Tricotomania and more

Andrea raises a good point in the comments to my last post.

“it’s not that school doesn’t teach useful real-world things, it’s that they don’t teach that the things you’re suposed to be learning can actually be applied in the real world.”

Although I clearly don’t think that the only reason to teach math is because it is useful, it also makes sense to teach useful mathematics in ways that make that utility obvious. This is where many unschooling discussions are actually very good. If you have to learn fractions because you need them when baking and in order to double or half things like recipes, then it is much better to teach them by actually baking and doubling or having recipes or whatever than to sit down and teach fractions with a workbook/textbook while admonishing your child to pay attention because this is “useful”. And I think many of us get that even if we don’t always follow through.

Of course that probably means that you shouldn’t wait until your child is 9 or 10 to introduce fractions (which is usually when they turn up in the curriculum guidelines) but should introduce them in appropriate ways as you come across them in your daily life. Dividing up cake at dinner. Baking. Cutting wood for shelves. Buying fabric for sewing. If this stuff really is part of life, then children will figure it out, with your help, naturally as they are exposed to the ideas and come to use them in their own daily life. Might be hard to report, I suppose, but that is your job not your child’s. (Neither Andrea nor I have to report to anyone what our kids are learning, except at the point where past learning is a prerequisite for something like college. But I’m not sure why your children need to know about that. They just need to know how to use fractions, or whatever.) Maybe report the observed evidence that they have now grasped the concept, rather than the work they did to grasp it.

But I can see that some of us have more opportunities to teach the utility of math than others. I suspect that Ron and Andrea use, on a regular basis, more math concepts than I do. Hexadecimals come to mind, but there are no doubt others. And Becky keeps a whole bunch of farm records — budgets, feed records, etc. Her children have 4H projects that involve calculating how much feed a heifer consumed, how much weight she gained, the cost of the feed, the price the meat will get, etc. Angela’s husband was a contractor and could hire his son to help on jobs, presumably giving him exposure to all sorts of calculations related to building as well as the costs and profits of that business.

Many of us do not raise animals, build things (for fun or profit), or build databases on a regular basis. Heck, some folks don’t even bake much. I certainly have few occasions to double recipes, whereas others probably have to do that every day.

Some of the activities that involve math are activities we don’t involve children in, particularly when they are young, due to cultural beliefs about the appropriateness of certain knowledge for children. I am thinking primarily of household finances. In this culture, money is considered very private and often not discussed much even within households. We may provide children with ways of learning about money — making small decisions, or handling an allowance — but we are unlikely to involve them in discussions of household spending nor even conduct these when they are around.

So teaching children math by involving them in using it in myriad practical ways seems impractical for many people. It would involve changing deeply held beliefs about the proper roles of children and adults. It might involve doing many more tasks for ourselves than we currently do and doing them with children at least watching if not participating. Apart from safety concerns, involving inexpert children often slows the whole process down and certainly takes us out of our comfortable rhythms.

But just because something is difficult doesn’t mean it isn’t worth while. There is much to be gained from breaking down the separation between the adult world and the child’s world within the home. Willa has some interesting reflections on styles of parenting (and home education) that are too focused on children. It might feel a bit like making them grow up too fast or something. But it is precisely because we separate children from these facts of everyday life, that we then need these techniques for teaching apparently useful knowledge that ring false (to us and to our children) and often don’t work.

Of course, there are also opportunities to teach math while we are teaching other subjects. Unfortunately, many of the resources available for teaching those subjects seem to purposefully strip the math out, particularly in materials for younger children. For example, physics involves a lot of math. Newton’s laws, which we now study in physics classes, were published in a book of mathematics. Yet in my investigations of materials for teaching about mechanics and simple machines, little is said about the math involved. The concept of mechanical advantage might be introduced, but formulas for calculating it, or even experiments for taking precise measurements so that children could begin to get a sense of the mathematical relationships are sadly missing. I was surprised not to find a spring scale or any kits for investigating these issues at the local educational supply store, but perhaps I shouldn’t have been.

It seems to me that math-phobia has permeated the professional elementary teaching profession to the extent that math instruction is kept fenced in. As long as you can get kids through these worksheets and they can pass these tests, most of which involve not real problems but lists of sums (in the British usage), you will be fine. We’ll keep the math out of the rest of the curriculum.

This is not helpful for the rest of us who might be looking for assistance in presenting this material to elementary age children. I don’t want to introduce Tigger to mechanics problems requiring the use of calculus (though I have done a few of those in my life; I took a 2nd year Physics class in university). But I would like to include some of the mathematics of simple mechanics in our explorations of that subject. It’s been a while since I’ve done any of this stuff. But I guess I need to go find some high school physics texts and then work out how to present it myself. (Edited to add: I’ve found a useful online resource for high-school physics that seems to explain most of what I’m looking for. I’ll have to work out how to relate it to actual physical demonstrations but that should be less of a problem.)

The same could be said for probability and statistics. This often makes little sense in the context of a math program. But how many of our children are interested in other topics which lend themselves to the study of statistics? Tigger has read a lot of historical fiction, particularly about the settlement of the prairies. At one point she asked about why so many mothers and babies died in these stories. I went onto the Statistics Canada website looking for historic infant and maternal mortality data. It was a little bit hard to find and did not appear in any of their pre-packaged lesson plans. But I did find some data and we did have some discussions just looking at the tables and talking a bit about how to read the tables and learn things. But we don’t find much on these demographic trends in the history books addressed to elementary and middle-school children, much less assistance in teaching them about the mathematical concepts of statistics and probability in ways that would enhance their understanding of history.

Which brings me back to more general thoughts on the teaching of mathematics. Math is useful. And thus is makes sense that we should teach it in ways that make that utility obvious to kids. That is likely to involve less direct teaching of mathematics, more involvement in the daily activities that involve mathematics, and the inclusion of the mathematical components of other subjects. The problem is that our ability and confidence, as parents, to do those things varies considerably. And yet there is little supporting material out there to help us. I don’t think we need math programs that include more real problems and applications. I think we need more guidance to parents about how to explain the mathematics we use in everyday life. And we need resources for teaching physics and other subjects that don’t strip the math out.

Perhaps folks can share what they’ve found or even share materials they’ve pulled together to teach in this integrated way. Thanks, Andrea, for spurring me on to think more clearly about this side of the issue.

Something has been niggling for a long time and I think I will try to articulate it. Despite the widespread discussions of the value of introducing children to good (or even classic) literature, to art, to nature, and even to Latin, when homeschoolers discuss math, the thoughts turn away from beauty and focus on utility. Maybe I’m hanging out in the wrong circles, but I haven’t seen much discussion of the beauty of mathematics and how we teach our children to appreciate that. Even those who advocate the living math approach don’t talk in much depth about either the beauty or the fun of it. I sometimes get the impression they find this just a more palatable way of learning what they still consider a utilitarian subject. If you ever meet any mathematicians, you will find that utility is about as important to them as it is to philosophers or literary theorists. In fact, many would argue that mathematics is a humanities subject, not a science. The discussion raging over at Lissa’s provides an interesting example:

Lissa said : “School says that certain knowledge is more valuable than other knowledge. But you know what? Knowing how to fix a toilet would have saved me a lot of money, but school never presented *that* potentially valuable knowledge. I can draw really pretty circles with a compass, though. I’ve had more plumbing problems in my life than occasions requiring perfectly round circles.”

Willa replied: “But circles are more awesome and worthy of understanding in themselves than toilet plumbing, even though plumbing know-how is respectable and useful. Toilets come and go, but circles remain. It’s too bad that circles have to seem “schooly”, though, since really they aren’t.”

As with many subjects, the roots of the problem lie in the way that we were taught the subject ourselves. While there are many good math teachers out there, many of us get through school without ever encountering one. Or the ones we encounter are unable to engage with our preferred learning style. While self-confessed math-phobics try very hard not to pass that fear on to their children, they are not in an ideal position to bring a sense of beauty and fun to the study of the subject.

As you may know from my previous posts on math, I have “required” math for Tigger, mainly because I think that her dislike was due to what school did to her and I knew that she could love it and see the beauty in it. We went down some wrong tracks but we have now found materials that work for her and she is excited and enjoying it. We are using Challenge Math and doing the chapters out of order to follow her interests. We’ve done some algebra and trigonometry. Right now we are doing a chapter on “Distance = Speed x Time” problems. She enthused to someone the other day that she was really enjoying this because it was really algebra and she likes algebra. As we were looking at the other topics and talking about how long we might be working in this book she noticed that the last chapter is calculus. She is very excited about that possibility even though it might not be until next fall or winter.

I’m not entirely sure how I got to that place. One important step was to stop worrying about memorizing math facts and get on to using them in interesting ways. She still stumbles with her times tables and keeps a chart nearby to consult when needed. We’ve focused on problems rather than drill (a real advantage of Challenge Math) and talk about math as being puzzles. We’ve read some related history though not as much as you might think, given her interest in history. We visited that museum in Bonn and then played with arithmetic in other bases.

We haven’t done much geometry and I think I need to work more on the appreciation of circles. So far our treatment has been mostly as a vehicle for solving problems about perimeter and area (though those were pretty fun). Another local mom has organized a geometry and art class focusing on symmetry and optical illusions that starts in a week or so. That will be our required math for a while and should go some way to addressing this particular lacuna in our learning to date.

Because there isn’t that much detailed guidance out there for how to do this, I am realizing that I may need to require myself to do some math, too. This is a good thing. Tigger is very motivated to learn things together. In fact, when we were talking about that calculus chapter, she asked if her dad and I knew calculus. When I told her that her dad had never learned calculus, she suggested that perhaps he could learn it with her.

I have discovered Martin Gardner, who seems to be a promising figure for this way of engaging with mathematical ideas. I know very little about him but he wrote a column in Scientific American for many years including some puzzles. I found his Colossal Book of Short Puzzles and Problems in my public library and a quick skim suggested that I should investigate it further. In searching for that I discovered Gathering for Gardner a foundation “that works to honor the achievements of Martin Gardner by promoting the lucid exposition of new and accessible ideas in recreational mathematics, magic, puzzles, and philosophy.” A search on Amazon brings up a substantial list of both puzzle books and other writings.

Finding that Colassal Book has provided another term that seems useful in searching for more engaging mathematical texts: recreational mathematics. I’m hoping that sort of term might lead in directions that avoid having to plow through mounds of dry text books unconcerned with the beauty and joy of the subject. Certainly typing it into a search box at Amazon brings up a list with at least one book with “joy” in the title, which is a promising beginning. So I have more work to do investigating the possibilities. I’m not in a hurry. Challenge Math is going to last us until at least Christmas and if I make that foray into Simple Machines, there will be plenty of opportunity to include the mathematics of that as well.

So I am just setting out the general direction of my future travels. If any of you have been to some of these places and would like to contribute to our very own “Rough Guide to the Joy and Beauty of Mathematics” pipe up in the comments, or in your own blog. There are a few math-phobics who read this blog and the beauty is not necessarily obvious to them. A good travel guide can help us notice the stuff that we might have missed otherwise. I am amazed how many people ask us if we went to the Louvre when I mention Freya’s interest in Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art. The Louvre doesn’t have those paintings, but a good travel guide will tell you where to find them. Hopefully we can do the same for math.

Edited to add: After I posted this Saille posted a link to a rather good article decrying the traditional method. I rather like the title “Presidential Math Panel Vows to Increase Learning Difficulties”. If it read it right, he’s after something like what I’m trying to open up here.

Although no longer an academic, I still work in the sector so I subscribe to the Chronicle of Higher Education. They have some blogs now and one of them has a very interesting proposal for a college. Part II lays out the curriculum in detail. I think it makes sense without Part I, but you might like that, too. Here’s the overarching idea. She is imagining her “perfect college”:

The school would combine the ideas of my cynically rational, somewhat hard-hearted husband, with the lofty ideals I hold about what makes a human being “educated” and what makes knowledge worth pursuing. My husband and I agreed that every college graduate should know enough about numbers to understand a Wall Street Journal discussion about subprime mortgages (and to negotiate with a lender); enough about writing to produce an essay using correct grammar, punctuation, spelling, paragraph development, and rational argumentation; and possess enough reading comprehension to read an essay tackling important ideas and containing big words.

To all of this I added the requirement that our graduates should live with a sense of obligation — if not zeal — to contribute to what is best and most beautiful in the world. In fact, Fendrich University’s “mission statement” (were it to be forced to come up with one by an accrediting organization) would begin, “Fendrich University aims to educate students to become literate, numerate, and thoughtful citizens.”

The discussion in the comments is particularly interesting. Remember, most of the readers are college professors so their take is based on their experience of the students they teach. As I look at that curriculum, I think it would be a good basis for planning your homeschool high-school.

I was trying to pull together some ideas for teaching some basic physics a while ago. My plans sort of fell apart for the want of a spring scale that could measure small weights. My local hardware store only has a fish scale. And I hadn’t got around to checking out any local head shops (a friend who is into rock polishing recommended that type of store as a good bet for scales for small weights). I have an electronic kitchen scale but I need something I can hook to a small weight and measure the difference between pulling it up an incline plane versus straight up.

Then Becky pipes up with Canadian science suppliers and I found this at Efston Science and a few cheaper options at Boreal Northwest. The smallest is 250g in those cheaper ones, whereas Efston has a 30g one. I will need to use the old kitchen scale to measure likely candidates for these experiments. Though I could get a set of weights, too, either from Boreal or from Efston. I think the weights at Boreal are more suited to our needs. I like the look of the ones with hooks.

Boreal also seems to have a nice selection of pullies. And I quite like the look of this inclined plane with a pulley. I could clearly go a bit mad buying stuff we could make ourselves… If I was feeling flush, I could go for a kit with a video.

So now I’ve written all that stuff down where I can find it, I should step away from those websites before I actually buy something. Glad I know where to find it when we decide we want to do that stuff though.

Last up, for today, another book that I thought might be of interest because the main character is a 10 year old. I kind of liked it though it is very dark and the text is very sparse. The drawing style is interesting and well suited to the content. I think the story might well appeal to some kids, but those parents that are concerned about coarse language should be aware that there is some, all totally in character and used by adult characters for the most part.

The characters are what might be described as “men of few words” and this medium is well suited to portraying their relationships and their emotional life. At least I think that is what is being portrayed. Nothing terrible happens but the life of the characters is not particularly joyous either. Isolation, both geographic and emotional, is well portrayed. (I said it was dark, didn’t I?)

This series is winning awards. And it is well worth checking out. I don’t think it is particularly the kind of story that Tigger likes, but I can imagine Steph’s Sarah finding it interesting. And boys who might identify with the main character, who has a rich fantasy life as a superhero and builds a fort by the river, might also enjoy it. Volume II: Ghost Stories is now available and has won a prize. Volume III: The Country Nurse is due out in October. The other two volumes appear to focus on different characters and the whole trilogy looks to be an interesting commentary on small town life. An interview with the author can be found here.

Since we had been talking about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in relation to the news, I figured it was also time to read Joe Sacco’s Palestine. Like Persepolis, this was originally published in several volumes but has been reprinted in a single volume with an added bonus of an introduction by Edward Said. The juxtaposition of Said’s writing with Sacco’s graphic presentation is interesting though Said also has interesting things to say about the possibilities of the graphic medium drawing on the role of comics in his own life.

Sacco is a journalist and this collection is an interesting journalistic experiment in that the process by which he comes to know what he tells is an important part of the story. He is not trying to give a “balanced” account in the sense of showing both sides, but rather to provide an account that he finds is missing from most of the American journalism on the subject. Thus the book is meant to compliment other sources of information. He does attempt to provide a fair account and I think that letting the reader see how he came to know these things about the situation in Palestine is important. In general, I think he succeeds in this attempt at fairness, to the extent that this is possible in a situation as complex as the one he portrays. The context in which different people living there frame their own opinions of the situation is also portrayed well. While Sacco clearly has sympathy for the Palestinian people, he is able to portray the complexity and contradictions. Plenty of food for thought.

In terms of whether the material is suitable for children. I think that any child (probably middle school age and older) that is already aware of these political issues could probably cope. While violence and the effects of violence are portrayed, they are not glorified nor is there gratuitous graphic portrayal of brutality. Much is understood rather than portrayed directly. Sacco includes information about the lives of children, which I find is often interesting to children when they read about events.

I like his drawing style. And he lays out the panels in interesting ways. His slightly self-deprecating tone works well. It’s not overdone, but it gives a certain humility to the reporting. He portrays his own fear and his own goofiness. The contrast between his visits to Palestinian towns and refugee camps and his life in Jerusalem where he is staying is also interesting. I think that seeing the journalist in the story in this way probably makes us read other journalism differently. Or at least ask questions about the extent of the journalists engagement with his subject.

For teenagers with an interest in politics, this would be an excellent book to recommend. It raises a lot of important questions about point of view in politics and journalism. It also raises some interesting questions about the role of journalism in making political change (an ideal that many young people hold). At the same time it is not cynical.

I’m now thinking I will look for his books on the Bosnian conflict. Some of his earlier work has been collected in the volume Notes from a Defeatist, which also looks interesting. It includes his reflections on the Gulf War as well as something on his mother’s experience of World War I.

I’m a sucker for those “you might also enjoy” recommendations and spotted this while I was looking up those links. King: A comics biography of Martin Luther King by Ho Che Anderson. That might also be worth checking out, particularly for those of you who teach American history in some sort of systematic way. The cover art looks fascinating.

In my recent explorations of the comic form, I have been catching up on some classics. Since these are not intended as children’s books (despite some folks prejudices about graphic novels), and since even those of us who don’t think books should have ratings appreciate what others have to say about them, I thought I’d set down my thoughts here. I’m going to give each one it’s own post. First up Persepolis.

I came across this when I saw the movie advertised in my local art cinema coming soon list. Makes me think I’ve been living under a rock, but I’ve discovered it now. The book is autobiographical and was originally published in French in several volumes. Although my library has both the French and English editions, I read the English, one-volume one. The story is of a young girl (about 10) at the time of the Iranian revolution. I like the drawing style (sample pages are included at the link). The story is well told. It is clearly from a particular perspective — that of the child of intellectuals — but that perspective is interesting and gives insight into the various contradictions of radical intellectualism as well as insight into the how the bigger political events shaped everyday life. The author reflects on that choice on this page at the Random House site.

Because the main character is a young girl, I thought that it might be of interest to my daughter. However, because we are dealing with war and difficult political circumstances, I was concerned that it might treat subjects that you wouldn’t want 10 year olds to know too much about if they weren’t in the unfortunate circumstance of living in a war zone. My concerns were unfounded. Although it deals with difficult subjects, it does not dwell on them nor treat them with gratuitous visuals. The author succeeds in maintaining the perspective of the child and things are explained as her parents might well have explained them and as a child would have understood them. While these are difficult things to deal with, including arrest and execution, they are presented in a very matter of fact way that would probably enable a middle-school child to engage meaningfully with the content.

Since my 10 year old child does read the newspaper, including articles about Gaza and honour killings in the middle east, I think the content would be fine for her. She has chosen not to read it right now but if she is interested in the future, I will not hesitate to get it out of the library again. I have no idea what the movie is like. I know that for my daughter, she finds the same subject more disturbing in a movie than in a book (a recent example being the movie of Murder on the Orient Express, which she has read twice and enjoyed). So what I say about the book does not apply to the movie adaptation. If anyone has seen the movie, I would appreciate any thoughts on this in the comments.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been doing a unit on infectious diseases with our little co-op. I get the impression that some folks have co-ops that do quite formal learning and provide whole sections of the curriculum for the kids. Ours is more informal. We get together in someone’s house once a week for a couple of hours. Our kids range from 8 to 12 years old. The idea is that there is a learning activity for about an hour and then the kids get to play together. That learning activity can be anything including board games and crafts. This year we organized it in blocks of 3 weeks so that we could do more substantial things but those things vary considerably. I picked the topic out of the air.

These notes are mostly for the kids in case they want to do any more work on these issues or review anything we talked about.

Infectious diseases are those diseases that can pass from one person to another. Examples include the common cold, flu, and chickenpox. It is the fact that you can pass them on that makes them “infectious”.

Keywords for week 1:

• pathogen - from the Greek “pathos” (disease, suffering) and “genos” (origin), the collective term for the things that cause disease, these can include bacteria, viruses, fungi, parasites.
• Bacteria - single celled organisms, some cause diseases (for example, strep throat is caused by bacteria)
• Virus - a protein that can get other cells to reproduce it, some cause disease (for example, colds and flu are caused by viruses)
• immune system - the various ways that your body fights off pathogens including the barriers to their entry into your body and the white blood cells that kill pathogens
• antibodies - proteins produced by your bodies to mark pathogens so your white blood cells know to kill them
• vaccine - a weakened form of an infectious disease introduced to encourage your body to produce antibodies so that if you ever come in contact with the real disease, your body can fight it off before you get sick

BrainPop has movies about bacteria (check out the FYI link on the bottom of the page for more detailed information), viruses, and the Immune System. Unfortunately, you need a subscription though there is a 5 day trial. We have a subscription so if there is something on there you really want to watch, let me know.

National Geographic has some cool information and quizes about bacteria.

Good information about bacteria (with diagrams) can be found here the same folks have a good overview of the immune system, too.

There are good diagrams and explanations of all your body systems at the Sick Kids site. If you go to respiratory system, there is a tab for “defense” that explains the first line of defense against infections.

Keywords for Week 2:

• vector - word used to describe transmission of disease via another organism (for example, malaria is transmitted between humans by mosquitos)
• incubation period - the period of time between exposure to a pathogen and the pathogen reproducing itself enough to make you sick
• contagious period - the period of time in which you can pass on the pathogen to someone else
• antibiotic resistance - mutations of bacteria that are not killed by (certain) anti-biotics, such bacteria are sometimes called “super bugs”
• mutation - a mistake in the copying of the DNA during reproduction; mutations might make an organism weaker and it dies before reproducing again, have no discernable effect, or give it advantages that makes it last longer and reproduce more than other strains of the organism;

Health Canada has factsheets about handwashing, Antibiotic resistance, and on a whole range of infectious diseases (use the sidebar on the antibiotic resistance page).

There is good general information about infectious diseases and the ways they can be passed on here.

The table of incubation periods and contagious periods that I showed you was based on information found here. The important thing about this is that for many infectious diseases, you are contagious before you even know you are sick. And those who have caught the disease won’t know that they have caught it until the end of the incubation period, which might be several weeks.

The main modes of transmission are:

• air (for example, colds can be transmitted through the air when you sneeze)
• direct contact (depending on the disease this may be getting pathogens on your hands from touching someone else or from touching something that has pathogens on it, like a door knob; some diseases, like HIV/AIDS, are much harder to catch and require very intimate forms of direct contact)
• water (for example, polio and cholera)
• vector (for example, malaria, bubonic plague, West Nile virus)

To prevent disease it is important to think about the mode of transmission. So for airborne transmission, we want to prevent pathogens from remaining in the air. We can cover our mouths when we cough or sneeze, or even wear a mask over our mouth and nose.

For direct contact, we need to keep surfaces clean and wash our hands regularly. Because the skin on our hands is very good at preventing pathogens from entering our bodies, they are often not an immediate danger to us, but we should keep them away from our faces, where there are more ways for the pathogens to get in. It is also important to keep cuts clean as they are breaks in that skin defense. Barriers like gloves are used by medical staff for this purpose.

Water borne transmission is prevented by major public works like sewage systems and water treatment systems. When you are camping, you might prevent water borne diseases by boiling water for 20 minutes and letting it cool before you drink it. Many pathogens are killed at high temperatures though it may take several minutes for them to die.

Vector transmission can be prevented by keeping the carriers of disease separate from human populations. Clearing up sources of food (as in the case of rats and the plague) or the conditions in which they reproduce (as we do when we try to eliminate stagnant water to prevent West Nile disease and malaria) work well. As do barriers to human contact with the vectors like mosquito nets and insect repellent.

The level of precaution necessary depends on the level of risk. Your immune system is very good at repelling pathogens and at killing them before you get sick. But there are circumstances when your immune system will be weaker: when you are already ill, when you are very young (babies), when you are older, or if you have a condition that weakens your immune system. Your immune defenses will also be weaker if you are very tired or you are not eating properly. If ever you are visiting someone who might have weaker immunity to disease you should take extra precautions to prevent passing disease to them.

Remember, most of the bacteria, viruses and fungi that you come in contact with in daily life are not harmful and may be beneficial. I hope everyone enjoyed themselves. Remember we are meeting at the library next week.

In the comments of that post of Lissa’s on patience, someone wonders what to do when you have asked your children to do something and they are just obstinately refusing. The example she gives is cleaning their room. I’m sure it is just one. Certainly in my house this scenario has played out any number of times. And I am no paragon of virtue. In fact, I am what is known as a “shouty mom”.

I am also, as I used to tell my students, an expert on housework in a way that my mother would not recognize. I know more than a thing or two about what housework is and who does it and why. And as such, and in the interests of reducing the number of occasions on which shouting might occur, I share some thoughts with you about children and housework.

First of all a definition. What makes something housework is the social relations in which it is done. As Charlotte Perkins Gilman once put it “All work was once domestic.” What makes something housework is the fact that it is work done for the benefit of the collective living in a household. Having a bath is not housework. Bathing a baby or a disabled adult is. Some things are always housework, like cleaning the public spaces of a home. Some things could be housework or personal care. My favourite example is laundry. If you have one pile of laundry that is done collectively, it’s housework. If each member of the household does his or her own laundry then it is personal care, just like washing your body and brushing your teeth is personal care.

The big issue about this collective work then becomes who does it. Different households divide this work up differently. Some agree that this is the job of one person who might solicit the help of other members of the household at particular times. Others agree that it is a collective responsibility and they work out various ways of dividing up the labour involved. There is a considerable social science literature, primarily in sociology and economics, on the various ways this gets done and a similarly large literature on why. Suffice it to say that there are a lot of methods. All methods, including one person being responsible for all housework, are usually considered fair by the members of the household, though those outside the household may not agree due to a different understanding of what fairness is.

There is a much smaller, almost negligible, literature on whether and how children contribute to housework. I have argued (in an academic article) that this is because the social scientists in this field have great difficulty conceptualizing a division of labour between more than 2 people. Nevertheless, there is considerable evidence, both scientific and anecdotal, that children do indeed do housework. Indeed it is common in discussions on homeschooling blogs for children’s contributions to housework to come up in conversation, and not only as a cause of shouting and unpleasantness.

As with the division of labour between adult members of a household, I assume that various ways of involving children in housework are valid and acceptable. As with Melissa’s post, (which was not at all about housework, really) I am offering a way of thinking about the issues that I hope will help you to clarify your own values and goals and make your own decisions about how to approach this issue. There is a further assumption underlying my comments. There are no universally agreed upon standards of housework, beyond a minimum below which health is endangered. You, as a household, can decide what needs doing, how often, and to what standard.

I require my daughter, as she gets older, to take on housework tasks. I do this because I think that one of my roles as a parent is to teach her the skills she needs to be independent. But this is not the only reason. I also expect that all able bodied members of our household should contribute to the household. We do not delegate tasks to one person. We are all collectively responsible.

While Tigger was very small, she did not contribute because she was not able. In fact, early in her life, she created housework that we needed to do. As she ages, she has taken on many of those tasks herself. They have stopped being “housework” and become “personal care”. She can dress herself, brush her own teeth, bathe herself, etc. (A bit of supervision or reminder is still sometimes necessary.) As she has developed she has also taken on other tasks, like clearing the table after dinner and putting the dishes in the dishwasher. She knows how to mop a floor, clean the bathroom, and do laundry though she is not required to do any of these regularly. She is not paid to contribute to the household. Her allowance is completely separate from doing housework. My belief is thus somewhat like Marx’s maxim “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.”

Despite my strongly held belief that she should contribute, I find it incomprehensible that many people make the first requirement of their growing children in this area to keep their own rooms tidy. We have plenty to argue about without adding a task that is almost inevitably going to result in a power struggle. Why inevitably? Well, our children as they grow desire independence. This is at the root of toddler tantrums, teenage rebellion, and any number of struggles in between. We desire their independence, too, but we want to ensure that they have the skills required at each stage. The frustration of not having the skills to reach ones desires immediately is inevitable. However, there are certain areas of independence that can be granted relatively early: choosing what to wear, choosing what to do, choosing what and how much to eat. These choices might be easier, particularly for the very young, if the choices are limited but some choice is often possible.

Back to tidying your own room. If the definition of housework is that it is work that benefits the collective, ones own room seems a logical contender for personal space. If you require that a child tidy his or her own room, make the bed every day, etc. you are setting yourself up for a power struggle about whose room it is. The refusal to complete those tasks may not be a refusal to participate in the collective care of the household. It might be an assertion that this is one domain over which the child believes s/he has enough maturity to assert independence. The battle is really about who decides the standards.

What I have done is to not enter that fray. I do occasionally require Tigger to tidy her room. But I make it clear what the reasons are. If her room is so messy that she doesn’t feel comfortable playing in there and brings her toys out into public space, then there is a problem with the standard of tidiness in her room that needs to be addressed. She can choose to play in the living room, but if her bedroom is not in a state for that to be a real choice, then she has to do something about it. Similarly, she has to maintain reasonable access for her parents. As a friend put it, if the house were to catch fire and one of us had to go in there to carry her out in the night, we need a clear path from the door to the bed. And I can put conditions on which laundry I will do. I am not going to look all over her room for dirty laundry so if she wants things washed they need to make it to the hamper.

Because she is still young and learning, we have tried to be supportive in helping her learn how to tidy as well as how to develop her own standard of tidiness. Sometimes she needs prompting to see that the level of untidiness is causing her some distress or difficulty. We have also helped her to work out how best to organize the things in her room so that she can tidy. We have talked about and helped with decluttering, getting rid of toys she doesn’t really use, as well as providing storage boxes and bookshelves to enable her to easily put away and easily access what she does use. The standards have to be relevant to her. For example, the Playmobile has to be put away in a sealed box under the bed, rather than merely tidied away into the dollhouse, because the cat kidnaps Playmobile people and is capable of opening the dollhouse to do so.

I would argue that it is better to encourage children to participate in genuine housework from an early age. Rather than start by asking them to keep their rooms tidy, start by explaining that we all live in certain rooms of the house and therefore it is unreasonable for any of us to make it difficult for other members of the household to use a public room. So if you play in the living room, you need to tidy up afterwards so that someone else can do something different in that space later. Similarly, you can teach your children to respect the work that you continue to do for them and not make that work harder than necessary. Provide them with laundry hampers in their rooms and ask them to put dirty clothes in the hamper to make it easier for you to collect dirty laundry. Have young children clear away their own plates after dinner. Older ones can set the table, load the dishwasher, wash or dry dishes, or wipe down countertops. For some people, having lists of tasks helps, and having a visual reminder of how to do it can help children still learning. For others, doing housework together as a big “blitz” works. You need to figure out what works for you and your family. What I am urging you to consider is that the requirements be about collective space.

If siblings share a room, then the collective responsible for its tidiness is smaller — the children who share the room, rather than the whole family — and help may need to be provided to enable those siblings to reach agreement about that standard. It is possible for two people to share a room and have quite divergent standards. I give you my friend Em’s room as an example, I hope she doesn’t mind. (scroll down to the photos of her bedroom) The point is to come to some agreement that is acceptable to those who share a particular space.

Lissa is absolutely right that it works better to ask than to tell. But it is also important to ask reasonable things. To teach our children why certain things get done and why it is important for them to learn how to do them and to contribute to the household. And to teach them to respect others with whom they share space even if they don’t always agree with them. There are plenty of other things we can fight with our children about.

I should really participate in Messy Tuesday (see that link to Em’s blog) but one of the things I did this weekend was tidy one of the messier kitchen cupboards. Although I can usually be relied upon to have a messy house, it just isn’t that bad right now.

If you haven’t read Lissa’s post on patience, I highly recommend it. I’m putting a link here in case I ever need to find it again. I think it will bear rereading as a reminder. I had lots of “aha” moments as I read. One that stands out is when she talked about her decision to drive cross-country with her kids on her own (rather than have her husband take vacation time to share the driving). I could so relate to the importance of not having that deadline imposed.