In hindsight, it feels easier to see something I think we knew was always there. We teachers often said, back in the days before stay-at-home, that if we were having a bad day, or going through something hard in our personal lives, that we looked forward to coming to school. Somehow, once we got to school, and the kids came, and we were all there together, whatever was troubling us would fade away and leave us more peaceful, more clear. Each of us Cottage teachers has had those days, made better by coming to work. 

In this period of reflection, I have come to realize that it’s more than just the cuteness of little kids that shoots pangs of love through your heart, or their infectious excitement that has it feel so good to be there all together. It’s that little kids live right now in the moment, and to listen to them properly, to really get them, we have to set aside all else and be in the moment, too. 

We start off the year, every year, with Parent Teacher Training. Some version of this benediction has led us into the space of teaching and learning as the adults who will be caring for the kids in our community: “When you put on your Cottage apron, you step into this unique role. Put aside your preconceived notions, your judgements, your crazy morning, your childhood experiences, your fears, your hopes for the future. Acknowledge them and set them down. You don’t need them today”. What we create when we make that invocation is a container for a meditative space. We are awake and alert moving through the world, but we are not participating in the typical hustle and bustle, the familiar grind of life in capitalism. We slow down. We start to do things more on kid time. We stop to look at a bug. We let things unfold, instead of trying to hit all the items on our to-do list.

This slow down is integral to the Cottage curriculum. We utilize what, in Early Childhood Education, is called an Emergent Curriculum, which means that our curriculum is derived from the interests, developing skills, and preferences of the very children who are participants. They teach us who they are and what they are working on, and we listen and reflect, shifting what we have brought to offer as we learn them, and as they grow and change. It’s a conversation. It’s a dance. Kids act and do, we listen and respond. We ask and offer, kids accept or decline. It’s a rare and welcome respite from the outside world, where even the most respectful parent has to issue directives and steer kids toward vegetables and bedtime so much of the day. 

Trying to make people do things is exhausting. Nobody likes it.

When you are a work parent or a teacher at Cottage, you get a break from trying to make kids do things. We might even stop you and gently ask you to reconsider if you still think you need to make kids do things. You are asked to put your phone away. During class, whatever else is happening out there in the world, whatever dumpster is on fire, is none of your business, because we need your attention here. You are asked to be present. It’s a gift to you. 

When you can find your groove out there on the yard, you might accept a child’s invitation to be in their game or read to them, or you might just walk out there and find that the children are happily busy on their own, and there is nothing for you to do but observe. You look around, take a breath, maybe sit down on the logs to lower your body to kid level. You keep your eyes up, to see that they are safe, but you hold back from directing, from managing, from inserting yourself where no adult is needed. It’s an unusual parenting ask. I find that the mainstream way to parent tends to look like the adult doing so much to make their child’s environment optimal, that they end up smothering initiative. At Cottage, we do less, we hang back. We wait and see. We let the child make discoveries. We try to notice what is happening for the child. 

Equally important to our process and equally rare, we ask you to withhold judgement and labels. We humans are meaning-making machines. We love to sort information and categorize it, to make sense out of it. It’s usually an adaptive strategy, but it has some unfortunate side effects. As parents, we often make meaning around things our kids say and do that reminds us of some other moment in our lives. Our child hits and we worry that they will become an adult who hits. Our child chooses a friend who tells them what to do all the time, and we worry that they will choose this habitually. Our child refuses and avoids drawing and we worry that, what, they may never learn to write? That they will be late? Late for what? For other people’s expectations. We worry for our children, even though they are who they are, and worrying will never be the thing that makes a difference. Cottage teachers are masters of all the ways to ease parents’ worries, because we see lots of kids, and we have a lot of practice at not-making-meaning out of our observations of kids. 

In Zen buddhism, there’s an idea of meditation where one sits quietly, not with no thought, but letting thoughts cross our minds without holding on to them, like clouds floating across the sky. This is what we are practising in the yard at Cottage. We allow ourselves to observe, without judgement, without making meaning, without holding on to what we see and hear. Nothing is wrong. It’s just what’s so. I suspect that’s why we become so good at somehow finding our hand extended at the precise time and place where a stick is about to be swung toward another child. Our minds become uncrowded, because we let go of the stuff in the way of seeing clearly.