Title taken from this post and especially this point:
Live an interested life. I cannot put this in bold enough face. You are interpreting the world to your child. Is it fascinating for you? Are you engaged in creating, in thinking, in knowing people? Do you make music, take pictures, cook, teach yourself to sew, hike someplace new, learn to fish, eat at a new restaurant, take the back way into town? Are you reading about the history of mental illness, repairing furniture, learning to oil paint? *Show* your child how interesting the world is, and they will love to learn.
Engage. Do not sit back and wait for something to interest you enough to force your attention- be in charge of your attention. Direct it. Think about things. Don't be a passive recipient. Life is not a spectator sport. It's your responsibility to be interested, not entertained.
I combined that personal responsibility of living an interested life with being a mom by parenting my way, not by modeling my parenting on some glossy, Madison Avenue collection of advertisements disguised as a parenting magazine. I included my children in my studies of the things that interested me. Once I learned to think outside the covers of those glossy, Madison Ave driven parenting magazines, I was able to live and parent far more richly than ever.
Some of my acquaintances thought it was important for their children to spend most of their days with people who devoted the entire day to preschool level games, activities, and stories. They thought it was odd, even selfish and slightly neglectful of me to decide my little children would get involved in things like birdwatching, Shakespeare, calligraphy, or seashell collecting because that's what interested me. They thought I was dragging them along in the wake of my own interests when I should be sending them to school so they could feed the interests they already had.
I worried about that. A little. But I kept on, keeping in mind that I was raising my children to some day be adults, not to be perpetual youngsters. Years later I can tell you that my children are all their own people and they are not my clones. They are not all interested in the same things I am. Somebody asked me once how I encouraged that and I said I didn't, it just happened. They are their own people whether you want that to happen or not, but it usually does take a bit of parental oversight (especially in this culture) for them to be interesting people capable of providing their own mental stimulation. So I think I shortchanged myself just a bit.
They are their own people, certainly, with or without you and me, sooner or later. But I think Anna (above) makes a good point when she says you are interpreting the world for your child. I learned from my own childhood that the world is a fascinating place and that nearly any topic can be fodder for intellectual stimulation. Since I interpreted the world as an interesting place, my children saw it that way and found things to interest them beyond the confines of a 4 year old's limited experience. Not everybody does.
One evening at our house the children were occupied variously- paperdolls, puzzles, reading, sorting antique buttons into various patterns on the floor, listening to music, the usual, and a family member visiting us told me, "People just don't live like this. The twentieth century hasn't gotten to your house yet, it's like 1830 around here," and he took himself off to Hardees to get a newspaper, some intrusively bright lights, blaring music, and a package of curly fries, because in our house of several thousand books, dozens of tapes and CDs of an educational nature, collections to browse through (buttons, antique hymnals, rock, sea-shells, art books...) games, and more, he claimed that his brain was atrophying and that he was 'starving for stimulation.' The world is not something you discover by turning on the radio or picking up a newspaper (Thomas Merton). I like both these things, but if you can't be stimulated without them, your thought life needs some work.
I hear some reference about the need for more mental stimulation from people who really mean that they need somebody else to do the work for them.
And the reason they need somebody else to do the work of entertaining them may just be because their ability to provide their own intellectual resources was crippled in preschool by allowing pen and paper academic work to encroach on their free play:
Far from getting cleverer, our 11-year-olds are, in fact, less “intelligent” than their counterparts of 30 years ago. Or so say a team who are among Britain’s most respected education researchers.
“...By stressing the basics — reading and writing — and testing like crazy you reduce the level of cognitive stimulation. Children have the facts but they are not thinking very well,” says Adey. “And they are not getting hands-on physical experience of the way materials behave.”
Ginsburg says parents too can do their bit. “When did children stop playing with mud, plasticine and Meccano and start playing with X-boxes and computer games?” she asks. Parents should switch off the television and “sit children around the dinner table to debate issues such as ‘What should we have done about the whale in the Thames?’ ” says Adey.
Children, said an anonymous commenter to post of mine, "can't learn to reason about their world if they never interact with it. Watching Baby Einstein doesn't count.
Worse, without play, and with only a simulated world, it changes their expectations for entertainment and gratitude. They don't want to work hard, they don't learn the value of mastery. They learn how to cheat or mimic their friends who cheated to learn a special move or unlock a special key, but they didn't actually experience having to get better on their own."
As a friend once told me, she is "convinced that much of boredom in life is due to an appalling lack of interest in the wonders of human talents and creation around us!" They do not know how to entertain or educate themselves.
Children don't come this way. They come craving knowledge almost as much as they crave food. And just as you can ruin a child's ability and desire to try new foods by giving them too much junk food too often, you can blunt the sharp edge of their appetite for knowledge, their willingness to see the world as an interesting place, by giving them too much packaged entertainment. Children who are watching television for three hours a day are spending three hours a day doing something other than mucking about in puddles, scrambling through the bushes, sliding down hills, tramping through mud, skipping, hopping, and climbing, shimmying up trees, playing in the sandbox, going backward down the slide, and playing Poohsticks.
Include an hour a day for video games, time spent at the computer, and time in the car being transported from one organized extra curricular event to another, and it all adds up to less and less time spent on the vitally important activity of making mudpies. If we truly understood how important this play time is, we'd be as likely to let a day pass without letting our children be the little mudpuppies God meant them to be as we would to let an entire day pass without feeding them.
Charlotte Mason, writing after 'The Great War' when crippled and seriously injured soldiers were trying to pick up the pieces of their lives pointed out that "many of our young men and women go about more seriously maimed than these. They are devoid of intellectual interests, history and poetry are without charm for them, the scientific work of the day is only slightly interesting, their 'job' and the social amenities they can secure are all that their life has for them."
She considered it be a severe handicap to have any day where one neither nourished nor used ones intellect. It's not that nothing is ever inherently boring. I don't find it particularly stimulating to scrub a toilet or fold dish towels. There's nothing mentally engaging about sweeping up dog hair- or about a dozen routine tasks one might find in any job, no matter how much status it has. The key is to make yourself responsible for the life of your own mind, to work on the inner life, inner resources, and enriching that inner life we all share. Bring it above and beyond the level of an old Elvis Presley movie.
Much of this post gleaned from these previous posts:
'Only the boring are bored'.
'Why kids can't think.
Maimed Existence
Desperate
The Life of the Mind
Share Your Passions
Rewards and Prizes in Education
Why Children Don't Think Pin It
