Perspective in parenting
Plus, How we Homeschooled Today #22
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Comparison, as Teddy Roosevelt said, is the thief of joy. Certainly if your comparison is too narrow he is quite right. Is your child learning to walk or decline a Latin verb earlier or later than their peers? Are their manners or their maths ahead or behind the curve? These questions definitely do not lie on the path to happiness.
But I think if we broaden our horizons, comparison can be a tool to remind us how big and varied the world is, and how very privileged we are to be where we are. If you’re reading this, I suspect there’s a good chance you don’t have to buy your water from a private company because state mismanagement has left the taps dry, as it has in Lebanon. Your child probably hasn’t had the experience of being evacuated in the middle of the night due to flooding, as happens in Rwanda. Many of us here on Substack have never been directly affected by war. I worry disproportionately about scraped knees. I never have to worry about land mines.
My husband and I are always saying we can’t live in this flat forever. Our two children share a bedroom. In Nigeria, Emmanuel and Nwakaego Ewenike live with their four children in a one-room apartment. Their building has no running water or electricity. They still manage to send their children to school and religious classes, and the photograph of them all tumbled together on the bed looks a lot like my own family doing the same thing on a Sunday morning.
The photograph is in the April issue of National Geographic, and all the situations I reference above are from past issues. I subscribed several months ago because I couldn’t read any more daily news. It’s not even daily anymore, of course, it’s minute-by-minute. It had a disastrous effect on my mood and I also couldn’t seem to leave it alone. So I went cold-turkey. I blocked the free news sites on my phone. And on a recommendation from a friend I signed up to NG. I was looking forward to gorgeous photographs and new information about all sorts of topics, and I got it. What I hadn’t expected was the new perspective it would give me on childhood, families, parenting. It makes the latest hysteria about whatever topic you care to name seem laughably myopic. Of course it also makes me feel very, very fortunate. But more than that it’s a reminder that there’s a whole world out there, full of people who are probably a lot like you but may be living their lives in a completely different way. That, as I mentioned in another post, there is more than one way of doing childhood, and by extension more than one way of doing life. When we get caught up in our comparisons with what the neighbours’ new car is like or where they’re going on holiday or what grade their daughter got on a test, we forget this. The world is amazing and we are some of the luckiest people in it. Buy the latest issue and remind yourself.
How we homeschooled today #22
Son did some handwriting, daughter learnt one new spelling
Fraction kit games from Family Math
Kapla planks and gladiator imaginary play
The children wanted to learn about deserts. I printed each of them a world map showing lines of latitude and we talked about how tropical deserts are usually between 15 and 30 degrees N or S of the Equator. They then coloured in bits of the map where you find these deserts. I wasn’t expecting it to get so detailed but they were very keen.
Athletics Club
More deserts: We read the relevant page in the Usborne Geography Encyclopedia, and also several pages in The Wonderful Workings of Planet Earth, about the Mojave, Atacama, and Sahara (which my daughter had labelled on her map this morning). We watched this video which blew my mind.
My son’s Mysteries in Time subscription arrived (thank you again, Granny!), all about Ancient Greece. We made a Trojan horse and translated some Greek words.
My son played some more with his WW2 cards and my daughter listened to more of Into The Jungle.
My son read himself some more Stories from India and my daughter and I had a conversation about why fat is essential but also why it is rude to call people fat. It kept me on my toes!
Bedtime stories: The Lion and the Unicorn, and Dogger, both by Shirley Hughes.
I loved reading your thoughts here.
One thing that often reminds me of what you discuss here is the book “This is how we do it.” It’s my 4yr old’s favorite and we read it every night at her request. What school, breakfast, chores, lunch, dinner, bedtime look like in different countries around the world. She picks a person to be for that reading and so do I. So many shared beds around the world. ♥️