Nurture for the Future

Winter Solstice Festival and a Lesson in Tolerance, Respect, and Culture

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We are a family of mixed religious and non-religious beliefs. Because of this, we observe a variety of traditions and festivals to embrace the beliefs and practices of all the members in this family. I won’t pretend that I didn’t have initial reservations about it to begin with but now I think it is a good lesson for the boys on tolerance, understanding and respect for others. Through their experience of these cultures, I hope they will learn open-mindedness and respect for the beliefs of others. I also want them to be free to make their own choices about their beliefs without judgement or criticism. With this experience in the comfort and safety of their own family, they may extend the courtesy to others that they meet in their lives who are different.

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They say that the best way to educate your child is to do so by example. What better example can I be than to show that even though I don’t share the same religious beliefs as my in laws, I am able to set aside my differences and observe their religious practices. I may not follow your faith but I know that it is important to you and because you are important to me, I respect your beliefs.

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Observing and following the practice of these festivals isn’t only an education of character but also an education in culture and religion. For example, when we celebrate the Winter Solstice Festival, the boys are also learning about Chinese culture, practices, and customs.

Winter Solstice

Winter Solstice Festival

In the Tang and Song dynasties, the Winter Solstice was a day to offer scarifies to Heaven and ancestors. Emperors would go to suburbs to worship the Heaven; while common people offered sacrifices to their deceased parents or other relatives. The Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) even had the record that “Winter Solstice is as formal as the Spring Festival,” showing the great importance attached to this day.

More about the Winter Solstice Festival

Winter Solstice

Tang Yuan Dumplings

A common feature of the Winter Solstice Festival are the Tang Yuan dumplings that is usually eaten in a sweet dumpling soup. The dumpling soup is believed to keep away the cold during the coming winter but some people because it will drive away ghosts and other evil things. The dumplings are also offered as part of the sacrifice to ancestors. After the sacrificial ceremony, there is a grand banquet with Tang Yuan Dumpling soup as a dessert.

Winter Solstice

There used to be a contention about whether one may or may not hold joss sticks before an altar and what it means if we do it. But this is how I view it… the meaning of your actions depends on the intent in your mind. You can be physically present at church every Sunday to demonstrate your “devoutness” but it means nothing if you aren’t present in your mind. Anyone can sit mindlessly through a sermon with the mind idle and wandering, not hearing a word from the pastor’s lips – that is not devoutness. I can say I am a Christian but if I don’t feel it in my heart then what does it really mean?

But I digress… In the end, my hope is that my boys will learn that whatever religion, race, or culture, there is good and bad in every one and everyone, for it is not religion, race, or culture that is good or bad but the nature of being human.

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Help Me Be Good – Lying, Being Destructive and Other Undesirable Behaviours

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This happened recently…

Untitled

If you can’t figure out what you’re looking at,  it is our dining chair with four pencil holes. After some investigation, we figured out that the culprit was G2 except that he refused to admit to it and he even lied to us saying that it was his brother who did it. His steadfast refusal to budge on the lie almost made me wonder for a moment whether it was his brother. I might even have thought so if there hadn’t been an inconsistency to his lying that gave him away.

I don’t know why such poor behaviours from our children always take us by surprise as if it is a sign that our parenting has gone awry. We should remember that he is still only 4 years old – this is the age when they are supposed to start experimenting with lying. To expect a child to grow up without ever making mistakes, disobeying his parents, lying to them, or embarrassing them in some way would be to expect him NOT to be a real child. As my FIL put it so aptly, “If they already know all these things without you to teach them then why do they need you as a parent for?” Makota Shichida also reminds us, “Do not regard his current phase as a finished one. Believe he will continuously improve.”

These behaviours, by themselves, do not reflect poorly upon us as parents unless we choose to do nothing about them. A better way forward would be to view them as teaching opportunities. So here we are working on improvement…

When G1 was about this age, we also went through some “difficult behaviours”. We started reading a series called “Help Me Be Good” (among other character development books) to help address some of those issues. By themselves, the books don’t guarantee immediate improvement on behaviour – not by a long shot – but they are a starting point and a way to seed a thought. Sometimes, these lessons require repeat exposure to reinforce the message.

So I brought out the books again for G2 and we started reading them recently, beginning with the book on Lying:

Lying

I like these books because they are short and sweet – which is perfect for the child with a short attention span. They are graphic so your child can “see” to understand what the book is talking about. They provide examples to differentiate between lying (deliberate falsehoods), fantasies (make believe stories for fun), and mistakes (when you honestly believe something to be true when it is not). The book also covers different reasons how and why we might lie, for instance, lying doesn’t only occur with your words but with your silence (refusing to admit knowledge of the truth) and with your actions (hiding the truth by removing the evidence).

Since we started reading these books with G2, G1 has also been pulling them out to read all over again and he has also been trying much harder to be helpful as a result! Bonus!

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Apps: My Story World – Interactive Educational Read Along Stories

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My Story World by Mindshapes is the latest of our collection of read-along storybook apps to be discovered and this one’s a keeper.

My story world

Loads of stories!

My Story World contains over 70 interactive stories with more being added to the collection each week! These are some of the stories in their collection that your child is sure to be familiar with:

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Two Play Formats

  • Play and learn
  • Read to me

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Interactive Learning Moments

Play and learn format offers interactive learning moments throughout the story to facilitate comprehension. I especially like the emotion questions that help young children think about how a particular character might be feeling in the story as it helps them learn to put themselves in another person’s shoes. For instance, when Hansel and Gretel are lost in the woods, the narrator asks, “How do you think Hansel and Gretel are feeling right now?” This is particularly relevant for young children learning to verbalise the emotions that others are feeling.

Read Along Feature

Story text can be turned “on” for children who are learning to follow along with the words or “off” for younger children just enjoying the story.

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Awards and Recognition

  • NAPPA Silver Award Winner 2013
  • Parents Choice Silver Award Winner 2013
  • “Kids will want to return time and again” USA TODAY, 4/4 Stars
  • “A wonderful interactive app that is filled with educational stories” – appPicker
  • “Simple, intuitive and easy to use” – ToyBook
  • “My Story World is the last storytelling app you’ll ever need to download” – Red Tricycle
  • My Story World was also featured in The Guardian’s list “50 best apps for kids from 2013 that parents can trust”
  • Included in Apple’s 10 Great Kids Apps promotion
  • Certified by the KidSAFE program

Other Features

  • Collect stickers
  • Interactive activities
  • Create your own story

Availability

My Story World is available for free download on the iTunes Store. This gives you access to some of the stories for free. To gain access to the entire collection, there is an in-app purchase for an unlimited access to all content for 6 months for $15.99.

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Character Development: What are We Subconsciously Teaching Our Children Through Movies?

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What is the Bechdel Test?

There is something I learned about recently called “The Bechdel Test”. Alright, we’re late on the bandwagon since this rule has been around since 1985 when it was first introduced by Alison Bechdel in her comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out For“.

Image from Tribeca

The rule is basically about the unequal representation of women in films. Most female characters depicted are usually done so in relation to a man in the movie – mostly being the love interest and needing to be rescued. Even if there is a strong female lead in the movie, she usually lacks depth of character and is rarely shown having conversations with other female characters in the movie. If the women do have a conversation, it is almost always about a man. So for a movie to pass the Bechdel Test, it has to meet three criteria:

  1. Are there two or more women in the movie?
  2. Do these women talk to each other?
  3. Is the conversation about anything other than a man?

Subliminal Messages Our Children are Learning from the Movies they Watch

The test is simple enough (and even considered to be setting the bar too low), but it seems a lot of movies are failing it. Even one of my all-time favourite movies (the original Star Wars trilogy) flunked the test miserably! In fact, many of the movies I’ve watched and thoroughly enjoyed all fail the Bechdel test.

Until I had children, I have never really thought much about the messages we have been receiving from the movies we watch. Even then, I only looked for broader messages like fighting racism, building character with adversity, and developing a growth mindset. I also noticed and appreciated the improvements in the way movies portrayed the female characters in animated features like Brave, whose female protagonist is the unlady-like Merida climbing cliff faces and riding off on horses with her bow and arrows (whom I can totally relate to because that’s exactly the kind of girl I was growing up – without a single lady-like bone in my body)…

Image from FanPop

… and Eep from The Croods who represents the “larger girl” who is stronger than her love interest – Guy (although I still think she is a bit too gushy for my liking).

Image from FanPop

Beyond that, I have never given any thought to the subliminal messages that our children could be taking away from the movies they viewed – that woman are superficial, a prize to be won once you defeated the dark side, and only an accessory to a man – until I saw this video from Colin Stokes on TedxTalks:

Is this really what we want to be teaching our daughters? I know I don’t have any daughters but I do have three goddaughters and I would like them to grow up knowing how strong they are and what they are capable of achieving.

In addition to this, Colin Stokes makes another very valid point – although we can do a lot to empower our girls, we also need to teach our boys. Our boys are watching these movies as well – do we want them growing up viewing women in this way – shallow creatures that are merely prizes to be won and whom exist only as an accessory?

So whether we are parents of boys or girls, this message applies to all. What movie messages are your children taking away from the movies they are watching? If you want an easy way to find movies that pass the Bechdel Test, there is a list here.

Pitfalls of the Bechdel Test

Yes, like everything else in this world, nothing is perfect. The Bechdel Test, while an easy tool to use as a yardstick, is hardly the epitomic standard to go by. There are many ways a movie can still pass the Bechdel Test and still fail to convey the right messages – as highlighted by Jenny Trout in this blog post (although she was talking about books rather than movies):

Anyway, this got me thinking about what books and movies do pass the Bechdel test and yet are still packed with horrible, anti-female stereotypes and messages.  Like Sex and The City. One episode that stands out strongly in my mind is the one in which fashion-obsessed Carrie may lose her apartment because she’s spent all of her money on designer shoes, and her financial troubles cause a rift between herself and her friend Charlotte, who has alimony and a tony penthouse from the rich man she married. If we’re playing by the rules of “if it passes the Bechdel test, it’s feminist,” then there you have it.

You know what else passes the Bechdel test? Every. Single. 50 Shades of Grey book. All of them.

While the Bechdel Test represents a first hurdle to cross, we should still dig a little deeper if we want the right messages passing through to our children.

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So Homeschooling Raises Socially Awkward Kids?

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I had to post this…

I remember when I first entertained the idea of homeschooling the boys I was met with a lot of negativity – not that it should have been any surprise since it goes against everything we are familiar with. One of the common misconceptions that struck me was belief that it was a bad idea because homeschooled kids grow up weird. They become socially awkward adults because of their lack of social exposure or something to that effect. Anyway, the net idea that was communicated to me was homeschooled = freak. Perhaps this biassed has been influenced by movies from Hollywood that have often portrayed the homeschooled child as somewhat of an outcast. If you want to know what I mean, the movie The Internship portrayed a perfect example with the character Yo-Yo Santos who is a socially awkward adult who was formerly a homeschooled child with an overbearing mother.

Then I saw this presentation by 13 year old Logan LaPlante in his first TedTalk presentation on Hackschooling – a term he coined himself.

As expected, there is a lot of heat on the topic (and you can read about it in the comments on this post if you are really interested) but when I saw this video, I saw something else. I saw a bright, confident, and articulate 13 year old that any parent would be proud of. It certainly puts a new perspective to those misconceived notions that homeschooling creates “freaky” kids. Homeschooled or not, if either of my boys present like this at 13 years old, I wouldn’t be complaining – I’d be thrilled.

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Character Development: Raising the Visionary, the Trail Blazer, the Pioneer

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Photo Credit: Jessamagee on Flickr

“Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.” – Saint Augustine

There is a story I like to tell… It’s a rock climbing one but it’s a true one and it goes like this:

At the rock climbing gym I used to go to, there was a group of climbers who used to set “project” boulder routes. They would then take it in turns to see who would be the first person to be able to climb that route. One day, they set a route so difficult that no one could climb it. They tried and they tried without success. One by one, they started dropping off, muttering that it was “impossible”, “too hard”, and “cannot be done”. But one climber stayed on. He continued to work on it when all the others had quit. Finally, he succeeded. Within minutes after he succeeded, the others returned to attempt the route and they could climb it, too.

It is easier to do something once you can see it has been done before. The challenge is having the belief and vision to do it when no one else has succeeded before.

What’s in the power of a belief? I find the story of George Dantzig to be an inspirational example of the power of belief:

George Dantzig, while studying in college, arrived late to one of Neyman’s graduate math classes. On the blackboard there were two problems, clearly the homework problems assigned for the week. Dantzig copied them down, and worked on them for days and days. Fully a month later, Dantzig finally turned the problems into Neyman, remarking that they had been a little harder to do than usual.

About six weeks later, at 8 am on a Sunday morning, Dantzig and his wife were awaken by the sound of Professor Neyman banging loudly on their apartment door. Bleary-eyed, Dantzig opened the door, through which Neyman rushed in carrying papers, clearly excited: “I’ve just written an introduction to one of your papers. Read it so I can send it out right away for publication.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Those problems on the board weren’t homework problems. They were famous unsolved problems in statistics!”

Would George Dantzig have solved those problems if he had known they were famous unsolved problems? I wonder…

Some individuals seem to be born with that ability to see what others do not – that, I believe, is your 50% nature. What I want to know is how would you cultivate that ability and nurture it in a child that isn’t naturally able to “see”?

“You see things; and you say Why? But I dream things that never were; and I say Why not?” – George Bernard Shaw

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