Feeling more open and hopeful for burrow season to go well and be more pleasant than the years before, with just a few clicks I have opened the flood gates to autumn content come crashing into me. Hello girlies, hello pumpkin patches, hello autumn outfits and plastic decorations. Autumn has long been commodified, selling us back the feeling of the season through colors, real wool, real leather, and cinnamon scented candlelight. Even the simplest of pleasures, walking through fallen leaves calls for the right sweater, right socks above the right boots and right beanies on our aesthetics-conked little heads.

Nothing new there, only that the advertising is getting slicker and sicker than ever (thanks AI), and we are more vulnerable and susceptible to fall proxies than ever before.

The cozy fall objects are a shortcut to the feeling of being safe, warm, and enclosed from the dark and cold happening outside. Winter used to be incredibly dangerous and preparations for it in form of food and warmth were the difference between life and death. Wool, real leather, the candle flame and spiced foods, all of the sensory signals invoke our ancient memory of provision and protection. Our unconscious mind still reads these cues as a signal of safety, even now, when the danger of starvation and freezing is mostly gone. They sell us the objects that trigger the signal, knowing that the signal will briefly feel like the thing itself.

But that’s it. It’s very brief. And then you need another object, and another to trigger the feeling, and before you know it, the season has become a shopping list. I won’t be surprised if we come up with autumn-inspired haircut trends. 40 stunning auburn hairstyles for your perfect cinnamon season! We all need a right version of autumn loving persona, get yours for 30% off before we get to the winter slump! Link in bio.

And through the urges and shopping frenzy, the actual thrill of cold air, and the actual pleasure of looking at colorful leaves and the warmth of actual people around us go less noticed because we are too busy trying to buy the feeling that we can, um, get for free.

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I know all of this, and I still can’t quite resist the anticipation. All the people around me are getting excited for the same reason, talking about pumpkin carving and Halloween costumes. It’s absurdly early, though we have been having cold mornings recently, and they smell like autumn. After the excitement and movement of the summer (we’ve been camping every weekend, and I feel I spent half the summer just packing and unpacking), I crave a weekend at home, sleeping in my bed.

So just to appease my mind, my imaginary shopping list of October proxies would look something like this:

rust sweater: $80, button down skirt: $70, booties: $90, wool socks:$25, leather bag $100, plaid scarf: $30

total: around $500

Excuse me, maybe I should rather buy $500 worth of pumpkin muffins to stay plump through the winter. Perhaps I’ll settle for a $5 mug and a coloring book.

I do plan to buy more yarn to knit a few beanies for the family, which I will have to line with fleece (cause cold sweater weather here lasts a good 7 months, people!). That’s the kind of purchase that will bring me joy and feelings of safety and warmth, not to mention hours of meditation while I knit and watch the kids play. There is nothing quite like sitting on the floor doing something of my own, chatting and getting immersed into their imaginary worlds while not actually having to participate in the pretend game. I might sew my daughter another dress like this one I made three years ago, if she’d like, and if I find the fabric. So If I do buy some stuff, it will be things that help me make beautiful things.

But how will my October, full of gray days and muddy shoes and kids refusing to wear rain pants hold up against the amber-lit, lace-booted, latte-in-hand version of October? How do I make my real life October with children not disappoint?

There must be a reckoning that my day and my life is very different than latte-girlies who can push their contented babies in the stroller without them trying to fall out or eat their own mittens. Reality, people! Is it possible to sit by the backyard fire pit and enjoy the warmth and glow? Yes. Is it possible to sit by the backyard fire pit and enjoy the warmth and glow without a kid persistently trying to poke and prod the fire with a stick and might, in a moment of inattention, start a wildfire? Probably not.

Once again, kids play a big role in bringing us back to reality and into presence. Days can be a little calmer now, if the kids run and play for hours outside and come in all wet and dirty and tired. Then we can all pile on the sofa and read together, embodying the warmth and gathering even thought they don’t understand the concept of cozy evenings. I’ll try to remember that pumpkin spiced latte is actually too sweet for my taste (I seem to get so excited that I forget this every year), and that I prefer my own homemade, unsweetened spiced concoction. A joy in every sip. I’m growing small decorative pumpkins in the garden, I hope they grow well because my little one names them, and pets them, and carries them around until they start rotting. There will be baking. I make mean cinnamon buns any day of the year, but they are more satisfying in cold months, and they will smell just as amazing whether I am wearing a rust colored sweater or my husband’s old blue hoodie.

Autumn is generous to the senses, offering up the colors and deep pleasures of fragrances and warmth. It’s only natural that we want to mark it, savor it, celebrate it, gather our people close and prepare for the colder times ahead. We just need to find a way to invite our senses to appreciate all that is already here.

For the love of October,

Aleksandra

P.S. Stay tuned for a follow up post with recipes, fall cleaning, book recs and more.

P.P.S. You might like to read about how different the fall season was in my childhood in the post below.

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Hank the cactus is very prickly, he doesn’t like noise or intrusion. He ignores the cheerful tumbleweed, frightens a tortoise and lashes out at others. Finally, left alone, he begins to realize that he’s getting lonely. And that if he’d like that hug, he has to change his ways.

There is much talk about respecting children’s feelings, their needs, their sensitivities, about inclusion and accommodation, all good and true. But sometimes we are too polite to make an observation directly: some kids are just hard to be around. It is much easier to assume that some of the social difficulties children come upon are a fault of other children’s cliquishness, school bullies or higher level intellectualism that makes it hard to connect to peers. Sometimes, in a very small number of cases, this could be true. Largely, it is far more likely that the child simply isn’t being pleasant enough, cooperative enough, generous enough or socially aware enough to make for a preferred playmate. That they simply aren’t good company yet, and need some help to get there. My child certainly did.

Hank didn’t understand how his preference for peace and quiet was expressed in a very hostile manner and that it gradually acted as a deterrent to others. Many kids are in the exactly same position, craving friendship but largely unaware of what they’re doing that is pushing other kids away.

A lot of parenting advice emphasizes accepting children exactly as they are, and obviously, we don’t want them to cater their personality to our preferences. But, as I’ve said before, there is a difference between accepting a child as they are and avoiding the work of guiding them. Our children could be wonderfully imaginative, intellectually curious, intense, exceptionally talented, and still sort of repel other kids. We don’t want to teach our children that they should be people-pleasers and to mold so that everybody likes them, we want them to understand how their behavior affects others around them.

The first thing we set out to improve is noticing other people and their reactions. Paying attention to other children’s (and adults’) facial expressions, what they said, what they did. It sounds so basic because a lot of children pick up on it effortlessly and unconsciously, but for others, this must be pointed out and practiced consciously, repeatedly. It all goes towards understanding that other kids might have other preferences and ideas that need to be taken into account. Don’t take me wrong, this is still an ongoing endeavor. A few days ago I had to explain to my kid that the kid he was playing with at the lake was making a polite excuse in order to go away from him, because my son was hogging the floatie for too long. He was oblivious to what had happened, but understood it later after I explained.

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The second and the longest was something we’ve been working on behind the scenes for such a long, long time: getting him used to not getting his way all the time. Accepting a no, entertaining himself while waiting, losing at board games until he could take it with grace, not expecting swift justice from his mom and dad for every grievance he had with his sister or another child. This one actually does get better on it’s own as kids grow older and mature, but only with enough frustration and friction along the way. Which, by the way, normally is and should be mostly absorbed by parents during the learning process. If we delay this and we shift the absorbing entirely onto other children, then their friends will find it exhausting to play or spend time near them.

Nobody is entitled to receive friendship on account of being a wonderful person. Friendship needs reciprocity. So children need to learn to reciprocate and to be curious about others, to expand their view beyond themselves. Children who are interested in other children will be interesting to be around. Remembering what a friend said, what they liked or thought was funny will give them plenty to go on in creating bonds with others. A friend of my kid’s only ever wanted to play at his home, and never at ours and my kid found that pretty unfair. It was easy to understand reciprocity from there.

I don’t like to praise my children for ordinary behavior or ordinary skills. In my view, overpraise does not go towards boosting self-esteem, it goes towards ego-inflation. I call upon my children (and everything else in my life) to be realistic. If I convince my kids they are exceptionally brilliant, talented and wonderful at everything, then how will they take constructive criticism of their idealized, idolized self? How will they take correction when it comes from a peer? It’s going to be really hard, and it might just lead to deflecting. If the kid has grown accustomed of seeing themselves in a certain way (because they’ve been encouraged to see themselves in this way), then an abrupt criticism will feel like a threat, something to deflect, dismiss or blame on another. It’s a hard road from there on.

Peer feedback has such an important role because it’s an entirely different thing than a correction coming from a parent. It’s an unfiltered, real world message that carries social weight and implications for a kid since a friend is not your parent and the relationship does not function on the basis of unconditional love. So when my kid heard form another “You’re shouting at me, I don’t want to play like that!”, he had to reconsider his attitude if he wanted to keep playing. Hear this from enough kids and you get the message. Hear your parents agree that your voice is to angry and shouty (instead of, idk, “who needs them, there is plenty of other kids to play with, don’t worry”) and it is something your kid will now actively work on.

It really does all start at home, and home is the first practice ground. This is where they will first learn to be considerate of other’s needs and preferences, moods and opinions. Family life is one of mutual consideration, not one of doing everything in your power to not provoke a disagreement with your child. If they aren’t accustomed to considering others at home, they will bring the same lack of consideration to the playground as well.

That said, I do not invite negotiation into the parent-child dynamic. Negotiation is for siblings and peers, yet another example why access to other children and free, unorganized play is important. They can negotiate because they share the same territory with roughly equivalent standing. Parents can hear the child out, consider their position (and sometimes have the child’s point change their stand) without inviting negotiation. I will think about that and then decide, is what I usually say and do. The cognitive and emotional labor belongs to me. That is, until the children are mature enough to take some of it upon themselves.

Hank, the prickly cactus, realized he will not receive connection with others until he can be someone others want to come toward. I think it is a lesson full of hope, to realize there are steps you can take, things you can change to get a fair chance at friendship. It isn’t easy, but is still much easier to build the skills and habits in a younger child than to have to unlearn and change the whole worldview of an older child. My temperamental child is still a temperamental child, but nowdays with enough social skills to maintain friendships, to initiate repair after rupture, to understand what is fair to expect in a game.

With love,

Aleksandra

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I also had a sense that, if my home was filled with somewhat culturally precious, or moneywise valuable objects, my children would not be able to play in the home freely for fear of not damaging anything, that they would feel like the home is a museum (don’t touch that, look with your eyes only!). I certainly felt like that whenever I visited my friend’s mother’s beautifully decorated home. Precious decorative items everywhere. I almost tripped over a brass rhinoceros, and knocked down an empty vase.

And yet. I light up when I see a colorful space in front of me, and delight in eclectic attire, and would cradle every beautifully painted piece of porcelain I find. More than anything, I like making beautiful stuff, whether sewing clothes, crocheting cactuses and doilies, knitting sweaters, making dreamcatchers, painting mugs or growing a garden. Beauty tugs at me like hunger.

So somehow, pragmatism and love of beauty exist within me at the same time, and I no longer see them as opposites. They only felt like opposites because we’ve categorized beauty as something elective, decorative, optional. As a preference instead of a principle of life.

When I was in my friend’s mother’s home, every object was carefully arranged, delicate and ready to be admired. It was really all about display. It was protected from us, rather than used and enjoyed. I don’t know how much she really loved those wooden giraffes that seemed like they could fall over from a gentle breeze of someone walking past them, I certainly never caught her gaze lingering on them. It was a very tasteful arrangement of objects, but I am not so sure that it was an expression of her mom’s taste. So this kind of beauty seems to be keeping life at a distance and I don’t like that. I never felt comfortable there, and I am sure no child could leave that living room without being scolded a million times, and probably would break a lot of things too. Not my cup of beauty, no.

For me, beauty is the opposite, it invites life. It should be touched, used, worn, eaten off, sat on. I’m thinking of my son as a toddler playing with the curtain tassels, the giggles as the soft, silky threads glide across his fingers. A flick of joy my painted mug brings in the morning when I sip my coffee from it. The feathers of the dreamcatcher I made swaying all in a row as the fan blows through the room. The birthday cakes I made and decorated with fondant figurines. I cut them up into bits and all the children got to eat a piece of the mad scientist, sea turtle, Dogman, Petey. The woolen sweater my mom and I made together, each one knitting a few rows when the other one was busy. It kept me warm and it kept the feeling of my mother’s closeness.

I love to sew, so people assume I am really into fashion. I am actually not. Fashion for me means following trends, not chasing beauty. I see trends as a status signal, more than anything else. They tell us what people around us currently value and they shift as social hierarchies shift. Lately, they are manufactured on a retailer’s whim, and utterly nonsensical (proudly never owned a Stanley cup). Truly beautiful things cannot be all the rage one day and basically garbage the next.

So why do we skirt beauty so often in our lives?

Perhaps beauty is not efficient as we would like it to be. Making something beautiful doesn’t give a clean revenue in return. It takes, time, time that could be used for something more useful, time that we no longer have since our modern lives are so atomized, it’s nearly impossible to satisfy our needs, and we feel we cannot add another item to pursue. It is, in many ways, a luxury or at least something to get to once the real work is done (it never is though). I think this is a relatively recent, historically unusual position, coming down from productivity and consumerism culture the most.

We buy everything now, so we buy beauty too, or at least we think we do. And if not buy, then we consume images of beauty. Pinterest and Instagram are full of beautiful things that exist to be looked that, but you can’t touch it over the screen, can’t smell it, can’t live inside it. Consuming beauty this way is to what watching cooking videos is to cooking. It makes you hungry but never fed.

When beautiful garments became so conflated with fashion it became expensive and temporary, and then it went in a totally opposite direction, becoming cheap and utterly frivolous. Trends cannot reflect beauty, they are a commercialized imitation.

Ancient philosophers and theologians saw that striving towards beauty was transformative. As people try to make beautiful things, they are led to true things. And as they comprehend the true things they are drawn towards goodness. When I want to sew a birthday dress for my daughter, I will do so with care. I will not take shortcuts, and I will attend to it meticulously. I will design and measure, and think through the proportion, color, stitches to use, and I will learn truth about what works and what does not. And all of that will produce goodness, in the oldest sense, something that fulfills its purpose beautifully, something that is right.

I wonder if passionate accountants see their spreadsheets this way, too.

This is why I value making things and this is what I try to make my kids understand. Relationship to beauty is different when you are the maker. Making something by hand needs patience and persisting until you reach the image you had in your mind at the beginning. This is why it satisfies your soul so deeply, something that frivolous purchase of a beautiful object cannot do. It is, in the most literal sense, a life given form.

Fortunately for all of us, there are many ways to make beauty become a part of how the household functions, how things are made, used, cared for and noticed, by us and by our children. I’ll give a few practical ways that guide my thinking towards this goal:

1. I encourage children to participate in making their home beautiful and bear some responsibility for it. My four year old can fold napkins for dinner, choose where to hang up her art, and how to arrange the chocolate sprinkles on the coffee cake. My eight year old can arrange and rearrange the toy corners and shelves, and make small repairs such as gluing the edge of the night table or a broken toy. This kid has a favorite wrench, and I as well consider it a beautiful wrench. It’s a plain black handle wrench but it’s beautiful because it’s so easy to grip and does its job so extremely well.

2. Think beautiful rituals not just beautiful stuff. I love the sound of rain, and I always open the windows to hear it better. Now my kids open them alone every time the pitter-patter starts. We will not walk past a peony without trying to smell its sweet scent. We walk the neighborhood every December to see the holiday decoration and have hot chocolate after.

3. Have beautiful objects for everyday use.

   I choose the things we will use a lot with some care and opt for vibrant colors whenever I can. Children have beautiful objects that are used on the regular, instead of saved in the closet. I’m talking colorful cereal bowls, flower themed roll out pencil case, their choice of print on their shorts. I still remember my special plate with Bambi that I used as a kid. Beautiful things don’t necessarily need to be precious things or to be protected from life.

4. I try to choose or make visually interesting but physically forgiving things. I had sewed a snail for my kids, and it had been played with for great many years, now it is a little shabby and fit for repair, but very much still in use. So the best guidance is: beautiful enough to delight kids and sturdy enough to survive them.

5. I don’t like the no touching policy in the home, because I want to touch and feel things. Of course, I will not be putting breakable glass figurines on the coffee table and expect them to not get broken by a toddler, things have a time and a place. But with age, kids can understand that delicate things need a soft touch. And that the feathers on a dreamcatcher, once in reach, can be patted but not pulled at.

The most beautiful things I have in my surroundings tend to also be the most useful. The things that I made and surrounded myself by are made with attention and some pride which made them beautiful by default.

Our homes can be practical and also filled with beauty because beauty should be embedded into ordinary life instead of added on. They can be a place where children can play freely, where they don’t have to live in fear of a taking a wrong step and toppling things over, ruining the display. They can also be places where children learn that their mom made this, and they’ve watched her spend many hours doing it, so they should handle it gently and with care. And perhaps, one day, they can make one like that by themselves.

With love, Aleksandra

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After those two weeks, we had been able to properly surrender to July.

There has been smoke in the air from the forest fires, and we’ve unexpectedly been spending a lot of time indoors. During this time, my son got into playing chess, and so a few days were very intensely all about that. I’ve quite enjoyed brushing up on my (very basic) skills and losing to my husband’s obviously superior tactic. I find this light, competitive banter between spouses a great joy and a spark to drive me to better this particular skill. Most adult relationships accumulate a division of competencies where you're good at this, I handle that, and we each stay in our lanes. It's efficient and it works. But the danger here is that we sort of calcify and stop discovering new things about each other because we already know who knows what.

In chess, I get to be a beginner in front of someone who knows me as a capable adult. It’s vulnerable and intimate in a playful way. I can be bad at something in front of my spouse, and it’s rather funny. It’s a beautiful motivator, that my admiration creates aspiration, and that he selflessly shares his knowledge with me.

We recently watched the movie Sheep Detectives and found it entertaining. It was more enjoyable for the kids since they can easily get past the Hollywood plot machinery. They haven’t yet watched enough films to recognize the usual gimmicks of twist villain, the detective genre conventions, the resolution, which is what the book that the movie was based on parodies. Three Bags Full by Leonie Swann is a gem. The writer created a sustained thought experiment about what the world looks like before we learn to put everything into categories. Sheep have no labels for most of what they observe, they misunderstand the strange things humans say and do, their comments and reasonings are often hilarious, but they also stumble into surprising insights.. And from that position they solve a murder that the humans, with all their knowledge and category systems and social assumptions, completely miss. I hadn’t finished listening to the book yet, but Josephine Bailey’s whimsical narration makes it an experience worth repeating.

The campsite we’ve been visiting has daily programs for children. It’s engaging and informative, and they’ve been catching and identifying spiders, birds, touching snakes and frogs, getting familiar with famous pirates and navigating maps.

What’s been most enjoyable about this is that I can now just send the kids to the camp amphitheater when they want to attend a program. I do not have to schlepp them to and from, because I can trust my son to know the way, to take care of his sister and bring her back to me if necessary. He got a taste for freedom of movement that is nearly impossible to replicate where we live. This has been a huge benefit of camping that has nothing to do with nature itself. It’s helping him build competence through learning to orient himself, solve small problems, and practice with some real-time responsibility. We’re facing one of the great paradoxes of modern parenting where we worry so much about children's safety that we deprive them of the very experiences that teach them how to become capable and confident. The contained risks and walkable spaces of a campground had therefore been a real gift.

We are able to push bedtime a little farther without meltdowns the next day (the perk of kids getting bigger) and had been able to spot some fireflies. My little one was scared! The buzz (one was stuck in grass and couldn’t brake free) and the light terrified her, but the older one was delighted. Tried to catch them, couldn’t.

I’ve done most of the stargazing by myself, all alone on the lake shore, and I’ve realized that: 1) It’s incredibly beautiful. The lake, the trees, the darkness, the endless stretch of stars above me all create this strange feeling of vastness that makes me feel like I am in this particular place with a reason I might never comprehend. It made me wonder about all the unlikely events and all the decision I had made that brought me to this exact place and moment. I felt so deeply connected to the people in my life, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else or anyone else; 2) That, maybe, I need glasses. Or, perhaps, the mysteries of cosmos were meant to stay slightly out of focus.

Summer weather has been intense, with lots of heatwaves, storms and squalls, that made for some freaky-deaky zucchinis in our little garden patch.

It is perfect so far for practicing the outdoor equipment setup. We have to get the big heavy tarp up or else we get drenched. I cannot tell you how much fun a kid can have with tossing a bottle tied to the rope, trying to loop the rope around a branch. He’s mastered the bowline knot and uses it extensively. Unfortunately, he also runs around all the time, and he finally managed to run into a rope that was holding the hammock and scrape his neck really badly. Now he looks like he narrowly survived a medieval execution, and I’m scared he's going to inspire a call to Child Protective Services the next time we stop for groceries.

I’ve hadn’t anticipated that this summer will be a difficult season for writing. Everything is bright, alive, we are full of movement. The days are long, the world is outside waiting for us, and I can’t seem to be able to sit still long enough to wrestle with thoughts. There are just too many children asking me to come look at something amazing they found. There is no room for existential reflection when dog is trying to eat a frog, the leg sticking out of his mouth, and the noises he’s making are having us scream with laughter. Also, I don’t think the summer wants to be written about while it’s still happening.

With love,

Aleksandra

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My mom lived in a different city, my dad was off living in his brand new house with his wife and a couple of kids and a couple of newborns. He did buy the wood and coal for us, but the rest was on me. I tend to not think of it much. I can’t say I didn’t enjoy the swing of an ax, the way my muscles and my coordination worked together to achieve precision as tiny pieces of kindling fell down. I can’t say it was easy work, though even gym obsessed high school boys would compliment my toned arms. But the cold was a tangible, physical kind of discomfort that had a clear, fail-proof path toward resolution, relief, a biological elegance to it. Much different to the kind of discomfort we find ourselves feeling these days.

Psychological discomfort doesn't work this way. Anxiety, restlessness, loneliness, disconnection, dissociation, meaninglessness, the low-grade hum of feeling vaguely off have no address. There's no wood to split, no stove to feed, no external deficit that can be resolved the way we'd resolve physical discomfort. They're pointing inward. Yet, they feel like physical discomfort: urgent, unpleasant, demanding relief, and we try to treat them the same way. We reach outward for a solution to something that pains us on the inside.

I feel it often. The urge to go to HomeSense and get some beautiful new decor, as if orange flower pots might finally let me see my life for the beautiful that it is. The desire to throw away half of my family's belongings, thinking it will expand my lungs enough to take a full breath. The urge to put on a movie instead of discussing the difficult thing with my spouse. We reach for consumption, convenience and distraction. And the reach feels productive, feels like doing something, which is part of why it’s so hard to stop.

The solution we reach for is external and temporary. Consume and distract, feel briefly relieved. When discomfort returns, ever magnified, do it again. Wrong strategy applied to the wrong problem, over and over, with increasing sophistication.

Our children are introduced to this loop so early on, before they've had any chance to develop the internal resources that might address what's on the inside.

The solution to an internal feeling is usually internal too. Identify it, follow it somewhere. Mildly anxious, mildly restless child, left alone, would do something interesting: it would move. Restlessness into physical energy to be spent, anxiety into a worry that can be examined and addressed, or a fear to be exposed to until it dissolves. Helping our children gain the confidence that an unpleasant internal state won't last forever and doesn't need emergency action is a radically countercultural thing to nurture in a child right now. Everything around them is advertising the opposite.

The ambient anxiety of modern childhood is seen in performance pressure, lack of physical movement, utter self-focus, social complexity, the strange dislocation of growing up partly online and the list is only getting longer. Children are carrying more internal discomfort than previous generations with far less practice tolerating discomfort at all. What they will learn and repeat is influenced by what the adults around them are doing.

Will I indulge and speed off to a store to spend the money I don’t really have on things that I think will make me feel calm and happy? Or will I sit at the sewing machine and start creating something beautiful and lasting? Will I rage-clean or take a walk in the rain and come back to a warm, dry home and feel like the luckiest person in the world? Will I purge possessions or take my favorite mug and make a hot cup of coffee and be relieved that I can sit and enjoy it because the kids are playing by themselves with the lot of toys all around? Will I get over my fears of uncertainty and not wanting to hear things that I disagree with, because I know the only way forward is to compromise and strategize together? The better I get at noticing where my escape routes will not be leading me, the better I get at choosing more wisely. Will I numb or will I live? Will I flee or will I find, in myself, enough to wait it out?

Go chop some wood, Aleksandra.

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I don’t think they were repelled by the thought of the woods, the bears, the lack of electrical appliances, or even the absence of online entertainment.

“What are you going to do there?”

We had mapped out a variety of challenging hikes, nature center visit, beach lounging, biking trails and such. And in between those, the kids ( and parents) are expected to just entertain themselves. That’s the beauty of cultivating tolerance for low stimulation.

My children did not emerge from the womb happily gazing at clouds for hours (they still don’t). We had a fair share of practice and adjustment to the idea that absence of entertainment is an opening rather than a deprivation. So I stand firm that one of the greatest gifts we can give children is the ability to be comfortable with nothing much happening around them. And it isn’t just because it gives me room to breathe and relinquish the highly esteemed role of the entertainer.

There is something deeper than simply thinking that kids need less screen time. Developing tolerance for low stimulation helps develop effortful control, which is the ability to regulate attention, resist impulses, and persist with a task even when something more immediately appealing is available. Effortful control is associated with a wide range of positive outcomes, from academic success to healthier relationships and emotional regulation. The challenge is that it is really hard to develop in the environment where every moment of restlessness is quickly relieved or entirely made disappear.

For many of us, effortful control developed almost by accident. There were countless small opportunities to practice patience, entertain ourselves, and persist through activities that were not immediately rewarding. We weren't necessarily more disciplined than today's children; we simply encountered more situations that required an amount of discipline. But modern entertainment is so extremely effective at eliminating such opportunities. Children access novelty, stimulation, and reward at the push of a button and almost endlessly. We have to acknowledgment how powerfully it captures our attention. The result is that effortful control no longer develops quite as naturally as it once did, which makes it all the more important, not less. Because almost all of human flourishing happens on the other side of it.

On the other side of tolerance for low stimulation is imagination.

If not immediately entertained, the mind will begin to generate its own material. Mind-wandering activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, a brain system associated with imagination, reflection, future planning, autobiographical thinking, and creative insight. I wrote more about this in What Does Your Brain Do When You Do Nothing?.

On the other side is concentration.

It’s fairly easy to distinguish between two kinds of attention. The first is involuntary attention which is captured automatically by bright colors, movement, novelty, and rewards. The second is voluntary attention: choosing to stay engaged with something even when it unfolds slowly and isn't immediately exciting. The ability to concentrate deeply, direct our attention voluntarily is the foundation of almost everything meaningful we do. Children who learn to tolerate low-stimulation environments get more opportunities to practice directing their own attention rather than having it constantly involuntarily directed for them.

On the other side is self-knowledge.

Without constant distraction, children begin to notice their own thoughts, interests, and inclinations. They discover what they enjoy rather than simply consuming whatever is offered to them. Curiosity about oneself emerges from within when they have the space to reflect.

On the other side is competence.

Many, if not most, useful skills begin as tedious. Learning to read, cook, fix things, garden, sew, draw, write, or play music involves repetition, mistakes and periods that are not particularly thrilling. Children who can endure low stimulation are better equipped to persist through the early stages of mastery.

On the other side is appreciation.

When every day is exciting, excitement loses its power. How far will we have to go to surprise and excite our kids with an activity? How much excitement kids need anyway? Children who experience ordinary days a plenty are able to find joy in them, and therefore enjoy yet greater delight in special occasions. Anticipation becomes possible, gratitude easier.

On the other side is peace.

Many adults spend years trying to learn how to sit with themselves without reaching immediately for their phone, a podcast, or some other distraction. Children who develop tolerance for quiet and low stimulation are better equipped to simply be with their thoughts and feelings without feeling uncomfortable.

And perhaps most importantly, on the other side is freedom.

Constant stimulation makes us dependent on external sources of satisfaction. But when they’re able to generate interest, meaning, and enjoyment from ordinary life, that makes for an inexhaustible resource to carry within them. They are less vulnerable to boredom, less dependent on entertainment, and more capable of finding richness in the everyday world.

The same world that made low stimulation rare also made it something we now have to choose and work on, build into the architecture of a child's day on purpose. Here is what that looks like, for us, in practice.

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Give the children what they want—they want enough hours of sleep to feel well rested. To have energy to explore and learn, and have a good time of their day.

Give the children what they want—they want to play with a friend. A friend who will come to your backyard to shoot the ball with you after dinner, uninvited.

Give the children what they want—they want to fix the brakes on their bike. To feel the pride and tell everyone they did it themselves, they figured it out, that it wasn’t even hard.

Give the children what they want—they want to make grilled cheese sandwiches. To feed the whole family, and stretch the melted cheese as long as it can go.

Give the children what they want—they want to do nothing sometimes. To lie on the floor and stare at the ceiling, lost in their thoughts, imaginary battles and stars.

Give the children what they want—they want the truth. Their beloved cat died and she’s not coming back. To deal with grief is easier when mom and dad don’t lie.

Give the children what they want—they want something small to look after. A goldfish to feed, a tomato to water, something that needs them to be caring and kind.

Give the children what they want—they want to carry heavy things. Dog’s food bag, the sack of flour, their little sibling, anything that lets their body know it's strong.

Give the children what they want—they want to argue and win sometimes. To make their case, to be taken seriously, to find out their words can sway and change something they care about.

Give the children what they want—they want to walk to the store by themselves. To choose the candy, count out the coins, and swing the bag on the walk home.

Give the children what they want—they want to get dirty. To dig a pit, watch the worms, do things you don’t understand, and then get cleaned for bed.

Give the children what they want—they want to be forgiven. To say something unkind, to fiddle with truth, to think things through and then be given another try.

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Give the children what they want—they want to be surprised. To get caught in the rain on the walk back home, and blanket on the lawn to watch the stars.

Give the children what they want—they want knives that are sharp enough to cut strawberries. To give the tool attention and trust, because capable hands are made, not born.

Give the children what they want—they want to hear grown-ups laugh. To listen from the next room while dinner is cooked and stories are told, knowing home feels good at night.

Give the children what they want—they want to build fires. To gather sticks, blow gently on the ambers, and stare into the flames long after the hot dogs are gone.

Give the children what they want—they want secrets with their sibling. Passwords and clubhouses and whispering of plans that go against mum’s wishes.

Give the children what they want—they want to be looked at with delight. To catch your eye from across the room and see your face brighten. To feel a kiss as they drift to sleep and know everything’s all right.

Give the children what they want—they want their parents to stop looking at them so much. To forget themselves for a while. To play without being photographed, or applauded, and return when they're hungry and all done.

Give the children what they want—they want an adult in charge. Someone sturdy as a rock, against the wind and rain, to lean on, and lead them into life.

Give the children what they want—they want to remember who they are. To see their baby pictures, their earliest drawings, the moments they beamed with pride.

Give the children what they want—they want grandparents with time to spare. To hear the stories again, to shell walnuts slowly, to sit on porches and feel that they belong.

Give the children what they want—they want to know that love does not run out.

With love,

Aleksandra

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Slowly, it comes. And then all at once. The gloom retreats, the mud squelches underfoot, and then one morning the air smells different, warmer and green and full of possibility, and something in the chest unclenches that has been clenched since October. Our summer is earned through months of bleakness, which is why it feels almost sacred, why we spend it so hungrily and then spend the winter holding the memory of it like something we need to keep us warm.

Here are some ways we plan to meet it.

Wake up early enough to see the sunrise on the lake

Set the alarm and walk to the water while the mist is still sitting on the surface, before the heat burns it off. The lake at that hour is still and slightly serious, and I want my children to feel it. We must do it at least once. I have a feeling it will stay with them longer than most things I plan much harder, because I still remember my father waking me up to go and watch the sunrise on the beach with him, taking the first swim of the day in the calm, cool sea.

June’s Strawberry Moon

I hope we’ll be able to see the Strawberry Moon on the evening of June 29 (and overnight into June 30). June’s full moon is one of the lowest-hanging full moons of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, and it’s name comes from the season when wild strawberries ripen. I can’t think of a more fitting companion to early summer. A moon named after berries feels like something from a folktale, the sort of thing children should grow up knowing to look for.

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Spotting peony’s on the lawns

That’s it. Just walking throughout the neighborhood on long June evenings to look at and smell peonies. So far, no neighbor has minded a small girl and her mother appearing uninvited on their lawn to stand very close to their flowers and breathe.

My peonies have sadly been decapitated by the squirrels (all but two, about to bloom for the first time since I planted them, and they are all the more precious now), another victim righter after the tulips. Life is full of hungry critters.

Try to see fireflies at dusk near the lakeside

Firefly populations are dwindling all around the world. I use to see them in the countryside all the time when I was a kid, but I can’t remember seeing any in years. Certainly not near the city. We will try at various campsites, probably in August, when the daylight shortens, and it gets dark around 8pm. Being outside at that specific hour, in the dwindling light, doing something with no practical application at all, something that is only possible for a few weeks a year and only when you are paying close enough attention has its own charm. My childhood summers were full of evenings like this. Adults forget to make room for them.

Press flowers between the pages of book

We pick them on our walks, wildflowers from the edge of the forest, daisies from the lawn, all of what is growing in the garden, and from the flower beds of neighbors who let us. Press them between the heaviest pages an old dictionary I saved from someone’s curb, they beautifully contrast endless definitions of words. Flattened and dry and full of memories, they are a hard proof that summer happened, that these flowers existed and that they will come back.

Pick wild berries and eat half before they reach the basket

This is the correct way to pick berries, ask Sal and the bear. The ones eaten straight from the bush with stained fingers taste way better than the ones that make it into a bowl, sweeter and more temporary, carrying the flavor of summer’s brief abundance. I spied a place by one of camp trails where there will be a lot. Let the children eat too many and complain about it later. The berry-stained afternoon is the memory I carry from my childhood, of wild strawberries on the mountainside, and it’s only fair to pass on the memory to my children.

Watch the birds and learn their names

We know most of birds that nest around our neighborhood, but there is more variety once you move further from the city, especially in the marshy areas. And once we can name life in nature, the forest becomes a more populated and interesting place. A recurring theme in Robin Robin Wall Kimmerer writes that attention leads to affection, and affection leads to responsibility. In other words, learning the names of things is a way to love them because we tend to care for what we know. And I want to know who’s singing!

Tie useful knots from a book of forgotten skills

There is a book I fell in love with called The Handbook of Forgotten Skills by Elaine Batiste, Natalie Crowley and Chris Duriez that belongs in every summer bag. I loved the collection, and learning skills from it is its own reward. My older kid has tried some knots last year, but I think this year he’ll be ready to master and commit them to memory. There is something about working with rope and hands, repeating the motion until it becomes muscle memory, like knitting and crocheting is for me. I know my son will love it, and it will definitely be useful on camping trips. Yes, I am aware they will tie things to other things unnecessarily and I don’t mind too much, because they will feel extremely capable.

Get around the campsite with a compass and a map

GPS has almost entirely replaced our skills of spatial orientation, and it has cost us confidence that comes from knowing your surrounding, and knowing your way from reading the landmarks. Practicing this at the campsites where I am rather familiar with the trails will give the kids the best chance to succeed. It is a small thing and it feels enormous. I can’t wait to watch them take it completely seriously.

Spend weekday evenings after dinner playing in the park with the neighborhood kids

Let the neighborhood children find each other the way children used to find each other, by proximity and availability and the ancient social technology of simply meeting on the playground. The games that emerge from an unstructured summer evening, from not planning playdates riddled with snacks and activities, are different. They have more life, are more creative. No one grabs the chance and make the most of it like kids do.

Make a scrapbook with photos from an instant camera

The digital photograph is convenient and forgettable too. The instant photograph is black and white, imperfect and immediate too. It shifts the focus from achieving flawless to capturing an unexpected moment. My kids use it, badly and enthusiastically. I collect the prints and will be able to look through the scrapbook in February when the grey settles in and the longing arrives again.

Sew a few summer items for my own wardrobe

I really like the feel of linen-rayon blend, it has a particular way of moving in heat that feels like the season itself. It falls around my body without weighing on it, cooling me and letting my skin breathe at the same time, so I’ll be leaning into that. I’ll sew to replace a few items from my own wardrobe, but A-line skorts might be attempted also.

The kitchen does not know this yet

My books with creamy French and Italian dessert recipes are on the way, requested from the library. That feels like the correct way to acquire this kind of knowledge, not a quick search, but an actual book full of someone's knowledge of how to make things properly.

There will be plenty of cherry tomatoes from my tiny, makeshift suburban garden. I’ll be blending them into gazpacho when the heat wipes out everyone’s appetite.

Pretty much everyone has a favorite salad, and I am having way too much fun chopping veggies and greens with my new Santoku. Pasta, rice or quinoa as the base; tuna, shrimp or cheese for additional fortifying protein layer. Mix and match, on repeat.

The lilacs hand the season to the peonies, the peonies to the berries, the berries to the tomatoes, and before long you're looking for the first signs of autumn.

The Great Lakes winter will return all too quickly. But what I carry into it is up to me. So I make the summer heavy with small things to savor that I’ll appreciate the memory of, that will help me carry the warmth close to the heart when the sun is so far from my skin.

Let it leave a mark.

With love,

Aleksandra

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It isn’t easy for a child who is curious, intense, emotionally young to move through a world that has been consistently perceiving him slightly wrong.

The brain sees the size of a kid’s body and makes immediate, automatic calculations about age, capability, and appropriate expectation, subconsciously. It happened to me, his mother, the person who has known him since before he existed. I would catch myself calibrating wrong. He would fall apart over something small and I would feel a flicker of surprise before I caught it, before I reminded myself: he is two. He is two and he looks four. In the early years, this was an ongoing correction that I had to apply to my own instincts regularly. To meet him with patience rather than disappointment. He is younger than he looks, I had to remind myself when feeling the impatience arriving, whenever I found myself expecting more than was fair.

If my expectations could be skewed at the sight of him, what was everyone else experiencing? What was he experiencing, always being judged as older and capable of more?

We have a way with small children that is almost involuntary, the instinctive tenderness that their size produces in the adults around them. Tall children often stop being perceived as little long before they actually stop being little. People stop crouching to them, cooing at them, excusing them, protecting them. So the world withdrew certain forms of gentleness from him early, simply because he no longer looked like someone who needed them.

A little kid in distress will always be instinctively comforted. For a tall kid, it’s different. The size intercepts the compassion before it flows out naturally, usually with a beat of assessment: should they really be this upset, should they cry this much, are they perhaps being a little dramatic? By the time the compassion arrives, if it arrives, it’s had to be reasoned and willed into existence rather than simply felt. And I think kids can always feel it, somewhere below words, that comfort had to be convinced to show up for them.

Sometimes tall children are unusually capable physically or verbally, which confuses everyone further. The development can be quite uneven. My child when he was two and a half looked like four, spoke like he was four, climbed and used the playground like he was five, but had the emotional maturity of a kid who is two. When he was playing in a toddler sand box on the playground around age two, the sand he was playing with ended up in a girl’s hair. The girl was crying and her mom came over furious and scolded us both, saying he is too big to play in the toddler space. My kid was distressed and started crying. After that brief confrontation, realizing that what brought this on was simply my kid’s size, I almost cried too.

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A child who looks older is faced with a set of expectations they can't fully meet. Adults speak to them with less patience in the voice, with fewer repetitions, with the mistaken assumption that they have a longer fuse than they do. People make adjustments so subtle they're not even aware of making them. You’re big, you don’t need to cry about that. This was painfully obvious to me when one day he came out of school sobbing softly because he spilled water on his beautiful drawing. The teacher was scolding him, saying it was not a big deal, no need to be sad. But a different day, another classmate who is a head shorter than my kid, came out crying because he’d ripped his own sticker and the teacher was holding a hand over his shoulder comforting him patiently.

My son, who is all height and sharp angles, has an interior that is as young and unfinished as it should be for his age, perhaps even younger. I can’t help but wonder if this gap between what people see and what he actually is, has somehow contributed to his sensitivity and to the way he folds inward when something hurts. He has spent his whole life being slightly ahead of what he needed and slightly behind what was expected, never in the right place, never really being met where he was.

Other children read size too, and the social expectations of peers can be just as miscalibrated as adults. A big child gets pulled into dynamics and expectations that don't match their emotional development, and this follows them onto the playground as well as into the classroom. They may be expected to lead, to not cry, to be fine with things smaller children are allowed to not be fine with. They may be excluded from certain kinds of play that their peers consider babyish. When he behaves his actual age it looks immature.

I wonder what is in his heart when he overhears a mother saying to her daughter: “Why are you playing with that big boy? Don’t play with him, go play with someone else.” And the girl protests: “But Mooom, I am older than him, he’s only second grade! I like playing with him!” He went off to play but I am pretty sure he registered the whole weight of the moment.

I am constantly trying to hold both realities simultaneously, that he is capable and that he is more immature than he looks, and I feel I am failing a little in both directions.

My heartbreak comes from seeing the moments where I expected too much because he looked ready. I carry guilt about that. The reconciliation lies in understanding that this tension is unavoidable to some degree, whether our kids look bigger for their age or not. It’s magnified for me, because I have completely different experiences with my two kids. My daughter looks exactly her age, and I seldom calibrate my expectations wrongly towards her abilities.

The reconciliation also comes from looking at the better side of it. Bigger, more capable children often receive more trust, more responsibility, more opportunities to participate meaningfully in everyday life. Sometimes they grow into those expectations beautifully. The danger, of course, is not in seeing capability but in forgetting the child underneath it.

No parent can perfectly calibrate expectations at every moment, and it’s a daily task to revise our perception over and over again. To let the child surprise us in both directions: more competent than we imagined one day, much younger than we remembered the next.

I look at him when he’s asleep and I can almost catch a glimpse of the baby face that’s etched into my heart even though it grew too quickly.

With love,

Aleksandra

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The quality of attention that young children have is total, unselfconscious, undefended. As an adult, I recognize it immediately and feel something that isn't quite envy and isn't quite grief but it’s there somewhere. I was that child once. We all were. And we lost most of it.

It would be easy to idealize what they were doing on that path and leave it at wonder, at innocence, at the magical thinking of childhood. It would be simple too. I think what’s happening there is more specific and more interesting than “ahhh, the magic of childhood”, and understanding it is the first step toward recovering any of it for us adults. Because we’d like some of it back, wouldn’t we?

Children are so present in the moment partly because they are neurologically constrained to be. We know that prefrontal cortex, which handles abstract planning, future anticipation, self-monitoring, regret, develops slowly and isn't fully mature until the mid-twenties. This is usually seen as a limitation, and for the level of adult functionality, it is. But it also means that a four (or a seven) year-old following an insect through the undergrowth cannot ruminate on yesterday or plan the week ahead. They are in the only place their brain can completely occupy: right now, on this path, watching this multi-legged little creature scoot around. This incredible wisdom of children is partly an underdeveloped capacity for distraction. They aren’t exactly choosing to be so present in the moment, it’s more like they don’t yet have the tools to be distracted and pulled away in a million directions.

They also haven't learned to split their attention so effectively yet. Multitasking is a learned behavior as much as a chosen one, and most children haven't yet been absorbed into the always-on attention economy. That’s what develops the habit of continuous partial attention and switching tasks rapidly that adults need to master to function in this world. When they are watching the insect they are not simultaneously composing a thought about the insect, evaluating whether this walk is meeting expectations, whether it’s worth future effort or mentally drafting something he needs to do later, like we adults do. They are just watching. And I think most of adults long to have this, to just breathe and do one thing at a time.

This is changing, and changing fast. Children with early and heavy device use are developing fragmented attention earlier than any previous generation, which suggests that presence in childhood is not entirely developmental but that it is also environmental. It can be disrupted. The older children who still have it in abundance tend to be the ones whose environments have protected the conditions for it.

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As I mentioned that children are not simultaneously composing a thought about the insect, I thought of the modern habit of observing oneself having an experience while we're having it. This is especially notable of people who create content, it tends to distorts and steer into thinking about how you'd describe it, whether it's worth photographing, how it compares to other experiences. Children mostly haven't developed this yet. They eat the ice cream rather than thinking about eating the ice cream. They splash happily in the water rather than noting that they are splashing happily in the water. That layer of self-observation and narration that adults have habituated into every experience creates distance from it. We are capable of always slightly standing outside the moment even while we're technically in it. Children don’t normally do that.

None of what adults have lost is entirely our fault. Our brains have matured, but we haven’t simply become much lazier or less curious than previous generations. We are living inside an environment (and also co-creating it) that is engineered to prevent the conditions my kids had on that path: uninterrupted time, a single point of focus, no competing demands on attention, no device in the pocket with something instantly more stimulating.

Every tab, buzz and banner is the environment telling our brain to be somewhere else, right now, and the environment is extraordinarily persuasive. We don’t even need a physical cue to get distracted as Michaeleen Doucleff says in Dopamine Kids, the pull has become so conditioned that a feeling or a thought or a moment of quiet is enough to trigger it, no external cue needed. We comply thousands of times a day without deciding to. And each compliance carries the cost of a fragment of presence spent or a thread of absorption broken. It accumulates invisibly across a day, a week, a life, into a slow erosion of experience and pleasure. We are present for the outline of things rather than the things themselves.

The cruelty of it is that it doesn’t feel like loss while it’s happening. Fragmented attention comes with its own reward systems, the constant dopamine hits of novelty, the small satisfaction of responsiveness, the what we might be most proud of: multitasking that gives us a feeling of competence. Busy and engaged and on top of things. What we are not feeling, and we won’t notice until we step out of it, is what it’s like to be fully focused and inside the flow of the moment.

Can we get any of it back?

Well, the prefrontal cortex is not going anywhere. The responsibilities are real. And decades of learned habits won't dissolve through good intentions or the right attitude. The moves that could actually work to move us into the direction of presence tend to be environmental and behavioral. No, it’s not just our attitude and willpower. Trying to be more present through willpower alone is like trying to eat less sugar while keeping a bowl of it on your desk and a packet of it in the pocket.

A lot of it comes down to the environment. Keep some of your everyday habits free of distraction, do one thing at a time, on purpose. Trying to be present everywhere all the time will set us up to fail. Notice the itch and create a barrier to scratching it. Over time that noticing brings a small gap between impulse and response that didn't exist before, and that gap is where presence will rebuild. It’s what we want to stretch and expand, until the visceral need to respond starts to fade. For example, turn off wi-fi on the phone during a walk, keep just the phone calls for emergency (if you cannot truly leave it at home, which is understandable). One meal a day where you pay attention to the taste and texture of your food and eat it properly at the table with family members. Read the book or watch the movie away from the phone and laptop.

And then there is time with children themselves, which is one of the more underrated available practices for presence, for reasons that have nothing to do with sentimentality. Children are extraordinarily good at demanding full attention. They will demand you look at something and expect you to actually look at it. They will ask a question that only makes sense if you have been following what came before it. They will notice when your mind wanders off, and call you back promptly. In that sense, time with small children is one of the better available practices for presence.

Yet, none of this will work if we don’t change the basic orientation from wanting to the moment to be the most productive to wanting to feel the moment. Most of us have been very thoroughly trained to multitask and get the most done in the least possible time, and have very little practice in the state of complete absorption in a task where self-consciousness recedes and time distorts, the very moment when the activity itself becomes its own reward. This is why it feels strange and slightly uncomfortable when we first try it. We lose the muscle through disuse and then wonder why nothing feels satisfying or immersive. The capacity for deep enjoyment that young children have, like the capacity to deeply focus and follow the caterpillar along, atrophies when it isn't used. We don't notice it going away. We just notice, eventually, that things don't feel like much.

With love,

Aleksandra

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It's the day in between.

The day your kid wak…

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We enjoyed our time looking at the dresses, we commented on…

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This didn’t surprise me as much as the first time I heard him saying it, but I’ve been hearing my rather confident kid utter this or a variant of this for a few weeks now, so I thought it was time to back up a little, and think if I want to react to this or reassure him.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about how children develop their relationship with mistakes and failure, mostly because I had a fairly bad one myself growing up. When I was eight and wanted to play basketball in the school team, my stepmother mocked me heavily saying she saw me missing the hoop and that I’m so bad at it I would never make the team. I gave up on the idea, and have not picked up the ball without that voice in my head until adulthood. As time went on, I was able to better understand this person’s motivations, patterns of behavior and what made her the way she was, and slowly let go of the influence. If it weren’t for my mom’s encouragement countering that voice in my head, I probably would never pick up any ball ever in my life, and never enjoy (trying my best at) volleyball on the beach with my husband and friends. I think I would’ve made a decent ball player (instead of a catastrophic one), had I TRIED.

Needless to say, I was adamant to give my children completely different experiences. So before my kids were old enough to have opinions about much of anything, I was already paying attention to how I responded when things went sideways. Their things, and mine, because kids will watch my reactions at mistakes like a hawk. So when I burned dinner, or yanked the mug full of milk out of the microwave spilling it all over, I’d be pretty calm (after I let out a curse under my breath, duh) and say something like “I needed both hands for that, didn’t I?”, or “I should have stirred it more”, or just “Can you get the towel for me”, etc. I don’t tut tut, or go into blame mode. I grew up around adults who, whenever a mistake was made or something didn’t go according to the plan, they’d immediately shift into blame and deflect mode. For me, this is a telltale sign of big disfunction. So I believe that because of this, my go to mode is to troubleshoot and solve it, not finding someone to blame, and I’m trying really hard to transfer that to my kids.

There’s a window in childhood, roughly from the time kids start school until early adolescence, where they’re building confidence and internalizing feedback on whether they are capable and how much. What they decide about themselves in this window tends to become deeply wired. How the grown-ups in a child’s life respond to effort and failure during this stretch of time (and not just with words, but also with their faces, their tone, whether they swoop in or wait) will have an influence on whether a child grows toward challenges or shies away from them.

This is the age when kids learn and develop the drive to make things, complete tasks, acquire skills, and be seen as competent. Most of kids will be entering school and being formally evaluated for the first time and comparing themselves to peers, they’ll become deeply attuned to how teachers and parents react to their performance. They’ll be asking whether they can do things well enough to belong and be valued.

If the answer they receive through feedback, reactions and opportunities is broadly a yes, they develop a stable, internalized sense of competence that carries them forward. If the answer is repeatedly a no, or only when you’re perfect, they develop a sense of inferiority, a background feeling of inadequacy that becomes their default lens.

What is interesting is that the sense of inferiority doesn't always look like a sad, defeated kid. Often, it's the kid who gives up the second something gets hard, avoids challenges to avoid exposure or who needs to win every game to feel okay, or who performs loud confidence that's covering something much more fragile underneath. Sound familiar? That’s the fear of looking dumb.

We all carry both the feeling of competency and some sense of inferiority, they are what gives us a reality check once in a while. They are not binary outcomes. Before age five, I don’t think children really compare themselves to others in a stable, internalizing way. And after twelve, identity starts forming in a much more fixed way through adolescence. So this five to twelve window is when the raw material of how they feel about their own competence gets laid down. It’s also when kids are most accessible and most responsive to adult influence, so we have a lot of room to nurture that internal voice and steer it in the right direction.

So given all of this, why did my kid start talking about himself this way?

At age seven, he is squarely in this phase, actively working it out. The fact that he's vocalizing it rather than silently withdrawing could actually be a sign of some safety. He feels okay saying it out loud.

He’s definitely absorbing language from the outside world, trying on phrases he hears. School, peers, older kids, at age seven he’s getting messages from many more places than just home. You can shape the soil at home but you can’t control every seed.

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So was this a temporary expression of frustration? Or was feeling dumb and incompetent slowly settling as part of his internal story? That question has two very different answers, and I’d give them two very different responses.

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And so, I shall relay to you some of the finest reading locations my children have been discovered in. Consider this both a celebration and a warning.

Maniac under the bed

One night, maybe half an hour after kids’ bedtime, we, the parents, walked into the bedroom ready to enjoy each other’s company. I didn’t remember leaving the lamp on, but whatever. There came a rustle. Maybe I was just imagining. A minute later, another rustle. Like someone was turning a page of a book in the room. But where, but who? I looked under the bed, and there came a maniacal laughter. My son thought it was a good idea to hide under the bed and read there under the light of the lamp, thinking he won’t get discovered till late in the night when parents go to sleep. Here is your reminder to check under the bed for reading children, every night, before you get busy.

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Inside a clothing rack in a shop

I was almost panicking, cause I was in the shop, searching for pants for my kid, and the said kid vanished. He was at my side a second ago. The smaller kid, who fit into the tiny cart was accounted for, thank havens. So I started calling his name, and no answer came. Frantically, I circled around till someone said, “There’s a kid in there”. Hidden inside a circular clothing rack, he was sitting and studying a flyer he found on the floor, contemplating the kitchenware sales, deep in thought. Maybe we could get a new pan for crêpes?

The milk way

Book propped against the milk jug, spoon moving toward oats that are not always successfully located, then towards mouth which is also not always successfully located, milk spilling around, eyes never leaving the page. He has developed a system. It does not always work.

The entire walk to school

On the way to school, and I mean all the way to school, nose in the book, he put it down only to cross the road. I’m sure he knows the road by heart and could walk there blindfolded, but c’mon. A rock might trip you, then what? It’s the book’s fault?!

No hammer and the nail

I sent him to the shed to fetch the hammer, and stood waiting with the nail in my hand for five minutes. I walk to the shed and find him sitting on the basketball, just slightly sheltered from the rain, reading his book. Apparently he couldn’t open the door of the shed and didn’t think past that, since there was a book in his hand already.

Wild ride

“Don’t moooove, I can’t read like that!” I heard a shout coming from the living room. There, on the couch, my little daughter is trying to turn the pages while also trying to sit on the dog. Somehow, neither is working, and she is frustrated, y’know?

Pruney and perfect

The big kid is in the bath, and I’m thinking that the water must be cold by now, and it’s time to get to bed, what’s he still doing in there? He’s holding a book at an angle that defies both physics and common sense, one corner already wet. He says yes, yes, coming out now, and I hear him turning the page.

Partner in climb

The little kid always wants to climb the tree, just like brother. Fact is, she can’t climb it, she’s still too small. Yet, there she was, happily sitting on a branch, pine sap stuck on her pants, flipping the flaps of the farm book. She had help, and I know from who.

The other kid

The kids were tantalizing each other while we were trying to get out of the house and get going. I sent the bigger one outside to wait. Happily, now that it’s much quieter, I remembered why it’s so much quieter half way to school. I had forgotten the other kid, who, when I walked back, was crouching behind the car and enjoying his book, school be damned.

I wanted to raise readers, kids who will love and respect books the way I do. I think I achieved this, but I did not fully think through what it would look like in practice.

Some parents know that when the children go quiet, something is wrong. I am never entirely certain. Maybe they are just reading. Maybe they are up to something. Maybe, somehow, both. The only way to find out is to go and look. Always keep her on her toes, kids.

With love, Aleksandra

I’m deeply grateful to everyone who reads, reflects, and supports these posts. Thank you for being here.

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It surprised me how early it starts. I feel like just yesterday he was oblivious to all this, just like his little sister is right now. It’s coming from him in the form of genuine curiosity, and brutal honesty in observation, if sometimes skewed in understanding. He never once asked to have a Lego room (which was actually one big corner of a room filled with toys in his schoolmate’s home). He is asking, in a seven year-old way, what it means that we live the way we live and have what we have. What does it say about us, and are we enough?

These questions and measurements are really important because it seems that how a child first absorbs it will shape how it stays with them for a long time. And I want to be careful how I answer them, but they always catch me off guard, and the only way I seem to be able to answer is honestly and with a lot of questions of my own, cause I cannot, for the life of me, remember the recommended scripts and ways we should talk about material wealth and comparison to our kids. Luckily for me, honest seems good enough so far.

We were walking past a really beautiful huge house in our neighborhood and he stopped and looked at it for a moment. Then he asked me when we can live in a big house like that one. I asked him why he wants that, but he can't really pinpoint what draws him to it. More space, more toys, something like that, but mostly a vague feeling that bigger is better.

So we talk. I try to tell him about what makes things valuable. That value is not the same as size or price or the number of things you own. About the difference between what a thing looks like and what it actually gives you or does for you. How a space can be large and feel like it should be bigger still and a space can be smaller and feel like enough and be exactly what a family needs.

The house where we live now is on the smaller side (it is all relative) in our neighborhood. We can play on the street, and we can walk to school and park. It feels like enough because of the stability in and around it, and the people who come home to it. It fulfills most of our needs and has its own qualities.

It is warm, in the sense of close, intimate, present. There is not much room to disappear into. We are aware of each other’s moods in a way that, for better or for worse, I imagine is harder in a house where everyone has their own room and several shared spaces as well. When someone is having a hard day, you know. When something good happens, the house explodes with joy.

And because it cannot contain everything we’d ever want, it pushes us outward, to be a part of the world. This is the part I think about most. A home that provides space for every activity and every purpose, a yard large enough to be its own botanical garden, might not benefit from the neighborhood and communal spaces the way ours does. We go outside because inside has limits (and because we like being outside). I made the effort to get to know some of our neighbors, so now we can cross over to have a little chat or borrow a teaspoon of mint for the soup and swap flower and vegetable seedlings. My kids play outside more than they would if inside was endlessly accommodating. They know every corner of our street, where the rabbit burrows are, where it’s shady in the morning and where the shade moves in the afternoon.

I may be shaping the story to fit the reality we have. If our home were larger, I could likely explain just as convincingly why more space was good for us. What I do know is that when I imagine a very large house, my mind does not go to comfort and warmth, although I am sure there are a lot of happy, warm large homes. I somehow always imagine a melancholic person wandering around the empty halls, almost ghost-like. I might also be biased. My father built a large house for this second wife and their children, once I was an adult already, and it made no one happier. It was supposed be a dream come true, but it turned into a constant source of conflict, a burden to maintain and a strain between the spouses. The children had plenty of room, but friends rarely came over. My older sister and I called it the “golden cage”.

The house is your own little palace, your own kingdom, that calls you to stay in and take care of it, find solace in it. It does not invite you to go out into the world. Large homes tend to be a complete environment: self-contained, sufficient, with barely any gaps through which the world can enter. That is a different relationship with the world than the one I want my kids to have.

I want them to go out into things. To find the world manageable and interesting rather than overwhelming and best avoided. To know the people around them and their neighborhood and feel themselves to be part of something bigger than nuclear family. Our environment shapes us, and I think a smaller, modest home and people who are content with it, supports these values well.

When he notices that our house is smaller or bigger than some of his friends’ houses, I talk about the specific things that I love most about where we live. I invite him to tell me about it too, to identify the warmth and peace that lives in our home, and all the things he gets to do and feel inside it. I tell him the feeling of home can’t be measured in rooms. I call upon him to remember how it feels to come back home after a day out, and who is there. That the best thing a home can do is make the people inside it feel safe and known.

He listens. Whether he fully understands yet, I am not sure. These kinds of things tend to make sense later, when you are older and have lived in a few different places and realize that the ones you remember most happily were the ones where you felt safe and cared for.

There will always be a bigger house. There will always be a newer car, a better kitchen and upgrades to what you have now. And the constant wanting is not something that more money solves, but often accelerates. Contentment has to be chosen and practiced, by looking clearly at what you already have and learning to recognize it as enough. Nobody arrives there by accident, and wanting more, left unexamined, has no natural end.

There is a picture book that spurred me into thinking and writing about this, The Better Tree Fort by Jessica Scott Kerrin, who writes . It ends with a single paragraph that says everything I have been trying to say to my son. I will not give it away here. But if you have a child who is starting to notice and compare, find it. Read it together. Then let it do its work, the way the best writing does.

With love,

Aleksandra

I’m deeply grateful to everyone who reads, reflects, and supports these posts. Thank you for being here.

If you find this post worthwhile, please like, share and subscribe. It truly helps Curious and Capable Kids reach more people. If you are able to support these posts financially, you can do so with a 60% off coupon.

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