Productivity blog The Daily Saint offers some tips on Teaching GTD to Young People. GTD stands for “Getting Things Done”, a productivity system developed by David Allen and detailed in his aptly titled book, Getting Things Done. GTD emphasizes simplicity, keeping the mind clear by keeping lists of tasks that need to be done, and keeping yourself oriented towards your goals. In The Daily Saint’s language, this means simply:

Write down one task at a time. When you are finished with it, cross it out. Keep your little piece of paper with you wherever you go. While many students want to go out and purchase something more hip than a piece of lined paper, simple is good and very GTDish.

I’ve tried to get my stepkids to make and plan how to reach goals; writing down tasks and crossing them off is the next piece of the puzzle. Kids have a lot on their mind, and are often easily distracted — making lists is useful for them. Our favorite list-making place at the moment is the bathroom mirror, where we use dry-erase markers to write down what they need to do each morning before they leave for school. What The Daily Saint’s vision of kid-friendly GTD offers is the experience of taking responsibility for their own list and, by extension, their own tasks.

I’ll definitely be pushing this kind of list-making from now on, as the kids find themselves getting busier and busier with school, after-school activities, sports, and their longer-term goals.

Documentarian Alex Newman is doing research for a show on stepfamilies in Toronto. I told him I’d post his announcement; if you’re in the Toronto area, and you’re a step-dad, get in touch with him!

LOOKING FOR PARTICIPANTS

A new television series, called Save Me From My Step-Kids, is looking for families interested in participating.

You get:

• $1000- for participating
• perks
• professional help with your parenting struggles

We get:

• families made up of a mom, a step-dad, and her kids
• families that are experiencing conflict
• families who are ready for change
• families prepared to be honest when reacting to the blended family dynamic
• families not afraid to show pain and joy

Please contact Alex Newman

416-694-4941

houseandhumour@gmail.com

Take a look at www.propertelevision.com to see other shows that we produce.

That’s all the information I have, and I can’t vouch for the production; I don’t personally know Mr. Newman. The title suggests they’re looking for families having a hard time adapting to step-family-ness, and will provide some help in dealing with those problems, which should make for interesting TV if nothing else.

Apropos of my post about kids and art, Daddy Types describes an art outing gone sour at the National Gallery. The first part of the post is an excellent example of how to share art with your children. For example:

Taking the kid to see art, contemporary or otherwise, just seems like the most natural thing in the world to me. The scale, the abstraction, the diversity, it all seems perfect for engaging a little kids attention, far more than traditional paintings-in-a-frame galleries, which are usually too high and too small for a knee-high or stroller-bound kid to even see. And kids dont have a prejudice that art has to be “about” something; visual interest, stimulation, and discovery are often plenty to make a work a success.

[The artist] Louis made his giant, abstract works by pouring and channeling paint across his canvas. The kid was fascinated at the idea, and would pick out the colors and the overlaps, and she asked questions that frankly stump art historians, like how did he keep the paint from splashing, and how did he make straight lines? [Louis didn’t let people watch him paint, even his wife, so the specific secrets of his techniques died with him.]

Alas, his experience is marred when he overhears a truly clueless tour group leader telling a group of children about a Clyfford Still painting.

“Who wonders why this is here? Who wonders why it’s even art?” She waits and waits for sheepish hands to keep rising.

“Well, there are curators–do you know what that is? art experts who study and know what art is important enough to be in a museum–curators and art historians and other experts who say this is art, and even if it doesn’t look like it’s about anything and it doesn’t make any sense, you just have to bear with it sometimes.

“You just have to bear with it sometimes”? That’s the message the National Gallery is sending kids about art? That there are experts who know and the rest of us have to bear with them?

There are ugly paintings and sculptures in the world. There are deliberately obscure and difficult works whose value isn’t immediately apparent. And there are works you don’t like, works that convey messages that are at odds with your values, works that are poorly executed and poorly conceived. Accepting art means accepting all these things, and using them as a stepping off point to ask “why?”

The tour group leader’s comments imply two things:

1. We must accept the curators’ judgment without question.
2. Art is boring and only experts understand it.

As Daddy Types suggests, this comment will assure that few, if any, of these students develop much of a relationship with art. Contrast this with his own approach, which encourages his daughter to approach art as a joyful, playful exercise, and to ask questions both silly and profound. There’s no attempt to force her to love, like, or respond in any particular way to an artwork or an artist — just to look and wonder. For the poor students in the National Gallery tour, the lesson is simple: respect the museum’s authority and keep your mouth (and mind) shut.

Which is really too bad. And all too common.

Last month I reviewed Lois Lowry’s The Giver very positively — it’s an absolutely great novel, for young readers and adult readers alike. So I had high hopes for another novel by Lowry, Number the Stars — hopes which were almost, but not quite, met.

Don’t get me wrong: the Newberry-winning Number the Stars is a quite good book. Set during the German occupation of Denmark in WWII, Number the Stars tells the story of young girl Annemarie, whose family takes in their Jewish neighbor — Annemarie’s best friend — and ultimately helps their family escape Denmark.

Number the Stars tells an amazing story: after the Nazis announced the deportation of Denmark’s Jewish population, the Danish people hid and smuggled out of the country almost the entirety of Denmark’s 7,000 Jews, mostly across the channel to Sweden. To the occupying Germans, it seemed like the Jewish population they knew was there simply vanished, virtually overnight. The courage of the Danish population, who risked imprisonment and death if caught, cannot be underestimated.

Simply told through the perspective of Annemarie, Number the Stars proceeds smoothly enough, and maybe that’s my problem — there simply aren’t enough pages in this slim volume to give more than a rough impression of the mounting terror the Jewish population (and their non-Jewish neighbors, for that matter) faced. That said, it’s a fast-moving and ultimately heart-warming story, with both the personal triumph of Annemarie over her own fears and feelings of uselessness and powerlessness in the face of forces she cannot understand, and the wider tale of the triumph of the Danes over the Germans.

For younger readers — 10 to maybe 14 or so — who might not understand the subtleties of a book like Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl, I would strongly recommend Number the Stars (though with a lot of parental guidance to grapple with the enormity of the Holocaust). Older readers might not find it as rewarding as a book like The Giver — the story is much more direct and straight-forward, and there’s not much moral wiggle room when it comes to opposing Nazis. Best to move on to the work of Elie Weisel or Primo Levi for readers over 16.

Read more about Number the Stars on Lois Lowry’s site.

On November 8th and 9th, I’ll be at Blog World Expo, here in Las Vegas, and that Saturday (the 10th) at PostieCon. Officially, I’m going as a writer for lifehack.org, but I’d love to hang out with other bloggers, especially other parent-type bloggers if anyone’s coming. Let me know if you’re going to be in the neighborhood.

One of the things I’ve had to learn as a step-father is “the stern voice”, the voice of fatherly authority. Nothing cuts across the cacophony of children of play or the havoc of an inter-sibling argument like the stern voice, an often it’s the only way to get through to a misbehaving child who won’t otherwise take you seriously.

And yet, I hate it. I am by nature a mild-mannered fellow, quiet of voice and generally slow to anger. I rarely raise my voice and I really dislike doing so even when it’s called for. Speaking sternly is so out of character for me that all three kids are genuinely surprised, scared even, whenever I dig deep and call it forward. I hate the look of fear that comes into their eyes when the stern voice is called for — it feels like a betrayal of the agreement between us, the unwritten contract that spells out the terms of our relationship.

I suppose that’s a good thing, in the end. It means I’m not overusing the stern voice, which in turn means I’m not abusing what little authority I’ve been granted in the household. And when it’s necessary to turn stern — when a child is putting himself or someone else in danger, for instance — they listen, at least for the moment.

But I still hate it.

“Always leave on a good note”. This is the advice Lisa Hendry of Productivity @ Home gives in her article Building Confidence in Children.The idea is to always let children finish a project, activity, or whatever with a success, however small — a homework problem done correctly, a goal scored, etc. That way they’ll remember these past successes as they move forward in their lives, rather than a string of failures or disappointments. Seems reasonable to me.

Schools don’t seem to be set up this way, that’s for sure. The kids I get in my intro-level courses (mostly recent high school grads, though I teach at a community college so I get students ranging from high school juniors to retirees) come to me not only lacking confidence in many areas, but practically shell-shocked by the traumatic experience of high school. They’ve learned to shut up and follow directions and don’t make waves; they’ve learned the terrible consequences of being wrong publicly; they’ve learned that grades are the only measure of their performance that matters. What they haven’t learned is confidence: confidence in their own ability to reason through a tricky problem, confidence in themselves as speakers, confidence in their knowledge of themselves as thinkers, learners, essentially as adults.

Mostly they’ve learned to see their lives (or at least their student lives) as a struggle against failure and I’m not entirely sure that’s easily reversible by the time they’re 18, 19, and 20. Many of them will come around as they get older — I have few older students (say, 30+) who are quite so timid (but there are exceptions)– but right at the start of their adult lives, when they need it most, wouldn’t it be nice to see them embrace the uncertainty and opportunity in front of them with confidence?

One of my lifehack.org co-writers, Chris Brogan, wrote yesterday about Blogging for Kids. We don’t do this at my house — the kids haven’t expressed any interest in blogging, and I’m not going to press the issue — though the two “tweens” have MySpace profiles (customized by mom, marked “private”, with friend adds vetted by us).

Still, it’s an interesting idea. I started integrating blgging into my college courses over the summer, and one surprising outcome was that students started writing better (overall — there’s still some bad writing, but the ones that are basically competent seem to take more care when they know they’re writing for an audience). I would imagine that the same would hold true for younger bloggers — and even if it didn’t, the more practice they get now the better anyway. Plus, as Chris points out, there’s other lessons to be had from blogging, ranging from learning how to plan and research a written work to getting comfortable with the social networking software that is only going to become more important as our kids become adults.

And, of course, blogging is lots of fun. There’s nothing wrong with doing something just because it’s fun, whatever our age!

There’s some safety/privacy concerns, but with a little bit of parental involvement these can be minimized. Don’t let your kids post their email address, phone number (home or mobile, if they have cell phones), or address — and if you’re really concerned, have them post under a pseudonym. Activate spam filters (Wordpress blogs ahve the powerful Akismet filter built in) and disallow links in comments to prevent easy access to pornography in spam comments that do get through. Most importantly, talk to your kids about what they’re posting and what the response is — stay engaged with the process so that you can help them understand and deal with the rough bits.

Like I said, my step-kids aren’t blogging, but if they decide to follow in my footsteps, I’ll be happy to help them get going. What about you — is kidblogging too risky, or super awesome?

Cultivate Greatness has a powerful, long piece on current research into the role parental praise plays in encouraging children to succeed. As it happens, it’s not all about building up self-esteem by telling your children how smart they are. Instead, researchers find that kids do best when parents commend their hard work — and that complimenting them for their intelligence not only doesn’t help but can actually produce negative results:

But a growing body of research—and a new study from the trenches of the New York public-school system—strongly suggests it might be the other way around. Giving kids the label of “smart” does not prevent them from underperforming. It might actually be causing it.

Here’s the thing: intelligence in our society is understood as an innate quality, a “thing” you either have or you don’t. If you’re not smart, there’s nothing to do about it, and if you are smart, there’s nothing more you have to do. So kids that are smart and whose parents reinforce their self-perception as smart basically stop working. The article gives the example of a brilliant kid who, when faced with tasks that he had to struggle at, simply decided he wasn’t “smart” about those things and retreated to the things he was “smart” about.

On the other hand, kids whose parents praised them for their hard work are driven to work harder to please their parents and earn more praise. When confronted with something they aren’t “smart” about, they are more likely to work at it until they get it. In tests given under carefully controlled conditions, children whose parents commended their hard work showed greater gains than those whose parents congratulated them for being smart — and in many cases the “smart” kids actually did worse of follow-up tests.

What isn’t mentioned is how this kind of praise works in a household setting. Years ago I took a psychological anthropology course, and I remember something the professor said about clinical psychology: it’s very good at describing how the mind works in a clinical environment. What’s less clear is how well these descriptions apply outside of the lab. What I’m wondering is how praise of one child affects their siblings. I would guess that these effects would be seen in the other children’s performance, as well. That is, if older brother is congratulated for his hard work, younger sister will work harder to earn praise for herself — while if he’s praised for being smart, she might be discouraged as “not as smart” or simply concentrate only on the things she thinks she’s “smart” about.

Here’s a real-world example: yesterday we got a letter telling our oldest boy, 12, that he’d been nominated for a leadership course in Washington, DC. It’s a real honor, I think, and if we can afford it (it costs some $2000) we’d love to send him. The nomination came from his history teacher, and as far as I can tell there’s only one nominee from the entire school.

His sister, 11, goes to the same school, though she’s only been there since the fall semester started in August. Obviously, we want her to work towards getting the same kinds of honors. What we don’t want is for her to feel that “brother is just smarter than me”. My partner said something interesting: “Brother got this because he works really hard and shows people that he’s really committed” — a good example of the kind of praise that the research in the article recommends, I think. The message is that if you work really hard, you can get this kind of nomination too.

How successful will that be? I don’t know. They are, after all, two very different people with their own goals and style. We don’t want her working towards something just because her brother has achieved in that area, any more than we want her to avoid working at it because she’s “not smart like him”. What we do want is that she realize that working hard can help her accomplish things she wants, that it will be rewarding for her, and I think my partner managed to strike the right note to convey that lesson.

We often hear about the marriage benefits that are denied to homosexual couples because of their inability to legally marry. This is a compelling argument — nobody should be barred, for instance, from the bedside of their ill or injured loved ones in hospital simply for lack of a marriage certificate that they cannot legally obtain.

However, laws that ban same-sex marriage (in Nevada we have a Constitutional Amendment!) don’t just prevent recognition of same-sex relationships; they prevent recognition of non-traditional straight relationships as well. My partner and I are not married, and though we may decide to be down the road, the only good reasons for making that decision should be emotional and symbolic — I don’t want to get married for financial reasons. But both of us are state employees, me at the College and the University and her in public health, and use the public employees health insurance plan, which will not cover unmarried partners or their children. I cannot get on her plan, she and her children cannot get on my plan.

The school would like to do something about that. What’s the problem, then? They have to feel their way very carefully around the anti-same-sex marriage amendment to make sure that the state doesn’t “accidentally” treat same-sex domestic partners as if they were married! Sure, we could legally marry, but who wants to be forced into that — and over insurance? Is that in the state’s best interest? Is it in anyone’s?

Frankly, I’d like to see marriages between all consenting adults legalized, and domestic partnerships between consenting adult couples recognized. If marriage is supposed to be “sacred”, why should insurance, power of attorney, hospital visitation, tax law, and all the rest hang on it? We live in a changing world; to insist that only one kind of relationship can meet hte needs of all individuals and of society a a whole is foolhardy at best.