Tag Archives: education

Should You Limit Your Child’s Reading Choices?

Posted on September 17, 2012 by Haley | 55 Comments

I am surprised by the popularity of a post I wrote a few weeks ago: “Why You Can’t Read Twilight: A Letter to My Daughter,” and I’m simply fascinated by some of comments it’s received. Some folks love it, but boy does it rub some people the wrong way!

Many commenters think the idea that I would tell my daughter at say, age 11, that she can’t read Twilight is downright loony and they refer to my daughter’s “right” to read it. Now, I aspire to fight for many rights for my daughter: the right to a loving family, the right to a happy home, the right to a good education, the right to nourishing food, etc. But I guess I just wasn’t familiar with the “right” to read bad novels.

I believe Twilight is a waste of time and poorly written. And more importantly, it contains unhealthy views of women and relationships that I believe could be detrimental to a young mind’s developing ideas of self, love, and relationships. But I don’t think Twilight is really the issue. The real question is: Is it crazy to not let your child read certain books? Should we, as parents, limit our children’s reading choices?

Many critics of my decision to say “No” to Twilight just hated the idea that I was taking away a choice my daughter might want to make. If only I “trusted” her to make the right decisions, they lament, instead of limiting her choices! This line of thinking surprised me because limiting choices is simply part of being a parent. Few parents I know would allow their very young children to view R rated movies, for example. As parents, we strive to offer our children good choices that are appropriate for their age and maturity level. We do not offer them choices that we are fully aware are inappropriate or may cause them harm. We might allow our child to make the choice to ride a bike, but we would not allow her to make her own decision about whether or not she wanted to ride on a busy street without a helmet at night. We do not say, “You want to go to the mall instead of school today? Great! I respect your ability to make decisions!” Sorry. As parents, we limit choices. It’s just what we do.

Perhaps a better example is how parents deal with food choices. My 3-year-old son would eat candy for every meal if I recognized his “right” to eat whatever he desired. If I acquiesced to his constant requests for sweets, with the full knowledge that I was causing him physical harm, that he would likely develop diabetes, and that he was missing out on all the nourishing foods his body needs because he was filling up with sugar, I would not be a good mother. And it’s not because I don’t “trust” him. It’s because I know that he is three and that as a young child, the allure of sweets is stronger than his nutritional knowledge and his ability to make great choices regarding food. So, what do I do? When he asks for a treat I offer him good choices: peanut butter and apples, dried fruit, etc. Things that have nutritional value, won’t harm his body, and might partly satiate his desire for a sweet treat. Through offering him these choices rather than junkfood, I am teaching him healthy eating habits he can carry with him through life. So when the day comes when he is making all of those decisions himself, he will have a developed palate for good foods and the knowledge needed to nourish his body well. Does that mean that he won’t ever make bad choices? No. He might eat Cinnamon Toast Crunch for every meal. My concern is doing the task before me well: giving him the right tools he needs to be able to make good decisions about food.

Why isn’t it the same story with books? Do we not really believe that the books we read form us into the people we are? I want to offer beautiful and good literature for my daughter’s developing mind and soul rather than presenting her with the ultimate junkfood of books. In other words, I want to help her develop a taste for good literature. Because I’ve been an 11-year-old girl and—while I’d love to pretend that I had everything figured out as a pre-teen—let’s be honest: I was still forming crucial ideas, particularly about love and relationships. Would I have had the maturity to see through the ridiculousness of Meyer’s series at that age? Doubtful. It’s written to appeal to a fantasy of immature ideas of love. It’s MADE to be enticing to preteens. It’s even enticing to some grown women. Now, does this mean that as a teenager, my daughter won’t be allowed to read it if she really wants to? No. I hope that by that age she would have fallen so in love with good literature that reading Twilight would be an unattractive option to her. But she very well might read it some day. I’m not worried about that. My job is to offer her books that will nourish her developing mind, aren’t a waste of time, and that don’t present her with terrible relationship models during her formative years. If and when she gets her hands on Twilight, she will already be well-versed in truly good literature. And whether she likes Twilight or not, she will at least see its inadequacies.

Some of the other popular arguments for why I should let my children read Twilight are interesting, as well. One argument in their favor claims that the books are entertaining. But, to say that something is entertaining is not to say that it is good or that it is bad. It merely means that it holds your attention. Most parents have some sort of guidelines about what movies their children are allowed to view…and it doesn’t have anything to do with how entertaining the film may or may not be. Others said that reading Twilight is a positive thing because it’s better than just sitting in front of the TV, not reading ever, or reading books like 50 Shades of Grey. So, reading Twilight is better than frying your brain, being illiterate, or reading the most inappropriate book for children that you can think of? Wow! Impressive. Can’t we offer our kids better options than “well, it’s not the worst thing you could do with your time”? Why settle? Another recommendation is that the Twilight series is easy and gets kids reading. Seventeen magazine is easy reading, but nobody’s vouching for it’s literary value or that it spurs young readers on to great heights of literary achievement.

I have been advised by the Twilight fans that my daughter will hate me forever and eternally resent my decision to not let her read Meyer’s literary atrocity as a pre-teen. To be honest…I’m just not really worried about it.

My job as a parent is to do what is best for my children. It would be great if, one day, my daughter were able to fully understand and appreciate every decision I make concerning her. Sure, it would be sad if my daughter resents my decisions. But those decisions are based on well-thought-out reasons and I am not going to change them to satisfy the whims of a child.

Do you think it’s appropriate to limit your child’s reading choices? Join the conversation!

(This post is linked-up today at The Parent ‘Hood)

→ 55 Comments

Posted in Books, Children, Motherhood

Tagged books, children, education, literature, Motherhood, parenting, reading, twilight

Preschooling at Home: Our Vision

Posted on August 22, 2012 by Haley | 11 Comments

I promised to follow-up our “why” we’re homeschooling post with a “how we plan to do it” post. And I thought I’d start out by addressing a great question from a reader who asked, “Why bother “pre school homeschool” anyways?…I might have a stricter idea of preschool homeschooling in my mind though, I really see formal preschool as something that could get in the way of natural play and development at that age.” I completely agree that “natural play” is what we should be going for. Children are natural learners and I aspire to encourage our preschooler’s natural desire to learn and grow through our “homeschooling.” Here’s how I feel about early homeschooling:

We’ve been “homeschooling” since Benjamin was born. We would read aloud to our fussy, colicky newborn during those l oooooooooong sleepless nights: Peter Pan, The Iliad, and The Silmarillion. We read board books ad nauseum. We talked to our infant son, pointed out animals and plants, and explained what they were. And we’ve been answering those “What is that?” “Why does it do that?” “How does that work?” questions til we’re blue in the face. This is all part of our son’s education. The only reason we’re calling it “homeschooling” now is because he’s starting to be school age (3.5) and seems to be needing a little bit more structure to his days to prevent boredom. Basically, we want to offer him the resources to satisfy his seemingly insatiable desire to learn about the world around him.

We began by making some goals with Benjamin. We asked him: What do you want to learn about? We wanted to see where his interests currently lie. He told us that he wanted to learn about two things: “Space and Dinosaurs!” So, we ordered bunches of books from the library and are having a blast. (Our Space preschooling curriculum coming soon!)

Daniel and I also have some goals in mind for the year. We want him to do a little bit of pre-reading. He already knows all the uppercase ABCs and some of the lowercase but we want to spend more time getting familiar with the lowercase letters, reinforce what sounds each letter makes, and practice writing them. Benjamin is very interested in learning to read and will “read” aloud to himself books that he has memorized. So we want to offer him some resources to progress toward reading. However, if he doesn’t seem interested in the pre-reading activities we have in mind we will take a break and wait until he gains interest again.

We also will begin to do some learning together about our Catholic faith that follows the Christian Year. A friend gave me a great resource that is a curriculum for Home Catechesis for 3-6 year olds that looks perfect for Benjamin. It’s by Moira Farrell and is in the Montesorri tradition. I couldn’t find it on Amazon but you can find it here. Our first “lesson” will be setting up our family altar. We would also like to memorize more prayers with him. He has known the Our Father, Hail Mary, and Glory Be since before he turned two and he recently mastered the Bless Us, O Lord for mealtimes. But I think the Memorare, the Hail, Holy Queen, and the Prayer to St. Michael would be good ones to work on this year.

During read aloud time (which isn’t a set time at our house, just whenever Lucy is occupied or sleeping and I’m having one-on-one time with Benjamin) he asks to read our new library books about Space or ABCs. When he asks to be read something else, I obviously don’t say “no, we’re doing school now and that storybook isn’t on our syllabus!” I just try to use the library resources when the right moment strikes. If he doesn’t seem interested for a whole day (or a whole week), no big deal.

It’s also important to me to incorporate the visual arts and music into our learning (more on that when I explain our “lesson plans” for our unit on space.)

So, in our minds, “preschooling at home” is simply providing Benjamin with the resources to learn about what interests him, to spark his imagination, and to encourage him to develop skills that will help him learn to read when he’s ready. There will be a whole lot of the same activities we did last year: reading together, going to museums, going to the IMAX, playing outside, cooking inside, going to the park with friends, etc.

Do you have little ones learning at home? What is your vision for preschooling?

p.s. Thank you for your concern, love, and prayers for our little Benjamin! Your comments and emails are so appreciated. He is doing MUCH better. Breathing treatments are keeping his asthma under control and his terrible cough seems to be more from the little virus he’s been fighting off than because he’s struggling to breathe. His temperature is down and he’s back to his old tricks So glad to have my sneaky, wild, always hungry boy back after a couple days of no appetite and lethargy!

→ 11 Comments

Posted in Homeschooling

Tagged children, education, homeschool, homeschooling, preschool

Why We Are Homeschooling (From a Gal Who Tried Everything)

Posted on August 15, 2012 by Haley | 32 Comments

At 5am on Sunday morning, my husband woke up our 3-year-old son, Benjamin, and took him on a surprise adventure. They drove away from the light pollution of the city and found a place they could watch the Perseid meteor shower. After laying out a blanket and showing him where to look, my husband got to witness the delight on our son’s face when he saw a shooting star for the first time. When they got home Benjamin was beaming and couldn’t wait to tell me all about it. He explained that “shooting stars are called ‘meteors’ not ‘meat-eaters’ like dinosaurs and I saw TWO. They went like this ‘WHOOOOSH!” He went on to tell me that he saw two planets, Jupiter and “Eunice.” “Venus?” I asked. “Oh, yeah, Venus! That’s right! And we saw a constellation: Orion! He has a belt made of three stars!”

Benjamin called it “an adventure.” It was also homeschooling.

It’s the start of a new school year and since I posted this great article and mentioned on FB that we’re starting some unofficial preschool homeschooling for our 3-year-old son, Benjamin, I had some requests for a more in-depth explanation of my experience as a homeschooler and our vision for homeschooling our kids. I thought I’d start with the “why” and do some later posts on exactly what homeschooling will look like at our house.

I never attended a Montesorri or Parochial school but I tried everything else under the sun: private Christian school (Pre-K-2^nd), homeschool (3^rd-8^th), private secular school (10^th) and public school (9^th, 11^th, and 12^th). I didn’t hate conventional school. I was a straight A student. So why are we homeschooling? Well, we can’t think of any good reason to send our kids to school! If you’re interested in reading about modern education and its many problems, please read Anthony Esolen’s amazing book: Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child. It is truly life-changing and expresses so much of what we believe about education.

As for the benefits of homeschooling, here are some of our reasons for embracing it for our children’s education:

1. We don’t think learning begins and ends in a classroom and we don’t want our kids to believe that either.

2. We believe that every child is unique and will learn best with an education tailored to their learning style, strengths, and weaknesses.

3. We want our children to be challenged, engaged, and enchanted by learning. In essence, we want our kids to love learning instead of becoming skilled at the “grade game.” (Daniel and I both were great at knowing what we needed to know for the test. We do great on tests. From experience, we know that’s not the same thing as learning.)

4. Because there’s no way our son could sit still in a classroom environment. If you’ve ever sat behind us at Mass, you will understand this. We want him to run wild and just be a little boy in addition to learning his ABCs, how to count, etc (which he already does).

5. We want learning to be naturally woven through our days. We don’t want a 7hr block of time devoted to “school” that feels like “work” to our children.

6. We want to teach our children things they won’t learn in traditional school: classical and biblical languages (Latin, Greek, and Hebrew), music, art history, the lives of the saints, etc. (You might be able to take some of those in high school but they weren’t available at our high schools).

7. We enjoy our kids and want our family to be together as much as possible.

8. We want to be the primary influence on our children’s lives. I have lots of friends who are teachers. They are awesome. I have also had lots of teachers in my many years of different kinds of schooling: they were NOT all awesome.

9. We want the freedom to celebrate the liturgical year. The calendar we go by isn’t the traditional school calendar. We will be celebrating the Feast of the Assumption tomorrow. And nobody has to skip school to do it!

10. We’re not even remotely worried about “the socialization issue.” The idea that our kids won’t be just like everybody else’s kids is not a negative for us.

11. We don’t want our kids to be bored because they are pigeon-holed into a certain “level.”

12. We want the freedom to stay home, go to the library, visit a museum, etc. Whenever we want to.

13. We want our kids to have time to study musical instruments and participate in extracurriculars like dance, art, and sports without being stressed-out, overwhelmed, and exhausted (as a ballet teacher I see far too many pale faces and tired eyes after a long school day and it breaks my heart).

14. We don’t want our children’s imaginations ruined by the school system. As a voracious reader my whole life, nothing could destroy my love for literature. But my high school English teachers sure gave me a run for my money! Really, if anyone could have killed my passion for books it was those four women. In fact, in all of high school, I can only think of two really excellent teachers that I would want teaching my kids.

15. I’m not prepared to send my kids off to have so much time wasted every day. Because I spent so many years in traditional classrooms I know how much time is wasted. Between the discipline issues, teaching to standardized tests, and just watching movies in class, so many of my days were wasted. I’m not going to let that happen to my kids.

16. No one cares about our children’s education as much as we do.