Bad Judgement part two

Not all judgement, of course, is helpful.
 When someone is not looking for, doesn't want, and indeed doesn't need help, it is not particularly useful to offer a long, reasoned evaluation of their activities and ways that they can improve them.
Or a short one, really.
 Likewise, even the most constructive and helpful of opinions, eagerly sought, and full of precious nuggets of delicious wisdom*, will be less than gladly received if it is offered with the sort of tactless rudeness that would make Simon Cowell** blush.
 Then there are the comments that aren't even meant to be constructive.
There are people who will break into a Facebook thread, or a forum conversation, to offer what is quite simply an insult: "Anybody who does this doesn't really love their kids" is a popular one, or "People who do this are just lazy"***, occasionally the person offering this opinion is simply rather boorish, but more often than not they're actually trying to be rude.

By now everyone on the internet has probably seen that Facebook post: you know the one from the mother saying that baby boys don't deserve to have breastmilk because they're already stronger than baby girls****, and claiming that if she has a boy she'll be feeding him formula, as well as circumcising him so he can't get as much pleasure out of sex.
 It got a lot of attention and, unsurprisingly, stirred up a lot of horrified responses.
Because, as it happens, that mother already has a son.
She also lives under a bridge and eats billy goats.
 Because she's a troll.*****
Most of the people who offer such rude opinions are trolls too.
They sit, in cosy anonymity behind their screens and, out of boredom, or a weird sense of power, or whatever-the-heck-it-is that motivates them, they poke people on their tenderest areas to see if they can make them jump.

Which is all very unpleasant.
What makes it worse, though, is that because of idiots like this, and because parenting is already such an insanely sensitive issue, and because some of the trolls are disguised as newspapers with inexplicable American accents******, many people on the internet are now preconditioned to expect judgemental nastiness whenever anything child related is mentioned.
I was on a Facebook group the other month******* when I saw a new post from a woman complaining that there was "too much judging" on the group and asking everyone to read an enormous glurgey post about how everyone was equally lovely.
 The thing is, there was nothing remotely judgemental on that group.
Occasionally there has been, in fact from time to time there are massive rows, but for the last month everything had been sweetness and light.
Somehow, however, this woman felt judged.********
Presumably she had endured enough slights, real or perceived, that almost any conversation on whatever-topic-it-was was now felt to her like a judgement on her personal choices.

 What was funny though, was that in reaction to this she responded with a very judgemental post to the entire group, saying that everyone needed to read her enormous sticky sweet post, and especially the last line, which they should read twice (and which, of course just said that everybody was equally great).
And the odd thing is that I think that post may actually have offered a worse kind of judgement than the negative kind.

I tried to find it to repost here, but I couldn't*********.
Essentially, however, it compared and contrasted every facet of parenting she could come up with, though she missed slings versus buggies as well as hitting your kids versus not hitting your damn kids.
After mentioning each option she gave some inane comment about why it was a good thing, following it up with "Good for you!" or "You're a good mom".
The thing is, that most of her opinions probably did more harm than good.
She contrasted cloth nappies (ok, she said diapers) and disposable ones for example.
Why bother?
 Why on Earth take the time to write a little paragraph on how cloth and disposable nappies are equally valid ways to keep your baby from dripping all over the place?
 It's not exactly a subject of furious debate, at most, some people think cloth nappies take too much time or are unhygienic and some think disposables are bad for the planet, or something on those lines.
It's a subject that at most deserves a "meh", a shrug, and a new topic of conversation.
 But by putting it in her Big List Of Things she somehow managed to imply that it was a topic of dissent, that people on either side of the nappy line were glaring at one another with judgemental fury.
 If anyone was feeling a little uncomfortable about their choice of infant-rump-covering, they probably felt a lot worse after that.

There were others in a similar vein.
What bothered me about them was not only the weird sense that if she had to tell us all not to fight we must secretly have been hating each other all along, but also the repeated statement that "You're a good mom".
 Because, seriously, how would she know?
Breastfeeding doesn't make me a good mother, you can't tell whether or not I'm a fiend in human form based on the amount of television I let my daughters watch (though they might claim otherwise).
Breastfeeding just feeds Phoebe, all you can tell from the amount of television I let my daughters watch is how much television I let them watch.
 If you read this blog you know that we homeschool, you know I used a sling, that I'm vegetarian, that we make an awful lot of pie, that I think I'm funnier than I actually probably am, and that I'm terrible at updating my blog regularly.
 Maybe you know a few more things, too, but in general, that's it.
You do not know whether I'm a good parent.
Because none of that information can tell you whether I'm a good parent or the maternal equivalent of Snidely Whiplash.

Generally speaking, calling someone a good parent when you don't really know whether they are one isn't going to do a lot of damage.
 When it came to one of the entries in the list of Things That Can Be Done In Two Different Ways, however, things seemed a little different.
One of her "good mom"s was "The mother who fed her kids takeaway every night this week".
 The thing is, that isn't ok, it certainly isn't the sort of thing that should be met with a "good for you" or a trite little remark about how it's no worse than making a home-cooked organic meal each week**********.
 I've thought this over for quite some time and, honestly, the only decent response I can think of to a mother who's fed her children takeaway every night is "Is everything alright?" or maybe, "What can I do to help?"
 Because the mother who feeds her kids takeaway every night has a problem.
Perhaps it's a temporary issue: maybe her kitchen has been flooded out and she can't cook, or maybe she's getting over the flu and just hasn't felt like cooking all week.
Perhaps there's no-one else in the house who could make a hot meal.
Or a cold one.
Perhaps she just couldn't get to the shops for some reason, perhaps she's too tired, or too busy, and just can't fit everything in.
Perhaps she's depressed.
Perhaps she could use a friend, to pick up the kids from school so she has time to shop, or to bring round a home-cooked meal while her life gets back under control, or to lend her some fridge-space, let her cry on their shoulder, commiserate with her woes, or tell her that, no, that doesn't sound quite normal and does she think it would help to talk to someone?
Perhaps she's fine.
But if all you say is "Good for you! You're a good mom!" then you'll never know.
 So nobody will help poor Mother-on-the-theoretical-edge: her woes, if she has any, will go unnoticed and unanswered, brushed under the carpet with "You're a good mom!"

Ok, enough ranting about the presumably well-meaning woman's awful diatribe.

My point is, that if you just respond to everything with a cheerful "That's great! Everything's fine!" then real problems get ignored.
 It's bad enough to tell someone they're doing everything wrong, when they just wanted to tell you how much their toddler loves Dora the Explorer, but when they're actually seeking help, or even just sympathy, to tell them that actually, they're imagining their problems, everything's fine, hurrah for them,  is to completely ignore their pain and leave them feeling that, actually, no-one cares about their difficulties.
 If poor takeaway-mother wasn't miserable enough before she probably is now.

I remember, some years ago when I was overweight.
I wasn't badly overweight, I was a little over the average weight for my height, but for me it was a nightmare.
I'm naturally thin, my normal healthy weight is a little under the recommended weight for my height.
 But I had M.E. and couldn't exercise, could barely drag myself out of bed in the mornings and this, combined with what was, for me, a huge weight gain, made me thoroughly miserable.
What I needed was sympathy, or some useful suggestions for ways to lose weight without actually starving myself.
 What I was given was reassurance that I looked fine, that my weight was perfectly normal, and various remarks about the way society judges women based on their weight.
I was told to read The Beauty Myth, and Fat Is A Feminist Issue.
 But I didn't look fine, my weight wasn't normal for me, and I didn't care about society.
I cared that I didn't look like myself any more, that I didn't feel like myself, that everyone was too busy deconstructing societal norms of beauty to listen to me telling them that the only norm I cared about was my own.
 So I was miserable.
And the more everyone told me that I was fine or that I looked great, the worse I felt, because what I heard was that no-one really cared.

So here's the thing: sometimes people don't want your judgement.
Then, unless it's really urgent, unless they're telling you how great it is to knock your kid out every night with a couple of shots of vodka and a chaser of cough syrup, you probably shouldn't give it.
But when they are extolling the virtues of the vodka-meltis cocktail, someone really needs to speak up.
 And sometimes people do want it.
Because judgement, as I said before, doesn't mean telling people off, or running them down.
It just means a reasoned opinion.
Sometimes people need that, sometimes they want, not praise, but your real opinion, or advise, or help.
Sometimes they just need someone to hold their hand till the pain goes away.

The trick is to listen, to hear what people want, or what they need.

Listen, be thoughtful, be considerate, be kind.
 Say what needs to be said, do what needs to be done.

Then move on.***********









* Mmmmmm wisdom Mcnuggets.

** Yay, pop-culture references!
That was fun, I'm going to use more!

***I've seen this applied to pretty much everything: feeding formula, breastfeeding, using a sling, using a buggy, cosleeping, not cosleeping.
Apparently all parents are unconscionably sluggish.

****Although actually it's the other way around on the whole.

***** Yes, I know it was obvious, and it sort of ruins the punchline, but I just knew that if I didn't say something then the one and only comment I'd get on this blog would be from someone asking me what the heck I was talking about.

****** Stupid "Mommy Wars".

*******Hey Facebook Breastfeeding Is Not Obscene, if you must know.

******** Given the theme of the page I would hazard a guess that she fed her baby formula and felt uncomfortable among so many breastfeeding-based posts, but I honestly couldn't say for sure.

*********I did find a much shorter, much better one, containing some identical phrases, so I suspect hers was copied from there.
That one was actually rather nice and mentioned a few moments where parents can feeling utterly at a loss and generally rubbish, before assuring them that everyone has the odd bad moment and it doesn't actually make them a bad parent.

********** No, really, that was the comparison.
Did I forget to mention that the juxtaposition gave the distinct impression that, actually, she did think there was a better and a worse choice each time but was pretending she didn't?

***********Unless they've written some awful glurge about how everyone is lovely.
Then you should totally write a long ranty blog about how dreadful they are.

Reading Eggs: a review with ridiculous emotive bits.

Eleanor loves books.
 She is not so good with computers.

 Naturally enough we want to encourage her affection while preventing a descent into complete luddism, so we thought we'd try Reading Eggs.
Reading Eggs is an online learning tool*, using games and computer based activities to develop reading ability.
It is colourful and friendly and, best of all, it offered us** a free trial, so we could see if it was any good before we handed over our money.

So, we made an account, bought a shiny new tablet***, and off she went.

To begin with I was not terribly impressed.
Before a child can start using Reading Eggs they have to complete a test: there are an awful lot of levels, or "maps", to choose from and the system needs to know where to start you off.
So they run a little test, with some easy questions and some harder ones, to get an idea of each child's ability.
 Unfortunately, some uncreative genius decided to greet every right answer with a happy "Ping!" noise and a big green tick, and each wrong answer with an obnoxious "Uhuhhhh!"***** and a big red cross.
 Which would be fine for adults playing a game, but is not so great for children.
At least, not for Eleanor, who really cares about getting things wrong.
To make matters worse, while the ticks disappear from the screen, the crosses remain at the top, dropping into a row of boxes that make it clear, to any bright child who can count at least a little, that there is some kind of three-strikes-and-you're-out  system working here.
 I don't know how well this has been received by other children: perhaps they greeted the ticks with squeals of triumph, while the crosses merely spurred them to try harder next time.
For Eleanor, however, this was not the case.
 She did not care at all about the ticks, she considers ticks, if anything, to be her due.
The crosses were another matter.
The first time a cross appeared with its blaring klaxon she looked up in shock.
I explained that this meant that she had got something wrong, and encouraged her to try again.
 She returned to the test, but was now visibly wary and nervous, eyeing it as one might a pet cobra that probably won't bite.
One right answer, another right answer, then a trickier question appeared: she paused, went to enter her answer, then stopped.
What if she got a cross?
What if the computer shouted at her again?
She pulled back from the screen and screwed up her eyes.
 Carefully I explained that if she wanted to use Reading Eggs she had to finish the test first.
So she poked a finger quickly at the screen.
Big red cross.
Klaxon.
 Little girl hiding behind her legs refusing to look at the screen.
After some more coaxing she looked out enough to finish the test, but she was no longer paying attention to the instructions.
Her whole purpose, now, was to make the test go away as quickly as possible.
 Several random jabs and a klaxon or so later, the test was finished.

Finally she could play.
 Unfortunately, having panicked her way through most of the test, she had given no real indication of her actual abilities and was now expected to complete a number of activities designed to teach her that O says "O".
 Her expression much akin to Sara Crewe on being informed that "La Mere" means "The Mother"****** she pushed the tablet away again.

At this point I wondered if we should just abandon the whole thing but, after a little discussion, Eleanor agreed to try the test again.

This time we went through very slowly, taking care to listen to the questions properly before selecting an answer.
She was still very twitchy and nervous, but she made it through, and this time the activities presented were much closer to her actual ability.

Hurrah! On to the games.

The first game was a whack-a-mole style affair in which she had to explode space-invaders with a particular word written on their ships, while letting others through.
 All of which sounds like fun, and would have been, were it not for two problems.
The first was that, as it transpires, Reading Eggs is not really designed for tablet use and at times a perfectly valid poke at the screen would go unregistered, allowing a space invader to get through.
 The second reason is that whatever berk******* added a klaxon to the test had clearly been at work here too.
 Every time a Space Invader got through, a dolorous voice, sounding much like the unholy offspring of a Cyberman and a Dalek, intoned "Oh No: One Got Away".
 This, not surprisingly, further unnerved the still unsettled Ellie, till she again refused to touch the screen, resulting in whole fleets of escaped space invaders, along with a litany of cross-species metallic woe.
 Alas, Reading Eggs demands that you complete each activity before moving on to the next, so, if she wanted to play at all, she had to defeat the space invaders.
  No longer entirely sure that she did want to play Eleanor nevertheless consented to try one more time.
We turned off the sound, I read out the word to be sought, located and destroyed, she hunted down words and, when the enemy refused to explode, called in the mothership to jab the things to digital death.
 We defeated the evil invaders and finally moved on.

Fortunately, once this strangely terrifying experience was behind her, Ellie did have fun.
 The system is still occasionally unresponsive, so that she sometimes needs me to help out, or even to complete a game for her, using the mouse-equipped laptop, but the games are fun and, if unchecked, she would happily play for an hour or more.
 There are still weak points: the voices and sound effects are horribly grating, and from a purely adult point of view the characters********* and stories are thoroughly irritating, but the games are engaging, the progression, though prescriptive, is steady and comfortable, and Eleanor seems to build ability and, most of all, confidence, every time she plays.

She finished the trial about a week ago and has been pestering us to pay up ever since.
In fact, with her new found computer-awareness, she has located the pay-button on the screen and told me what to do next.
 This is a good thing, right?

So, if you're wondering whether to try Reading Eggs, I'd say go ahead.
But, if your child is as lily-livered as Eleanor the erstwhile Terror of the High Seas, I'd suggest that before taking the test, you tape a piece of paper over the top of your screen to cover up the Xs, stick on a set of headphones so they can't hear the klaxon, and ask the questions yourself.



 There is another system, called Mathletics, made by the same company and dealing, unsurprisingly enough, with maths.
We've been wondering whether to try this, too, but alas, they haven't offered us a free trial.
 And if they read this, I fear, they never will.





*Am I the only one who envisions some kind of complicated, sprockety device for adjusting brains here?

**Not us specifically: they just happened to advertise where I could see them.
One day this blog may be the kind of internet phenomenon that can influence the decisions of multitudes, so that all manner of corporations queue up to offer us their goods and services, in the hope of a kind word, or a hint to our adoring fans, but that day has not yet come.
 Thank goodness.

***This is a slight exaggeration.
Ok a huge exaggeration.
 We**** wanted a tablet computer so that Eleanor could use various computery things that are more awkward with a mouse.
We did not, however, think it was worth buying one for a four year old.
Then I changed to a mobile phone tariff that offered a free tablet, or, to put it another way, a tablet  installment plan that came with a free phone and internet service.
 The whole Reading Eggs thing kind of followed on from there really.

****Ok, ok, I wanted it for educational purposes: Richard was just hypnotised by the lure of new tech.
Too bad for him that it's mine, really.

*****This sound doesn't really transcribe well: imagine a wrong-answer sound-effect from an eighties games show, but played right up by your face, and you should have some idea of the grating, distracting, unsettling quality of the noise in question.

******Look! Literary references!
If children's classics count as literature.

*******"Feed Me!"

*********Seriously: I may be a vegetarian, hippy peacenik, but if Sid the Kid ever turns up on our doorstep he's going to be curried.
No, not like a horse.

Pink* Will Eat Your Brain.

There is nothing inherently wrong with the colour pink.
As hues go, it is no more offensive than turquoise, oxblood, or chartreuse.
The politics of pink, however, are another matter.

These days if you have a young*** girl in your family, you will find that your house quickly becomes covered in pink.
This is not because the colour pink is somehow magnetically attracted to the female gender****, nor indeed are girls irresistibly drawn to the colour pink.
It is, quite simply, because just about every ruddy thing that is marketed to girls is, quite emphatically, pink.
 Now I'm sure there are girls out there who really do love pink, who would love pink even if they were told that pink was really not a girls' colour, who would fight for pink even though everything marketed at girls was green*****.
 However most girls don't really have the opportunity to decide whether they like pink or not: they are inundated with pink from the moment they are born.
 Very quickly, they learn to associate pink with for me and, conversely not pink, that's any colour that isn't pink, or perhaps a pinkish shade of purple, with not for me.
Most early learning toys come in two versions: one in bright colours, normally all the primary colours, but occasionally blue with decoration, buttons etc in various contrasting colours, and one in pink.
The message is clear: the pink one is for girls, all the other colours are for boys.
 Somehow, despite encompassing just over half of all children, "girl" is considered a special interest group: we have toys for children, and then we have toys for girls.

As girls grow older pink continues to overwhelm them, but now it also begins to direct their choices: having been trained to recognise pink as for me, girls are now directed towards certain types of toys, and away from others, by their relative pinknesses.
 Baby dolls, fashion dolls, dolls houses and princess or nurturer role-play and dressing up?
Pink
Pretty craft and design packs******.
Pink.
Horse-riding, ballet dancing or ice-skating?
Pink.
Absolutely anything domestic or containing the word princess?
My gods it's pink.
Yes, Cinderella, you shall go to the ball, however the garage, fire-station, race track and outer space seem to be off limits.
Sorry about that.
 Anything that isn't pink, such as construction kits, race cars, train sets, superheroes, dinosaurs, serious art supplies, spaceships, board games that aren't about fashion or dating, bats, balls, yo-yos, stunt kites, chemistry sets and magic tricks, is, somehow, not for girls.
 Now of course there are girls who will fight this stereotyping, and there are certainly parents******* who will make a point of buying the non-pink items, and who will steer their offspring towards the dinosaurs, or spaceships, or maybe dinosaurs in spaceships, but the social conditioning of pink is hard to overcome.
With the knowledge that pink is for girls, and the correlating information that non-pink is not for girls, comes the understanding that to step outside of these boundaries, to choose the wrong item, is to put yourself beyond the pale: to defy the laws of the tribe is to exile yourself from the tribe.
The result is that, eventually, even if pink were entirely removed from the world of toys, girls already trained by past exposure to all that pink, would still gravitate toward the stereotypically girly toys, because those are all they expect to play with.
 Likewise boys will avoid anything that falls within that girly stereotype, on the grounds that it is not for them.

As girls grow older pink becomes less predominant, not because their options are opening up -if anything they become even more constrained- but because, their training complete, they can now recognise toys and other items that are for them without the assistance of the colour pink.
 So pink becomes less dominant, a fashion doll's packaging, for example, will be blue and pink or, often, a lingeriesque black and pink, instead of the solid pink of their earlier toys.
 Eventually there is no need for pink at all: the girls', or rather the young women's interests having been firmly directed down the road of shoes, handbags, and hair products.

This may seem ridiculous, and it is true that few young women will end up completely conforming to stereotype, however I find it interesting that Woman's Hour , (on a programme about pink) interviewed a young woman who was colour blind.
 Her interests, even her taste in clothes, were very different to those of her friends, something she attributed to the fact that she could not see the colour pink, and therefore had grown up without the dubious benefit of a signpost to tell her which route she was supposed to choose through life.********

The world of pink, and the world of non-pink are very different places.




 All of which is pretty awful, all by itself

However, long before a girl has learned to like pink, before she has any say in the toys and clothes she receives, whatsoever, pink may already be making its mark upon her brain.

As I mentioned earlier, most early learning toys these days come in two versions: normal (for boys), and pink (for girls).
 The boys' versions are brightly coloured, with plenty of contrast between the various shapes, buttons, numbers and so on.
The girls' versions are, by and large, pink.
 This means that while a boy playing with the toy intended for him will start to develop an understanding of those shapes, numbers, and colours without really trying, a girl playing with that same toy in the "girls' " version will not.
 Indeed, as the mass of pink or lilac buttons blurs together, a girl who tries to take an interest in shapes and numbers (colours being notably absent from her toy) will find it quite difficult.
 The lesson to girls, right from infancy, is: maths is hard.

Deterred from an interest in basic maths by its difficulty, and by the relative ease of other, less complex, activities, girls are moved away from mathematics, science and engineering, before they even know what those words mean.

Pink will eat your brain.


 Of course girls can fight against the tide of pink, they can develop their own interests, and even those who truly, naturally incline towards pink, are not condemned to a life of brainless fashion-following.
Girls who like pink are every bit as capable of becoming renowned historians, architects, or cognitive scientists, as any other girls.
Nature can defeat nurture.
 The pink doesn't make it any easier though.













*Not Pink the singer, pink the colour, Pink is actually pretty cool.
Yes, I just put an asterisk into the title.
I'm not proud of this**.

**Maybe a teeny bit.

***Where young means somewhere between a foetus and old-enough-to-draw-a-pension

****Technically, only words have gender.
People have sex.
There is nothing wrong with sex.
The word gender, however, is used to denote, not merely the sex with which a person is born, but also that to which the subscribe whether it is that assigned by birth or not.
So it's a nice, egalitarian word, even if it is horribly inaccurate.

*****I'm sure of this because I know more than one boy who likes pink.
Pink is not marketed to boys.
Quite the reverse in fact.

******Often low in creativity and high in spangles and words like princess.

******* Hi there!

******** This is clearly anecdata, but I do find it rather telling.

Evil Pieday

We made a pumpkin pie.
Swearing was involved*.
 The thing is, the recipe called for a pre-made base and a can of pumpkin purée, and I, being a strange and petty person at times, thought it would be funny to do exactly what it said.
So I bought the can of purée.
It was made by a company called Libby's.
What I didn't know, and what Ocado's information page didn't tell me, was that Libby's is a subsidiary of Nestlé**.
I didn't just buy a can of purée, I bought an evil can of purée.

Me and my stupid ironic-kitsch sense of humour.

If you can't find a more virtuous brand of purée, I recommend just boiling and mashing a normal pumpkin*** instead.

Pumpkin Pie

One pre-made pie case
One can of non-evil pumpkin purée, or the puréed insides of one pumpkin****
One carton of totally non-evil (which means non-Carnation) evaporated milk*****
150 grammes of brown sugar
Another 75 grammes of brown sugar for the topping
Ground cinnamon to taste
Ground nutmeg likewise
Ground ginger ditto
Ground cloves as above
Two eggs
75 grammes of pecan nuts
A blob of butter
A tiny pinch of salt.


Get the swearing over with quietly and get on with the pie

Turn the oven on to a high pie-setting, 220 was fine for us

Put everything but the pie-case, nuts, butter, salt and second lot of sugar into a bowl and stir vigorously till you have a bowl of dark orange gloop.
Try not to get any on the walls.


Pour it into the pie-case and put it into the oven on a tray.

Leave the oven on high for fifteen minutes, then turn it down to a low pie-setting (around 180 for us)

Meanwhile express rage at the evil and deceptive nature of certain companies by smashing the pecans to itty bitty bits with the end of a rolling pin.

Put them into a bowl with all the remaining ingredients and stir like crazy.

Go and brood darkly over Baby Milk Action websites till the timer goes off.

Take out the pie and sprinkle the crumbly nut mixture all over the top.

Put it back into the oven for another ten minutes.

Take it out and leave to cool.

Eat it, or, should every bite turn to ashes in your mouth, cut into slices and serve to unsuspecting innocents.








*Well, not real swearing, daytime television swearing, but this is me we're talking about, it's a big deal.

**Those who have been lurking under rocks may like to visit Baby Milk Action to see why this matters to me.

*** Not the whole pumpkin, just the solid orangey yellowy inside bit that's left after you scrape out all the seeds and gloopy stuff.

**** Oh, and make sure you get a decent pumpkin, most of the ones in the shops at this time of year are grown for carving and are fairly tasteless and watery.

*****This is easier to buy than it sounds, Sainsbury's and Morrison's both stock it.
You see why I came over all ironic-kitsch though?
I mean, pre made pie cases, canned pumpkin, and evaporated milk, it's nineteen-fifties America in a pie.

Absence makes the heart grow blasé.

We went to Center Parcs* this year.
While we were there Eleanor went to a Pirate Princess Party**, which was mostly a great success.
Unfortunately somewhere along the line she started to miss us and, when we failed to materialise became very upset.
 When we picked her up Richard remarked that she was probably upset because she wasn't used to being away from us "because she's home-schooled".
 Everybody there seemed to think this a perfectly reasonable explanation for her distress, I on the other hand was more than a little annoyed.
 Eleanor, at the time of the party, was three years old: six months younger than the minimum age for starting pre-school.
As such her home-schooled status could not possibly have had anything to do with the matter.
If he had said "Because we don't take her to a nursery" it would have been quite reasonable: nursery children have to get used to being away from their parents much sooner than those with a parent at home, so a nursery child might have done much better at the party than our three-year-old with her stay-at-home Mother.
 This didn't even occur to Richard at the time.
This might seem like a bit of a rant directed at poor Richard so here's the point: he supports home education, he's actively involved in home education, yet, like so many people he subconsciously assumed that a home-educated child must be less socially secure than a schooled one, to the extent that when our three year old became upset he thought not "she's three" but "she's home-schooled".
If home educators can think this way it's no wonder the rest of the world seems to agree.

Fortunately for all of us home education doesn't seem to have scarred her too badly and at the age of three and a half Eleanor's a much more confident little girl.
Somewhat to my chagrin in fact.
This week she is attending a Musical Theatre Summer School which runs from nine in the morning to half past three every day from Monday to Friday just like a standard school.
She has been looking forward to this with great anticipation, I, on the other hand have been terrified.
 Most schooled children start pre-school at around three and a half to four years of age.
They'll probably have gone in with a parent for a day or two to get used to the place and the people but when the time finally comes for them to be left alone there are, inevitably, tears.
So when the time came to leave Eleanor on Monday I naturally expected her to be a little concerned.
She knew the teachers*** but the girls were all strangers, all bigger, and mostly a lot older than her.
I thought there would be some trepidation, some hesitation, a little reluctance to see me go.
Not a bit of it: she barely paid attention to my leaving, so engrossed was she in what those bigger girls were doing.
Coming to pick her up I was afraid there might have been some tears in the interim: it was a long time to be without a parent after all, most preschool classes are only half days at first and children still have trouble with those.
At the very least, I thought, she'll be glad to see me.
Nope.
I was met with perfect equanimity but with utter disinterest: a glance, a shrug that said "Oh. It's you. Hello you." and she went back to fastening her shoes.
 It's not that I wanted her to be upset but would it have been so hard to look just a little happy to see me?
Alas, we seem to be raising a confident, outgoing little girl who's comfortable in any society and who has no desire to cling to her parents whatsoever.
Oh well.
Maybe it's because she's home-schooled.





*You don't know what it cost me to spell it like that.
**Apparently pirate princesses say "Ooh la la arrrr".
***One teaches her ballet class, one taught her as a toddler, and one ran the baby class.

We Get Around

The biggest issue for a lot of people, when discussing Home Education, is socialisation.
"But how will they be socialised?" is the common cry whenever you mention that you're not sending the kids to school.
It gets a little annoying to be honest, I mean here I am with my friendly, talkative daughter who clearly knows how to behave in society and people are asking how she'll be socialised.
She already is pretty darn socialised* for her age!
Maybe they mean how will she socialise?
It's true that we won't be sending our kids out every day to sit in a classroom or run around in a contained space with a lot of other children of the same age but that doesn't mean they won't be socialising.
At present Eleanor has two ballet classes a week and Phoebe has one**, we visit the library, where the ladies on the desk always stop to talk to Eleanor, at least once a week, we visit the Soft-Play centre where they can play safely with random kids (who, now I come to think of it, aren't in school either), Eleanor goes to the swimming pool once a week where many people know her by sight, we attend a playgroup and all manner of Home-Ed groups***.
That seems like plenty of socialisation to me.

It's true that it's a different kind of socialisation, it's more fluid, less forced, and the people they socialise with aren't all the same age as them, but I consider this to be a good thing.
Our daughters will grow up knowing how to talk to people of all ages, in formal and informal settings.
They may never experience the latest playground obsession for yo-yos, or slinkies, or collectible plastic aliens with removable plastic bits****; or the woe when we refuse to buy them some rubbishy plastic alien with collectible plastic bits; or the sheer misery of having someone laugh at them because they packed the wrong kind of sandwiches today, but, frankly, that's a price I'm happy to pay.








*To be socialised means to be able to function in society, socialisation is a lifelong process.
** Where "ballet class" in the latter sense means "clap your hands to the music and smile at your friends"
***This was actually meant to be a post about Home-Ed groups, then the introduction got out of hand.
**** I doubt it to be honest, stupid crazes get everywhere, I'm still not going to buy them the wretched aliens though.