Next week's buzz

One of my favorite things to do with my kids is see people really at work on something they know a lot about. Museums are great, but just watching someone doing something that you’ve never done and asking a few questions can lead to a depth that just

Looking at the observation hive
Looking at the observation hive

looking at the results of the work can’t. Some recent trips we’ve taken in this vein was when we went to San Jose Tofu Company and also when my friend Daniella Woolf taught a class in encaustic. It’s one thing to eat the stuff or admire it; it’s another to see it being made and talk to the person who was making it.

Another local experience that I can’t recommend highly enough is Pacific Crest Apiaries’ Open House, which starts next week. The first learning opportunity for your kids comes with the name… do they raise apes? Nope — they are beekeepers, and their open house is a homegrown affair that’s really fun. Dana and Ed Mumm are infectious with their enthusiasm over their little charges, and they can answer pretty much any question you have.

Ed Mumm tending the bees
Ed Mumm tending the bees

At their open house, you get to see bee boxes up close to see how they work. You get to see the extraction machines. You can see the many displays that Dana has made over the years which explain bee anatomy, the social life of the hive, what honey is, and more. Outside, you can see their bees at work, and best of all, you can watch the bees in their observation hive, which has clear sides so you can watch them work.

Dana Mumm at work
Dana Mumm pouring candles

Dana paints the queen in the observation hive with a dot of color so that you can find her amidst all the busy work. Your kids will definitely get the meaning of “busy as a bee” watching the hive!

And yes, there will be opportunities to spend your money as well, though that’s not the focus of the event. Dana makes gorgeous beeswax candles, and sells them along with their honey, bee pollen, and other lovely items such as soaps and tea. So in one trip, you can see the tiny workers that start the product, the machines and processes that turn it into the raw materials, and the products themselves. And Dana and Ed will be there to answer your questions and show you around.

If you are looking for honeybee educational materials, here are a few:

The health of our children

Science news is a little frustrating for parents to follow. Because of the nature of science, it’s always changing! If we were raising kids in the 80’s, we’d probably be dumping oat bran into everything they eat. Although this wouldn’t necessarily be a bad idea, it wouldn’t be the miracle cure some scientists believed it was then.

Sodas are a number one source of unnecessary calories. Banish them from your house except as a treat!
Sodas are a number one source of unnecessary calories. Banish them from your house except as a treat!

Many of those who are parents now were themselves raised by parents who had no idea of the harm that could come to their children from packaged and fast foods. When these foods started to gain popularity in the 50’s, it seemed the height of modern living to eat them. Why fuss over a pot of beans that takes three hours to cook when you can open a can?

So now we have a whole generation of parents who are completely removed from the process of cooking from basic ingredients. And their kids are suffering. The health news is full of it: obesity, dietary deficiencies, behavioral problems.

So if you’re one of those parents who was never taught how to cook from the raw ingredients, where do you start?

First of all, you’re going to have to get buy-in from your family. Kids who have been raised on the high-salt, high-sugar packaged foods that we’re faced with on TV and in the grocery store will be reluctant. Spouses might not want to change, either. Jane Nelson of Positive Discipline fame suggests weekly family meetings to cure all sort of family problems. I’d suggest you start now, and bring up the subject of health as a major issue of importance.

Second, most of my readers live in Santa Cruz County, and we are blessed here with the very best resource for healthy family living that I could imagine: Our farmers markets. We have one almost every day of the week in some part of the county. And the food you can find there is varied and healthy all year long. Take your kids along and make it a party. Try tastes of everything that is offered. Commit to buying one fresh vegetable that you’ve never tried to cook.

Third, take a look at the biggest offenders in your diet and get rid of them. I just wrote an article for Examiner.com about new research about high fructose corn syrup that has just come out. There’s been a fight about this for years: some health experts suspected HFCS as a contributing factor to our incredible rise in obesity. Others said that a sugar is a sugar: they are all processed exactly the same in our bodies. It’s looking more and more like HFCS is, in fact, a big offender. Similar to trans fats, which have been taken out of almost every packaged product out there at this point, I predict that HFCS will soon be a thing of the past. Yes, our food will be slightly more expensive, but we will all be healthier.

(Think you don’t have much HFCS in your diet? Look at all the non-sweet packaged foods in your cupboard for a shock: it’s in everything, including commercial bread!)

Another thing that has to happen is that your family will have to commit to more time focused on food. If your family is overweight, you probably think that’s a strange piece of advice, but a lot of bad nutrition comes from people just eating whatever is available rather than thinking about their food. Try to commit to eating at home, first of all. The more often you eat at home, the more often you control what goes into the meal. Think about creating a monthly menu so that shopping is easier.

If you’ve never done much cooking (I mean real cooking, not just heating things!), you could start easy and treat yourself to a bundle of meals at Fresh Prep Kitchens, where they will walk you through the steps of preparing healthy meals for your freezer. Or ask a friend who cooks to make some community meals for the two families so you can see someone who does it regularly in action. Or buy one of the many simple cooking cookbooks out there that will not only walk you simply through the steps, but even perhaps present you with menus and shopping lists.

If you do buy packaged foods, start looking at the labels. Be aware that if the label says “nutritious” and “low-fat” and “heathy,” your alarm bells should go off! There are lots of words that food packagers are allowed to use that have, shall we say, rather vague meanings. For example, you can load a food full of vitamin supplements, but if it’s still high in HFCS and fat, and low in fiber, protein, and all that other good stuff, then it’s still junk. Junk + vitamin supplements does not equal healthy!

Finally, don’t think that organic = healthy. There’s lot of organic junkfood on the market these days. It’s junkfood because your children won’t be getting nutrients to balance the calories, salt, and fat in the food, not because of pesticides. You’re probably better off in general shopping at a store that is committed to carrying healthy foods, but mindless consumers of organic packaged foods are simply paying higher prices if what they’re buying is junk.

There are a few online resources I think are good:

  • One site I like is KidsHealth.org. They have a site for parents and one for kids. You can get good information on the parents’ site, while your kids can learn about health, mental health, exercise, and the human body with engaging articles and videos.
  • KeepKidsHealthy.com has lots of information on how to read food labels and what the various nutrients do.
  • ParentsAgainstJunkFood.org presents tons of reasons to keep it out of your kids’ diets.
  • I love scanning ScienceDaily.com‘s nutrition news, personally, but if you get a headache from too much conflicting detail, stay away!

Note: I see that SantaCruzParent is offering a Parent Perk for: 8-Week Natural Chef Training, New Leaf Community Markets, Valid until 04/30/10. If you’re a member, just go to The Parent Perks page after logging in at the website. If you’re not a member, sign up to receive the newsletter and then you can go to that page!

Homeschoolers. Will work for learning opportunity.

OK, so I shouldn’t have left a post called “Existential Angst” up for so long. Perhaps my readers thought I’d decided to run off to the Himalayas to be a Buddhist nun. Or decided to take my kids on a sailboat trip around the world. Or decided to sell everything and stand by the road with a sign: Homeschoolers. Will work for learning opportunity.

No such luck. Here I am, rushing around as usual, passing by learning opportunities as they stand by the road, trying to thumb a ride.

This is our outschooling year. Next year will be our inschooling year. At least, I hope it will be.

Daruma
Daruma is a Japanese Buddhist icon which helps you achieve goals

Previously I wasn’t certifiably insane, but now upon this declaration I will be: Next year I am going to homeschool both of my children.

One of my calm, experienced, rational homeschooling mom friends was with me and my kids recently on a fieldtrip for Japanese Culture Club. My son has been jealously passing up most of Culture Club (cue music) because he really is supposed to go to the school we’re paying for. But going to San Jose’s Japantown just couldn’t be passed up. We were going to a tofu factory where they make tofu the ancient way. We were going to see a Japanese Buddhist temple, and eat shabu shabu.

Those of you who send your kids to public schools may or may not care how much your school loses in Average Daily Attendance funding each time you take your child on an unofficial fieldtrip. Those of us with kids in private school can easily calculate how much we lose each day we take our kid out…. but we prefer not to. I do on occasion let my son “be sick” when something important is happening, such as when Apple was announcing the iPad, probably the biggest event in his life this year.

But Japantown came in a close second. We didn’t even bother to use the word sick. We told his teacher he was going on a fieldtrip.

So my homeschooling friend is one of those unflappable moms who says, Oh yes, my kids drive me crazy, with a smile on her face. But about an hour into our fieldtrip, she turned to me and with only a hint of irony said, “You’re going to homeschool these two next year?”

San Jose Tofu
San Jose Tofu makes tofu as the Japanese have been making it for hundreds of years.

Yep.

The thing is, we searched high and low for the right school for our son, and when we found it, we realized what we were giving up. He’s gone all day, and when he comes home he’s beat. By all accounts, next year in middle school, he’ll not only be beat but he’ll have tons of homework, too! And on top of that, we’ll be paying tuition.

That leaves us badly situated for bringing about the major goal the kids and I have had together: study Japanese and go to Japan. As long as our son is going to his wonderful school, we’ll have neither time nor money to pursue that goal. So it’s off to our homeschooling adventure next year!

Why don’t you just send him to your local public school, you ask?

Ask me again in March… or January…. or perhaps September. My answer may change!

Really, my kids can get along when they have a common purpose. And I plan to sit them down the day after school ends in June, armed with a copy of Siblings: You’re stuck with each other so stick together!, school them in meditation and nonviolent communication, and rev them up for a common goal.

Oh, and I also plan to keep their fingernails cut short.

I’m determined to do it one way or another.

Candy store
We also visited a Japanese Candy store, and tasted a traditional candy for girls' day.

In Japantown, one of our stops was Nichi Bei Bussan, a Japanese general store. The owner told us about the Daruma, little squat eyeless figurines like a Weeble. The purpose of a Daruma is that when you buy it, you paint on one eye. You set a goal, something you really have to work for, and you don’t get to paint the other eye till you achieve it. My son and I each bought one. The day after school ends, we will paint our first eyes, and then start working on our goal.

Come spring next year, we’ll either be on our way to Japan, or on a corner near you.

Homeschoolers. Will work for a little peace and quiet.

Existential angst

One of the talks I went to at the conference last weekend was about how intense adults who spend a lot of time in their heads can struggle with bouts of existential depression throughout their lifetimes.

As one woman I talked with afterward said, “That was a great talk, but now I’m SO depressed!”

The speaker was James T. Webb, the wonderful publisher of Great Potential Press and the founder of SENG, the organization that gave me the psychological tools to start understanding what might be going on with my daughter. And with my son. And with my husband.

And with me.

During the talk, Webb asked us to define the major roles in our lives, and then he asked us to strip them away one by one and consider who we really are. There I was, stripping myself bare of mother, wife, writer…

As parents, I know that our roles are so important that sometimes they can take over. When I talk to parents, their complaints often fall into a pretty common set of categories:

“Our kids take up so much energy my husband and I don’t even know each other anymore.”

“It’s such a relief to go to work and not to have to worry about my kids.”

“I’m concerned that I do too much/too little for my child and this is causing the problems he’s having.”

We are the first generation that brought many of our kids into the world “with aforethought.” It took the combination of widely available birth control, thoughtful living, and progressive gender roles to bring this about. Very many of us (I don’t know the number but I bet someone does!) now actually think about having children, or not having children, before we do so. As the bumper sticker says, “A child is not a choice,” but having a child certainly is.

So we thought this all through before we did it, or at least we thought we thought it through! And then along it comes and it’s so very different than what we had imagined. Our children are people we could never have made up. Our spouses change — they will never again be someone who has not raised children. Our relationships to our spouses change — we are now partners in supporting another human life!

Really, there’s no way we could have known how intense this would all be. And as the sort of person Webb was talking about, someone who has always questioned my roles and my place in this world, having children has been, well, life-changing. When he asked me to strip myself of that role, I wondered if I really could.

Before I had children, I occasionally inserted a minor character into my fiction who had children. But the main characters were children, either literally or in the roles they were playing in their lives. Now, I occasionally sit myself down to write fiction, none of which gets finished. And in that fiction, all of the characters have children, and the way I approach the child characters has been indelibly changed by the experience of being a parent myself.

But mostly what I’m doing in my writing now is writing about children and parenting, so really, all three of my major roles are tied into one. I can imagine my husband and I once again living without children in our house, as ours grow up and move away, but I can’t imagine us as we were before we raised children.

In the past, I always liked feeling like I could just up and change my life if I wanted to. At one point I decided to take the LSAT and apply to law schools. I have to say that from my present vantage-point, I think it’s highly likely I never intended to go. I just wanted the option to do something radically different.

But having children changes all that. Anywhere we go, we have to go in a car that has four seats. Even if the trip is just for me, or just for my husband, or just for one of our children, we are all intrinsically involved. I don’t know that there is anything else in life that can change us so deeply and so finally.

We chose to have children, and thus we became parents. And there’s no standardized test that can get me out of this one.

Here I am. Here we go!

A conference for people who work with kids with special needs

I spent the weekend at the California Association for the Gifted Conference in Sacramento. This isn’t a conference for people who doubt what “gifted” means, though I would guess that most people at the conference dislike the term as much as I do because of its implication of a value judgment. The conference focuses on the needs — psychological, educational, social — of kids that present a large number of common characteristics. [See the NAGC’s FAQ page for specifics.] Let’s call them accelerated learners.

It’s clear to anyone who has worked with them that such learners have special needs. I remember when my four-year-old daughter’s therapist recommended, “You should refer to her at her school as a child with special needs.” I was initially shocked — that term is most commonly applied to kids on the other end of the learning spectrum.

But these days I totally get what she means. And so did pretty much everyone at the conference. Whether they were parents of these kids, teachers of these kids, or therapists of these kids, they could see the group as clearly as special education teachers see kids with Down Syndrome.

The aspect of this group of kids that interests many of the people at the conference is not the fact that they can learn quickly. That’s like saying that those who care for and educate kids with Down Syndrome are focused on their slower learning pace. Their learning rate is part of the whole package.

What many people who are working with these kids are interested in is the fact that not all these kids are doing well. Yes, there are kids like that straight-A student, captain of the football team, president of the student council. But most kids who present the characteristics of this group have unrecognized problems. Many of them are unlikely to be designed “gifted” in school — not a small percentage of them are put into remedial learning. Many of them are not socially adept and end up lonely and confused. Estimates of how many of them drop out of high school range from 10 to 20 percent.

So although there were some talks aimed at what these kids can do, most of what I heard was about what we need to change to help these kids negotiate the minefield they were born into. I went there determined to wear my reporter hat and go to lots of “schooly” talks about GATE funding and the differentiated classroom. However, I found myself drawn again and again to the psychologists who are learning why these kids are like they are, how they can reach their potential, how we can keep them from falling into those negative statistics quoted above.

[I did go to some “schooly” talks and will be writing about those soon.]

The various developmental theories that are being developed attempt to explain why a child who learns to read at 3 can’t seem to get along in a social environment till she’s 8. Or why a child who can do math in his head just can’t seem to get himself to write it down. Why some children start out fast and then slow way, way down. Why accelerated learners can present symptoms of ADHD, bipolar, dysgraphia, sensory integration disorder, etc. [See Hughes.]

No matter what approach they take, psychologists see an usual progression of development in the brain. These kids seem to be getting more signals into the lower brain — there were many knowing chuckles in the audience when one presenter mentioned the kids who are annoyed by their socks, the sound of the lights, a smell no one else notices. It’s also clear that they seem to be developing the frontal lobes (the reasoning area) long before they are developing the parts of their brains that usually develop first, such as emotional and social skills. [See NIH News.]

So what you end up with is kids who present differently but are treated similarly. The kid who presents ADHD excels in a faster, hands-on learning environment. The kid who can’t get along with other four-year-olds gets along just fine with older kids with a higher academic level. The kid who hates school and gets awful grades loves her “gifted” program and does even more work than is assigned. [See Grobman.]

This is hard for other parents to understand sometimes, and can lead to conflict. Many kids would do better in a GATE program than they do in our test-obsessed, repetition-heavy classrooms. But not all kids would. The average kid designated “gifted” needs around 2 repetitions to learn a skill. The average kid needs 8-10.  So in the perfect world, each student would get what she needs in any classroom, and none of them would be bored. But in our world of finite resources and test-obsessed administrations, we’re having to choose who gets which services and which learning environments.

What’s clear to me is that the “they don’t need any help” attitude is not serving these kids at all. Sure, some of them excel, but the CAG Conference was full of people working with and studying even more kids who don’t. They do have special needs. Yes, all children have gifts, but accelerated learners need the disabilities that can accompany their gift to be acknowledged and understood in order for them to live successful, fulfilling lives.

Now available