great deal of very open and wrenching soul-searching as she tries to come to terms with the moments that she wishes she could have back and her wishes that she could have influenced the course of events in anyway that she could, right down to the possibility of not marrying her husband. She loves her son, still does. She aches for the losses that she has contributed to are palpable and her efforts to sort through her relationships with her son and examination of the family she has had are brave, open efforts to shed light on something that is baffling in so many ways.

If I were to look at the entire range of my feelings, flaws and interactions with my son with the intensity and critical acuity that Klebold has looked at this moment of her life and everything that lead to it, I would be a much wiser, more informed and compassionate father. While not a parenting book in the sense that the other I book I read was, it will have a much deeper impact on me.

At this point, I am inclined to grant the other book anonymity. It is very much a by-the-numbers book about parenting. The author, a father of five, is quite confident in his approach to parenting and he boils it down to a set of points, each illustrated with a pithy chapter that features an amusing anecdote about something he did right or something another parent did that he disapproves of. The religious forays were relatively infrequent but did make me bristle at times with other aspects of his view of ideal parenting. On more than one occasion, there were suggestions that there were financial means to good parenting or the building of strong memories. On another occasion he excoriates a father he never met for golfing on the weekend and says that all fathers should quit golf. He steps back slightly from this position and he does eventually acknowledge that there are circumstances where golf is not something that fathers ought to quit and fess up that he does not know the father he skewers, but he continually favours making his points, and others, in simplistic terms.

As the religious orientation of the other parenting book emerged -- at first in passages quoted from the Bible that mix easily with adages from Garrison Keillor and other secular voices, but beyond to passages describing the Devil as a tangible figure who is celebrated at Halloween -- the shift from pithy and insightful toward fear-based and narrow-minded made me weary of the confident certitude that the author worked from. The checklist that the author -- as other authors of parenting do's and don't's -- created ultimately lacked a depth or flexibility that would come from the advice that is found in Klebold's book. Whether a book of 10, 40 or 100 "tips," such books leave substantial gaps and perhaps give a parent a sense of inadequacy because they did not do the 63rd item from a checklist or that they forgot much about a book that was actually quite forgettable to begin with.

While those checklists would find their way to the discard bins with some speed, Klebold's book, even as a mere talisman on my shelf, would be a reminder of the need for compassion, patience, sensitivity and intuitiveness that ought to guide a parent through each moment of this vocation.

To Walk Alone

It is just 400 metres. Just.

But it is the walk to school and as much as I want my son to develop the independence he would have in walking himself to school, it ain’t 1972 (when I walked half the distance and crossed only one street rather than three) to get to school when I was in kindergarten. Another factor that may have influenced that was the challenge my mother would have faced of dressing my younger brothers to get them out the door to do the walk along with me.

He made his request to walk to school on his own and, as is often the case, a resolution of sorts emerged before the day was out. Unfortunately, it merely happened to be an opportunity to cop out rather than take the topic as far as we could. The out of school care (OOSC) program he is in, coincidentally enough, sent out an email a few hours after his request to me. In the email, they reiterated their need for the kids to be logged in when they arrive for they day. They did not, however, make it explicit that it was the parents’ responsibility. If I wanted to close down the discussion, I could say that OOSC wants or needs his mother or I to log him in and out when we drop him off and pick him up.  

I want him to have this responsibility and the trust, confidence and independence that would go with it but now it is something that requires a great deal of negotiation with his school, or the OOSC program. It is quite easy to say that times have changed but the institutions have girded themselves with such rigorous caution against liabilities. My wheels are already turning about the negotiations that I could have with either the school or OOSC to discuss him going on his own and, at OOSC, logging himself in. There is a strong possibility that older kids in the program walk themselves there and log themselves in.

For about 2 1/2 years I have walked my son to and from daycare regularly and we put our steps in throughout the week to other destinations, so covering the distance is not a factor and at every intersection my loop of "look both ways, watch the cars" has played incessantly. He actually stops and waves cars through ahead of him, so I now have to coach him up a bit on asserting his own rights at an intersection but at least he is erring on the side of caution. For the third street crossing he has a well-worn pedestrian overpass that takes the concerns of looking both ways out of the equation. At this point, though, I find it frustrating that I have to rationalize this brief walk to the extent that I do because it is unsupervised.

I am confident that the risks, if any, are minimal and that the consciousness of stranger-danger or traffic are in part a factor of our collective fears, being normalized rather than mitigated. The only other people I see when I walk him to OOSC or school are another parent who lives on the same floor on me taking her daughter, and two cyclists coming north on the sidewalk and prompting me to squish to my left as my son walks the top edge of a low cinder block wall he climbs every morning. I know this walk.

There seems to have been a trade-off between low-probability tragedy and in favour of the guaranteed loss of independence and autonomy, not to mention a higher probability risk of a child getting hit by a car given the number of parents drive their kids to school now. There is also the spectre of parent-shaming looming on this matter of letting a child venture out on their own.  It is easy to say that it is not that much time each day for a parent to drop off their kids and it is a good time for my son and I talk each day.  The city, however, is not as dangerous as we convince ourselves it is and having my son develop the skills to navigate himself through the city on foot or by transit are things that would give him the autonomy that I had when I was his age.

When I raised this with him on our walk home he had forgotten about it but I doubt that it will be for long. I will likely wait until it is light in the mornings again and venture carefully toward ramping him up toward this walk or similar walks and assure myself that he can do it and assure him that I want to give him this independence.

The Right Run

Competitive sports have been something I have done my best to keep my son way from to this point. He is going to be six in a few weeks and I have so far avoided the drumbeat to enrol him in hockey or any of the team sports that tend to bring out the competitive instincts of parents who have their own aspirations or agenda. He has been told a few times that he is not going to be playing football regardless of how big he gets.

To this point, he has been relatively active with gymnastics and swimming thus far and we may be at a crossroads with the gymnastics. His most recent round of gymnastics is in the late afternoons which has seen his class relegated to a corner of the gym that affords the older and more competitive kids access to much of the equipment that was the highlight during previous sessions.

Running continues to appeal and there have been more and more opportunities for him to sign up for races. He wants to race me whenever we are walking somewhere and his enthusiasm for it remains unbridled. Today, he had a 2K race and on a bracing, subzero morning he toed the line with about 30 other kids. Before the race, I cautioned him to go out slowly, take his time and save his energy for the second half of the race.

In the 1K race he had last month, he finished in just under 6 minutes, but I was not sure what to expect with double the distance. For an experienced runner, grasping the challenges with pacing, with saving a little energy, whether to compete with the people around or simply with yourself are all hard things to take into account.

As the kids start to cross the finish line and the minutes ticked away, I wondered how he was doing out there with the extra distance and whatever concerns I had eased when he crossed the line in tandem with a new friend and did a high five as the other boy's mother and I looked on. They fell into step together and spent the race getting acquainted with one another and by the time they crossed the line, they were a team. We parted ways probably too quickly, but I was not immediately aware how well Gabriel bonded with this other boy. As he talked about how he told his running partner about himself and his family and learned the same from him, I thought about how I bonded with fellow runners during my favorite races and how, whether we spoke a great deal or not, we shared the run in several ways and got to know each other and cheer each other on as we pursued our goals.

I am fully aware that as Gabriel gets older, sports will pose dilemmas as we weigh the difference between competing and participating. It is still too early for that and there is the simple matter of him finding sports that he is passionate about. If running happens to be the sport, then he has had a good head start and gymnastics will be helpful in developing the balance and physical awareness required for other sports. I am conscious of the blight of the participant medal and hope that he learns the lessons that come with competing but I hope that those lessons are learned in areas or endeavours where he is striving to do his best and find the personal achievement or growth that he seeks rather than in sports where he is less interested. 

In the meantime, I will cross my fingers that he runs into his new teammate the next time he lines up for a race.

The Walk Home Evolves

From https://www.emuparadise.me/

Before getting into this post, a quick anecdote from a few days ago.

Our heat has been off in our condo as the boiler is being replaced. With the temperatures closer to freezing than we would like there is a little more bundling up.  A few nights back we asked our son if he wanted pyjamas with feet or without feet.

"Yes!", he replied.

We asked again and again -- I could inflate this to 7 repetitions of the question -- and each time he replied, "Yes."

Finally I said, "You know, if you can't answer an A or B question, we might have to hold you back a year."

His response, which I admit I clearly had coming: "You already did!!"

He's 5 now.  Going on 15 in November.

Despite the lad being in school now and rounding out his truncated days in kindergarten ("Oh, when I was a boy...") with sessions at Out of School Care (OOSC), I still have the opportunity to walk him home.

The changes may have been gradual but they are significant and noticeable at this point.  Our walks on the pedestrian overpass that straddles 14th Street are far more amusing now as he essentially turns it into his version of the old video game Frogger.  He pauses strategically before racing over each lane of traffic to avoid getting exploded.  I'm slower to catch on but he assured me on Monday that even though I got exploded I still had two lives left.  (Obviously he is getting exposed to video games somewhere.)  Today he added a variation to the game by telling me that the northbound cars were marshmallows and the southbound bombs. Or was that the southbound were marshmallows.  The strategy has changed and he is less likely to adopt the full on sprint across the overpass to smash himself into the chainlink fence on the other side of the bridge.  He has not, however, developed a clear scoring system.

The conversation has opened up a little more. He still tends to give accounts of the people who contributed to the scrapes and cuts on his knees. This month, however, the stories have been of real conflict over sharing or not sharing and I have taken the opportunity to share with him my simmering observation that one of the hardest things to decide is whether it is better to be patient and tolerate a situation or to impose your will on someone and make them concede to you.  At his age the second scenario may result in a fight, though there may be a chance that will or personality can assert some influence as well.  I told him my tendency has been to be patient, though I have wondered from time to time if that was the best strategy.  Despite my doubts, I told him that I preferred that he be patient and try to talk things through -- the third way that I have yet to get full command of.

A chance encounter with his uncle on our way home today also gave me the opportunity to talk about walking.  His uncle is involved in a conference on walkability here in Calgary this week and after we had a brief chat about the conference, my son and I continued home talking about how much we walk.  I did not bother to trouble him with kids who have to be bussed to school and just reminded him of entire weekends we have gone without using the car.  I pointed out the advantages for his health and safety when there are fewer cars or more time spent walking.  Today, though, I could have added that it is a good opportunity to clear your head at the end of the day.

Again, Again

Music will likely be one of the things that Gabriel and I will always bond over. I know I ought to chase that comic voice bubble out of the frame as I suspect there is a every likelihood the two of us will butt heads in the years ahead as our tastes diverge or his indifference to his guitar gains a critical mass, but when adolescence passes we should be able to pick up the conversation again from when or wherever we leave off. Unlike the Kinsellas in Field of Dreams, we will be more likely to sit down near the stereo or with our guitars than pick up baseball gloves.

Tonight was one of those nights where a song and a musician provided a span of the bridge that will take us through that still-distant stretch of adolescence to whatever conversation there will be when we sit down to share music on the other side.

After nearly a year of listening to an emerging pop-folk master named Paul Johnson, who commercially plies is craftsmanship under the guise of Canyon City, Gabriel was asking to hear, "The one that starts, 'I woke before the sun rose...'" during his bath and asked for it again as I turned him in for the night.  As we went on to listen to said song, titled "Needles and Pins," eleven to twelve times in a row until his breathing finally eased into the rhythm that portended sleep we talked and talked - the lad not merely stalling sleep, but asking questions that would not come from anywhere else.

"What is grace?" and, in response to my attempt to capture it for a 5-year-old, "What is a virtue?"

We lay in the dark exchanging favorite passages of the song. He, the chorus, with its fairy tale mention of plastic crowns and the certainty about where home is; me the more adult world evocations about "wear(ing) a tie to go to work and tell(ing)... lies like everything's okay" and "los(ing) some keys in the dust." With each repetition of the song in the dark, Gabriel's questions continued about the song, the individual words that emerged and caught his ear more easily with each listening and I'm sure there were unasked questions planted there to bloom later about music, craft, poetry and love that he will ask when he has the words in the weeks and years ahead.

I have every confidence that Mr. Johnson/Canyon City will have a wonderful career ahead of him as songs such as "Needles and Pins" continue to find their path to ears and hearts in the days ahead.  If it has not happened already, he will nightly have audience members who will tell him that he wrote their song, whether it is the one they make love to, danced for the first time as husband and wife or any other milestone in life of someone following their romantic path to one-and-onlys that he describes so aptly in song and song again.  In about ten years or so, there will also be a 60-year-old man with his 15-year-old son -- the lad possibly doing a great job of portraying adolescent indifference to anything the old man springs on him or indulging in some patience with me for the night -- and, with a wink, I'll simply say that I used his first album to lull that lad asleep not so long ago.

Thanks Paul.

On Kindergarten Eve

As I write this post, I am contemplating the browser tab for the Google search, "inspecting for lice" and wondering whether I should bookmark it or just leave it open.  I had to do a search last night after a flurry of text messages and a phone call from friends we camped with over the weekend, and it made for a little baptism for mother and father heading into the heart of September.  The flashlight inspection last night, the lack of even a single scratch of the scalp and a good hair wash tonight provide some reassurance that we are all clear.

We hope.

The lad heads on the next stage of the journey tomorrow. Kindergarten is a little more than 13 hours away and I pause to look in all directions.  He will be headed to an old sandstone building still older than the one I started school in in days of yore.  It is not the red clapboard single room school of one stereotype but the creak of the wood floors, the wide-yet-cluttered hallways and tall windows give a sense that this is a school that gives some comforting associations with the word.  With the school being only 400 metres away, there is the chance to see him build some independence in the weeks and months ahead as well.

Today, it was a challenge to give the sense of significance that was appropriate for the occasion of starting school. An afternoon at a trampoline centre, an early bath and a bit of a speech from the old guy (that's me!) was part of the effort to make something of the day, but it is more of a transition for mom and dad than it is for him. New friends, new expectations and perhaps the threat of a little less play than has been the case, but it may be hard for him to identify significant differences between elementary school and day care. There will be lots of new kids and a lot of bigger ones too, but other than that there will be little to overwhelm the boy who so calmly transitioned into day care 30 pounds and 18 inches ago.

There are some questions about how we prepared him, but I try to tell myself that would be the case with any parent. He has an undeniable knack for math and sciences, a mild indifference to art, drawing, and... ahem... printing.  I look ahead to the partnership with his teachers in the years ahead to help us set goals for him and I anticipate the challenges we will all face with some degree of excitement.  I can picture him sitting down at the kitchen table - not necessarily tomorrow night - working on the things that he is struggling with where I can bring something to his growth, but I will dread -- just as I did during junior high school -- the Science Fairs that loom.

Apart from the scholastic aptitudes that are yet to be measured more precisely, there is the boy that we are sending off into the world.  He is an affectionate boy who can be a goofball and enjoys the role of the clown.  There are moments when he can withdraw when he is not getting his way, but there is a chance that he is more sensitive to the needs of others when he is in a big room. From day one we have been conscious of his size.  I recall seeing other newborns when he was just two or three weeks old and gaping at my wife with the question, "Was he ever that small?" We are more than a little anxious about how the expectations and perceptions of him are altered because of his size and while we may have done him an advantage academically by waiting an extra year before sending him on to kindergarten, there may be greater expectations of him as he towers over the other kids in his class.

Ultimately though, he is a prodigious hugger and (if they allow that in school) I think he is the kind of kid that can help bring together a room of kids.  We that thought and the insistence that we want, above all, for him to be a good, kind sensitive boy and man, we send him into the world.