Those millennium bugs!

I’ve got one and I know several of you have two, a little Y2K (now that was an annoyingly overused phrase which has gladly gone wasn’t it – for a time I thought we were going to have Y2k1, Y2K2, Y2K3 but as no-one as yet has wished me a Happy Y2K5 (or should that be Y2Kv) I guess it’s over 🙂 ) baby.

Hence the watching of ‘Child of Our Time’ was always a must-see in this house. I can clearly remember playing ‘which cup is the toy under’ with Davies when he was one, feeling happy and reassured that he was normal when he was two, feeling a wee bit smug last year that he seemed to be ahead of most in some things when he was three and now here we are at four.

Last night’s show was somehow different. I don’t know whether it’s me, or the show that’s changed but it seemed somehow darker and less a simple catch up on where those four years old are now. I think there was definitely more of an element of ‘reality TV’ about it last night – some of it just seemed so staged for the cameras, which I never noticed before. I know that they did cover two quite sad stories last night – one of the single mother who always seems down on her luck when they catch up with her. I thought the little boy was doing remarkably well considering all he and his family had been through in his short life – and a real good example of why school is not always wrong. The Yorkshire folk who always annoyed me somewhat in previous years also seemed to be trying to deal with a 4yo still in a toddlers mindset (although as my 4 yo is the older sibling maybe I should reserve judgement until my youngest is 4 and see if she has grown out of the tantrums and biting like I hope she will!)

I found the whole big house, small house thing very odd. The questions seemed entirely leading, not really relevant or designed for a 4 yo’s understanding or logic and I got the feeling many of the answers they got were whimiscal instead of considered – which would seem a bit unscientific really – certainly if I quizzed Davies on dolls house sizes in relation to what a child would be bullied about I would not rely on his answers to be the same as the ones he given the day before! (I know I simplified it a bit there but I think they really struggled to find a way of showing class divides mattering to 4yos!). I found the skin colour thing quite disturbing as well, even more so that the black children also thought the white ones would be nicer and have more friends. I have always felt that Davies is largely colourblind – and have certainly taught him that the differences he has noticed in people’s appearances are just that – difference’s in appearances and no more. I myself have at least two very obvious physical traits (hair colour and size) and I have explained to him about how I was teased as a child for having ‘different’ colour hair, and he is aware that size is something people can feel quite sensitive about and is therefore not to be used in a derogatory fashion to describe someone.

I did the OU pages with him earlier and was pleased to have my theory proven. Firstly that his attention span was short enough to get nonsense answers by the end of it, so totally unscientific, secondly that his reasoning for choosing certain children was not remotely based on skin colour (he chose the chinese boy to be PM, as I explained that was an important job and that child was wearing a smart stripey shirt!!) He did choose the white child as the most kind and they one he would like to play with but only because he does bear a strong resemblance to one of his friends and he was smiling. He then asked to do the girls version to, where he also chose the chinese girl a lot as she was smiling (he said she was the most like Scarlett!) and also on several he chose all of the children or at least more than one.

It did strike me watching it last night that being a child who has not been in a playgroup /preschool environment is already marking him out as different in many ways even at this preschool age. He is far more aware of family, our home and daily life – he knows our address, whereabouts in the country we are on a map and also where we used to live too – so that question would have been easy. He is less aware of stereotypes, gender specific toys, choosing a same sex child as your best friend being the norm and generally less institutionalised I suppose.

I was chatting to Karen earlier (hope it went OK btw K 🙂 ) and saying that for those children who never go to school I believe are already getting a ‘different education’. E started school yesterday so all of pre-Christmas was spend choosing and buying and persuading him into his new school uniform, worrying about whether he can wipe his own bum or not, sorting out a routine for getting him to and from school, ‘bigging up’ school as he doesn’t actually want to go, preparing him for writing his own name, putting his hand up to ask a question instead of just asking it, eating and drinking at set times instead of when he is hungry or thirsty, teaching him how to chant ‘good.morn.ning,miss.teach.cher’ with 30 other voices and so on. In contrast we spend December talking about friends and family and what they mean to us, the whole Christmas story and various beliefes and cultures and ways of celebrating, planning what we want to do for this coming year and going up each and every one of those odd alleyways of thought and reason that your average 4yo wants to explore if you only had the time. Yesterday we did puzzles pretty much all day – every aspect of the curriculum was there somewhere but not in any structured or planned out way. Today we are playing at dressing up – again it’s all in there but not neatly packaged into one hour compartments and labelled as such. I guess where I’m going with this is that school wastes a hell of a lot of time as well as all the other things it robs from us and our children – shame there is no-one representing that on Child of our Time on that really isn’t it 🙂