Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Recommended Resources The Blessing of a Skinned Knee

Has anyone read the book The Blessing of a Skinned Knee by Wendy Mogel. My DW and I just started it and have found it very informative and helpful. The book speaks a lot about creating self sufficiant children. At our DS6 school they have been offering parenting classes for 6 mondays. My DW has been able to attend, and many of the core principals in this book are brought up in the class. Also our first meeting with DS6 room 1 teacher, covered much of the same. The school pushes natural consaquences for actions. They push independance, and personal responsibity. They want the chldren to learn to self advocate if they have any issues. If they fail to bring in their school work, they have to deal with the consaquences. I am curious if anyone has completed the book, and what your thoughts are on it.

I love the idea, and I think it is a vital skill for a child to learn. But I do think the key word there is learn.

6yo seems a bit young to me to expect kids to self-advocate effectively. I'm 100% in favor of making moves in that direction, but that's too much pressure to put on a child so young, IM(not so)HO.

I'm a big fan of natural consequences at any age though. I think that's just good parenting.

I agree Kriston, I think its something you step into rather than jump into.

DS was a great self-advocate from pre-school on. Clearly personality is a huge part of that. But I do think that the environments he was in really encouraged him to feel safe and feel that he would be heard. That made a big difference.

Heck, there are many environements that I still refuse to self-advocate in because there really is not point.

Anyway, I think a large part of self-advocacy comes, not from "pushing" the child, but creating a space that accepts the child as a valuable participant and welcomes the child's ideas and views.

The principals are great. but I have to agree with kriston too. DS7 is really to young to get the courage to self advocate. He is in a somewhat bad environment, when he does speak up he is ignored by his teacher.

I don't see that as him being too young to self-advocate, but smart enough to know when he is wasting his time! In a safer place, it is possible that he could find his voice. But I certainly wouldn't encourage a child to speak up in a situation where that would result in being beaten down.

I guess I figure that if advocacy seems hard and scary to me, imagine how much more hard and scary it must be to a little boy/girl.

I agree completely that much depends upon personality, and there are bigger and smaller ways to self-advocate, certainly. But I don't think that self-advocacy would be a specific goal for my kids until they're 9 or 10 at the earliest. (Though I wouldn't discourage it!) We'd take steps toward self-advocacy between now and then. Heck, we're taking steps toward that now. DS4 often orders for himself in restaurants, for example. But I wouldn't expect DS7 to be ready to handle conflict resolution with an authority figure at this point. That's a pretty high-stress situation for an INTJ kid...

In bringing up self advocacy, our D6's teacher was more about interaction with other students and less about with adults. He mostly went over that they need to be responsible for doing thier own homework, that they need to remember their own backpack. They are responsible for the work in their cubbies at school. In advocay he was tlking about if they do have an issue, with him, or another student, that they bring it up to him. He wanted them to do things with less parental invlolvment. He did not say that the parents cannot contact him, just that if we could, try and encourage our children to come to him. They do share 7 hrs a day together. The book also encourged some of this kind of behavior. Some of the examples she used from her practice show that over involved parents can create issues. That many a parent place their child above all else, and make them their entre focus. One telling thing was a school that had a student pass away, the school arranged for counslers for the students, and everyone was working to make sure that the children where ok. What they din't do was make sure that the family that had the death was taken care of, that the siblings had help from other students, that the students and their familys help out. To me it showed how child centric we can be. Note: I am making no statements about anyone on this board, just a portion of our socity.

I think the term self-advocacy has a very different connotation on a forum like this than what you're talking about, Edwin. The average ND child doesn't have major mismatches in school, so self-advocacy really means standing up for yourself in small ways, as you're describing. I'm all in favor of that. I think virtually all kids can and should do this from a very young age. If someone pushes my 4yo in line, I expect him to deal with it. If his friend is mean to him, I expect him to tell the kid (nicely) to knock it off, and if he doesn't knock it off, then I expect him to talk to the teacher about it.

No argument there.

But on this forum, I think advocacy is a much more loaded term. I wouldn't call the exchange I just described advocacy at all. That's just basic social skills, you know?

To me, advocacy means asking for the appropriate level of schoolwork. That's doggone hard to do without insulting the teacher, even for a socially skilled adult.

I think we may just be talking about different things here...

I agree, I am not refering to advocay in education. I see that as our job.