Multiple Intelligences and Scheduling Activities--thoughts from Linda

 I love this response I got to my blog from my friend Linda!    It speaks to the multiple intelligences and spending times doing activities with your child.   It is really worthy of a careful read.  

I'm writing not as a parent but as a youth advocate and M.A. Ed. with 15 years working with home-schooled, alternatively-schooled and traditionally-schooled kids. And as someone who tends to think and write a lot about how we can provide sanity in the midst of the over-stimulation of this contemporary world, with my three wonderful nieces, ages 8, 10, and 13, in mind.

Great post, Peggy. I especially like your confessional, because in taking control of one's schedule, whether just for oneself or for the kids, we have to be willing to be real about our own proclivities as we figure out kids' temperaments.  I like the important lesson that there's no one way to do it "right." 

I am the same as you--I love myriad activities. As a kid I couldn't get enough of trying new things. I am happy my mom had me in ballet, art, roller skating, ice skating, gymnastics, swimming, tennis, piano, skiing lessons, pretty much anything I asked to do.... And I only wish we'd known about rock climbing and wilderness school! 

The thing I didn't do much of, that I look back and realize I truly wanted, is SHARED activities--I always wished my mom would do art or get in the pool or on the ski slope WITH me so we could--and this is perhaps the crux of it -- craft some narratives together. "Remember that time, when I fell on the bunny slope, and you had to help me up, and then you fell too..." 

I had those narratives, but only with other kids, not with adults. Of course I am sure my mom cherished the break time from her energetic kid. And she did sign us up once for a mother-daughter cooking class. THAT, of all the activities, really felt special, because she wanted to spend time with me. 

This is one reason I SO love and support the work you do, Peggy, to bring parents and kids together for shared self-exploration and getting to know our deep selves. It's so brilliant that you work with both at once, that your programs actually nurture the needs of both the child and the parent. I realize now that that was at the heart of what I wanted from my mom-- time for authentic exploration of "who are you? who am I??"

I'm aware that this is sounds at worst not helpful, or at best off-topic, in that it throws in yet another thing for parents to balance: kids and adults need their own activity time, their alone time, and, I'm saying here, it's the shared activity time that should not be overlooked.

Because the operative question, if you're a busy parent, is HOW to figure out the right balance, I'd like to suggest one heuristic: that we try configuring schedules of activities around something like the 'Multiple Intelligences' (Howard Gardner's theory)-- so that means you strive to allot time for the intelligences that are NOT covered by the school's curriculum and the soccer team etc. That would be the interpersonal, intrapersonal, existential/spiritual, and naturalistic ones. 

NATURALISTIC: Unless you go to a nature school or live on a working farm, engaging the natural world is not usually covered in the curriculum or in your home life. It would be nifty if something so elemental as learning to attune to our natural surroundings were not relegated to one week of camp in the summer, no?

INTERPERSONAL: Schools certainly provide important interpersonal learning time, or I should say "experimenting time", and they're slowly realizing the importance of offering actual social skills training--things like how to be a good friend, how to advocate for your needs, managing angry moments, etc. But because schools are mainly about kid-to-kid engagement, kids still need contexts for meaningfully engaging with other age-groups, including adults. (However, in my observation, this is sort of flipped for home-schooled kids, who often get a lot more practice with negotiating adult-kid engagement, but they may be  more challenged to get  interpersonal learning time with people their own age.)

EXISTENTIAL/SPIRITUAL: Unless your child goes to a Waldorf school or you have a spiritual activity in your weekly life, this part of a child's being doesn't get much exercise without overt planning and effort.

 INTRAPERSONAL: schools and extracurricular activities generally provide little or no self-reflective, self-actualizing type of inner-work opportunities; and parents are often bereft of ideas in this arena because they probably had little intrapersonal time with their own parents. This is why we're so blessed to have someone like you, Peggy, in our community, who creates programs just for this need to be met! 

So I'm aware that bringing up the arguably neglected intelligences is not necessarily helping lessen the stress of the parent who is already worried they are over-scheduling! But maybe if the paradigm, the criteria is adjusted to be about balancing TYPES of engagement, it will help both parents and kids feel more whole, more fulfilled by their activities, regardless of whether they are many or few.

To Overschedule or Not--that is the question

One thing I find myself thinking about a lot is overscheduling my child.  

It's a tough issue in today's busy world.

Before you read this post, I want to confess that this is an issue that I haven't figured out yet.  

You see, I LOVE being overscheduled.  I thrive on it.  I  love activities  and lots of them.   There is nothing more exciting to me than signing Mira up for a new class, something new to introduce her to in the world.

I'm serious.

I want her to be well rounded and adventurous.  But more than that, it's just the trill of knowing that she'll get to try something new for the first time.

But the first question is, um, what to choose:   My community has a well-developed and amazing dance program (plus those little four year olds in tutus are so adorable), so that seems a given.  Swimming is VERY important, more of a life skill.  Music is important for brain development and so is art.  Soccer builds hand eye coordination.   And aren't you supposed to learn language young?

Then there are the activities Mira begs for.--  "Mom I want to take gymnastics, please oh please."   

To top it all off, my professional self believes it is "bad" to overschedule kids.

I know that I am talking about my four year old, but this is something that all parents I know struggle with.  The age old question:  free time vs.  scheduled time.  

Have you noticed, for instance, that the demands of being on a soccer team are VERY different than from when we were kids, especially if they are on a travelling soccer team (did we even have that when we were kids?).   There is an ethos that you absolutely don't let down the team, even when grandma is in town.   If there is one thing I have learned from running mom/daughter programs on weekends--soccer trumps everything.

How do we as parents handle this and find an appropriate balance?  Gloria DeGatano, the head of the Parent Coaching International and also an expert in the field of brain compatible parenting believes that children need free time (and lots of it) in order to learn to think, imagine and problem solve.  

I know some people let their child choose one or two things to do each semester (I admire those parents).   Other people have their children doing a ton of activities at a frantic pace (I fear I have a natural leaning towards the latter).   

I think I will always be walking the balance.  Checking in with myself and my daughter to see what's a good fit in terms of activities and what feels like too much.    I will be always wishing there was more time in the day to do more, see more and experience more. And I will wonder, for example,  if I am robbing my daughter of the spirit of the team when I see cute pictures of the kids her age playing soccer in the rain (something we didn't pick to do this time around).

I recently learned of a concept called scheduling "white noise time."  What this means is time that is left free.  When that time comes up in your calendar, you can do anything--take a nap, work on a project, play.    I also read somewhere to make sure you have a period in your week where your children are home with no set agenda for at least three hours.  When you are particularly busy, make sure you have this time to balance it out.  And, in case you are wondering, that three hour stretch of time should not be television time.   At first your child may be beside themselves looking for something to do or pulling on your shirt sleeves wanting you to engage.  However, my experience has been that after a while my child settles into her own play and her imagination sky rockets.  

I know that no matter how busy we get and how full our life is of activities, I am always going to off-set it with "white noise time."

What are your thoughts on overscheduling and how do you handle it?  I really want to know.  

Family Night at the Ellis household

I decided this Fall to start having a once a week family night.   Here are my self-imposed rules for family night:

1.  I make something fun to eat.
2.   We eat somewhere different (not at our dining room table).
3.  We do an activity together.
4.  We don't check e-mails, answer the phone, and/or do our personal things (this one I haven't totally mastered YET).  

I don't know what inspired me to try this out, perhaps it is all the researched-based e-mails I get on parenting that speak to the family meal as a really good thing. 

Or perhaps I am remembering this girl named Abby who I met when I was a teenager on an Outward Bound trip.  Her family was Jewish and celebrated Shabbat, from Friday night to sundown on Saturday.  The family stayed home playing games or hanging out having fun with each other. Friends could come over and join, but they were not allowed to go out.  I couldn't believe that poor Abby had to stay home on Friday night, it sounded awful to me.  I was surprised that she actually seemed to like what to me sounded like a terrible restriction on her social life.  

Now that I'm a mom though, I think Abby's family was onto something.    It's easy to get busy and reserving a time to do something together seems sacred.  Our family spends a lot of time together, but this is a way to mark it as something different (a ritual of sorts) and also to make sure that it happens.

We have had three family nights so far and my three year old is over the moon about them.    Here's what we've done:

Night one:  We ate Vietnamese spring rolls in our dining room and played Chutes and Ladders.
Night two: We ate udon noodle soup while watching Tangled.

Night three:  We ate hummus burgers and Moroccan carrots on our back stairs.  I covered the table in butcher paper and we brought out a whole bunch of paints, stickers, glue etc. and made a big mural.

These nights are pretty simple.  Mira goes to bed at 7:30, so dinner/activity takes about an hour and half or less. 

Now I know that some of my readers will have a sixth grader or above who may be, um, resistant to family night.  There are also sports schedules that tend to get in the way of family dinners.   Maybe you could start small--once a month.   Or maybe go for just the game, or just the dinner.  

But many of my readers have children in the younger grades (K-5th) and my hunch is that most of those kids would jump at a family night.    I don't know how it's going to work out for us, but I'm hoping that it becomes an established part of her growing up.  When Mira hits the pre-teen/teenage years,  it could become a peaceful anchor for her in this busy, chaotic world.   One can only hope!