Training Your Child Part 2 - The Coffeeshop

While I'm waiting for Vicki to complete the questionnaire from the viewpoint of a careers' advisor, I decided to take my 9th grader to coffee and talk about his future as Part 2 of my exploration of careers for my teens.

You may recall in Part 1, my eldest who's in 11th grade was inspired by a book to decide her career with no further discussion.

The last time I had a chat with "Killer", my number 2, he said he was thinking of going into animation for NASA. That was in 2015 as we hiked for 10 miles for my Moon Walk training.

London Moon Walk: with Kim and Jenny

I thought it was time - now that he's 14 - to re-visit the topic, and it's interesting how differently the discussion went this time around.

Killer has done a lot of growing up in the past two years. He has been accepted onto the youth group's leadership training course and completed its first year of it; he volunteers weekly for the library, trains in our swim club's highest squad, and recently was promoted to First Officer in his Trail Life troop.

The highest "boy" office in a TL group

We had some time to kill after his dermatology appointment today, so I took him to the local cafe for a chat.

I did not order a large latte - it was a mistake by the waiter!

We first brainstormed about things that interested him: guitar, animation, computer programming, building computers, careers associated with his lovely voice and English accent such as radio DJ, event announcer, director of films, lighting specialist. Some of these, he thought, were hobbies and not careers. Some of these might be his job. Which ones for a career? He wasn't yet sure.

Then I wanted to establish some ground rules. Given his academic strengths, I wanted him to consider a degree in something "solid" like English, math, science, history, etc. It's best, I said, to be sure to make good grades and to finish, not necessarily to worry about which subject you do it in as long as, at least at this stage when you're not really sure what to do, it's a broad and traditional one.

Next we talked about the God-oriented view: God has made us with certain strengths. He knit us in our mother's wombs to do something. There are seven mountains of influence, one of which we are probably gifted to work in.

And then we had a revelation together: Killer feels called to the mountain of arts and entertainment. This is a complete shock to me: a child who just loves electronics, who can hug a computer to make it work, who knows which buttons of a thousand to press to get the right responses from a machine, an introvert of introverts, and he wants to produce things that make people happy and bring them joy.

For an introvert, he can be quite the comedian!

So with this in mind, I have suggested to him that he has a great opportunity as a 9th grader to spend the next four years in exploration, but not just random exploration: intentional exploration; otherwise, there's a likelihood of frittering away these opportunities by time-consuming use of electronics.

He's a checklist kind of guy, so we'll be looking into creating a checklist of careers to look into this year, and in the meantime, keeping our spiritual ears attuned to what circumstantial opportunities that God might put in our path.

When was the last time you had a "date" with your high schooler to talk about their future? Why not put one on your calendar right now?

In the meantime, put your best guess in the comment box about what you THINK your child wants to do, then update with what he or she ended up surprising you with! We will all enjoy the broad opportunities available to our children.

Boy and Computers - Our 21st-Century Dilemma

This is a post that I’ve been meaning to write for a long time - probably for four years or more — and it’s about computer use, particular when homeschooling boys.

We all recognize there’s a problem. It may not be your child, but you know that Facebook is full of moms (and it’s almost always moms) who write SOS messages about their child’s obsessive focus on some kind of screen, be it tv, computer, laptop, tablet, or gaming device.

I know all about this. I’ve been there … in spades!

When my eldest son, who is now 14, was about ten years old, we went through a period where he was exhausted all the time. We soon learned that it was because he was setting his alarm for 2 am so he could sneak down and play Minecraft all night.

Little Boys and their Games

Ever since then, I have been a loud voice on the internet for vigilance and caution when it comes to screens. I have read just about every book there is on the subject. Some titles that come to mind are Boys Adrift, Wired Child, several titles by Michael Gurian, and numerous scientific studies where changes in white and gray matter in brain scans make for some very uncomfortable reading.

Further, we had an au pair for a season when my children were younger, a Spanish student who was improving her English in order to start graduate studies in optometry (where all the reference books are written in English). She stressed to me almost daily that children need to limit their screen time for the sake of their far vision. Numerous studies backed up her assertions: myopia is on the rise because kids don’t get outside enough and flex those far-vision muscles.

Even with all my research and my vigiliance, I’m still struggling to keep my boy off screens. One reason is that he clearly is a “technopath” (a term borrowed from the delightful super-hero film called “Sky High”). Honestly, if your computer is acting up, he’ll come over and hug it, and it will work again!

He even took an MIT course about computer coding when he was 12, and received an A.

It’s tough. What to do? He’s good at this! 

Got a problem? Let me fix it!

I posed this question to Richard Freed, the psychologist who wrote Wired Child. He said to me in a private email that children need to have screens limited in their young lives for a whole host of reasons. He suggested to me that I have my son pursue a broad-ranged academic path of study rather than focus too much on technology itself, and to ensure that any computer use is productive rather than simply gaming, with an emphasis, perhaps, on coding. He added:

• “Future tech use will continue to pose risks of addiction as your son has already been there, and because it makes it harder for kids to use tech productively as they get older.” (private correspondence)

All these years of concern and suspicion came to a head this week. He was supposedly doing his homework for an online class, but he was acting especially secretive when his siblings were walking into the room, so I decided to secretly film him. The 35-minute video was very telling.

As I thought: it was 25 minutes of swapping between windows - Reddit social media threads, pop-up windows of games, notifications from his buddies on Steam, chat boards with classmates - and, mixed among these numerous and frequent distractions, he probably managed ten minutes of reading an online summary of his book and re-wording it for his assignment.

Thirty-five minutes of screen time where five, at most, was productive. (Although I would argue that even that five minutes was also unproductive because he read a summary instead of the book - since I teach this class, I can tell you that the teacher is MOST UNIMPRESSED!)

So you know what happened, don’t you? Time for confrontation.

"I'm comin' after you, Boy!"

But here’s where things go a different path than you probably expect. A fourteen-year-old is a much different animal to a ten-year-old, and he actually stated his case. 

Sure, he says — summary and not book? Bad. Sorry. Swapping back and forth between work and play? Could do better. 

However, he notes that he swims up to 2 1/2 hours every day for swim team; he contributes to jobs around the house like mowing the lawn. That day, he had cooked lunch for everyone; walked the dogs with me; wanted to go on a bike ride to the shops but I said he couldn’t (not exactly what I said, but the bottom line is the same - I talked him out of it); he had showered and played guitar and helped my younger son fix something on the computer game he was being allowed to play, and that night, he was going to his friend’s house for a night of socializing. He had even done some of his homework even though it was Spring Break.

In the course of a normal week, he went on, he had youth group one night, a leadership class every other week, a 3-hour slot for volunteering in the library, an academic co-op, Trail Life (a group like Boy Scouts), and church. He had spent the weekend camping. In the pouring rain.

"I'm really a sensible guy."

Where in there, he asked me, was his life not well-rounded?

Suddenly, I felt a bit foolish.

So I have re-evaluated what it is that I’m so concerned about, because I still have an uneasiness about the length of time he’s on the computer, especially if it’s going to be lop-sided against his academic things. 

I’ve boiled it down to this: I would like more reading from a hard copy of a book and more writing by hand. I think these are media and skills he still needs to cultivate, and I realize that to be reasonable, I’ll have to give him a check-list of exactly what and for how long. We can both measure the progress then, and I won’t have a leg to stand on after that. 

Further, I still feel he needs to limit the time he’s looking at a brightly lit screen. if we could negotiate no more than 2 hours on the screen a day, plus some time for him to do social media on his wifi-only smart phone, and no screens at all between 9 pm at night and 9 am in the morning, then I think I would be fully satisfied that his life was balanced.

Judging from our reasoned conversation this week, I have every confidence that we’ll come to this mutually acceptable arrangement, and we will have both moved forward in our relationship, especially in terms of honoring each other.

Most of all, I've learned something really important: this teen-parenting stuff isn't all bad.

My lovable teen!

Boyschooling Wordle Fun : What Homeschooling Boys is all About!

Just a fun "Wordle"
Gosh, it's a steep learning curve on the Internet!

Check out "Scratch"

"Scratch" is a programming language for everyone to enjoy -- free to download and developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at MIT Media Lab.

In a downloadable paper by Peppler and Kafai, you can see the argument for that "learning the language of creative coding is essential to expression in a digital medium."

In other words, it's not just about viewing or playing the games, but constructing them oneself through coding that make essential connections to art expression.

Anyway, why not?  It's cool and it's free.

Having a Heart-to-Heart (on the way to Ikea)

I had the privilege of driving with my son to Ikea the other night in order to return a damaged item.  It's a two-hour round trip, and gave us some valuable one-on-one time.


On the way, I thought I'd ask him how life was going.  He's only 7, so I'm not sure how much detail I was expecting.


Nevertheless, he opened up to me.  "I just wish I did my work better."


Mommy-probe got into high gear: what do you mean by work? work, as in chores at home? work, as in homeschooling?  And when you say you want to do it better, do you want a schedule?  Something written out?


He was pretty quiet after that, so I gave him the low-down of what our homeschool schedule was going to be like this year: the Bible study, the history, the map skills and math and art.


"And you'll have a project this year.  Something for history, when we're studying World War One."


"I could do something with poetry," he said.  "Like make computer stick people do the actions."


Brilliant!  He's reading poetry, and it's about his history topic, and he's combining it with his love for animation and computing.


So in my mind I've established his long-term goals and schedule till Christmas, and my intuition is to leave him to get on with it.  


Oh, no, no, no!  Not boys!  You see, it's been tried in Norway for years, this idea of setting a work plan for individual students and them letting them get on with it, but they've discovered that boys are falling further behind the girls when they employ this strategy. 

The study makes the following generalizations: boys don't do well with self-regulation and taking responsibility for their own planning: instead, they like when a teacher sets clear learning objectives, short-term tasks, and tightly timed activities with clear targets.  Boys want immediate feedback, tend not to collaborate or discuss, and often put things off till the last minute.

Boys like immediate feedback

Of course, these may not be true for all boys, but in my struggles to get "Killer" peaceful in his school work and productive, they may not be far wrong.


Now it's not exactly back to the drawing board -- more like, back over to the computer to watch "Killer" make his stick figure animations and continue to encourage him in his poetry project.


This could be really good.  I must tell him so, often.