Once in a while, I try to imagine what’s going on in a particular child’s mind. Today I thought about a child whom we’ll call Jimmy. Jimmy is slow. He’s a third grader who doesn’t really know all of the letters of the alphabet yet, and there are many other things most third graders know…
There are many parents today who don’t live with their children. Of course, children do grow up and move away; eventually, the average parent has to adjust to life without her/his children, and vice versa. Children stop being children. But this article isn’t about the empty nest syndrome or the trials and tribulations of growing…
“I expected more of you,” says the disappointed adult. And the child learns that what she/he has done is less than what the adult had expected and hoped for. The child may think, I’m not as good as this adult thought I was. This adult has misjudged me. Or maybe the child thinks, I’ve disappointed…
Sometimes a child has difficulty doing what’s supposed to be done in school. Ideally, the child, the child’s parent(s), and school personnel work together to figure out what the difficulty is and what can be done about it. Then the child is given timely and effective help, and what was difficult gets easier. This scenario…
Sometimes people don’t have anything they feel like writing about. That’s my problem right now. I’ve been having computer trouble for almost a week, and during that week, I assumed that articles were growing in my mind, and that I would have all kinds of things to write about as soon as my computer was…
Teachers have a lot of things to think about as they plan and carry out their plans. They think about the needs and preferences of the children, the curriculum, the issues that come up, the various senses of mission they feel, and their own needs and preferences. Some teachers may approach teaching as just a…
Some people emphasize children’s ability to survive disappointment, abuse, neglect, and disaster, and to bounce back. Some say children end up stronger because of the hard times they go through – that they’re more ready for the raw deals life will offer them later on. I think there’s some truth to that, but I was…
After school, as a child and as an adolescent, I always came home to a place where I had my own room. That’s where I did or didn’t do my homework. I had a big desk that had a large map of the world on top, covered by a large sheet of glass. Sometimes I’d…
I was raised to be a devout atheist. My father taught me that belief in God was responsible for a great deal of trouble in the world. Without religion, he taught me, there wouldn’t be so much war, poverty, oppression, and so on. My mother didn’t say much on the subject. I am now an…