In Laurel Snyder’s Orphan Island, ostensibly a middle grades novel but filled with allegory that would go right over the head of the average ten-year-old, nine children live together peacefully on an island. Every year, a mysterious boat arrives with a young child and takes away the eldest child. The new eldest child must teach the new youngest child the ways of the island, rules that have been handed down from child to child for as long as anyone can remember.

Read More

Mothers are widely presumed to have supernatural knowledge, and who am I to argue with this idea?

That’s why, at a party with cookies laid out on a table (the kid equivalent of an open bar), children will go find their mothers to ask whether they can have one (sometimes with the desired baked good in hand).

If they don’t ask, she’ll know anyway. They need to know where the limits are.

Read More

Many of us are used to rules and accept them without question.

For some of us, they make us feel safe and comfortable, like someone’s in charge.

For others, they are begging to be tested, contested, rebelled against, bent, and broken.

Each of these tendencies are valuable and necessary. A society in which everyone is constantly questioning the rules has no peace and stability. On the other hand, a society in which everyone always follows the rules, no matter what they are, veers toward totalitarianism.

Read More

School is compulsory and not necessarily aligned with our areas of greatest strength or interest.

Often, doing the minimum required to reach your goals is a reasonable decision.

And doing the bare minimum to pass is understandable.

The problem comes when we don’t know how to give more than the minimum, even if we want to. We become so conditioned to parrot back answers or get things over with as quickly as possible that we struggle to go deeper, even when giving more is what would actually help us to reach our goals.

Read More

I was playing outside with one of my nephews (because I am an exceedingly lucky person, I have five of them). We were throwing poorly inflated balls back and forth, following the kind of arbitrary and unfair rules favored by young children.

In other words, he made the rules, and I followed them.

We threw our balls in the same direction, where they landed side by side in the wet grass. “You lost that time,” he said. “You say, “Darn!”

Read More