A Glass Half Full

Today I was conversing with a friend about the size of the glasses we have. She was wondering if her glasses were bigger than ours and we were musing that because of the fluting on our glasses if you filled them to half the way up you probably wouldn't get very much drink. We wondered where the "half way" mark would be on our glasses if you were judging by volume.

I figured the kids could help us find out where "half a glass" actually WAS on our glasses. I think easiest way to get my kids interested in doing scientific experiments is to show them how I do it, so we played a game with it. I got a permanent marker and got the kids to each have a guess where "half way" was on a glass. It's through discussing things like this that you really begin to get an idea of things like "volume", "size", "halves", and the conventional language and meaning of measurement. The kids have heard that liquid is measured in litres or millilitres (or mls). It is something that they will grow familiar with over time, but not something I need to push. Once they have experience with measuring liquid, for experiments, or cooking, or craft, or buying liquids, filling bottles... then words like cups, litres and millilitres will just be normal, and they will have constructed their own understanding of how much those measures are.

I filled the cup all the way to the brim, and then poured that liquid into a measuring jug. It was exactly 300ml. I asked my son(7) how much half of 300ml would be, and he didn't know. I counted the divisions of 50ml on the jug. There were 6, so I asked him half of 6, which he got, and we counted up 3 and found 150ml.

Then the moment of truth... pouring the water back into the glass. "I got pretty close!" he cheered. This is fantastic for him, because he's finally aiming for a best guess rather than perfection. He's come so far. I'm happy for him.

This is such a cool way of doing things because the results are self evident and he gets to assess for himself how well he is doing. He gets to feel successful and know his own merits without it being anything to do with my approval of him. My judgement or ideas of him are not necessary when he can assess for himself how well he is going, and when he is the one setting his success criteria he doesn't feel crushed when it doesn't work out. He's not disappointing me, or facing my criticism; it's a low risk activity.

And yep... our glasses are half full at about two-thirds of the way up the glass!

Kiwiburn 2015

We just went on the best family camping holiday to date.

When I first heard about the "Burning Man" festival in Nevada, USA, it was through the videos on internet and an amusing episode of The Simpsons. It was something that I didn't even look into hard, because the ideals of the thing seemed intuitive to me. What I didn't know was that there is a regional event here in New Zealand called Kiwiburn.

It's said time and again in my parenting circles that "it takes a village to raise a child" and this festival really did feel like that. What happens when you get nearly a thousand hippies camped on a farm with a little forest, in the Central North Island of New Zealand, next to a river? Well a lot of it comes down to values.

The Simpson's episode warns that a Burn festival may not be "family friendly"... but a lot of that has to do with the family and their cultural ideals. Much of that which was cherished by the people at Kiwiburn were ideals that our family already held dear - freedom of expression, conscious decision making, explicit consent, creativity, collaboration, participation, having a go, taking reasonable risks, taking responsibility for one's actions, recycling/upcycling, gifting and rehoming, and basically cleaning up after yourself, making a contribution... and enjoying electronic dance music and tribal rhythms :)

At this stage of my children's learning voyage, it is shaped predominantly by the experiences social contexts we provide. Interacting with different people, in different contexts, people learn that certain things have a place and time, and Kiwiburn provided a fairly unique social context. We knew before the festival that this is an environment where people often greet each other by hugging and express affection openly and physically. We believe in a person's body being their own, and so we let the kids know well  before we even got to "The Paddock" that at Kiwiburn people often hug, but that if they weren't comfortable with hugging someone they didn't have to, they they could instead say "no thank you" or say "hi" and wave instead of going in for a hug. The fabulous thing about this environment is that the people knew that different people have different social boundaries, and that a person holding back is not an insult. Everyone was very accommodating of our kids and never pushed social engagement especially with our toddler, who they let engage on her own terms.

A lot of the things that the adults at burn events do will never be interacted with by children. One burner told me: "I bet they enjoyed seeing adults play. I see burns as giant playgrounds for adults." Some of the ways that adults "play" are not child friendly. Thankfully most of these they keep to themselves. My children are ignorant of most of the sexual habits of adults, but it's not like they haven't seen naked bodies before. Some people might find it particularly inappropriate to expose children to nudity, but at events like this there is a disconnect between nakedness and sexuality. A naked body is just as likely to be a canvas for body art. My children are used to seeing naked breasts. That's just how you feed babies. There were a lot of people in states of undress at Kiwiburn. Our kids didn't care.

I consider the lack of body shame to be a parenting success on our part. The children know that these things have a time and place, and they aren't going out in town wearing no clothes. They were clothed throughout the Kiwiburn event, buy they weren't phased by people stripping down to cope with hot weather, or to celebrate around a bonfire.

My kids got in and did. They took part, and were supported to take part. They were offered musical instruments, art and craft supplies, and opportunities. They watched as adults tried to do things they had never done before. They watched as people unashamedly messed up over and over again trying to rope walk, paint, do yoga, juggle, perform card tricks, or use a hula-hoop. They watched as people tried to improve their skills by practising the things they found really difficult saying things like; "Step back when I try this; I'm going to drop it because I'm really bad at this..." and "Just one more time! I think I'm getting better...". Taking part was more important than getting things "right". Making your mark was more important than making a masterpiece. Getting better, was better than being the best.

If there's one thing that an event like this has, it's a lot of people with a lot of energy. I was thankful to have my exhausting progeny be cared for by young people who felt that their energy was contagious. My kids socialised with people from toddler age to grey haired elderly people, who all listened to their fresh take on the world, and helped to contribute to their understanding of their world. They were cheered on as they dressed up like rock-stars, or had the supportive presence of other artists as they wrote their name in shared art space, facilitated as they collaborated with spray paint on canvases destined for a community art gallery, spotted as they climbed up towering artworks, or thanked for collecting pine cones for use as kindling in the drum-circle fire.

Kiwiburn has a tradition of gifting. "Burners" are encouraged to give each other gifts (without expecting money or favours in return). My eldest son was given many treasures, but the greatest was experience, and the one he remembers fondly was being given hand crafted items to redistribute to other people.

When asked what the greatest thing about Kiwiburn was his reply was: "MAKING FRIENDS!"

Cooperative / Collaborative Games

Our society has an overwhelming love affair with competition. Arguably, without competition we wouldn't have the impetus to improve, but putting ourselves in high risk situations actually shuts off the reasoning parts of our brain and makes us less good at clever problem solving. Babies don't learn to walk to be better walkers than each other. Our drives are there to empower us, and so are our relationships with others. As a society we grow strong when we know our own strengths and weaknesses, when we can build relationships with others, and we know our contributions are valued and we will get help if we ask for it. We don't need to strive for independence, or co-dependence, but rather, healthy interdependence. We are social creatures.

So here I am trying to get my children to play together. On the days when it is working they have an amazing synergy. The main thing they do together is playing with props - mainly Lego and toy cars. They create worlds together, most commonly recreating and combining different stories they have heard, from movies, videogames, YouTube casts, books, and personal experience. At times my eldest sounds like a cartoon super villain. They have teams of ninja battling zombies, and cars, rescuing princes and princesses, dragons, Pat and Jen, Hiccup and Camicazi... they get to be the characters and feel what being them is like, and wonder what if...?

As they get older I might get them into real "roleplaying games". For decades now people (well, nerds) have played games with paper and dice, and rules that standardise the beasts, powers, tools and threats, and the physical and magic laws of fantasy worlds in which they co-create stories together. Whether that's Dungeons and Dragons, or Vampire: The Masquerade, or pop culture spin offs like Buffy The Vampire Slayer, grown ups often need these rule systems because.. they are basically competitive. You can't have a struggle without something to fight against, whether that's quests, or your co-story makers, or the world officiated by your Game Master. Conflict is the essence of  drama.

For Christmas we got the family a copy of the game King of Tokyo. It's a relatively simple strategy game (that isn't completely random) aimed at 8+ age group. It's a cool game. With parents helping, my 7 and nearly 5 year old really love to play it, but they really need the assistance of a mediator. One of the things about my kids is that they are very close to the now. If playing short multiplayer video games like Pikmin 3 Bingo Battle has taught us anything, it's that, retrying a game over and over may give us the chance to win every now and then, but at the moment losing is huge. Losing against a game is one thing, but losing to a person is a tragedy, especially if the small person in question becomes a gloating maniac in their supreme domination of their competitors. As a child I hated competitive games, because I hated hurting other people's feelings when I won and they lost, and I hated losing, probably more than most people could understand.

I was lamenting on social media, the screaming rage of siblings desperate to play boardgames but unable to cope with it, and a friend of mine suggested getting board games that were collaborative rather than competitive ones. She sent me a couple, which was utterly awesome! Again, community is all about supporting each other like this, and as I have made friends on the internet over the years one of the bests things has been "paying it forward" and sending gifts to people. It's also lovely to receive.

I showed the games to my two older children and I noticed a few things happened.  The boys were only interested in playing Kakapo Rescue, because it was familiar subject matter to them. They knew what a Kakapo was, and the idea of the game was pretty easy to get across. They were really engaged with it and excited. They liked handling all the little pieces. They came up with strategies, and they were happy to follow my lead. They wanted to go again once the game was finished.

Unfortunately, for all the early enthusiasm, the game got boring quickly. When it got boring my older child decided to try making up variant rules to see how that would change the gameplay. This got me really excited. This guy is normally reactive to things rather than an instigator, so it's cool to see him pushing to play with new ideas and try new things. It has taken us years of working together to get to the point where he is prepared to take risks.

But since then they haven't got the game out again. It seems that there is just not enough appeal. I think their collaboration works better when there is an intrinsic reward, such as the excitement of a good story, understanding new ideas, solving problems or making good food. I wonder if they have already learned that board games are a competitive context and having a board game be non-competitive is weird. Or maybe, it would have caught their attention more if they were trying to survive a dragon attack or the zombie apocalypse....