Visions of sugar plums and Marcel Mauss

How I spent the last week: Giving finals. Grading finals. Drawing long eyelashes on Beanie and her seven comrades-in-arms for five performances of "The Nutcracker."

Watching Beanie march on stage before a packed house - it was something to see. It makes me wish every child had opportunities like this. To perform and to transform and to learn - and to teach her mother what it means rise to the occasion and act with grace. I am so proud and so hopeful for her :)

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I like to think of Christmas as the Mauss wonderful time of the year.

Yuk, yuk, yuk.

A friend posted on FB the following link to comedian Jimmy Kimmel's shtick urging parents to punk their kids with prank Christmas presents.

She posted the link, commenting that while she found it side-splitting, she also wondered whether or not it was abusive. Others then mused about the potential for children to draw lessons about gratitude from the stunt.

I hope not. As a parent, I hope that my children never learn to be grateful for a gift deliberately selected to be just plain bad.

As an anthropologist, I also hope that they learn a bit about the meanings of gifts.

Marcel Mauss observed that a reason why it might be better to give than to receive is because gifts create obligation to the giver from the recipient. Or as anthropologist Lee Cronk wrote in an article that is widely taught in introductory anthropology classes, gifts always come with strings attached.

It is at this point when I am teaching on gift economies in ANTH 100 that I need to remind students that it is not necessarily "bad" to be under obligation. When you think about it, feeling obligation, as individuals and as groups, enables us to live together. We call it a sense of responsibility and of belonging. I think when my students start to feel the weight of obligation as "bad," they are responding to their understanding that giving gifts can be assertions of status and power - and receiving gifts (or feeling obliged to receive them) can be experienced as a loss of status and power. (For more on this, see the classic ethnographic film, "Ongka's Big Moka," with the memorable line from Ongka, "In giving so much, I have knocked you down."

As much as we tend to want to forget that status and power exist between adults and children and within families, they do. This is perhaps what prompted my friend to think aloud about whether or not the prank Christmas presents were abusive.

I will open myself to accusations of being utterly humorless and say that I think punking your kids with prank Christmas presents is mean.

Of course, having no sense of humor is my specialty as a woman, in particular a feminist, and a member of an ethnic minority in the U.S. The former also makes me fiercely sarcastic.

However, I say with complete sincerity: Enjoy your winter holidays :)

Aha!

So, to follow up on my last post about what student are or more particularly what they are not bringing to school:

Curiosity.

When we talk about what schools fail at teaching kids today, the focus tends to be on teachers and / or parents. As in, what are parents doing or not doing to raise their kids right?

Susan Engel, a psychologist at Williams College whose op-ed pieces in the NYT I have found to be thoughtful defenses of kids and parents (and playing!), has a book that I plan to purchase at my local independent bookstore: Red Flags or Red Herrings? Predicting Who Your Child Will Become. (How I like to see academics writing popular books!)

The point of the book is to look at the science and distinguish between what can and cannot be changed about kids. "It's unlikely that any parents, however loving or involved, can fundamentally change whether a child is dreamy or driven, shy or gregarious, optimistic or anxious," writer Ali Benjamin explains in her profile of Engel, which appears in the September 2011 issue of the Williams Alumni Review. "Nor can a parent influence whether a child has a temper or calm demeanor, what captures his interest or even her basic IQ."

Curiosity, however, is an attribute that Engel suggests can be influenced. "When kids want to know the answer, they learn the material more deeply, they remember the answer longer, and they can do more with the information," Engel tells the Alumni Review.

Here is what caught my attention:

Research shows that at home a preschooler will ask an average of 25 to 50 questions each hour. But several years ago, when Engel and her students recorded the day-to-day activities in area kindergarten and fifth-grade classrooms, they found a significant drop in the number of questions asked. An entire class of 22 kindergarteners might ask only two per hour. By fifth grade, several hours might pass before a single question is raised.

Engel discussed how this resarch her own observations indicate "there's so much pressure on teachers to teach lessons that there's not time to deviate and allow kids to follow their hunches."

It is not all bad news. Engel describes how teachers themselves can be encouraged to encourage curiosity: "Teachers who were told the goal was to 'help the student learn about science' encouraged student inquiry and exploration significantly more than teachers who were told the goal was to 'help a student finish a worksheet.'"

It is true that as a college professor, I sometimes find myself astounded and frustrated by the lack of curiosity that too many students in my classes exhibit. Unless it is a question that will be asked on the exam, too many seem utterly apathetic about knowing anything. (I also hear students express their frustration with other students who in their opinion are not taking advantage of being in college. So, the incuriosity is notable.)

If Engel is correct about encouraging curiosity, then testing students and assessing teachers actually works against learning and there should be a lot less learning for / teaching to the test.

What are the ways that parents might encourage curiosity? It might be not about enrolling them in enrichment activities or constructing perfect parent-child teaching moments and continuing to up the ante on parenting.

As I read excerpts from the Engel profile aloud to StraightMan this morning as he shaved, benignly neglecting Bubbie who was loading his toy cars into the seat of his ride-on scooter (I have no idea why...), Beanie called from the other room (where she was sprawled on the floor with colored markers and a ripped T-shirt that she was decorating as a banner for Christmas - never too early to start, I guess...): "What is psychology? Do I ask a lot of questions? So, is it good to ask a lot of questions? Why are you not answering me?"

***

For those of us who might have been hoping that I was referring in my title to a certain Norwegian pop group of the 1980s.

Protecting children and childhood?

Earlier today, I shared this post from Free Range Kids - "Five Freedoms I Had that My Daughter Won't" - on Facebook.

Like the blogger, I am inclined to think that kids today need more free time and unstructured play than they seem to be allowed - I favor more (not less) recess at school.

I admire the work of organizations like KaBoom!, a national non-profit organization with the mission of building "a place to play within walking distance of every child in America."

A mission like this recognizes that the kinds of childhood experiences that adults (like myself) wish to protect and promote are (and were), in fact, not accessible to all children.

For each of us who thinks back on the freedoms we had as children, I wonder how many other adults remembers not feeling especially free as children. There might be good reasons why some parents think they are taking better care of their children than they were.

So, in a way, I am critical of the idea that we ought to be protecting children and childhood. Clearly, this is not just about children and childhood. Plus, we run at risk of further romanticizing childhood in ways that I think ultimately undermine a concept of children as themselves agents of culture and society. Which I think is what it ultimately means to respect children and childhood.

Keeping up with the Times

With the college semester starting this Wednesday, and Beanie starting the 2nd grade in two weeks, I found these two op / ed pieces worth a gander:


"The Hidden Costs of Higher Education" notes that payment plans intended to help middle-class families afford tuition - paying by the month instead of by the semester, and by credit card instead of by check - end up costing them more:

Struggling families often face rough patches during which they don’t have enough cash on hand to make such payments, and so have to go to their credit cards — and pay the fees. Meanwhile, wealthy families that can afford to simply write a check upfront each month avoid both credit card fees and interest payments.

To be fair, monthly payment plans intend to help lower-income families afford college. But they have also had the unintentional consequence of creating bonuses for the wealthy and added impediments to the less well-off.

"The Kids Are not All Right" describes childhood in crisis today. Being the jaundiced parenthropologist that I am, I admit to approaching claims of "crisis" a bit wearily and warily, esp. when the usual suspects of Big Bad Business become paraded. Not that I am an apologist for BBB. What I found most interesting in the piece is this little bit of legal history:

By the middle of the century, childhood was a robustly protected legal category. In 1959, the United Nations issued its Declaration of the Rights of the Child. Children were now legal persons; the “best interests of the child” became a touchstone for legal reform.

But the 20th century also witnessed another momentous shift, one that would ultimately threaten the welfare of children: the rise of the for-profit corporation. Lawyers, policy makers and business lobbied successfully for various rights and entitlements traditionally connected, legally, with personhood. New laws recognized corporations as legal — albeit artificial — “persons,” granting them many of the same legal rights and privileges as human beings. In an eerie parallel with the child-protective efforts, “the best interests of the corporation” was soon introduced as a legal precept.

Children and corporations both being ascribed personhood at around the same time, using similar metaphors and images? It seems like not small coincidence - and that, I think, is far more fascinating and frightening.

Letting kids fall

This post is an apology to my husband, StraightMan. The man who took our then just-able-to-walk toddler to the top of a rather steep slide at the elementary school that I had attended in northern NJ, and released her with the words: "Let's just see what happens."

Her eyes widened as her body gathered momentum and crossed the high untrespassed sanctity of space, hands touching the face of God, then landed on her diapered bottom in the wood chips spread across the ground. I rushed over to Beanie, who sat stunned, and checked for signs of damage. (There were none.) StraightMan, to my recollection, just laughed.

I admit it: I was a scold, and I still am, but less so. I have learned. At least a little bit. StraightMan insists that kids hurt themselves only when we are watching them play. It is true when Beanie or Bubbie has become bumped or bloodied, it is usually when StraightMan is standing right there, at an arm's length or so. Now, another parent might regard this as evidence of StraightMan's supervisory skills or lack thereof - I know I have - but who among us has not had kids fall down and bang into each other, etc. on our own watch?

Also, it turns out that StraightMan might have science on his side, as science writer John Tierney reports in the NYT today. It reports that there is a downside to making playgrounds too "safe," removing tall slides and climbers and so on:

“Climbing equipment needs to be high enough, or else it will be too boring in the long run,” Dr. Sandseter said. “Children approach thrills and risks in a progressive manner, and very few children would try to climb to the highest point for the first time they climb. The best thing is to let children encounter these challenges from an early age, and they will then progressively learn to master them through their play over the years.”

Sometimes, of course, their mastery fails, and falls are the common form of playground injury. But these rarely cause permanent damage, either physically or emotionally. While some psychologists — and many parents — have worried that a child who suffered a bad fall would develop a fear of heights, studies have shown the opposite pattern: A child who’s hurt in a fall before the age of 9 is less likely as a teenager to have a fear of heights.

By gradually exposing themselves to more and more dangers on the playground, children are using the same habituation techniques developed by therapists to help adults conquer phobias, according to Dr. Sandseter and a fellow psychologist, Leif Kennair, of the Norwegian University for Science and Technology.

There is joy and triumph on Bubbie's face as he comes careening down the tongue slide (which you ride with your legs straddling either side of the slide, not with your legs in front). It is not that he knows no fear. Possibly the slide would be not that exciting without a little bit of trepidation. Yet, he takes whatever fear he might have into his own hands and manages it with his own efforts.

These days, I work hard not to hover and to squash what I realize are my fears. I guess I should have spent a little more time on the monkey bars myself :)

Walk around the block

A few weeks back, Beanie asked me: "Mommy, can I take a walk around the block?" As I gathered myself off the couch to go with her, she added: "By myself."

Unhesitating, I told her no. Yet, I also felt a tingle. Not of pride exactly, but a good feeling about her wish to act independently and her confidence and comfort with both who she is and where she is.

"Why not?"

B/c, I told her, the driveways along the block can be busy at 4pm, and "around the block" is a much longer distance than you think when you walk it alone, and you are only 7 years old, so I think you are a bit young to be on your own.

"When will I be old enough?"

We will have to see, I said.

I have thinking about this conversation as I have read the news coverage about Leiby Kletzky, which has spun quickly into attempts to draw the lesson of the story. Is it that parents need to keep a closer eye on their children? Or that horrors like this still remain the exception, not the rule?

It is hard not see that a young child is vulnerable in a way that an adult is not. (Also, that not all adults are equally vulnerable or invulnerable.) So far, the reporting seems to suggest that the man who took Leiby Kletzky was not necessarily a "predator" actively seeking children, but someone taking advantage of a situation that had presented itself.

What happened to the boy speaks to every fear I have as a parent, including the fear that I might make a mistake which brings harm to my child. No doubt Leiby Kletzky's parents regret their decision to allow their 8-year-old son to walk home by himself, but I am not convinced that they made a mistake.

I am not sure what lesson there is to learn.

Should I get Bubbie a guitar, too?

Have you seen this video of five North Korean kindergarteners playing guitar?

If not, take a look. Then scroll ever so quickly through the comments on YouTube for a taste. (A blog post and more comments also here.) Warning: Do not linger too long or read too many b/c you might become upset.

I think it is interesting that a number of comments seem to express a certain kind of disgust with the virtuosity itself of the children's performance: A dismissal of its "authenticity" b/c the commenters assume that if the performers are North Korean, then their ability to perform at all results from lunatic Soviet style training. Or intense tiger mothering at the level of the nation state.

Had the children been white and American, I wonder whether or not the video would have prompted the same kinds of responses. I suppose there might have been comments about obnoxious stage parents and doomed child stars and so on, but I think "talent" might have been used to describe the children themselves.

The response "frightening" is also worth examining. What is frightening here? That such young children can perform to such a level? What one imagines might have been the experiences of the children themselves? Or the idea that such a performance can be produced from sheer will and exertion that those of us gawking at the video simply could not muster?