With my oldest at 11 1/2, I have now read My Side of the Mountain, the entire Little House series 3 times (and will shortly embark on the fourth), Winnie the Pooh and the Mary Poppins Series four times.  We’re still discovering new books to read and re-read, but I thought I’d mention some of the best, including a few less obvious ones than the classics above.   I’ll also mention a few classics we’ve had less than total success with, although, of course, your mileage may vary.

Every kid in my house gets a story at bedtime (sometimes both of us reading simultaneously) most nights, and the range of preferences is pretty large.  Isaiah likes animal stories and  adventure, Simon likes everything, especially stories that seem real to him,  Eli loves poetry and Asher jumps back and forth (at nearly six) between picture books and chapter books, and has a taste for magic and fantasy.

Good books and good read-alouds are different, I find.  There is considerable overlap between them, of course, but some books that aren’t quite as compelling read to yourself are fabulous read-alouds if you hit them at the right moment in childhood, and some wonderful classics aren’t ideal read-alouds unless you do considerable on-the-fly editing.  Different families will have different opinions, of course, but I find a few ingredients make books especially good for reading out loud.  Many of them come from the virtue that for most of us, reading out loud slows you down, and forces you not to skim over anything.  As a fast reader, what I find is that I am required to take full notice of parts of the book that I might not attend to fully were I not simultaneously reading (or listening to Eric read) and listening.

1. A certain kind of dry humor.  There are some books that are simply funniest when you read the jokes out loud.  My favorite example of this is _Cheaper by the Dozen_ where much of the humor involved is most effective when you hear it read – even the reader will find it funnier that way.  _Three Men in a Boat_ which incredibly wonderful anyway, is another book where simply slowing down to read it out loud makes the comedy more effective.

2. High adventure of a certain sort – storms on boats, pirates, sword fights, horseback races, etc… all demand to be read aloud in minute and meticulous detail – every sword slash or adventure is detailed.  For someone reading silently to themselves, it can be hard to fully savor every detail in the way you can when voices and description beg to be read outloud.  _Treasure Island_, Howard Pyles _Adventures of Robin Hood_ and _The Hound of the Baskervilles_ are obvious examples, but this is, of course, one of the appeals of the Harry Potter books and books like _The Tale of Despereaux_ as well.

3. Certain kinds of style and language.  There isn’t one kind of writing style that is suited to being read out loud to children – wonderful children’s books come in all sorts.  At the same time,  it is harder to hide weaknesses of style when reading aloud than reading to oneself.  I know for example, that I wept at _Black Beauty_ as a girl.  I made a stab at reading it out loud to my kids, however, and we were all bored stiff.  Some children’s books substitute extensive description for good description, frankly.  Particularly for younger children (or for everyone when it is well done) I’m partial to a certain unadorned quality in my language – just good, clean, elegant bare prose (of the kind I never write myself, sadly).  Laura Ingalls Wilder (particularly in _Little House in the Big Woods_ which was the book of hers least amended by her daughter), Robert Heinlein (whose juvenalia like _Have Space Suit Will Travel_ makes for delightful read alouds) and Patricia MacLachlan are all very different practitioners of the art of producing amazingly clean prose for children.  When the writing is more elaborate and stylized, there’s a certain flow and grace to it that allows for good reading – why children who don’t really understand all the words can enjoy _Ivanhoe_ or _Midsummer Night’s Dream_ or _Robinson Crusoe_.  There are some children’s book authors who really have this gift down – Sterling North, E. Nesbit and Jane Yolen can be counted on for stylized prose universally perfect for reading aloud.

I do have one rule for reading children’s books – never assume you want to read a sequel – and never start a book with a thousand sequels unless you are ready to read the other ones.  I admit, my children’s passion for the _Redwall_ books has worn me down some – they are all exactly the same, and while one is delightful, nine is not better.  Also, beware the tagged on sequel – _Ella of All of a Kind Family_ (the last of Sidney Taylors series about a Jewish family in WWI era NY), _The First Four Years_ , _Jo’s Boys_ and all the books after the second Anne Shirley book get old pretty fast for the reader.  Some children are content to say “ok, this isn’t very good, let’s stop” others must complete a sequence.  It certainly won’t kill me to read books I find dull, and I do (and hey, it is better than the years of reading _Green Eggs and Ham_ nine times a day, or worse when Eli at about a year had to read the thrilling cliff-hanger _Who Says Quack?_ over and over again), but it can save someone some trouble to establish a stopping point early on.

The Birchbark House by Louise Erdrich  A wonderful, charming, funny book about growing up among the 19th century Ojibwe.  Frankly, if I was going to read the _Little House_ series, with its problematic relationships to Native Americans and westward expansion, I thought it was important that my kids read books that were just as compelling and brilliant about the Native Experience – and this is a glorious book to balance the expansionist, manifest destiny narrative that underlies so many westward bound children’s books.  Elizabeth Speare’s _The Sign of the Beaver_ is another good one.

Understood Betsy by Dorothy Canfield Fisher.  We first read this on a car trip into Vermont (if you can read in a car without getting sick  (I can, Eric can’t)  and have an adult or teen to do so, it is a wonderful way to make trips pass) and read the entire book.  It is a wonderful story for younger kids about a little girl who has been denied competence by her loving aunts, and who gains it when she comes to live with a Vermont farm family.  Simon has asked us to read this several times, even though he’s really a bit too old for it, because it is so beloved.

Snow Treasure by Marie McSwigan  There is no real evidence that this ever happened, but that doesn’t change the fact that the story of young Norwegian children sneaking gold past Nazis on their sleds isn’t just one of the most enjoyable children’s books out there.  I adored it as a child, and after reading it out loud to my sons, it received the encomium “It is just too short.”  It also has a somewhat unique narrative in that this is a story not about children shedding the adults in their lives, or about malicious or foolish adults, but about adults and children of both genders working in tandem together, and respecting each other’s capacities.

Rascal by Sterling North  I loved this book as a child, and particularly enjoyed reading it to my sons.  Isaiah, especially adored the stories, which are tinged with both nostalgia and sorrow, and regard the adult world with a critical eye that I think resonates with children.  Rascal is Sterling North’s pet racoon, and his stories of growing up in a world only marginally touched by adults are glorious.  This is the ideal animal story book.

Meet the Austins by Madeline L’Engle.  My kids liked here Wrinkle in Time and the Murray/O’Keefe series a lot, but somehow the Austins, without the science-fictiony details have appealed to them more, perhaps because they feel very real.  We picked this one because it deals with some of the issues of adding difficult children to your life, but it also is a book that simply describes what it is like to be a kid in an unusual family very well.  Unfortunately, most of the sequels deal with Vicky Austin’s love life and aren’t of any particular interest to my boys, all of whom are too young to regard that as anything but revolting.

Captains Courageous I admit, I’ve often Kippled. I like Kiping’s children’s literature quite a lot, and this is my favorite – perhaps because I grew up along the New England coast in a family that included a number of fishermen, I have a taste for boat literature.  We’re working our way on this now, and loving every second of it.  This is the perfect children’s adventure story in many ways.

Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis – my sons loved this story of Great-Depression era wanderings of an orphaned Michigan boy seeking to find his father.  Through tent cities, bad foster homes and into the jazz world, Bud is just a delightful character and again, very real seeming.

Some failures:

The Swiss Family Robinson I remember liking this one, but my kids hated it.  Besides the heavy handed Christian moralism, which didn’t bother me as a kid, but does annoy my children, their main objection was the perfectly correct statement “but every time they see a new animal, they shoot it.”  Plus, they correctly thought that it was too convenient that everything anyone could want was always available on the ship.

On to Oregon by Honore Morrow.  You know, I’m a big proponent of addressing the problems of racism and sexism in older children’s books by discussion, rather than demanding that all great books be untroubling in those regards.  At the same time, there are a few books we’ve taken a shot at that turned out to be so appallingly racist without having much else to redeem them that I simply couldn’t read them.  _On to Oregon_ was one of them – the “all indians should be murdered” rhetoric is just to revolting to bother with.  I found _Half Magic_ (which I’d loved as a kid) and _Hitty: Her First 100 Years_ to also be simply without sufficient virtue to justify working through the worldview they arose from.

Heidi by Johanna Spyri  I’ve never been able to get my kids into this, even though they should like the goats, the reasonably light-handed German romanticism and the story.  I admit, when I was a kid I kind of skimmed lightly over the long section about Heidi’s exile in the city myself, preferring her life on the mountain, but my children just got bored there and started to wander off.  I don’t think it is the gender thing (plenty of books about girls in our repetoir, giving the lie to the claim that boys won’t read about girls – although if they start kissing, boys or girls are right off Simon and Isaiah’s list), and I’m not sure what it is.

This is only a partial list of some of our favorites, but perhaps you’ll have suggestions of your own!

Sharon

This occasioned some comment among the event’s organizers – a number of the adults mentioned that they too had the same wish, and expressed surprise that a child should wish for this.  There was amusement when I said that we did, in fact,  live on a farm.  But I also knew what Isaiah meant.

You see, Isaiah from as early as I can remember, took to this life in ways my other children did not.  They all love the animals and the open spaces, the creek and the gardens, the climbing trees and the woods to play in, but of all my children, Isaiah is organically, naturally, innately a farm child.  Of my sons, he is the most fascinated by plants and animals, most anxious to participate in anything domestic.  When he was younger, he hated to leave the farm, although he’s grown more adventurous with time.

Isaiah loves to cook and can bake a mean pan of cornbread almost by himself or a sheet full of chocolate chip cookies.  He can name more plants than Eric can, and when Asher scraped a finger recently, Isaiah was the one who ran to the lamb’s ears to make a bandage for him.  Every animal on the farm likes and trusts him, and he alone can pick up every bird on the whole farm.  He loves to build and mend things.  When he was two, as we left for a visit to his Grandmother in New York City, each child was allowed to pick something to bring with them for the trip.  My other children brought favorite books and toys.  Isaiah brought a salad he’d picked himself – sorrel, mint, lettuce, mizuna, arugula – as a gift for his grandmother.  I think that salad still says something deep about my child.

He’s not a perfect child by any means – he can be just as cranky and mean to his brothers as anyone else –  but he has an astounding generosity for a child his age, something that seems innate in him, since he has had it since birth.  When there isn’t enough candy to go around, Isaiah is the first to offer his up to a friend or a brother.  He likes giving things away so much that he saves up his money to make more donations of trees and animals to the Heifer Fund than the ones we subsidize.  If he does spend his money on himself, it is often for plants – while his brothers want candy or toys, Isaiah just bought himself a bamboo plant which he carefully carries out to the porch each morning and in every cold night.  I take no credit for any of this – it all comes from deep inside of him, and we are fortunate that he is so well suited to his place.

And I know, because he tells us, what Isaiah’s farm dream is – he wants more animals, more kinds of creatures.  He wants a tall, two story barn with a hayloft, and ideally, barn cats to chase and bales of hay to climb in.  He wants more of the animals to be his own special ones, his to care for and choose.  He wants to sell more things, be a true working farm with people coming down the drive to buy eggs and plants – and sometimes from him.  He wants it to be beautiful to others, beautiful to us, integral to the landscape and to the community – the place our neighbors come to buy what they need that we can provide.  He wants to be part of the diversified small farm of every child’s dream.

I admit, I dream of a hayloft myself, but I can’t give him that…as yet.  Our hay barn remains a small, low building.  But what we can perhaps give him is precisely the rest of it – slowly, slowly we are returning from days Isaiah can barely remember, to being a true working farm.  Over the years of my intensive writing projects, we’ve let many of things we did in our first CSA years fall apart – the gardens were enough to feed us but have gotten smaller, many maintenence projects were deferred for lack of time and energy as the computer took up more and more of my days.

I still have to finish one more book (by spring of next year), but the pace has slowed and I am able to focus on our next steps.   Like Isaiah, I have a “real farm dream” – but it is slightly different.  It has more perennials in it, and different animals, a hoophouse for winter greens, summer heat lovers and rapid solar drying of my herbs.  It has a small building for displaying our wares – the eggs, the bedding plants and herbs, the tinctures, salves and creams, salad greens and flower,  a list of other products for sale - rabbits, dairy goats, baby chicks. 

Eventually it has a two story barn with a hayloft and room enough for all the creatures that eat our good grass and grow fat and rich with milk.  Eventually, I dream there will be hayloft.

Someday I dream of  barter with the neighbors for pasturage, perhaps, for a pair of working horses to haul logs out of the woods for firewood and cut hay.  Or maybe we’ll finally break down and get a tractor, who knows.  I understand the horses better, though.

Eventually the young perennials I am planting right now will grow large and begin to produce, and I will have nuts and new fruits to sell, and elderberry syrup and currant and aronia juice to sell.  I’m waiting until the children have the fun of climbing up the trees to help the harvest – it is hard to believe that someday they will need to climb.

Eventually, we will begin seeing the fruit of our breeding and selecting of small backyard dairy goats for thrift and hardiness – and I hope we will begin to see them popping up in yards.  I find that the best advertisement for the goats is the goats themselves – it is not possible to meet them without beginning to consider ways you could bring these small creatures home to your own yard.

I’m still mulling over sheep in the long term, and a host of other projects.  My goal is a year round income – products that come and go with each season, workloads that move around the year, if not evenly, gracefully. 

I dream of a place to teach classes, to invite people in.  I dream of neighbors all sitting down to a homegrown thanksgiving turkey.  I dream of open-farm days and tomato tastings. 

I have no idea how many of these dreams will come true, or whether Isaiah will ever get the farm he dreams of.  I hope he does – at least some of it – with us. I hope as he grows bigger, we are wise enough to let him make as much as he can of our place in his image, so that he doesn’t feel he has to go off, seeking a farm that he could never find at home.  I tell him that we can try and make our farm into what he wants – that it will take time and determination and work, and if he’s not afraid of those things, it may well happen.

The old saying “Doing has no need of wishing” is only partly true, you know.  It is true that you need not stand about in hopeless desire for something that seems so far away an unattainable if you set to making it happen.  But there is a time and a place for wishing, for the innocent dreaming of what could be.  I’m glad my son wishes a farm, and I’m looking forward to a long future of doing the work of making both our wishes come true.

Sharon

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

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

 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

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

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

But this year he really got it – we had some snow last weekend, and Eli got that the snowpants helped keep him dry, so when he wanted to go out to play in the fenced yard,  he put on snowpants, all by himself.  Now the little hitch in this story is that the snowpants were his three year old brother, Asher’s, and he could only get part way into them. Eli, at 4’8 is a strapping young man, and you can just imagine how the toddler pants fit.   And then the boots that he found were his Dad’s.  Oh, and he only found one of them.  So Eric found him outside on the front porch, hopping as best he could in a 3 year old’s snowpants and one giant boot.  And the snow had mostly melted.  But still.

Now we laughed (because we knew he would forgive us) but silly as it looked, this was a huge accomplishment for Eli, and while we were finding appropriate weather gear and helping him get it on, we told him how terrifically proud of him we were – and we were.

If you had to describe me, the words “wordy” “overeducated” and “overthinker” probably wouldn’t be wildly inappropriate.  I think some part of me assumed that my kids would live in language, as I do, like fish in water.  Instead, I got a little boy for whom language is a mystery, who fits into words about as well as he fit into those boots and snowpants.  He’s healthy, happy, funny and athletic – but words are not his thing, and probably never will be.  The odds are good that he’ll always need his parents or some other family member to help him navigate the world, at least some of the time.  Having an autistic kid is rather like going to the shelter to adopt an puppy, and coming home with a kitten.  It isn’t that kittens are bad – they are terrific – but if you go around thinking that you are going to get it to walk on a leash and bark for you, you are in for a rough time.

But that, at least for me, is the great gift of having a disabled child as well.  Because while having your puppy meow can be shocking and overwhelming, especially for parents who deal with much tougher permutations or deep health issues – it also does a lot to help you recognize what really matters – and that spills over into your worldview and tends to mellow it.  It is hard to spend a lot of time worrying that one kid might get into a second tier college, or might not make first string soccer, while you are getting really excited because your 11 year old finally walked himself to the bathroom with his crutches.  Disabled kids have their challenges, but they also get you right down to brass tacks – because of Eli I know that I’ll be thrilled if each of my boys is a good man, a mensch, does good work in the world and grows to fulfill their potential.  This is truly a gift – it is immensely freeing, and frankly, it saves a lot of time and energy.

But being freed from expectations doesn’t mean that facing a shifting world with kids with disabilities isn’t hard.  There are plenty of pleasures and compensations for most of us, but they can’t override the basic fear that a world already hard for our kids, is about to get less hospitable.

I’m grateful to a single mother who jump-started this post about what to do  by sending me part of a lovely piece she’d written on the subject of adapting with her two special-needs daughters, one with a potentially life-threatening condition.  This is what she wrote:

Like many parents of special needs children, I wonder – and worry – a lot about what effect this strange new world we are racing into will have on our sons and daughters. So many wonderful advances had been made in how we teach non-typically developing children and so many new technologies make life easier for people will all sorts of handicaps. What will happen when the battery powered wheelchairs can’t be recharged? When the school buses stop running? When the less common drugs are unprofitable to manufacture? When the time need for a theory routine is need for gardening for wood chopping?

Then, last night, I had an epiphany. It doesn’t answer any of my questions, but it gave me a bit of comfort that I’d like to share with others.

My older daughter was getting ready to babysit with her girl scout troop, and as she went through the toy closet, she pulled out a copy of Pizza Party, a game for young children where each player has a cardboard slice of pizza with holes in it, and fills it with circles representing different topping in order to complete a slice. A couple of years ago, she’d adapted it to play with a blind friend, cutting pieces of paper, cloth and sandpaper to represent three of the four topping and gluing them onto the pieces. Every time they played there were lots of jokes about eating sandpaper pizza.

I realized that families (and friends) of special needs children are all ready used to adapting, as are adults who themselves have special needs. We look at the bits and pieces of daily life – from socks to knives and forks to stair to backpacks to toilets to homework routines and lunch packing – and find different way of doing things that are better for us. And because children grow and change, we have to keep changing how we do things. This goes for all children, of course, but for some parents, making the transition from finger food to cutlery means proving a spoon at the right time, and for others, finding the spoon with just the correct angle between the bowl and the handle, or bending a spoon, drilling a hole in the handle and wedging a peg in to provide a better grip.

And we learn to adapt on the fly – in restaurants, at friends’ houses, school picnics – anywhere our child wants to do something and we need to make a change. And later, if we are lucky, our children start making suggestions and fixing things on their own.

We do this until it becomes second nature for us – and other members of our families. I didn’t have to tell my older daughter how to fix the game so her friend could play it. She didn’t even ask if she could, just got what she needed and set to.

It’s nice to think that this ability to see that we need a different way of doing things will help us in the days to come.

I’ve found what she has – that the practice of living in a world we didn’t expect, of shifting to a different worldview and dealing with crisis as a routine part of my life, has, I think helped me adapt. 

Now don’t get me wrong – there’s a lot to be worried about in raising a kid with disabilities in a changing world.  But I do think it is worth starting with the assets, the benefits and the gifts.  I say this for several reasons.  The first is that I think those of us who have special needs kids have already had a kind of boot camp in adapting to shifting realities.  Unlike a parent who always knows what is coming next – first they crawled, then they walked, then they ran – we’ve gotten used to not knowing. 

The other reason is that we live in a society that so deeply undervalues the disabled and overestimates their burdens (and this is not to underestimate them – I realize many parents have children who are much more demanding than I do).  I think this is best epitomized in our reproductive culture, where the risk of having a disabled child (discoverable by amniocentesis) is listed as equivalent to the risk of late miscarriage/early stillbirth caused by amniocentesis itself.  That is, pregnant women are told that losing their wanted pregnancy at 16-18 weeks is a worthwhile risk, because otherwise, are just as likely to have a disabled child.  That is, our reproductive culture says that having your baby die and be born with Down’s syndrome or spina bifida are equivalent losses.  This is just one example of the thousands of ways we learn that having a child with a disability is bad, wrong, to be avoided at all costs. 

Many parents who choose to bear or adopt a child they know will be disabled are strongly discouraged – they are told over and over again that such a child will be an unbearable burden, that the burden will be a one-sided destructive force.  When parents discover an unsuspected disability, often the assumption is that the child is a total loss to the family, a disaster they have to bear up under.  My claim is not that the blessings of such children always compensate for the losses – what I’m trying to get at is that our society so heavily overestimates the suffering caused by a disabled child that I think it is urgent to recognize that such children do not exist solely as a drag on their families.  The assumption that such children will inevitably cost their siblings goes along with the idea that disabled children are a burden – and there’s some truth – they do cost their siblings something sometimes.  And they return something to them.

When Simon was small, he was terrified of the dark.  From very early on, he and Eli slept together – at first I couldn’t keep Eli from climbing in his crib, and by the time Simon was old enough to sleep in a bed, the two were inseperable at night.  My fearful, non-disabled younger son relied on the stability, warmth and comfort of his not-at-all fearful older brother.  When Simon awoke in the night, if Eli’s body was not nearby, he would cry out “I need E-li!!!!”  At no point in any of my children’s lives has the relationship ever worked one way, one child giving, the other taking – reciprocity is not always even, but it is always present, and has been present in the lives of most families of disabled children I know. 

This is important because as our society becomes less wealthy, and as certain kinds of reproductive healthcare become less part of many people’s lives, more of us will have disabled children – the idea of choosing whether to give birth to a child with a disability will probably not disappear entirely, but there is a very good chance that those options will be the territory of an increasingly small number of wealthy people.  And if times get hard enough, we will probably see more children who are damaged by drugs and alcohol, and more children who have disabilities that might have been minimized or repaired by costly medical treatment, but who now have no access to such treatment. 

One of the things we can and I think must do – for our own sakes and for the parents who come after us, is do what we can to change the assumption that disabled children a disaster, so huge a disaster that anything would be worse than having them.  This belief burdens parents, children, siblings, and it subtly shapes the culture in destructive ways – not just for disabled children, but for anyone who becomes disabled by illness or age. 

Ok, beyond appreciating what you can appreciate (and I know I have this one easy – my child is physically healthy and responsive to me – for many people the bright side can be harder to find, and I truly understand that), what kind of preparations for the future should we be making for our disabled kids?  What new challenges might we face, and how might we deal with them?

1. I would expect to see services decline and be disrupted in many cases.  To the extent that’s possible, most of us should have contingency plans and the ability to keep some of our kids’ programs going ourselves, or with help.

- To some degree, services for disabled children will likely be among the last things to go in school systems, because in the US, the Americans with Disabilities Act mandates special needs services.  In the early stages, parents may have to act as advocates for their kids.  But in places where there are no funds, and without a rapid federal response, services will be cut eventually. Even suing won’t make money magically appear.   Moreover, increasing numbers of climate change related natural disasters may close schools.  This means the huge and overwhelming burden of helping your kids learn to function in the world may fall on parents and extended family members.  That means learning now how to meet as many of their needs as possible – attend parent trainings, watch your child’s therapists, talk to them about dealing with disruptions.  Consider recruiting help – grandparents, college students, teenagers, neighbors – anyone good with disabled kids might be able to learn to provide some support, and take the burden off of parents.   I realize none of this is easy, especially for families facing more, not less economic pressure.  And being your kid’s therapist is not a delight.  But we do have to face the reality that we may have to do some of this work – or find ways to get others to do it.

2.  Financial planning for your child’s future is not sufficient – the money may not be there when your child needs it.  Make backup plans for kids’ longterm future that rely on people rather than funds.  Start preparing family members, including kids, for this reality early.

- We can see this now – the money we’ve been saving for our kids is disappearing rapidly. That means that instead of expecting our kids to live in an apartment with paid help after we’re gone, our kids may need to rely on an aunt or a sibling.  We need to talk about this, and make plans.  And our other children, or nieces and nephews need to understand – gently, lovingly, age appropriately – that we parents will bear the responsibility of our children as long and as fully as we can, but that someday, their sister or brother or cousin may need their help.  In our society, we tend to see this as unfair – and it is, a little.  But the truth is having responsibility for others is not only a burden.  We can and should teach our non-disabled kids to view it this way – while also keeping too-heavy responsibilities off their shoulders as long as we can.  It is a balancing act – but an important one.

3. Work as hard as you can now to help your child achieve their full, functional potential.  We need to make sure that our kids can do everything they are able to for themselves, and return as much as they can for others.  In some ways, the coming shifts may not be bad for some kids – those with intellectual limitations may find that they do better in a society that emphasizes practical skills more than this one.  Kids need to be taught the value of hard work and discipline (this is easier said than done with some kids, I know), and be taught to participate in their world.  Start early on whatever practical skills your child can manage.  The difference between a burden and a responsibility is a child who learns to contribute to the extent of their abilities.  Children should be taught a trade when possible, certainly to participate in household and family activities.  Children who are going to receive must also learn to give.

4. For children who depend on high-cost health care, begin now making contingency plans to keep that coming.  My hope is that we get some form of universal health care out of Obama’s “let’s hurl money at the problem” plan.  If not, all of us are going to have to be advocates who get to know the resources available very well – many of us already are, but as resources get more limited, making sure our kids get their basic needs met becomes more and more essential. Now is the time to talk to your doctor about ways to get an extra reserve of medications, to your utility about making sure you don’t shut off electricty to a child who depends on it. Now is the time to talk to your hospital and your community about ensuring health care for the most vulnerable.

5. Forgive yourself for your limitations as a parent.  This has been something of a challenge for us – early on we decided that we would not be the kind of parents of an autistic child who devote their whole existance to that child, to “overcoming” autism.  We explicitly decided that after Eli’s many hours of therapy and training, he should come home to playtime and family time, and to being a participant in our family, rather than the center of our world.  I still believe this, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t sometimes wonder whether we made the wrong choice, if Eli would be more functional if we worked with him constantly and shifted our focus.  As times get more difficult, parents are likely to have to try and take the place of more professionals – and, frankly, we’re likely to fail sometimes.  What we don’t won’t be as good as the army of speech therapists and physical therapists.  It won’t be perfect.  Our kids may not go as far as they could have in a richer world where everything was better.  Or they may go further in different directions.  But the truth is that if we’ve done what we can, we’ve done what we can, and beating ourselves up for our imperfections is a waste of time.

6. Don’t isolate your child from the community.  I know a mother of a recently-diagnosed autistic preschooler who tells me “we never go anywhere, we can’t take him anywhere, he does weird things, he has trantrums…”  This is the wrong approach, no matter how hard, how embarassing, how uncomfortable it is, your child needs her community desperately – we don’t know what the future is going to bring, but all of us are going to need community.  So as difficult as it is to load up the wheelchair, as uncomfortable as it is to take out a child who has tantrums, as hard as it is to ask for help or to ask the neighbor kids to include your child – we have to.  We have to find ways for our children to participate in our society, so that when our communities come together, it will be as natural to include them as it can be.  The same is true with extended families, biological and chosen – your kids will need their family, and the people who love them.

7. If you are preparing, invest in adaptive strategies that will make your life easier.  The best money we ever spent in our lives was the inheritance from my husband’s grandparents we spent on fencing our front yard – now I can be gardening without looking up in panic and wondering where Eli has wandered to.  To the extent you can, make your own life and your child’s life easier – make the barn wheelchair accessible, get the assistive devices or dog.  And don’t let what you hope will be blind you to the reality that you may have to deal with things as they are now – no matter how much you hope your child will toilet train before the apocalypse, get some large-sized cloth diapers.  Be prepared to go forward from where you are.

8. Despite my focus on the benefits, I don’t want to include too much sentimental bullshit here – the idea that G-d never gives you more than you can handle is, to my mind, so much crap – plenty of people, including me, are regularly over their limits.  Yes, you need to love your kids and appreciate them for what they are.  But remember, you also get to complain.  So does your spouse and so do their siblings.  You don’t have to be constantly happy and feel blessed – I’m a Jew, and in my faith, whining is a sacrament.  It is ok to be angry, be sad (and for those who may actually lose children in this, I can’t imagine walking in your shoes, and you don’t need my permission), to be pissed at G-d or the universe or fate, to be overwhelmed, to screw up.  This is hard stuff sometimes. Even when it is mostly good, sometimes it sucks – and the best way to drive yourself crazy is to deny.  Every parent of a disabled kid needs some good friends with shoulders to cry on, some people who will help out when you can’t take it any more, a certain measure of self-forgiveness, an outlet to distract yourself when you can’t take it anymore, and the ability to make a good Margarita or three.

I’m sure other parents in other circumstances have additional suggestions.  I hope this helps someone, I really do. 

 Shalom,

 Sharon

Now on the one hand, I think most of us realize that the traditional Western holidays and birthdays are kind of ridiculous.  Less is good for our kids, good for adults, good for our personal economies. 

 On the other hand, I also think gifts are important – they play an important role in our culture, and in difficult times, they may provide the only luxury items in our lives.  The idea of scrimping and saving to be able to afford one thing that our partner or grandkid or friend wants and needs, to offer a little beauty when really there has only been enough for necessities – these are good things, they have value.  That gift giving has been perverse and excessive is bad, but it doesn’t erase the value of all gifts.

And on a purely practical level, it is important to think about gift-giving well ahead (ideally well before now, but all is not lost, if you are just getting to it) if you are going to give handmade, trash picked, yard saled or homegrown (I could have just said “cheap” here )  gifts.  I discovered this during the year we went without buying anything new – let’s just say that the term “IOU” appeared more than a couple of times at our family gift exchange.  

So I encourage people to think now about gifts, and about their role in your family. Do you exchange gifts?  What kind?  Is this something you are happy with, or unhappy about?  Is there a way to shift your family’s gift giving to a kind that feels enriching and positive?  How?  What, exactly, can you give?  If budgets are tight, how can you overcome economic constraints?

On a practical level, my kids usually get one gift each for their birthdays from us, and one group gift (toy) along with a couple of books I want them to have each for Chanukah.  I buy the books over the course of the year, along with books for my nieces and for our friend’s kids, birthday party gifts, etc… Being a book person, that’s my favorite gift, and I spend a lot of time hunting for appropriate choices.  Perfect condition children’s books are pretty easy to find used, or new but at wildly discounted prices.  Plenty of wonderful adult books appear that way.  Books are so undervalued in our society – even if the books are clearly used, the value of good reading material is in no way undercut.  If money is tight – or even if it isn’t – used books make terrific presents.

It helps if you begin thinking long in advance – and occasionally really long.  No one tell Simon and Isaiah, but for several years, I have been picking up inexpensive superhero comic books at local library sales.  Some of them probably have collector value, but that’s not why I want them – I want my kids to enjoy them. Right now, at not-quite 7 and 5, they are a bit too young not to wreck them and a bit too young for this sort of comics.  But in a couple of years, they will receive them as a Chanukah gift.  I don’t think they’ll be less appreciated because Mom paid 10 cents apiece for them.

I don’t run across as many trash-picking opportunities out where I live, but my family that lives in suburbia often finds wonderful trash pick gifts.  My kids have long loved a wooden, rideable airplane, an absolutely beautiful toy that my sister trash picked for my oldest son when he was two.  My nieces play in a trash picked toy kitchen my step-mom rescued, and my son rides a bike his aunt and uncle saved from the dump and restored.  Check your dump, freecycle, garbage bins, etc…  If you have prejudices against trash picked articles, get over them – the kitchen pretend cooks just as well as a new one, the airplane rides beautifully and the bike is the best one ever, according to Simon, particularly since my son’s uncle spray painted it purple.

Ebay, Craigslist, Freecycle, barter networks, Goodwill, the Salvation Army, Thrift Shops - these are good places to get used and high quality toys, clothes and linens.  I also have seen good tools there, at reasonable prices.  My Goodwill routinely has brand new clothing of extremely high quality for very little money.  My own professional wardrobe comes from there, and I have bought gifts for kids and adults through them.

Homemade gifts are terrific – jams, jellies, baked goods, homemade treats of all kinds including liqueurs, candies, and dairy products are wonderful gifts.  Then there are hand knitted and crocheted, handsewn and homebuilt projects of all sorts.  Remember, they don’t have to be made from new or expensive materials.  Consider unravelling woolen thrift shop sweaters for yarn, or making mittens out of felted wool sweaters (cut out a mitten shape, sew the ends together and flip it inside out).  Build with scrap wood, repair broken goods, make quilts from old fabric.

Or give the gift of service – help your Mom clean out her attic.  Give your son a month of daily baseball practice with you.  Give your children a “get out of chores free” card.  Babysit for the new Mom, make dinner for the busy family, do some chore for your wife or husband, or fulfill a favorite fantasy.

 Charitable gifts are especially important now that safety nets are being overwhelmed by increased need.  My children give an animal to the heifer fund each year, and one year, everyone in my family got something poultry related plus a donation to Heifer.  We also give to relief groups, food pantries and Doctors without Borders as holiday and birthday gifts.

There are tons of options out there – no matter how poor we are, there’s almost always something to give.  I know there are people out there who really can’t have anything under the tree or on a birthday, but most of us, given a little time and thought, could find a gift that was appreciated and free, or very nearly so.

If you are going to buy something new, buy something with real longevity.  Spend your money carefully on things that will last, that have permanent value.  Choose nice clothing that will last your lifetime, tools that you will pass on to your children, toys your grandkids can play with.  And remember, you don’t have to fit it in a box – if you are saving for a piece of land, needed health treatments, some other piece of security – that’s a gift too.  Give your children the chance to give the whole family a gift (small children probably won’t get this – a certain amount of abstract reasoning is required) – that is, to put the resources you would have spent on Christmas towards paying off the house, getting your land, making sure Grandma is healthy for the holiday. Even children are more moral and generous than they are often asked to be. 

If you are facing birthdays or the holidays in despair, wondering how you will pay for it all, stop.  It will be ok.  Instead of seeing a well into which you must plunge your remaining financial security, start looking for ways to make holidays and birthdays inexpensive, comforting, and simple.

 Sharon

Now for my own 8th birthday, I received my first pocketknife, a prize that stunned me – because it had never occurred to me that I was old enough to have something as adult as my own knife.  I wish I could say that I still own it, but it disappeared into the world of lost things that is childhood long ago.  I do still have the scar on my right hand from where I ignored my father’s command to always cut away from yourself when whittling – and a strong memory of the flash of recognition I felt when I suddenly realized that grownups actually have reasons for some of the things they say .  But most of all, I kept the memory of how suddenly taller and older I felt because of the confidence my parents had in me.  I think that was the first time I suddenly really grasped that someday, I too would be an adult, and that I was on a journey in that direction.

As Eli approached 8, I somehow realized that some secret part of me believed that my sons would also receive pocketknives at the same age.  But, of course, for Eli, this is unrealistic – he’s autistic, and while he progresses steadily, he doesn’t yet have the ability to use a knife safely (of course, the above mentioned scar suggests neither did I, but he’s running even a bit further behind).  Every child is different, of course, and what one child can handle at six, another can’t until 10. 

Still, my husband needed a replacement for a lost pocketknife, and as long as I was ordering them, I lingered over knives suitable for children.  I hesitated a while, and then I ordered – not one, but four pocketknives suitable for young boys.  And I put them away in a corner to wait for the day when my sons are each of them ready – or perhaps, as I was, almost ready – to take that step towards adulthood. 

With Eli, there’s a part of this that is gesture of faith.  I hope and trust that the day will come that he is ready for this.  It doesn’t matter that much when it comes – I’m not in a hurry, just that it does.  But, of course, anytime we invest in our children’s future, we are investing our hope and trust that they will grow up safe and secure and become good and honorable people.   For me, this small investment in my children’s future competence – a competence that will be, I think growingly important in a depleted world – ensures me that when the day comes that each boy is ready, he will get that moment of feeling 10 feet tall, because his parents think he is grown enough to have a knife.

They come to us as babies or small children, and we look and try to find the men and the women they will be.  And bit by bit, we see them appear, we enable them to appear.  We push them back, we pull them forward, we risk our precious kids for the sake of the grown people we trust they will become, people we do not yet know, but must imagine.  This thing I do not know but must believe – that my children have a future, both rich and strange to me.  

I bought the pocket knives because I don’t know where the dollar is going and I don’t know where my husband’s job will be in a year or two.  I bought them because even if money is tight, this gift I want to give.  I bought them because I do believe that one day, I will see my oldest son take out his pocket knife is the pursuit of some ordinary bit of farm competence.  I bought them because no matter what the future is, my children will be men in it, and our children, men and women alike, will need good tools.  I bought them because I trust that even if I do not know where I am going, the journey into the future has promise and reason for hope.

 Happy Birthday, Eli!

 Sharon