Learning at Home: A Mother's Guide to Homeschooling Take II (negative interpetations and making mistakes)

On pages 31-34 Layne talks about learning from mistakes, allowing children to make mistakes, repentance (she says “repentance really means . . . to change your way of thinking and to act differently” – easier said than done, eh?  Seems like another good thing to keep in the front of one's consciousness), interpreting children’s intentions/inferring children’s motives and children’s need to be taught to express anger, rage, frustration in an appropriate way.  I’m truly trying to not just type out the whole book for you, but it’s just such good stuff that it’s hard to rein myself in! 

She says that, if you are homeschooling, the way that you view mistakes (and react to them) becomes a part of your child’s learning environment (clearly this is true to some extent even if your child attends school outside of the home, but it makes sense to me that this is even more true in a homeschooling family). 

Attributing “bad” motives or intentions to a child’s (spouse’s, friend’s) behavior is such an easy pitfall for humans, isn’t it?  “It has taken me years of thinking this through, and observing my children to see how often I infer a motive for an action that says more about myself than about my child” (p. 35).  Can I get an “Amen!”?  I just think this is such a spot-on observation. 

My confession of the day, related to negative interpretations –  Recently Fiona and I were getting ready to walk to the grocery store with our little wire mesh cart.  When I walked into the living room, she had just finished placing Felix, one of the two cats we are fostering, into the cart. It looked like he was scared -- the spaces in between the metal are larger than a cat’s foot and it looked like he was trying to climb out but couldn’t quite do it.  I reacted much more out of sympathy to Felix than a desire to understand Fiona’s point of view.  My inner dialogue was probably something along the lines of “Ack!  My child is hurting an animal!  Ack!  I want her to be gentle with them!  Why would she put Felix in the cart when it is so obviously not a good/safe place for him and she knew it would freak him out?!”  I got Felix out  and was talking to Fiona about how it “wasn’t okay” to put him in the cart and how it wasn’t a funny joke, how I wanted her to be gentle to the cats, etc., etc., etc.  In retrospect, I wish I had focused on helping Felix feel safe and saying something along the lines of “I wonder if you were interested to see what Felix would do in the cart – We don’t have it out very much and it probably seemed like such a perfect little place for Felix to hang out.  I bet you didn’t notice how big those holes in the cart were, huh?  Were you surprised when he didn’t like it in there?”  I could also have asked her if she wanted to help Felix get back out.  I think part of the irony is that it’s not like me reacting the way I did soothed Felix’s nerves or helped him in any way – in fact, my tone of voice while talking to Fiona probably just made him more stressed out!  This is something I think about often when one child hurts another – so often it seems like the focus is on making sure the child who did the hurting gets chastised – what are we modeling when we do that?  It certainly isn’t helping the hurt child to feel better and, in my opinion, the “hurt-er” isn’t really learning anything other than that perhaps the next time s/he’ll slug someone where there aren’t adults around to watch! 

A final quote from this section on page 35:

Perhaps . . . our children don’t understand our language and we need to find a way to communicate in their language.  We need to trust in their ability to achieve mastery and allow them to make mistakes and learn from those mistakes just as they did when they were learning to walk.  We need to trust in our development and learn from our mistakes.

All quotes from Learning at Home used with author's permission:   www.martylayne.com