Bloggy peeps, I need some advice. There’s a 10 year old boy in my life who is dying for a skateboard.
I am nervous about this whole concept for a couple of reasons. First, I don’t know anything about skateboards. My childhood experience included many trips to the ER due to spills on toboggans, bicycles and falling up the stairs, but I have no experience with skateboards.
Second, we have a very steeply pitched driveway that dumps into the road at a spot well-hidden from oncoming drivers by a giant cedar hedge. I don’t worry so much about the 10 year old here, but I do worry about the four year old who THINKS he’s a 10 year old.
I don’t want to be overprotective. A skateboard is really not that different from a bike. Is it? But how do you get a good one and am I insane if I make him wear elbow, wrist AND knee pads in addition to a helmet? (And, erm, a full suit of bubble wrap?)
I have some serious misgivings, but I want to be convinced. Help me, bloggy peeps. Tell me what I need to know to make Tristan’s dream come true!
Okay, this? Best parenting advice I’ve read in a long time, and very in line with my ever-strengthening philosophy of giving kids room to be kids. Thank you to my friend and longtime reader Kim for sharing this article in the weekend Globe and Mail: Bucket list for kids: 50 things to do before they’re 12
I love this, because I think each and every one of these is an excellent activity — and yet it makes me sad and kind of tired. Do we as parents really need to make an itemized checklist of experiences our kids must achieve? Meh, maybe the grey Ottawa skies and cold, damp temperatures are making me cantankerous. It actually sounds like a road map to a pretty great summer, if spring ever decides to return.
Here’s the official list, editorialized with my own local spin:
1. Climb a tree
2. Roll down a really big hill (Mooney’s Bay has a great one for this!)
3. Camp out in the wild (did you know there’s a campground on Prince of Wales just north of Hunt Club? Practically downtown!)
4. Build a den
5. Skim a stone (I recommend Britannia Beach for this one!)
6. Run around in the rain (or puddles, maybe?)
7. Fly a kite
8. Catch a fish with a net
9. Eat an apple straight from a tree (we love Kilmarnock and Cannamore orchards)
10. Play conkers
11. Throw some snow (can we wait until December for this one, please?)
12. Hunt for treasure on the beach
13. Make a mud pie
14. Dam a stream
15. Go sledging
16. Bury someone in the sand
17. Set up a snail race
18. Balance on a fallen tree
19. Swing on a rope swing (the rope swing is hands down the kid-favourite feature in our backyard)
20. Make a mud slide
21. Eat blackberries growing in the wild (there are – or were – wild raspberries growing along the boardwalk at the Chapman Mills Conservation Area)
22. Take a look inside a tree
23. Visit an island
24. Feel like you’re flying in the wind
25. Make a grass trumpet
26. Hunt for fossils and bones
27. Watch the sun wake up
28. Climb a huge hill
29. Get behind a waterfall (or maybe go caving?)
30. Feed a bird from your hand (bring some seed to the Lime Kiln Trail or Hogsback Falls for this one!)
31. Hunt for bugs
32. Find some frogspawn
33. Catch a butterfly in a net
34. Track wild animals
35. Discover what’s in a pond (Mud Lake is great for this!)
36. Call an owl
37. Check out the crazy creatures in a rock pool
38. Bring up a butterfly
39. Catch a crab
40. Go on a nature walk at night
41. Plant it, grow it, eat it
42. Go wild swimming
43. Go rafting
44. Light a fire without matches (um, no thanks)
45. Find your way with a map and a compass
46. Try bouldering
47. Cook on a campfire
48. Try abseiling
49. Find a geocache
50. Canoe down a river (although you might want to wait until they’re older than 3 and 5 yrs old!)
I figure the boys have a good half of the items crossed off, and I can tell you for sure I won’t be taking them abseiling any time soon – although the zip-line at a local aerial park is not out of question. What do you think? Is there anything on here a child of 12 can or cannot live without doing? Something you’d add to the list?
So let’s imagine a hypothetical boy. He’s plenty bright, and gets reasonable marks in school. He’s a little scatterbrained, though, and a bit of a daydreamer. It’s quite possible that he has the same inability of his hypothetical mother to hold a thought in his head, except for when he’s exhibiting her other hypothetical tendency to obsess on things.
So our boy has just brought home his report card, which shows he’s doing well academically, but has for the first time been graded with a couple of “needs improvement” in some behavioural categories: responsibility and self-regulation. The hypothetical teacher has made observations along the lines of “difficulty assuming responsibility for and managing his own behaviour” and “he is encouraged to approach learning with a positive attitude” and “requires some reminders to fulfill classroom responsibilities and commitments.”
If he was having (hypothetical) trouble with academics, I would know what to do. Devote more time to study, help him, even hire a tutor. But what do you do with a child who can do the work, but only works hard enough to do the bare minimum required? How do you motivate a child to govern his own behaviour when you have to stand over him and nag to make sure the bare minimum gets done? And how the heck do you correct a behavioural problem that you yourself suffered through most of your own (hypothetical) academic career?
The hypothetical teacher and I will meet to discuss, but I’m thinking this problem may be inherent to a lot of boys. How do you work on focus and motivation and initiative? When learning comes easy, how do you get kids to put in more than the minimum effort required?
Any tips from the trenches on this one?
This is yet another blog post inspired by a twitter conversation. (And they say twitter killed blogs!) The twitter conversation itself evolved from a conversation about bullying, and about Rick Mercer’s eloquent rant, and included this post by my friend Angela on how her 12-year-old daughter was being harassed by text messages. (It’s a good post – you should read it. I’ll wait here until you get back. Her message is important, maybe moreso that whatever I’ll come up with here, so if you only have time for one post today, read hers and come back to this one tomorrow!)
All of which brings me to what I’m wondering about, which is this: at what age do kids start getting their own cell phones? What about their own social media and online accounts? Obviously, the answer is going to be different for each family and each child, but I’m curious about your thoughts. My boys have only recently “discovered” Club Penguin and its very controlled online interactions – and this has been pretty much the extent of their interest in connecting with their peers online. I’m thinking this is a bullet I can’t dodge for long.
Really, I guess I’m just curious. I was a little surprised to hear that kids as young as 10 or 12 are carrying cell phones, to be honest. I thought this was a conversation we’d be having when the kids were approaching high school, not smack in the middle of elementary school. I asked the boys if any kids in their class have mobile phones or talk about Facebook, but they seem to be blissfully oblivious — so far, at least.
What do you think?
So we’re emasculating poor Willie the Cat today. Or, as Simon so eloquently put it, “he’s getting his neuters taken out.”
This whole neutering thing has provided an unexpected wealth of teachable moments. We’ve recently had conversations with the boys about the responsibilities of pet ownership, about the differences between males and females of various species, and even some rudimentary sex education.
I think the big takeaway, though, is this one: don’t mess with mom or she’ll have your balls cut off. That’s a good message for three boys to internalize, don’t you think?
(Photo caption: “You’re gonna WHAT my WHAT now??!)
Sorry, Willie. But thanks for the cautionary tail — erm, tale.
August was marked by much anxiety about sports. I googled, I asked friends online and IRL, I blogged, I tweeted, I wrung my hands in anxiety. To hockey or not to hockey, that was the compelling question.
Do you like how I just turned hockey into a verb? If ‘friend’ can be a verb, so can hockey. And we, as a family, have decided not to hockey. At least, not yet.
When I realized that I was projecting many of my own innermost anxieties about social acceptance and peers onto the situation, I realized I had lost all perspective and sought the opinions of others. (The irony does not escape me that even in this, I seek external approval for my actions and validation of my decisions. Don’t judge me.)
There were many factors that informed our decision to not hockey, and many voices. On the pro-hockey side there were those who shared their own childhood hockey experiences, those who loved being a hockey parent (see, if hockey can be an adjective as well as a noun, surely it can be a verb as well!) and those who saw hockey as a natural right of passage for their sons and daughters. On the con side, there were those who expressed reservations about the cost, the culture and the violence. Annie of PhD in Parenting wrote a post that helped me crystalize my own reservations – read it here, because it’s worth seeing the other side even if you’re a rabid athletic supporter.
I was so torn that I first registered and then a week later de-registered one son from our local minor league team. The money and the time commitment were just too great, and I couldn’t rationalize the benefit against the costs. When I told said boy that we had in the end decided it was best for our family that he not play hockey this year, he looked at me mildly with this thoughtful brown eyes, shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘Okay.’ For this I lost hours of sleep.
The absence of hockey gave us room for activities for two boys. One will join Beaver Scouts, something I find endlessly delightful. And, it’s around the corner on Thursday evenings instead of all over the eastern half of the province at wildly unpredictable times. The other was given a choice of activities, and he chose — be still my heart — guitar lessons.
There was more googling, more researching, more consultations. A school was chosen, a guitar was acquired, a teacher was hired, a time slot was secured. In the end, the total cost for the first year of lessons and the guitar may yet exceed the cost of the damn hockeying.
And you know what? I am happy with that. Moreso, I am delighted with this turn of events. We are artsy, musical people. (Well, Beloved and Papa Lou are musical. Me, not so much. Despite seven pathetic years of school band, I remain largely tone deaf and unencumbered by any sense of rhythm whatsoever.)
Here’s five reasons why guitar lessons trump hockey playing:
1. We do not risk growing out of this guitar in mid-season.
2. Guitar lessons do not take place at 6 am on a Saturday, or in damp, dank 12C arenas.
3. There is little to no risk of a concussion in guitar lessons.
4. Other parents do not yell angrily at your child during guitar lessons. (Although the jury is still admittedly out on whether we will yell angrily at our own children in the act of encouraging the practicing of said guitar lessons.)
5. Chicks dig guitar players.
We start our first lessons this week. I can barely wait!
