Dan Q
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I’m sure that this music video is supposed to be for children, but between its plasticine-and-fuzzy-felt simplicity and the delightful, joyous, carefree song I can’t help but dance along.
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“Even at a young age, I was able to grasp the concept that my mum and dad could love more than one person,” he says. “The only thing I’ve found challenging about having three adults in my family is getting away with things, because it means more people to check up on you, to make sure you did your chores. But I also have more people around to give me lifts here and there, to help with homework and to come to my lacrosse games. The saying ‘raised by a village’ definitely applies to me. I feel like a completely normal teenager, just with polyamorous parents.”
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Yet another article providing evidence to support the fact that – except for the bigotry of other people – there are no downsides to being a child of polyamorous parents. Nicely-written; I’ve sent a copy of Alan for the Poly In The Media blog.
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It’s worth noting here that the idea that a parent should be a caretaker, educator, and entertainer rolled into one is not only historically, but also culturally specific. “There are lots of cultures where [parent-child play is] considered absolutely inappropriate—a parent would never get down on their knees and play with the children. Playing is something children do, not something adults do,” developmental psychologist Angeline Lillard said in an interview. “And that’s just fine. There’s no requirement for playing.”
Differences in practices around parent-child play exist within American subgroups, too. Sociologist Annette Lareau has observed a gap in beliefs about parent-child play between working-class/poor parents and middle-class parents in the United States. Working-class and poor parents in her study held a view that they were responsible for “supervision in custodial matters” (Did the child get to sleep on time? Does the child have sneakers that fit?) and “autonomy in leisure matters,” while the middle-class parents engaging in what Lareau termed “concerted cultivation” invested themselves heavily in children’s play. Ultimately, the poorer kids, Lareau found, “tended to show more creativity, spontaneity, enjoyment, and initiative in their leisure pastimes than we saw among middle-class children at play in organized activities.”
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Interesting article (about 10 minutes reading), so long as you come at it from at least a little bit of an academic, anthropological perspective and so aren’t expecting to come out of it with concrete, actionable parenting advice!
Engaging in some kinds of play with your kids can be difficult. I’ve lost count of the hours spent in imaginative play with our 6-year-old, trying to follow-along with the complex narrative and characters she’s assembled and ad-lib along (and how many times she’s told me off for my character not making the choices she’d hoped they would, because she’s at least a little controlling over the stories she tells!). But I feel like it’s also a great way to engage with them, so it’s worth putting your devices out of sight, getting down on the carpet, and playing along… at least some of the time. The challenge is finding the balance between being their perpetual playmate and ensuring that they’re encouraged to “make their own fun”, which can be an important skill in being able to fight off boredom for the rest of their lives.
If I ever come up with a perfect formula, I’ll tell you; don’t hold your breath! In the meantime, reading this article might help reassure you that despite there almost-certainly not being a “right way”, there are plenty of “pretty good ways”, and the generally-good human values of authenticity and imagination and cooperation are great starting points for playing with your children, just like they are for so many other endeavours. Your kids are probably going to be okay.
This afternoon, the kids and I helped with some citizen science as part of the Thames WaterBlitz, a collaborative effort to sample water quality of the rivers, canals, and ponds of the Thames Valley to produce valuable data for the researchers of today and tomorrow.
My two little science assistants didn’t need any encouragement to get out of the house and into the sunshine and were eager to go. I didn’t even have to pull out my trump card of pointing out that there were fruiting brambles along the length of the canal. As I observed in a vlog last year, it’s usually pretty easy to motivate the tykes with a little foraging.
The EarthWatch Institute had provided all the chemicals and instructions we needed by post, as well as a mobile app with which to record our results (or paper forms, if we preferred). Right after lunch, we watched their instructional video and set out to the sampling site. We’d scouted out a handful of sites including some on the River Cherwell as it snakes through Kidlington but for this our first water-watch expedition we figured we’d err on the safe side and aim to target only a single site: we chose this one both because it’s close to home and because a previous year’s citizen scientist was here, too, improving the comparability of the results year-on-year.
Plus, this expedition provided the opportunity to continue to foster the 5 year-old’s growing interest in science, which I’ve long tried to encourage (we launched bottle rockets the other month!).
Our results are now online, and we’re already looking forward to seeing the overall results pattern (as well as taking part in next year’s WaterBlitz!).
The 5 year-old and the 2 year-old are playing at running a veterinary surgery (the 5 year-old’s department) and animal shelter (the 2 year-old’s department).
The 5 year-old’s filled me in on the tragic backstory of this particular establishment: she and the 2 year-old are twins but were orphaned soon after birth. They were adopted by different families but then those families all died, too, and because everybody else in the world already had children there was nobody to adopt them and so they had to look after themselves. 67 years of schooling later, at age 15 (maths might need some work…), the pair of them decided, at the end of secondary school, that their shared love of animals meant that they should open a vet/shelter, and so they did.
When they’re not busy fitting collars for unicorns or treating yet-another-outbreak of canine chickenpox, they’re often found patrolling the streets and shouting “does anybody have any sick or injured animals?”. Except during naptime. Their work has a naptime, of course. (I wish my work had a naptime.)
It’s a tough job. Sometimes animals need quarantining in the safe. Sometimes you’ve got to fit an elderly crocodile with false teeth. Sometimes you’ve got a hippo whose owner says that it thinks it’s a duck, but thanks to your years of training you’re able to diagnose as actually thinking it’s a goose. Sometimes it’s a swan that won’t stop vomiting, or a snail that lost it’s shell and now has diarrhoea. It’s hard work, but the twins find it rewarding.
Imaginative play rocks.
Instructed a 5 year-old in diagnosing and replacing a blown PSU in her mother’s computer.
On this day 50 years ago launched the first mission to take people to the moon. As part of #GlobalRocketLaunch day the 5-year-old and I fired off stomp rockets and learned about the science and engineering of Apollo 11.
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My nephew, Michael, died on 22 May 2019. He was 15 years old.
He loved his family, tractors, lorries, tanks, spaceships and video games (mostly about tractors, lorries, tanks and spaceships), and confronted every challenge in his short, difficult life with a resolute will that earned him much love and respect. Online in his favourite game, Elite Dangerous by Frontier Developments, he was known as CMDR Michael Holyland.
In Michael’s last week of life, thanks to the Elite Dangerous player community, a whole network of new friends sprang up in our darkest hour and made things more bearable with a magnificent display of empathy, kindness and creativity. I know it was Michael’s wish to celebrate the generosity he was shown, so I’ve written this account of how Frontier and friends made the intolerable last days of a 15-year-old boy infinitely better.
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I’m not crying, you’re crying.
A beautiful article which, despite its tragedy, does an excellent job of showcasing how video gaming communities can transcend barriers of distance, age, and ability and bring joy to the world. I wish that all gaming communities could be this open-minded and caring, and that they could do so more of the time.
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Keep an eye out for our youngest (and, briefly, me!) in this promotional video just released by the Ashmolean Museum.
Elderflower season is here once again and the eldest and I are kicking off our elderflower cordial production line!
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“Have you had a good wee day out?”
This isn’t how I behave when I’m out cycling with one of our little ‘uns in tow. But sometimes, just sometimes, when I see a solid-looking jump… I wish it could be. Honestly: our eldest would be well up for this! (And would probably be quite disappointed to sit around until the end where they reveal that, obviously, they swapped the small child for a doll for many of the shots.)
Our eldest singing a classic song.
Our youngest, aged 2, may have just came up with his first joke.
Yellow duck: Quack quack quack. Quack quack quack quack.
Blue duck: Shut up. I hate quacking.
tl;dr: TRRTL.COM is my reimplementation of a Logo on-screen turtle as a CoffeeScript-backed web application
For many children growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, their first exposure to computer programming may have come in the form of Logo, a general-purpose educational programming language best-known for its “turtle graphics” capabilities. By issuing commands to an on-screen – or, if they were really lucky, robotic – cursor known as a turtle, the student could draw lines and curves all over the screen (or in the case of robotic turtles: a large sheet of paper on the floor).
While our eldest and I were experimenting with programming (because, well…) a small robotic toy of hers, inspired by a book, it occurred to me that this was an experience that she might miss out on. That’s fine, of course: she doesn’t have to find the same joy in playing with Logo on an Amstrad CPC or a BBC Micro that I did… but I’d like her to be able to have the option. In fact, I figured, there’s probably a whole generation of folks who played with Logo in their childhood but haven’t really had the opportunity to use something as an adult that gives the same kind of satisfaction. And that’s the kind of thing I can fix.
TRRTL.COM is my attempt to produce a modern, web-based (progressive, offline-first) re-imagining of Logo. It uses CoffeeScript as its base language because it provides all of the power of JavaScript but supports a syntax that’s more-similar to that of traditional Logo implementations (with e.g. optional semicolons and unparenthesised parameters).
If you’ve not used Logo before, give it a go. Try typing simple commands like forward 100 (steps), right 90 (degrees), and so
on and you’ll find it’s a bit like an etch-a-sketch. Click the “help” icon in the corner for more commands (and shorter forms of them) as well as instructions on writing longer programs
and sharing your work with the world.
And of course the whole thing is open source in the most permissive way imaginable, so if you’re of an
inclination to do your own experiments with <canvas>, Progressive Web Apps, and the like, you’re welcome to borrow from me. Or if anybody wants to tag-team on making
a version that uses the Web Bluetooth API to talk to a robotic turtle or to use WebRTC to make LAN “multiplayer” turtle art, I’m totally game for that.
My volunteering and academic workload for the rest of this year is likely to reduce the amount of random/weird stuff I put online, so it might get boring here for a while. Hope this tides you over in the meantime.
How did our parents cope with just I-spy and 99 green bottles on -hour journeys? This is definitely the way to hypnotise kids in the car!