My seven year old is beautiful, amazing and talented. I found a drawing hidden in her bedroom the other day; chalk on brown paper. It’s a duckling and I love it so much I pinned it to the wall next to my desk.
She draws things and screws them up into a little ball, lobbing them across the room to end up land mines of destroyed creativity, left for the baby to chew to pieces and for her to feel lesser, somehow.
Her imagination doesn’t match up to the skill of her fingers. Not yet, not yet.
I take the abandoned papers, smooth out their crinkled lines and point out that I really love her artwork. I tell her I’m proud of her, she has a talent, and drawing is a skill that you work at. I tell her of course her drawings don’t look like the ones in books, because she is seven and illustrators are much older than that, with years of practise. I want her to keep drawing, because it makes her so happy.
Raising children is touch and go. Encouragement and discipline. A mix of you’re amazing and keep trying because you’ll get there.
I was talking with my husband today, about encouragement, and children, and art. And suddenly I remembered my art teacher in Primary school telling me I had no talent for drawing and she didn’t know why I bothered.
I remembered having a sculpture I’d made out of clay screwed up in my face, while being told that it would never work and that I was no good.
Visceral reaction to a memory I didn’t realise I still had. My art teacher didn’t like me, and for years, I believed that I wasn’t any good at art, that I couldn’t draw, couldn’t paint, couldn’t art.
This is the power adults have over children. Turns out I’m still angry, about my sculpture, about the disillusionment that she instilled in me.
Children need encouraging in the things they enjoy, and we don’t give that enough. Flippant comments cut deeper than we realise.
Related:
For years, I stopped showing my mother my writing because she used to correct my spelling and grammar before encouraging me. I refused to let her read my homework. I didn’t bring my stories home. If I needed help with school work I went to my father, or my grandmother, who were softer critics. I was a sensitive snowflake and I couldn’t handle my mother at that stage. She wielded her red pen like a sword and she was very good at it.
Years later, I get my revenge. I hack her blog posts to bits sometimes, and put them back together, better. I am a good editor, and I learned at her feet. I write things for a living. Her red pen didn’t cut me down, although it felt like it at the time.
But I get my revenge, even as she still rings me to point out a single error in my writing.
“But did you like it?” I ask.
“Of course I liked it, but you need to fix this sentence that doesn’t work.”
She wants me to be better. I want to be better. I have thicker skin nowadays. But I didn’t then, and it was hard, and I hid myself from her.
I’m trying to be a softer parent. Walking between encouragement and teaching. My red pen is not a sword for my daughter. But then, maybe hers wasn’t when I was seven either. Maybe it all came later and it’s muddled up in my brain, a great timey wimey ball of yarn.
I remember sitting at the plastic covered desk, working on a sculpture of a fish. Smoothing and scaling and reforming the arches. I remember being proud of how it looked, of how it matched the picture inside my head. I remember the art teacher appearing over my shoulder, telling me I was no good. I remember her hands, reaching over to touch my work. Don’t touch my work. I remember her picking it up, as I watched, ten years old and fragile in my new found creativity, picking it up and crushing it into a ball. Destroying the last hour’s work, telling me I was no good.
I remade that sculpture, and gave it to my father for father’s day. It wasn’t as good as the original, and I never forgave the teacher. For the record, my parents loved the fish, and it’s still hanging in my parents house, if I remember correctly.
But it’s a poor imitation of what I started to do in the beginning.
As a writer, and an editor, I truly believe that sometimes tearing things apart and putting them back together is a good thing. Strip things down to their bones, hack out all the marrow and resculpt them into something new, something better.
Is that what my teacher was trying to do, when she reached over and took over?
My memory tells me no. I remember more than one time when she took the pen off me, took the paper, stole the paintbrush. I remember more stories of destruction than of creativity. Maybe my memory is flawed.
Maybe not.
My art teacher in Primary School was not a good teacher. She did not make me better with her criticism.
I looked her up on Facebook, earlier today. She’s not really on there, it seems. But neither is she an art teacher anymore. She’s moved on to real estate, which in my opinion, is a much safer place for her to practise her destructive tendencies.
Teaching children is a difficult thing. They’re fragile in your hands and it’s an honour to be allowed to shepherd them through to adulthood.
Don’t fuck it up, okay?
Beautifully said!
I find myself having to stop and reassess all of the time.
I am constantly asking myself “What is my job as the parent?”.
I believe my role is to help my child through life, to become a good person. I am here to teach them values, and from that, they can then apply them to life as they see fit.
My role is not to correct everything or to say that something is not done right. I give guidance, encouragement, and a pat on the back for effort.
But I have to remind myself all of the time.
I fuck up a lot as a parent. I am the Queen of fucking up. But not in this area. In this, as in a few others, I do ok. I recall my daughter saying to me, aged about 6, as I drove them home from school “We’re your magnum opus, sure we are mama?” and I said “That’s right, beautiful” and she paused and said “Mama, what’s a magnum opus?” 🙂
How does the quotation go – “Mother is the word for god in the lips and hearts of children”.
When I worked as a TA in Learning Support (for 6 years) I think I managed at least some of the time to help a child realise they were not stupid, or dumb, or an idiot or any of the other awful names I heard them call themselves. I like to think my intense belief that they had value and worth reached them, at least a little.
And oh, that story about your teacher hurt my heart. Too many times I have heard this sort of story. I find cruelty and unkindness to children almost unbearable. Loathesome woman. Most teachers I worked with were great, well intentioned and kind hearted. Some were not.
I love your daughter’s duck too, it’s actually very good 🙂
Hi,
When I was a Special Educator and doing a lot of Remedial Reading remediation – there was a system some kids responded well to, with a process called Lindamood-Bell.
My next door neighbour’s son was helped with this method. Very intensive but worked a treat.
The system used coloured cuisinaire blocks, to symbolize sounds and to help train the phonertic bones of reading, and dyslexia.
I just googled it. Some one in Tassie may be trained in it.
I think you well and truly have your ” eye on the ball ”
Duck and parrot are terrific
Happy Birthday, for the 12th November, I hope a lot of serendipity comes your way, everything gets better and better.
And congratulations on your 25 thousand words – I did not realize it was 50 thousand words when I wrote my comment.
Good writing muscle building, no doubt.
What I said about what I enjoyed about your writing, still stands.
Sometimes, I think you are 25 thousand years old; your maturity and insightfulness is way beyond, your earthly years.
I fucked it up many times as a teacher and as a parent, but , I believe that it takes an focus and awareness to learn from that;
Teaching practice has hopefully come a long way, since your awful learning experiences.
I think the best thing I passed on was: –
it was OK, not to get something “right” straight away;
It was important to keep trying when something seemed difficult, and not to give up
It was OK to make mistakes, because you learn from your mistakes and this is just another opportunity ,
and practice is good, gives you power and in time, mastery.
It, (practice ) gives you opportunity to get get the hang of something. It doesn’t matter how many times you need to practice,
some things are not necessarily mistakes, but a chance to be creative.
Art is a bit different, I encouraged them to keep “their perceived” mistakes, I would build up skills with materials and media and then tackle the project.
I would hang up all their work so that they could see how they started, and, where they got to, after the process was finished.
Always asked permission, to touch their work;
if it was something technical, I would show in a separate demonstration, not on their work.
ALL work was kept.
No learner should get subjective, disenfranchising remarks made to them about their skill or remarks that take away their self worth.
The deficit of your experience has given you the bones of understanding and sensitivity, with which, in turn,
and how you are, now, relating and teaching, now, with your own children.
You make me take a good breath in, as I see both sides of your experience.
What I love about how you help your children, is your honesty, compassion, reflection and vision.
I made similar, unwitting, helpful corrections with my daughter, but I think it is the intention behind it, and she has survived my mistakes.
We are very close now.
She made learn and grow with her, tempestuous teenage years.
Like your mother loves you, I love her to bits in the same kind of way.
It took me long time to stop measuring my children’s success with that of my success as a parent, my own inadequacies got in the way a few times-
letting go, knowing when to; standing back, are the hardest lessons that I have learnt, and seems, still learning, and the other gremlin. is not “seeking” approval.
Just found Katie Goodman of Broad Comedy. She sings a song called, ” I Fucked it up”, it is funny and uplifting. If you get a chance, have a listen.
Beautifully written and a powerful post. I felt angry at your art teacher — they are still around and have a lot of shattered children to answer for.
It can be delicate balance as a parent, how much do we ‘teach’ and how much do we say is wonderful. When it comes to art — the visual arts, music, creative writing — I can’t help but love what my kids create. I can’t help it, nor would I want it any other way. Very rarely do I make a ‘suggestion’ with something they have created. I’ll help with Maths, Science, essays, etc, but not the arts. One of the nicest things one of my kids ever said to me was when I said I thought something they’d made was really good, was, ‘Oh, but you love everything we do.’ Yep, I do and they know I’m biased, but I think there are plenty of people out there who will, and do, put them in their place. As their mother, I’ve decided (rightly or wrongly) that I don’t have to do that, not with the arts anyway. I will always love their work, I can’t help it, and will always love them even when no one else does.
It always incenses me when I hear of art teachers like that, of any of the classes it’s the one that that attitude has absolutely no place. I’m still undoing the damage an art teacher in high school did to my confidence. But whenever I hear her in my head I remember my better art teacher who knew when to make me push my work further and when to believe it was done and how I saw it should be.
I really hope to pass that critical thinking encouragement on to my children.
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