Here goes another cliché

Another cliché I’ve heard about parenting is how parents of kids with special needs talk about how brave and inspiring their kids are. It sounds like something people say just to make themselves feel better about how difficult their lives are. Then it happens to you.

SoftballMy daughter declared yesterday that she must sign up for softball. She had said this before, and I had looked into it, then I hid the flyer someplace in my desk. But she said it again, with that determined face that said this was not something I could hope she’d forget. (Lots of parents say things like, “Oh, just ignore it. Your kid will forget about it.” They don’t have my kid!) So bright and early this morning, we were off to softball try-outs.

I have written about how my daughter loves soccer. But really, she loves all team sports. Not watching them on TV. Not watching other people playing them. She loves them for two reasons: Learning something new, and getting a uniform. Practices, as long as they include learning something new, are fine with her. Games? Well, as far as she’s concerned, games exist so you can get a uniform. She doesn’t seem to have any great competitive streak, just a hunger to learn to play all games and to collect as many uniforms and t-shirts as possible. In fact, she said the other day, she could dress only in Santa Cruz Soccer Camp t-shirts at this point. She was pretty proud of that.

The thing is, she’s never actually played softball. Since I attempted to forget about her interest in softball — though she’s been asking since last spring — we don’t own a softball. We own a glove because she saw one at the DLC Flea Market and begged to buy it. She didn’t even care that it’s pink! Have I mentioned that I abhor games that involve balls? When I was a child, my eyesight was very poor. When a ball was coming at me, it would split into two balls and I’d have to do eeny-meeny-miney-mo on it. I always lost.

But this is where the bravery and inspiration comes in: We get to the try-outs and she reveals that in spite of my reminders to bring “everything for softball and your riding lesson,” the glove was sitting on the bench in the front hall. Furthermore, all the other girls are out there warming up with their dads, and she’s got no glove, no ball, and her mom’s tendons scream every time a ball actually hits her glove (accidentally, of course).

But happily, she lines up with the other girls and waits her turn to show her stuff on a softball diamond (never set foot on one before). She is instructed that she’ll first catch a ground ball (she learned what that is from a Youtube video yesterday), then throw the ball to first base (that’s the one where all the people are waving their arms and saying, Good Catch! Throw it to me now!), then after three balls, run to first base.

Good thing we didn’t arrive any earlier, or she would have had to go first.

But the fact is, she did just fine. She watched about five girls ahead of her, girls who had clearly been playing softball since they were in the womb, and she was not discouraged. She marched out there with her borrowed glove and she got those ground balls just fine. She threw them so that…. eventually… they got to first base, and then she trotted off herself.

I know myself: When I’m going someplace I’ve never been before, to do something new with people I’ve never met before, and those people are most likely much more accomplished than I am, I get nervous. In fact, I try to find many reasons why I can’t go. Really, it’s not that I know that I’ll fail, but, uh, I really did need to, uh, refinish the floors that day.

Or something like that.

But my brave girl doesn’t think like that. Everything she does out in the world is a challenge. Each time she walks into a new room, people figure out really fast that she’s different, and their reactions have not always been positive. Adults usually try to cover up their dismay, but it shows. Other kids have said really nasty things right to her face. But she plows on and does what she wants to do.

I was sitting next to a dad and his small son. When my daughter stepped up, the boy said to his dad, “That’s a boy!”

“No,” I said, “That’s my daughter. She hates brushing long hair. She has never played softball before. But she’s here, and she’s doing it.”

So much for another cliché. She was brave, and she inspired me. What a gal!

Just about 1/4 mile

My older child has been working on his science fair project. He’s highly motivated this year, having noticed last year how the stakes were raised: they expect more, but they give more. And he’s a computer-obsessed kid who is saving for a new computer. So he’s got this idea that his science fair entry could win him some money to put toward this purpose, and he’s been working on it as much as we have let him.

Since my husband and I both work with computers, we know a thing or two about it. And one thing we know, that we’ve been trying to impart to our kids, is that sometimes the best way to solve a problem you’re having at the computer is… NOT at the computer.

This may be true in general: When you stand at a locked door literally banging your head against the wall to get in, it’s very easy to ignore the open door around the corner.

The thing is, computers have this way of sucking us in. We become hyper-focused, not noticing anything in our surroundings, answering “mm-hm” to pretty much anything someone asks us. (My kids take advantage of this last feature relatively often, knowing that they might get a distracted “mm-hm” to pretty much any question if they ask it when I’m very busy!)

So even though it’s true of any problem that sometimes the best way to solve it is to walk away from it, I think it’s even more true of sedentary, hyperfocused work like computer programming.

That’s one reason I treasure my solitary morning walk: I often “write” more while out on a walk than in front of a computer.

In fact, I composed most of this piece while walking on Sunday morning. In that case, however, it wasn’t my solitary walk. I had convinced my very reluctant boy to tear his focus from the computer screen and ride his bike on my walk.

He was very reluctant. “I’m in the middle of trying to figure out a really hard problem,” he told me. “This isn’t a good time to go for a walk.”

“This is a perfect time to go for a walk,” I assured him. After some cajoling (and perhaps some not-so-veiled threats), I got him out the door. He got on his bike and rode out ahead of me as I walked. He zoomed down the road, then turned and came back to me.

As he approached, I saw the smile on his face.

“I think I figured out my problem!” he said.

We were about 1/4 mile from our house.

Sometimes that’s all it takes. You walk away from the problem, putter in the garden, or take a nap. And then suddenly, the problem that seemed unsolvable only a short time before presents itself fully formed in your mind.

We got back from our walk and I said, “OK, go solve your problem!”

He bounded up the stairs with a smile on his face, some fresh air in his lungs, and freshly stimulated neurons ready to go to work again.

A passionate plea for more mud pies

You’d think that hanging out with homeschoolers, as I do, would insulate me from people who feel the need to do academics with kindergarteners. However, amongst new homeschoolers you hear this common refrain: I really don’t know how to homeschool, so I just want to find a curriculum in a box I can do with my five-year-old. The people saying this mean well—they really think that a curriculum-in-a-box will be better for their children than just hanging out with mom and doing whatever lame stuff she comes up with. But those parents have fallen into the same trap as the administrators of our public education system. They think this is some kind of race, and they’ll be hurting their children if they don’t get them on the track and running as soon as possible.

I should have read it long ago, but I recently read what should be required reading for new homeschoolers, Tammy Takahashi’s Deschooling Gently. Takahashi’s book is considered a classic amongst homeschoolers, who see the process of “deschooling” a child who has attended school before homeschooling as key to homeschooling success. However, I found that the book had a lot more to say to me as an adult: How many of my ideas are residual bits of misinformation planted by my many years in school? All of us have this stuff stuck in there, even if we’ve consciously denied its validity.

Our feelings about “academic” education, in particular, are strong. Many of us inherently believe that “earlier is better” and that there’s something wrong with letting a child play if he can’t read yet. We haven’t turned out in mass protests as our public schools are pushing academics earlier into the curriculum, forcing out such kindergarten staples as finger painting, story telling, and free play on the playground.

The thing is, every single educator worth listening to has read the data and knows this simple fact: The most educated people in the world are not necessarily the people who had academics shoved at them at an early age. Forcing academics earlier into the American public schools is not going to slow the decline of our kids’ education. In fact, it might hurry it up.

Finland is an oft-cited example. There, they don’t even start teaching reading till around the age of 7, and academics, such as they are, are hands-on and cooperative until the higher grades. No tests, no grades, just fun. How can that be?

Well, I can give you plenty of examples closer to home: Millions of successful adults in America. If you went to public school in the 70’s, it is very unlikely you did any sort of academics in kindergarten. Sure, you probably sang the alphabet song and learned to write your name, but you spent as much time learning how to tie shoes and, yes, doing finger painting as anything academic. Those Americans who were educated in the 60’s and 70’s are no sorry bunch. You’ll find them at every successful technology company, in every important medical lab, in government buildings making decisions about our national safety, and making fabulous art, music, and literature.

Keep in mind, these people did not do academics in kindergarten. They didn’t get recess canceled because they couldn’t read. Their schools didn’t get denied funds or have every teacher replaced by a stranger because of their parents’ socio-economic status. And yet, here they are, leading the fastest technological and scientific change ever before seen by humankind.

There are better ways to educate than to force five-year-olds to study. I say, Let them make mud pies! Let them develop their minds at the same time as their hands, their bodies, their hearts, and their souls. There will be plenty of time for them to sit in front of a computer. But as we adults know, there’s limited time later in life to contemplate the wonderful feeling of mud between your fingers.

OT Graduate

My daughter just went through one of those little milestones that mean a lot to parents with a quirky kid: She has officially “graduated” from Occupational Therapy.

Before I had kids, I went for adult occupational therapy for a wrist injury. But I remember the first time I heard someone refer to the sort of OT my daughter received. It was a teacher in her preschool, who told me, “Some people recommend occupational therapy for kids like her, but I can’t really tell you what they do.”

That seems to be the point of view of lots of people: I’ve heard of OT, but I’m not sure what the point is.

At its core, pediatric OT is just like adult OT. Because of an injury or birth defect, children need to learn to do things they need to do in their lives. For adults, OT sometimes results from an on-the-job injury, so the “occupation” part of it makes sense. For kids, just consider eating, playing, and socializing their “occupation” and OT plays a similar role. So a classic case for OT would be a child who needs to be taught (or re-taught after an injury) how to feed herself.

The sort of OT my daughter had, however, goes a bit further afield. It starts with an evaluation. The therapist asks the child to do all sorts of things that kids normally do: Playing activities such as balancing on a beam or catching a ball, learning activities like tracing a picture and writing words, and social interaction activities like asking an excited child to suddenly be quiet as a mouse.

Neurotypical children have no problem with these tasks, and though of course all children vary in their skills, the typical mastery of these skills has been charted so that the therapist can see how far off the curve a particular child is. Some kids are just going to be generally behind the curve, and this may not be cause for worry if their development is otherwise normal. Some kids, such as a classic child with autism, will be further behind. Other kids are on the curve or accelerated in some ways, while at the same time wildly behind in others. That’s more like my daughter.

I’ve written before about how frustrating it can be to have a child who is clearly different, but not diagnosable. Depending on who we’d ask, we could come up with an alphabet soup of diagnoses, none of them fitting her any better than the next. The great thing about OT is that although they have to give a diagnosis for insurance purposes, the OTs we worked with over the years never focused on a diagnosis and thus an expected cluster of problems. They always looked directly at the child in front of them.

I loved the guidance I got from our OTs. My daughter had some autistic-like characteristics — toe-walking, lack of understanding of social cues, out-of-proportion emotional responses — but they never just gave her some “autism package” of treatments. When she was a preschooler, I got the great advice that helped us work on some of her more difficult physical behaviors. Our first OT gave me this memorable advice: “If this kid had been born 200 years ago, she’d have been up at the crack of dawn hauling water from the well as soon as she could carry the bucket. Kids need hard, meaningful work.”

Another OT helped me understand her need for tactile stimulation, and we brainstormed ways that she could get what she needed without a) destroying our house, and b) further damaging my fragile back.

As she aged, we got a new OT who started to help her with her fine motor skills such as handwriting and typing, which were keeping her from being able to do the things that she was intellectually ready to do.

My daughter still has stuff to work on. Her most recent OT would love to get her in a group situation where she has to control her responses and practice social cues, but luckily, life provides a fair amount of those. Her handwriting still doesn’t match her academic skills, but that’s what keyboards are for! (And hopefully it will continue to improve as she grows.) But in general, she’s showing positive change in all the areas we were so concerned about.

This sort of graduation is a strange thing. There’s no one event that announces its arrival. Just one day her OT and I realize, pretty much simultaneously, that she’s ready to move on.

Today she asked, “When do I go to OT next?” and I reminded her that she’d graduated.

“Oh,” she said, disappointed. “I wish I could go back and do the zip line.”

And see her wonderful OT, Melissa, who sent her off with a hug and the promise that she’ll be there if we need her again.

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