A Note from Alicia: Talking to Children about Coronavirus

Dear Families, 

Talking to Children about Coronavirus

Knowing how best to communicate with our children when life is causing significant anxiety for us as adults can be one of the most stressful challenges of parenting. We have a powerful instinct to protect our children, and these moments activate some of the most deep, primal parts of our own brain. This means that, on the one hand, frightening events can trigger even more anxiety in us once we become parents than they may have at other points in our lives, because we are overcome with such a strong instinct to shield our children. And, at the same time, just as our anxiety crescendos, we also often feel a deep desire to protect our children from experiencing the same fear we are feeling. The challenge of simultaneously trying to be knowledgeable and proactive in our response to frightening events, while projecting an attitude of calm for our children and managing the amount of information they take in, can be very difficult. 

While it is tempting to avoid talking to our children about topics that we worry may feel frightening, it is important to remember that young children often overhear and absorb far more than we realize, and they are almost always most scared by the explanations they create on their own, in the absence of our voices. Until around the age of seven, children process their experience through “magical thinking.” This way of understanding the world allows them to have the extremely rich fantasy life that we associate with the beautiful sense of wonder and imagination in the preschool years. However, the same quality that allows children to pretend to be a princess, a dinosaur, or a superhero with full conviction, also leads them to be particularly susceptible to creating false correlations between snippets of information, or to developing dramatic narrative explanations and theories, when they have only their imaginations to guide their understanding.

Image from Something Might Happen by Helen Lester

Image from Something Might Happen by Helen Lester

Therefore, it is usually best to provide them with honest and accurate information, while being as attuned as possible to their individual thoughts and questions and to the scope of information they can reasonably make sense of. The amount and specificity of information children need usually depends upon a combination of their developmental age, their temperament, and the information they have already picked up from their environment. Below are some guidelines and additional resources. 

Manage Your Feelings First: The old advice to “put your own oxygen mask on before assisting others” is essential when helping our children to manage their feelings, not just their physical safety. As challenging as it can be when we are feeling anxious ourselves, it is important to try to provide a reassuring sense of calm for our children. Children have acute radar for our emotions, so being aware of your tone of voice and your body language is extremely important in helping them to feel calm. 

Find Neutral Ways to Gauge Your Child’s Understanding: Some children may have heard a lot of information already, while others, particularly at the preschool age, may not have. Knowing how much information to share with children begins by assessing their current level of knowledge and their individual questions. It can help to begin with a neutral question. For example, you might mention that you’ve noticed some people washing their hands a lot or wearing a mask, and ask your child if they have any ideas about why that might be. If they seem nonchalant, this may not be a topic that they are feeling too worried about, and it may not be the right moment to push the conversation further. If they have questions or appear anxious, this is a signal that they may need to talk about it. 

Embrace Play: Play is the young child’s natural avenue for understanding the world, so this is an ideal way to check in on their feelings and understandings and provide information. Taking a teddy bear’s temperature or having a puppet express a question or an observation can be powerful ways of accessing children’s ideas and emotions.  

Answer What is Asked and Wait for More: Children are often seeking much more specific information than we realize and do not necessarily need big answers to small questions. Answer honestly, but try to stick to exactly what they are asking, and then wait to see if the child has more on their mind. In most cases, children will ask for as much information as they feel they need and will stop asking questions when they feel calm and satisfied. 

It’s Okay to Be Honest About Your Feelings: While it is important to try to establish a sense of calm for our children, it is also okay to acknowledge our own feelings. This lets children know that their feelings are normal, acceptable, and manageable. You can let your children know that you sometimes feel worried or scared when you hear about something that sounds frightening, and then share what actions help you to feel better (such as talking to someone about your feelings, finding “expert” information that can answer your questions, or doing something helpful for others).

We All Benefit from a Sense of Control: If your child seems worried, find age appropriate tasks they can help with. Take them to the grocery store with you or let them help you with some simple, safe cleaning tasks. 

Be Careful to Use Precise Language: Children often create false explanations when they misunderstand and overgeneralize our language, particularly when it pertains to things they cannot see, hear, or touch, like “germs.” Provide balanced, precise language and keep an ear open for misunderstanding when listening to their play and to their questions. For example, you might explain that some bacteria helps our bodies (like the good bacteria in yogurt) and some bacteria can make us sick (like the bacteria on a tissue after you blow your nose). Not all germs are scary and "bad." 

Model Responsible Media Consumption: Relying on factual information from experts and minimizing our media consumption is important in managing our own feelings and in teaching children how to process scary situations. In school, we often talk with the children about identifying “experts” on topics they are exploring. Avoiding excessive, emotionally charged headlines and social media and teaching children to rely on scientific sources helps everyone to stay calm. 

Double Down on Kindness: Young children are naturally learning to sort and classify, and this, combined with their tendency toward magical thinking, makes them particularly prone to developing stereotypes and becoming fearful of the unknown. While teaching healthy hygiene habits, also be sure to continue to encourage children to be kind to all people, regardless of appearance, and explain to them that most people, even those wearing masks, are not sick. Remind children that everyone is doing their best to stay healthy, and it is no one’s fault if they are sick. Fear tends to make all of us, adults and children, more egocentric in our thinking. But kindness remains possible, and feeling a sense of community belonging reduces stress for everyone.

Additional Resources

Talking to Children

Information for Adults

Picture Books for Children

As always, we at the JCC are happy to be a resource to you in these situations. Please do not hesitate to reach out with questions, big or small. We are here for you. 

Shabbat shalom,
Alicia

A Note from Alicia: Learning to Read in the Block Area and on the Playground

Dear Families, 

Learning to Read in the Block Area and on the Playground

Reading is one of the most common topics parents ask early childhood teachers about, and frequently their primary questions revolve around when we will teach children to read. For parents this, understandably, seems like a straightforward question, because for many of us our own recollections of learning to read feel quite binary, as if a switch flipped in our childhood between the time before we were able to read and the time after. Reading does, after all, change the way in which we relate to the world. A code that was mysterious to us is revealed, and with this revelation comes new independence as well as a vast breadth of information and experience that was previously inaccessible and is suddenly ours. There is indeed something fundamentally different about life before and after becoming a reader. Reading is often described as the “gateway” to all other learning, as if we are stepping across a threshold into a distinctly new life, and certainly it does grant us access and power that is critical to our lifelong learning, to the opportunities we will have, and to the way in which we participate in our culture.    

Image from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

Image from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

 However, the binary vision of learning to read that lives in these metaphors of transformation and fuels the question of “when” undercuts the most important feature of reading, which is understanding. In teacher speak this is the difference between fluency and comprehension. Fluency primarily involves learning to decode words with increasing speed and accuracy. There is a great deal of variation in the age and pace at which children learn to translate the abstract symbols of grouped letters into words and sentences. For some children this comes suddenly and quickly; it does indeed feel transformative when they “break the code” and words swiftly begin to come to life. For other children, it takes more time and requires more direct instruction, practice, and nurturing to make sense of the jumble of lines and curves on a page. Even when decoding appears to be miraculously spontaneous, there are still many precursors. As children are exposed to books and to letters they build experience with the conventions and consistency of printed material, and as they learn to rhyme, to distinguish between sounds, to recognize shapes, and to translate other more basic symbols, such as the red octagon of a stop sign, into a word or directive, they are paving the way for later decoding. Reading may, for some children, appear to develop overnight, but even in these cases it is, in fact, a skill that rests upon a mountain of other skills. 

Comprehension, on the other hand, requires a much deeper well of experience and continues to develop and deepen across our entire lifetime. It is the fundamental purpose of learning to read, and yet it is often the side of reading we think about the least, presuming that understanding will flow naturally from decoding—as though once we have unlocked the ability to transform symbols into words, knowledge will readily follow. 

But the dynamic between experience and understanding is much more complex. We certainly gain new insight from reading. We also bring our prior understandings to our reading, gleaning as much from the text as our own experience allows us to access. Think, for example, of books you may have read and then re-read later in life. Sometimes this experience brings a comfortable familiarity, but often it reveals gaps in our initial comprehension, and we are able to understand more deeply as we return to the text with increasingly complex knowledge of people and of the world. Coming back to a text with a new range of life experience to draw upon gives us a greater capacity for insight. 

We see evidence of this in the drop in reading scores that often occurs in the middle school years. Certainly some of this is due to the many other challenges of middle school life. But it does appear that there is some correlation between the resources children bring to their understanding of increasingly complex characters and stories and their objectively measured skill as readers. Reading gives us a glimpse of the experiences of others and allows us to practice understanding people, stories, and information that may be novel to us. But our capacity to do this at all—to step into someone else’s experience or way of understanding—is a skill-set in and of itself, and one that begins on the playground, well before we have learned to decode words. 

Longstanding research has shown that there is a clear relationship between play in early childhood and literacy development later on in school. An aspect of this relationship appears to have to do with the way in which young children begin to experiment with the use of symbols in their imaginative play, before they ever learn to read. But a relationship between learning to empathize and take perspectives, as children play with puppets, create characters for one another, and negotiate their own differences, is also coming to be understood as a fundamental precursor to story recollection and comprehension in later literacy.  We begin learning to “read” people from our first days in the world, and each experience that enhances and adds nuance to this ability supports our access to complex characters and narratives. As children negotiate a difference of opinion in the block area, enact a familiar story with their stuffed animals, or weave superhero narratives on the playground, they are learning to read. For, as educator Vivian Gussin Paley reminds us, children know that, “a person is a story.”

Shabbat shalom, 
Alicia

A Note from Alicia: Valuing Presence Over Praise

Dear Families, 

Valuing Presence Over Praise

We often talk, both among teachers and with parents, about the idea of praising effort over accomplishment or process over product. This is particularly significant in a progressive school environment, in which we place much greater value on planting the seeds of lifelong curiosity and engagement with learning than we do on immediate demonstration of skills. We believe that it is paramount, particularly at the earliest stages in a child’s educational journey, to nurture a highly engaged, intrinsically motivated relationship with school and with community, because this internal desire to learn, to innovate, and to connect becomes the foundation that bolsters a child’s approach to education and to any challenges that may arise in the future. Praising effort and process over results is a mindset shift that is central to laying a positive and sturdy foundation for a life of learning and accomplishment. 

I often think, however, about a study that challenges us to stretch this mindset beyond praise altogether. Over the course of three decades, Bruce E. Brown and Rob Miller surveyed college and professional athletes, asking them about their best and worst memories of playing sports as children. Two resoundingly consistent answers came through in their results. The worst childhood memories were most often of the ride home from a game with their parents. Generally, this wasn't due to any of the extreme responses that we might think of as embodying the most objectionable behavior of parents in the bleachers, but rather from the simple parental urge to talk about the game "before the sweat has dried on their child's uniform."

The best memories, on the other hand, were not of victories or accolades, but of adults saying simply, “I love to watch you play.” These questions were being asked of highly accomplished players, so it is particularly important to note that the feeling children gain from moments when we resist any praise or critique and simply share our love of witnessing their experiences, does not dampen motivation or achievement. Rather it may amplify both by allowing children to feel our unconditional love and to truly take ownership over their own efforts. (Grandparents, as it turns out, are often better at conveying this sense of pleasure in simply being able to watch, without concern for the results). This goes beyond praising effort and serves as an important reminder of the vital role that our simple presence plays in our children’s development and emerging sense of self. 

Toni Morrison spoke of this idea powerfully as well. She said:

“It’s interesting to see when a kid walks in a room, your child or anybody else’s child, does your face light up? That’s what they’re looking for...When my children used to walk into the room when they were little, I looked at them to see if they had buckled their trousers or if their hair was combed or if their socks were up. And so you think that your affection and your deep love is on display because you’re caring for them. It’s not. When they see you, they see the critical face. What’s wrong now? But then, if you [try], as I tried from then on…let your face speak what’s in your heart. Because when they walked in the room I was glad to see them. It’s just as small as that.”

Is there really anything more powerful in life than having someone whose face lights up when they see us, whose pure pleasure in our company is palpable? 

I was reminded again of the coaches survey and of Toni Morrison’s words this week when I read this article on interviews with people who have been highly successful and have made a significant difference in the world. They were asked about the most important lessons they learned from their parents. The lessons they highlighted were not rooted in a push toward high ambition or success or even hard work. They were: the importance of having an open heart, of being present for others, and of “stepping up” for the people we love. None of the people interviewed for the article shared easy childhood stories. In fact, each of them is filled with adversity, and certainly there is a lesson there as well about resilience. But it seems the most significant lesson was not about the thick skin that developed for these people through adversity, but rather the wisdom and compassion that can emerge out of vulnerability and the primary importance of the love that is found there. 

We live in a culture that constantly pressures us to feel that parenting is about perfection—providing perfect experiences for our children, perfecting our interactions with them, and yearning for perfection in their accomplishments. And yet so many people who have experienced objectively dramatic success in life remind us, on the other side of that success, that they arrived there through highly imperfect lives, in which the common thread is seeds of unconditional love and presence. 

When we are tempted to offer either praise or criticism, it may be far more impactful to take a moment simply to notice whether our face is reflecting scrutiny or light and to remind our children that we just love to watch them play. 

Shabbat shalom,
Alicia

A Note from Alicia: The Courage to Let Go

Dear Families, 

The Courage to Let Go 

“Like God, new parents are miracle makers. When children are tiny babies, we vigilantly monitor everything that goes into their mouths and comes out their bottoms. We make sure they aren’t hungry or thirsty, and we provide constant protection and care. But as our children mature, we need to withdraw from smoothing their path and satisfying all their wishes...By continuing to make miracles on demand, we are unwittingly slowing down the development of our children’s strength.” 

~Wendy Mogel, The Blessing of a Skinned Knee

From the first days of parenting we enter a mindset of protection. We research the safest crib and car seat, the toys and gadgets that claim they will spur our children’s development, and the best methods for introducing food and teaching them to sleep. We learn their individual needs—what sounds and motions are most soothing to them, what routines are most effective, and eventually what their unique interests and passions may be. All of this is deeply biological, as our most primitive instincts drive us not only to keep our children safe but to do all we can to ensure that they thrive. This very powerful and important motivation naturally leads to a feeling that it is our job to control the world around our children in order to create an environment that is not only safe but perfectly tuned to their needs. The challenge of this entirely natural desire to keep our children from harm and set them up for success is that, in most instances, it is not actually possible for us to control all of the variables and experiences that impact our children. We can, as a result, sometimes come to feel that our own success or failure as parents hinges on our ability to control the uncontrollable. 

Last week, I wrote about the hurdles we encounter in our relationships with children, as we try to determine when they need us to reinforce boundaries and the sense of safety that comes from knowing that adults are in control and when they need to test their own limits and feel the power of their own ability to exert control. However, there is another tension that plays out as we navigate the appropriate limits of our adult control, which is not about the control we exert over children, but rather the control we exert over their experiences and over the ways in which the world around them touches their lives. This is, perhaps, an even greater challenge, for there is so much in the world that we cannot predict, let alone prevent or reshape for our children. Creating a perfect childhood is in fact an unattainable bar to set for ourselves as parents. And yet it can be profoundly difficult and even painful to come to terms with the fact that there is much in our children’s lives we cannot control, and the range of experiences that are beyond the limits of our adult powers expands as our children get older and their lives become both more their own and more complex. 

In addition to the impossibility of controlling the many ways in which the world will touch our children’s lives, there is also the very critical need to allow our children the experiences that will ultimately enable them to feel confident and competent in responding to challenges and to the unexpected themselves. For the challenges we all face often feel too big to overcome when we first encounter them, and yet we manage to find our way. One of the greatest gifts we can give to our children is the knowledge that they have within them the strength and the agility to respond to all that life sends their way, good and bad, big and small. 

So does all of this mean that we should not try to protect our children or that we should not try to make the best choices for their happiness and wellbeing? Of course not. It is our job as parents to make the most positive choices possible for our children whenever we can. But an aspect of this work is at times allowing ourselves to take a step back rather than a step forward, to let an obstacle rise up even when every instinct may be telling us to clear the path, and to let our children know that we see their frustrations and their fears, but we also see their abilities and their bravery. For ultimately it is not possible for us to be the architects of our children's lives, but we can be their cheerleaders and their partners. We cannot reshape every curve in the road, but we can help our children to know that they can meet whatever may be around the bend, and we can offer our hand when they need to know that they are not alone. For we all need that sometimes.             

Shabbat shalom, 
Alicia

P.S. Please RSVP here for PLC Night next week. We look forward to seeing you there and learning together about the many ways in which navigating control and power is central to our work with children. 

A Note from Alicia: Navigating Power in our Relationships with Children

Dear Families, 

Navigating Power in our Relationships with Children

“To rescue our children we will have to let them save us from the power we embody: we will have to trust the very difference that they forever personify. And we will have to allow them the choice, without fear of death: that they may come and do likewise or that they may come and that we will follow them, that a little child will lead us back to the child we will always be, vulnerable and wanting and hurting for love and for beauty.”

~June Jordan, Old Stories: New Lives

Each year our teachers explore a question that is central to the work we do with young children, in order to push their thinking forward and ensure that their relationships with children remain vital and active, not formulaic or rote. This year, the teachers are discussing the role of power in our interactions with children. Their question is: When are children seeking power and control, and when are adults seeking power and control? 

This question, on many levels, goes to the heart of the developmental experience as well as the progressive model of education. At every stage of development, we are engaged in a process of trying to understand how much control we have over the world around us and the people in our lives, where the limits of our powers are, and how much power we wish to have. Our emotional stability, throughout life, is rooted in finding a balance between feeling we have some control and comfortably letting go of that which we cannot control. 

As children develop new skills and increasingly sophisticated thought processes, they are often excited to discover that this growth leads them to have greater control, because their skills and ideas expand their choices and their range of freedom. At the same time, it can feel overwhelming and scary for children to gain additional power, as they wonder how far the reach of their power is and whether they will still be cared for by others. Children push boundaries in these moments of developmental tension, both to determine how much they can take charge of by themselves and to ensure that the scaffolding is still stable, and we are still present for them. Attachment theorist John Bowlby said, “Life is best organized as a series of daring adventures from a secure base.” We need to be permitted to test our wings and explore the boundaries of our capacity, but we also need to know that we will be welcomed back to a safe place, where the world feels a little smaller and our power a little more limited, so that we may catch our breath.

Much of the relationship between adults and children, whether teachers or parents, is governed by this constant dance, as we give children the trust and the opportunity to expand their reach and feel the empowering sensation of true agency, while also reminding them that they don’t need to worry about the whole of the world just yet. We want them to feel our sincere belief in their capacity to be fully active, engaged, and competent, while reminding them that their job at any given time is only to be two, or three, or four-years-old.  

This dance is not always graceful! In fact, much of the time it is quite fraught. Children often seek out the limits of their own power and affirm the safety of their boundaries by pushing as hard as possible against us. 

We as the adults are often fearful, particularly when children are testing new skills, that their wings may still be too delicate and they may not be able to navigate safely without us. It can also be, understandably, exasperating and exhausting to be constantly tested and pushed. There is no way to make the right judgement in each moment, as we attempt to gauge what our constantly changing children can manage on their own, and to keep our cool when we know that their most frustrating behaviors might be a way of asking for more freedom or a way of asking for reassurance and support. 

The importance and the very real challenge of helping our children to feel both empowered and secure necessitates that we, as teachers and as parents, remain constantly mindful of and engaged in understanding this dance, as well as supportive of each other when we worry that we’ve stumbled. 

We hope you will join us on Thursday, February 13th from 5:45-7:00 p.m.  to learn about the teacher’s exploration of the question of power in our relationships with children at school, and to share your own experiences of navigating power with your child at home. 

Please RSVP here. We look forward to seeing you there and learning together!

Shabbat shalom,
Alicia