Engaging The Whole Child in Learning

 “Holistic education engages the head, heart, hands and spirit of the child.
It is a curriculum that makes connections –
community, earth, soul, subject and mind-and-body connections –
and it develops intuition and inquiry.”

- From the curriculum documents for The Whole Child School,
a Toronto District School Board
alternative school which opens this fall

The parents who received phone calls telling them that their children had secured spots in The Whole Child School reacted as if they had won the lottery. And, as it turns out, they had. Demand for spaces in the new school  was so great that the school had to conduct a lottery to allocate spaces as fairly as possible, says Shari Walczak, a mother of two who has been serving as parent co-chair of the school’s organizing committee.

When The Whole Child School opens its doors this September, it will start out with seven classes: three combined JK/SK classes (Walczak’s 4-year-old son will be in one of those classes); full classes at the Grades 1, 2, and 3 level; and a combined Grade 4/5 class. The school will grow with its students, eventually offering classes from JK through Grade 8.

It isn’t difficult to see what has attracted students to this publicly-funded alternative school. The Whole Child School (which will be sharing space with Roden Public School in the Gerrard and Coxwell neighborhood) will be following a holistic curriculum that has been developed by a highly skilled team of educators, with input from Professor John P. Miller of the Department of Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto.

One of the key challenges that the school’s founders foresee will be managing parent expectations. No school is perfect--even if the curriculum documents make The Whole Child School sound like a learning paradise on earth. What the Whole Child School community can promise to do is be open to learning from the mistakes that will inevitably be made as the school gets through its novice year. “We’ll be learning and adjusting and changing as we go.”

Walczak and other members of the organizing committee are counting on The Whole Child School’s parent community to play a hands-on role in shaping the school during this first, formative year. “We’re looking for a real time commitment and involvement level from our parents. We want them to be involved with everything from fundraising and identifying potential partnerships to providing input on the curriculum and vision.”

If all goes well, The Whole Child School could end up serving as a model for the kind of education every child should be receiving in order to be able to meet the challenges of the future, says Walczak. “We would love for The Whole Child School to become the norm for all children down the road.”

"Holistic education is an effort to cultivate the development of the whole human being.  Where conventional schooling views the child as a passive receiver of information and rules, or at most as a computer-like processor of information, a holistic approach recognizes that to become a full person, a growing child needs to develop – in addition to intellectual skills – physical, psychological, emotional, interpersonal, moral and spirited potentials.  The child is not merely a future citizen or employee in training, but an intricate and delicate web of vital forces and environmental influences."

- Ron Miller, one of the major thinkers and contributors
to the field of holistic education, on the role holistic education
has to play in the development of the whole child,
quoted on The Whole Child School website

Dummy Mummies, Baby Crazies, and Reasons Not to Have Children: It’s Open Season on Mom....Again

The Guardian slams all things parental (and blames all things maternal) in its weekend magazine

A British parent looking for a relaxing read over a cup of tea this past Sunday morning was in for a bit of a jolt. What was being served up in the Life & Style section of The Guardian was a triple-header of parental condemnation, with the bulk of the blame being pinned on mom.

ONE.
In The dummy mummy decade: boring, selfish smug: how a generation of women because obsessed with motherhood, Rachel Cooke makes the case that the child-obsessed “baby crazies” (a.k.a. the dummy mummies) have  “reverted, 50s-style, to identifying themselves primarily, vociferously, and sometimes exclusively, as mothers.” She argues that a “loony excess of maternal feeling” is the result of women having their babies later in life. “[When they have children. they] feel grateful, a gratefulness that gives them the zeal of the convert. And it is this zeal, I am assuming, that prevents boredom from setting in as they ponder the pros and cons of the Bugaboo Bee.”

TWO.
In Why I don’t want children, Polly Vernon argues that parenthood turns adults -- particularly women -- into self-absorbed, selfish bores (much the same point Cooke makes in her piece, which makes you wonder why The Guardian saw the need to run two we-hate-mothers diatribes on the same day). Anyway, here's Vernon:

“I really don't like what parenthood does to grown-ups....Spare me the one-track conversations. Spare me the self-righteousness, the sense of entitlement (you, with the toddler-on-wheels: astonishing news just in! You don't have pavement priority over the rest of the world!). Spare me the pretensions of martyrdom and selflessness....And please spare me the pitying glances (I promise I don't want what you have. Honestly, I find it mind-boggling that you don't want what I have. Are you quite sure you're not poleaxed with jealousy?). While I always offer pregnant women my seat on the Tube, on my darkest days I also find myself thinking: let's get something straight here. Your condition is self-inflicted, you made the choice to get knocked up, and you presumably knew it'd leave you incapacitated in this way. I don't know if you deserve my seat any more than you would if you were incapacitated by a banging hangover, say, or a great deal of shopping.”

THREE.
And in 20 other reasons not to have a baby, John Hind offers a catch-all list of reasons for abstaining from parenthood, with those reasons ranging from the gynecological (“96% of women say they are "less pleased" with their vaginas a year after giving birth than before”) to the environmental (“British parents wishing to offset the C02 emissions resulting from bringing one child into the world would need to plant 1,073 trees”) to the financial (“The Optimum Population Forum judges the price of a condom to have had a nine million per cent "return on investment" when set against the cost to the planet of having a child.”) Go ahead and check out the other 17 reasons, if you dare.

Here’s a footnote which you may find interesting if, like me, you are interested in the way that the media influences the ideas we form about parenting. The Guardian’s down-with-parenthood triple-header ran just a few days after columnist Kira Cochrane accused the British press of pinning the blame for all of societies ills on moms. (She was referring to a barrage of media coverage in response to an important UK report about childhood: A Good Childhood: Searching for Values in a Competitive Age. You can read The Star’s coverage of that same report here at ParentCentral.ca.) Here's what Cochrane had to say:

“A quick scan of the newspapers would have led to the assumption that the report is about one thing alone: how armies of working women are laying waste to family life.

"Working women 'fuel family splits'" said the Daily Telegraph's front page headline.

"Kids 'damaged' by mums who work" blared the Sun.

"Mum's cash 'leading to split home'" frothed the Mirror.

"Children 'suffering from lack of two-parent family'" pronounced the Mail.

“The people who really seem to be implying that women should get back to the kitchen are the newspapers themselves.”

It's not unusual for societies to adopt increasingly conservative attitudes when things go from bad to worse -- and the UK is being particularly hard-hit by the current economic hard times. But declaring it open season on mothers (at least via the newspaper headline or Sunday feature) isn't the way to deal with the need for change.

That's an important point to bear in mind, just in case the next British import happens to be a wave of just-blame-mom mania. We've got enough of our own bizarro attitudes about motherhood to sort through here in North America.

Update:

I just noticed tonight (Thurs. Feb. 12th) that Her Bad Mother -- a popular Toronto-area blogger -- has written a passionate response to Rachel Cooke's piece (mentioned above). The debate is raging in the comments section over Her Bad Mother's blog. Was Cooke serious when she put forth such outrageous arguments? Should women ever question other women's choices? Those are just a few of the issues that are being debated over at Her Bad Mother.

And the Sleep Debates Are Back On

Resist the temptation to hit the snooze button -- or to start a pillow fight. There's too much at stake in the sleep safety wars.

Another infant sleep safety study is making headline news – which means that one of the hottest debates parenting debates is back on again: whether or not you should sleep with your baby.

Here's the dirty little secret about this particular debate. The majority of parents end up sleeping with their baby at some point, whether if it's for a single night or the long haul.

That primal quest for sleep -- to say nothing of that primal drive to comfort a baby who refuses to fall asleep more than an arm's length away from a parent because the baby is lonely, scared, in pain, or simply a baby -- can lead to a rewriting of the sleep rules at any time.

When that happens, parents find themselves in the situation of having to make complex sleep safety decisions when they're at their most sleep deprived and least coherent.

And if they had never intended to bed share (and didn't bother reading up on bed sharing issues as a result), they can find themselves improvising in the area of sleep safety as well.

This is not a good thing.

The lack of any official bed-sharing guidelines doesn't make life any easier for sleep-deprived moms and dads -- or wide-awake moms and dads for that matter, either. They have to make up their minds about a complex situation without having all the facts they need to make a truly informed sleep decision. You see, in an effort to avoid doing any harm, public health authorities have failed to share sleep safety information that has the potential to prevent harm. Talk about a sleep-safety Catch 22.

The Canadian Paediatric Society is one of the few health organizations to recognize this problem and shine a spotlight on what needs to be done. Its sleep guidelines highlight the need to support parents by providing them with information about all sleeping infant environments: "No sleep environment is completely risk-free, but much can be done to educate parents on the provision of safer sleeping environments for their infants," the recommendations state.

The CPS, however, tends to be the exception rather than the rule.

Other health authorities, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, have taken a much more conservative approach to providing information about bed sharing -- and been much criticized as a result. 'While bed sharing can never be publicly recommended, due to its complexity, blanket recommendations against bed sharing and eliminating safety information for bed sharing families cannot be justified either,"  respected sleep anthropologist James McKenna, PhD, has stated (.pdf), for example.

So what's a sleep-deprived and safety-conscious parent to do in the absence of comprehensive evidence-based sleep sharing guidelines?

Get informed, regardless of what you think you'll be doing about bed sharing tonight, tomorrow, or next week. Share the best sources of sleep safety information with other parents. And stay tapped into the sleep research grapevine. 

Resources:

Here are some resources you may find useful, whether you're currently bed sharing, thinking about bed sharing, or positive you won't be bed sharing ever. (Never say never, remember.) Because we're still waiting for an evidence-based set of guidelines to be released by a pediatric health authority (and we may be waiting some time for such guidelines), you'll probably want to consult as many of the following sources as possible before making your own decisions about whether or not to bed share.

• Canadian Paediatric Society: Safe Sleep for Babies
• Canadian Paediatric Society: CPS  Position Statement: Safe Sleeping Environments for Infants and Children
  
• American Academy of Pediatrics: The Changing Concept of Sudden Infant Death (.pdf)
• American Academy of Pediatrics: Other Sleep Resources
• "Sleep Arrangements and Bed-Sharing Families in the Home Setting:" Baddock et al. Pediatrics, January 2, 2007.
• The Natural Child Project: James McKenna, PhD
• PhD in Parenthood: Co-Sleeping Safety 
• A Safer Sleep (.pdf) tip sheet which I developed for a parenting workshop. It is based on a much lengthier chapter on this topic ("Bedroom Politics: Where Will Your Baby Sleep?") from my book Sleep Solutions for Your Baby, Toddler, and Preschooler (Wiley, 2006). (More sleep articles here.)

BE SLEEP SAFETY SAVVY: Steer clear of sleep safety source that promises to offer the definitive set of do's and don'ts for safe bed sharing. No source can make that guarantee at this time; just as no source can make the opposite guarantee -- that your baby can sleep totally risk-free away from you. Nothing about babies and sleep is totally risk-free, just as nothing about raising kids is totally risk-free. "Safer" or "less risky" is the best deal going.

The Stuff of Which Pre-Baby Fantasies Are Made

One of the hottest new trends in the world of pregnancy and babies is the baby planner: a consultant/concierge who, for $75 to $150 per hour, will ensure that baby has all the right stuff (green, silver spoon, or both); the perfect nursery (hip, healthy, and unique); the ideal baby shower (one that generates the right stuff for the perfect nursery and encourages friends and family members to purchase the services of the baby planner to boot).

Baby planners are selling something bigger than the specific services listed on their baby menus, of course. They're selling the stuff of which pre-baby fantasies are made: visions of after-baby bliss. Baby planners promise to ease the transition to parenthood by providing parents-to-be with the knowledge, the tools, and the gear needed to feel confident and in control every step of the way. There's no need to worry. Someone else is at the controls. You can just relax and enjoy the ride.

If only it were possible to download the worry -- and to predict every parenting curve ball ahead of time. Unfortunately, that's not the nature of the adventure you've signed on for. The thing you need to know about parenting is that nothing is perfect or predictable – and hiring a baby planner isn't about to change that reality. If anything, you might end up with a false sense of security about your readiness for baby and a heightened sense of unreality after baby arrives (the result of downloading all the baby preparation functions to someone else). After all, when you're picking out baby clothes or choosing a color of paint for your baby's nursery, there's something fundamentally important going on deep inside your brain. As you handle that sleeper and pour through those paint chips, you get a chance to prepare psychologically for baby's impending arrival. Outsource too many of those nesting-type functions to a baby planner and you may find the jump from the abstract concept of being pregnant to the physical reality of having a baby in your arms sudden and jarring. Besides, the musing and the dreaming and the thinking and the planning are the stuff of which pregnancy and baby memories are made. You don't want to miss out on the magic. Really.

Here's something else to think about as you mull over the pros and cons of hiring a baby planner. Nice-to-haves can rapidly morph into must-haves and frills can disguise themselves as necessities once you appoint a designated shopper. After all, she has to justify her reason for being. Case in point: "Making sure that all your notes and announcements are unique to you and your family is a top priority," says Time to Nest, a Maryland-based baby planning company. And another: " She deserves the very best, so give her what she wants, diamonds, birthstones, and platinum, oh my!" adds Ohio-based Blue Skye Baby.

Likewise, experiences like the baby shower that were once the exclusive domain of family and friends become part of the post-modern baby marketing machine: "Showers are a wonderful time for the expecting family to be surrounded by loving friends and family. Time to Nest can offer gift ideas and services that are sure to mean so much. Providing the soon-to-be-parents with our Make Your Mark service is also a wonderful gesture that can be included in the party planning."

If your budget can swing upwards of $75/hour for a shot at the fleeting fantasy of post-baby perfection --- a fantasy that will hold up for as long as it takes you to realize that a professionally accessorized nursery doesn't necessarily guarantee postpartum bliss – and what's being offered seems like good value to you, then go for it. Just realize that there are other less pricey and more time-honored ways of achieving the same goal (sans the coordinating accessories). The not-so-secret recipe is to tap into the parenting community in your area, to do your own research about the hot-button parenting issues of the day, and to trust your own instincts as a parent (something that becomes easier as you clock more time as a new mom or dad). And spend the money you would have paid the baby planner on things your baby really needs and invest in a dream with staying power: start trying to make things better for all the babies of the world.

Postscript: Thinking of Hiring a Baby Planner? Be Baby Planner Wise:

• If a baby planner refers to a select list of service providers, find out whether these individuals are screened by the baby planner (e.g., reference and police checks) and whether any referral or kick-back fees move back and forth between the baby planner and the service provider.
• If you're interested in taking a parenting course offered by a baby planner (typical topics include infant and child safety, baby proofing, the do's and don'ts of installing a car seat, making your own baby food) ask about the instructor's credentials and compare the cost of the course with similar offerings in your community. You might be able to find a similar course being offered free of charge (or on a cost-recovery basis) through community or non-profit organizations.

Mother Metamorphosis

My first year of motherhood was all about change: watching my daughter wriggle and crawl from baby stage to baby stage and feeling myself make the mind shift required to move from the intimacy of the-two-of-us to the much more complex family that is born the moment baby makes three. It was no longer me and him: it was me and him and me and her and her and him: three times as many relationship combos to maintain in the same small space. No wonder the house suddenly felt so much more crowded. The house wasn't simply overflowing with piles upon piles of baby stuff, piles that grew by the day as new parcels arrived by mail, courier, or baby-obsessed neighbor. The house was fully charged with the high voltage energy of new relationship possibilities, possibilities that were both brilliant and dark at the same time.

I remember feeling this strange mix of anxiety and joy: being simultaneous head-over-heels in love with my daughter and freaked out about how much my own life was changing, particularly my relationship with my husband. I couldn't believe that a person could be so happy and so sad at the same time. Were he and I destined to drift apart at the same time that we had the best reason in the world to want to stay together? If we couldn't even carry on a conversation without arguing about something,would we ever come out of this dark place as a couple?

I've been thinking back to this time a lot lately, because I've emerged from another year of growth and introspection. At first everything seemed scary and uncertain in the wake of my youngest son's Aspergers diagnosis, but now my husband and I have found our way back to something resembling the new normal again. In the early days, weeks, months, I remember feeling like a new mom again; realizing that I didn't even know what questions to ask in order to figure out what I needed to know.

For the longest time, I felt like I was walking around in a daze that was eerily reminiscent of the isolating fog of new motherhood: unable to concentrate and yet thinking all the time. My husband felt much the same way, and yet we were each in our own, separate fogs. This time, with the benefit of knowledge gained over 20 years of parenting, we groped through the fog until we found one another. We knew we needed to remind ourselves that we were on the same team, not at war with one another; that we needed to support one another while we were supporting our son.

When I signed up for this motherhood gig 20 years ago, I thought that being a mother was all about raising children. I had no idea that my children would also be raising me – providing me with opportunities to learn and grow more than I ever thought possible, particularly during those times when I was challenged to the max as a mother.

Don't get me wrong. I certainly wasn't grateful for those soul-wrenchingly painful parent development opportunities while I was living through them, but, looking back, I know now that I wouldn't have developed the ability to care deeply for parents and children in all kinds of circumstances nor would I have evolved into the person I am today if I hadn't been given the opportunity to experience so many different types of highs and lows myself. If I'd set up parenting digs at 123 Easy Street, I might easily have assumed that all parents and kids live on streets like that street. I would have been terribly wrong.

Because our family has spent time on Infertility Crescent and Stillbirth Street and Learning Disabilities Lane and Eating Disorders Drive and Depression Drive and Aspergers Syndrome Street and at other assorted addresses, I know that Easy Street is a very tiny street; and that some of the families who have houses there are living in a state of self-delusion. They aren't really living the picture-perfect existence they think they are living. At any time, the foundations of their houses and their lives could come tumbling down.

Parents who've lived on the streets that spiral off from Easy Street know what it's like to feel as emotionally downtrodden as a partially stepped on or totally flattened caterpillar -- the kind of feeling you get when your something worrying or terrible is happening or has happened to your child. At first you think you're going to stay in flattened caterpillar mode forever. And then you decide that what has happened to your child will not be in vain: you will find a way to make something positive come from this experience. And so you start to inject life back into your squished caterpillar body even though, at first, your body says, "What's the point?" At some point, you find the courage to wriggle out of the what's-the-point cocoon you retreated into when you were at your most vulnerable. You reach out to the only ones who can truly understand (a group of formerly squished caterpillars who have somehow morphed into butterflies). You work hard to heal yourself and the rest of your family and to recreate your life in a new way. Then you watch yourself soar above the worries of the day, knowing you have what it takes to help yourself and your family weather the next storm.

Note:
I've just given my personal blog -- The Mother of All Blogs -- a major revamp. I've moved it over to TypePad and added links to hundreds (there may be over a thousand) of links to parenting resources and articles (with many more to come). If you're used to linking to http://www.motherofallblogs.com, you don't have to do a thing. You've moved with the blog. If you used to link to the blogspot address, you need to change your link for my blog over to the new address.

Potty Training Math

Is there a potty in your future? (Or, rather, your toddler's?) If so, you might want to sign up for this quick and almost pain-free crash course in potty training math.

27: There is little benefit to starting toilet training before age 27 months, according to researchers at the University of Pennsylvania. Start training children any earlier and the entire process simply ends up taking longer. (You may be ready for your child to be out of diapers, but that doesn't necessarily mean your child is developmentally ready to master the skills involved in learning how to use the toilet.) The takeaway message? Toilet training will be less stressful for all concerned if you wait until your child is both physically and emotionally ready.

8 to 10: You can expect the entire toilet training process to take about 8 to 10 months, according to researchers from the Medical College of Wisconsin. Don't expect overnight results and do plan for plenty of stops and starts. That's how the potty training process tends to play out.

32.5 to 35. Girls tend to be toilet-trained at an earlier age than boys, but there's huge variation from child to child when it comes to acquiring individual skills. Researchers at the Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee found that the median age for "staying dry during the day" was 32.5 months for girls and 35 months for boys, but there was variation of up to a year in the attainment of individual skills (e.g., showing an interest in using the potty, staying dry for two hours, indicating a need to go to the bathroom). Here's something else you'll want to know:Keeping your child in diapers during the toilet-training process can be counter-productive. Researchers at the University of Nevada discovered that wearing diapers increased the rate of accidents (e.g., wetting the diaper) and decreased the number of successful trips to the potty.

1 in 4: Approximately one in four young children develop a toilet training problem known as stool training refusal (a.k.a the refusal to poop on the potty). According to researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, the problem typically begins with hard bowel movements and pain during defecation. If parents can head off or detect these earlier problems, problems with stool training refusal (an understandable desire to avoid future bowel movements because bowel movements are now associated with pain or discomfort) can often be avoided.

POSTSCRIPT: The secret formula -- for success in potty training, parenthood, and life: "Being a doctor has made me a better mother, and being a mother has made me a better doctor....Both jobs require flexibility. No two children and no two patients are the same. For example...one child may be able to proceed through toilet training easily, while another may take months. Recognizing each person's needs and adapting my approach is crucial." - Sarina Schrager, MD, mom of two, writing in the February 2006 edition of Family Practice Management