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Homeschooling and Friends and Frustration

Playground day was huge yesterday!  The nearby homeschooling chess club was cancelled, and so everyone turned up at the playground!  There were all ages of kids from two to ten to mid-teens, and of course 9 y.o. Daize, 7 y.o. Towser, and 5 y.o. Tawnse, (aliases all). 



And before anyone asks, "Playground day?"  Allow me to jump out ahead.  Yup, we have one playground day a week, and it was yesterday.  But, it’s a bit of a misnomer.  Playgrounds are more of a daily thing.  This morning?  The kids were at a different playground where the youngest of the group is taking a cooking class through Parks & Rec.  Buddies who live near that playground often turn up to play some more.  This afternoon, another set of buddies will turn up at math group at a nearby public library.  And so it goes throughout the week.  There’s one day a week we call playground day because it’s set aside for kids and parents to meet at a different playground in different parts of the city.  But, that’s not the only time those homeschoolers will hang out with other kids.  They hangout with other kids that share their interests on a daily basis.  We’re lucky, we live in a city that’s peppered with playgrounds and libraries.  I’ve digressed a bit to make the big point: yeah, homeschooling kids—at least the ones we know—hang out with buddies on a daily basis. 

So, getting back to the original story, yesterday was ‘playground day’, and it was huge!  The group of kids was fascinating for me to watch.  Sometimes, almost all of them would form up into a big amalgam of kids spread across a piece of playground equipment.  Some kids were standing at the base of the slide, some had climbed into the lead-in tunnel, others had climbed up on top of the elevated tunnel.  Then, a few kids would break off into some just-invented game with a ball.  As the game roved its way across the playground, more and more people would join in.  Eventually, the game would split back into smaller groups. 

Sometimes though? Sometimes the game would devolve into total and utter frustration for some of the kids  Two of those kids were in the gang I get to hangout with on a daily basis.

(Have I ever mentioned that I don’t like referring to my kids as ‘my kids’?  I don’t.  It feels too much—to me—as an ownership kind of term.  I think everybody should use whatever phraseology they like, ‘my kids’ just makes me feel kinda squeamish, so I never use it, which on occasion confuses folks.  In the sense that we share DNA, and I parent them, and I’m responsible for them, yes, they’re very much my kids.  In the sense that I control everything they do?  I’m trying very much to move away from that, even in my phraseology, and hence, ‘the gang’.

I try to stay out of the gang’s hair  while we’re at playgrounds.  That usually means—if I’m doing it right—that I don’t even know where they are in the playground.  (Truly, in ideal conditions, that means more and more that they just go to the playground without me being there at all.)  The playground was small this time, and the game was really, really fast, so the kids were whipping past me pretty frequently, and it was on one of those whips that Daize biffed it, ( I could tell because everyone stopped moving, and she was on the ground), and Towser started yelling at her.  I wandered over to see if I could help or understand, (I probably shouldn’t have in retrospect), but by the time i got there Daize was back up and around.  Towser, however, was peeved as all hell, so I asked him, “Hey, do you think you could explain to me what’s going on?”

We sat down on the grass over to the side.  Towser was taking deep heaving gasps of air as he explained, “Sometimes when I get frustrated in a game, I act like a mean puppy.”

(Frequently in games, whether there’s supposed to be pretend animals or not, Towser pretends to be a puppy.)

“OK, buddy, but, um, why were you yelling at Daize?” I asked.

Towser gulped several more heaves of air before he followed with, “I was the only one on my team!  It was me against everyone else.  Daize wouldn’t help.”

“Well that makes more sense.  Did you push Daize down?”

“No.”

“Did you bump her?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Umm, OK… cool.  Just a piece of general advice?”

“Yeah?” *sniffle*

“When somebody falls down, maybe don’t yell at them OK?  Even if you are frustrated.”

*sniffle* Then, looking at me with soulful, frustrated, eyes, “OK.”

And off he went. 

I was happy I got involved because Towser and I got to talk about feelings and whatnot.  Also, I got to understand what was happening.  I like talking about feelings, because one of these days when there’s something really important going on involving feelings, I’m hoping this will all carry over.

After Towser and I were done talking, one of the ‘big kids’, a girl in her teens came over to ask what had happened. 

“Oh, it’s no big deal.  Towser just felt like the teams were uneven.”

“Ohhhhhh….”

“Really, it’s not a big problem.  It happens.”

Even though I got to talk to Towser about feelings, and everything was good, I kinda wished I hadn’t gotten involved because I may have caused what happened later.  About fifteen minutes later.

That’s when I looked up to see another one of the gang crying inside the elevated pipe in the playscape.  It took me a while to figure out which kid it was ‘cause I could only see part of their face through a cutout hole in the pipe.  It was Daize.

Once again I wandered over to see if I could help. 

“What’s going on?  Are you OK?  Did you get hurt?”

“Noooo.”

“OK.  Do you want to talk about it?”

“No, I want to sleep.”

“I’m sorry booger-bear.  I’d love to take a nap too.  Maybe we could do it at the house?”  (We had another couple of errands to run before we headed back home for a little break.) 

“No, I want to sleep right here.”

“Oh.  I’m sorry, but you can’t do that.  We’ve gotta get going soon.”

A little while later Daize climbed out of the pipe.  A few seconds after that she explained what had upset her in a quiet trembling voice, “I wanted to be on a team with my friend, and they wouldn’t let me be on that team.”  She heaved a huge  sigh, and gulped her next breath of air.

‘Oh.  Yeah, that’d be really frustrating if it happened to me.  I’m sorry.”  And I really was because I might have caused this problem when I wandered over to talk to Towser.

There was a team she wanted to be on, but she couldn’t be because of the way the other kids had organized things.  Like I said, it might have been my fault.

As I walked off to get my backpack, I noticed the girl who’d asked about Towser walk up to Daize.

“Can I give you a hug?”

“Yeah…”

She hugged her, and a few seconds later, there was Daize with a bewildered little grin forming on her face, a face that had just a moment before been truly anguished.

I told Towser and Tawnse we were headed out, and in due course, we were all walking towards the playground gate when I heard, “Daize, Towser, and Tawnse, can you all come here?”  I looked back to see that the whole group of kids had assembled again.  The gang walked over to their friends.

“Can we all hug again?”

The gang nodded yes, and then there were a dozen kids hugging on the playground.

“I can’t breathe,” one of them gasped somewhere towards the middle of the pack.

The rest of them giggled and let go.

The gang came back over to the gate with grins on their faces ready to get on to the next thing.

So, my takeaways for the day? 

Homeschooling kids play with other kids.  A lot. 

I maybe should stick to my general philosophy of hands off playground involvement.

Kids on playgrounds experience and deal with frustrations whether they’re in organized school, or homeschooled.

Kids rock!  The next generation is looking pretty great!  They care about each other, and are great examples of practicing affirmative consent!

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