Rescue Me

Yesterday marked two months since our dog Sarah went to heaven. Bess still asks on a nearly-daily basis when Sarah is coming home, so I suspect that she isn't ready for another dog yet. If you ask her, she'll tell you she wants a puppy, but what kid doesn't? I don't think that really has anything to do with an actual desire for another dog. As for me, part of me wants another dog to fill some of the empty space, and part of me knows that no other dog will ever fill the space left by Sarah and it would be unfair to me, and to the dog, to even try right now.

Our dog Chryssi is another story. She has been horribly depressed since Sarah left. She doesn't know what to do with herself. In or out? Sleep in bed, in the crate, on the couch, on the chair, on the floor? Where do I eat? She still hangs out in Sarah's crate at least 50% of the time. Partly I think she specifically misses Sarah: Sarah was pure alpha dog and Chryssi is happiest at the bottom of the pecking order, so they were a match made in heaven. But partly I think she is one of those dogs who really likes having canine companionship. She doesn't really spend a lot of time alone, and we have the cats to keep her company when the humans are out, but I think she is really longing for another dog.

So I have begun pondering the possibility of adding another dog to our family. Sarah, as wonderful as she was, was a lot of work. I mean, a lot. She had to be crated when we left (even to go to the mailbox) because if she wasn't she'd eat herself nearly to death. In fact, all things edible had to be locked up like Fort Knox, and let me assure you that if there was ever a breach in security we were made to pay very dearly for it. She was hyper, even until just a few months before her death, and she barked all the time. She was high-maintenance. I love her, but I do not have room in our family for such a labor-intensive dog right now. I want a mellow, easy-going dog, the kind of dog who only eats food you put in her bowl. One who is good with kids, cats and other dogs, and who doesn't require a lot of coat maintenance. And speaking of coats, I don't think I could handle a dog that requires outerwear. It's enough work getting the kids dressed to go out in the winter, I don't want to have to dress anyone else, especially a dog who may potentially go out twenty or so times a day. I want a dog who is sturdy and can go on hikes, but doesn't require an outrageous amount of exercise. A puppy is utterly out of the question on both practical and philosophical grounds. I don't want to deal with the nipping, chewing and house training, and I would rather give a home to an adult dog who needs one rather than adopting a cute lovable puppy who will be snatched up in an instant. And as for buying a puppy - let me just say, over my dead body.

I've often thought that I'd love a greyhound, but I think they require outerwear, and I'm not sure they would pass in the sturdy department. I like German Shepherds but they have a lot of coat - and probably too much in the brains department too. I don't really like little dogs, though the idea of a beagle has crossed my mind. But the truth is that we're probably lab people for life. The key is getting one of those big lazy ones instead of the wiry ones who bounce off the walls. I know that when the time is right a dog will find us who is right for our family. In the meantime, maybe I won't take Sarah's crate down just yet.

A Little Perspective

My car has required extensive (not to mention expensive!) repairs twice in the last week. First, the battery and alternator went, and then four days after getting it back from the mechanic the brakes went.

Since John and his car are out of town, I needed to rent a car. So what this looked like went something like this: I dropped my car off at the mechanic at the crack of dawn in the snow, and had the rental car guy meet me there. I had to switch all my stuff, and two car seats, into the minivan they gave me - did I mention the snow? Then we had to all go to the rental car place to fill out the paperwork, and then we were off to an Attachment Parenting Support Group meeting. Of course, by the time we went back home, the driveway was a sheet of ice and I couldn't get the minivan up so I had to walk up carrying Harry (who hates the snow) and hoping Bess didn't face plant and require stitches. Then this morning, back down the frozen driveway into the minivan for school. Unfortunately, due to all the snow and freezing temperatures, the sliding doors were frozen shut, so we all had to climb into the backseat through the front to get into car seats. You'd think I would have enough foresight to go in through the passenger side, but I didn't - so I had to sit in snow for the entire ride. And the best part was that even though I didn't manage to open the doors enough to get in, I did manage to open them enough to make the car beep at me the entire ride to school to notify me that the door was ajar. Then back home, walk back up the driveway, then back down the driveway, back to the rental car place, back to the mechanic, car seats and stuff back into my car, and now all is well. This is all within a thirty-six hour window.

I am sure I don't need to tell you how irritating, not to mention exhausting, I found this whole extravaganza. I was especially irritated this morning when we were fifteen minutes late for (the first day of) school (in the past week because of snow and the holiday). On the way home, I started to think about how my thinking was making me think this whole thing was so annoying. The truth is, some people actually live in houses made of ice and hunt with spears to feed their families. Some people have to walk miles to get water, and then have to carry it home on their heads. Some kids never go to school, never learn to read and write. Some people can't afford a safe car, or any car at all. And I'm tired and aggravated because I had to move some car seats and walk up my driveway?

Isn't it funny how we can get so wrapped up in our own little thing that we totally lose sight of the big picture?

Keeping Informed

I really believe that Accurate Information is the foundation of humane parenting - and humane living, for that matter. I sometimes think how blessed we are to have so much great information at our fingertips. Other times I feel like I am drowning in information, and I am spending so much time researching that I don't spend enough time living the life I am trying to learn how to live.

Two tools that have helped me to organize my information-seeking behavior are:

GoodReads.com - I have this habit of reading about a book and thinking that it sounds fascinating, so I order it from inter library loan. Then I get it and either end up having more books than I could possibly read at one time, or deciding that it wasn't all that interesting after all, but I feel obligated to read it because the library went to the trouble of getting it for me. What I do now when I hear about a book that sounds interesting is add it to my Good Reads list under To-Read, and then when I return a book I check the list to see what I want to get next. I also keep track of what I've read and include a brief review so that I remember what the book was about.

Google Reader - I do not think I am overstating things when I say that Google Reader has changed my life! I believe that blogs are one of the most important tools we have right now for sharing ideas and information in real time, but I was also finding that keeping up with them all was a drag. I was using RSS and it would take me FOREVER, hours literally, to read them all every couple of days. I'd get frustrated and stop after awhile, and then many of the things that would have interested me didn't get read until the information was already out of date. Now, with Google Reader, I can very quickly scroll through my blogs and news sources, read what interests me, and leave the rest - and I can even do this on my phone while I'm picking Bess up from school or waiting for an appointment!

What are your information gathering strategies?

Online Learning Opportunity for Humane Parents

Raising a Humane Child is a month-long distance learning course for parents who wish to bring the principles and practices of humane education to their child-rearing and family life. Humane education focuses on providing people with the tools, knowledge and inspiration to create a just, compassionate, sustainable world for all.

Developed for parents with children of any age, Raising a Humane Child will expand parents’ strategies to help them bring humane education concepts and values to their children and manifest their vision for a better world, starting with their family. Participants will learn to help their children become more compassionate citizens and to make choices that demonstrate respect for the environment, other species and all people.

Course Dates: March 1-26, 2010

Course Advisor: Mary Pat Champeau is director of M.Ed and Certificate programs at IHE and has been a teacher for thirty years, beginning as a Peace Corps volunteer in Niger, 1979-1981. Her experience includes teaching in community-based refugee and immigrant programs in NYC, as well as teaching creative writing at NYU, working as a teacher trainer in Southeast Asian refugee camps, and coordinating language and culture programs for the World Trade Institute. She has an M.A. from NYU. Mary Pat is also the mother of two teenage children and an adopted pre-school age daughter from China.

About Our Distance Learning Courses: The Institute for Humane Education’s month-long distance learning courses immerse participants in a process of connecting with their
deepest values and helping them discover the inspiration, knowledge, tools and community they need to help create a more humane world. Each course includes:
• a course book
• a booklet of exercises
• links to relevant resources
• access to the Online Commons for engaging with fellow students and the course advisor(s)
• guidance and feedback from the course advisor(s)
• participation in one or more course salons (conference calls)
• a certificate of completion and/or Continuing Education Credits, if desired

Between the course assignments and the Online Commons, participants should be prepared to devote an average of 90 minutes a day to their course.

About the Institute for Humane Education: The Institute for Humane Education (IHE) is a non-profit, 501(c)(3) educational organization dedicated to fostering peace, sustainability and compassion through humane education. Headquartered in Surry, Maine, IHE has been training humane educators and promoting humane education since 1996. Co-founded by IHE President Zoe Weil, IHE:
• Created the first humane education certificate program in the United States.
• Created the first Master of Education in Humane Education in the U.S.
• Has trained thousands of humane educators reaching tens of thousands of students.
• Has reached hundreds of thousands of people and communities worldwide through our distance
learning programs and courses, our workshops, and our presentations, publications and resources.

IHE believes that human rights, environmental preservation and animal protection are interconnected and integral dimensions of a healthy, just society, so we must seek solutions to global problems that truly work for all people, animals and the earth. IHE’s humane education and humane educator training programs instill in others the belief that a humane, just and sustainable world is possible. Our programs and resources fuel the desire and capacity to live with compassion, integrity and wisdom. Participants in IHE’s programs put the knowledge and tools they gain with us into action in meaningful, far-reaching ways.

Find out more about IHE and our programs and resources:
http://humaneeducation.org
Institute for Humane Education • P.O. Box 260, Surry, ME 04684
(207) 667-1025 Phone • (877) 544-1025 Fax • info@HumaneEducation.org
www.HumaneEducation.org

Mom-Actualization

I just came across this blog post from The Happiest Mom called Mother's Hierarchy of Needs. It reminded me of a friend who told me the story of her first day back at work after her oldest child was born. She was in her office sobbing, and a co-worker asked if she was sorry to be leaving her new baby. No, my friend replied, she was crying because she wasn't the kind of mom who wanted to stay home full-time with her kids.

Financially, my friend does not need to work. But her need to work is real, if not as compelling as the need of a woman who struggles to put food on her table to find paid employment. She is comfortably able to meet her family's physical and security needs and is therefore able to tend to her own higher needs.

Personally, I also struggle with the fact that I don't want to be at home with my kids all the time. I feel guilty that I envy (and I don't think envy is too strong a word) my husband every time he puts on clothes that are free of wrinkles and stains and walks out the door to spend time alone in the car, followed by stimulating adult conversation and more time alone in the car to listen to something that isn't Music Together on the radio.

I have my finger in a lot of projects, and I am often asked how I manage to do it all. This is a humbling and baffling question for me because I feel that I don't do much of it particularly well, and I feel that I may be not be offering my kids enough mommy time, especially when I have a lot of things all coming to a head all at the same time. I joke that it is ADHD and caffeine that keeps me going, but the truth is that I need to do what I do for my own sanity. If I don't get a chance to have time for contemplation and reading, to explore thoughts and have interesting conversations, I am miserable. And a miserable Mommy is...well, not a very good Mommy.

Am I depriving my children of something important? Maybe. I'll never know, but I also think I am giving them a gift. I am providing an example of curiosity, and motivation, and open-mindedness and commitment that maybe they will follow someday.

Humane Parenting, Lesson One

Now that I am done (DONE!) with my thesis, I am enjoying the opportunity to read for pleasure - though, strangely, my "pleasure" reading looks an awful lot like my "school" reading. Anyway, right now I am working through Education and the Significance of Life by J. Krishnamurti (nice, light reading, kind of like a Harlequin romance novel - NOT!), and I am loving it. It's short and surprisingly easy to read, and chock full of profound nuggets of wisdom.

One of the ideas that really caught my eye is this: "Fear perverts intelligence and is one of the causes of self-centered action." When I read this, I began thinking about Lawrence Kohlberg and the stages of moral development, and the idea that we cannot meet our higher needs for connection and development if our most basic needs, such as those for food, water, shelter and safety, are not met.

I began thinking about some of the more self-centered people I know. (Forgive the judgemental-sounding term, maybe ego-attached people would be better. Or maybe not.) I often find that these people are not "bad" or unkind people, it's just that their first reaction to situations is often to consider the impact on themselves. I began to consider the fact that this could be a reaction to some deep-seated fear: namely, the fear that if they don't look out for themselves, if they don't ensure that their needs are met, then no one else will. They don't trust the world to provide for them.

And I began thinking that, for all the consideration I've been giving to finding ways to teach children about diversity, and responsibility, and creativity, and all those things, maybe the first thing we should consider as humane parents is what I included last in my thesis: Respectful Parenting. Perhaps none of the teaching and lecturing and modelling will do any good if our children do not feel safe enough in the world to be able to turn their attention to the needs of others. Perhaps we need to, first and foremost, ensure that our children have confidence that they are loved and cared for in this world, no matter what, and know that compassion will grow from there.

International Aid

News of the devastating earthquake in Haiti is all over the airwaves, newspapers and Internet. Millions of people are suffering unspeakably due to lack of food, drinkable water, basic services, or the loss of a loved one(s). Aid organizations are mobilizing around the globe, and donations are pouring in.

My question is this: why is it that Haiti, one of the poorest countries in the world and THE poorest in the western hemisphere, all of a sudden deserves the world's attention on Tuesday when it didn't deserve the attention on Monday? We should always help a neighbor in crisis, but Haiti has been in crisis for a long time.

Some of the reports that I've read argue that much of the devastation in the city of Port au Prince could have been avoided had the buildings there been built properly. However, they were not built well because there wasn't enough money to do the job right, or if there was money it went to corrupt government officials instead of to materials and labor. I cannot confirm or deny the accuracy of these reports not being a contractor nor having ever been to Haiti, but certainly that country's history suggests that this report is likely true. Haiti has been ruled by one militaristic despot after another for the past several centuries, and is isolated from the world by trade embargoes that do not seem to have a warming effect on the country's totalitarian leaders.

The pain and suffering the Haitian people are enduring right now is heartbreaking. I hope that many survivors are found and are given treatment, and that basic services are restored quickly. I am glad that so many people are finally having their eyes opened to the everyday living conditions of many of the people in Haiti, and that if anything good can come of this horrible tragedy it is that people are mobilized to help, not just in the short-term, but over time to improve the lives of these poor and downtrodden people.

Boys and Girls

Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending a Reggio Emilia roundtable at my daughter's school. This is a monthly event put on by the New Jersey Educators Exploring the Practice of Reggio Emilia and is held at a different location each month. They also organize trips to Italy to visit the schools where it all began - I'll add that to my To-Do list.

Anyway, yesterday's discussion was about how to manage long-term projects in the classroom, and one of the issues that came up was that of how boys and girls tend to segregate themselves at the younger ages, and how they tend to do things differently from each other. This is something that has become increasingly interesting to me as my kids have become older and I am seeing the differences between my son and daughter emerge. I'm sure many of the differences between them are particular to them as individuals, but there are also some highly stereotypical gender differences that are appearing and becoming stronger. My daughter is all about pink and sparkles and drama, and my son is obsessed with trucks and sports. Now, I am in no way a pink sparkles person, and while my husband is definitely a sports guy, cars and machines are of no interest to him whatsoever, so whatever proclivities my kids are showing in these areas are their own.

One of Bess' teachers used the opportunity to express her concern over the boys' attraction to guns, and her uncertainty about how to handle it. In striving for a child-led learning environment, she wondered, what do you do if the children want to do a project that the teacher does not want to do? Again, as a humane educator, this is something that is very interesting to me and something that I am asked about often - at nearly every talk I give, I am asked "Humane Parenting, blah blah blah - what do I do about my son's need to turn sticks, blocks, and slices of bread into a lethal weapon?" The ubiquity of the question, both in my reading and in my personal experience, leads me to this conclusion: boys' attraction to gun play is archetypal, and it is gender-specific. It is a way of dealing with questions of gender identity, of power and weakness, and of persuasion.

I know this may sound strange coming from a militant feminist such as myself, but I am going to say it anyway. Boys and girls are different from each other. That's not to say that some boys don't do things that we typically consider feminine, and certainly not to say that girls can't do or be anything they want to. However, it is the height of hubris to think that millennia of natural selection, which designed female humans to serve different functions than male humans in terms of the survival of the species, no longer apply to humans. We may consider ourselves to be the most evolved of all animals, but we're still animals.

Female humans are designed to nurture new and growing life. Male humans are designed, from a physical, psychological, and social perspective, to do something different. They are better equipped to hunt game (a woman with a sometimes noisy and often cumbersome infant tied to her breast or a tantruming toddler hanging on her leg is not likely to have much success sneaking up on a gazelle) and to do other physical tasks. While some modern societies are increasingly expecting men to do some of the nurturing, and many of the physical tasks that used to be required for our species' survival are becoming obsolete, that does not necessarily change the way we are wired.

War is not inevitable, and I am in no way advocating violence as an acceptable conflict resolution strategy. I am a hard-core pacifist all the way. However, I do believe that it is inevitable - healthy, even - that young boys will be driven to explore their physicality and to express some of their aggressive feelings in a more physical way than many girls do, for whatever reason (biological, social, whatever - I don't pretend to know the answer to that one). I believe that by teaching our sons about the realities of violence, and giving them safe and constructive outlets for their curiosity about violence, we will raise them to be more kind, compassionate, and nurturing men.

Teaching Empathy - Mission Impossible???

Lisa Belkin posted on her Motherlode blog the question, Can You Teach Empathy to Children? As someone who has spent the better half of the past five years trying to do just that, and the better half of the past year also writing about how to do just that, my answer is, "I sure hope so!" I see her point, but I think the question is better phrased this way: Can You Teach Empathy to Children by Requiring them to do Service Projects? To that, I think my answer would be "Not really."

In theory, service requirements are good, I guess. Get children out there, in the real world, and maybe they'll learn a bit about how good they really have it while making a positive contribution to their communities. The problem is, I think it often loses something in the translation. They see service learning as another thing to add to college applications, and don't really commit themselves to the cause. Instead of immersing themselves in a cause they really believe in, they often look for the project requiring the least commitment and effort they can get away with. The fact of the matter is that kids who would get something out of it would do it anyway, and the ones who wouldn't, well, I think the non-profit sector is often better off without them.

But as for the question of whether we can teach empathy to children, now that's something altogether different. Research shows that by modeling empathy and respect for self and others, by practicing autonomy-supportive parenting, by nurturing creativity and critical thinking among our children, they are more likely to be empathetic and to reach high levels of moral functioning. But it's not a six hour investment, please sign my time log and thank you very much. It's a lifelong investment that we, as parents, begin to make from the moment our children are born by treating them with empathy, respect and love.

Two Months? Really?!?!?!

Has it really been that long since I've been here? Shame on me!

Well, it's not like I've been sitting around eating bon-bons on the couch. Mostly, I've had my head down, plowing towards the finish line that is my Master of Education degree. I am proud and relieved to say that my Independent Learning Project is complete, all 100 pages and 30,000 words of it, and now I - Kelly Coyle DiNorcia, M.Ed. - am ready to re-commit myself to everything else that I've been neglecting.

The beginning of a new year is just the time to be doing that, right? New Year's Resolutions and all that jazz? At our house, we've taken a different path towards self-improvement. John got the family a Vision Board that we've hung in the dining room, with pen and paper nearby for whenever the inspiration strikes us. When something comes up that requires some work, personal development, or commitment, we manifest it in the physical Universe by writing our intention on a slip of paper and putting it in the board. I think I'm the only one who has used it so far, but that's okay. So far, I have set my intention to be more patient with my children (which I'm hoping will be a bit easier now that I don't have this huge deadline looming over my head), to commit myself to a regular spiritual practice, and to develop my ILP into a book. I also plan to recommit myself to blogging, because I love the opportunity to explore my thoughts, send them out into the Universe, and get feedback. I hope you'll join me!