Author: Deborah Kallmann

I keep thinking about my childhood in Zambia. Images of sunshine in the clouds, beautiful tall trees, huge ants on the flagstone, red ants under the avocado tree bark, the squabbling chickens, our three huge dogs, those turtles after the rain, dry lightening storms, and yes, a pile of dirt that arrived every spring and was dumped by the fence. True, there were no screen-entertainment options – not even T.V. The one-channel state media came on at 5:00 p.m. every evening; once a week my brother and I could watch an hour of Sesame Street or I recall seeing “Gilligan’s Island” (but maybe that’s made-up), before the news came on. 

Zambia in the late 60s – early 70s was a “failing colonial state”. It was a time for reinvention and remorse, a time to come together or to blame one another. It was a time for religion to open its many hearts or splinter us. We could either reinvent our destinies or leave. My family tried to reinvent itself and then we left. We were not missionaries or teachers or bankers or escapees from South Africa. We were Zambian. Our hopes for Zambia were as great as the sunrise on the Zambezi river. Our home was a place of much mirth, many gatherings, conversations about a “new politics”, and the door was always open, no “warning calls” needed. We had pool parties every Sunday.  ANYONE was welcome – ethnic backgrounds were irrelevant, friendship was not.

We kids knew how to play – mostly because adults were busy with this new world. We built forts in the bushes, houses in the bamboo, and played-out stories in the enormous strawberry patch. Our dogs were fellow-characters. There was much ado about nothing. 

But, that pile of dirt was one of my favorite places to play alone. I climbed it and stood on top, feeling the breeze and seeking out the little girl who lived next door. I told stories to myself and molded them in the soft, pliable, (manure) soil. I ran down and lay in the grass, gazing at the story-clouds. Apparently, I was there all day. And by the end of a day, I was so stinky that a full-force hose was turned on me before someone threw me into the tub. 

I did not feel my parents’ insecurities very often. Their worlds were exploding. Once a thief broke in to our house and I remember us sitting down all together with the police the next morning. I heard that the robber had actually crept to my parents’ bedside tables to look for jewelry and money. I think I slipped away through the side door to find that centipede I’d been playing with the day before. And, I remember my father talking about how difficult it was to get his trucks across the country (he ran THE moving & storage company for Central Africa). Thieves were pillaging and attacking the trucks and their drivers. I remember that we had to get an armed guard. I did not know why.

I don’t remember that my dad was gone for several weeks, seeking a new home for us somewhere in the world. I don’t remember that my parents and all our cousins disagreed about where we should emigrate. I don’t remember how the last day arrived. When it did, I felt the grief. But, I felt no fear. We were on an adventure. Together.

What’s summertime for? There’s a myth that our long summer breaks are a vestige of agricultural rhythms – but how are we to interpret that when we easily misunderstand other “founding acts” for the sake of present-day benefits? How many private industries grow out of this “gap in the public fund”? How do we continue to work (to pay for the daycare) so that we can afford the house (to sleep in) to buy our healthy food to heat up in the microwave (because the oven takes too long)? Perhaps we can accept summertime as a gift. Somehow everyone slows down, and children know this if they are outdoors in the heat and sunshine. Children know what to do with these long days – if we let them.

Because young children are born knowing how to play, they will know what to do in a backyard filled with twigs, sticks, stones, water, and shade. Unlike us, they can fill that space with their imaginary friends and companions, stories, time with a pet, or a family of fairies and gnomes. Yes, these imaginary creatures are important vehicles for our young ones who don’t yet distinguish between “fact” and “fiction” (as if we can). If we let them, our young children will fill an apparently empty space with their imaginations. But we need to get out of their way.

If we have filled their lives with stimulation: “entertainment-parenting”, screens of any sort, constant outings, etc., they will need more time to settle-down to the expectations of a “blank slate” – the backyard. If we have placed our precious one in the center of the world, responding to every request and statement, that too will take time to unwind. If we have few other children to invite over into our backyards, maybe just one or two a week would do – social time with others, but unstructured. How much time to clear the system of overstimulation? At least a month. At that point a young child will not want to come indoors, will be so self-entertaining that you’ll be able to write your masterpiece, will be an active participant in a world of her or his making and less willing to sit in front of a screen. Within a predictable summer routine of time together in the morning, at lunch and at dinner, our children will thrive on less.

Summertime is for our backyard, for lying under a tree and watching the breezes, for listening to the bustle of birds and rodents, and envisioning their homes inside trees, under the ground, and in the branches. What does mama bird yell at her babies? Where does that hole in the ground lead to? Maybe I can build an underground home too. Perhaps there’s a family of moles building more rooms, connecting to a town, collecting for the winter, playing together? There are few limits on how children will imagine the lives of animals in their yards (unless they’ve been exposed to the lies of Disney). These internal narratives will nourish their literary souls and entertain you at the dinner table.

Summertime is for slower time, thoughtful time, time together as families, the backyard.

“The unexpectedly rigorous business of bringing up children exposed me, as it necessarily exposes almost any parents, to our ‘child-centered’ society’s icy indifference to everything that makes it possible for children to flourish and to grow up to be responsible adults.” (Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics, p. 33).

We spent an evening at our first parent-enrichment last week discussing and reflecting upon the importance of establishing good boundaries for our children by setting them most clearly for ourselves. The difference between our approach to the discipline that young children need and that of authoritarian-type parenting consists in a form of necessary self-reflection; “no” for us becomes “yes” for them. “Yes” you may play outside, climb a tree, sweep the porch, sit in the swing, play with a friend – emerges easily out of practices that do not allow iPads or television in our young children’s lives, sets time limits to play dates, bed times, dinner-table routines or rowdiness. We also need to deny ourselves the pleasures of too much screen time or overindulgence, while creating pleasurable time with our children: lying around doing nothing, doing chores together, hiking, family game nights, camping, traveling. These experiences of “togetherness” are the building blocks of our future, older families. These are daily practices of self-discipline. And if we know our children thrive in a predictable world designed by us through our abilities to set limits for ourselves, they will want to enter into that world in healthy ways.

Not only do these limit-setting practices help our young children, but they will help us as we and our children age – to know ourselves and to arrive quickly at the answers we need to difficult questions. What will we do when our 9 or 10 year old asks to go to a friend’s house and we don’t know that friend? What will we do when they encounter another family’s values and they are different from ours? How will we cut through the chaos of conflict that other value-systems will bring into our homes if we have not examined our own values and decided how we will act as a family? Inevitably we will encounter these other sets of values (if the television is on other people’s values are already in our home). But we will know that no matter the issue we need to wade through we’ll meet at the dinner table, or speak to one another respectfully, or give one another space if needed, or create opportunities for each other to feel better. This is the “fabric of family”.

We’ll be able to do this only if we’ve spent the time in our children’s early years, establishing well-thought-out practices of “togetherness” and discourse. If we push our young children away from our homes too early, we will lose touch with each other’s needs. We will not respect each family member’s difference. We will invite chaos into our homes and struggle to tame it. Our young children’s lives offer us the time to become “family” and to build strong foundations out of self-knowledge.

There is nothing more lovely than telling a story outdoors, living into the images our own imaginations conjure, while the leaves rustle and the wind cools. We take inspiration from African storytelling which values the moment of storytelling as well as the images that need to be conveyed. One of my teachers, Harold Scheub, helps here: “Storytellers are constantly in the process of taking ancient images and casting them into contemporary kinds of forms. And so there’s no such thing as an original story. I don’t care where it is, whether it’s written or oral, the fact is that every story has been heard before. Every story has been told before. So if we’re looking for originality we’re going to find it, but in unique kinds of ways. We’re not going to find it the way a story is told, we’re not going to find it in the story itself. It’s that connection, that’s the important thing. Connections are everything. Connecting the present and the past, connecting the storyteller and the audience.” ( “The Man with 10,000 Tales” by Tim McDonnel. http://narrative.ly/the-man-with-10000-tales/) When we choose the stories we tell the children it is purely out of this connection that we operate.

The stories we tell are old, orally-transmitted tales, folktales, or pedagogical tales. We tell stories appropriate to the ages of our children, the season, and the make-up of the group. Story time on most days is silent – not a pin drop can be heard – because the children are so absorbed by the telling, the imagery, the lyricism, and the repetition. Young children love to hear a good story over and over; we tell each of our stories for three to four weeks. Stories contain gems that allow children to encounter wolves, thieves, giants, or elves. But these elements are true. So, for example, when I tell “Bremen Town Musicians”, each animal does not become “human” it remains within the bounds of its characteristics: the nervous rooster, the lazy cat, the chatty dog, and the clever donkey. These are not Disney characters who are really just humans in disguise. These are animals confronting their mortality and finding strength in one another.

Another story, “The Turnip”, seems very simple at first. But the group effort needed for all the characters to pull the turnip out of the ground is a magical image of helping one another make the harvest. I watched the children “act it out” last week and will never forget the looks of joy as each child wrapped their arms around the person in front of them in order to pull out the two children who were the “turnip”. Our children need images of social cooperation more than ever.

Unlike reading a story, our stories are not told “perfectly” every time. And sometimes the teller embellishes or erases details, much to the delight of the listeners. Our “Africanization” of storytelling gives the child permission to tell her own stories – to take a story into play with other children, to tell a story he’s heard before without worrying about whether they it’s “right”. Again, the perfectionism inherent in our industrially fabricated material realities (books) can hinder our children from becoming authors, ready to jump into the creative abyss of their own abilities.

Literacy is nothing if it is not love of stories and story telling. Children who are not forced to read too early have time to author their own tales, to play with language, and to hold a captive audience with whomever will listen – perhaps a small audience of stones and bottle caps (as my daughter used to do). Reading is useless if our readers don’t know the value of a story. And in order to love that story, our children need to be free from other people’s images (either in books or in videos) and to hear tales rich with ancient images cast both in old clothing as well as contemporary garb.

The yard sits ready; dirt, sand, shade, plants. Teachers have created summer circle, chosen stories, and decided the menu. Crafts and chores await. We’ll be planting and playing, learning while doing; new poems and new languages. And, most importantly, we’ll be making new friends.

Our late summer menu: