Sharing What We Know

I was born, according to my kids, before the glaciers thawed and the Great Lakes were formed. That was at a time when even lower-middle-class families could squeak by on one income, and the norm was "stay-at-home" moms.

I was recalling this earlier today as I was talking to a mother of three who has her kids doing math workbooks during the summer. She's not trying to turn them into mathematicians, engineers or physicists, she is merely taking advantage of their free time in the summer to help them continue to build their confidence in a subject where confidence is half the game, and she is making it fun. 

I have a sister 5 1/2 years my elder. During the summer, my mother and the mothers of my sister's friends hatched a plan to both keep the girls busy, let them spend time together, and teach them things at the same time. Each mother took the group of girls for a week and taught them a skill. My mother taught them to sew, another to cook, etc. By the end of the summer, they had gotten to hang out with their friends and learn a bunch of things at the same time. No single mother was burdened with having to teach their daughter everything alone, and they were able to mazimize opportunities based on the skills of all the moms.

I don't hear of this happening very often these days. Certainly the economy almost requires that both parents work to make ends meet, but even if it were just in the evening, think of the things we can share with our kids and their friends. When I think of the talents among my kids' friends' parents, I think of all the things that I could not have taught my kids nearly as well as they could have.

In our Novato circle of friends - formed to a great degree based on our kid's friends — I marvel at all the talent. There is a mom who is a singing teacher. A dad who is an excellent photographer. Another who can engineer and build damn near anything. Several moms, including my wife, who are excellent seamstresses and knitters. We have moms and dads who are doctors. I think about how great it would have been for our kids to go through the kind of rotation my sister and her friends did. How much they would have learned.

Maybe you and your circle of friend have school-aged kids. Think of all the talent and knowledge within your group, and the benefit of sharing some of that with all your kids.

As I write this, I think of how much fun it would be to do it as adults. People have book clubs, why not do the same with medicine, sewing, photograpy and the many other things we can teach each other. I think it would be a great to keep my brain stimulated like this.

And maybe, just maybe, someone in my group of friends can help me understand what happens when a train leaves New York going west at 60 mph and another leaves Chicago going east at 55 mph.