Slow Parenting: a talk by Carl Honore

Last week, author Carl Honoré gave a wonderful talk on slow parenting as the public keynote lecture for an early childhood education conference. I completely forgot to take a photo during the talk (facepalm!), so instead, here are his books, which you really should read:

Under Pressure: Putting The Child Back In Childhood,
and In Praise Of Slow, by Carl Honoré 

Honoré talked about how childrens' lives have been hijacked by adult fears and agendas, as modern parenting has become a cross between competitive sport and product development. We've been primed by media and advertising to want perfection in everything. This has put both children and their parents under intense pressure that is leading to the opposite of our goal of bringing up healthy, happy children. He shared stories of young adults with helicopter parents who are unable to cope with minor challenges because their entire lives have been stage-managed, the extension of adolescence into late 20s, and grim statistics about ritalin use and abuse, suicide, self-harm, and burn-out.

He's not immune to the pressure to overparent, either. He described how, when he suggested an art tutor to his son after a teacher described him as a gifted artist, his son asked, "Why do adults always have to take over everything?" He also told the story of his daughter, stopping to watch a ladybug on a leaf and coming up with an elaborate backstory and context for the insect - while he looked at his watch and tried to hurry her along. Neuroscientists tell us that quiet moments of contemplation, these 'ladybug moments', are the times when our kids' developing brains are on fire, making connections and absorbing information.

The need to dial back on overscheduling and create more time for contemplation for a better academic and life experience has recently been recognized by Eton (with a project to start in November) and Harvard (with this 2004 letter to newly admitted undergrads). Burn-out is also a problem among young athletes, with many kids dropping out of sports altogether during their teens, and Honore talked about the need to give kids a chance to "fall in love with the game" instead of making sports about winning.

Honoré also observed that our newsmedia-fueled fears of our children getting hurt or kidnapped and the "cult of safety" that arose from that has led to a generation being "practically raised in captivity", never getting to explore nature on their own or play pick-up games with neighborhood kids. Some parents are trying to counteract that tendancy by creating 'Backyard Sports' leagues and neighborhood summer camps, organizing 'Dangerous Book For Boys' parties, and taking their kids to nature playgrounds and outdoor preschools.

Finally, he gave some practical advice and answered questions. He observed that raising children is a journey, not a project to be managed using business-school methods. Less is more: the less stimulation and pressure, the greater the benefits for our kids' development. Furthermore, "by giving our children the very best of everything, we are denying them the opportunity to learn to make the best of what they have," which may be one of the most valuable lessons we can teach. 

Parents in the audience asked: how do we slow parent in an inner city apartment, or with teenagers, or with both parents working full-time?  Every family is unique, so he advised finding what works best for your family. Look at your schedules and your kids' interests, then dial back on the extracurricular activities and give your kids more unstructured play time. Find like-minded families to get a support group or find playmates for unstructured play in safe, supervised spaces. Try art or nature projects as a transition to less scheduled activity during the period when your kids are learning how to amuse themselves without resorting to TV and video games.

Mr. Honoré will be back in Edmonton next April to promote his upcoming book, The Slow Fix. Meanwhile, both the above books are available as e-book editions from the various online vendors (is there something ironic about that?). You should also check out Carl Honore's website and TED talk on slowness, and this blog post from another local parent who attended the same seminar.

Dealing with head lice

Despite being an incredibly common problem among school-aged children, head lice are still discussed in whispers in North America. My daughter caught them at school at the same time as several of her classmates at the end of the school year. Since September is a common time for infestations to be found, I thought I'd share our experience in removing them from her hair (and my son's, since of course he had them too, although a fraction as many). We did all of these treatments as a family every time, because the lice spread so easily.

(We followed the house cleaning instructions provided at the very thorough websites linked above, washing our clothes and bedding in the hottest water and drying them on the hottest setting, and vacuuming thoroughly. Head lice are not bedbugs or fleas, and they die after 24-48 hours off a human host, so full-on-hazmat-throw-everything-away is not necessary. Thank goodness.)

Treatment 1, Day of discovery: An over-the-counter permethrin conditioner recommended by the pharmacist at the closest drug store, used according to the instructions (shampoo hair, leave in 10 minutes, rinse out, towel dry hair, comb with provided plastic comb). Unfortunately a growing percentage of lice are resistant to permethrin treatment, and the pesticide only kills the live insects, not the eggs (nits). Supposedly it leaves a residue in your hair that will kill them as they hatch, and needs to be repeated after 7 days.

Treatment 2, daily since discovery: A half-strength rinse with vinegar followed by combing, twice a day. The vinegar helps to remove the glue that holds nits in the hair, so that they can be removed more easily. This worked like magic to remove the majority of the eggs and empty egg casings - but my daughter has lots of very fine-textured hair so the comb could not grab everything. Some people pick the rest out with their fingernails at that point, but my hands are too shaky for that (thanks, essential tremor), so I needed to get a better comb.

Treatment 3: carefully flat-ironing the hair while wet to kill any remaining eggs by heating them - a home remedy I had run across that seemed like it was worth a try. Of course this only works if your child will sit very still, because you need to be able to get right next to the scalp.

Treatment 4: saturating hair with conditioner then combing. A friend who lived in the UK said the kit available from this website worked great for her - and I highly recommend the video on it for good advice on how (conditioner keeps live lice from evading the comb because they won't move while wet!) and when (at least every 3rd day (after any missed eggs could have hatched), until day 14 or when the lice are gone, whichever comes last) to use the comb. This is super important!

Treatment 5, Day 6 after discovery: The Nit Nannies kit, purchased locally from Beaners, a kids' haircut chain. It includes a mineral-oil based treatment (to suffocate the insects; it also contains an ingredient that dissolves insects' exoskeletons, and more vinegar), shower caps (because you leave it on for 2 hours, and it's messy - you'll also want a towel draped over shoulders to protect clothing from drips), and two combs (one metal that looks similar to this one, and one very fine-toothed plastic one with a magnifier on it, both of which work better than the comb we were using previously).

If you don't have local access to Nit Nannies, you could try the mineral oil / vinegar 50/50 solution in its place, combined with an isopropyl myristate rinse (another chitin dissolver). You don't have to use mineral oil - olive oil or canola oil will work too - but it's colourless and scentless so it's usually what's recommended.

I'm mentioning this kit by name, instead of in generic terms, because it's the one that worked best for us, alongside a careful combing procedure, AND it's an environmentally friendly option. When we did our 7-day retreatment with permethrin the following day, there was nothing left to comb out of my children's hair. 

We continued checking daily for the next couple of weeks to be sure, and found a couple of additional insects during the second week, but by the third week we found nothing. Continuing to comb even when you find nothing is crucial to make sure you don't end up with a single missed egg turning into a whole new infestation - as we discovered to our chagrin in week five, when we found a dozen or so insects in my son's hair, and two more in mine, and started the cycle over again. We are now at week 10 since we originally found the lice, and we haven't seen any nymphs or nits since week 7 during religious combing with conditioner every third day, so I think we can finally loosen up our combing schedule. We'll continue to comb once a week through autumn and winter just to make sure the kids haven't picked up more at school.

We also use a preventive hairspray with essential oils in it (geranium, lemongrass, and peppermint is the combo in the one I bought), although that feels more like we're spritzing it for good luck than because of any proof that it works.

Here's a couple of good summaries of head lice myths and facts. I'll add a few more:

1. Hiding from your kids how utterly icked out you are about the whole thing is way, way harder than the actual tedious act of nitpicking.

2. Anecdotally, it appears from many of the articles I've linked to that lice infestations are becoming more common among school-age children worldwide. I haven't found any actual numbers though.

3. Head lice don't carry disease, have no preference for dirty hair over clean, and are found infesting children of all socioeconomic demographics. This bears repeating. It's not your fault if your kids get this, and nobody should be shunned because of it.

4. Insensitive parents who loudly gossip about which disgusting children are responsible for the notice sent home from school to check your kids' heads, will probably get their comeuppance when their kids get lice next year. (Karma's a bitch when you are.) They can also be easily derailed by breezily saying, "Oh, one of those kids was mine, sorry! I was so grossed out! I never thought it could happen to us. But here's what I found really worked..."

Passport To Summer Fun: DIY summer camp ideas

Last summer, some friends and I had standing playdates to do a sort of DIY Summer Camp, trying to knock as many activities around our city as we could off the bucket list below. However, we did it with a twist, inspired by the Nova Scotia Museum passports I remembered from my childhood - we got small inexpensive journals for each child, and every activity got a page or two of the book, with ticket stubs or other memorabilia and a printed photo from the event and a written date. If we had an opportunity to do something separately as a family, that went into the Summer Fun Passport too. We called it a scavenger hunt, but there was no prize for who completed the most tasks off the list, just the fun of seeing how full the passports were by the end of the summer.

I kept a kit with the passport notebooks, a pen and a gluestick, the bucket list of ideas, and a book journaling notepad in a large ziplock bag in my summer go bag all summer long. As we did stuff, I'd put ticket stubs or other mementoes into the bag and snap some photos, and once every couple of weeks I'd print out photos and glue things into the passport. We'll do a similar kit for the go-bag this summer, with the printables I mention below, an actual date stamp, and our updated bucket list.

PASSPORT TO SUMMER FUN: SCAVENGER HUNT

* = indoor activity for rainy days or once the weather turns cold

playground playdates - a stamp for each new playground you try

electric tram from Whyte Ave to Downtown

*Royal Alberta Museum bug room

*Art Gallery of Alberta

Edmonton Zoo visit including pony ride

Fort Edmonton Park visit including train ride

John Jantzen Nature Centre (has both outdoor activities and indoor ones)

*Muttart Conservatory

*a movie in the theatre

Edmonton Fringe Festival play

*West Edmonton Mall aquarium and wave pool

*Terwillegar Rec Centre

*Airplane Museum

road trip: Calgary Zoo

road trip: train museum

road trip: machine museum in Wetaskiwin

Devonian Botanic Garden butterflies and Japanese Garden giant bell

road trip: Elk Island National Park and Ukrainian Village

road trip: Jasper National Park

*kitchen chemistry day: volcanoes, bottle rockets, and making slime

*math and spelling fun day

building a cardboard space ship or club house

*reading three books borrowed from Edmonton Public Library

*chef school day

berry picking and corn maze

decorate bikes then go for bike ride and picnic

*yarn craft day: learning to crochet / knit / braid / weave / make tassels

make stepping stones

mystery day (using your sleuthing kits)

composting and gardening day

painting self portraits
*music making day (with homemade instruments)

*puppet making and puppet show

hula hooping camp

take a hike in the River Valley

*Tour de Value Village

*Telus World of Science

This summer, to encourage unstructured outdoor play in front of our house so we meet our new neighbors and make friends, do some community building on a street where some houses are newly built, and spend some time exploring the natural world at our doorstep in the Whitemud Creek ravine, we're adding these activities to our list. (For more ideas along these lines, check out the fantastic blog and new book from Playborhood.)

bike ride (a new stamp for each path explored)
nature explorer (a new stamp for each path hiked and each new animal sighted)

skipping games (to be played on the sidewalk in front of our house)

sidewalk chalk art creation

sprinkler day (set up sprinkler, small water pistols, spray bottles, bucket of ice in front yard)

lemonade stand

made a new friend (a new stamp for each playdate)

block party
gardening (our front yard is a blank slate so the kids will get a stamp for a garden centre trip followed by helping me plant some perennials and containers)

exterior decorator certification (painting our front porch and setting it up with seating for resting and snacking, and a couple of summer activity buckets full of outdoor play toys, water toys, sidewalk chalk - I have a good idea how this will look but the kids will get to provide lots of input so it's an area where they want to hang out)

We're also travelling to Nova Scotia for three weeks, so we'll also add stamps for

trip to the beach

trip to a museum

visit to a historic site

going for a hike

lessons from the kids' cousin who teaches swimming

day at the cottage


Here are some more posts to give you ideas for your own DIY summer camp or passport project:

• Simple Homemade has a great post with free printables for stamps you can glue into your 'passport'.
• Heather Carson has a beautiful printable for a summer passport with stamps - but less space for memorabilia and photos than my scrapbook-ish approach.
• Jackie at weelife is taking the passport approach too, and has her bucket list on her blog - lots of great ideas to add here! 
• Imagination Soup (for older kids) and Parenting magazine (for preschoolers) have great summer camp ideas - and Oopsey Daisy are doing a series of guest posts with summer camp ideas for a range of ages with the cutest crafts ever.
• Brown Paper Packages has a great guest post from a mom who outlines the book-themed DIY summer camp she did with her triplet daughters.
• I like 504 Main's approach of doing an organized camp one day a week where each family takes a turn hosting activities.

What's on your bucket list this summer?