The Homeschool Journey

Resisting the Lure of Electronic Games

The following was written by Alison, a Waldorf homeschooling mom who started a thread on my online discussion forum about electronic games and gave a version of the following story. I liked it so much I asked her to write it up so that I could include it on my blog and share with all of you - as this is a huge issue which effects us all.

 

Sometime while Lydia was 8, she figured out that I’m the one who generally chooses her birthday and holiday gifts.

 

I’m the brains behind the Waldorf in our lives, but my husband has been a Waldorf trooper from the start. Kevin explained the value of delayed reading to his parents. He has contributed plenty to the fairy fancy in our home. He listens to me talk about the nine year change.

 

With her ninth birthday a few weeks away, Lydia announced to her father, “You need to get me a Dad-gift.”

 

 

Most nights, after Lydia goes to bed, Kevin catches up on work, and I conquer the battle zone that is our kitchen. Later, Kevin takes a break, and we talk while I finish up.

 

One night, he brought up their last Dad and Daughter grocery-shopping trip. Lydia asked to stop at another store, to look at video games. We’d attended a family music camp a few weeks before, and Lydia saw kids there who had Nintendo. She didn’t always care what other kids were doing, but times have changed.

 

Now, Kevin thinks Nintendo would be a good gift for Lydia. I’m wiping the counter but out of the corner of my eye I can see Kevin is trying to read my face.

 

It looks really good. The counter, not my face.

 

“That girl from camp she’s pen pals with,” he says, “they could play over the internet. Lydia could get a little computer experience.”

 

Like other Waldorf dads I’ve come across, Kevin can have moments of impatience with the Waldorf curriculum’s lack of obvious skill building. He once suggested less time on storytelling and more time on reading road signs.

 

He smiles with pride. “You should have seen her. We got hold of a salesperson and Lydia asked great questions. She notices absolutely everything.”

 

I shake some basil scented scrubbing powder into the sink. I find it fragrant and soothing.

“And the reason she notices absolutely everything is precisely because of the things she’s done: Waldorf. And the things she hasn’t done: video.”

 

I recite a short list of the research on the bad health effects of screen time and the world of rapid video. “Her brain will never be the same.”

 

 “They’re just games,” Kevin says. “There’s one called Baby Sitter. Lydia loves babies. Baby Sitter doesn’t sound so bad.”

 

I stand close and look up at my husband. On another night there might have been a kiss. Instead, I whisper, “ Please let Lydia be a child awhile longer, let our home be a refuge from the electronic onslaught all around. Do you really want to bring the launch pad to virtual-land right to her bedroom? Our family will never be the same.”

 

A few moments later I stood in the kitchen alone. Kevin grumbled as he walked out and I didn’t ask him to repeat what he said. I hoped that somehow, the universe would find a way to help him see things clearly.

 

 

The next night, just as I finished stuffing the chaos into the dishwasher, Kevin appeared at the kitchen entrance. I closed the dishwasher door. Our eyes met.

 

“I saw an interesting family today.” Kevin enjoys the variety of people he encounters in a workday, and the snippets of human drama that happen by in his presence.  The family included a grandma and 2 young children. The bespectacled boy had a blue Nintendo and the smaller girl with the two ponytails had a pink one. Kevin found himself eager to engage the kids, and proud that he knew enough about Nintendo to interest them in talking to him.

 

No such luck. He said the kids kept their faces to the screens and did not respond at all. The grandma told him that the OTHER grandma gave the games to the kids. She talked about how awful they have made life, how everything now is about how much time on the game, or how much time on the computer, the kids never want to go out, play, do crafts, do anything but be at the screen.

 

All the while, the kids were oblivious to everything but the screens, their fingers a frenzy at the buttons. Kevin has worked with addicts, and to him, these kids looked just like addicts.

 

He told me, “The grandma said she wishes the things had never been given to the children and now it's ‘impossible’ to take them away.”

 

 

Just days before Lydia’s birthday, Kevin was suddenly inspired to introduce Lydia to his own childhood passion: stamp collecting. The two of them can sit for hours together.  She picks out her favorites. He finds their places in the big collecting book, sticks them in, and reads her the little stories about them.

 

I’m happy that the soft strains of Waldorf continue to play in our home, supporting the whole family through her Lydia’s nine year change and beyond. Kevin is glad to have come up with something “educational.” Lydia loves these ultimate stickers with their tiny portraits and landscapes. Even more, she’s pleased that with the stamps come an even better gift - the gift of Dad-time.

 

As a follow-up, Alison sent this link to an article about the effect of electronic games on reading - not very surprising to us Waldorf folks!

Death in the family

 The following was kindly written for me by my friend, Marianne Dietzel. Marianne lost her eldest child in a car accident in 1996 and has, along with her husband and two sons, been on a long journey of healing. One thing to come out of her grief was Marianne's discovery that she was called to work in hospices, playing the lyre to ease the crossing of souls through the threshold of death. She and several others founded an organization to help others explore alternatives to the usual antiseptic approach to death and dying favored by our culture. She and her colleagues promote family funerals and caring for the dying at home, where possible. This of course includes children which can be incredibly healing for them as they learn that death is simply a part of life, not to be feared but perhaps even celebrated.

 

Another part of Marianne's healing came as she wrote a book about her daughter's death and the effect on her family. Her book is called Laughing in a Waterfall: A Mother's Memoir and it is a beautiful testament to the power of love to move beyond the perceived barrier of death.

 

If you would like to find out more about Marianne's work and perhaps to purchase her book please visit her website where you can read a chapter from this book.

 

 

When my daughter Nina died in a car accident in 1996, my two sons, Kevin and Soren, were fifteen- and four-years-old.

 

The loss of my eldest child and only daughter was devastating for me. My grief was multi-faceted, for I mourned not only for myself, but for my family as a whole and for my sons and this loss that they would carry with them throughout their lives.

 

Kevin lost his childhood companion and the only other person who shared the same early family memories. Now he would be the eldest without someone else to forge the way before him, to scheme with, and compare notes with in the same way, with Soren being so much younger.

 

Soren lost a big sister who loved to cuddle, read, and play with him, and would watch over him as he grew up, almost like a second mother.

 

How was I to tend to my sons’ grief when I was engulfed in my own process?

 

It seemed easier with Soren. When he asked questions, my husband, Dennis, and I answered them as simply, directly, and truthfully as we could. We told him stories about Nina’s life. Dennis wrote poems about Nina with him, drew pictures with him, and put them together in a little book. We did things together for Nina while we were playing outside in the snow (see pp. 152-154 in my book). We maintained our daily routines, and gave him time to play alone and with friends to express himself in the mode most appropriate to his age.

 

With Kevin it was less clear. We included him, and tried to address his needs, in all of the activities surrounding Nina’s wake and funeral, and later in our times of remembering Nina on holidays, anniversaries, and birthdays. We were grateful that his small Waldorf school environment provided him with the peer and community support that is so important to young people. Yet I didn’t know how to approach him emotionally. I hoped that my freely expressing my emotions would allow him to when he needed. It was only later that I learned how difficult it was for him to see his mother crying. His way of processing grief was quite different. After all, he was busy being a teenager.

 

We did the best we knew how and were emotionally capable of at the time. I have had to be forgiving of myself for omissions or mistakes I might have made.

 

It was in part with my sons and their life-long loss in mind that I wrote my memoir, Laughing in a Waterfall, three years after Nina died. If I perhaps wasn’t always there for them emotionally, I could at least write about Nina’s life and death, while it was the world I was living in, as a gift for their future.

 

As it turned out, neither of them read the book until I published it ten years later (thirteen years after Nina’s death). We had been through several pilgrimages to Harlemville, NY, where Nina died, an evolution in our yearly observances of Nina’s death day, a bench dedication and a stained-glass window dedication, and other rituals which gave opportunities to revisit Nina’s accident and the surrounding events. These repeated tellings of the story gave the boys a chance to renew their own perceptions of what happened from the vantage point of different developmental stages as they grew older.

 

To hear the story from my perspective in the form of a memoir brought further healing around our family’s grief process.

 

Soren, who read it on a trip to England at age eighteen, told me it brought him to tears several times. Being the same age as Nina was when she died made it real for him. He had no memories of his own of most of the story that happened when he was so young, so it fulfilled my wish to give him his history.

 

Kevin read it at age 29, when he was married and well on his way in his career. At my book launch party, he shared publicly some of his deepest feelings about moving forward in his life without his sister. Like others of us, he wondered how his life might have been different if Nina had lived. However, he realized that her presence continues to be an influence on his life. Also, through reading my book, he was able to experience how difficult it must have been for us as parents to lose a child, even though at the time he felt overshadowed by our tendency to idealize Nina.

 

The grief process does not clearly come to an end after a certain amount of time or proceed in a predictable sequence of stages. My family’s experience confirms that there are many layers of grief to uncover, and the process of healing extends over a long arch of time. It is never too late to reach out to someone who has had a loss and talk about it. No matter how much time has passed, looking back and sharing stories is an important part of the process and helps us connect in deeper ways.