Winning and losing

My son’s class had a banner year last year, as far as winning goes. Their environmental video project won a few big prizes and lots of kudos. Not only did they get on the free stuff train (Disney logo-gear!), but they got articles in the newspaper and money for the classroom. The same year, my son had his first experience in entering but winning nothing in the science fair.

My sons classic towering redwoods photo
One of my son's classic towering redwoods photos

My daughter entered the science fair as well, with a really great project, but we forgot part of it, had to return home to get it, and were late for the judging. She was so flustered, she forgot to show the judge the most interesting part of what she did. The judges’ comments made it clear that they had no idea what her project was actually about, yet she got a respectable third place.

She said she was happy she didn’t win first because she didn’t only want to have blue ribbons!

This year both kids entered the county fair for the first time. My son entered one thing: a really gorgeous and unusual photo he took. I thought he would enter a redwoods classic: the towering redwoods with sunlight coming through them. But his choice of a close-up of a leaf had a mystery and depth unusual for an 11-year-old.

My daughter, ever the big producer, entered three things: An excellent pair of dragon pants she sewed, a vegetable creature made of deformed corn she named “Franken-corn,” and a watercolor of the Monterey Bay with sailboats at sunset.

The results were mixed: My son’s photo got an honorable mention. My daughter’s pants won first place (how could dragon pants not win something?), her vegetable creature won third, and she didn’t get a mention for her watercolor.

My son said he was pleased to get an honorable mention—I think he sensed that his choice was unusual but liked that they had acknowledged his work.

Ever the rationalist, my daughter explained to me that had the judges known that her painting was modeled on Monet, they would have given her a prize. And she immediately perked up at seeing that her best friend from her homeschool program had won first prize for her watercolor mounted directly above my daughter’s.

This is the photo my son entered in the fair.
This is the photo my son entered in the fair.

It’s interesting to me to watch how my two children react so differently to winning and losing. My daughter’s interest in contests is very energetic: she loves to toss things in and see what the judges think, and then she moves on to her next interest, not dwelling too much on results.

My son thinks carefully about his submissions and never wants to do the obvious thing. At the science fair last year, we counted at least five entries about testing hand sanitizer. He was amused by this, but perplexed why any of them would get a prize. Like me, he values the originality of an idea and the intent. It’s hard for him to get judging that doesn’t value the same things. Like me, he sees each of his efforts as an individual to be nurtured. Winning and losing is, necessarily, more personal than it is to my daughter.

I think that contests are great for kids for a variety of reasons:

  • When you do something and throw it in a drawer, it doesn’t achieve the sort of finality and finished quality that it does when you see it hanging in a show or displayed in a hall.
  • When there’s a goal to work toward, kids tend to do a more thorough job.
  • The experience of submitting something and, in the case of the science fair, having to explain it is a much deeper learning experience than just doing it and moving on.

Most importantly, though, winning and losing really are a part of life. And part of raising a child is teaching him or her to be able to understand what losing means, and by extension, what winning really means.

My daughters dragon pants
My daughter's dragon pants

My daughter studies Judo, and her sensei says that one of the most important parts of learning Judo is learning to be completely in yourself. He’s a former champion, yet what he talks about is losing: How everyone will lose at some point, and when you lose, you learn an important thing about winning. That important thing is that your effort is yours and isn’t diminished or canceled out by the winner’s effort. When you know that you did your best, you can have respect and admiration for the opponent who beat you. When you know that you didn’t do your best, you can’t blame your opponent. Instead, you need to question: Why didn’t I do my best? What can I do to improve?

My daughter is about to compete in her first Judo tournament, which should be interesting. She is very, very good at Judo, but there’s probably another 7-year-old out there who’s better, and who knows? They might meet up on a mat this weekend.

My son is starting to contemplate entering various other contests this year, including the science fair. I am sure that what he does will be meaningful and important to him, and despite what the judges decide, he will win. Because if he goes about his other contests as he did his photo, he’s going to look inside himself to find something new and surprising.

In any case, I hope that they both find contests inspiring and meaningful, even when the ribbon isn’t blue.

Wonder kids

I try not to respond to every dumb blog post I read — there’s just too much out there to tempt me!

However, after I saw a link to this one, it led me to thinking about some responses I have, and I have an appreciation for any writing that leads me to think. So that’s my grudging appreciation for her ill-thought piece.

The writer is a mom who tells of her interactions with another mom of a “gifted” kid. The other mom seems to be pushing her son to perform in public, and this annoys my fellow blogger intensely.

I understand completely. The thing is: I understand both moms.

I won’t use any details that would identify particular parents, but let’s just say that I have met them, and I have probably even been them. These parents have kids who are truly wonderful, as most kids are. (I reserve the right to believe that there are a few kids out there who are not full of wonder, though I haven’t met them yet.) These kids, at home, are talkative, inventive, imaginative, and precocious. They memorize all the names of the dinosaurs. Or perhaps (like a child of mine) they become fascinated with learning all the different types of sushi (in Japanese, no less).

The parent gets used to enjoying this part of their relationship. “What kind of dinosaur is this, Johnny?” they ask, because they just love to see that three-year-old tongue twist around those long, Latin names, and because they love to see their son’s pleasure in acquiring this body of knowledge.

Problem is, then they’re in public and they do the same thing. But somehow it isn’t the same. Johnny, instead of answering in his usual adorable way, looks at them like he doesn’t even know who they are.

[Aside: one time when we were in Trader Joe’s, my 2-year-old daughter looked at me in dismay. “You’re not my mommy!” she cried out. “Who are you?” Thankfully, no one called CPS on me…]

The parents come off looking, at best, overly proud of their child’s putative achievements, and worse, those pushy “gifted” parents that really bother the rest of us. Like I said, I’m putting myself in both camps here.

So one thing about this blogger is that she can’t recognize that the mother’s intention was not necessarily to brag or make her feel bad. Her son is who he is. She celebrates him. Don’t we all do that with our kids, whether we’re celebrating their brains, their hearts, or their strong legs?

But the blog goes on: The writer chides us for having made our children this way through “coaching.” She admits, “It dawned on me that my permissiveness in exposing my kids to pop culture might be putting them at an intellectual disadvantage” and then she goes back to blaming other parents and implying that parents whose kids really like to learn the names of dinosaurs don’t want their kids to laugh, dance, and sing.

This reminds me of a family who have been longtime friends of my family. When their daughter was young, she formed a fascination for the British royal family. She knew everything about them. Her parents would buy her magazines with articles about them, and she had a detailed scrapbook and could go on, and on, and on with details and minutiae. Her parents even let her talk about her fascination in public! They even admitted to people, this kid knows everything about the royal family.

Here’s where this story changes: their daughter was learning disabled. Her parents knew that she would never get a PhD, and that she’d be lucky to be able to care for herself and have an independent life. (However, due to their capable raising of their child, she is in fact a self-supporting adult.)

Did they “push” their daughter into this fascination? Were they wrong to encourage and celebrate it? Of course not.

So then why is it wrong for parents of kids on the other side of the academic spectrum to do the same?

Let’s just admit this and move on: Families are different. Parents make different choices. The kids they get often determine aspects of their parenting, and their parenting does affect what kinds of kids they get.

So my blogger friend loves that her daughter loves to sing and dance. Of course she does! We all, good parents, celebrate our kids’ achievements, take pleasure in watching them develop their interests. Many of us, also, watch other kids sometimes in wistful fits of jealousy: “I wish my daughter could sing like that, but all she likes to do is math puzzles.”

But that’s just like admiring a beautiful dress that wouldn’t fit our bodies. Admiring the dress and thinking wistfully of being able to fit in it doesn’t mean you’re going to step out of your body and into another. You got what you got, and you learn to live with it.

Yeah, there are parents of really smart kids who think their kids are “better.” And, my blogger friend, there are parents of talented singers who think their kids are “better” and parents of socially popular kids who think their kids are “better.” So what?

So here’s my advice: If you think your kids are watching too much crap on TV, turn off the darn thing, cut the cable, and put on some music.

“Dance!” you say. “Sing!”

And then watch your wonder kids go.

That magical world…

I had the pleasure the other day of caring for three children who aren’t mine. I brought them to my parents’ farm, where there are endless new things to discover.

The two older children are around the ages of mine, and they did what older children do: The two boys went off to horse around on the swingset and then try to train the new kittens in various stunts, and the girls took baskets to the corn patch and the basement to get potatoes.

First Tomato was one of our kids favorite books
First Tomato was one of our kids' favorite books

I was left with the four-year-old, who doesn’t have an age-mate in my family. I took her around the garden and we did the sorts of things you do with four-year-olds: we looked at dried-up sunflowers and discovered where their seeds were. We picked zucchini and talked about how prickly the plants are. I showed her the little hairs on the freshly picked zucchini, which come off when they are washed so you never get to see them on store-bought zucchini. We noticed that all the red tomatoes were way down deep in the tomato patch, and we found funny tomatoes, red with green spots, and we smelled that particular, fresh-tomato smell.

The world of the young child is full of magic. Very little is yet explained, or even explored. Around every corner is something new. There’s a story in everything.

This is something that’s so easy to forget when our children get older. It’s something so small we forget to miss it, until a little girl reminds us of it.

My youngest is only three years older than she is, but I felt transported back into the past. I imagined myself a be-hatted grandmother showing her grandchild around the garden, rediscovering all the magic she’d forgotten. Who can forget the shock of the smell of warm, ripe tomatoes? But once you’re reminded, you can also remember reading “First Tomato” by Rosemary Wells, and the magical language of a girl going out into the garden to find the “fat” smell of the first red tomato on the vine.

No matter that you can’t make tomato soup from the first tomato. (I know this for certain: I just made First Tomato Soup last night with the first TEN tomatoes that I’d been collecting over days!) The book captures the magic of being a small child alone in a garden.

I didn’t have time to leave my friend’s four-year-old alone in the garden, but I did my own. I would furnish a basket and a mission and then hang back, letting them explore the magic alone. More than once, I lost a child in the tall corn: feeling the silk, watching the ants marching up the stalks, contemplating the impossibly far-away sky through the arching leaves.

But I knew they weren’t lost. They’d been found again in their magical world, the one I hope they can still remember when their own children grow away from the age of magic.

The end of the autism/vaccine debate

http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/09/07/p.autism.vaccine.debate/index.html

There’s a question mark at the end of their headline, but I’m hoping that question mark is gone for all reasonable parents.

“I took care of a child who died of measles encephalitis because he was not vaccinated. It was a horrible death that was needless and preventable, and those parents never forgave themselves for not vaccinating their child.”

That's the way they used to make them

My husband decided that the perfect Labor Day outing for our family would be to a showing of the 1938 Errol Flynn/Olivia deHavilland version of Robin Hood. Our daughter is obsessed at the moment with knights and the middle ages, and our son says we never take him to movies. Perfect!

I was, to tell you the truth, expecting that the movie would be corny and dated, more of a giggle than entertainment. But besides some obvious flaws, it has aged extremely well.

Robin Hood: when tough men were allowed to be good
Robin Hood: when tough men were allowed to be good

The thing that really impressed me, though, is how much more directors used to respect their audiences. Now, I have to admit that I haven’t seen the latest Robin Hood (Russell Crowe), but here’s my prediction: First, very little will be left to imagination. The deaths will be gruesome, the acting will be hard-edged. Second, the actual history will be either implied or ignored. And third, the beautiful morality of the Robin Hood tale will give way to the action. (Click here to read the CommonSense Media review of the modern version, with their rating of IFFY for ages 13+.)

According to a review on IMDB, I’m not far off: “There is the theme of the idea of a king’s right to govern, but this is mostly an action, not a historical film about Medieval government.”

Things were so much different in 1938. Then, many movie-makers believed that part of their role was to inspire and teach their audiences. Robin Hood is full of easily digested history lessons, with the conflict between the Saxons (who have been in England long enough to feel themselves indigenous) and the Normans (relatively new conquerors from France) front and center.

Robin is declared Robin “Hood” almost as a joke — it’s clear to anyone watching that he is the moral player in this conflict. Marion comes over to his side gently, and not just because he’s a gorgeous hunk, but because he convinces her that might does not, in fact, make right. (In one of the inconsistencies of this old film, Flynn has the blue-eyed tall stature of the conqueror, while deHavilland is the dark-eyed beauty he might have found in a Saxon village… but no matter.)

It was so uplifting to watch a film in which people were allowed to be good. A man who could kill chooses not to. A woman who could stay in safety and marry a wealthy (and cruel) protector chooses to be loyal to a man who is about to be hung.

And not only are they allowed to be good, but they are allowed to experience joy. There is so much heartfelt laughter in this movie. This is one thing that really depresses me about movies lately: even movies for little kids are full of negative conflict, rather than the conflict borne of someone trying to be a positive force against conflict. No wonder our kids are depressed!

There is a lot of killing in the 1938 Robin Hood, and it is done comic-book style, with very little blood. There is some amount of laughing at people who have been gotten the best of. Small bits of 1938-style sexism. But I’d much rather my kids see a film like this than one in which bleakness is elevated to something to aspire to.

They’ve still got their teen years ahead of them, when I’m sure they’ll get plenty of angst to go around. For now, their laughter and inspiration was precious to me.

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