The Chatelaine's Keys

Sharon November 18th, 2009

There was a lot of attention last week to Sesame Street’s 40th birthday.  For Eric and me, 39 and 37, well,  we just can’t remember a time when Sesame Street didn’t exist.  My family didn’t always have a television, but Sesame Street is one of my enduring childhood memories – and my parents liked it too.  My father sang the number songs to us – the Alligator King and his 7 sons, the 8 penny candy man, the 12 Ladybug picnic.  It was an often-present part of my childhood in all the places we lived – the apartment in New Haven, the housing project in Naugatuck, CT, the apartment in Lynn, MA.

None of these were affluent places, and one of the things I remember best about Sesame Street is that it looked like home – the stoops were a little worn looking, the people looked more or less like my neighbors, and did the same things urban, working class people seemed to do, except of course, for their strange obsession with the alphabet and the presence of muppets. 

Sesame Street tracked me even after I got too old for it.  My youngest sister, 7 years my junior, still watched, and I would pass by and find myself stopped in front of the “D” song again.  Then I went to college, and our Sesame Street memories would come up in conversation – there was something foundational about it for many of the people I knew. One friend remembered how she learned english, a new immigrant child, from Sesame Street, heartened by the fact that there were people with accents on the program. 

I know there’s a lot to be said against television, and I can agree with almost all of it – but I have a hard time thinking that Sesame Street did me any harm.  In fact, I think it was the opposite – and I admit, while we went into parenthood wanting to minimize television exposure, Sesame Street was a single exception.  Both Eric and I loved it, and we wanted our children to know Cookie Monster and have the same sense of familiar comfort.  Our debate about whether to allow the occasional video was ended when Eli, autistic, responded to television in ways he could not respond to human teaching – he learned to read from Sesame Street and Between the Lions.  The judicious application of Kermit was in.

The problem was that the Sesame Street we’d loved was gone.  By the time Eli was old enough to watch, Sesame Street had responded to pressure from cable and other sources of television and dumbed down.  Faced with more competition and pressure on public television, Sesame Street responded by choosing a much younger audience, shortening the required attention span, cutting back on real content and replacing it with a lengthy “Elmo’s Room” segment – and it had switched from telling kids “it is ok to live an ordinary, lower-class or lower-middle class lifestyle, that lifestyle has a culture that is valuable” and had started telling them, along with everyone else “it is good to be affluent.”

The first Sesame Street had begun with Stevie Wonder singing “Superstitition” and had encouraged, with in-jokes and smart material, parents to watch with their kids.  My father recounts sitting with my sister and I and hearing the Count tell children “I am the finest counter since formica!”  That’s gone from contemporary Sesame Street, which talks down to kids, and is intolerable to every adult I know. 

Now it is not wholly Sesame Street’s fault that these changes came about.  There are a lot fewer parents home to watch tv with their kids, so why spend time writing scripts that are compelling to adults?  Now kids as aged as four or five are “far too old” for something as slow paced as Sesame Street, and have long since graduated to more advanced material.  And the culture has suburbanized as well – now more than half of the world’s poor live in the suburbs.

But some of this was Sesame Street’s fault.  Consider the rise of  Elmo as an example.  Consider Elmo, if you can bear it.  Fully 1/3 of Sesame Street’s content was at one point devoted to the happenings in Elmo’s bedroom.  What do we see in Elmo’s room?  Well, first of all, he has a lot of private media – he has both a television and a computer in his own bedroom.  The drawn landscape outside his window is resolutely suburban.  His room is full of possessions, and Elmo rarely goes out of it in these segments – instead, he watches people demonstrate things on his tv, or through his computer.  When he wants to learn more about something, he doesn’t go to the library, but back to the computer – that is, his is a multiply-mediated experience.  By now, I’m sure he has a blackberry too.

There’s something really troubling about setting your three year old to watch a muppet watching something on tv.  What does that teach? What was valuable about Sesame Street to millions of children was that it mirrored their own material reality, and validated it, and said that they could learn in that context.  It said that your real home, small, not wealthy, often ethnic, not shiny, clean “American” but a mix, somewhat gritty, filled with people like you and unlike you in close proximity, hanging on stoops and out windows, was ok, and good, and a wonderful place to learn and grow.  It reminded us that community was more important than affluence – I knew suburban kids growing up in the 80s who envied Sesame Street.  It was one of the most powerfully formative counter-balances to the growing culture of white flight, suburbanization and the valorization of affluence.

Contrast the indoor sequences of Bert and Ernie with the indoor sequences of Elmo.  First, and most importantly, Bert and Ernie had each other – it is implied that Elmo lives with his parents, but the experience he offers is primarily solitary (with the occasional exception of  a guest that comes out of the closet) – people mostly appear through screens.  Bert and Ernie read books and interact, and Ernie drives Bert crazy – but they also care for each other.  Elmo interacts with a variety of animated household objects – lots of furniture and machinery, but no people – he loves his blankie, and his tv and his computer.   

It is true that many low income children do have tvs in their rooms – but Sesame Street presumably sets out to validate not pernicious trends, but good ones.  And we know from every sort of research that one of the worst possible things for children is for them to be left unsupervised with lots of media.  Ideally, no one would watch tv, perhaps.  But in a world where most people do, Sesame Street can at least be minimally expected to respond to that trend by emphasizing community – instead, they gave us Elmo and his room, and his private intimacy with the screen.

And that’s the big loss from Sesame Street over the years (we’ll skip over the depressing Abby Kadavy entirely here) – is that there’s no there there anymore.  As Sesame Street became more suburbanized – it added a playground, spiffed up and reduced the communal elements of its programming, it gave us a vision of childhood that is probably accurate, but empty of the culture that Sesame Street once offered.  And since by sticking to its past, Sesame Street had the chance to offer a vision of what we could get back – but instead, it accepted the emptying of culture into an affluent blank.  Moreover, we got the dumbing down of everything.

It is true that most neighborhoods don’t have as many people hanging out on stoops anymore. It is true that more parents are gone during the day, and more kids are alone with their media. It is true that community isn’t something we value anymore.  It is true that parents don’t let their kids out into the neighborhood as much anymore.  It is true that we hate anything that smacks of being poor, and we have a harder time imagining validating it.  And it is true that in some small respects, the actors and writers of Sesame Street have truly tried to make it possible for children to imagine a place where you play outside, where people talk to one another and help one another out. 

But in the main, Sesame Street gave up on its most basic message – which is “here are the things you need to know – that these numbers and letters are important – but also, that people are important, and how they live together are important, and how they get along is important,  but stuff isn’t important.”  The culture of low-income urban life was a communal culture at its root – people needed each other. I grew up in that culture – my mother babysat for the neighbors’ kids, they babysat for us, the big kids walked with the little ones to school, the parents shared tips and gave each other rides.  It wasn’t perfect or idyllic, but it was valuable and worth having – and the only way to live a good life in a place where no one had enough money – the community compensated.

The culture shift that overtook our society overtook Sesame Street.  It wasn’t acceptable to be poor – the backgrounds got shined up, and Elmo got rich.  The community stopped being the center of things – and an hour of fairly sustained, repeating narrative that covered a theme got shifted to short segments with a letter here and a number here, but no overarching context for the child’s mind to return to.  Elmo got his own spot, and so two and three year olds got to spend their time watching Elmo, in his room, a priveleged little boy with talking tv, watching more tv, so that things were happening only very faintly and far away.

The friendly neighbors, there, that’s where you meet – you don’t meet them as much anymore.  I admire Sesame Street for its ability to continue, and to preserve it’s cast – there’s a part of me that is pleased that the Maria of my childhood is still the Maria of my children’s childhood.  But as we head back to a time when then neighbors are more important than anything, when learning in community, and the ordinary acts of every day, low income life are more normative, I wish that Sesame Street had been able to continue in the courage of its own convictions – but maybe that’s asking too much.  Asking Sesame Street to keep valuing things that we as a society have not valued may be unfair.  And yet, that’s how it started.

Sharon

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Sharon July 10th, 2009

Note, this is a re-run – I’m trying to get the final contract arrangements for the AIP book done, and don’t have time for a post today.  Hope you enjoy it!

I know all of us with kids or grandkids, neices or nephews or just beloved child-friends are deeply worried about their future.  We want to help them have a good one – and it is tough to realize that sometimes the way we can give them the best possible future isn’t by insulating them (although doing some of that is good too) but by helping them adapt to the world they’ll be living in ahead of time.  This is a big topic, and one that I can’t do more than brush against today, but here are the things I think might be the most important stuff we can do for our kids (and here I refer to the young ones, not grownup ones, who have different issues).

1. BE THE GROWNUP.  This sucks.  I hate it a lot of the time.  Every parent knows the feeling of wanting not to be the responsible one, not to have to deal, and suck up their pain and frustration and fear.  Tough. 

This is the Mom and Dad (and Grandpa and Grandma) job – to bear the brunt of things, to do the hard stuff so the kids don’t have to suffer, to not make your kids parent you or deal with your emotional inadequacies any more than strictly necessary.  This doesn’t mean you have to be perfect, noble or never feel anything, or never cry in front of them – it just means you don’t indulge yourself at their  expense. It just means that except when you just can’t (and those moments can’t be too often) you can’t ask your kids to take care of you – it isn’t their job.  And if you are scared, they are too. If you are sad they either are sad or scared because you are sad.  Your ability to control yourself and be a grownup even when you don’t want to, to say “I’m sad, and sometimes I cry, but now we’re going to go forward” makes a big difference.  

This is a hot button subject for me, because I think honestly a lot of our present problems can be summed up as “no one was willing to be the grownup.”  It is time for all of us who are grownups, whether we have kids or not, to act like we care about the future, and to be the grownup, not just when it is convenient but all the time – that means dealing with reality, not with self-indulgent versions thereof.  We will probably not enjoy this, but who cares?  That is, we have to live our lives asking “does this hurt the ability of future people to live and have a decent life?”  And if the answer is yes, then no matter how many good excuses we have for doing what we’re doing, things have to change.

I have no doubt that someday the four of my kids will write an expose of “advice my Mom gave online and didn’t always live up to.”  I suspect it will be a long and vibrant essay .  I don’t always find it easy to follow this advice, which is why I suspect it isn’t easy for most other people (although I shouldn’t assume most of y’all aren’t better folks than me).  But this is, I think, the first and most important job of preparing children for the future - giving them models of real adulthood.  And the models they’ve got are us – so we’ve got to do better.  I’m hoping my kids won’t be able to say I screwed this one up too bad when the time comes – I’m trying.

2. Involve your kids – in a kid appropriate way.  There is no need for children to know all the bad news, or your worst fears about the future.  Sometimes, with teenagers, this may be appropriate, but I don’t think younger kids need to be scared by things they can’t fully understand.  But the choice is not “do I wait until they are 15 and spring Peak Oil and climate change on them” or “do I start them reading Savinar at three ”  Most of my readers are probably already doing this, but some may wonder how to get started. 

Obviously, you can bring them into the garden, you can bring them into the kitchen, give them chores helping you with your home economy, get them to help in your home business, teach them about ecology and environmental issues.  I hope all of us are doing these things, at age appropriate levels.  And there’s more -  one of the things we tend to think in our society is that children should not work – I think this is absolutely wrong. I believe children, like adults, need good work.

It goes without saying that young children should work appropriately and have lots of time for learning and play, but children not only can work, they should.  What they should not do is have to do the kind of work that drives adults to despair – that is, they need good work, and to understand why their work matters.  They should get pride in being able to help their household, and know that their accomplishments matter, not in a fake self-esteem sense, but in a serious way.  They deserve, to the extent they are able, to earn respect and serious attention for their work, and if they work with you, once they are old enough, they should have a say in how things are done, and a share in the rewards.

3. Respect what matters to them.  I know it feels like you are trying to save their lives, and they are worried about how crazy it looks that you are storing all this food, or doing some other weird thing.  But that matters as much to them as your concerns matter to you.  Try and be respectful.  Sometimes the needs of kids simply have to be subsumed to family priorities, or their needs/wants aren’t good for them.  But sometimes they need to know that they count, and that you care about how they feel.  So maybe it makes sense to do your shopping only at the store where your neighbor’s son doesn’t bag groceries, or to stockpile lip gloss and zit cream for the apocalypse.  Just because you don’t consider it essential doesn’t mean they don’t – and let’s be honest, you have a few things in there that might not totally be essential too .

 4. Without taking everything away, make their new normal ahead of time.  This is tough – on the one hand, we want our kids to be regular kids, we don’t want our preoccupations to affect them, and since we know all this abundant cheap energy probably isn’t forever, we may want to do a lot of special things now.  That’s not bad or unreasonable.  But your kids will probably do best if they keep their lives generally about the same as the lives they lived before whatever happens occurs.

That means that most of the time, you should probably model the life you expect to live, with a balance of some things you want them to have that they won’t later.  Too much of the latter, and the new life is a huge deprivation.  Too much of the former, and the child realizes your family is insane a bit too early, plus, you end up with losses you don’t have to have. 

Everyone’s family is going to be different – but it helps if your routines and sense of what is normal is fairly adaptable – that is, it is tough to replace the “Christmas at Disneyland” routine in a post-peak world – you just have to lose that one.  But “We all stay up late and decorate the tree at midnight on Christmas eve, and then open presents” can work whether you decorate with electric lights and tinsel or just your old ornaments, and whether the presents are purchased or handmade.  The more susceptible to adaptation, the better.

5. Kids need the people in their lives.  I grew up in a family where my parents did a remarkable job of essentially creating joint custody long before it was widespread, but where in relationship to other extended family, the issues adults had with other adults in the family frequently intruded into the relationships kids had with those other adults.  That latter is not something I approve of, except in the case of genuine danger to a child. 

That is, I think kids who are related to people by biology or long connection, have a right to those connections being maintained and kept up.  The kids have a relationship that can and should be separate from the relationships the parents have with each other or other adults in their lives.  They shouldn’t have to lose people because the grownups can’t get along.  This goes for divorce (and yes, I know some exes are assholes, and sometimes the courts choose badly and sometimes there is no good choice) as well as larger extended families.  That is, what your kids may have going into this is their parents and the other people who love them.  Don’t take those people away lightly.

I realize that sometimes this is unavoidable – parents have to move, people really can’t find a good compromise.  But in a lower energy world, being far away from people you love is going to be a much bigger thing – divorced parents living across the country from one another who could afford to fly back and forth, or moving for that new job and uprooting the kids from Grandma and the cousins mean taking away from your kids one of the primary sources of comfort, security, even long term health and safety that they will have.  Don’t do it lightly. If you are divorced or divorcing, please try and stay near one another, and as difficult as it is, play nice.  And if you can, get along with your relatives – because your annoying, intolerable FIL may be their beloved Grandfather, and there are enough losses coming – try not to make more for them. 

6. Be prepared to educate your children.  I was struck by Dmitry Orlov’s observation that in a crisis, education isn’t less important, it is more.  Because you may end up digging ditches, but a person who also knows poetry or music and has a head full of ideas can live in their minds while their bodies work.  One of the most common misconceptions, I think is that the future means that we should concentrate only on professional, manual or technical education, and that every other kind of education is fundamentally useless.

 I think this isn’t true at all – it is true that certain kinds technical degrees may still result in a high paying job when everyone else is poor, and it is true that people will need a career.  But they also need critical thinking skills, a relationship to the world of art, literature and music, ethical and moral principles, good reasoning skills, a deep knowledge of history, religious training for them that want it,  the ability to understand what the world looks like from other perspectives, the ability to understand other languages.  Now it is true that college is probably too expensive a way for most kids to do this – I honestly don’t think that even if you can get student loans, I’d recommend putting a kid into college to get a degree and come out with tens of thousands in loans – period.  But you don’t have to go to college to learn these things – there will be plenty of unemployed people who know about them, and books are cheap now – you can stock up.

Education as it is practiced in the US is very energy intensive, and likely to get less so.  Many of our kids may need to be educated at home, or in neighborhood cooperatives, may need to find substitutes for college.  And while it is important that they learn the manual and technical skills many of us lacked, they will also grow up gardening and cooking and fixing things – so their needs may be for art and astronomy, poetry and history and the life of the mind that they can practice while they weed and build and hammer.

7. Let them be in charge sometimes.  Turn some of the responsibility over to your kids – when they are young, they can help decide what non-essentials go in the emergency kits, or whether to make ketchup or salsa with the tomatoes.  When they get older, give them more responsibility as they prove they can handle it.  Let teenagers be in charge of the bulk order, or even the family budget if they have the relevant abilities.  And when you let them be in charge, let them be.  Let them make mistakes, but not life threatening ones.  Treat them with respect, and when they make a mistake, let them fix it. 

Also, if you want them to stay on a piece of land or in a particular place near you, help them see a future there.  That is, they aren’t going to want to live their lives as your assistant farmer forever – make it clear that you will cede control. Help them start small businesses of their own, and grow them.  Help them go forward, but also let them have their own territory, their own responsibilities and do things in their own realm as they see fit.  If they have dreams you think aren’t feasible, well, help them get there anyway – but also insist that they have practical back-up plans.

8. Enter the pass-down economy now.  In most poor societies, what children inherit is what their family collectively owns, and the improvements and investments that their parents and previous generations have put into something.   They can’t afford to buy land – what land they have access to comes from the stewardship of previous generations.

It is disheartening in some ways to realize that what may most define our children’s future is what we can pass down to them – particularly when what we have is a bunch of debts and a lot of plastic.  So it makes sense to shift into the pass-down economy sooner, rather than later.  That means buying things that are of good quality, trying to keep your life unencumbered, and caring for what we do have of value, so it can serve future generations.

It also means our relationship to our children should be about passing on our values – not what we say we value, but what we really and honestly do care most about – and the way to do this is to live our lives according to what we believe.

9. Have fun with your kids.  I’m not suggesting you should be their friend all the time – discipline is important, and being at the center of your parents’ world is a little too scary for kids.  But joy and fun and play are important for kids even more than grownups (and they are awfully important for grownups as well).  So make sure you allow time for fun – if not the kind of fun you were accustomed to, the kind that doesn’t cost money. 

Moreover, *be fun* with your kids – don’t let your fear or anxiety take away the pleasures of laughing with them, or dreaming about the future, or just being with them.  It is reasonable to be worried – but not to let it overwhelm your life now, and it isn’t fair to your kids.  Heck, it isn’t fair to you, either.

Keep festivals and rituals in place, take time off even when times are hard, make jokes even when things don’t seem funny, make time for play even when it seems like the work is endless – especially when it seems like the work is endless.  Do it even when they think the rituals are stupid and your jokes suck . 

10. Help them up when they fall down.  Let them fall, sometimes, either because they need to or you can’t stop them, but be there on the other end.   Even in good times they are going to fall. In hard times, they may fall harder and longer.  There may not be as many safety nets.  You can’t protect them from everything, and sometimes you shouldn’t.  But with exception of the occasional addict, what you should do is be there when they fall down, every time from those first steps to the first arrest (which ideally you’ll get to skip entirely, or it’ll be the kind of arrest that you can be proud of ;-)).  Yes, it teaches them that you’ll be there to save them.  And for some small percentage of children, that’s a bad message, that says they don’t have to be responsible.

But for most kids, I think that helping them up, and maybe resisting the temptation to tell them what an ass they’ve been, lets the stupid thing be the lesson itself.  That is, all the lessons don’t have to come from you.  All the judgement doesn’t have to come from you.  At some point, we can take our hands off and let them know that they have to do their own judging.  That, I think is that growing up thing we’re supposed to want them to do.  And then maybe we’ll have some more people being the grownups to work on the future with.

Sharon

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Sharon June 26th, 2009

I’m a mean Mom.  By this I mean that I make my kids do chores.  Don’t get me wrong, they don’t labor all day in sweat shops while I eat bon bons.  But when my husband and I say, clean for the Sabbath, guess who is expected to help out?  Each of the children is responsible in part for helping to tend the menagerie – Asher feeds the cats and collects the eggs, Isaiah feeds the bunnies and brings them dandelions, and fills their water bottle.  Eli feeds the dog and helps brush her, while Simon makes sure the goats have hay, water, minerals and baking soda at all times.  Everyone helps get ready for the Sabbath, everyone helps haul wood and weed the garden, as well as do the big harvesting jobs.  Eli collects laundry and puts it in the baskets and loads the washer,  Isaiah makes the kids’ beds and sets the table  (and is awfully proprietary about it once it is made - I think he may have gotten the tidiness gene that skipped his parents ), Asher puts away towels and cloth napkins and helps hang the laundry,  Simon wipes down the bathroom and gets the beverages.  Once per week, each boy picks the meal, and must help cook it. 

 As they get older, they can do more – I’m sort of astonished by how much they alread do.  Last week, Isaiah made a pan of cornbread all by himself, with only adult help with the hot pads, the oven controls and with reading the recipe.  He just hit the 5 1/2 mark - I thought that was pretty good.  Simon has already mastered chocolate chip cookies and making tomato sauce.  We allow Simon and Eli to take turns with the hatchet, chopping kindling, with heavy supervision, and Isaiah has declared that he will start using the hatchet this year.  These are words to strike fear into any mother’s heart – but also to fill it with a certain pride and delight.

By the standards of the past, my children get off awfully lightly.  At 7, Simon is only allowed to use the hatchet with help – by the time he was seven a hundred years ago, my son would have been expected to keep the woodbox filled.  I have no daughters, but had I, a 7 year old would have been able to tend the fire and produce a simple meal, as well as sew a fairly neat seam.  Simon’s seams are graceless, and I won’t trust him with an axe or a fire – and for the latter two, I think that’s probably wise.  And yet we never cease to remind ourselves that balancing keeping them safe and letting them be competent is a balancing act – too much on either side, and you tip. 

I must admit that my children are both more willing and better workers than I was – although I think most of my memories come from adolescence, and I may find that my children’s willingness dries up somewhat then.  I still remember the outrage I felt at my two step-mothers, both of whom rightly felt that since I made use of the household, I should do some of the work.  “What do you mean I not only have to do *all* the dishes but wipe down the stove and counters too?”  I remember that thought all too well.  I take comfort in the fact that I probably wasn’t any more spoiled and callow than any other 13 year old, but still…  I do not want my children to ever believe that toilets magically make themselves clean, that dinners simply appear, or that any part of life comes without honest effort.

That said, however, I understand why many well-intentioned parents just do everything themselves – quite honestly, a lot of times, it is much more annoying to train your child, as they say, up in the way he should go, than to just do it yourself.  One of the least-favorite things I’ve ever heard come out of my own mouth is: “I know you want to help me cook, but I just have to do this fast and you can’t help.”  That this is sometimes the reality is not much consolation.  But I have found that the time I invest in doing it with them, or even occasionally sneaking around fixing what they do is mostly worth it – I can see in my older kids the seeds of competence.  That corn bread was really good.  So are were the cookies. 

My kids still find helping appealing for the most part – they particularly love to be engaged in a collective process.  For example, they love harvesting herbs and food – picking is a kid-appealing job.  The younger ones will happily dig deep planting holes, and the older ones enjoy showing how much wood they can carry at once. In fact, every one of my sons enjoys proving his strength as much as I did at the same age. It takes some practice in schooling your face to watch a three year old first carry, then drag, then roll a long that is too big for him, and some practice to stop yourself from asking if he wants help, when he’s already said he doesn’t. 

Up to now, we’ve not paid allowance – they children have tzedakah (charity) money to give away, but other than the occasional windfall from family, they don’t have their own money.  But we’ve decided to add on earning chores, which can be paid for in either cash or in popsicle sticks (the home currency) to be redeemed at yard sales, or in our “home store.”  These will be larger jobs that, hopefully, actually save Mom and Dad work, or contribute to our well being, like weeding a whole garden bed (or more if you are bigger), tidying your room, herding the goats into the back field to graze, entertaining a brother who needs supervision or stacking a certain amount of wood. 

Besides the competence, I want my children to have a full sense of what it means to be a participant in any human relationship – whether a nuclear family or a larger community.  And a whole lot of that is work.  I want them to have a sense of the whole range of work – the annoying jobs that no one likes that have to be done, and are better done cheerfully and with grace, the jobs that become pleasures as you do them, the work that can be integrated with play, the work that takes all your attention.  I want them to balance remunerative and subsistence labor, because most of us need to find such a balance. 

There is an ongoing debate among parents about whether chores should be done for pay, or because you are a member of the household.  My thinking is that it is no bad thing to work for pay from early on – but that I also don’t want my kids to expect to be paid for every contribution.  So one of the things I do when we are doing the chores is try and point out (as often as I can without being boring or pedantic)  how useful these skills are or will be to them, or how these skills potentially invest them in the farm as a whole.  So, for example, I point out that the wood they split for kindling keeps them warm, but also that our neighbor, a young man in his late teens, makes a fairly good income over the years selling firewood that he cuts after school on his father’s land.  I point out that when they are older, they too could cut wood, and that the work might keep them warm, and help their family stay warm, or might make them some money.  The same is true of baking, mending, milking or cleaning – these are jobs that can be either subsistence labor or a source of income.

My favorite of Joel Salatin’s many excellent books is his _Family Friendly Farming_ book, where he makes the point that if we want to keep our children down on the farm, we must help them find ways to envision themselves as having a viable future there – that means everything from teaching them the work itself to helping them start businesses of their own to treating them as apprentices and junior partners in the shared family agricultural project.  I suspect this is good advice for most families, not just farming ones.  Fostering as much competence and independence in children as possible, is, I think a tool for making viable and connected futures.  The idea that children’s proper work was making good grades, and achieving at sports, and that parents should handle household labor was not only an artifact of a period of long economic growth, but also an artifact of times when families were not expected to stay together, when the right and proper order of things was that children should grow up, move out, go to college and then start their own place somewhere else.  But that model is not fully viable in the face of our collective reality, and I think teaching our children to be competent at home carries with it, not an insistence on proximity, but preparation for it to move back to our lives.  Right now, millions of high school and college graduates and students have no summer job, have returned home, after living their whole lives in places where “work” was something you did outside of home.  Making space in the home to share the subsistence work we’re all going to need is part of preparing for the future.

I realize that it is a long step from Isaiah’s pan of cornbread, or Eli’s starting the washer to them producing their own crops, managing their own household (or a portion of mine), raising their own livestock or starting up their own businesses. And I realize that by the time they are men, things will be different and it is possible (I don’t think likely, but possible) that we will have shifted back into another mode. But it is a step, I think – that is, the things are linked contiguously – they are getting a sense of what work is, and how work will be the way they spend their lives.  I hope they will learn to enjoy working, to get through the parts of every job that are drudgery, to delight in the parts that are engaging, and to enjoy working together with others. 

I sometimes run into people who advise against making children do particular kinds of work because their parents made them do it, and they hated it.  They had to weed the garden or carry wood, scrub the toilet or do the shopping, and the injustice of that shaped forever their relationship to that work. I admit, I sort of identify – my sister and I had to share the dishwashing chores, and I still rather dislike doing dishes, more than 20 years later.  On the other hand, I have yet to find a way to compel magical elves to do the dishes for me, and so, I do them.  When people tell me that their mother made them weed the garden and thus, for 30 years, they never touched dirt, it makes me think that the problem was not the cruelty of their parents but the lack of ubiquity of gardens , that is, that had their most-hated job been something they had no choice but to suck up and do, they’d have gotten over their repression much faster and been the better for it.

That said, I’m fully expecting my children to write a tell-all book someday about me.  My prayer is that the very worst thing that will be said about me (unlikely, but a girl can hope, right?) is that she made her sons pull weeds, wash clothes, cook dinner and get down and dirty, keeping house with their parents.

Sharon

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Sharon May 17th, 2009

We recently had a friend of mine and her 14 month old son to lunch at our place.  I got to chat with both, and see the full range of her bright young boy’s vocabulary.  There was “Goggie” (Doggy), “Kiki” (kitty), “Hi” “No” “Mama” and then “Moo” “Baa” “Quack” and “Cock a doodle”

What’s interesting about this linguistic range is not its adorableness (although it was adorable) it was that this little urban child, who had never seen a cow, sheep, duck or rooster in person until that day (we were able to cover most of them), had fully half of his vocabulary made up of agrarian animal noises.  Their family has a “Kiki” and he regularly sees “Goggies” on his walks around his neighborhood – since many of them are at nose level to him in his stroller, it is hardly surprising that he should take a compelling interest in them.  “Hi” “No!” and “Mama” are of obvious utility to a very small person, and need no explanation.

But there are many words of great utility and value to a very small child than the sounds that domestic animals make – one would think that “cookie” “milk” and “car” might preceed the farm animal noises.  And yet, they don’t.  And this is fairly typical – most children, who experience “the farm” and its life through books, and the occasional outing to a tourist farm, find themselves utterly riveted by these large animals with whom they know instinctively that they have a relationship.  My own sons all learned the sounds of animals long before many other equally valuable, and not much harder to say words as well.  I am a bit embarassed to admit, that I simply can’t remember right now whether it was Simon or Isaiah whose first word was “quack.”  But at least one of them said “quack” to our ducks before they said “Mama” to me.  This is perhaps less surprising, since  my children lived on a farm, and heard these sounds – but that seems to have little to do with how important they are in the imaginative world of young people.

In fact, I think it is not an exaggeration to say that the world of childhood *is* “the farm.” That is, the world that children dream of, and are told they should inhabit is that of a certain kind of farm – a diversified, nontoxic small farm, filled with animals to play with, vegetables and fruit that a child can pick and eat, hay bales to climb on, pleasant chores like egg collecting (and life on a farm has never dampened any of my children’s love for this job) and feeding of small creatures.  Children live in the world basic things – and there is nothing more basic than food, and its origins.

This is no less true whether you live on a farm, or like most children, don’t.  While there are many “city child” books, checking the shelves of any child’s library will almost certainly reveal a disproportionate number of stories about farms or farm animals – disproportionate because the world of very small children is mostly a world of familiarity and comfort – that is, most books for children under 3 do not emphasize distant things they have not seen.  Instead, they are about the world the children live in and are beginning to understand.  And the prevalence of the farm in children’s imagined world, in their toys, their play, their books, their videos suggests that young children are being told that the farm is their world too – even when it is not, even when the farms they are invited to inhabit are gone.

And not just any farm.  Modern industrial agriculture has no place in this imagined world of young children.  The farms we see are the farms that once existed – small family farms, diversified, with many kinds of livestock, pastures, orchards, gardens, and other animals.  None of my children’s books show pigs in confinement pens, manure lagoons, debeaked hens, or crop dusters as part of this world.  Instead, they show children picking food and eating, it which precludes chemical agriculture.  They show children interacting with animals on grass, which means diverse small farming – that is, the imaginative world in which we originate is the one that we have tried so hard to eliminate in practice.

Even when the books acknowledge industrial agriculture, they find that they can only contextualize it in the diversified small farm.  Consider a book that my children own, called, creatively, “Tractor.”  In it, a huge tractor is shown in limited detail.  “Farmer Hill has a busy day ahead.  He is going to plow the field in his big green tractor.”  So we are told.  But the big green tractor happens to have a rooster on it, going “Cock a Doodle Doo!” on it.  A dog is barking, a hen and chicks and a duck and ducklings are superimposed next to this giant piece of equipment. 

We then are treated to a page of “checking the engine” “filling the tank with fuel” etc… until the next page when we read “On the way to the field he passes…” and then a list of farm animals, the usual ones with the usual adjectives, (wooly sheep, brown cow, hungry pig, noisy goose…), then one page of plowing, and back to the poultry and dog again.  Of the five pages in this book, three are visually as much or more about animals as about a tractor.  Why?  Because there isn’t that much to say about tractors – oh, later there will be for those interested in such things, but for 2 year olds, tractors are interesting because they are big, and because they are associated with farms.  Never mind that this particular tractor is radical overkill for the sort of farm would actually have these animals on the scale shown – the implication is that the tractor is interesting in large part because it is part of the farm of childhood, even when it isn’t.  The tractor is not just exciting, but interesting, because it is a vast thing in a comfortably known world, with plenty of other important things, living things, to lend interest to its big, green deadness.

Books for young children are about familiarity and comfort, about  pushing back the necessary and real strangeness of the world, even as you recognize that it is strange – yes, there are wild things and children go off to visit them, but when you come back, dinner is waiting and you are loved “best of all.”  Yes, you may be alone in the room with someone who is not mother or father but a nameless and different ”old lady, whispering hush” but here is your room, and your mittens, your comb and your brush and the moon, and all is well.  And yes, you will go out into the world, which is full of strange and large things, but it will be filled with things to eat, and animals to touch and places to run and trees to climb – that is, it will be your world. The ubiquity of the farm in children’s books implies that there are places like this in the world, where children can roam, and meet eyes with other living creatures, can find food and explore, not confined by the fences around the playgrounds or other spaces.

So children learn now, even more than before, that cows say “Moo” and that the farm is the world of childhood – but a world they will not often experience.  The kind of farm they dream of exists mostly in the memories of their parents and grandparents.  It was once possible to feel that most children had a farm somewhere in their experience and family – that is no longer the case.  If they do, it is most likely an industrial farm, with one or two kinds of crops and animals on it, probably kept in confinement.  While it can be fun to hide in a cornfield, a thousand acres of corn leave little space to play.

One of the first chapter books my children ever read, and one of the first movies they saw as ”The Wizard of Oz.” One of the things that struck me about the difference between the books and films is the subtle, but not unimportant role of agriculture.  In the movie, Dorothy’s family’s grey, dustbowl farm is “real” if troubled, whereas Oz is shown as magical, a place where food appears by magic – by trees that throw apples, say, or by servants in the Emerald City.  Dorothy longs to go home to the farm, which is a place prosperous enough, despite the times, to feed not just Aunt Em, Uncle Henry and Dorothy, but three farmhands as well.

In the book, the situation is reversed.  The dustbowl farm barely feeds them – it takes the light from their eyes and leaves them desperately impoverished and suffering, and a large part of Oz’s magic is its fertility – instead of the dance of the Lollipop kids and the Wicked Witch to astound her, Dorothy is as much astounded by the creeks, the lush fields and prosperous farms of Munchkinland as she is by the good witch of the North.  The books do not rhapsodize so much about home – in fact, in a later volume in the series, Dorothy escapes Kansas to Oz, and manages to bring Aunt Em and Uncle Henry with her.  

In either case, the place where the farms are real ends up being truly home – all the love Dorothy feels for the scarecrow can’t keep her in Oz when Auntie Em needs her, and she’s returning to a troubled, but possible land.  All the ties Aunt Em and Uncle Henry have to Kansas can’t make it home, when the land gives out and they eventually lose everything, and the lush land of Oz beckons.  Home is where the farms are.  Ironically, though, Dorothy’s grey dustbowl farm, where she walked the pigpen fence, where Auntie Em and Uncle Henry could provide work for three employees even during the Depression, is as lost to us as Oz is, in some ways – or is it? 

There are a number of farms near me that have become tourist farms, and I think these fail just as deeply to connect children to farming in some ways, as the industrial ones do.  For reasons of legal liability, children can mostly not actually do very much interacting with these animals – so they see sheep who have become accustomed to being fed pellets from small hands crowding to a fence to stick their noses through.  It is certainly valuable that small children get to pet a sheep, to feel a warm, damp nose against their hand, and the feel of tangled wool.  But it isn’t enough – these sheep aren’t busy being sheep, they are busy rubbing the hands that feed them.  They are pets, by necessity.  Yes, it is wonderful for children to get to witness shearing, or collect eggs – even if the eggs are purposely left in the nest boxes, and the sheep’s wool is composted afterwards. 

None of this is bad, but it also gives you little sense of the relationships that attach to domestic animals, that are implied by them. That is, small scale farm polyculture is to a large degree about relationships with animals.  In our society, the only way we make relationships with animals to turn them into pets – and certainly, some farmers and some farm animals do turn their creatures into pets – even the best intentioned working farmer will have some animals that crossed the line from “farm animal” to “companion.”  But it is worth knowing that human beings and animals have had intense and meaningful relationships which were neither “pet” nor the deep inhumanity of industrial agriculture.

And there are some people who might say that this traditional and complex relationship between domestic animals and farmers is bad – after all, it involved measures of trust and care, and in many cases, ended in death for the animal at the hands of people who cared for it.  My turkeys run to me for food – and I give it to them, give them one perfect summer and autumn on the farm, and then we eat them. Most people these days would shield their children from that reality – the animals they want their children to see are always cute, always safely penned and neutered, usually babies.  Their future is not something children are supposed to contemplate. 

And yet, most of the stories we tell children have a dark part as well, and this is no accident.  In _Goodnight Moon_ the child, clearly from an affluent family, is alone, apart from his parents, isolated in a separate space, with an unrelated “old lady” whispering hush.  I’ve written before about the absence of the mother in _The Cat in the Hat_.  The place where _The Wild Things Are_ is frightening.  Children “go” there, when they lose control and become “king of all the wild things” and get so angry at their parents that they tell them “I’ll eat you up!” – and thus must process their fear that their parents will stop loving them because of this dark and frightening anger.  The fairy stories we tell children are frightening – we sanitize them, but it is not clear that the old versions were not better for children.

The dark part of the diversified farm is this – our food did not begin on styrofoam trays in plastic wrappers.  The dark part of the farms is this – that we love and relate to the animals and then we kill some of them. Unless there are no animals on the farm, farms are steeped in death – sooner or later even the most ardent vegetarian farmer will have to put down an injured or ailing animal, may have to choose between a pest animal and one they wish to preserve and protect.  There is no retirement home for extra animals.  Death is, at every level, from the microscopic to the macroscopic, at home on every farm.

The funny thing is, it is adults, more than children, that are traumatized by this.  Oh, plenty of children go through vegetarian phases, but my own children are surprisingly capable of sustaining multiple knowledges – that some animals stay on the farm, and others do not, that the meat we eat comes from somewhere, that it had a life that preceeded it. 

In my copy of _The Year at Maple Hill Farm_ which, in the late 1970s, I read aloud to my own baby sister, the cycle of the year, wild and tame on a farm, is described in minute detail, from the hatching of eggs of all sorts (chicken, goose, robin, cuckoo, duck) to the end. In November, we are told “…before winter comes finally, a few of the animals leave the farm.  Some are sold.  The finest are borrowed by neighbors for breeding.  A few ganders are sent along as gifts.  Everyone likes ganders – you can’t have too many ganders – except in the barn through the winter.”  This is as closely as most of the books dare approach this subject.  Why does everyone like ganders?  Well, they are tasty (although you can tell this is a product of an earlier era – I love the idea of sending live ganders to my family, just to see the expression on their faces “here’s Christmas dinner, I assume you’ll know what to do with it.”;-)).  Why don’t we want them in the barn through winter?  Because the hay and grain may not hold out, and we can afford to keep only a few males for breeding.  It is the way of farming with animals.  It is the dark part of the story that lurks around the edges of the surface.

And it is one of the reasons I don’t think that the farm of childhood is simply nostalgic – that is, the farm is a good place for children for all its ambiguity.  It is not all that there is – children need contact with wild things too, and with the cities and towns they live in – but it is important that children experience farms, and food, as they really are – and as we want them to be.  By “want them to be” I do not mean sanitized or purified into petting zoos – but real farms, where real fiber and food, real things that matter to children come from, and where children can participate, can see that work and play are not always easily divided from one another.  This includes some knowledge of life and death, and of the cycle of life.  Without connection to the origins of their food, and the pain that sometimes underlies it, children risk growing up, as so many have, without a sense of the value of that food.

In the world as a whole, the farm, as I have described it, is part of most children’s world.  85% of farms worldwide are diversified small farms – many of them tiny farms on the edges of cities, others large farms in grain raising areas, or small dairies.  Children live and grow on these farms, and in the developing world, and through most of human history, were tied to them – they may never have lived on a farm, but there was a grandmother or an uncle with a farm, or a farm down the road that would employ them in the summers.  Never have children been so far away from the sources of their food and their imagination as they are in the western, developed world.

I had a farm as a girl – it belonged to my great uncle – my cousin Amy and I would load vegetable from their truck garden to be hauled to market, would chase each other in and out of the dark, cool hen house, and dare each other to climb to the hayloft to see the kittens.  I did not spend nearly as much time there as I would have liked, and it was not perfect, but it lives in my memory, imprinted, in ways that other experiences do not – as a memory of perfect summers, in a child’s place.

We would not repeat to our children endlessly the noises of domestic animals if they did not matter to us, even if we can no longer fully articulate why they matter.  We would not show them the farm so constantly and urgently if the farm did not matter to them.  They know it does.  We know it does.  But just as urgent as teaching them the language of animals and showing them where carrots come from is the work of making these farms real again, in all their imperfections, with their dark side intact, but whole, and a place where children can visit.

We invite as many people as we can to our farm, knowing that it will sometimes disappoint – the children will get dirty and sometimes even get manure on them.  The barn will have flies sometimes.  The animals won’t always want to play.  At some point the hens’ eggs will all be collected, and there will be no more until tomorrow, or we will be hatching, and will say “no collecting.”  At some point, a creature will become ill, or die. At some point something will kill and eat something else.  Sometimes the meal on the table derives from a former playmate.  I don’t think these things are bad for the children who visit us – some of whom knew all of these things before, and some of whom did not. 

If I ever accomplish one thing, I hope it will be to encourage more small farms, perhaps enough that most children in the so-called “developed” world, will have a farm in their lives – not a petting zoo, but an actual farm.  These can be city lots turned into microfarms, or CSAs that allow families to come pick up their share and see the land that produces their food.  They could be the truck farm that grandmother and grandfather made when they retired, or the farm that grew out of a neighbor’s suburban lot and backyard chickens.   I do not wish to see the farm dwindle to an Oz or fairyland, lost entirely to the children raised on its tales.

The story of the farm was never wholly clean, never perfect.  The role of the story has been to teach children that underneath the strange and dark parts, is an overarching comfort – a place where they can discover where food comes from, and wonder what another creature thinks of them, where they can touch and feel things both warm and beautiful, and a little ugly, with the hand of a grownup reassuring them that all these things, dark and light, go together in perpetuity, like children and the farm. 

Sharon

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Sharon February 5th, 2009

The Jewish Holiday of Tu B’Shevat, the New Year of the Trees (yup, Jews have a special holiday for trees – it is their birthday!) is coming up, and in homeschool this week, we read  _Planting the Trees of Kenya: The Story of Wangari Maathai_.  It tells the story of Maathai’s Green Belt movement, and its role in reclaim land from desertification in Kenya. 

When we finished the story, Isaiah said, “I don’t want us to cut down too many trees for our stoves, because then the soil would wash away like it did in Kenya.”  I assured him that we have enough firewood without taking down healthy trees, and that protecting our forest is very important to us. But I was secretly pleased that he grasped the reality of the role of trees not just in “the world” but was able to understand how it affected *his* world. 

In _Depletion and Abundance_ I wrote about the acute need to get our children into relationship with nature – but not nature out somewhere in the distance, but the complex, sometimes damaged and grubby but very real nature that they are embedded in:

“…we have to preserve nature in our man-made landscapes.  We must, in some literal and metaphorical way open up the boundaries of the enclosures and let our children out into their own world.  We cannot expect our children to be attached to a nature that is majestic, transcendent, and “over there somewhere.”  If they are to be invested in the preservation of their future, they must grasp that nature is them – it is their world, their lawn, their garden, their park, their food, their soulds.  And they must get to know it in concrete, direct and real ways – both knowing about it and knowing it with hands and mouth and nose and body.”

For most of us, particularly those who don’t live as I do in rural settings, getting our kids out into our gardens may be one of the most urgent projects we can do.  Gene Logsdon wrote about gardening in _The Contrary Farmer_ that the garden is the “proving ground” for the farm.  He meant that gardeners try out many techniques that can be adapted to farm scale.  But it is also the proving ground for the new generation of farmers – if we are to scale up from 2% of the population involved in food production to the 10 or 20 or 30 percent we will need in the future, those farmers will come first from the garden.  Maybe even your garden.  And if we are to produce a world full of people concerned with a sustainable ecology, they will come from the garden ecology. 

I want my children to live in the garden – and that means welcoming them into it, making it accessible to them, setting them to work in it, helping them play there beside us while we dig or hoe.  I want them to dream in the garden, and of the garden, so even though it is twice as much work to plant with Asher’s help, we want him to help plant.  Last year when he was two, it was his job to take care of all the “baby” earthworms we uncovered – he would cover them up with a little bit of soil very carefully when the dirt turned them up. 

A child accessible garden starts at the dreaming stage, in winter.  Some books I really like about making children’s gardens and children’s playspaces are these:

_Great Gardens for Kids_ by Chris Matthews – A beautiful book with tons of great ideas for incorporating kids activities into the garden.  My older boys were immediately taken by the idea of a carnivorous bog garden, a daffodil maze, and the catmint cat basket. 

Sharon Lovejoy’s two books _Roots, Shoots, Buckets and Boots_ and _Sunflower Houses_ are terrific, filled with kid friendly ideas for gardening.  My kids loved the year we made a Pizza patch – a circular garden in the shape of a pie, with pizza topping plantings (including calendulas and marigolds for “cheese” along with the tomatoes, basil, eggplant and peppers).  My friend Alexandra has made a playhouse for her children out of sunflowers with morning glories trained across for the roof.  And this year, we’re planning a butterfly flower garden in the shape of a butterfly.

What about books for kids about gardens?  This time of year, storytime often features garden stories.  Here are some of our favorites:

_Weslandia_ by Paul Fleischman.  Wesley doesn’t fit into his mainstream culture, but he does pay attention at school and one summer, he decides that his summer project will be “to grow his own staple food crop – and found his own civilization.”  And believe it or not, he does – the strange weeds that show up in his garden plot turn out to have a myriad of uses.  This is just a flat out great book!

_A Kid’s Herb Book: For Children of All Ages_ by Lesley Tierra is one of my own favorite herb books, and a big hit with my kids.  While I admit, the stories are a little boring (12 variations on “finding the magic herb”), the book is generally very good.

_Eddie’s Garden and How to Make Things Grow_ by Sarah Garland is cute – my kids think the little sister who eats worms is hysterical.  Very good garden book.

_How Groundhog’s Garden Grew_ by Lynne Cherry is perhaps my single favorite children’s gardening book – lovely, lovely illustrations, and a great book.  Every kid could use this!

_A Gardener’s Alphabet_ by Mary Azarian – wonderful woodcut illustrations covering real things like “prune” and “arbor.”

_Pumpkin Circle: The Story of a Garden_ by George Levenson.  Lovely, rhyming slightly mysterious introduction to the lifecycle of a pumpkin, that uber-kid plant. 

This is just a small selection of children’s garden books – there are many others and on my long to-do list is a full list of them. 

Ok, onto strategies for bringing kids into the garden.

 1. Start ‘em early.  I was running a CSA when the kids were babies, so we *had* to spend time out there – a lot of it.  They could play on the grass or in the playpen or in the dirt, but they had to get used to being out in the garden with us.  Just like you have to go to work, or do the dishes, the garden should be treated as fun, but essential from as early as possible.

 2. Make it kid friendly – this can be a pile of dirt and a spoon, or it can be elaborate play structures for their entertainment.  But think about how to make it friendly – can you draw hopscotch or foursquare on the sidewalk next to your garden beds?  Can you give them a garden of their own, or a section of yours?  What about a little fountain to give them water to play in?

3. Get them involved from the beginning – my kids love to look at seed catalogs with me, and have strong opinions about what flowers and herbs we should be growing.  We plan kid projects – we’ve done our pizza garden, an alphabet garden (a plant for every letter) and a three sisters garden, as well as other projects.

4. Assign garden chores.  Yes, I know some people will say “I came to hate the garden because my Mom made me hoe.”  So what?  I hated doing dishes when my Mom made me do them, but since they need doing, I went on to do dishes without whining.  Chores are a fact of life, and if you are getting your family’s food from the garden, they should be helping.  Little kids will love helping, while bigger kids may whine, they can still do their share.  Treating the garden as optional trivializes it.

5. Be out there together.  Make your garden space, however big or small, a place you live in.  That way, when the hummingbird comes to the feeder for the first time, or you see the first monarch, when the cherry tomatoes come ripe or the melons are ready for thumping, well, you’ll be together. 

6. Let them eat – encourage your kids to scavenge, plant lots of snackable things – this is what everbearing and alpine strawberries and cherry tomatoes are for.  But don’t underestimate your kids – when they are in the garden, they’ll try things they’d never touch on a plate.  So plant greens, edible flowers, anything and everything.  And when the peas all get devoured by the kids shrug and accept that it is a good thing.

Sharon

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