Enormous Changes Every Minute

This is a still from one of my children's first movies, Death is Coming to You, Live! It has been five years since my 11-year-old started his movie company, W.M. Thing. He has made more than a dozen movies, and many more trailers, scripts, and concept drawings since then. He recently turned 11. He is changing so fast—too fast for me. Last night, he and my almost-9-year-old daughter decided to stop going to karate and try some new types of exercise. This morning my son decided to start blogging and he is sitting next to me, posting to his new blog right now. Feels like the big world is invading our sanctuary.

Visiting our karate teacher and telling him we were stopping (I had reached high brown belt, the kids brown), left me feeling dejected. Way back when my kids were toddlers, I read an article in a homeschooling magazine that said sometimes young people will take classes in a discipline, then give it up. Don't worry about the dropping activities, the author said, it's all part of the process. Anything left can be returned to. In my mind I know this is true.

In practice, these little departures are felt as loss just as surely as is my children's loss of their teeth, their baby fat, and their friends—some of whom have moved, some of whom have entered school after years of homeschooling. If falling in love introduces the possibility of loss and grief to a person, having children introduces loss as a constant companion. So many goodbyes.

Right now we are in limbo with respect to new pursuits. A whole lot of writing, animating, moviemaking, music-making is going on, but we need some "out-in-the-world" stuff, and I don't know what it will be...
We've had a year of little goodbyes.

Brooklyn Blogfest

Here we are, well, three of the four of us, at the Brooklyn Blogfest organized by OTBKB. This picture is one of many taken of bloggers that night by fabulous OTBKB photographer, Hugh Crawford. (The rest are at SmugMug.)

The third annual Blogfest drew hundreds of bloggers to celebrate the power of citizen-powered new media, neighborhood activism, and the power of the local merged with the reach of the digital. Brooklyn bloggers have become the new beat reporters, and their stories have invigorated the life of their communities. The evening ended with a rousing shout-out from the bloggers present. The upshot of the evening: the more the merrier, so get blogging. It would be great to do this in the Hudson Valley. Email me if you're interested in a Hudson Valley Blogfest.

Another Parenting Rage...Free Range

Free Range Parenting is the next big thing in raising kids, having sprung out of a notorious woman's decision to let her 9-year-old ride the subway. That gave rise to a blog she authors, Free-Range Parenting, articles like this one in the Globe and Mailand this Newsweek piece by my buddy Louise, publisher of Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn.

On a homeschooling list I subscribe to, a mother wryly commented, "sounds kind of like trying to homeschool your schooled children to me." I agree.

So many parenting and educational theories amount to what I call "closet unschooling." In the case of "free-range parenting," parents have caught on that shuttling kids from one activity to another stresses the whole family. Children without enough free time are hampered in their creativity, blocked from taking initiative, and, as the Globe and Mail article says, feel infantilized.

Other examples of closet unschooling: at a Montessori school, there's a homey room full of "work" activities—children can "iron," "sweep," or "do dishes"—the only thing missing is their real home, where there is real work to be done. At the high school I attended, we had an "open space"—a large room where we could hang out in groups, see other students working, kind of an agora, except not outside. How I would have preferred the real thing. In democratic schools, children choose their own activities and participate in decisions affecting administration. It's like real life, but ideally, real life should involve multigenerational interactions, not social units separated by age.

Parenting by instinct, intuition, and personal authenticity can be done without a book, a kit, or a list of tips.




What takes the place of drama classes and school plays at our house: the Play Art Theater, with productions scripted, produced, directed and acted by the owners and operators.