I’ve heard from many parents who dream of planting their children in community. Like them, maybe you too have raised your head and looked around and seen nothing but fragments of a village, shards of a tribe, threads of an ancestral tapestry. You think at times of moving your family to where community seems more […]
gardener
Validation is a fertilizer
Timely validation helps our child master herself. When we notice that she can now safely handle a knife, we help her integrate this new skill. When we decide our child can now cross the street on his own, he gets to practice his increased capacity for autonomy. Validation is a timely fertilization of emergent growth […]
Too much support for the sapling topples the tree
A newly planted sapling needs stakes to support it against strong winds. If you leave the stakes in too long, though, the tree suffers. It grows taller, but its roots don’t spread. When the stakes are removed, the tree is thin and weak, and breaks or falls in the first storm. Too many stakes prevent […]
Raise your child inside a walled garden
Mythology is rich with stories of a walled garden. Inside there are treasured plants, a verdant richness, great beauty and solace. Outside of the walls there is all that is untended, unlimited and beyond our influence. As parents it helps to be mindful of the walls we build around our children. They need us to […]
Every family needs a gardener
Every family is an ecosystem to itself, a vegetable bed set in a larger landscape of great mosaic beauty. This fertile soil in which our children grow is a complex, wondrous, wobbling weave of ancestry, biology, spirit, life stages, genders, roles, grief and losses, professions, passions, dreams, possibilities. It is so vast even in its […]