Category: Mothering without a licence

All-day kindergarten recommended for Ontario

A couple of weeks back, I started writing a series of posts about the state of early education and child care in Canada. The first post was an introduction and summary of the Canadian Senate’s report called “Early Childhood Education and Care: Next Steps.” I was rather underwhelmed by the Senates main recommendations, which were for more bureaucracy. Before I had a chance to write up my next post on the series, the government of Ontario released a watershed (I hope) report full of jaw-dropping recommendations for early childhood education in Ontario, centred around the recommendation for full-day kindergarten for 4- and 5-year-olds.

Compared to the Senate’s call for more bureaucracy, I was delighted – practically gleeful! — to see the clear plan and call to action laid out in “With Our Best Future in Mind: Implementing Early Learning in Ontario.” The report, commissioned when the McGuinty provincial government was elected in 2007, contains recommendations that are so full of promise and potential that I’m almost afraid to hope they might be implemented.

Here are some of the things the report recommends:

“Every child in Ontario who turns 4 by December 31 would be entitled to attend two years of full-day, school-year Early Learning Program operated by school boards.”

“Parents would have the option of extended programming before and after the traditional school day and year, not as an add-on but as part of the Early Learning Program.” That’s integrated before and after school care!

The report also calls for schools to become “community hubs” offering many of the same services that the current Early Years Centres offer, including parenting support and counseling, pre- and post-natal support and information, early identification of issues and resources, etc. Schools will be open to the community from 7:30 am to 6 pm, 50 weeks of the year. “Crucial to the new vision for Ontario is the transformation of all elementary schools into community schools, open to their neighbourhoods and capable of providing families with opportunities for children’s learning, care, health, culture, arts, and recreation from the prenatal period through to adolescence.”

Imagine that! Schools open to the community! (Is anyone else vaguely disturbed by having to stand outside a fence practically off school property for school pick-ups and drop-offs? I understand the school’s concern for safety, but I do in fact feel vaguely alienated from my kids’ school!)

It also calls for fee-based Extended Day Primary programming – basically, enrichment programs in arts and sports for ages 6 to 8 and 9 to 12.

A final recommendation is the implementation of a 400-day paid leave for parents, including a six-week leave for the exclusive use of fathers and other “non-birthing” parents.

It’s a hugely ambitious plan, aiming for implementation beginning next year in 2010-2011. I can only hope the school boards and teachers’ unions that are currently criticizing the plan have the sense to recognize it as containing the kind of radical shift in philosophy that we will look back on and wonder why we didn’t do it a generation before.

I love the fact that this report gets it right by first suggesting a series of finite, clearly enunciated steps to be implemented more or less immediately, and THEN follows it up with a recommendation for the necessary ministries and legislation to support the revitalized system, instead of the other way around as recommended by the Senate report.

If you haven’t read it between the lines, I’m very excited about this report and just about everything it contains. Once upon a time, when the idea of full-day kindergarten was first floated by the McGuinty government circa 2007, I admit that I saw it mostly as a way to reduce my own out-of-pocket costs on child care. But, after spending a lot of time recently up to my elbows in public reports on child care and early childhood education, I can see that there are huge societal gains to be had in implementing these ideas and the potential for saving a few bucks on daycare is actually among the lesser of the huge benefits to be reaped. I’ll take a look at the research I’ve seen in the next post in what is becoming an increasingly elongated — but suddenly extremely positive — series!

Letter to the editor: child care and early childhood education

Submitted this morning to the Ottawa Citizen:

As the mother of three boys, ages seven, five and one year old, I read with interest Elizabeth Payne’s op-ed article (“When we are six“, June 4, 2009) about school readiness in Ottawa. I think Ms Payne missed a valuable opportunity to link the issue of school readiness to the state of early childhood education in Canada.

Earlier this year, with practically no fanfare from the media, the Senate of Canada released a report called Early Childhood Education and Care: Next Steps. The report was inspired by a 2006 report from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) that ranked Canada dead last of 14 countries participating in the OECD’s Thematic Review of Early Childhood Education and Care.

As noted in the Senate report, “the 50 reports that make up the OECD’s review of education and care services for pre-school-aged children comprise the largest body of comparative policy research to date in the field” and “allowed Canada to evaluate itself against international peers and provided a unique opportunity to drawn on best practices in early learning and child care policy and delivery.”

The report notes that of the countries studied, Canada ranked fourth overall for GDP and seventh overall for proportion of working mothers, but had the fourth-highest costs for child care and had the seventh-highest levels of child poverty. And, more on point with Ms Payne’s article, Canada came in last overall for attendance in early childhood education programs for ages 3 to 6 years old. Further, Canada came in 15th out of 20 countries on spending on social programs as a proportion of GDP and last of countries compared in spending on early learning and child care services.

Unfortunately, the main recommendations of the Senate report were for more bureaucracy, including recommending a Minister of State for Children and Youth and a bureaucratic network to support the Minister. It’s a start, I suppose. More disappointing, though, was the abject lack of interest by the media in this vitally important topic.

The issue of quality child care is not just about babysitting or “beer and popcorn” money designed to buy votes. We need to start working now on a workable national system of integrated early childhood education and child care. That will help to level the playing field across socio-economic levels, not just throughout the city but throughout Canada.

(Seems about once a year I get my knickers in enough of a knot to write to the Citizen. I’ll let you know if they publish it!)

A call to action for my American friends

You know the topic of affordable, quality child care is dear to my heart, and I hope to continue my series on the Senate of Canada’s recent report on child care and early childhood education in Canada later this week.

Today, I received this note from MomsRising.org about the Family Tax Relief Act of 2009 that is currently before the U.S. Senate, and I thought it was important enough to share with you:

The Family Tax Relief Act of 2009 (S. 997) sponsored by Senators Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) and Olympia Snowe (R-ME), would improve the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit for millions of families by more than doubling the maximum credit families can claim for child care expenses and making it fully refundable so that low and moderate income working families will also benefit.

Now, more than ever, families need our support. The Family Tax Relief Act of 2009 would make a real difference in the lives of millions of families.

Please forward this message on to friends, families, moms, and dads at your workplace and in your community. We need everyone’s voice to pass this important legislation.

Don’t forget to send a letter to your Senators now asking them to co-sponsor this critical legislation: Click here support the Family Tax Relief Act of 2009.

Thank you for your support of America’s families.

Because the need for affordable, quality child care knows no boundaries.

The Senate Report on Childcare in Canada: Part 1

At the end of April 2009, the Senate of Canada released a report titled Early Childhood Education and Care: Next Steps. I printed it out and have been lugging it around with me (it runs more than 200 pages) for the better part of a month. If you are at all interested in the issues of daycare, child care and early childhood education in Canada, and how Canada compares to the rest of the world, I highly recommend you make yourself a copy and find the time to read it. If you’ve never read a Parliamentary report, you don’t know what you’re missing! And if you can’t quite find the couple of spare hours you’ll need to polish it off, fear not, because I am going to break it down for you and share the highlights over the next little while.

When I read the Executive Summary, my first reaction was eyeball-rolling disappointment. The main recommendations are (spoiler alert!):

1. That the Prime Minister appoint a Minister of State for Children and Youth, “with responsibilities to include working with provincial and territorial governments to advance quality early learning, parenting programs and child care” and to research early childhood development and learning.

2. The Minister should be advised by a new National Advisory Council on Children, on matters of “how to best support parents and advance quality early learning and child care.” The Council would be populated by “Parliamentarians, other stakeholders, community leaders and parents, with appropriate representation from Aboriginal communities.”

3. That the government call a series of multi-jurisdictional meetings to establish a “pan-Canadian framework to provide policies and programs to support children and their families” and establish a “federal/provincial/territorial Council of Ministers…to meet anually to review Canada’s progress with respect to other OECD countries and to share best practices.”

4. The government should establish “an adequately funded, robust system of data collection, evaluation and research, promoting all aspects of quality human development and in early childhood programming, including the development of curricula, program evaluation and child outcome measures.”

Captivating stuff, isn’t it? The Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Techonology took nearly three years to issue a report that calls for — more bureaucracy.

Because this is a topic dear to my heart, and because I think it’s important for every single Canadian to know at least a little bit about this issue, and because I like to think I have at least a moderate ability to translate government-speak into a language people other than the bureaucrats can understand, I’m going to take an in-depth look at this report in a series of posts over the next little while. By the time I finished reading it — and I read every single word because there is no end to the things I will do for my bloggy peeps — I was more or less in agreement with the Committee’s recommendations.

This Committee’s report was inspired by a 2006 report from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) that ranked Canada dead last of 14 countries participating in the OECD’s Thematic Review of Early Childhood Education and Care. As noted in the Senate report, “the 50 reports that make up the OECD’s review of education and care services for pre-school-aged children comprise the largest body of comparative policy research to date in the field” and “allowed Canada to evaluate itself against international peers and provided a unique opportunity to drawn on best practices in early learning and child care policy and delivery.” Did I mention dead last? Ouch.

The OECD highlighted strengths and weaknesses in Canada’s early childhood care and education system. The strengths included the one-year parental leave, Quebec’s early education and child care policies, a well-established kindergarten network for children aged five years and older, and “efforts of provincial administrations to maintain ECEC services ‘despite a withdrawal of Federal funding and a climate of suspicion of public services’.” The areas of concern included:

  • weak public funding of ECEC services, especially for children under five years;
  • the separation of child care from early education;
  • limited access to affordable child care services and particular issues related to access for Aboriginal children;
  • the quality of child care, e.g., very poor accommodation, child care workers’ protective and interventionist approach, lack of direct access to outside space;
  • the apparent predominance of unregulated care; and,
  • staff qualifications and training and other issues related to their recruitment and retention, e.g., absence of federal and provincial/territorial guidelines and low wage levels, and lmited tradition of professional development.

A few more statistics that I found both enlightening and alarming: among the OECD countries under review, Canada ranked in the top 10 in the following categories:

Wealth: ranked 4th in gross domestic product (GDP) per capita
Cost of child care: ranked 4th in amount paid by parents for early childhood services
Child Poverty: ranked 7th overall
Proportion of “working” mothers: ranked 7th overall for mothers with children under three years old and 8th for mothers with children under six years old.

Further, Canada came in 14th out of 20 for early childhood education attendance for children ages 0 to 3 and last out of 20 countries for early childhood education attendance for ages 3 – 6. We came in 15th out of 20 countries on spending on social programs as a proportion of GDP and last of countries compared in spending on early learning and child care services.

It’s not a very pretty picture, is it?

And that’s only skimming through 20 of 200+ pages of information. In the next couple of posts, we’ll take a look at what other countries are doing, why early childhood education is so important to every single member of our society, and what Canada should do next.

Talk to me about sleep training

First, I loved your comments on my last post, where I asked you your thoughts about letting my five- and seven-year-old boys walk around the block together alone. For now, we’ve decided to hold off, and I swear it’s not because my mother called me up the night I posted it and more or less told me I was free to support the idea of free range kids but I was not free to subject her grandsons to the philosophy. Well, not entirely because of that, anyway… (*waves to mom*)

So today, let’s talk about what psychological damage I can wreak on her youngest grandson instead. Yep, I want to talk about sleep training. Ah, the controversy never gets old around here.

Lucas is fifteen months old, and for pretty much each night of those fifteen months, he’s been cuddled to sleep. I think it’s time he learned to start falling asleep on his own in his crib. Can someone please flip a magic switch so I can get him to do it immediately, without any stress to him or extraneous effort on my part? No? I didn’t think so.

I’m not opposed to letting him cry it out, if I must. It worked with both Tristan and Simon, although they were each a little less than a year old when we tried it. It took about five nights of fussing with Tristan (you can read my CIO diaries in the archives) and about twice that long with Simon, but in the end, it was soooooo worth it to just be able to put the baby in his crib, kiss him goodnight and walk away.

It’s not that I begrudge Lucas his nightly cuddle, either. I’d still cuddle him before hand, but I still believe that it’s important that they learn to sooth themselves to sleep. He’s not a bad night-time sleeper overall, but he’s been waking in the night a lot lately, and I think he’d be less fussy when he wakes up if he’d put himself to sleep in the first place. A couple of times in the past week, instead of dropping right back to sleep when I re-insert his soother, he’s been wide awake in the crib. He’ll stay in the crib and eventually drift off again, but only if I’m standing there. While I’m pleased with this development, I’m not overly fond of standing stock-still in his room for fifteen minutes at a time in the middle of the night, pining for my bed the whole time. I’m thinking I can somehow parlay this into sleep training, but not quite sure how to do it or if I want to start down that road.

This is, after all, my last baby and I’m coddling him for all he’s worth. As much as I’m a fan of Ferber’s ideas and I totally agree with the theory — I just don’t want to put either of us through it all and in my experience thus far, there’s been no middle ground. It’s either CIO or cuddle to sleep, and I’m not sure either extreme is where I want to go next.

This is where you come in. I don’t particularly want to debate the merits of CIO, and you should know up front that I am deeply offended by Elizabeth Pantley so I’d appreciate it if you didn’t drag her into the conversation, but other than that — what have you found works or doesn’t work in sleep training? How did you get your kids to start falling asleep on their own? How old were they? As with all things mothering, I know I won’t still be rocking him to sleep when he’s on his honeymoon, but even on the third go-round, I’m still not sure how I want to navigate this one. And you know I get all my best mothering material from the bloggy peeps, right?

Growing boys, growing freedom

We’ve talked about this subject before, but it’s always an interesting conversation to me. Mom, don’t read this post. You won’t like it!

Now that the weather is fine, the boys have started playing outside every evening after dinner, and they’ve made friends with the family that lives across the back fence. Their kids are a little older — ages eight, 10 and 12, I’d guess — but they seem to enjoy playing with Tristan and Simon. They’ve been playing catch over the back fence (it’s one of those 6-foot wooden plank fences) and Tristan has clambered up and over once or twice — until I firmly and unequivocally forbade him from doing that. Even so, the kids on the other side (and it’s one of those yards that seem to contain almost all of the neighbourhood kids) climb up from their side and sit on the top to chat with the boys.

I like this family a lot, but I don’t know them very well. Just a kind of “Hi” over the back fence thing. I think Tristan is old enough to play with them as a peer, but they’re tolerant of Simon as well. I’ve debated pulling out a plank or two to give the kids access through the fence, but worry about (a) damaging the fence and (b) the dog escaping. Last time we talked about this, someone suggested adding velcro to a couple of the planks, making them removable. This seems like a neat idea, but I really don’t want to muck too much with the fence — a replacement fence is simply not in the budget right now, nor is building a gate. Plus, I’m just not sure how long this fledgling friendship will last — I figure the older kids will lose interest pretty quickly.

After a couple of evenings of watching them play and holler across the fence, I started thinking about walking Tristan and Simon around the block to let them play in the other kids’ yard. This poses a couple of inconveniences, including what do I do once I’m there (with Lucas) — do I sit on the deck and supervise in someone else’s yard, waiting to walk them back home again? Knock on the door and ask the mom to call me when they’re done? This seems to me to be a big imposition, because her kids are old enough to play unsupervised.

So I started thinking about letting them walk over by themselves. There’s lots of reasons why it would be okay. It’s a single block — no streets to cross, and they live on a cul-de-sac, so it’s pretty safe all the way along. Tristan is fairly responsible, and there is safety in numbers. I could see them when they get there, and they could come home whenever they wanted without having to call for me and I wouldn’t have to wait for them. Plus, I do believe in giving freedom where freedom is earned. The drawbacks are that if they left the yard, I couldn’t see what they were up to, and I don’t know that any progress is made if I spend the whole time hovering at the window spying on them.

Late last week, I took an informal poll on Twitter, asking this question: would you allow your five and seven year old to walk around the block, unescorted but with no streets to cross, to play with the kids who live behind you?

The results were split pretty much down the middle, with most of the “yes” answers having the caveat along the lines of “as long as they’re together” and quite a few “as long as I could see them” or “I’d creep along behind them” type of answers.

I’m a huge believer in the idea of “free range kids” and I wish there were more (heck, any!) kids on our street for the boys to play with. Not to haul out this old song again, but really — when I was four I was walking to and from school by myself, and when I was six I used to walk down to the corner store and the park by myself all the time. I really don’t believe the world has changed so much in 30+ years that it’s any different now.

In the last year, the boys have been earning more and more freedoms. They’re now allowed to play in the front or back yard unsupervised (unless I leave the front door open or watch from the bedroom, I can’t see the front yard from the house) and they’ve been allowed to walk to the mailbox around the corner unescorted to get the mail by themselves. There’s a park across the street and down a bit, just out of my line of sight, and I think next summer they’ll probably be allowed to go over together and without an escort. (Although by that time, Lucas will be old enough to demand that he go to the park with them, and perhaps two is a little young for unescorted trips to the park…)

So what do you think? Would you let your five and seven year old walk around the block unescorted to play outside? Not a supervised playdate, just neighbourhood kids running around together, just like I remember doing back in the golden days of my childhood. If not five and seven, then what age? And is it really so different now than it was in 1975?

So what exactly do you *do* with decomposing human teeth?

The tooth fairy has started to visit our house. Last August – on my birthday, in fact – Tristan lost his first tooth. He lost the second one later in the fall, and the third one popped out a couple of weeks ago.

You know, I have a pretty strong stomach, and I like to think I’m generally not the squeamish type. I’m fine with blood, and for at least as long as it takes to get the job done, I can handle most of the products of the baser bodily functions – puke, snot, poop, whatever. Lucas peed on my leg yesterday and my only consternation was that it was my last clean pair of jeans.

This whole tooth thing, though? Ugh. The loose teeth make me feel more than a little squeedgy, and the tooth removed from the mouth makes my stomach do an unpleasant little roll. Blech. Teeth belong in mouths, firmly rooted to bony jaws, not hanging by (*gulp*) bloody little tentacle-like threads.

So once the tooth gets out of the mouth, it goes directly into a ziploc bag where nobody has to run the risk of touching it, especially of touching the (*gulp*) gutty parts where the roots used to be. The ziploc bag goes under the pillow, where it usually takes about three nights for the tooth fairy to magically transform that tooth to a shiny $2 coin. (Lucky for us, Tristan has been very accepting of the fact that the tooth fairy is more than a little overworked, and it’s not unusual for her to forget be so busy taking care of other kids that it takes a couple of nights for her to get around to everyone on the list.)

The first time he lost a tooth, after groping around under his pillow in the morning gloaming on the second day the tooth popped out, I managed effect the swap of tooth for twoonie and slip out of his room while he was still sleeping. I could hear him stirring, though, and knew it wouldn’t be long before he woke up. I froze once I hit the hallway, ziploc-sheathed tooth pinched distastefully between thumb and forefinger, flummoxed.

Now what?

I hadn’t thought the plan through past the tooth-to-twoonie alchemy. What the hell do I do with this decaying bit of human remains? I can’t just throw it out. (Could I *be* any more ridiculously sentimental?) Certainly not with Tristan about to walk into the room, anyway. So I did the first thing I could think of — I stuffed the entire ziploc bag, tooth enclosed, into the bottom drawer of my jewellery box. Where it remained, untouched and unconsidered, until the next time Tristan lost a tooth.

After three days of utterly and completely forgetting to effect the trade of tooth-for-twoonie, I found myself in the Exact Same Predicament: gnarly bit of discarded bone in hand (well, in ziploc in hand) and no idea what to do with it. So I stuffed it unceremoniously in the jewellery box with its mate.

Well, you can guess what happened with the third one. There has been just enough time between the loss of each tooth for me to completely forget to consider the problem of how to divest myself of the discarded baby teeth.

So now I have three rotting teeth stuffed in the lower drawer of my jewellery box and I have no idea what to do with them. I can’t bring myself to simply throw them out, especially now that I’ve taken steps – however rudimentary – to preserve them. Sheesh, they’re not even very good teeth – both of the big boys have already had cavities that need filling.

With three kids that will lose an average of 20 teeth each (Tristan actually has an extra one up front, just to add to my vexation) I’m facing in the neighbourhood of 60 teeth over the next dozen years or so. If nothing else, I’m eventually going to need a bigger jewellery box. And I no longer wear any of my jewellery because I’m beginning to feel vaguely squeamish every time I get anywhere near my dresser. Pretty soon I won’t even be able to get out any fresh underwear and that can’t end well.

What do you do with the teeth your kids lose? Surely if there are regulations against dog poop in household waste there must be some prohibition against decaying human remains? Do you flush them and release them to the wilds? Bury them in the backyard? Save them and present them in a velvet lined box to his future wife the night of the rehersal dinner? Help!

In which Lucas makes his preference clear

I was just settling into the comfy chair with Lucas, preparing for our regular bedtime routine. He’ll nurse for a few minutes and then I’ll cuddle him to sleep – the third child truly is spoiled rotten. I’d just pulled him in close when I realized I’d completely forgotten to give him his after-dinner bottle. (I blame Granny and Papa Lou for their scintillating after-dinner conversation.)

I looked down at him and said, “Oh no! We forgot to give you your bottle! I’m so sorry!” He looked up at me with his beautiful brown eyes and said, “Bottle.” Clear as day! He’s got a dozen or 20 words, but I hadn’t heard that one before. What really shocks me, though, is how much he understands of what we say to him. Unbiased as I am, I truly think he’s ahead of the curve in comprehension.

I laughed and started pulling up my shirt to offer him a boob, figuring even though he’d be down a couple of ounces of milk because we’d skipped the bottle he’d survive and it was too late to bother now. He looked at my breast, looked at me and pointed quite clearly to the shelf in the kitchen where I keep the baby bottles, which we could see from the chair, and said, “Bottle.”

“Okay,” I said, laughing again, “I’ll give you a bottle. But you have to drink a little bit of this first.” The nursing is staggering to a halt, but I’m doing what I can to prolong it. He took about four cursory slurps, popped off the nipple and pointed at the kitchen. “Bottle.”

This is the same child who last summer would pop off the boob randomly to suck on his own toes. It’s a good thing my ego is not fragile, I tell you. Apparently toes and cow’s milk are both preferable to whatever I’m brewing up.

So I brought him into the kitchen, where he giggled in delight as I poured the milk into a bottle. He pointed at the microwave and said, “Bottle!” while it warmed, and proceeded to snarf down all six ounces. For good measure, as I was finally settling in to cuddle him to sleep, he arched his back to look at the empty bottle on the end table where I had placed it.

“Bottle!” he announced, pointing to it and grinning at me with a look of self-satisfaction that clearly said, “I am the cleverest baby who ever lived, and aren’t I devilishly cute, too?”

Somehow, I think I’m going to spend a lot of this child’s lifetime thinking, “It’s a good thing you’re so darn cute…”

Failure is no longer an option

I wish I had a lot more time today to write about this subject, because it really fascinates me. There was an article in yesterday’s Citizen about how secondary school students in Ontario are no longer being failed for transgressions as serious as plagarizing. (When I was in university, it seems to me that was grounds for explusion, let alone failing an assignment.) The article notes:

Teachers are saying they are increasingly pressured to make sure students pass. If a student fails to hand in assignments on time, cheats, plagiarizes or doesn’t show up for tests, they can “rescue” their endangered credit. If the student fails, he or she can re-do the assignments they bombed and “recover” a wayward credit. Teachers are, as a result, concerned about “credit integrity” — whether a final mark awarded to a student who procrastinates, plagiarizes and bombs tests should be worth the same as the mark awarded to a student who earned a credit by the books the first time around.

This drives me crazy! It’s all linked to the Ontario Ministry of Education’s new and noble drive to increase graduation rates and decrease dropout rates. As the article notes, “While 68 per cent of students graduated from high school within five years in 2003-2004, the province aims to increase the graduation rate to 85 per cent by 2010-2011. Last year, 13,500 more students graduated from Ontario high schools than in the previous year.”

Well yes, they graduated, but can they write a paragraph? What will they do when they go off to university and have to actually do the work to pass, with thousands of dollars of tuition on the line? And what happens when they head out into the real world and they have a boss who isn’t interested in offering “rescue” or “recovery” options the first time they miss a deadline for an important project?

Call me a hardass on this one, but I think this is yet another way in which we’re coddling kids today and it’s really got to stop! In another article today that I couldn’t immediately find online, Ontario Education Minister Kathleen Wynne said, “What we know for now from education research is that failing kids doesn’t motivate [them].” Well, passing them for shoddy work certainly isn’t going to do it, either!

I feel very strongly about this, in case you didn’t notice, but I also feel like the old fart waving her cane at the passing hooligans from her porch rocker. But seriously, I cannot imagine how frustrating it must be to be a teacher working in these times. Johnny failed the test because he was playing his Xbox all night instead of studying for the exam, but he’s sorry now and he’d like the chance to recover his credit, so Ms Teacher can you please redesign another test to give Johnny a second chance? Oh, and make sure it’s equally challenging, make special arrangements for a quiet time and place for him to write it, take extra time to mark it, and then help Johnny catch up on all the stuff he missed while he was taking his second test? Oh, he failed again? Oh well. Go ahead and start making up that third test for him.

I also see this as horrendously unfair to the kids who do try their best and who are going to learn in a righteous hurry that there is absolutely no reason for them to work hard or indeed work at all if the kid sitting next to them committing academic fraud and showing up only when it’s convenient ends up with the same damn diploma at the end of it all.

Am I reading this wrong? Have I got my knickers in a twist over nothing? (Can’t say that’s ever happened before.) Do you think the province is on the right track by mollycoddling kids through high school?

Rerun week continues with Notes from a Therapy Session

I’m guest-blogging over at Canadian Family magazine’s Family Jewels blog this week, and dredging up some of my favourite posts from the archives to keep you company over here. This one is from the summer of 2006.

***

Tristan: And did I tell you about that time when I was four, when my mother tried to kill me twice in the same month?

Therapist: Hmmm, I don’t think so. There was the episode where she locked you and your brother in a running car while you were sleeping…

Tristan: Right, and then less than two weeks later, she yanked me off some playground equipment and I dropped like a stone from eight feet in the air.

Therapist: Surely she didn’t mean to…

Tristan: It was one of those things where you dangle off a handle and zoom across a beam from one platform to another. She called it a zip line, but I insisted on calling it a zip code, which was pretty funny because we don’t even have zip codes in Canada. Anyway, I had just barely mastered holding my own body weight up but I loved that zip code. We went to a new park one evening on our bikes, and I was so proud to be able to actually reach the zip code from the raised platform, and all I did all night long was zip back and forth.

Therapist: And what did your mother do?

Tristan: Well, she was watching and cheering for me at first, but then she said it would be easier if I used my feet to push off the platform at the far end. The big kids could hurl themselves across really fast and bounce half way back on one push, but I kind of had to wiggle and squirm to make it all the way across and back. Remember, I was a big kid for my age, but I was only four years old.

Therapist: Mmmm hmmm…

Tristan: And so my mother said, ‘Here, let me show you. Just use your feet to push off the platform…’ and she grabbed me by the ankles to demonstrate, but she pulled me off balance and I lost my grip on the handle. I fell face first in the sand, and because she was still holding my ankles I landed with my whole body perfectly horizontal, basically doing a giant belly flop into the sand.

Therapist (cringes): Ouch! That must have hurt!

Tristan: Yah, it knocked the wind right out of me. There was a long minute where I just lay on the sand and tried to figure out if I was still alive or not, and my mother later said the entire city of Ottawa fell silent and every pair of eyes at that very busy playground turned to me to see what would happen next.

Therapist: Were you okay?

Tristan: After I cried for a couple of minutes and got over being pissed off about all the sand in my mouth I was okay. My mother said she had nightmares for days about how close my head came to hitting the platform on the way down. I mean, I got over it pretty quickly and once my mom finished wiping the tears off my face and the sand out of my mouth with the corner of her t-shirt, I went right back to playing on the zip code for the rest of the evening. Funny, though – when we got home my mother had a whole bunch of new grey hairs I had never noticed before…

***

Bonus conversation!

We were playing in the driveway last night, and there’s a little plastic toy that was supposed to have gone in the garbage. I’m not sure how it migrated back out into the driveway, but I ended up running over it when I backed the car out of the driveway to give the kids more room to play.

Tristan picked it up and ran over to me excitedly. “Look mummy! You sure broke the hell out of this thing, didn’t you?”