For kids they have to stay productive. They have to be doing things. They have to be digging a hole, building something out of wood. They have to be creating art. They have to build on what they know. But I think for us we always have to stay fully alive by always learning new things, figuring out something new, not jumping on every bandwagon that comes along. Every new curriculum idea. Every new thing that somebody says. I don’t think we have to do that because we have to question everything that we know. Is this really good for kids?
Things to think about
One of the ways for children to stay productive and have meaning is to give them real work with real tools and hand machines: corn shellers and flour grinders are two examples. Do you have any of these things in your program? How can you make an activity like baking more than pouring ingredients in a bowl? How far back can you take the processes? Can you harvest the wheat and grind it yourself?
How do the adults in your program stay productive in order to model that to young children or do they stand around observing children all day long?
What are you currently learning to do in your own life?
Highlights from Playful Wisdom
by Michael Mendizza featuring Bev Bos and Joseph Chilton Pearce
John Bowlby coined the term attachment for healthy mother-infant-father relationships and was plummeted by his peers for doing so. Marshal Klaus, MD helped popularize the term bonding to describe the precious cascade of discovery-contact-response encounters shared by the newborn and mother during their first moments and hours after birth. Bowlby was influenced by infants who had missed or were deprived of normal mothering, those in institutions and orphanages. In these infants something was broken, detached. Klaus observed what may be called “attached mother-infant relationships” as they discover, make contact and respond in completely new ways, postnatal, coming together, forming new patterns. Each term, attachment and bonding, was and is appropriate given its context. Both terms break down and lose some of their meaning, however, when applied to the larger, ever-changing reciprocal dynamic we call childhood and parenting. Attunement may be more precise when describing this overarching movement. To bond and attach imply, at least to me, two more or less fixed objects being connected, like gluing together two pieces of wood or attaching a key to a chain. Attunement conjures movement, like surfing or tango. My son fell in love with Argentine tango because it was not fixed, but rather spontaneous, improvisational. It demands greater flexibility, sensitivity, present awareness, care and sensitivity to remain in sync or attuned to one’s partner’s ever-changing body and feelings. Drifting into half-awake into fixed patterns or formulas implies a lack of present-moment attunement, as if some past dream were calling the shots rather than responding to what is actually taking place this moment. I will take attunement over fixed habits any day.