July 23, 2003

• Ruling Ourselves

  
  

  I've been thinking about rules.  It seems to me that a significant portion of parenting is strictly devoted to identifying rules.  From the day you bring the baby home from the hospital you begin to realize there are rules you never considered but which you will disregard to your peril.  I think the first RULE that we discovered was Never allow cool air to enter the baby's diaper area.  I don't know if it works the same for baby girls as it does for baby boys, but the second that diaper is opened, they experience this reflexive shoot first and ask questions later phenomenon.  We got really good at changing the diaper without ever allowing the baby to be in an unclothed state. 

  
  

  At every stage so far there have been new rules to live by.  At six and nine, the rules that most concern them now are the rules of socialization.  It's one of the things every homeschooling family hears, "But what about their socialization!"  This betrays a fundamental lack of awareness about what socialization entails.  To be socialized is to internalize the "rules" that make it possible to live together with other people.  It isn't necessary to throw kids into a big pool of other unsocialized little critters and wait back while they sort it all out although that's primarily the way we've done it for the past hundred years or so.  At just the age that kids start being concerned one way or the other with whether they are liked, whether they have playmates, whether they can get along with their teachers and impress the people in authority over them - we send them off to school without giving them the benefit of a rulebook they can consult when the going gets rough. 

  
  

  I'm not saying that homeschool allows kids to circumvent the process of trial and error that will occasionally have them making the same kind of mistakes that every novice will make and have to learn from.  What homeschool does is put the parent right there beside the child 24 hours a day helping them figure out the rules.  Essentially, the same rules that children need to learn are the rules that we all must live by if we are going to interact with other people.  We need to know 1) how to make friends  2) how to achieve popularity and 3) how to behave politically, the rules of socialization guide us to our ultimate succes or failure in these three areas. 

  
  

  My kids are very concerned right now with externally imposed rules.  They want to know who made that rule and what its purpose might be.  We've talked about speed limits and taxes to illustrate the fact that even grown-ups have externally imposed guidelines with consequences for ignoring those guidelines.  I'm more concerned with whether they are internatlizing the rules.  It doesn't warm my heart much at all if I hear Tucker say, "I can't bite you because there's a sign posted on my wall that says "no biting".  On the other hand, when I heard him say to the cat, "I can't bite you because you have feelings and it's wrong for me to hurt you."  THAT makes me a happy Momi.  (And yes, Tucker has indeed bitten the cat before on multiple occasions which is another blog entirely.)   

  
  

  Out of consideration for your time and appreciation for the fact that you've read this far!  I won't get into the specifics of the rules of socialization, today.  Consider this an introduction and tomorrow I'll get into the meat of the matter. 

  
  

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  I tried to visit people yesterday and had a disturbing experience.  I clicked on the links in my SIR list and was sent to bizarre places in the backwaters of Xanga that I had never seen before.  I kid you not, I was going to comment on my friend Kris, and I wound up at a site devoted to Hell.  After the fourth or fifth of these excursions into surreality, I gave up.  I'm sorry.  It was just messing with my head too badly.  Today, I very much hope that Xanga has fixed that bug.  And I'll be around to see where you've really been hanging out.         

  • 8:25 am
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