Mike on Mom Enough podcast

(Mike)

I was a guest on the podcast, Mom Enough, hosted by Marti and Erin Erickson. The topic was Dealing with Impulsivity in Young Children: Promoting Reflection and Executive Function. https://momenough.com/2021/01/impulsivity

I talk with them about impulsivity having a positive side. It leads to intrinsic motivation and goal-directed behavior in children. It is necessary for creativity at any age. We go on to talk about effective ways to help children learn to recognize and override misguided impulses and come up with more appropriate alternatives.

She Knew Our Names and We Knew Hers

(Mike)

Priscilla was our friend

She ate popcorn with us

She played tic-tac-toe and noodle ball with us

She knew our names and we knew hers

We will miss her

Priscilla was our friend

This week my class learned that one of our beloved Grand Friends passed away.  The Grand Friends are the residents at an assisted-living facility that we visit twice a month.  We made a card for Priscilla with lots of flowers and hearts.  I asked the kids what words I should write. They came up with the words above.

It can be difficult to talk about death with young children.  I wrote about the death of another Grand Friend in a previous post.  I also talked wrote a post about talking to children about death on another website.  Today I want to focus more on the words the children used for their card, which the children gave to Priscilla’s daughter.

You can see how preschoolers focus on concrete details: we ate popcorn and played games with her.  They are defining a friend as someone you eat with and play with.  That’s a pretty good definition, but it’s the next line that really made me pause.  “She knew our names and we knew hers.”

These children understand the power of names.  Young children first learn this power by naming close family members, usually mama, dada or some variation.  They quickly realize that these words produce a lot of excitement from mothers and fathers.

Children also learn to name objects.  As young children become mobile, their world expands greatly.  Toddlers become curious about everything.  Older toddlers gain about 10-20 words per week as they continue to explore and have conversations with others.  By the time they are preschoolers, these children can start to use this vocabulary to have conversations about objects that are absent, and eventually objects they have never seen.

 There is also power in the naming of emotions. When toddlers learn to label their emotions, they can start to recover from some of their strong emotions a little quicker. Preschoolers continue this process as the names of emotions move past happy, sad and mad to include scared, lonely, frustrated, jealous and others. The better preschoolers get at naming their emotions, the easier it is to control impulses associated with those emotions. For example, a preschooler can learn to say they are mad while controlling the impulse to hit the person they are mad at. Simply naming the emotion allows for them to control the impulse. I used the term simply, but of course it is not learned quickly, but through lots of experience and guidance from a patient adult.

In addition children (and really all people) feel more secure and comfortable in an environment where others know their names.  Teachers and caregivers quickly learn that using a child’s name makes a child recover easier at drop off time.  Parents also are more trusting if their names are used.

Priscilla was the first Grand Friend to get to know the children’s names and she soon became the Grand Friend the children talked to the most.  The children picked up on that when we wrote our memories of Priscilla.

Our visits with the Grand Friends are important because we learn how to be a part of a wider community. Children and elders are often overlooked in our society. All of us can make a difference and it starts with learning the names of those around us. I am thankful that my class reminded me of the power of names.

Human Being or Human Becoming?

(Mike)

“When I got home from school, I would run with my dog spot to the pond past the pine trees. That was a long way back, probably a quarter mile. Then we would run back to the road. We would run back and forth until I had to go in for dinner.”

My dad didn’t talk much about his childhood. I didn’t even know he had a dog, but I could tell he was picturing the scene in his head as he told me about the freedom he felt as a child as he ran endlessly. When he told me this story, it was hard for him to get around. His legs didn’t always take him where he wanted to go. But he still had his memories. He could smell the pines. He could feel the breeze. He was no longer on the other end of the line as I talk to him on the phone. He was back at his childhood home, and I pictured it as if it were a vague memory of my own.

This made me think about some of my assumptions as a preschool teacher. In early childhood education, we often think of children in terms of “development.” Child development can be important, but we must remember it is one lens to look at children. When we look at children in this way, we are always looking at where the child will go next. Emily Plank, author of discovering the Culture of Childhood, told me that we think of children as Human Becomings rather than Human Beings (although I think she was quoting someone else).

This conversation with my father, I see it is just as important to look at childhood from the other side, to look back and see what we have been. That boy running with his dog was still a part of who my dad was when he was talking to me even if he could no longer move like so swiftly. That boy running was also once an infant taking his first steps. The developmental view is no more important than the reflective view. I could talk about how that child running is not just developing his muscles, but releasing BDNF to spur neuron growth, while also regulating his attention so that he could focus on academic skills. But that is really beside the point. It seems to me that where we might be next in our development is comparatively unimportant. What matters is that all of these experiences make us who we are.

[My father passed away in October 2019. I had originally written this before he died. He was unable to speak on his final day in this life. ALS had rendered most movement impossible by then. I sat with him and told him stories of my own childhood as well as the stories I remembered of his childhood. I can’t be certain but it seemed to make him smile although the movement was almost imperceptible. His physical body was failing him, but he still had the body in his mind]

A Place for Every Child

(Mike)

Creating a culture of consent is more than limiting children’s behavior, or helping children speak up when they want someone to stop. Those are important, but they are not enough. Consent needs to be embedded in the very structure of the classroom.  The teachers need to make sure there is a place for each child and there are guidelines for everyone to follow. The two guidelines in my classroom were:

• We Take Care of Each Other

• We Solve Problems Together

The first statement may seem simple. What does it look like when children take care of each other?

Leah was a four-year old who liked to build with blocks most days. She assumed that the other children would be careful if they walked through the block area, so they didn’t knock over her building. She also assumed that children like Evan and Sarah who liked to play rough would find a different place to roughhouse when they saw her building. But Evan and Sarah also had to know that they have a place to roughhouse.

Usually I had a mat set aside for more boisterous play including roughhousing. I did this the same way I made sure there were books for children who wanted to read, paint and markers for those who wanted to create, small cozy spots for children to be alone, etc.

Creating a culture of was not simply a matter of me preventing children from certain behaviors. It also involved finding a way for everyone to meet their needs. If I simply told children not to play rough inside, those children would try to find ways to meet their need to play physically. We would end up in a cycle of them starting to play and me telling them to wait until they got outside. For consent to work, everyone’s needs have to be met.

We often talk about self-regulation in the Early Childhood Education field, but too often I think teachers will decide that a child has trouble with self-regulation when the root of problem isn’t internal, but rather a lack of opportunity for the child to meet their needs. Fostering a child’s self-regulation is important for that child’s future success in general and specifically their ability to practice consent. But we cannot forget our role as a teacher to first ensure that each child has a place in the classroom community. Only then can we help them meet the expectations of that community.

Who Has a Voice?

(Mike)

I have been thinking quite a bit about how to teach the concept of consent to young children. It is often said that morality is better caught than taught and I think that is apropos in this case. But that does not mean the teachers aren’t actively teaching consent. Rather, I think the focus is on creating a culture of consent in the classroom. Then the teacher can find times for short “direct instruction” to help instill what consent is.
In the classroom it means that adults and children have a few basic agreements. I would use the term “guidelines” in a classroom setting. The agreement is essentially that everyone has a right to their own body and that when mistakes happen, we can fix those mistakes. Here is the wording I have used in my preschool classroom and my colleague used in her toddler room:

• We take care of each other
• We solve problems together

Together these allow for wording to use over and over. If Lena (a toddler) tackles someone who clearly does not want to play rough, the teacher can say, “Remember, we take care of each other. You have to ask if they want to be knocked down.”

If the other child cries or gets mad, the teacher goes to the next guideline. “Oh no we have a problem, but we solve problems together.” Then the teacher can follow the steps of conflict resolution.

The teacher will be repeating the two guidelines over and over, but toddlers do start to internalize them. The teacher can also post the guidelines using different color for each so the toddlers can keep track of them. The teacher can point at the words when they say them. Many of the toddlers will start pointing at them as well.

The first guideline is a little more obvious. If each child has a right to decide what happens to their body then they must respect others bodies. I don’t use the word respect for young children because it doesn’t seem concrete enough. Most young children know the phrase being “taken care of” so it seems to work better. I have seen toddlers use this terminology after it is used.

The second one might not be so obvious: solving problems together. When I started using guidelines, I thought We Take Care of Each Other encompassed this one. But in the classroom I saw how useful it was. Some children feel shame when they hurt someone, intentionally or not. Other children at this age honestly don’t realize they caused someone to get hurt (not yet understanding cause and effect).

I found myself referring to this guideline all the time. It had an unexpected effect. It helped restore peace in the classroom. Children learned that the teachers were not interested in blaming children, but rather solving the problem and moving on. Many toddlers and preschoolers will step in to help when there is this focus on repair. It doesn’t matter if an individual was even part of the conflict, each child can be part of the solution. I think this aspect of consent is often missing in our culture’s recent discussions on the topic.

If children mostly see adults searching for someone to blame and “take responsibility”, many may try to simply avoid getting caught or deny any responsibility if they are caught. Instead, children should step up and try to solve the problem (whether they are the one responsible or not). I think this is where the important learning can happen. Because consent is not simply an agreement between two people about what is allowed to happen. It is a community deciding who has a voice.