Happy Mothers’ Day

In honor of Mothers’ Day, I thought I’d share some good news I read on CNN a few weeks ago. This article states that recent CDC surveys have found that 3 out of 4 new moms now breastfeed their babies, which is the highest rate of nursing in at least 20 years. Overall, about 77% of new mothers breastfeed, up 15% from 15 years ago.

This is great news since nursing is indisputably the most healthy course for both moms and babies. I have great sympathy for the small percentage of moms who cannot nurse due to medical or physical problems and I feel sorry for those who try to nurse but give up in frustration because they don’t receive – or know they can seek – lactation guidance, knowledge, or advice. But I have no words for mothers who don’t even consider trying to nurse because they feel it is inconvenient, cosmetically damaging, or unseemly. Newsflash: children are inconvenient, time itself is cosmetically damaging, and why the heck do you think you have mammary glands in the first place?!

Personally, breastfeeding was the most amazing, incredible experience of mother power I will probably ever experience. The ability to literally sustain another human being on my milk alone for months on end was mind blowing! I nursed each of my girls for 14 months and was honestly disappointed when that era came to an end.

By the way, while browsing the CDC’s website for the original data (which I never found), I stumbled on this website that lists interesting facts about US mothers and motherhood culled from various sources.

Happy Mothers’ Day to all moms out there!

A Hard Week at Home

The last week of parenting has been trying. On Monday afternoon, the 30 minute Suzuki violin practice with the 6 and a half year old took 90 minutes to complete. Tuesday morning, I turned into my usual morning version of Mr. Hyde (as in Dr. Jekyll and) to get her onto the bus on time. This morning, I discovered that the 8 and a half year old has been lying – again, for the last two weeks daily – about eating breakfast. And it’s sneakier now, as she leaves a bowl with cereal remains in it on the counter AS IF she ate something. I love being a mom, but this week, not so much!

For those of you who don’t know the violin story and might be thinking that I am some kind of over-achieving, push-my-kid-into-every-activity-imaginable kind of parent, Megan started talking out of the blue about playing violin when she was 2 and a half. Really. Right after Christmas of 2003, she started talking about asking Santa for a violin the next year so she could learn to play. She also started identifying instruments on an orchestra placemat she had by saying, “There’s a flute, there’s a drum, there’s a bassoon like Aunt Dawn plays, and there’s the violin I’m going to learn to play…” We thought it was cute, but didn’t pay much attention. After all, she was 2 and a half years old and no one we knew played the violin. We figured she’d seen it on Sesame Street or something and was momentarily obsessed.

Six months later, she was STILL talking about learning to play the violin. We decided that there might be something to her interest, so we explored our options and ended up at the Western Reserve Suzuki School in the fall of 2004. We’ve been there ever since.

Now, Megan LOVES to play the violin; she just doesn’t usually like to practice. And Meg has the Schinker family charm in spades. Ever heard the saying, “She could sell snow to an eskimo?” That’s Megan – and the side that most people see most of the time. As a result, very few people believe that she can throw a tantrum (and I mean the throw-yourself-on-the-floor-and-scream-at-the-top- of-your-lungs type of tantrum) to rival ANYONE. And that’s what she did Monday night for the umpteenth time.

And Emily and breakfast – argh!! She started getting up half an hour earlier so she’d have some quiet time to herself in the morning and more time to get ready for school. As a result, she eats breakfast by herself I usually get up 20 minutes or so after her). After eating oatmeal and nothing else for breakfast for literally years, she decided last fall that she didn’t like oatmeal anymore. Totally understandable to me! So we went to the grocery together and she picked out a new cereal – the ONLY thing she found that she wanted for breakfast.

But somehow, she doesn’t like that cereal now, can’t find any others to try, and refuses to eat anything but toast with cinnamon and sugar. Even THAT wouldn’t be so bad (though I am generally against lots of sugar for breakfast on a regular basis), except that the child likes no dairy except Nestles chocolate milk and one slice of cheese in her lunch. Letting her eat cinnamon and sugar toast with chocolate milk for breakfast every morning seems wrong to me, but I am coming to think that it might be better than the alternative of no breakfast (which I haven’t let here do), the return of Mommy Hyde, or the lying that I suspect is arising from her determination to NOT eat food she doesn’t like and still avoid yelling mommy syndrome.

I have worked – and continue to work DAILY – at being a patient parent, but this week I am definitely behind in the count. It’s a good thing Mother’s Day is coming up this weekend…(-:

Learning Today

This article on the Taste of Tech blog states, “I worry about how K-12 education can remain relevant and engaging as we continue to filter out anything that’s not on a test.”

The information may remain relevant, but not engaging. I think that’s why kids start to view school as a chore by 4th or 5th grade. (You hardly ever hear kids in lower grades complain about going to school – they almost all start out loving it). We have already seen a dramatic increase in testing and teaching to the test materials this year with our 3rd grader. Grades, test scores, and levels all matter to her a lot more now than they did last year.

The way in which material is typically presented slows down the learning process in an age when there is so much more to learn and so many more ways to learn it. Listening to a lecture IS typically boring. But creating dynamic, interactive, multi-sensory learning is hard within the current school structures of fixed class periods, divided subject matter, and fact memorization. Heck, I can’t even make a one hour Sunday School class interesting to 7th through 12th graders! I can’t imagine trying to do it day after day for a 6 hour school day. (This is why I’m not a school teacher, so don’t get too worried).

What’s worse is that parents are blocking educational progress as much as anyone. The attitude I see weekly is that “if my kid ISN’T being taught the same way I was, there must be something wrong with the school or teacher.” The reality is that if your kid IS being taught the same way, that’s the larger problem. It is hard to imagine a better way to learn than the one you personally experienced. After all, we came out ok, didn’t we? But the world today is FAR different than the one in which we grew up.

My kids are still talking about visiting Plimouth Plantation last summer, where they got to see, taste, smell, touch, and live life in 1628. Before they went, they watched the PBS Kids show “Fetch with Ruff Ruffman” where they watched other kids complete reality-tv-show-like challenges in Plimoth. So when they got there, there was huge satisfaction in being somewhere they’d seen on tv.

Then last fall, our 1st grader studied Plimoth at school with the incredible Mrs. Hricik. She taught our daughter and her class even more about that time in history through an interactive game, online research, hands-on building experiment, food tasting, and team activity that captured for the kids the emotional, human side of the pilgrims’ story. It was all capped with a program for parents and relative consisting of a series of short skits interspersed with factual presentations for those kids not as interesting in acting.

The beauty of this type of teaching is that it was relevant to a 1st grader’s perspective, engaged all types of learners in the class, involved all their senses in the learning, used a variety of media, and captured the human experience. You can bet the kids in this class will remember this info in context for years to come – and not because they needed to know it for any test. THIS is TRUE learning.

It’s also why we parents have to be engaged in our children’s education from day one. Children are natural scientists and eager learners. My kids were learning in formal and informal ways years before they started school. Learning happens through play, travel, experimentation, and observation of the world around us. It happens when we talk about something that just happened that wasn’t planned or expected. Learning doesn’t stop after school or in the summer. Learning happens in the tiny questions that pop up unexpectedly as we spend time together. This is self-guided learning; it is this type of learning that is lost when children spend more hours in daycare than they do at home with parents who care about answering the incessant barrage of questions that everyday life raises for younger children.

No Books to Read

This article on CNN today was supposed to be a quick read, but it stopped me in my tracks. This man from Ethiopia received a $1200 grant twenty-two years ago to buy books for the children in his home country – but he couldn’t because there weren’t any books written in the language. Can you imagine that? NO BOOKS written in that language, and no books relating the stories, poems, songs, history, and culture of an entire people. That boggles my mind.

So what did he do? He became an author! Bravo. He has since established a children’s library of 15,000 books in Ethiopia.

This story reminded me not to take for granted the vast wealth of knowledge and access to knowledge that my family and I enjoy every day.