Lions, Nonna!

“Lions, Nonna!”

When she was four-years-old, my granddaughter enjoyed watching the nature channel. One Saturday, we got a worried call: “Daddy told me that you and Grandpop are going to visit Auntie in Africa,” she said. “Did you know there are dragons there?” She went on to tell me that although these dragons were very small, she thought they might breathe fire. I assured her that we would wear sturdy shoes and watch our step. 

Dragons, I thought. Something a child would worry about.  I was more worried about clean drinking water and bathroom facilities. Our daughter, in Namibia where she was serving in the Peace Corps, had assured us that she had a latrine. Asked to describe it, she had said, “Spacious.” This was not the adjective I hoped to hear. But dragons were real for our granddaughter. She knew her fairy tales. She was truly concerned.

Kids worry about a lot of things. When I was teaching I often had to soothe ruffled nerves about things adults would not think twice about. Thunderstorms topped the trauma list.  Boomers could start a rolling hysteria in a primary classroom. Flickering lights caused shrieks. I bravely battled many a bee that buzzed into our room. A bug in the sink was a real freak-out for all. 

Mechanical things scare kids too. Escalators rise from subterranean depths and disappear again into the floor. Could a little foot or little person be pulled inside also? A whirring blender makes a great milkshake but looks too much like a tornado in a bottle for comfort. Lawnmowers, fans, revolving doors and motorcycles jangle the nerves of our little friends.

Adults sometime attempt to push past the fears of children.  

“Come on,” they say, “that little dog won’t hurt you.”

“That slide isn’t so high. Just get on, you’ll enjoy it!”

“This water isn’t so deep.  Hold your nose and jump.”

“ Give Aunt Gertrude a kiss.”

Kids balk and cling. Many don’t even want to admit that they are frightened.

Fear isn’t cool.

Do you remember when you took your first ride on your new two-wheeler? Wasn’t it great to have those training wheels that held you up? Remember the day you decided to take them off and how your mom or dad ran alongside while you pedaled furiously and pleaded, “Don’t let go!” 

Good parents don’t let go. They stay close until you lose your fear, until you are confident enough to take off on your own. They don’t push you; they hold you up. 

           

A few minutes after I hung up that Saturday, my granddaughter called back. “I just saw that they have big snakes in Africa.” Our daughter had told us about the scary green snake that had slithered into her hut. I told the little sweetie that we knew about the snakes and, that since we were visiting Africa in winter, we didn’t think we would see too many. Silently I added, “I hope!” I thanked her for wanting to take such good care of us. She seemed satisfied and, after passing the phone to her father, went back to her show. 

           

Suddenly, I heard her shriek “Lions, Nonna!”

Mind the Gap

Mind the Gap

I was sitting with two of my little friends reading a fable called “The King and His Gold.” In this story, a greedy king is crossing a river with a big bag of gold in his hands. He looks down and sees another king with a big bag of gold and thinks, “If only I had his gold, I would be doubly rich!” He reaches for the other king’s gold and drops his bag into the river. As the gold disappears, so does the other king, who was only his own reflection. The moral of the story is “It is foolish to be greedy.”

Both my little friends enjoyed and understood the story, but when I asked them some questions, I noticed a difference in how they responded.

When I asked the first little girl if there really was a king in the river, she said “No, it was him.” When I asked the second the same question, she responded “No, it was just the king’s reflection.” Both understood the story, but the second used more precise words to answer. This held true for all of the other questions I asked.

Researchers have found a “vocabulary gap” between children from upper socioeconomic status (SES) homes and children from lower socioeconomic status homes. One study showed that, at the age of three, children of college-educated parents had much larger vocabularies than the children of less-educated parents. On average, the children of high-SES parents hear 382 words an hour, while children raised in lower SES homes hear 215 fewer an hour. In a month, that meant a difference of about 20,000 words (assuming 4 hours a day of interaction). That’s a lot of words.

Not only do these children hear more words, they also hear more different words. Since their parents have larger vocabularies and are more likely to use more complete syntax (the structure of sentences), their children will be more likely to know more words and know how to use them to communicate. Studies have also shown that parents in higher SES groups are more likely to use gestures to punctuate speech. Pointing to objects and illustrating meaning with gestures help young children build meaning.

This “vocabulary gap” once established is hard to rectify. This gap may be evident as early as 18 months -- putting lower SES children at a disadvantage from preschool through high school. Vocabulary is a key predictor for school success. Children who begin school with smaller vocabularies may never catch up. 

So what’s to be done? Obviously, parents need to talk with their children -- and to one another. Parents are models for language usage. Start early!  Engage your infants in conversation. Read to them. Get a library card. (Librarians hold story hours for children as young as two.) Make reading together a daily routine. Help other children too --volunteering to read with young children helps the children build their vocabularies and is a lot of fun to boot!

So share your words. Talk to the children you know. Sing with them. Read to them. That king with the bag of gold might as well have had a bag full of words. If he had shared them with that other king, both would have been richer.

The moral holds: it is never good to be greedy.

Slow Talking

Slow Talking

Some years ago, I had the opportunity to spend the summer teaching English to a group of Taiwanese students. It was a great job which included sightseeing tours at our nation’s historic attractions. 

Rising in the elevator to the top of the Washington Monument, we met a young, hearing-impaired woman. She was very interested in my students and asked several questions through her interpreter. She would sign a question, her friend would speak it aloud for me, and I would repeat it to the Taiwanese girls. Then we reversed the process, the girls asking, me repeating, the interpreter signing.  

When we reached the top and were saying farewell, some other tourists commented that this had been an amazing exchange. They were especially impressed with my ‘interpretation’ for the students.

“Do you speak Chinese?” they asked. 

“No,” I said. “I speak slow English.” 

My students spoke some words of English. I knew the Chinese for Hello, How are you? and Quickly, (which is a word that comes in very handy when crossing busy streets.) We communicated well because we had discovered a secret of communication. When you speak slowly understanding speeds up.

         

English is a second language for many of our students today. My Latino students enjoy a good laugh when I try out my high school Spanish on them. My accent is atrocious and I speak only in the present tense. They chatter to each other leaving me clueless. But when we slow down and listen hard, we connect. 

Every year, more and more people pour into our country looking for a chance for a better life. They want to be productive. They want to advance. They want to understand. They want to learn English. But hurry is a way of life here. We have become the United States of rush, rush, rush.

Latin American author Isabelle Allende related this story during a radio interview: When she arrived in the U.S., she spoke not a word of English. A mother with young children, she found it difficult to attend classes. So she did what so many others do; she watched TV hoping to learn English.

“I watched Mr. Rogers along with my children.” she remembered. “He was the only one who spoke slowly enough for me to learn.  I love Mr. Rogers.” 

         

John Adams, founding father and the second President of the United States wrote home to his wife Abigail after a visit he had made to the New York Legislature. He noted that everyone there spoke very quickly and at the same time and that, as a result, no one ever listened to anyone else.

         

While visiting my mother’s family in Italy one summer, my husband, a slow talking man, amazed an entire party by telling a long, funny story -- in Italian! He knew only one Italian word and his audience spoke no English, yet everyone understood him and laughed heartily. 

“Miracolo!” they cried -- a miracle that they attributed to good Italian olio di oliva, mozzarella, and pomodori (tomatoes.)

We have all become New York talkers. We zap messages through cyberspace, by satellite and cable. The world is changing every day at lightning speed. Let’s slow down our speaking and speed up our understanding. 

Speak slowly, listen carefully and learn a lot.

         

         

         

         

Music Hath Charms...

Music hath charms…

When I was a junior in high school, one very enterprising class president managed to get a juke box installed in our cafeteria. In those days, this was a huge novelty. For a quarter, we could play our favorite tunes. 

During lunch, we’d chat while the music played in the background. But there was one song that stopped all our chatter:  California Girls by the Beach Boys. When the opening rhythm began, every kid in the room joined in. As the rhythm washed over us, we’d tap the beat on our tables. Competing harmonies blended in that unmistakable Beach Boys style as we sang along. We became one, no more cliques, classes, nerds or jocks. We were a choir, surfer dudes in landlocked Pennsylvania, swaying and singing together. 

Music has that power. It joins us together. When we sing, we have to stick together. We sing the same words at the same time and keep a measured beat. We harmonize. Our voices blend.

At baseball games, we stretch at the seventh inning and sing, Take Me Out to the Ball Game. Every football team has its fight song. Every country has an anthem lovingly belted out at sporting events and national ceremonies. Many have five or six verses known by citizens young and old.    

Political parties rally supporters with rousing theme songs. Supporters of John Adams, our second president, used the tune from a popular drinking song as an anthem for his re-election campaign. That same melody, later joined to a poem by Francis Scott Key, gave us our national anthem. 

We sing hymns as we raise our thoughts and souls to a higher power. The Civil rights organizers used spirituals to pull people together and change dividing laws peacefully.  

My husband and his friends lead sing-alongs in retirement homes. They bring their guitars, harmonicas, keyboards and tambourines and belt out the old time favorites.  Everyone sings. It’s amazing how many songs senior citizens know. Even those with failing memories pull the words from deep within. And boy do they have fun. Clapping and singing, smiling and laughing, they ask for just one more tune.

Remember those long car trips we used to take? Singing helped the time pass.  How many verses of Old MacDonald did it take to get from home to Grandma’s? Camp songs evoke lazy summer evenings spent roasting marshmallows over a fire. How many bottles of ‘pop’ were really on that wall?

Children love to sing. At school, we started every day with a song. Singing helped us focus. We left the cares of home behind as we joined together as a community of learners. We were many, yet we were one.

There was one other song that stopped us cold in that high school cafeteria long ago. It was a sappy love song sung by Dean Martin. We couldn’t imagine how it even got in our jukebox, being as cool as we were back then. But we always sang anyway.  Everybody loves somebody sometime…  

           

Sing with your children. Sing with your friends, your co-workers, your congregation, your ball team and your rivals. It doesn’t really matter if you know all the words nor have a good voice. Just sing. Be part of a community. 

Join in. 

A Dangerous Child

A Dangerous Child

A number of years ago, my cousin and her lively four-year-old daughter Kay came to visit. Naturally, we took them sightseeing. Walking through the picturesque village of Intercourse in Lancaster County, Kay and my own eight-year-old daughter bounced along between my cousin and me. The sidewalks were crowded with tourists enjoying the beauty of the countryside. As we walked single-file, my cousin first, then Kay, my daughter, and I, along the narrow sidewalk, we came to a place which had been blocked off for construction. Seeing that we would have to step into the road to pass, my cousin reached back for Kay's hand.  Kay, not wanting to hold her mother's hand, pulled away-- directly into the path of a pick-up truck.

Tires squealed, the crowd gasped, and a woman behind me screamed. I grabbed Kay's sleeve and snatched her away from the truck to safety. While my cousin, who I must say has nerves of steel, quietly applied the appropriate discipline to Kay, I tried to calm the shaken tourist behind us who kept sobbing, "I didn't come all this way to see something like that."

On that day, Kay had been a child in danger and a dangerous child. The danger of the truck was obvious, the dangerousness of her attitude more subtle. Kay had decided at the tender age of four to be a defiant child. She hadn't wanted to hold her mother's hand so she had pulled away into danger. A defiant child is a child in danger.

As a teacher I came in contact with many defiant children: children who think they know better than their elders, children who want their own way, children who choose not to obey. A defiant child disregards the rules. A defiant child doesn't obey the first time. A defiant child doesn't come when called, doesn't stop when cautioned, doesn't wait when asked. Sneaking around the rules and hiding behind a sly smile, the defiant child takes the risks every parent wishes their child to avoid.

These children have not come to this place of danger by themselves. They have been helped along every step of the way by their parents. Children come into this world with guardians-- their parents.  A guardian's job is to guide, provide, and protect. Parents today work hard to provide every need, real or imagined, of their child. But many over-stressed busy parents have neglected the guiding aspect of parenthood. Afraid to mar the precious few minutes of quality time they spend with their child, they compromise over bedtimes, waffle about household rules, and negotiate endlessly to achieve a few minutes of peace.

On that long ago day, my cousin didn't waffle, compromise, or negotiate with Kay. She let her know in no uncertain terms that her defiant behavior would not be tolerated. My cousin and her husband take the guardianship of all of their children seriously. They set rules and keep them. They train their children to trust and obey their judgment. They love their children enough to discipline them and keep them from danger.  

Every parent wishes to keep his/her child from danger. Parents must decide which guidelines they will set for their children, set them, and stick to them. Train your child to obey the first time. One, Watch out for that car!  obeyed is worth a thousand, If only she had listened's.

Get up out of your chair and make them listen. Guide them, correct them, and discipline them; it’s the only way to keep them truly safe.

A few weeks ago, I was walking with my sister-in-law and her four small children along a quiet tree-lined lane. The children were running about one hundred feet ahead of us when we heard the roar of an all-terrain vehicle racing through the corn field that flanked the line of trees.  In horror, we realized that the ATV would cross the road just ahead of the point where the children were running. 

We were too far away to ever reach them in time. Quickly my sister-in-law called out,

"Everybody stand still!" 

And those four children, those well-loved, well-trained, safe from the danger of defiance children, all stopped dead in their tracks -- or should I say, alive in their tracks as the ATV roared harmlessly in front of them.

Breathing a prayer of gratitude, I was glad that I had come all this way to see something like that.