Caitlin Ciannella

The Art and Practice of Play

4 year-old: So, what do you want to do? 10 year-old: I don’t know. 4 year-old: Well, you could be my dog. 10 year-old: Ok. 4 year-old: But this time, you have to behave. If you live with a preschooler, play is probably the default activity in your home. Make believe, construction, water play and more are staples in our house, even for our thirteen and ten year-olds. Variations of the conversation above, one I overheard a few months ago, occur on a daily basis and the infectious enthusiasm of our youngest is nearly impossible to resist. Assorted scholars define play differently. I am comfortable with this simple definition of play: play is any freely chosen and self-directed activity. Soccer practice, while hopefully fun, is not play. A neighborhood whiffle ball tournament with group-decided bases and imaginary all-star players is play. While we live in an era in which play and free time have been marginalized, I am thrilled to see the increasing attention paid to th …

Why it Pays to Play

If you’re like many parents, your child’s summer may already be booked up with “enriching activities.” Maybe you’re shipping her off to a rigorous math or computer camp designed to give her an academic edge. At the very least you’re using the break from school to double up on her (already daunting) schedule of gymnastics and dance classes, supplemented with an ambitious summer reading list. I have a question though: When will your child have time to play? Just…play? It’s too bad that the old-fashioned notion of summer as endless free time—to climb trees, chase fireflies, build a fort in the woods, maybe set up a lemonade stand—has fallen by the wayside. This is what kids need—they need it far more than they need a high-priced summer camp or some other program aimed at cramming a little bit more learning into their exhausted brains. Play is serious business. We may see it as wasted time, but it’s actuall …

Media and “The Meanest Mom in Town”

In the interest of full disclosure, I have the “only” seventh grader in “the whole town” who does not have a mobile phone. According to his friends I might be the “meanest mom in town”… As Madeline Levine persuasively contended in her most recent post, an essential job of parenting in our (especially electronic) media-saturated society is teaching media literacy. In fact, I believe this so strongly that I have incorporated media literacy activities into my classroom curriculum for over a decade. However, in our home we have delayed some of the thornier issues surrounding media inflow. We have one family computer and one television. Both sit in a public area and their use is determined by our family rules. We expect our children to learn how to become savvy media consumers and we know that the learning process will probably involve some mistakes. For our thirteen year-old, we know he is not quite ready to tackle some of the decisions that …

Friendships 2.0

This was written by a student (and friend) involved with Challenge Success. We appreciate his wlllingness to share his personal story with us. I don’t have a Facebook account. Anymore. About two years ago, I deleted it in a move which has since brought me a lot of weird looks and comments about how “out of the loop” I have become. People complain that I am now “hard to reach” and wonder how I manage to stay “in touch.” Which I all find very interesting. Because I have a phone. And an email address. And even a P.O. Box. And I also live on the same campus as them. It is almost as if the rules of social interaction have been rewritten. Apparently, it is no longer socially acceptable to get by with seeing people face to face. So what is it about these new platforms that makes them such a crucial part of day to day life? Why do I really need one? And how did it get to the point where I found that they were actually hu …

“Just five minutes more. Please.”

I’m certain there isn’t a parent alive who hasn’t been begged, implored, cajoled or even threatened by their otherwise reasonable youngster when faced with the command to shut down the television, computer, video game, Facebook page, smart phone or tablet. Little kids throw tantrums, bigger kids have meltdowns and teens slam doors. It’s as if we’re cutting their digital umbilical cord without warning or anesthesia. Almost all forms of media consumption are up, and the average child is spending over seven and a half hours a day with different forms of media (actually, closer to 11 hours a day if you separate out all of the multi-tasking.)1 This is more time than most kids spend in school or with their families and friends. Parents have every right to be concerned about the impact of such a disproportionately large amount of time spent on activities that we know so little about in terms of their potential long-term consequences. Are our kids getting smart …

Trainers for Four-Year Olds! Will Kids Pay a Price for Getting an Athletic “Leg Up?”

A year or so ago as I was waiting to give a presentation entitled, “A Balanced Approach to Navigating Youth Sports” to a group of preschool and elementary parents, a mom approached me and asked if it was okay if her kids’ “trainer” attended the session. This was a new one for me—4 and 5 year olds with an athletic trainer. I had visions of little kids doing boot camp-style exercises, but it turned out the trainer was a recent college grad with a sports background who was, according to the mom, “teaching them fun games that were sports related so they could begin developing a good fitness foundation.” Hiring athletic trainers is all part of the “earlier is better, more is better” arms race that pervades youth sports, just as it does academics (think Kumon, academic camps, tutors, test prep industry, and private college advisors). Now at seemingly any age, opportunities abound for parents to provide “additional sup …

Giving Your Child A ‘Leg Up’: A Short-Term Boost With Long-Term Consequences

As the school year winds down, many teachers assign thought-provoking, topical projects and year-end tests to allow the students to both synthesize the semester or year’s learning and also demonstrate an ability to articulate new knowledge. While assessment itself is a fiercely debated topic and is the subject of many ongoing studies, the essential goal for any type of assessment is to allow the student to demonstrate her or his understanding. Key word: student. While I feel confident that many parents can make a lovely model of Mission San Juan Capistrano and write some excellent paragraphs to accompany the fourth grade project, that is not the point. Unfortunately, there seems to be widespread angst about these final challenges. Performance on any particular task is perceived to either ‘make or break’ the year’s learning. Concerned parents want to be sure that their daughter or son’s work is the best it can possibly be, and here is where they veer fr …

A “Leg Up” or Cut Off at the Knees

In 1996 a young couple, Julie and Bill Clark, from Alpharetta, Georgia, invested $18,000 of their savings to produce a VHS (remember those) product called Baby Einstein. Julie, a former teacher and stay-at-home mom, and her entrepreneurial husband quickly added an extensive line of videos with names like Baby Van Gogh and Baby Mozart, beginning a Baby Einstein line-up that would eventually include multiple videos, educational toys and even a television show. The target audience for these videos was infants and children ages 3 months to 3 years (or perhaps more accurately, the parents who put their babies in front of these videos, so that mom or dad could jump into the shower, guilt free.) In any event, the Clark’s business skyrocketed, growing from $1 million to $10 million to $400 million in a little over a decade. Popularity and profits soared and, in 2001, Disney bought a majority share of the company. Estimates were that one in three American households with a baby owned at l …

The Allure of Perfectionism

This was written by a student (and friend) involved with Challenge Success. We appreciate his wlllingness to share his personal story with us. High school was the first time where I ever saw something other than a straight line on my transcript. I was shocked. But I should have seen it coming. My entire semester of AP calculus had been a grating experience, but being the stubborn student I was, I refused to really do much about it. Although I didn’t fail the class, seeing the physical manifestation of my struggles printed on an official document was a particularly humbling experience—especially because it was in a subject that I never expected to have difficulty in. In middle school I had been placed in an accelerated algebra class with a dozen other kids under the assumption that we would all be able to thrive in advanced courses designed for students two years our senior. The first few years weren’t easy, but still reasonably challenging, and I fou …

Encouraging Failure to Promote Success

I often ask my graduate students, all of whom plan to be teachers, an unnerving question: how will they set up their classrooms so that failure is rewarded? The question forces us to confront our fears, and assumptions, about failure: “Wouldn’t that just encourage laziness or lack of effort?” the grad students ask. “Give students permission to give up?” A similar fear often governs our parenting. A friend confides that she’s worried: if her daughter doesn’t do well in school, she’ll lose confidence, and decide she’s just not that academic. Not only do we worry that failure will mar our children’s chances at future success. We also worry that it will mar their very identities, hurt their self-esteem, and create a self-fulfilling prophesy, an acceptance of failure. But if an identity built on failure is a problem, much research suggests that its opposite – an identity built on …

Failure, Adversity, Perseverance, SUCCESS

A pack of ninth graders rush into my classroom and insist that I come to the girls’ bathroom as quickly as possible. One of their friends is sobbing and refusing to come out. Apparently, she has earned an A- on a quiz, her lowest grade ever. This bright and capable student is paralyzed by the idea of perceived “failure.” Resilience and grit have been buzz words in both educational postings and the popular media recently. Resilience is the ability to recover from a challenging situation or set-back rather than being crushed by it. Grit is defined as: perseverance and passion for long-term goals. Grit entails working strenuously toward challenges, maintaining effort and interest over years despite failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress. [Duckworth, Peterson, Matthews, and Kelly; Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2007, Vol. 92, No. 6, 1087–1101] Explicitly embedded in the definition of resilience and grit is failure. In fact, the only …

Why Our Children Need Successful Failures: And Plenty of Them

Remember your toddler’s first steps. Remember how your child let go of your leg or the sofa edge or the playpen railing, and on legs so wobbly that locomotion seemed impossible, he or she moved to take a step towards you. And you crouched down so your eyes were level with your teetering toddler and held your arms out so that there was a safe harbor to fall into. You held your breath, your own limbs quivered and your face urged your child to go, to try, to take those first steps. One. Two. Oops. Down on his well-padded butt with a look of stricken surprise on his face. But you smiled broadly, clapped in delight and erased the fear from his eyes with your own laughing eyes. You urged him to get up again, to try again. And he did. Again and again. Up, standing, teetering, swaggering, walking, running. A million fall downs and a million get up and do it agains. These forays were some of your young child’s earliest failures. But they were also necessary, strengthening his m …