“Tell me about how it is okay for teachers to make mistakes,” Michelle said. “I am both a teacher and a parent,” she went on. “As a parent, when you make a mistake, you can acknowledge it, change your mind, make a better decision, and move on. But when you are responsible for other people’s children, you can’t make mistakes. What’s a professional to do?”

In a talk I gave last month at a school in the Midwest, I had made the twin statements: “Mistakes are learning opportunities; Fear of Making Mistakes is a learning disability.” The idea hit a nerve.

Another parent in the room answered Michelle with: “I am a perfectionist, so I know exactly what you are talking about. If my child were in your class, I would want you to handle your mistake the same way you would handle it with your own child: make the mistake and learn from it.”

Another parent spoke up, “I agree. You know, one thing that I do with my son is say something like, ‘Remember that thing I said, yesterday? That was wrong. Please ignore that. What I should have said is….”

“I know,” said another parent. “I do the same thing, and he always appreciates it. I have learned three things since I started being open about my mistakes with my daughter:

“1) I am modeling to her that it is okay to make mistakes (I saw that she was starting to become a perfectionist.);

“2) our relationship is a lot better once I started admitting my mistakes to her, and

“3) it has helped me a lot with my perfectionism—which is most definitely a learning disability. I hate it.”

“I know,” said Michelle, “but what about the parent-teacher conference? Are parents okay with me talking about my mistakes? I would rather talk about the child’s mistakes.”

After the general laughter had subsided, another teacher spoke up and said, “I have found that it is much easier to talk about the parents’ mistakes once I have talked about my own mistakes. Even better, it makes it easier for us to talk about what we need to do to help him, because sometimes parents are afraid to admit to a teacher that they aren’t perfect. Like: it’s not my fault that he is a troublemaker! They’d rather we agree that he has ADHD.”

Another teacher said: “I have found that for a teacher to admit his mistakes is one of the best ways to make your class a learning community.  A day when I begin a class with, ‘Yesterday I said something wrong, and I want to correct it,’ is a day when my classes go well.”

There was general agreement that fear of mistakes is most definitely a learning disability. However, near the end of the evening, one parent asked a question that was harder to answer, “Why are so many of us are plagued with this disability, and what can we do to free ourselves?”

If you had been there, what would you have said?

Technorati Tags: Authority, building character, character, child-rearing, children, conflict, decision making, education, Emotional control, kids, Leadership, Learning, Learning community, learning social skills, Parenting, parenting skills, parents, respect, responsibility, school, school reform, teacher, teachers, teaching, teaching responsibility

The publisher of the second edition of “Genius”, Globe/Pequot Press, has selected a photo for the cover after a great deal of searching. It is particularly fun for me that they selected this candid taken by a new photographer friend of mine, Julie Carter, who lives in Decatur. Here’s what Julie says about the photo she took of her granddaughter at home a year or so ago.

“When Rick talked to me about creating a photo to illustrate the message he was wanting to convey in his book, I immediately thought of the photograph you are considering. The little girl in the photo is my granddaughter, Natalie, who was four-years-old when the photo was taken.

“Natalie was ”teaching” my husband how to read a book after telling him that he was reading it to her in a rather “silly” way – guess he wasn’t taking his reading seriously enough for her!

“My favorite part about the photo is the obvious focus and attention she is giving as she carefully enunciates each word. I also love the patience my husband is showing Natalie as she reads each word with excitement and enthusiasm - how fortunate I was to have been able to not only observe this special moment, but to also have my camera close at hand to capture this entertaining interaction between Natalie and my husband!”

Now that we have the cover, I can’t wait for the book’s second coming this July.

Technorati Tags: Authority, building character, character, child-rearing, children, decision making, Discipline, education, Emotional control, Genius, homework, kids, Leadership, Learning, learning social skills, learning to read, Parenting, parenting skills, parents, play, Reading, slow parenting, teaching, teaching responsibility

 Man walks into a room with a clothesline across it, takes a handful of clothespins out of a basket and starts pinning up clothes. A mother and her 18-month-old son are sitting on the floor watching. After pinning several items, the man accidentally drops a pin on the floor. He then pretends to reach over the clothesline to try to pick up the dropped pin, but his arms just aren’t long enough. The 18-month-old watches the man struggle for few seconds, then leaves his mother, goes over to the clothespin, picks it off the floor and holds it up to the man, who takes it and says thank you. The boy goes back to his mother on his own.

This and many moments like it have occurred under experimental situations in the last few years demonstrating that one of our culture’s deeply held convictions—children are naturally selfish and have to be taught empathy—is false. Thirty-some years of working with grade school children have taught me the same thing. A couple of weeks ago a former colleague  told me his own story about these social animals.

At a Boys and Girls Club in San Francisco over spring vacation Cam and Aiden, two second graders from a private school, were throwing a football around with kindergarteners Maya and Jayden, when four public school 10-year-olds came over and asked if they could play. A teacher, anxious about what might happen, decided to stay and watch. He thought he would at least have to organize the teams and referee to keep the younger kids safe, but he soon discovered how wrong he was.

Cam quickly organized everyone into teams: private vs. public, and the eight young people launched seriously into a game of touch football with other activities swirling around them in the large gymnasium.

The teacher was concerned that the teams were unfair; the older kids were so much bigger. But again he was wise enough to wait and see. The younger students quickly realized that Aiden and Maya were too speedy and shifty to be caught, and they began improvising handoffs and reverses executed by quarterback Jayden and directed by Cam.  Jayden hardly came up to the waist of the opponents, yet time and again he was able to throw the ball just over their hands, either Maya or Aiden would race to grab it and take off. The game continued without let-up for an hour and a half.

But what impressed the teacher most was the students’ ability to resolve conflicts. They collectively decided how they would handle kicking extra points and agreed that certain markings on the walls would be goalposts. From time to time the game would be halted by a big disagreement about rules or whether someone had been touched or gone out of bounds. Each time the game stopped until the dispute was resolved.

Several times the teacher thought he would have to mediate, but each time he discovered that the students, themselves, had matters well in hand. The little ones confidently debated issues with strangers a foot taller than them, and each time they all agreed on a resolution or a do-over.  Nobody was going to let too much time get wasted before they could play again.

The game attracted the attention of some other adults who watched the proceedings together for a while. “How is it that are these younger ones are doing so well?” asked one club worker?

“Because they’re being a better team!”  answered another.

Of course, it was good that the teacher was watching. There are times when children need adult intervention. But why do adults think children won’t learn to be kind if we don’t teach them? Certainly not because adults are so good at it. A little self-awareness would be appropriate here. In our culture adults need to bring in lawyers to handle the dirty work of conflict precisely because we hate it and are bad at it.

At their childish level kids can often do better on their own. If children are not doing any better on their own, perhaps they have been watching adults and are mirroring back what they see.

We are social beings. Being happy and successful in life requires being thoughtful of others, reading other minds, finding common interests, harmonizing your wants with theirs, and engaging in collective action. Homo sapiens would never have gotten this far if we weren’t naturally good at cooperation.

Acting as if children are naturally selfish is a self-fulfilling enterprise.

Technorati Tags: Authority, building character, character, child-rearing, children, conflict, decision making, education, Emotional control, kids, Leadership, Learning, Learning community, learning social skills, Parenting, parenting skills, slow parenting, teaching, teaching responsibility

Responding by email to my article last week on children’s natural inclination toward empathy Allan, grandfather of Elise, wrote:

Having just spent five days with a 3 ½-year-old, I can reaffirm everything you say in this.

While her mom was working nearby, Elise and I had a wonderful pretend game where she was the proprietor of an ice cream shop and I was the customer.   She stood on the other side of a table and served me.   Unfortunately she only stocked chocolate, vanilla and strawberry, so just to stretch her imagination a bit (after enjoying a chocolate cone), I started asking for flavors she didn’t have.

“Do you have any jamocha almond fudge?”

“No, only chocolate, vanilla and strawberry!”

“Any pistachio?”

“No!  I told you, just chocolate, vanilla and strawberry.”

This went on for maybe 8 more uncommon flavors.  Then I asked:

“Do you have any birdseed ice cream, Elise?”

“What?  There’s no such thing as birdseed ice cream.”

That led to an interesting discussion of whether birds can eat ice cream.

Great fun.

I guess the context of this story is not so much about building empathy as reaffirming kids’ imagination, meeting them where they are, and stretching them out of their intellectual comfort zones.

One of my favorite “bits” with toddlers is watching them holding say, a brown bear toy and saying, “Can I have that green giraffe?” That not only makes toddlers reinforce what they already know, but confront authority in a safe way when the authority figure is doing something obviously stupid.

And I don’t correct kids’ grammar mistakes as they’re struggling to learn a crazy language like English. I just use the terms correctly myself and trust that they will pick it up because, after all, they do want to speak correctly.

Allan’s vignettes are indeed about building empathy because they are about building imagination. Putting yourself in someone else’s shoes requires imagination. Others are not thinking and feeling the way you are thinking and feeling; they are thinking and feeling the way they are thinking and feeling. That requires imagination—a lot of it.

Children are better stewards of their reality-testing-mechanism than anyone else. In fact, come to think of it, consider the arrogance of adults who think they can do a better job of building their children’s brain than the children themselves.

Allan’s thoughts go to the core of raising children: Do we treat them as if we, the culture bearers, need to instruct them in order for them to become acculturated, or as if their education is one continuous self-directed drive to map reality onto their brain?

(Photo from Janet Lansbury’s essay on a baby’s social learning)

Parents usually get it right during the first year or so. They don’t try to teach their children so much as interact with them and have fun. When their baby first says, “Mama,” they don’t say, “No, no. That’s ‘Mommy.’” They bubble over with delight and shriek, “She said my name!” Parents instinctively know that children will get the words right by copying. All a parent has to do is be his delightful, loving self and the child will learn to speak.

By the age of four children know the past tenses of 10,000 verbs even though they may only have heard a couple hundred. You discover this is true when they come up with words like: “goed, or bringed, or eated.” Their path toward adulthood is paved with thousands of mistakes. Only adults act like there is such a thing as a mistake-free zone. (Adults ought to know better.)

If we think of Allan as a teacher with a lesson plan, there is only one thing going on: what he is teaching (vocabulary, consideration of others, arithmetic, etc.) However, if Allan is an educator—and clearly he is—there are several things going on, not one. He is teaching her; she is teaching him; he is learning about her; she is learning about him; she is learning about herself; she is developing her ability to put herself inside someone else’s brain; they are each building their own relationship brain. Most importantly, she is experiencing the impact she can have on the world, increasing her repertoire for doing that, and in the process learning that she matters.

The core competency of all educators—parents, grandparents and teachers, alike—is to know how to “Treat children as if they know what they are doing.”

Technorati Tags: Authority, building character, character, child-rearing, children, decision making, Discipline, education, kids, Learning, Learning community, learning social skills, Parenting, parenting skills, play, respect, school, school reform, slow parenting, teaching

 “Hey, would you help me…”

Say this to children, and you will usually get an enthusiastic, “Sure.”

If you get a negative reaction, I can think of several possible causes off the top of my head:

• It feels imposed rather than offered as an opportunity.
• It’s a job you hate and, therefore, you are actually taking advantage of them.
• They feel singled out, and not for greatness.
• They need a little seducing.
• You might have caught them at a bad time, in which case you might consider saying something like, “Would there be a better time for you?” (Next time you will be more sensitive to the mission they are on.)
• You have already made the mistake of giving the lecture on social obligations, and said something stupid like: “You kids! All you ever want is rights. You have to learn that for every right there is a responsibility.” Maybe, they sense that your request was not really in the free will department, but more in the obedience department.
• They know you think they are selfish.

Beth, a kindergarten teacher at one of my schools, once said: “I see any unused ability in my classroom as an incipient behavior problem,” and she understood the natural empathy in children to be her greatest resource.

I read in the blogosphere that parents should teach children empathy. No, we shouldn’t. Children have empathy; the best way to educate it is to utilize it. As Beth and all other good educators know, empathy is one of their greatest abilities, and the origin of some of their greatest passions. Their brains are designed to know how others feel. They are wired with mirror neurons; when someone else is hurt, they feel it. By eighteen months they know that another person might want something different from what they want, and are inclined to give them what they want, rather than what they would choose for themselves.

When a small child investigates an object, one of the moves he always makes is to hold it out to the adult. This is our chance to play the game of give and take. Take it. Say “Thank you, for the spoon,” and give it back. When they can talk, they will say “Thank you,” too.

Rather than trying to “teach” children empathy we would do better to act as if we know they are already wired for it, see our homes are hotbeds of empathy and give them opportunities to put their empathy into action—like, say, asking them for help. We also know that children rise (or fall) to our expectations of them. It would be smart to assume they care about others and are working on the never-ending task of understanding other points of view.

Our culture gets in the way here. So steeped are we in seeing the individual as self-determining, self-serving, and self-maximizing, that we tend to see children as selfish. But children know what many adults in our culture often forget: the happiness of others is inextricably connected to our own. By the time children walk in the door of a kindergarten classroom they have been practicing the art of harmonizing their own needs, wants and interests with those of others for over 40,000 hours. Talk about an ability! And Beth always counted on it. Her students were always doing things for her, doing things for others, serving the community. Imagine the ambiance.

Self-centered doesn’t have to mean selfish. Some of the happiest children I have seen over the years are those engaged in real work that matters to someone else. Kids are often honored to be asked to take on a grown-up responsibility. My three-year-old grandson’s favorite line is, “I like to work.”

Children want to matter; they want to make a difference; they want to please. They are eager to be admitted into the adult world of work, unless of course the adult understanding of work is distasteful and to be avoided, in which case…duh.

Adults think they are sending children to school (as if to a sweat shop) to learn the three R’s and to climb the ladder of success. Children want to go to school to be with other children, to make friends, to learn more about their capabilities,…and also to learn stuff.  When we honor the genius in children, we find there is plenty of room for a meeting of these two minds.

Technorati Tags: Authority, building character, character, child-rearing, children, conflict, decision making, Discipline, education, Emotional control, Genius, kids, Learning, learning social skills, Parenting, parenting skills, parents, respect, responsibility, slow parenting, teaching, teaching responsibility

 Passover begins this Friday, the first of eight days remembering the process of liberation from enslavement. Last Sunday Christians celebrated Jesus of Nazareth’s triumphant parade into Jerusalem in the hope of liberation from the Romans and the dawning of a new age; this Friday we remember that those hopes were dashed when Jesus died on the cross, and next Sunday we commemorate His triumph, anyway.

In both traditions it is God that gets us out of trouble, and once a year is not too often to be reminded that it is only God (or some such notion) that can get us out of trouble. The very nature of the human brain requires it.

Several years ago the mother of a 5th and 2nd grader came in to talk. She was in the early stages of a divorce and was having a lot of trouble with fifth grader John. About fifteen minutes into her descriptions of unpleasant incidents she said with tears just behind her eyes: “I only want him to be happy.”

“That is probably not a realistic objective right now,” I said.

She actually appreciated the truth. It was understandable that John was unhappy, and he had a perfect right to be unhappy. His parents were going through a divorce, for heaven’s sake.

But my statement has general validity, too. It is completely understandable for parents to want their children to be happy, but it is not particularly constructive as a goal. In fact, it is self-defeating. The pursuit of happiness makes happiness increasingly elusive.

In fact, all of our pursuits: happiness, freedom, success, a good life for our children—you name it—are likely to be elusive if we rely on ourselves. The freedom we need is liberation from the bounds of our own consciousness.

Martha, age 30, has been a writer ever since she started making books in pre-school. Through grade school her writing was often read to the class as exemplary or put on bulletin board. In eighth grade she was the editor-in-chief of the class newspaper, got A’s in English and all her other papers, majored in English at Columbia University, wrote for various publications during and after college, and after several short stories, is working on her first novel.

Not only is she accomplished, but also a nice person with many friends, a boy friend and good relationships with her parents who think she is great, because, well, objectively speaking she is.

However, Martha called me in desperation. She is in her last semester in graduate school, has been working on her thesis for over year, the deadline is looming, she is going to New Guinea in a week on an assignment, and can’t finish her final project. She is confronted with impending failure. She sounded suicidal. This self-confident, successful person is stuck.

Her self-confidence is well founded, but where did it go? For those whose life has been mostly successful, failure is always lurking.

Martha has been creating a self for thirty years, and even though it is a fabrication based on fact, it is a fabrication, nonetheless, and there is a voice inside her that speaks for the entirety of her thirty years of experience—not just the part of that experience she is aware of. That voice knows that for all she knows there are mountains that she doesn’t know. That voice knows about her limitations and knows what she of course never really wants to face; i.e. failure is always an option. Her brain has constructed a fiction in the course of the last 30 years called “Self;” a voice inside her knows this self and is terrified.

To console Martha I said many things, most of which she had an argument for. My brain was going: “Not helping, not helping,” until finally I said, “Self-confidence is not knowing that you will succeed, it is knowing that you can’t fail.” She got it right away and laughed. How can I have that kind of self-confidence if I have never experienced failure? Her laughter freed her from herself, at least long enough to take her through the rest of the week.

There can be no liberation from the Egyptians if we insist on leavened bread. There can be no new age, if can’t face our tried-and-true selves dying. To be free a self must die. I recommend killing it as often as you can. Your self is such a pathetic creature compared to the fullness of you.

Technorati Tags: building character, character, child-rearing, conflict, education, Learning, overparenting, Parenting, parenting skills, parents, teaching

Even though parents and teachers are both educators, things will work better if parents and teachers play different roles. A year ago Lorrie Soria told the following story in a comment on one of my posts about homework. I read it again this morning and decided it stands on its own two feet as a great story about “playing position.”

Years ago, when my daughter was in 3rd grade, homework was indeed a struggle. After one particularly grueling go-around, I mentioned the struggle to my daughter’s teacher. She told me to make sure my daughter had a suitable place to study, a set amount of time in which to do so, and all the requisite materials. She suggested I set a timer, be close by to offer assistance, let my child know I was there, and then make myself scarce. At the end of the time allotted on the timer, I was to have my child put her homework away. If it was done, it was done; if not, then my child could discuss the issue with her teacher the next day. Her philosophy was that if my daughter couldn’t finish her homework within the amount of time then either my daughter didn’t understand the assignment, there was too much assigned, or she had not spent her time wisely. Ms. M. told me that she’d figure it out so it wouldn’t be a battleground at home.

Well, that afternoon, I set my daughter up at the kitchen table with all her materials and books, offered help (which was declined), let her know I’d be in the next room if she needed help after all, set the timer, and then left her to it. When the timer went off, I went in to clear the kitchen table for dinner. My daughter had barely done anything, and when I asked her to clear things up, she got upset. I told her calmly what Ms. M had said – either she had too much work, didn’t understand what she needed to do, or hadn’t used her time properly. In either case, I told my child, Ms. M. needed to know what was going on. If there was too much work, she needed to know so she could adjust the amount. If my daughter didn’t understand what needed doing, Ms. M would explain it to her again. If she hadn’t used her time wisely, well, she could do her homework the next day at recess time.
Faced with the options, my daughter begged for another chance to do her homework after dinner, and explained that she did know how to do her work, but didn’t want to sit for so long to do it. However, she didn’t want to have to sit during recess the next day, so if I’d give her another chance, she’d do what she needed to do. I asked her to clear up, help me set the table, and we’d see how things went after dinner.

After dinner, she went, of her own accord, grabbed her materials and books and sat down at the kitchen table to work on her homework. In a relatively short span of time (certainly less than she’d spent earlier), her work was done, and done well. I told her how proud I was that she’d taken responsibility for getting the work done, while secretly blessing this wise young teacher for handing me a solution that took the battle out of homework.

After that afternoon, any time there was homework fuss, for her or for our son, we simply moved to put the homework away. If there was indeed a question, it surfaced at that time, and assistance was either given or a note was written to the teacher requesting additional help. If there was no question, but the kids felt they had just had enough studying for one day, they knew they’d face the consequence the next day. Because there were no battle lines drawn, the policy opened a number of wonderful conversations about such things as the importance of homework and responsibility, self-esteem, intelligence, and the future applications of XYZ subject (fill in geometry, Civil War battle names, etc.).

When I became a teacher, I offered the same advice to my parents and students, with similar results. It continues to be one of my favorite discussion topics.

Thank you, again, Lorrie. Nice illustration of “genius” Principle F: When you care more about it than your child, it absolves the child of responsibility.

Technorati Tags: Authority, building character, character, child-rearing, conflict, decision making, Discipline, education, Learning, overparenting, Parenting, parenting skills, parents, responsibility, teaching, teaching responsibility

Last week I saw 25 kindergarteners walking through the hallway of a school, each with a 4×6 notebook in one hand and a pencil in the other. They flooded slowly along quite naturally, heads turning left and right, eyes going up and down, and all with studious expressions on their faces. Looking, looking, looking. Every onceinawhile one would jot something down.

I asked one boy what he was doing, and he said, “We are looking at the world with our poet eyes.”

“Wow, that’s cool,” I said. “What does that mean, though.”

“It means to see normal things in a new way.”

“Oh, that’s really cool.”

I asked a girl what she had written, and she read from her notebook: “You skitter and you scatter, and it’s fun to play today.”

I love to watch education in action, a teacher who knows that her job is to teach the disciplines of the infinitely challenging process of changing a mind. Knowing how to see “normal things” in a new ways…

in today’s world,….

Heck, no. This has always been important. It’s actually the core challenge of being human. Changing our brains is the name of our game.

I am happy to see it happening all over, too. Sarah Elizabeth Ippel‘s latest inspiring talk is now up on YouTube.

A living vision of what education can, should and does look like all in one 17 minute talk! Do you agree? If so, pass it on. Make a couple-million people see education in a new way.

Technorati Tags: Authority, building character, character, children, decision making, education, Genius, kids, Learning, learning to read, school reform, teaching, teaching responsibility

Still face experiments demonstrate the importance of babies’ attachment to their parents. The video below portrays the natural human process of attachment between a baby and mother, and then the effects of non-responsiveness on the part of the mother.

At the mere suggestion that you are about to watch a mother being unresponsive to a child you feel revulsion even before you click “play.”

Then as you watch it and delight in the wonderful interaction between mother and baby, neurons are firing in the same parts of your brain as in the mother’s (your mirror neurons at work), and oxytocin is coursing through your body. We are wired this way.  Empathy, relationships, responsiveness, interaction…we call it love, and it is. Then, when the mother becomes still-faced, you immediately feel the pain of both the child and the mother.

But is this about attachment or something else?

One of the beauties of the scientific process is that experimenters sometimes set out looking for one thing and uncover another. I think this is one of those times.

While the video shows the importance of mother-child attachment, it also reveals something else of vital importance to parents and all other educators. Watch it again. Is the baby experiencing a loss of attachment or a loss of agency?

When the experimenter says that the baby “uses all of her abilities to try to get the mother back,” that is poetic rather than scientifically precise language. The mother is still there. Perhaps the child’s distress is the frustration of no longer having an effect on the mother rather than her “loss.” Smiling, beguiling faces, pointing, reaching, clapping, whining, even screeching…all her tried-and-true methods no longer work. She had power; then she lost it. Do we detect the baby trying to think up something new to do to get the mother to react? Maybe the baby is experiencing powerlessness.

Attachment experiments going all the way back to Harry Harlow’s rhesus monkeys show that babies attach—they even attach to abusive surrogate parents, so great is the need for contact. Parental love is good, AND the form that love takes matters. I would suggest that the greatest loss, when the mother goes still-faced, is the child’s sense of efficacy.

The need to know that you can get what you want, that you can create, that you are not powerless in the world—let’s call it the “need for agency”—this is a big need. The truth of this doesn’t even require research or a video. Each of us begins to discover where our power lies and where it doesn’t early in life; then we spend the rest of our lives learning how to use it and grow it. Toddlers are powered from within and communicate,  “Self do it!” with their whole complicated selves. My three-year-old grandson’s favorite line is, “I like to work.” Helping someone else is one of his great loves, and this inclination is basic to three-year-olds.

The reason this is worth mentioning is that it seems to be forgotten when it’s time for school. In general school is not understood as a place for you to continue to practice your agency: making things, making friends, making books, solving problems, making a difference. All too often school is waiting patiently—in silence–for the adults to do things to you so you can make them feel efficacious. (And if you don’t make them feel efficacious, it’s your fault and they start diagnosing you.) When kids drop out, maybe they are on to something: “Sorry guys. I am off to seek my fortune.”

Look at the video again. Look at the pain on that one-year-old’s face when she tries to communicate and fails. Let’s imagine this baby four years later. She is about to walk into her first kindergarten on her own. By now she has been experiencing herself as an agent in the world for about 20,000 waking hours. How will she reply when her mother asks her, “How was your first week of kindergarten, Pumpkin?” Will it be “Boy, I love school. I get to do so many cool things!” Or will she say, as Emily did last September, “Kindergarten is a waste of time. I can’t write; I can’t read; and they won’t let me talk.”

Most teachers do not  “still-face” a child, but all too many schools create the conditions in which the child gets still-faced.

Technorati Tags: building character, child-rearing, children, education, Emotional control, kids, learning social skills, Parenting, parenting skills, parents, respect, school reform, teaching, teaching responsibility