{Reposted from my Moonlight Blog, 8/28/2017}
Today is my son’s first day of school away from me. He is three, and I have had a classroom at our home for him for the last year and we are raising him in a Montessori home. I am not saddened by this transition, or worried that he is too young or will not be able to handle being away from me. Rather, I am excited for his future. I am excited for him to become attached to another caregiver, an adult that he can trust and learn from. I am excited for him to make friends, and I am even excited for him to have arguments with other children and the resulting lessons he will learn from those interactions. We dropped him off and then we left. We did not linger, we are not spending our time watching him through the observation windows.
The most important thing when your child starts school is TRUST. I was deliberate in my choice of his school. I researched, I visited, asked important questions about how the classrooms ran and the certifications of the teachers. I talked to past parents at the school.So now I trust that they will do what is in his best interest and in the best interest of the community of learners.
As a school owner, I have seen that families often cause unwitting stress on the school relationship. This in turn puts stress on the child and inhibits the child’s growth. The two issues I come across most often is 1) The families do not want their child to be growing up and see the child as still a baby and incapable and 2) The families do not trust that someone else will do things like they do it.
One of the primary differences between Montessori and other philosophies of education is that we start from the place that a child is inherently capable. From the time of birth the child has within him all he needs to construct himself.
“At birth, the child leaves a person- his mother’s womb- and this makes him independent of her bodily functions. The baby is next endowed with an urge, or need, to face the out world and to absorb it. We might say that he is born with the ‘psychology of world conquest’. By absorbing what he finds about him, he forms his own personality.” (The Absorbent Mind, Chapter 7, p. 88).
This child is not ours to mold into who we want him or her to be. Rather, the child MUST construct himself as he is. And to do this the child needs rich experiences.
No, no other person will care for your child like you do. Not even your partner. Part of the rich experiences a child needs are allowing other caregivers to be a part of our children’s lives. Research has shown that children do well with more than one caregiver: “In the Study of Early Child Care, when quality and type of care were controlled for along with family background, children exposed to large amounts of care were at increased risk for attachment insecurity only if their mothers were highly insensitive.” (Retrieved from: http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/570794). Throughout a child’s life they will have to learn how to deal with all sorts of people. Through our carefully chosen network of people we allow into our children’s lives, we can give our children practice in this. And there are many positives besides experiences. Try as we might, we are not impartial observers of our own children. We have biases, both positive and negative, that can blind us to some of the realities of our children. We need outside sources to push past these biases to allow our child to reach their full potential. As parents, we have strengths and weaknesses that affect how and what we can teach our children. Having a bigger variety of caregivers will allow our children to capitalize on other adults’ knowledge and experiences.
So fly my little bird. The sky is the limit for you and I am so excited to be a witness to your journey.
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