I’ve not really blogged about this but I have hinted at having struggled a bit lately with Davies. I’m not going to detail the whole thing but I did want to record a few general things, more for my own honest record of our relationship than anything else really.
When I found out I was pregnant with Davies I really, really wanted a son. Actually, the truth is if I was going to have children at all I only really wanted sons anyway. I was fairly sure he was a boy and we had it confirmed at the 20 week scan and I was delighted. There were various reasons for wanting boys rather than girls, not least the repeated history of my Grandmother and Mother both having a boy and a girl and so clearly favouring their son that I was terrified of repeating that situation yet again. I quite enjoyed my position of being Ady’s and my Dad’s and my brother’s ‘princess’ and was not particularly keen to breed my own replacement and of the few children I knew I far preferred the little boys to the little girls. I recalled from school days how tricky girls could be and was not at all keen to have the house cluttered with Barbies, pink and fluffiness. Of course that all got blown out of the water two years later, but that’s a whole other story! 🙂 Suffice to say I’m over my worries in all areas on mothering a daughter and such trivial concerns soon got put to the back of my mind when faced with a real live girl anyway!
So, Davies. He was a tricky baby but as I was expecting no less than utter chaos and bedlam to come along with a new baby that was no great surprise. He was a model toddler, an excellent big brother when Scarlett came along and a mature, trustworthy and helpful 3, 4 and 5 year old. I do look at Davies and think he would be such a different child if he’d gone to nursery at 3 or 4, gone to school at 5 and was sitting here next to me on half term, exactly half way through his second year at school instead of the product of four years active Home Education. I guess the true answer is ‘we’ll never know’ but I certainly have my suspicions and am supremely confident that there is nothing negative in not having sent him to school.
Sometime in the last year though he has changed. Of course he’s changed I hear you say, and you are dead right, of course he’s changed. It’s just that my expectation of him took a while to catch up with those changes. I think it is a parent’s job to view their child through rose tinted glasses to a certain extent – I hope I always see the best in my children and whilst I might be aware of the worst it is not what I choose to dwell on, to articulate too often or too form too big a part of how I see them. I don’t think I’m blind to my children’s faults it’s just that I see them as far outweighed by all their many good points to focus on them too heavily. To be honest I view most of my relationships in life like that – if someone is worth bothering to have in your life then you must see more about them that is desirable than is undesirable – I see the faults in my husband, my friends and myself but I consider them far outweighed by what I love about those people so why spend time focussing on the negatives?
But Davies has become slightly more challenging, I have been less able to view his positives, less able to curb my own temper in reaction to him and less tolerant of his behaviour. I struggle almost daily to deal with him being a six year old boy. And actually that is all he is doing. He is loud, boisterous, inquisitive, bossy, sensitive, sometimes aggressive, quick to act but slower to think, unable to keep still, likely to start the squabble with his sister, annoying and full of energy even after having been out for a (winter) walk all day. He is also like pretty much every other healthy, normal six year old boy I have ever met! 🙂
After a particularly bad couple of episodes the week before last involving a very poetic Aesops Fable type lesson in telling the truth otherwise next time you do people may not believe you, punishment of x box ban (I’m not at all sure I believe in punishments and actually he seemed fairly unfazed by it anyway) and general shouting and bad temperedness from me, a whole host of tics from Davies (he is prone to such things when tired or upset) and some serious threats and consideration of school – on the basis that I was not prepared to compromise his and my relationship for the sake of Home Education before realising that actually Home Education is a massive part of our relationship and forced entry to school would likely do a hell of a lot of damage particularly when it was being as a punishment. I concluded last week that it was time for me to roll with it a bit, accept this next stage rather than fighting it, reevaluate who I think Davies is and put some of the effort, time and energy into our relationship that I did with Scarlett last year to quite some level of success. Time to put aside the whole ‘but Davies is X’ thoughts I had and accept some of the responsibility of being his mother, the grown up, some one who loves him and needs to work with him rather than constantly finding faults and picking him up on them.
So first steps, talking to him, establishing whether there is anything going on that he is not happy with? Plenty of his behaviour comes quite neatly under the attention seeking catergory. I have always felt that if a child is being attention seeking then the answer is simply to give them attention. I agree that there is some bad behaviour which shouldn’t be rewarded but I think acting out to gain a parent’s attention is not really bad behaviour as such. I am aware than me working will have had some impact on the children. I think it’s been pretty low level, they like and enjoy the company of all the people they have spent time with while I’m working and it has not felt too disruptive. Davies has started at (new) Badgers and Beavers since January and possibly most key to a lot of his behaviour, we are spending huge amounts of time with children far younger than him. In the main I think a lot of good has come of Davies spending so much time with younger children, many of the positive aspects of his personality have been honed from being the ‘big one’ in a group, but that is only good when there is the balance of time spent with peers or older children. Some of his previous freedoms have had to be limited by being with 3 littler children, for example when Lucy is housesitting and here alone with D, S, R & R. Little things, but hard to deal with perhaps in amongst other challenges at the same time. It’s winter and although we do get out and about a fair amount I bet we don’t clock up nearly as many outside, active hours per week as we do in the summer. For a six year old boy with ‘excited puppy syndrome’ and certain amounts of energy needing to be exhausted every day this can pose problems. He insists he’s happy with everything in his life and actually in those odd snatched moments each week when he and I are on our own, just chatting straight back comes the Davies I know so well.
Phase 2 would normally be to talk to people in similar situations. Thing is all my friends who have boys either have same age ones but they are not their first child or don’t have boys at all, or their boys are in school. But I did chat with a few people, all of whom simply agreed that six year old boys do a fair old bit of acting like six year old boys :lol:. Next came doing some reading. I’ve always read around subjects when issues have arisen. I read loads about pregnancy, babies, toddlers, siblings, education, recently loads about spirited children but never specifically boys so I got a copy of Steve Biddulph’s Raising Boys – the pertinent bits of which I read in one sitting last night (didn’t bother with the bits about teenagers, I’ll deal with that when we get there 😉 ). I’m not going to say it’s changed my life, or Davies’ or that it is the answer to all our woes – I’ll leave silly claims like that to the dust jacket, but it did give me several ‘oh yeah!’ type moments, I’ve chucked it at Ady and told him to at the very least read the bit about Dads and in the same way as one single comment from Alison taken from the Spirited Children books she recommended changed my whole approach to Tarly I think this is going to do the same, for now, for me and Davies.
I do think birth order – which is not mentioned in the book, plays a big part in children’s behaviour /personality. I can certainly identify with things related to being the oldest which Davies get’s frustrated with and he gets being the oldest perpetuated even more by the posse of smaller children we spend lots of time with whereas most children would at least get a bigger taste of being the same age as everyone else for most of their day at school. I think Beavers, Badgers and MM gives us a good weekly dose of that, as does the various get togethers we have with HE friends but I’m going to try and foster some more one to one time with other same age boys for him too – watching him with Liam last week, where he got the chance to do all the classic laughing at things to do with toilets, brandish swords and be generally loud in the company of someone doing the exact same thing and with noone frowning or telling him to hush demonstrated to me that he needs more time to do those things. I’m also talking to him lots more, explaining that aslong as he is trying to behave and is attempting to rein in his craziness when the situation calls for it then I won’t be cross with him (or send him to school!) and hopefully in giving him the opportunity to work off the stuff this age dictates he needs to do, provide a bit more for his needs we can move forwards to the next stage with as little fall out as possible. 🙂
Any chance he might simply be bored?
Comment by Chris — 20 February 2007 @ 10:38 am
Gosh – that was a big think! I think you’re right that birth order makes a big difference to how we relate to our kids and how they feel about things. I have noticed that I always expect P to be very grown up and still think of L as a ‘little one.’
I do take into account that our two are girl and boy but I have a deep distrust of any of the books that seek to convey universal truths about raising either.
Bored? Davies? A child of Nic’s, bored? I don’t think so…!
Comment by Allie — 20 February 2007 @ 11:58 am
Why couldn’t he be bored? Perhaps not in the ‘sitting about, nothing to do’ sense, but maybe he’s bored of playing the games he always plays, doing the usual sort of stuff, but hasn’t yet discovered what else he wants to do, or even what he could do.
Maybe he needs to be mentally challenged more.
Maybe he needs more of those “odd snatched moments […] just chatting”.
I still don’t think that being with younger children is *in itself* a problem though – how do you think families with lots of chidlren manage? 😉
Comment by Alison — 20 February 2007 @ 3:36 pm
btw, C and I haven’t been talking about this! I’ve been thinking about it on and off since yesterday, and just came back to reread it and C’s comment just sparked some thoughts. Will come back to it again if anything else occurs to me.
Comment by Alison — 20 February 2007 @ 3:53 pm
Sorry, I was being flippant! I meant that I didn’t imagine life with Nic could ever be boring. But also, having got to know Davies just a little bit at MMs, he always seems to be busy – physically and mentally. He has an incredibly active imagination and I imagine that mitigates against boredom.
Comment by Allie — 20 February 2007 @ 5:31 pm
OK, this is likely to come out completely garbled, but I’ll try anyway.
Sometimes I’ll be perfectly happy doing stuff for days or weeks on end, and then I’ll read a really good book or watch a challenging flim or do something *different* that someone else suggested that I wouldn’t even have thought of, and think, “Wow, I REALLY needed that!”
And it’s not that during all the preceding pleasant-but-clearly-not-stimulating-enough activity that I felt bored, but I was, um I dunno, coasting? And probably not on my best form.
I could sit and watch tv all day and be engaged with each program as it happens, but at the end of the day I’m likely to feel flat and pretty shitty.
Imagination is a great thing, but in a small child it’s going to be limited by their experience and knowledge of the world, isn’t it?.
If I ask my kid what it wants on its toast, but the only thing that I’ve ever shown it is Marmite, I could *think* that I’m offering it a free choice each morning. One could argue that if a child is really interested, then it will go and find out about toast toppings (sorry, this analogy is getting stupid, but I’ll carry on!), but isn’t it easier all round to show them a variety of spreads in the first place? Knowing about Marmite isn’t going to help you imagine marmalade.
I see my own kids be so much happier when as many aspects as possible of them are being stimulated – when they get enough physical exercise, when they have plenty of time to give their imaginations free rein, when their minds get to work at puzzling stuff out, when they have the social interactions they want, etc.
Boredom sounds like a terrible state to be in, and one you would recognise, but I think you can be in some sort of not-consciously-aware-of-it state of sub-boredom pretty easily. (Huge proportion of kids in school all day for a start, lol!)
Comment by Alison — 20 February 2007 @ 6:52 pm
No real reason why he couldn’t be bored I guess, but I don’t think that particularly explains the blips we’ve been having really. Allie is right, he is very busy’ generally. If you give Davies a piece of string he would find a way to amuse himself with it for an hour. I think I’m pretty good at introducing new things to do / ideas / concepts to him generally – in the scope of a normal day’s conversations we cover all manner of things and he is pretty good at finding new ways to challenge himself.
I think that mostly what I’ve identifed lately is that for some reason I have been struggling with and surprised by him acting like a 6 year old boy. Maybe it’s me who needs to spend more time around them as well as him ;).
I also think that in struggling with accepting that in him I have probably ended up being more of a nag / ogre than the usual easy relationship that he and I have too so those snatched moments of conversation haven’t happened so much because I’ve been busy laying into him about behaviour. Several times lately he’s stopped doing something at my request and said ‘please don’t shout at me when we get to the car’ – now normally our car journies are full of either listening to music or general chatter so if he is starting to associate them with me telling him off he will be feeling like he’s lost that nice aspect in favour of a crappy one.
So the crux of my post, which I may or may not have gotten across was more that I have realised my percieved problem with Davies and his behaviour was actually more about him and I than it was about him specifically. Does that make sense? And that in realising it I am striving to put some of the same effort I did with Tarly last year to get things back on track and stop us from drifting too far.
WRT what families with lots of children do, erm I don’t know really, I don’t have any good examples. In terms of socailsation there seems to be a lot of signing up for lots of extra curricular stuff, an element of going to school or a lot of agonising over it. Much though I don’t think we need school for socialisation I do think children need to do some socialising (as do adults) – maybe if we had regular contact with a child he had a real connection with and considered *his* friend whether they were boy, girl, older or younger then I wouldn’t be thinking about that aspect of it but actually if I didn’t have my regualr contact with my circle of friends, who not by pure coincidence seem to be the same gender and within a few years of my age I would flouder too. The difference between *most* 6 year old boys and *most* 4 year old girls is vast. If I had an 8 year old son it would probably be him I was worrying about more than my 6 year old one as I’d be thinking that the 6 year old was getting everything he needed from his older brother, if Jack and Maisie were 2 or 3 years older than Davies, if Richard and Rebecca were the same age or older then maybe I’d be finding a different reason to agonise but it just seems to be like a good partial explanation.
Comment by Nic — 20 February 2007 @ 10:58 pm
Just read that back and it reads as though I meant everyone I know with older children is doing a crap job, which is not at all what I think / mean. Just that I couldn’t think of an example where an older child didn’t have something additonal to their younger siblings. 🙂
And lol at the kids in school comment re: boredom!
And finally, yes I do think too much! 😉
Comment by Nic — 20 February 2007 @ 11:02 pm
‘and he is pretty good at finding new ways to challenge himself’
That’s a concept I don’t really understand. As an adult I find it very difficult to truly challenge myself. I do things that I know (at least in my sub-conscious) that I can probably do. My real challenges come from things that I don’t choose to do myself. If that makes sense. Work, for example, is often pushing me to do things that are fucking hard! (without it I would be bored intellectually I suspect as I am utterly shit at challenging myself ).
I often have to do things that are hard, and I make mistakes (not often of course) because of that. I don’t enjoy making mistakes. Doing hard things off your own back is something a lot of people (including me) wouldn’t choose to do? I am not that convinced that many six years old would choose to do it without some guidance, which I am guessing is not part of you autonomous approach?
I have no idea whether any of this is relevant to D, I don’t really know him very well.
Comment by Chris — 21 February 2007 @ 10:59 am
I think that there are extremes of two personality – one which seeks to challenge and try new things without the safety net of knowing you’ll succeed – people who climb mountains for example, accept defeat as a mere stumbling block to success and go out and try again and the other which will not try anything almost certain to be achievable, deseperate not to fail and happier to stand still than risk trying to move forward and going backwards instead.
I would consider myself to me more towards the first type, I’m not scared of failing, not frightened of cocking things up by trying and unafraid of dealing with the consequences when they do happen. I’d rather try and fail than never try at all. I’ve made decisions which in hindsight were crazy but I don’t regret them as at the time they could have panned out differently and I’d have hated to not taken the risk and always wondered what might have been. I think D has a lot of that in him.
An example would be his x box playing. In the start he simply couldn’t do it, it was quite simply beyond him. His hand / eye coordination was not up to it, he didn’t get what he was supposed to be doing, he couldn’t read to work out the instructions and it would have been far easier to just pass the controller to me for all the tricky bits. But he didn’t, he stuck at it, consistently ‘failing’ by going back to the beginning of a game but hardly ever getting upset or frustrated and just perfecting each bit until he got the hang of it.
He will regularly decide he wants to achieve something and set about working out how to do it, often that requires help from me but I have honestly never heard him say he is bored – the concept simply doesn’t exist for him, he has a constant mental list of things he wants to do / make / talk about. Today I asked him what he wanted to do and he said ‘make an animation about toast’ he had every scene planned out, all he needed was my help with making it into a film once he’d taken all the photos. I’m not saying I never make suggestions or present activities because I do but thinking up new ways to challenge him is something that never seems to fall to me, he manages that all by himself.
Would be interested in hearing what others’ children are like in this respect though…
I have always told the children that if something is worth doing then it will probably be tricky, that if you try hard enough you can probably achieve most things you want that there is nothing more satisfying that having to really strive to get something and then getting it. Far more rewarding is the A grade on an essay you sweated over IMO than the one which simply came easy to you, far more enjoyment in spending the money you earned than that which you were simply given?
Comment by Nic — 21 February 2007 @ 11:33 am
I am not taking about superficial boredom, the not having something to do or inability to think of something to do. I am thinking more about intellectual boredom, the lack of new stimuli, challenges etc and I as I said I am not in any place to comment on D in this regard. One can be busy and under-stimulated at the same time. Stimulation in my mind is a lot more than just being interested in what you are doing.
Comment by Chris — 21 February 2007 @ 12:03 pm
If you’re right then I guess that would be a pitfall of autonomy then – or a failure in my parenting to introduce sufficient new experienes to stimulate or challenge in an autonomous way. Neither of which I believe to be the case – and I know also not what you were getting at.
I think there is a fine line between autonomy and neglect in some ways, we have often jokes about the ‘lazy bugger’ style of Home Ed and to a point it is true. I’m just not sure what you would consider intellectual stimulation unless you mean things like workbooks or specific literacy and numeracy based tasks, surely general knowledge, exposure to life in general and constant question asking is intellectual stimulation. I don’t have a career at all currently, am not following any specific learning programme or doing much other than day to day living but don’t consider myself intellectually under stimulated.
I wonder if your comment “As an adult I find it very difficult to truly challenge myself. I do things that I know (at least in my sub-conscious) that I can probably do. My real challenges come from things that I don’t choose to do myself. If that makes sense. Work, for example, is often pushing me to do things that are fucking hard! (without it I would be bored intellectually I suspect as I am utterly shit at challenging myself ).” is in part due to learned behaviour from school / college / university where work is taxing and pleasure/ leisure time is not. I think autonomy is about not seperating the two, not considering something ‘work’ and something you ‘have to do’ learning-wise.
Do you not find activities like your photography intellectually stimulating? How about when you have helped me sort out my blog cock ups?
BTW this is now more of a debate than anything to do with D 😉
Comment by Nic — 21 February 2007 @ 12:30 pm
No I don’t find photography intellectually stimulating. It’s something I enjoy and like doing but ultimately it doesn’t tax me or stretch me particularly. It *could* but I don’t let it. I think of intellectual stimulation of being those times when you have to use your brain and really make an effort to understand, enjoy something. It’s not necessarily academic work; it could be watching a film, reading a book, a chance comment, anything at all. But a moment when you have to make the effort to comprehend. In other words something you can’t just do and it hurts your head to do it 🙂
I am definetly intellectually under-stimulated. In fact I think the vast majority of people are and that it’s a choice that people make. And for the most part people are perfectly happy with that choice and happy in life. I could count on the figures of one hand the number of times I have really had to think to understand, enjoy, solve something in recent months. Be it at work or at home. Most things that I do don’t need that intellectual investment (not because they are easy but because I know how to do them) and I am happy with that. There were times in my life when I wouldn’t have said that, but not now.
Comment by Chris — 21 February 2007 @ 12:49 pm
“I’m just not sure what you would consider intellectual stimulation unless you mean things like workbooks or specific literacy and numeracy based tasks”
I find it hard to believe that you don’t have the imagination to think of anything else, so I’m kind of assuming that’s supposed to be a dig.
I would suggest things like word games, number games, puzzles of all kinds – anything that makes one *think* – a project one has to plan and work on, etc. Loads of things. E asks me every day to ask him questions, to give him problems to work out. He doesn’t see any difference between a Singapore maths workbook and a logic puzzle on GameGarage.com – he does whatever he wants all day and he loves to be challenged and have to stretch his mind.
And I don’t think that Davies doesn’t *do* that sort of stuff, but maybe he’s getting older and more able, and now he needs *more* of it. More of your attention and input for things he can’t do by himself, more encouragement to get on with things that will really engage him, rather than another Geomag game that he could play in his sleep.
Isn’t the crux of the problem with being surrounded by younger children that he probably gets BORED by being with them? 😉 I don’t really see that what C and I have suggested is substantively any different to what you said in your OP.
Did he do the toast animation today? Was he a PITA whilst doing it, or was he happy? I’d guess happy?
Comment by Alison — 21 February 2007 @ 5:52 pm
What is a toast animation????? I sit by my youtube subscription with anticipation 🙂
Comment by Chris — 21 February 2007 @ 6:02 pm
“I find it hard to believe that you don’t have the imagination to think of anything else, so I’m kind of assuming that’s supposed to be a dig.”
God no, not at all. I was simply defending autonomy as offering intellectual stimulation in it’s own way as I said further on in that sentence. And as I said I had moved away from talking about D onto a more general debate. There is no comparison between E and D – or indeed any of the other children I know because they are all so different. E *asks* you for maths puzzles, I know P and M love their reasoning puzzles. D clams up completely when I suggest anything like a word game or some sort of maths type puzzle as he *does* see a difference between them and playing something like Zoombinis. I think he gets plenty of mental stimulation from the things he does and I do indeed see him progressing in things like his xbox and other games, including, yes, playing with geomags.
Yes, he is bored with the younger children and yes, he does thrive on having more of my attention but I am not able to be his playmate and that is overall what I think he is most lacking atm. Yes we did the toast animation and yes of course he was happy with that – and then he went off and got out the geomags 😆 I think the difference between my OP and the debate about intellectual stimulation is that I concluded he and I needed more time together and that he could do with some more same age playmates rather than he was lacking something more academic. I’m sure the company of older children will indeed provide that stimulation indirectly but it really hadn’t struck me as *the* issue and tbh I still don’t really think it is.
Comment by Nic — 21 February 2007 @ 8:46 pm
Ah but C do you have D’s youtube account watched aswell? 🙂
Comment by Nic — 21 February 2007 @ 8:48 pm
Lol – after a very interesting conversation with D today I’ll blog about later he’s either secretly reading my blog (now that would be a success for autonomy eh? There’s readers of 30plus years experience who find that tricky! 😉 ) or he’s overheard me talking to someone (much though I have tried to do it out of his earshot).
Comment by Nic — 21 February 2007 @ 8:54 pm
“something more academic” is not what I was trying to get at at all.
I have no problem with the idea of autonomous education providing adequate stimulation – what my problem has always been is with what seems to be the the idea put forward by many proponents of autonomy that parents shouldn’t offer suggestions, shouldn’t offer challenges, etc. I don’t think autonomy means leaving the kid to think up everything themselves – that’s a lot of responsibility to put on a small child.
I suppose my introduction to the idea of autonomous education came from TCS, and the general idea I received from there is of offering your children as many options as you possibly can, so they can choose. Not of just thinking that they know best what they want or need to do.
And if it wasn’t a dig, are you really saying that’s all you could think of??? Just admit you were being a bitch 😉
Comment by Alison — 21 February 2007 @ 10:07 pm
And for chrissakes, how long have you been doing this? Can’t we stop having the conversations about education yet? Autonomy, autonomy, rah rah rah – now stop the bloody proselytizing 😉
Comment by Alison — 21 February 2007 @ 10:11 pm
Same age playmates……..I thought one of things about HE was that children did things at different ages, developed skills at different rates?????? If he needs same age playmates I can think of a ready made placed where he could 30 a day every day……….
Comment by Chris — 21 February 2007 @ 10:45 pm
Chris and Alison!
xxxxx
Comment by Nic — 21 February 2007 @ 11:13 pm
And we provide all our opinions and advice free of fucking charge 🙂
Comment by Chris — 21 February 2007 @ 11:54 pm
You’re beautiful. It’s true.
Comment by Nic — 22 February 2007 @ 12:10 am