We Turned Off the TV, for Good

In a recent post titled “We Turned Off the TV,” Allison Hart writes about the amount of television that her children used to watch in the mornings and what happened after she decided to eliminate it. Just two weeks into the new regimen, she reports, “I can't tell you how much of a difference it's made.” I applaud Hart for the change that she’s made for her family. And if two weeks without television can make such a difference, what effect might years without a television have on young children?

I can tell you what I know, based on my own experience. My children, ages nine and six, have lived since birth in a house without a television.

“So what do your children do?” people ask. Many other parents can’t imagine how we fill the vast chasms of time that seem to stretch endlessly from waking (sometime around 6 a.m.) to school (the bus comes after 8 a.m.). What do the children do on weekend mornings without cartoons to keep them occupied? What do they do in the evenings in that extra time between dinner and bed?

The short answer: they do a lot.

Here are some of the things I’ve found them doing in the morning: reading, writing, drawing, playing with Legos, playing with stuffed animals, watching the fish swim in the tank, solving math problems, cooking, building marble runs, putting together snap circuits, playing with paper dolls, dancing, devising a comedy routine, listening to an audiobook, taking photographs, telling jokes, cutting and gluing paper, making a doll house out of recyclables, making cookies with Play-Doh, nailing together pieces of wood, stringing beads, pressing leaves, and . . . talking.

And not ever having had access to a television, they don’t miss it. Seemingly not one bit.

That’s not to say we’re completely against technology, or that we’re purists when it comes to TV. Of course the kids have seen TV—when they visit their grandparents or when we stay in a hotel, for example. And they are occasionally allowed to watch videos on a small portable DVD player. But for the most part, our lives are TV-free. And though we have computers in the house, the kids rarely use them—usually only when required to for school. And they don’t have access to other devices with screens either (no smartphones, iPads, or video games).

But before I wax poetic about how idyllic our lives are without television, I should add one disclaimer: My husband and I had decided we were better off without TV years before we had our first child. So not having a television was not so much a conscious parenting decision as it was an extension of what we were already doing. And what seemed natural to us became natural to the kids. Only in the last few years have some of the effects of our TV-free life become apparent to us.

If all of this sounds like bragging, I apologize. My family is not perfect, and I could easily make a list of our faults. On the other hand, since I believe that not having a television has had a remarkably positive influence on our lives, here I’m going to focus on the good qualities in my children that I believe can be attributed, in part, to their lack of TV exposure.

So what are the benefits of raising TV-free kids? I’ve come up with a list of seven broad areas.

1. Behavior

My kids are well behaved. All their lives, I have been getting compliments about their behavior—from teachers, from flight attendants, from strangers in restaurants, from other parents. They’ve never had public meltdowns of any sort (and very few private tantrums either). They’re “easy” kids—they entertain themselves, they become engrossed in tasks for long stretches of time, and they are generally happy and good natured. Yes, they complain from time to time, they get whiney or obstinate, but for the most part, they’re fantastic kids. They listen to us. Almost always.

How is this related to television? Kids mimic what they see. As Hart notes, “my kids were watching obnoxious TV shows and were acting obnoxious accordingly.” Studies have linked high rates of television viewing with antisocial, aggressive, and even criminal behavior. And even if the content is geared toward young audiences and seems harmless, ask yourself if you want your child’s behavior and values influenced by the shows they’re watching. Personally, I don’t want a little Hannah Montana on my hands.

2. Concentration

My kids have long attention spans. When my son started preschool, his teachers marveled at his ability to sit still and focus on a task. He would still be sitting at the table, drawing or working on an assigned activity an hour later when all of his classmates had become distracted and wandered away. My daughter can read a book for hours at a time—for even longer than I can sit still reading! She’s read 300-page books from cover to cover without hardly moving. In short, my kids can concentrate on a single task for a long time. They don’t get distracted.

Researchers have been telling us for years that television (along with video games, texting, and other technologies) erode children’s attention spans. Watching a television show does not require much mental effort or complex thought; it is largely a passive activity. And the constantly shifting images are not conducive to concentration; in fact, some researchers have suggested that exposure to television and video games may contribute to ADD/ADHD. So why offer my kids a frenetic, fast-paced cartoon—possibly with frequent commercial breaks, making the experience even more disjointed—when I can offer them a book?

3. Academics

Probably not a day has gone by in my daughter’s life that has not had a book in it. She’s been read to or has read on her own every day for nine and a half years since the day she came home from the hospital. She has been exposed to thousands of books. Think of all the hours that the average fourth grader spends looking at screens (television, computer, etc.). Now imagine what would happen if that fourth grader had instead spent all those hours reading books. That’s the reality my daughter has lived.

And it shows. She excels academically. Her vocabulary is extensive—better than that of many adults. One of her teachers calls her a “walking dictionary.” She performs well above grade level in virtually every subject. She has been deemed “gifted” in math as well and receives individualized enrichment, allowing her to advance several years beyond her grade level. I could go on and on, but you might ask—how can you attribute all of this to the lack of a television?

Of course I can’t. It would be folly to say this is all due to our TV-free lives. In the endless permutations of the nature versus nurture debate, it’s impossible to isolate any single factor. If my daughter had spent hours in front of a television screen every day of her life, she would probably still be smart. On the other hand, she would unlikely have her stunning knowledge of Greek mythology or her extensive arsenal of Shakespearean insults.

4. Materialism

My kids are not materialistic. Or at least they’re a lot less materialistic than their peers. When we go shopping, they don’t ask for things. Admittedly, I go shopping as infrequently as possible, but they do end up at the grocery store with me every couple of weeks. During our last trip my son asked if we were getting raspberries. I told him no, the price was too high—and that was the end of it. Last Christmas, my daughter asked Santa for a ball of yarn. Yes, just one. That was the extent of her Christmas list. She hates shopping even more than I do and has no interest in clothes, especially the clothes that some other girls her age seem to obsess over. My son has a weakness for Legos, art supplies, and all things Egyptian. He is a little more materialistic than his sister, but his wants are minor compared to some kids, and the requests are few and far between.

How is TV involved? TV makes you want things—especially the programming that is interrupted every few minutes with advertising. The average American child sees somewhere around 20,000 commercials per year. This is an astounding number! The cumulative effect of being told 20,000 times that you should buy something—toys, articles of clothing, food products, video games, digital devices—has to be monumental, especially for an audience of children who have not yet learned to distinguish information from persuasion. Viewing all of these ads not only makes children believe that their lives will not be happy or complete without certain products, but it also affects their behavior, causing them to nag their parents to purchase the products. Researchers have dubbed this the “Nag Factor,” defined as “the tendency of children, who are bombarded with marketers’ messages, to unrelentingly request advertised items,” and advertisers design commercials to specifically encourage this behavior in children.

That’s why my kids don’t ask for much—they aren’t being told, 55 times a day, 385 times a week, 1,667 times a month, that they want stuff.

5. Gender Stereotypes

If you want a girl to believe that she should play with dolls and fluffy stuffed animals, that her favorite color should be pink, that she’s likely not that great at math or science, that she should like clothes and cosmetics, that she should behave like a drama queen, then turn on the television. If you want a boy to believe that he should play with trucks and machines, that he should be macho and tough, that he should hide his emotions, that he should like violent video games, that he’s better than girls, then turn on the television.

Otherwise, just leave it off.

While some children’s shows have made great leaps in portraying gender equality, many are still lagging sadly behind, and what’s worse—much of the advertising, especially for toys, targets boys or girls exclusively, maintaining the divide between the genders and creating fixed notions in children’s minds about what it means to be male and female.

My son has taken ballet lessons and art lessons. My daughter loves science and chess. We want our kids to explore their interests wherever they may lie, to reach their potential, to be fully human—and that means not being pushed into narrow spheres by the outdated, rigid gender roles that sadly, are still perpetuated in so much of the media.

6. Nonconformity

My daughter is an individual, someone who is comfortable in her own skin. She plays the tuba because it is “awesome”—never mind that she’s the only one in fourth grade who picked that particular instrument. The height of fashion, for her, is a navy blue T-shirt that has a somewhat obscure math pun on the front, a faded pair of tan shorts, mismatched brightly colored knee socks, and worn-out sneakers. She loves mythology and Shakespeare, puns and logic puzzles. She’s proud of the fact that she’s the only one in her class who doesn’t have a TV. It makes her even more different. And being different, she will tell you, is awesome.

And it’s not having a TV all of these years that has enabled her to be different—without exposure to television, she’s never felt a need to conform to the stereotypes perpetuated by popular programs and advertising.

My kids have never said, “I have to do XYZ because Jane is doing it.” Or, “I need to have XYZ because all the kids have them.” Or, “But Tom’s parents let him do XYZ.” Or, “But all the kids are watching XYZ, so I have to.” Or anything along those lines.

7. Finding Their Passion

If your kids don’t watch TV, they spend a lot of time doing other things. A lot of other things. And as they do those other things, they just might find something that they love.

My son is an artist. He’s only six, so it’s hard to tell if he’s going to stay with it, but for now, art is his passion. He draws, he paints, and he sculpts. His art teachers have commented that he has talent. And he can sit still working on a piece of art for an astonishing amount of time. He finishes his pieces with painstaking attention to detail and care.

Maybe if he watched TV he’d still be an artist. But we might not know it yet. And he wouldn’t have had all of those many hours to sit in silence with a pencil and a piece of paper. Just the pencil, the paper, and him.

Watching television would have made him more like other kids. Not watching television has allowed him to be himself.

***

But it’s hard to give up television, you might argue. It’s deprivation, torture, a punishment too severe for the adults in the household. Remember, you don’t have to go cold turkey, chucking your flat screen out on the curb. Give up TV in the mornings, as Hart did. Or evenings. Or limit it to weekends only. Or to one carefully selected film per week. Make sure the TV isn’t on as background noise. Be selective and thoughtful about when you turn it on. And pick programming that is ad-free and that emulates the behavior and values that are in keeping with your own. Your kids will benefit. Really, they will. Even with just a small change.

We are not really radicals. Since we had already been TV-free for five years when our daughter was born, we never felt deprived. I can understand, though, that many parents might feel inconvenienced giving up TV. But having children is not a matter of convenience. It’s also not convenient to be up all night with a fussy baby or to change diapers or to read a dozen storybooks before the sun even comes up. In fact, I’ve discovered that most of the things worth doing in life are not especially convenient or easy. It’s a matter of what we choose, where our priorities lie. If it’s more important that the children be quiet and occupied in front of a TV so that you can sleep in or stare at your own screen to check email or Facebook, then you have made a choice. Turning off the television is another choice. It’s not that hard. And it’s important. Because our choices have repercussions that extend far beyond the here and now.

Xylotheque: "Mulberry"

My book, Xylotheque, is made up of nine essays accompanied by ten photographs. Every couple of weeks, I am posting an excerpt from one of the essays along with a photograph that was not included in the book. "Mulberry" first appeared in Adanna in 2011. 

Excerpt from "Mulberry"

Seeing for the first time the purple glints of my newborn’s eyes, her skin downy and puckered and tumescent, perfectly ripe for this world, I thought again of mulberries, of being held in their branches, of purple stains, of the burst of berry on tongue, and I saw giving birth was akin to climbing a tree: a reaching toward light, nourishment, endurance, life, a cradling and an offering of the most cherished to the world.

Maybe this is not true. Maybe I did not think of the mulberry then. Maybe I seamed it into my memory later: mulberry, birth. Who can say what thoughts occur during birth? It is stark physicality, a rending. It is an elbow against sky. And yet, on some level, the mulberry was there, subsumed by my laboring. Everything in my life was there with me, on that delivery table. Is it a lie to create memories after the fact? Is it a fiction to plaster over experience with words? Is it a violence to insist a tree means something other than itself?

To read more of this essay, look for my book Xylotheque, available from the University of New Mexico Press and other online retailers.

Treasure Hunt

It’s the last day of school, and the treasure hunt is ready.

The first year, there were just a dozen clues. The second, we were up to twenty-five. Last year, thirty-four. And this year, they’ve requested fifty clues. Hard ones, they told me. They want clues that will send them looking in the dictionary or searching for abbreviations on the periodic table, clues that will test their knowledge of the Greek pantheon and Harry Potter lore, clues that contain algebraic equations and puns, scientific names for plants and animals and words in foreign languages.

I will hand them their first clue as they get off the bus, and for the next couple of hours, they will run all over our property—upstairs, downstairs, basement, front yard, backyard, garage, shed—as they solve the riddles I stayed up way too late writing for them. They will consult books. There will be words they may not know—ornithology, velocipede, codex, antiquated, subterranean, textiles, cathode, pate, doppelganger, supine—that will require a dictionary. There will be inside jokes. (And there will be some bathroom humor for the six-year-old.)

And there will be a few small prizes along the way, with a larger prize at the end, but that’s not the point. They don’t even remember what last year’s prize was—but they learned nearly every clue by heart. After the hunt is over, they will carefully redistribute all the clues to have the hunt again—and again. They will soon be chatting about velocipedes and doppelgangers.

They still have last year’s clues, and the ones from the year before. They still hide them for one another to find. And they make their own treasure hunts for one another, hiding scraps of paper all over the house with their own riddles. I find them occasionally, in the backs of drawers, between the pages of books, in coat pockets. They are always writing these little notes to lead one another on to the next good and surprising thing.

Their bus will come in an hour. I have the first clue in my pocket, ready to go. I can’t wait.

Christmas List

The eight-year-old goes to see Santa. After some small talk, he asks her what she wants for Christmas. She replies, “A ball of yarn.” He asks what for, and she explains that she is learning how to make yarn bracelets. He asks her what else she wants, and she replies, “Nothing. Just a ball of yarn. That’s all I want.” Santa presses her, insisting there must be something else. She maintains that there is nothing else. Santa presses on. Does she like dolls or video games? Clothes? Stuffed animals? “Just a ball of yarn,” the eight-year-old concludes firmly.

I am watching this exchange, and I am tempted to chastise Santa. Instead of suggesting there is something wrong with a child that wants only a ball of yarn for Christmas, why not praise her for knowing her mind and for not being greedy? A ball of yarn is enough for her. How many of us can be content with so little?

The line is long, and publicly chastising Santa seems a questionable approach to take. So I bite my tongue. As the eight-year-old comes back over to me, her five-year-old brother approaches Santa and begins the small talk.

“Am I supposed to want more than a ball of yarn?” the eight-year-old asks, clearly exasperated.

“No,” I tell her. “That’s perfectly fine.”

“I mean, I like to give presents more than I like to receive presents,” she explains.

The five-year-old is laying out his list to Santa. It has three items. 1. A Lego set. 2. A bow and arrow. 3. An Egyptian mummy. Santa seems more pleased with this list, though he is not sure he can fulfill the mummy request. “Well, an Egyptian mummy kit,” the five-year-old clarifies. “I guess the mummy doesn’t have to be real.”

Later, the visit to Santa over, the five-year-old says, “I don’t think my Christmas list is long enough.”

“Why do you think that?” I ask.

“Because all the kids at school have like a hundred things on their lists, and I have only three.”

The eight-year-old chimes in. “You don’t have to be like all the kids at school,” she says. “Three things is enough. It’s plenty. Besides, if you had a hundred things on your list, you’d never get them all anyway. And you don’t even want that much stuff. Trust me.”

I am certainly biased, but I’ll say it anyway: she is the wisest eight-year-old I have ever known. Instead of a Christmas list, she wrote this letter.

Ginkgo biloba

For three years, I’ve been going on tree tours alone, and my daughter has been asking to go. Finally, this past weekend, I took her on her first tree tour at the University of Connecticut campus in Storrs. Except for one other eight-year-old, the attendees were all adults—many older than me. A number were devotees of Ed Richardson, the grand master of trees in Connecticut. (I’ve written about him previously here and here.) But this isn’t about Richardson or the trees that he talked about; this is about my daughter looking at trees.

At each tree that the group stopped at, my daughter would listen for a minute or two to Richardson’s wavering voice, but then some other tree nearby would catch her attention, and she would wander off, armed with her camera. (For the record, she took 102 photos during the two-hour tour, and I took 89.)

 

UConn’s arborist, John Kehoe, was on the tour as well, and my daughter asked him about seeing a ginkgo tree. Serendipitously, we were at that moment standing about thirty feet away from a blazing yellow gingko. Kehoe pointed at the tree and told her to go get a leaf. She came back with one, beaming. Into her pocket it went—along with an assortment of other leaves, acorns, and cones. Her pockets swelled with treasures; her camera filled with photos.

Later, Kehoe pointed out another ginkgo—this one completely green. She collected another leaf sample and asked the tree expert why one tree was all yellow, the other all green. I didn’t hear Kehoe’s answer, but later she explained to me that it was because the green tree was older, more established, with a more extensive root system. (Yes, she said established and extensive. She pays attention.)

She also asked where the biggest ginkgo in Connecticut is, and Kehoe told her it is in Hartford. Later, I asked her why she liked ginkgo trees. “Because there are no other trees like them alive today,” she told me. “They’re dinosaur trees.”

Later still, apropos of nothing, she said, “You know that champion ginkgo tree in Hartford? I want to go see it.”

Photo/Text 6: Outdoors

Take them outdoors. Lead them up mountains. Let them chill their flesh in icy lakes. Tell them the names of trees and flowers. Show them the ever-shifting dome of sky. Put rocks older than multi-cellular life into their hands. Look for birds and marmots, bees and moose scat. Allow them to be drenched in sudden cloudbursts. Take them to snowfields and waterfalls. Let them climb high into trees. Push them to feel the competence and limits of their bodies. Show them a maimed butterfly in its final death shudder. Read with them the Braille of tree bark and moss. Search the sky for signs of change, for new colors and clouds, for turns in the weather. Listen with them to the wind and night noises. Study the stars. Remind them that they too are animals. Place them not at the center of the frame. Help them feel their smallness in the universe. Guide them towards the promise of themselves, towards what they may become. Show them how to feel in their brains and in their bones these places that are all we have.

The Gift of Time

"Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
—Simone Weil

He wakes up at 5:30 in the morning to build with Legos or answer questions about time travel. He coaches soccer and creates nearly perfect ballet buns. He helps with the construction of cardboard robots and works through complex chess exercises. This past school year, he helped to organize a STEM (science-technology-engineering-math) club at the elementary school. He took four afternoons off from work to help students build bridges out of drinking draws. Just this past week he took another three afternoons to design and build stone walls—and then to knock them down—with the three second grade classes. While he certainly does a great deal to provide material things for our children, what they appreciate most is their father’s attention, his daily gift of time.

This evening, my children made cards and wrapped gifts and arranged the schedule for the Father’s Day festivities tomorrow morning. Before bed, they ran their ideas by me—cook dad a special breakfast, then give him his gifts to unwrap. “And then at the end of it all,” my daughter said, “We’re going to say, ‘Your best present is impossible to wrap because that present is love.’”

 

Signs of Spring

In A Sense of Wonder, Rachel Carson writes about exploring the natural world with her young nephew:

We have let Roger share our enjoyment of things people ordinarily deny children because they are inconvenient, interfering with bedtime, or involving wet clothing that has to be changed or mud that has to be cleaned off the rug. We have let him join us in the dark living room before the big picture window to watch the full moon riding lower and lower toward the far shore of the bay, setting all the water ablaze with silver flames and finding a thousand diamonds in the rocks on the shore as the light strikes the flakes of mica embedded in them. I think we have felt that the memory of such a scene, photographed year after year by his child’s mind, would mean more to him in manhood than the sleep he was losing. He told me it would, in his own way, when we had a full moon the night after his arrival last summer. He sat quietly on my lap for some time, watching the moon and the water and all the night sky, and then he whispered, “I’m glad we came.”

For the past couple of weeks, as I have taken my children on small excursions around town to enjoy the warm weather, I have been thinking about the importance of exposing them, in every season, to the natural world. I have been thinking about the importance of returning, year after year, to see the blooming magnolia tree on our street, to look at the greening trees at Elizabeth Park, to search for wildflowers in the woods at Westmoor Park. Like Carson, I believe that such scenes, photographed year after year by my children’s minds, will mean more to them in adulthood than many other things I could give them.

One summer evening when my daughter was three, a vibrant watercolor rainbow spread across the sky right before sunset. I had just put my daughter to bed, but without hesitation I rushed into the house, pulled her from her bed, and carried her outside in her pajamas to see the rainbow. She still remembers being held in her mother’s arms while looking at a rainbow. She will likely remember it for the rest of her life. What better gift could I leave her with? It’s worth it.

And now, my son notices the starbusts of the forsythias glowing in yards across town, the coral blossoms of the Japanese flowering quince in our front yard. “Mom, I just found another sign of spring,” he tells me, again and again, pointing at his strawberry plants awakening from winter dormancy, at the dandelions studding our lawn. “Everywhere I look, I see signs of spring.”

Touching Trees

When I held my ten-month-old daughter up to a pin oak and she pressed her hand up to its bark, a look of guilty pleasure spread across her face. Furtively she felt out the tree’s corrugations, casting looks of disbelief my way, as though it didn't seem possible that I was allowing her this textured, coarse pleasure, as though placing the softness of her baby skin against such ridges and roughness must be prohibited. The wonder of it was nearly unbearable. She pulled her hand away and her gaze followed the trunk of the tree high up into the branches. “Bark,” I told her. “Tree.”

Since then, my children have touched trees of all kinds—the white scales of sycamore, the smooth bark of beech that gathers up in wrinkles like elephant skin, the sticky places around injuries where sap has run from pines, the wild dishevelment of shagbark hickory, the prehistoric spines of the floss silk tree with its armored dinosaur hide, the gold leaf shimmer of stewartia, the black eyes flashing on white birch bark, the pliable striations of cork, the spongy, ruddy give of redwood bark, the gnarled rind of the three-hundred-year-old white oak near our house, and the smooth-stemmed pencil trunk of its offspring that now grows in our backyard—their fingers exploring scars, burls, lichens, gaps, wounds.

More than seven years after she touched her first tree, on the eve of her eighth birthday, my daughter is still touching trees. May she touch them always.

Proximity

I was at work in my office in Massachusetts on Friday, waiting for my students to drop off their final projects, when I checked the news online.  I saw the words, Connecticut school shooting, and my heart seized up for a moment. Both of my children were at school in Connecticut, in different districts. I quickly scanned the article, and seeing the words Newtown and Sandy Hook, I felt only relief. Not me, I thought. Not mine. Before it was known who was dead, or how many, my first reaction was to be grateful for being spared. My state, but not my town. Not my children.

When I was in my early twenties, I worked at several daily newspapers, reporting on crime. Every day, I would make a round of calls to police stations and fire departments, asking if there was any news. And every day, there was news: traffic accidents, burglaries, fires, robberies, assaults, rapes, murders. Every day, the world was rife with crime, with danger. Gradually, I began to see the world in terms of danger, near misses. I could have been on that street when that shooting occurred, or I could have been driving on that overpass when that fatal accident occurred. Every day, I narrowly missed being robbed or murdered. It was just a matter of time. My life became a matter of dodging danger, of not being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I began to believe that somehow, proximity—distance in space, distance in time—could protect me.

In one high profile case, a ten-year-old boy was abducted, and later, he was found murdered. I couldn’t imagine his mother’s suffering. I remember telling myself: At least I don’t have kids. Having children, I realized then, was the worst way of exposing yourself to the world. My brother-in-law once told me that having a child was like watching your own heart walking around outside your body.

Now that I have children, I have multiplied my exposure to danger.  As the news came out of Newtown on Friday, as the full magnitude of the event became clear, I counted the hours until my children would be home safe from school. The superintendent of my daughter’s school district issued an emergency communication promising “increased police presence” at the schools, which, we were assured, was “purely precautionary.” In one online news story, a Newtown resident was quoted as saying that he hoped his neighbor, a Sandy Hook teacher, was not among those who were shot. Like me, he hoped it was someone else, someone he didn’t know.

That evening, my brother-in-law called. “How far away is that school from you?” he asked. “It’s southwest of here, probably forty-five miles,” I told him. “Not that close.” He was asking about proximity. How close are you—in space, in time, in impact—to the horror?

Is it human nature to measure our proximity to events of great magnitude? People older than I often recall exactly where they were when they heard news of JFK’s death, men landing on the moon, Pearl Harbor. My generation has no shortage of momentous events: the Challenger disaster, the Berlin Wall coming down, Columbine, Oklahoma City, Virginia Tech, and, most memorable of all, 9/11.

On 9/11, I was working at a cemetery in Northern Virginia, a little over twenty miles from the Pentagon. My husband and three of my brothers-in-law were all working nearby in Northern Virginia or Washington, DC that morning. Although no one I knew was directly impacted, we did eventually bury one Pentagon victim at the cemetery where I worked. I watched his wife weep during the funeral. That was my proximity.

My students, college freshmen, remember 9/11 through the lens of childhood. On 9/11 they were about the age my daughter is now. Earlier this semester the subject of 9/11 came up in a class. How much were they told? I asked them. What did they know? One of my students said she was told nothing at all about it at school, but another said that her class watched the whole thing unfold on television. “We knew everything,” she told me. “From the very beginning. They didn’t keep anything from us. We were right there watching it all.”

What, if anything, should we tell our children about what happened in Newtown? Many parents here and across the country asked themselves that question over the weekend as they prepared to send their children back to school on Monday.

My own children didn’t yet know. They had been told nothing at school on Friday. We don’t have a television, so there was no chance of them hearing it on the news. I knew it would be best to tell my second grader, since she would likely hear about it somewhere, but I hadn’t figured out what to say. Then on Sunday morning, as she mixed waffle batter while listening to Christmas carols on the radio, the announcer mentioned “the children and the brave teachers we lost in Newton, Connecticut, on Friday.” My daughter looked at me and said, “What happened to the teachers?” I said, “I’ll tell you later.”

I read the articles about what to say to children: that we should give them the most basic information, that we should reassure them that they’re safe, that adults are here to protect them. And yet all of these things that I might say are not completely true. You are not safe. There are other shooters. You are never safe.

It was my husband who told our daughter that someone who had something wrong with his brain shot some people on Friday, that the shooter was gone, that her school was safe. He told her that if she wanted to talk about it, she should talk to her parents or her teacher or the social worker at her school. He asked her if she had any questions. She didn’t.

On Facebook I discovered that I know people who know people who lost a child. I can count my degrees of separation, measure my proximity. And I am just one person away. Just one person stands between me and the anguish of Newtown. An acquaintance knows one of the families. She changed her profile picture to one in which she is hugging a girl who is now dead. They are as close as can be, skin on skin. The dead girl’s mother has posted comments. I see her words on Facebook, and she is almost in a room with me, almost speaking to me. We are not that far apart.

Another Facebook friend who lives in my town and has two young children posted a quote from his daughter’s former kindergarten teacher: “No one’s perfect, but a five-year-old comes pretty darned close.” I think of my son, just shy of five, who doesn’t know about Sandy Hook. And I will not tell him, not now. Because he is still so close to perfection. Because he—and all of our children—deserve to live in a better world, and the only way I can give him even a piece of that world is by shielding him from the real world. In the world I make for him, first graders are not gunned down in their classrooms. In the world I make for him, he does not have to go to school in fear. In the world I make for him, he does not have to measure his proximity to tragedy. I do enough of that for the both of us.

On Monday, I got emails from my daughter’s teacher and school principal. With the crisis team standing by, all went well at school. It was “a routine day.” But that afternoon I made the mistake of turning on the Christmas carols again. During a break, the announcer said, “The first funerals were held today.” I hurried to turn off the radio, but my daughter had already heard.

“Is that related to that thing that happened with the person whose brain didn’t work properly?” she asked me.

“Yes,” I told her. “You’ll probably be hearing about it for awhile.”

“And then what? It will blow over?” Her tone was so flippant that at first I was appalled, but then I realized that she was merely mimicking the way adults talk. She has learned this from us.

“Well,” I finally said. “It won’t blow over for those who were directly affected.”

“Were we directly affected?”

“Well, no,” I told her, desperate to change the subject. “We don’t know anyone in that town.”

And I chose to say nothing more, to make no more of the matter, because being seven years old is not that far from perfect either. Because I can do enough thinking about children being shot for the both of us.

And then there is the proximity of time. Four days after the event, even as we keep burying children, already the headlines are suggesting a hint of normalcy. Already in our yearning to put pain behind us, we begin to turn away from tragedy. And I shield my children from it, fiercely, protecting them in their brief innocence, their perfection. Yet while I keep them out of proximity of fear and tragedy, I remind myself that what happened at Sandy Hook did not happen somewhere near here to someone I don’t know. It happened right here. It happened to all of us.

The Dragons of Fall

When the first glimmerings of fall color light up the trees, I tell my children that the dragons of fall have arrived. First, they spend several nights flying over, stirring the cool air with their massive wings, surveying the trees, seeking out the most tantalizing foliage, usually at the very tips of the highest branches. And then, slowly, they begin their work, gently singeing the select leaves with their fire, turning them red, orange, or yellow, depending on each dragon’s temperament. Wouldn’t their fire burn the trees? the children want to know. Ah, but these are the dragons of fall. Their lungs full of frost, they singe with icy breaths. Every night they come, for weeks, starting the first slow fires of color in the trees. They are the smoldering dragons, the catalyst dragons, the ones that get it all started. And sometimes, if you’re up very early in the morning, you might see pools of fog in hollows and valleys—these are the places where, in the pre-dawn, the big dragons, tired from their night of work, take their baths before winging home, and what you’re seeing is the steam from their recent ablutions. If you’re very quiet, you might hear the far-off creaking of their squeaky clean scales as they head home.

 

During my commute along two-lane roads through rural western Massachusetts, I feast my eyes on color: the fields pebbled over in pumpkins, the roadside stands with their starbursts of mums, wagons piled high with gourds and squash, sugar pumpkins spilling out of bushel baskets, and warty, haggard heirloom varieties piled high in rustic crates. At one quintessential New England church, dazzlingly white against blue sky, orange pumpkins crowd the grass and the front steps, more than a hundred, like a whole congregation flocking to the doors of the church. Every day more leaves change over, and every day I think: today must be it, the most dazzling day of fall, the climax of autumn. And every day, I am astonished anew with more color. This is the time of year when the foliage differentiates itself, the green mass of forest suddenly becoming individual trees, vibrant reds and golds and browns. And in the wild places, the vines that normally blend in so well, secretly, insidiously strangling trees, suddenly have their presence betrayed when their captives redden or yellow in their still-green grip. Sometimes, it’s the choking vine that turns color and is left holding its green prey in a blood red stranglehold.  

 

 

After the big dragons have done their smoldering work, the miniature dragons arrive. Known as the spice dragons, they travel in immense flocks that fill the nighttime sky. Descending on the trees, they send out their little jets of fire—no bigger than the flame on a crème brûlée torch—to color the leaves, continuing the work of the big harbinger dragons, the pioneering ones that come first and leave in their wake the first hues of fall, marking the territory, laying out the palette of colors that the spice dragons fill in, leaf by careful leaf, like a paint-by-number. Why are they called the spice dragons? the children want to know. Each flock is responsible for a single color; the cinnamon dragons turn leaves cinnamon brown, the saffron dragons turn leaves saffron yellow, and so on. Flocks of cumin, vanilla bean, nutmeg, coriander, cayenne, paprika, peppercorn, clove, ginger, and sumac dragons crowd the skies. Each imparts only the color, not the scent, of the spice. But the children swear they can catch a whiff of cinnamon walking under the browning leaves of an oak. What about the leaves that are two different colors, green and red? What kind of dragon did that? Those two-tone leaves are created by the tiniest spice dragons of all, the ones who can make barely a match flame of fire. One such tiny dragon can’t color even a single leaf in a night’s work, so it comes back night after night, sending out its tiny licks of flame until the whole leaf is colored.

 

One night, as I’m putting the children to bed, they demand to know what has become of the moon. I tell them it fell out of the sky so I put it under my bed. How did it fall? The riveting dragons who are responsible for anchoring it in place each night got careless and didn’t put enough rivets in it, and then when the wind blew, it fell out of the sky. Luckily, the nailing dragons who nail the stars into place each night are never so careless, or else we’d have all those sharp stars falling from the sky and walking around barefoot would be hazardous. At least the moon is smooth. Can we go look under your bed to see the moon? Well, it’s pretty dull and lusterless now because it’s early. It won’t really start shining until the middle of the night. The children threaten to peek at it in the middle of the night, but of course they don’t, and the next morning the moon is gone, the space under the bed empty but for a few dust bunnies. All of those moonbeams shooting out from under my bed kept me up all night, I explain, so I returned the moon to the riveting dragons at dawn with an admonishment to use more rivets next time. I told them that I couldn’t keep their moon for them again.  

 

We walk to visit a nearby three-centuries-old white oak. The children pick up the oak leaves that are just beginning to turn to brown leather. Where do the flocks of spice dragons live? They live in the hollows of ancient trees like this one. Oak leaves are good and sturdy for the dragons’ winter attire. Dragons don’t wear clothes! The miniature dragons do. They sew little suits out of oak leaves and spiderwebs. How else are they going to stay warm in the winter months? Are dragons cold-blooded? They’re lukewarm-blooded, with cold lungs and hot hearts. Do the miniature spice dragons grow into big dragons? The lifecycle of a dragon is a long story, best saved for another day. You know the leaves that are yellow and brown, or red and purple and gold? That happens when two or three flocks of spice dragons join and work together on the same leaf. That’s right, I say. That’s exatly right. My daughter peers into the hole in the old oak, declaring that she can see the passageways into two separate chambers, but no dragons.  

 

The children cultivate mums and asters on the front porch. We harvest their pumpkin crop—a mere three beefsteak tomato-sized pumpkins—but we bake them, mash the pulp, and make pumpkin bread, filling the kitchen with the scent of cinnamon, clove, nutmeg, and ginger, the scents of spice dragons. And we dig up the cool fall soil and slip creamy cloves into the ground, our yearly October garlic planting. Eight months from now, in the heat of next summer, we will harvest our fall planting and remember the dragons. 

 

Are there dragons for other times of the year? Oh yes, I tell my children. Every season has its dragons. Just you wait and see.

 

 

Listing

My lists are proliferating—lists of writing stuff, teaching stuff, kid stuff, household stuff, each main list branching into its own taxonomy of sub-lists and sub-sub-lists. Writing lists include “novel revisions,” “essays to write,” and even “blog”—which further branches into lists of blog entries that I aspire to write. I want to tell you about babies touching tree bark, about a day at the beach in Ventura, about trees we’ve planted, about a blue china box full of maple samaras from Omaha, about an accordion file stuffed to overflowing with 568 letters sitting right by my desk, and about my daughter’s toothbrush (to name just a handful of items on my “blog” list). But as always, my lists are in conflict, competing for my time, my attention.

When my daughter was three and my son a baby, we took a road trip from our home in Nebraska to Montana to visit family. I made endless lists to prepare for the trip—stuff for the three-year-old, stuff for the seven-month-old, stuff for the adults, perishable and nonperishable foods, stuff to do before we left, stuff my brother needed to do while we were gone, stuff I needed to do upon returning. I ended up with so many lists on so many different sheets of paper that I created a separate list—titled The Master List of Lists—to keep track of them all.

During the two-day drive, after having exhausted the picture books, sticker books, coloring books, and audio books, the three-year-old came up with an engrossing new activity. “Let’s make lists!” she cried exuberantly, so we occupied ourselves for the rest of the drive by making lists: Relatives We’re Going to See, Things We’re Going To Do, Favorite Songs, Favorite Numbers, Favorite Books, Reasons Baby Brothers Cry, Good Things to Eat, Beautiful Colors, Friendly Animals. She proudly held the growing stack of pages in her hands. I had—inadvertently—taught her well.

But later, back from our trip, we were sitting on our front lawn when my daughter curled into my lap. “I want to go back to Montana,” she told me. Distracted, I replied, “What were your favorite things about Montana? Let’s make a list.”

“Just being there,” she said. “It’s not something you put on a list.” And I will never forget the look of exasperation she gave me, the way she climbed out of my lap to go sit next to her brother who was chewing on a blade of grass, the way they both sat looking away from me at the crab apple trees in front of our house. Chastised, I watched my children sitting there as the deep blue began to seep into the sky, as the trees became dark silhouettes etched into the twilight. And I thought of all the things I did each day that never appear on a list: Read books with my children. Look at the sky. Enjoy an apple. Listen to a song. Tell a joke. Watch a bird. Touch a tree. These—and so many others—are beyond the reach of my lists.  

I sit writing this post—which I never planned to write, which wasn’t even on the list—and I watch the clock, trying to resist the urge to flip open my notebook. For the moment, I am here, but too soon I will be consulting the list, looking for the notation that will tell me where to go from here.

 

Maple Birthday

My daughter was born at the tail end of winter, spring just weeks away, and as I sat for hours holding and nursing her, my firstborn, I was acutely attuned to the time of year, the slant of the low winter sun, the gradual lengthening of the days, the changing angle of light coming in through the window onto the pair of us in the rocking chair. I followed that shifting rectangle of anemic light across the floor of the nursery to treat her mild jaundice, holding my baby up like an offering to the sun. How carefully I tracked the sun in my daughter’s first weeks, how slowly the time eked by as I longed for spring and for sleep, sensing that I would wake from my post-partum daze as the natural world erupted in bloom. But for those first weeks, everything seemed dormant, in stasis, and yet so much was already beginning to happen: the bulbs stirring underground, the birds already winging our way, the grasses preparing to green, the latent shoots waiting to emerge, and the sap flowing vigorously, secretly in the still leafless trees.

Now I tell my daughter that she was born during one of the most special times of the year, when the world is secretly preparing for rebirth, when the trees are great columns of moving sap, when the maple sugaring season is in full swing here in New England where we now live.

On my daughter’s seventh birthday, we invited about eighteen boys and girls, most of them first graders, to a local 4-H farm for a maple sugaring party. The day started with an indoor lesson about how to identify different types of maple trees based on their leaves, bark, and buds. The children sat in a half-circle on the floor listening to the naturalist and passing around maple samaras, pressed leaves, and bits of bark. Next they took turns practicing drilling a hole into a log with a hand brace and fitting the spile—or spout—into the taphole. They learned about different types of maples—sugar, black, red, even silver—all suitable for tapping, though the sugar maple is preferred for commercial production due to its higher sugar content and longer season.

Running out into the sunny, chilly March morning, the children headed for the sugar bush where they gathered around the maples, examining the spiles, lifting the lids and peering into the aluminum buckets collecting sap. At the naturalist’s invitation, they dipped their fingers into the buckets and sucked the sweet sugar water or let the slow drips off the spiles accrue in small puddles in their palms, which they licked away with relish.  

Next they headed for the sugarhouse, gasping at the intense heat and smoke from the wood-burning evaporator boiling down the sap. Standing in a safe perimeter around the fire, they listened to the naturalist tell them about the process of evaporation. Every forty gallons of sap, she told them, makes just one gallon of maple syrup. As the children’s cheeks began to glow red from the heat, she told them Native American legends about the genesis of the maple’s sweet sap and how people first learned of its deliciousness.

Of course it didn’t begin there. The year before, when my daughter was turning six, I took her to a maple sugaring class at another local farm. “There’s nothing quite like it in my experience,” said the naturalist who led that class. “You put a hole in a tree and you get water. Then you boil it down and get syrup.” We learned that maple syrup production is unique to North America, that the first accounts of Native Americans consuming the sap of maple trees date to the 1500s. We learned the ideal conditions for tapping the trees—temperatures in the forties during the day, in the twenties at night—and that the sugaring season typically lasts around six weeks, sometimes four, sometimes even eight. The season comes to an end when the temperatures stay above freezing or the buds on the trees begin to open. The sugar of this season, the naturalist told us, is what the tree built up last summer and stored as starch, so the production of this winter is determined by the conditions of the summer before.

To be tapped, a tree has to be a minimum of ten inches in diameter, usually thirty to fifty years old. A tree between eighteen and twenty-four inches in diameter can have two buckets; a tree over twenty-inches can have three. A good day’s flow fills a gallon bucket. Taking sap from a tree, the naturalist told us, is like donating blood. As long as you don’t overdo it, it doesn’t harm the tree. Some trees have been tapped every year for a century.

“And just think that this happens right on my birthday,” my daughter told me at the end of the class. That was the genesis of the maple birthday. She planned the party for a whole year.

Hungry from their time in the outdoors, the children headed back inside to eat. There was no cake at this party. Instead, the children were offered all-you-can-eat pancakes with maple syrup from the farm’s trees, poured out of mason jars. My daughter ate six, but my daughter’s friend who had also just turned seven, who was also a child of maple season, ate a record seven. Their stomachs full, the children headed back outside to roll down the hill and visit the 4-H animals in the barn. Near the end of the party, my daughter stationed herself by a box of the goody bags she had assembled herself. As the children prepared to leave, she handed each of her friends a brown paper bag hand-stamped with a maple leaf containing homemade maple cookies and a slip of paper with a maple-themed joke she had written and signed herself.

The maple birthday was really a series of lessons disguised as a party. Our goals were lofty: We wanted the children become more aware of the cycle of the seasons, to understand that they live on a planet where every day is not the same. We wanted them to think about how the natural world depends on these cycles—that there is a time when animals sleep the deep slumber of winter, a time when the leaves redden and then crisp, a time when nestlings fledge, and a time when the sap begins to course through trees. We wanted them to be aware of consequences—that what the trees did last summer affects them now, in late winter. We wanted them to appraise trees with an expert’s eye: “That’s a maple,” my daughter will say. “And I’m pretty sure it’s a three-bucket tree.” And we wanted them to know the sources of their food, to understand that maple sugaring is unique to this continent, that is has a long history and folklore. We wanted them to see the inherent worth of the local, the homemade, and to participate in the production of something valuable and delicious.

But really, it came down to sheer enjoyment. What seven-year-old can resist a big fire, a good story, and a puddle of syrup on a plate? What child wouldn’t want to run outside among the maples in the late winter days suddenly brimming over with light?

The party over, the children spilled into the arms of their parents, sticky-fingered, sated, the scent of wood smoke in their hair.

How (Not) to Fly a Toy Helicopter

First, due to your four-year-old’s latest object of fascination, acquire a remote control helicopter. Though the package indicates “age 14+,” and though your son is a whole decade shy of the age requirement, figure that 4-year-old + dad = successful helicopter flight. Unfortunately, as you will soon discover, the package fails to mention that in addition to being 14+, one needs also to be in possession of a helicopter pilot’s license with 500+ hours of flight time logged. Thus, you will learn that 14 + several decades + a college education and innumerable talents – helicopter flying experience does not = successful helicopter operation.

But don’t get ahead of yourself. Flying a helicopter is a serious undertaking. Take this one step at a time. And whatever you do, do not read the instructions. I repeat: do not read the instructions. They will not help you. They will only terrify you. Or baffle you. Or astonish you. But already you’re peeking at the cover. You note that your “R/C Helicopter Using Instruction” warns: “To avoid copter’s damage and player’s injury, please read this instruction before flying!” Yes, the exclamation point seems emphatic, but don’t do it!!

I know: you can’t resist. You open the Using Instruction. Just remember: I warned you. As the four-year-old and his dad begin to disentomb the helicopter from its Styrofoam sarcophagus, you read out loud with the seven-year-old looking over your shoulder. “Safety regulations,” you begin. “One: Placed in small parts of the reach of children, to avoid accidents.”

“Mom, I think that says to put small parts in the reach of children to avoid accidents,” the seven-year-old observes.

“Hmm, yes, that’s how I would read it,” you comment.

“Well luckily,” the seven-year-old says wryly, “Dad already did that.” She points at the baggies of various miniscule parts clutched in the four-year-old’s hands.

“Great, so we’re safe,” you say and keep reading. “Two: The blades of this helicopter is used activities blades, don’t screw up.”

“You got that, Dad?” says the seven-year-old. “Don’t screw up.”

You notice that the four-year-old is beginning to look nervous, but you plod on. “Three: The helicopter was powerful, should be gradually pushed up the remote control shift lever on the left for first flight, to avoid the surge caused the helicopter crash damage.”

“Crash damage,” echoes the seven-year-old. “That sounds bad.”

You decide to skip ahead. “Six: Note that when the helicopter to keep the user or other persons from 2-3 m to avoid the helicopter flight, landing crashed into another person’s head, face and body and so on.”

The four-year-old’s face takes on a blanched, stricken expression. “Maybe I should stop reading this out loud,” you say.

With the helicopter finally free of its plastic fetters, the four-year-old and his dad begin to examine the remote control. “We’ll have to charge it,” your husband observes. “What does it say about charging?”

Against your better judgment, you begin reading again. “Don’t soak the toys in the water, or the electronic parts will be destructed,” you offer. “Do not use the battery slam or beating hard surface.”

“I should have clarified,” your husband interrupts. “What useful information is there about charging?”

“Iron core device charging time: can be 240~250 minutes flying about 7~8 minutes!” you say. “In case my voice didn’t carry the inflection, there’s an exclamation point at the end of that sentence.”

“That’s because that’s over half an hour of charging time for every minute of flight time,” your husband observes. “The writers of the Using Instruction were expressing their shock and outrage.”

When the four-year-old learns that you have to charge the helicopter for an inordinately long time, he seems oddly relieved. He becomes jovial, talkative.

“Mom, what did people use for batteries in the olden days?”

“People didn’t use batteries in the olden days,” you reply. “Those lucky ducks.”

“So everything was kid-powered?” he clarifies.

“Kid-powered, grownup-powered, sometimes horse-powered. Maybe mule-powered.”

“Maybe frog-powered,” the four-year-old offers. “Snake-powered. Worm-powered.”

This desultory conversation will go on for awhile; if possible, prolong it for 240~250 minutes. Otherwise, bake blueberry muffins, draw construction equipment with chalk on the sidewalk, take a nap, and trap some sow bugs in a jar and bombard them with crumbs from the aforementioned muffins for their afternoon snack.

Finally, when the helicopter is charged, follow your family into the backyard. You might as well bring along the Using Instruction even though it will be of absolutely no use. Still, it may give you comfort to have something to grip in your sweaty hands. Watch as your husband sets the helicopter in the center of the yard and moves back holding the remote control. You see that the children are clutching one another’s hands on the patio, staying as near to the house as possible. Note that their instincts are good.

Due to your nervous habit of reading anything at hand during moments of great tension, you open the Using Instruction. “Maybe we should read the ‘Ready to fly’ section,” you offer. “One: Please recheck the ground, keep away from the crowds, animals and other barriers.”

“Animals are barriers?” the seven-year-old asks.

“To a helicopter,” you reply. “Two: Push the motive handle must be pushed to the maximum control route of travel first, then adjust it to the lowest.”

But you husband is no longer listening. He’s pushing levers on the remote control, and something is happening to the helicopter. It seems to be jumping back and forth, lifting its front up and then its rear, front and rear, like a person rocking from his toes to his heels.

“The spinners are going,” you observe.

“Those are rotors,” the four-year-old corrects you as he clings to his sister for dear life.

“I have a trim problem,” your husband mutters. “I can’t seem to control the pitch and yaw.”

“There’s nothing in here about pitching and yawing,” you observe. “There’s a section called ‘Helicopter control ways.’” You study the diagram. “Is your spinner going clockwise or anticlockwise?”

“Rotor,” says the four-year-old.

“Shouldn’t it be counterclockwise?” says the seven-year-old.

“I think anticlockwise might be British,” you reply.

“Did the British write those instructions?” she asks.

“I most certainly hope not,” you say. “OK. Does this help? ‘When the helicopter tail presents the clockwise rotation, you may the counterclockwise rotation you in the hand the remote control vernier adjustment knob until balanced.’”

“Yes, well, the vernier adjustment knob seems to be too sensitive,” your husband replies, and suddenly the helicopter launches into the air, ascending at an astonishing rate to twenty feet, thirty, where it begins to careen crazily, as if dodging imaginary fire. Without warning, it heads towards the neighbor’s yard and, as if on a suicide mission, crashes into an oak tree.

“DADDY, IS MY HELICOPTER BROKEN?” shrieks the four-year-old.

“Your dad’s going to go get it,” you tell your son while his dad goes tromping off into the vegetation at the property line where the helicopter has crash landed.

Surprisingly, the helicopter is unscathed, and your husband decides to give it another try. The children wrap their arms around one another in a full-on embrace. Again, the helicopter does its heel-to-toe Irish dance in preparation for its sudden ascent. This time, it begins to fly toward the house and the patio while your husband is frantically jamming the levers on the control. The kids watch it, wide eyed, and at the last minute it seems to plummet from the sky and fly straight for them just a couple of feet above their heads, as though intending to strafe them. They skitter away and take cover under the table while the helicopter zooms past them and clatters onto the patio.

“DADDY, THAT’S ENOUGH FLYING MY HELICOPTER!” screeches the four-year-old.

Your husband comes over and sets down the remote control. “I think I need to fly it into the wind,” he observes. “But we can take a break.”

Presently, the four-year-old comes out from under the table. He looks pale, shaken.

“How did people fly in the olden days?” he asks you.

“Not well at all,” you tell him.

The four-year-old nods, perhaps wishing he had lived in that simpler time, a time without batteries or human flight, a time when the world was powered by worms.

“Let’s go play in the sandbox,” the seven-year-old suggests. She takes her brother’s hand and leads him to the wooden sandbox that your husband built.

“I think if I took it to an open field,” you husband is saying, examining the rotors on the helicopter. “I think I could get the hang of it.” He picks up the Using Instruction that you’ve put on the table and begins to leaf through it with a determined glint in his eye. You can see that he and the helicopter have embarked on a long, contentious relationship. Don’t bother to say anything; it won’t do any good. Just allow the man-versus-helicopter plot to play itself out to the bitter end. Hope for the best. A few more crashes into trees just might do the helicopter in. Don’t consider the alternative.

“Mom!” the four-year-old calls from the sandbox. “What were wood and sand made of in the olden days?”

“Wood and sand,” you call back, “have always been made of wood and sand! They can never be improved on!”

And fortunately, they require no Using Instruction.

Flowers and First Graders

A couple of weeks ago, my husband Doug went to our daughter’s elementary school with a large carton full of pipe cleaners, pom-poms, marbles, aluminum foil, copper wire, string, tape, straws, popsicle sticks, paper cups, rubber bands, erasers, baking soda, index cards, test tubes, Petri dishes, small lengths of PVC pipe, and a flat of various potted flowers. The teachers had prepared the first graders for his visit by reading and discussing a story about a girl who needs to figure out how to pollinate a plant and, with the help of her aunt, an agricultural engineer, designs a hand pollinator. During his first visit, Doug went to each of the three first grade classes and talked to the students about engineering and technology. The first graders studied the shapes of flowers—impatiens, petunias, salvia—and tested how well pipe cleaners, pom-poms, marbles, erasers, foil, and other materials would transfer pollen. They recorded and discussed their findings in preparation for the next lesson.

The engineering unit was Doug’s culminating project for a twenty-week parent leadership class that we both recently completed. He applied for and received a grant from his employer that provided all the lesson plans and materials for the project. In consultation with the first grade teachers, he selected the curriculum on insects and pollination to complement the entomology science unit that the first graders had completed earlier in the year.

In describing why he chose to do an engineering project in our daughter’s class, Doug wrote about the gender disparity in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields. Statistics show that females continue to lag behind their male counterparts in STEM careers. For example, according to a 2011 U.S. Department of Commerce Report, the STEM workforce is only 24 percent women, compared to the 48 percent of women total in the U.S. workforce, a statistic that has remained unchanged for ten years. The field of engineering shows an even greater gender disparity. Only about 20 percent of engineering majors in the year 2000 were female, and a mere 9 percent of engineering jobs were held by women.

One of the factors that lies at heart of this gender disparity, researchers argue, is the degree of confidence that females have in their science, math, and engineering abilities and aptitude. For example, a recent study found that some women’s lack of confidence was “the main contributor to the gender gap between the number of males and females studying engineering and following engineering careers.” Confidence was also cited as a key factor in girls’ success in Encouraging Girls in Math and Science, a guide released by the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences: “Students who are more confident about their abilities in math and science are more likely to choose elective math and science courses in high school and more likely to select math and science-related college majors and careers.” And many researchers agree that the time to build this confidence is during a girl’s early years.

On his second visit to first grade, Doug gave the students models of flowers (made of test tubes, Petri dishes, and PVC pipe to resemble the shapes of real flowers) with “pollen” (baking soda) as well as bags of various materials. The first graders were then given the task of constructing a hand pollinator out of the materials they had tested during the first lesson. This time, the pollinator needed to collect pollen from inside the specific type of flower each child had been assigned. Taking into consideration the flower’s structure, the students adjusted the lengths of their pollinators’ handles, selecting materials based on size, shape, and degree of flexibility. Once the pollinators were built, the children tested them, collecting the baking soda pollen on their ends and attempting to transfer it. In the time remaining, they made alterations and perfected their designs for optimal pollen transfer.  

My daughter wanted to work on a pollinator for what she considered to be the hardest flower, the bent Bucket Orchid, and she worked diligently on a design that would go around the crook in the pipe to the pollen. She made several different designs, testing them, but in the end, she discovered that her pollinators weren’t picking up noticeable pollen. As she ran out of time, she faced the fact that her pollinator design didn’t work. And we didn’t tell her that her design was successful because she knew the truth. And because feeding children platitudes is not the way to build their confidence.

When researchers talk about girls’ confidence in STEM fields, I don’t think they mean the kind of confidence that supposedly comes from boosting children’s self-esteem by telling them that they’re doing a great job, even when they’re not. In fact, studies have shown that unwarranted praise can cause students to become risk-averse and less self-motivated. Bright girls are especially “vulnerable to the inverse power of praise.”

True confidence comes from doing something with your own hands or your own mind, figuring something out, making something genuinely useful or beautiful. It comes from engineering a fairy house or a hand pollinator that works, from solving a difficult math problem or puzzle, from fixing something that has broken or adapting something to a new purpose. Confidence comes not from praise, but from true engagement with the world, from taking risks and failing, and from experiencing success firsthand.

Later, at home, my daughter asked for the pollinator materials again, and she designed a new hand pollinator for the Bucket Orchid. And this time, it worked. And she didn’t need anyone to tell her that she had succeeded.

In his report about his project, Doug also wrote about the roles of fathers in their daughters’ lives. Research shows that girls whose fathers are actively involved in their lives are more successful. Confidence, it turns out, also comes from fathers. A study in England found that children who spend large amounts of time with their fathers have higher IQs, a difference that is still discernible even thirty years later. And specifically, children whose fathers visit their classrooms and interact with their teachers tend to be more successful academically.

These are all reasons why Doug spent two afternoons building hand pollinators with sixty first graders. But there are other reasons, too. Here are just seven of them:

1. The child in one of the first grade classes who has put all of his hand pollinator handouts and diagram of the parts of a flower into a three-ring binder and has started to collect flower specimens for further study.

2. My four-year-old beginning sentences with “I have a hypothesis,” and his seven-year-old sister replying, “Let’s go test that hypothesis.” (Need I even mention that the four-year-old has already designed three of his own hand pollinators?)

3. The conversation that I recently had with a fellow mom about a local STEM magnet school where she was thinking of enrolling her son. When I told her I had visited the school, she said, “Well of course you wouldn’t enroll your daughter there.” When I asked why not, she said, “Because girls aren’t interested in math and science.”

4. The diagram that my daughter drew of a device that—were she to become a cobbler and set up shop in her second-story bedroom—would lower shoes down to customers standing in our yard.

5. The things that she asks for. “I need a strip of cloth,” she says. “I need a piece of aluminum foil. I need some foam and some tape and a glass full of hot water.” It turns out she is reading a science book on heat and wants to do an experiment on conduction. “I don’t like it when the books give you the answers,” she tells me. “I want to find the answers myself.” (And, of course, once the experiment is complete, the glass becomes a vase for flowers.)

6. The flowers that we have all begun to see in new ways; suddenly we are struck by their delicate fluted throats, their bends and kinks. “Look at that flower,” my four-year-old says. “How would you make a hand pollinator for that?”

7. And this, from my daughter: “I wonder what Dad is going to come teach my class in second grade.”

And all the other reasons we don’t yet know.

First grade ends tomorrow. My daughter’s plans for the summer? “Read lots of books, work on math problems, and design some new hand pollinators.”

We’re not trying to make her into a scientist or engineer or mathematician. We only want to make it possible for her to become those things if she so chooses. We want that path to stay open. And it begins here, right now, as so many things do. It begins with fathers and daughters. It begins with flowers and first graders.