The fifth stop in my morning Internet ritual is a bit shaky. I’ve been mostly on a news holiday for the last half a dozen years – I began to feel like I’d pretty well heard it before. I’m trying to get back into the “responsible citizen” mode. Some mornings, I get my news via Doonesbury, sometimes I go for the more formal approach of Google News,, sometimes I check Slashdot because I really like their motto, “News for Nerds, Stuff that matters,” even though I never really understand what they’re talking about (unlike what I get from CNN?), and sometimes I just follow Simon and Garfunkel and check the weather report.

So how about you? Do any of you have morning Internet rituals – sites that are worth checking daily, either because of their enduring interest and value or because of their particular meaning to you?

My first morning stop was The Astronomy Picture of the Day
My second stop was The Hunger Site
My third was Comparing Notes
My fourth was Wikipedia’s daily featured article.

I recently posted a review of an article that appeared in the September / October, 2003, issue of Psychotherapy Networker. The article, by William Doherty of the University of Minnesota, is called See How They Run. In it, he argues that the pressures on kid’s time, and the increasingly structured nature of childhood activities, is working against families, and against the children the activities are supposed to benefit.

I’d like to take Professor Doherty’s theme for a jaunt in the cognitive direction that is the focus of Grow With the flow. As you know if you’ve looked at my book, I believe that fun is at the core of effective learning, and that parental fear for their children can backfire. In the introductory chapter, I say:

Every word here is meant to calm a fear, almost a panic, that has come to pervade the way our culture thinks about children. We seem to be taking childhood awfully seriously as we step into the new millennium. We hear that our children will have to fight and claw their way into the world if they expect to do more than survive. Even when we try not to listen, the messages of ruthless competition, dwindling opportunity, increasing demands — the threat to these people we love so much — chews on us. It makes us fearful. It can even corrode our common sense and our natural instincts. Our children have to be prepared! Every minute is important! Every homework assignment has to be finished!

Wanting to prepare our kids for the worst, we are, paradoxically, in danger of giving them a taste of it. Real intelligence, I constantly argue, is built on a base of enjoyment. Learning is what humans do best. It is our natural state. When we try to force the process, we are in danger of thwarting our own good intentions.

Now, juxtapose that sentiment against this research result described in “See How They Run":

Studies have shown the importance of regular family dinners, one of the chief casualties of hyperscheduling. ….. The University of Michigan study of children’s time found that more meal time at home was the single strongest predictor of better achievement scores and fewer behavioral problems. Mealtime was far more powerful than time spent in school, studying, going to church, playing sports, or doing art activities. Results held across all types of families and all income levels.

Should you read that again? Would you agree that increasing achievement and reducing behavioral problems are common parent goals? Would you agree that you sometimes feel pressure to support those goals by making sure your kids have lots of worthwhile activities to do after school, or by being absolutely sure they get adequate study time and homework time into their evenings? If those are your goals, and if afternoon sports programs, or study time, regularly keep your family from breaking bread together, you may be shooting yourself in the foot. That research says (stretching it a bit, I suppose): “You want better grades, better behavior? Forget the soccer game – go home and have dinner with your kids. Cut their study time in half so you can sit and talk.” (Hey! You could write a note for your child to take to school: “My parent ate my homework.").

I don’t know what Professor Doherty would think of my extension of his argument for more family time, and I don’t know of any research to justify this, but permit me to speculate?

Would you agree that these are critical skills for our children?

• Develop better ability to devise, plan and execute a course of action.
• Develop independence – and independent learners, who can imagine and pursue their own plans and path.
• Empower children, so they feel confident that they can manage.
• Develop creativity.
• Develop effective problem solving. (How many times have you seen that one advanced as a critical goal in the last year?)
• Develop effective problem finding – the ability to know a problem when you see it.
• Develop an ability to work cooperatively in groups.
• Develop responsible, self-motivating children.

Now, look over that list again. For each item, ask yourself: Is my child more likely to develop these abilities in activities structured by adults, or spontaneously, in the company of other kids?

I agree completely with Professor Doherty’s concern that the frantic, overcommitted, no-time-for-dinner way many kids are living is destructive of families and of the parent-child communication that matters so much. But I suspect in addition that by scheduling, guiding, driving, prioritizing, problem solving, and deciding so much of our kid’s “free” time, we are also depriving them of the opportunity and necessity of learning skills they’re gong to need to meet their own real-world goals.

(I’m not even mentioning the sleep deprivation that often results from overactivity, and what it does to cognitive functioning. I’ll get back to that one!)

For an earlier rant on the same general topic, see Labor Day to Memorial Day.

And, of course, Doonesbury had the definitive word on overactivity.

We should all clean our desk now and then; I just stumbled across a fine article I tucked away when it first appeared, in the September / October, 2003, issue of Psychotherapy Networker. “When did childhood turn into a rat race?” asks William Doherty, of the University of Minnesota, in his passionate article: See How They Run.

His theme: “… for many kids, childhood is becoming a rat race of hyperscheduling, overbusyness, and loss of family time. …. Parents have become recreation directors on the family cruise ship.”

He documents critical changes of the last two decades: less playtime, more homework, less unstructured outdoor time, more structured sports, and much more time spent watching others play sports. The end result? families spend a lot less time interacting. One national survey “plotted a one-third decrease in the number of families even claiming to have family dinners regularly.”

Professor Doherty and I agree that a primary cause is parental fear. I want to return in another post to one image he uses: Parents fear that their children will “be left behind when the achievement train leaves the station.” A related fear is that if kids don’t get started early in structured programs (music, athletics) they won’t be able to play competitively – or even get past try-outs. There are also a great many more activity choices for children than there used to be. Good-hearted efforts to provide opportunities have resulted in more attractive possibilities than any one family can pursue.

But beyond these, Professor Doherty points to a number of distressing cultural pressures on parents. He gives the language an important phrase: “parental peer pressure.” Parenting, he accuses, “has become a competitive sport, with the trophies going to the busiest …. We’re facing a new threat to childhood and family life, one disguised in the costumes of fun, achievement, healthy competition, and keeping busy.”

If his argument rings true for you, you may want to look at his companion article,
Creating Community Solutions
or at the web site of a group he helped found:
Putting Family First.

For my part, I hope to return to consider these issues from the cognitive point of view that is the focus of Grow With the Flow.

The fourth stop in my morning Internet ritual is Wikipedia’s daily featured article.

I learned about Wikipedia, and thus about wikis, about a year ago, and the idea knocked my socks off. Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia, started only in 2001, which has, this morning, 737,704 articles – that is, just short of three-quarters of a million encyclopedia entries. Now the kicker: Anyone can write, edit, or comment on a Wikipedia article. It is an encyclopedia built by the community of its readers and users.

Technically a wiki is the software that creates a web page on which anyone can edit or add content. Someone correct me if the usage is too sloppy, but to me “a wiki” then becomes a web site, organized around a theme, where anyone can create or edit content. While anyone can submit an article to Wikipedia, there is a multi-tiered, quite elaborate process to assure the quality of entries.

Consider for a moment – This is an encyclopedia to which anyone with Internet access, worldwide, can contribute. Any topic – however controversial it may be – can be covered. Now consider that if you don’t find an article on a topic, you’re invited to write one. And if you find an article where you disagree, you’re invited to make your concerns known. Now you understand why “civility” is one of the three essential principles of contributions. If you’d like to understand more about the process, you can learn how to be a Wikipedia contributor.)

If you’ve read Grow With the Flow, you know that I constantly stress the critical role of our knowledge base as a component of our effective intelligence – not a result of our intelligence, but instead an important tool that helps us act more intelligently in the world. This is from the start of Chapter 2, Cognitive Abilities Theory:

This change in our understanding has enormously optimistic implications for influencing our children’s intelligence. If achievement is part of our functional intelligence, then to some extent, just knowing more can help us be more intelligent. That’s big news…

So of course that’s one aspect of my morning stop at Wikipedia: my conviction that it isn’t only kids who should be learning something new every morning.

But the way Wikipedia is assembled – that’s a draw for me too. It’s a daily reminder of the power of collaboration and cooperation. Wikipedia isn’t written by people who always agree with each other. But they’ve built ways to co-labor and to co-operate to build something extraordinary.

One final aspect of my daily stop here: I’m writing this (over my morning mocha!) sitting in a coffee shop with wireless access (could you be a coffee shop and not be wireless today?). When I tap into this morning’s Wikipedia article of the day, I become one node of a topological geography which is changing my world each morning. It seems smart to keep that in mind.

My first morning stop was The Astronomy Picture of the Day
My second stop was The Hunger Site
My third was Comparing Notes

My wife used to call the process of getting young kids into the car “herding butterflies.” A series of Web clicks brought that image to mind. The series started with real butterflies, passed through “butterflies in my stomach” and ended with me feeling like I was herding conceptual butterflies – a fluttering of events that seemed both to clang together and to be strangely synchronous – which was the idea Paul advanced at the start of the whole sequence.

So: On September 13, Paul started a post to Comparing Notes by saying “Vaughn Ormseth, producer of Saint Paul Sunday pointed me to his latest blog entry…”

I don’t want to defuse the powerful story told there; but if you don’t have time to read it, it juxtaposes butterflies, violence, and the redemptive power of Robert Schumann, who “braved his demons by composing music as beautiful as any ever written—music that’s offered hope ever since. Real hope in the face of real darkness, not the easy fear of vengeful cowards.”

With that story still reverberating, I turned to my next email, which had a link to a new book which tells how the authors of the Curious George books, German Jews, escaped Paris hours ahead of the advancing Nazi armies. Art and violence and butterflies in my stomach at the idea of two gentle illustrators of children’s books, who were to bring joy to millions of children, coming just that close…

Well, the next item in my morning queue will lead me in safer directions, I thought: a notice from Google Alerts that there had been a news story somewhere that mentioned Oxyrhyncus, the astonishing garbage dump full of unique manuscripts, discovered a century ago, still being catalogued, and now able to be read by new imaging techniques – new plays from major Greek authors – discoveries at that pinnacle of importance.

But the theme of art and violence was going to stay with me. The Oxyrhynus link led me to an article in Egypt Today, “the leading current affairs magazine in Egypt and the Middle East — and the oldest English-language publication of its kind in the nation.” The reference to Oxyrhyncus turned out to be minor, but the rest of the issue felt like a set of variations on the theme of art and violence: both a reminder of the deep culture of the Islamic world, and the attack from within on that tradition. Excerpts, pasted without regard to meaning or coherence, but just to point to the reverberation of the theme:

…. a group of kids stuffing their schoolbooks into a garbage can. …. took to the streets in protest against the book. …. the mob mentality behind the students’ hysterical outbursts …. three young Egyptian novelists [were} hung out to dry …. forced the university to stop teaching the controversial book …. demanded the revision of some 450 books, and banned four outright …. complained to their parents about the book’s “pornographic content” …. sentencing … to death for blaspheming …. five people died in riots against the book …. the victim of a nearly fatal stabbing by an Islamist fundamentalist….. charged by the internet monitoring unit affiliated with the police of “disseminating information harmful to the reputation of the country” and the “intent to corrupt public morals.” …. several of her books were banned. …. led to numerous death threats …. assassinated by religious extremists ….

Conceptual butterflies: I feel the need to say that I think it would be dangerously short-sighted of readers to go into a self-righteous “well, that just goes to show” tirade because of these violent responses to art in the Islamic world – this post started with a story about violence on the streets of Minneapolis, and passed through a reminder of the Holocaust. The “Egypt Today” essay comes bravely from within the Islamic world, chronicling and decrying these acts of violence against art: “I once read somewhere that the only sure weapons against bad ideas are better ideas. Banning books is probably the most counterproductive form of intellectual terrorism that ever existed. As the bearers of ideas, books are weapons that have changed the course of history and the most powerful ones have been the most forbidden.”

This all started with Paul’s post. Here’s how he wrapped it up:

Artists have long wrestled with how art should coexist with its world: should it comment on events? or provoke them? or function as an escape? or a catharsis? But as in Vaughn’s experience, that coexistence is sometimes jarring and nonsensical – for example, Mahler told a story about learning of the death of his mother, then walking outside to find a man playing an organ grinder. It is a strange and profound fact of our minds that we find sense in those situations regardless; in some way, that’s what makes art work in the first place. Our hunger for music is tied to our hunger for order in the world.

I can’t say better.

The Harvard Mental Health Letter, published by Harvard Medical School, is reliably the best eight pages of solid information and state-of-the-art advice I know of in my field. Their advertising blurb is flat-out true:

For nearly two decades, this uniquely positioned newsletter, Harvard Mental Health Letter, has delivered information, current thinking and debate on mental health issues that concern professionals and laymen alike. In the ever-changing and complex field of mental health care, the newsletter has become a trusted source for psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and therapists of all kinds.

The December 2004 issue had a summary of our current understanding of children’s fears and anxieties. The article reviews the different diagnoses used to describe anxiety: generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety disorder (also called social phobia), obsessive-compulsive disorder (which is usually considered to have its roots in anxiety), panic disorder, separation anxiety, simple phobias, and post-traumatic stress disorder. It talks about the causes of childhood anxiety (both genetic and environmental), and outlines various treatment methods.

The article comes to mind now, at the start of the school year, because of a sidebar on school refusal: reluctance to go to school, or resistance or avoidance tactics to avoid going to school. Kids may fear school, or they may fear leaving home. There may be good reason to fear things that are happening at school – like bullying. The beginning of the school year is one of the commonest times for school refusal to emerge.

If your child is resisting going to school right now, should you worry about it? As with so many of the decisions we parents get to make, this one isn’t an easy call!

Some references that may be helpful:

The standard medical / diagnostic view is essential background. Here’s
a parental information sheet from the American Family Physician, and a more technical version of the same information, designed for MDs: also from the American Family Physician – for MDs, and the language is a bit technical, but a good general review, similar to the one in the Harvard Mental Health Letter.

Here’s a link to Children Who Won’t Go To School, from the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.

Here’s a common sense review with a good list of possible reasons for school refusal, from the South Austrailia Children, Youth and Women’s Health Service. (Don’t you love what the Internet can give us?)

Finally, here’s a publication on the topic from The National Association of School Psychologists which may be helpful to your child’s school if they seem unsure how to be helpful.

Are you a grandparent? Here’s a link you may find really helpful.
The Foundation For Grandparenting says:

We are a non-profit organization whose mission is to raise grandparent consciousness, and promote the importance of grandparenting as a role and function that both gives important meaning and empowerment to later life, and benefits all family members. In addition, we promote aspects of “grandparenting” as a role for all elders, whether or not they have biological grandchildren.
We call this “Grandparent Power” – the power to love, care for others, and grow personally by so doing.

We aren’t familiar with these folks, but their web site looks absolutely respectable and their goal seems like an important one.

The third stop in my morning Internet ritual is Comparing Notes , Minnesota Public Radio’s blog about what’s happening on the music scene in the Twin Cities.

Minneapolis / St. Paul is a 900 mile drive from my morning mocha (talk about take out!), so why on earth do I check the MPR site several times a week? Well, of course the main reason is that “Comparing Notes features pianist and composer Paul Cantrell along with MPR classical music hosts.” It’s a sort of morning wave to both my sons; Andy also has a strong hand in the process of building human culture.

But I’d like to think it’s not merely fatherly pride. It’s a way to remember that we humans, in spite of a number of really frightening characteristics, are also capable of ourselves adding to the beauty of the world.

Does it sound like I’m trying to make some big symbolic deal of the sites I happen to check out most mornings? Sure, of course. Did I set it up that way, picking sites to make prerehearsed statements about the human condition? Nah. These are the sites I check. It’s been amusing and instructive to notice that they comment on how we humans are put together – what matters to us and what we create, for better and for worse.

My first morning stop was The Astronomy Picture of the Day
My second stop was The Hunger Site

One dog explaining to another, on page 50 of the September 12, 2005 issue of The New Yorker: “I had my own blog for a while, but I decided to go back to just pointless, incessant barking.”

A few days ago, I started listing the sites in my morning Internet ritual.

My second stop is The Hunger Site. I click on a button, and in some way I don’t quite understand, I give a cup of rice to a hungry child somewhere in the world. It takes only a few seconds. The site is, so far as I can see, completely legitimate: It is commercial, but in the interest of good causes – mostly small economic ventures world wide. Those sponsors pay the cost of the rice via their advertising. If you have questions about all that, check out their “About This Site.”

What does my morning click on the “Give ” button represent to me? It’s a reminder of that Buddhist principle (as though Buddhism invented it!) that there is suffering in the world, and that we need to be mindful of it. It is a daily reminder that the suffering is large and my help is small – but that it seems better to click for a bowl of rice than to do nothing.