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February 27, 2013

Which cultural world do you live in today - Which will be best for you?

In 1830 if you lived in America on the frontier you lived a very different life to the one that you had left back in Europe. But to get to this new life, you had to get on a ship, get to St Louis and then take a wagon train out west.

There were two worlds The Culture of the Old world and the Culture of the Frontier

Today this split in culture is back. The difference is that there is no ocean or continent to cross. Today the ocean is in our minds.

The frontier is here now. Enough people now live the new or aspire to it to make it a future that most of us might take in time. Remember, after the railway was built in the 1860's 50 million people left the old world for the new in the next 50 years. Once the tipping point is reached a better offer for life will beat the lesser.

Here are 2 short descriptions of the Old World and the New. Just to make it honest, I used to live in the old and thought it was the only way - so I am not being judgemental here.

The Old World

In the old country, you have a job or see the job as central. So you accept that you work away from the home for an organization. You have a lot of debt. You have student debt, car debt. You don't have a mortgage because your student debt prevents this. You rent. You live in a big and expensive city because this is where the jobs are. You have to put your kids into school because you work outside the home. You both commute for 2 hours each a day.

Your kids are 10 and 12. They have no idea what they want to do later in life. They do nothing around the house. The boy doesn't read very well and has had behaviour problems at school where is is profoundly bored. You have been advised to put him on Ritalin but have refused. When they are 18, it is anticipated that a 4 year residential BA will end up with $100,000 of debt. Unemployment for 18 - 35 year olds is now 23% and is expected to climb to 50% in 10 years as technology and globalization continues to kill jobs.You expect that the education system will be there but you don't know how you will pay for it.

You expect the system to be there but you don't do anything to take care of yours self. You rely on processed food because you don't know how to cook well and you don't have the time or energy to prepare meals from scratch. You are both over weight and pre-diabetic. Your kids are both over weight. You don't sit down together to share any meals. There is not a single member of your family that lives closer than 1,000 miles away. You expect the system to look after you when you are old.

In the last 2 winter's there have been terrible storms and you have lost power for weeks. You are pissed off with the the mayor and the utility. There have been layoffs in both your workplaces and you worry about your jobs. You have have no savings. Your debt makes that impossible.

The New World

In new you don't have a job and nor do you seek one. You work at home and you make things. You are a coder. Your spouse works in a co working space near your home. She is a personal coach. You are both artisans with deep skills. You are deeply connected to your customers on a personal basis. You have no debt. You have a small home. You own in a small community where housing is affordable. You educate your kids at home and with several other families close by. You don't have a home classroom.

They learn by getting engaged by what is going on. You read to them all the time as small kids and they both learned to read well by 6. By 10 it is clear what they are really interested in. Your son is mad for drones and you have built several together and he has been using the CAD side of you Mac to drive the 3D printer to make many of the parts. Your skill as a programmer has been invaluable. He watched you work ever since he was an infant. You had him on your knee coding as he learned to read. He is selling them now to a few adults and has a small business of his own. Your daughter is fascinated by carpentry. This is something that you know nothing about but your neighbour is a carpenter and she got the bug by hanging out with him. She is his apprentice and works full time as such. She can do that at 12 because she does not have to attend school. All the math that she needs comes via her work. Your 10 year old has to read at a college level to learn more about design and has the math skills of a math grad. They have never had a lesson.

You eat real food and take care of your health. All at home cook. Your wife's mother lives with you and she does a huge amount of work in the garden where you grow most of your veggies and raise chickens. All the kids have jobs to do in the family household economy. Your extended family have been moving ever closer to you in the last few years and you can now see them all the time. Your dad and mum live very close to you and host a large family meal every 2 weeks. You have a very small car and the kids bike around town.The family own a van and a truck and many of the larger tools that you all need jointly.

All the family have good health. They eat well and have a complete social world. They all use their bodies. They all have a lot of time outside from work to just hang out. The surplus cash flow goes into making the family more resilient. Last year you all built a large green house on your brother's place. The larger family share this. This year the family will buy a large wood splitter so that all the wood you use for heating can be bought in 8 foot lengths and cut up and split by you all. The family supply the labour. In large items like this, the family share in the cash costs. As a result the family are not exposed to the global food system and only in a small way to oil costs. The family use almost nothing from the state and are largely self sufficient.

So which world will be best for you over the next 50 years?

Posted at 10:43 AM in Community, Complexity, Education, You Don't Need a Job | Permalink | Comments (0)

What Marissa Mayer can do to make it right

The wonderful Hugh McLeod does it again and shows one side of the story that many people will respond to because it's true. It is easier to work at an office than to work at home with the kids close by.

MM's desire is to get her staff to work better together. She fears that when so many are not face to face, that they cannot. I think that she is partly right here but also wrong.

In this post I am not going to knock her. I deeply sympathazie. I am going to offer an exciting work out for her real problem. And a workout for any who wish to have a successful workforce in the future.

We do need lots of time face to face to get really close. But the office culture does not accomplish this - as it is today.

At the office you are encouraged to leave every part of you outside that is not part of the task at hand. You are mainly in your cubicle with your head down and your earphones on. You attend endless pointless meetings that are all about control and status - not yours. You are stressed by the gap that opens up between this world and your other life. The Cable guy is a reality. Your kids in daycare are a reality. Your commute is a reality. The fact that you have to have a more expensive house, is a reality. The fact that you have to dress for work and eat outside for work is a reality.

You are not fully present at the office.

Nor do you know your colleagues that well. You don't share their lives. You have few opportunities to hang out. Most people eat at their desk alone and spend less than 20 minutes doing this. You may be in teams. But you were ordered to be in this team. You owe nothing to the others in the team. It is like softball at kindergarten. You don't know your boss either - who spends so much of her time reminding you that she is your boss. You often know more than she does too!

How the office is set up as a culture - as factory with you doing piece work with a foreman - is not the setting for collaboration.

But, because most organizations spend no time, thought or effort on culture, working at home can be no better.

Most people who work at home have had no experience in not being a supervised factory worker. This all starts at school where the teacher sets the schedule and the work. If you have worked in an office, you have been cultured to work like this too. I am sure that MM is correct in her observation that many of her home workers are not very productive.

But this is not their fault. It is the culture.

Real freelancers are measured and valued by results. They are hired to pull something off. How they do it, is their business not the client's. But home workers in a traditional organization are measured on how much effort they put in, in time and in the how. They are in effect still in a factory culture.

The issue for Yahoo and others is not who works at home or not but culture. That is the CEO's job.

You cannot have collaboration or innovation from domesticated pets. They have to act out because they have been made into small children.

Wolves are free and are collaborators who innovate all the time. They are wild. They are not domesticated. They live or die by their wits and their ability to work together and innovate and learn.

They also hang out all the time with each other. They know everything about each other.

Real Freelancers do this too. They hire each other for gigs. They hang out on Twitter and Facebook with each other all day and night. They visit each other. They fly across the world to spend days, night, weeks and even months with each other. They don't do 9 - 5 and run.

If they get no work, they starve. If they do bad work, they starve.

The alpha in a project is the one who got the gig. Or the one who knows the most for that gig. There is a hierarchy but it is a real one. There is one at the bottom too. And he or she is there to learn. In time they grow to be core members or leaders in their own gigs.

The pack goes hunting. The gig is the prize. The pack feeds on the gig.

The pack get gigs because they do a good job. They give the client the result that the client wants They are not hired to spend time or to fit into a work protocol. They are hired to get hard things done in a set time.

So if I was MM I would do this.

I would start to move Yahoo's culture in this direction. I would set up an inner core that had responsibility for key results and fucntions. Some I would keep inside traditionally - you don't outsource your core processing etc. But all other work I would shift to networks. At the core of each would be a set of Facilitators. They would surround themselves with circles of packs of freelancers. There would be a gradient. The inner circle would get work most of the time. As the rings moved out to the periphery, less. But the core would keep a close eye on the edge for that will be where the novel will emerge.

The packs/teams would self organize. Yahoo would not set them up. They would hire on the basis of the task and the capability. It would be up to the team leader to hire the team. She would pay them from the contract.

Yahoo would set up the world's best closed social network so all can be in constant ouch with each other. Skype have open screens in all their offices. A person in Redmond can look up and talk to a co worker in Estonia as if she was next to him. The entire network would be able to talk to each other and help with problems. The full power of the full crowd would be available.

Periodically Yahoo would organize and pay for face to face events that would last for several days and nights where many teams would get together and hang out. Just as tribes used to do. These would mainly be powows where partying and doing fun things with each other would be central. Alcohol, dancing and food would be vital. People will get layed.

The point is to build real relationships in face time to lubricate the virtual.

The cost of this would be payed from the fact that Yahoo's office costs would be cut by millions. So would their salary and benefit costs.

But they also would set up a Yahoo Freelancer health insurance plan that would give their freelancers access to a group. They do as much to empower the group as possible.

Yahoo then will have to do that most vital of things. Yahoo have to know what it is that they want to do. Process no longer needs to be measured. Results have to be measured.With an online workforce this is easy to do.

The core inner circle skill will be facilitation and project scoping. The core executive skill will be in keeping ther network healthy and in noticing important movement that will show them where to focus on next. They will have to be skilled Hackers!

Now Yahoo have a Darwinian ecology of a workforce. Talent rises to the top naturally. Good new teams enter naturally. Now Yahoo can hire from a pool of 7 billion people. This would be exciting and worthy of a turn around.

So why not? What do you have to lose?

PS In my old life I was SVP HR for a company with 45,000 employees whwre my focus was culture and for the last 20 years have been writing about the network - my book You Don't Need a Job: The Rise of the Network is here.

Posted at 09:59 AM in Hugh McCleod, Natural Organization, Organizations and Culture | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 26, 2013

What if animals ate fast food?

Posted at 04:32 PM in diet | Permalink | Comments (0)

What is an education for in a "Post Job" world?

I am musing aloud today about the themes that will be in book 4 - You Don't Need a School to get an Education - the next book in my series on the shift to the Networked world of the Person.

What is our education system for? Many see that its purpose is to get us ready for a job. Many of us have been well served by it.

Now many recognize that it has some problems. Many think that it just needs some fixes to make it work better. Better testing. Better teachers. More private ownership. More online. More MOOC's.

But I ask can it be fixed? Should it be fixed?

I ask myself, why are our institutions so self serving and even corrupt? Why is our political system so inept? Why do we watch reality TV rather than take charge of what is going on ourselves? Why can't we see the predicament that confronts us and act wisely. Why do we retreat into ranting? Why do we take comfort in being consumers? Why do we feel lost without a job? Why are we so helpless and can hardly do anything practical? Why are we so passive?

We seem incapable of confronting and solving our problems. I think that this is because we have made the job the purpose of an education. We created an education system that shapes us culturally to exist in the job world. To work in the job world, you have to fit in. You have to belong. You have to depend on external authority. You have to depend on others for all you need. You cannot rebel.

To fit the world of he job, we have inadvertently domesticated ourselves. We have become pets. We did this the same way we tamed wolves to become dogs. Our school system is how we did this. We used a series of processes in school to condition behaviour.

Belonging - You are put into a narrow age cohort. For 12 years, you are cut off from the adult world and you are segregated into a world of children. In the US the average teen spends only 16 waking hours a week in the company of an adult. Worse, you were further segregated into a tiny world of your own age group. In such a culture, the core value is to fit in. This is the core value of the job world.

Obedience - The curriculum is made up of many separate parts. When all the aspects of the world are separated, you cannot see the patterns and so you become unable to see how the world works. This makes any complex problem impossible to see or to solve. As the world is mainly complex, the world remains a mystery. As a result, you look for the answers from those in authority over you. This keeps you a child. You have been trained to have a boss.

External Locus of Control - A broad symbolic curriculum means that no practical mastery is possible. In such an approach, experience has low value. The symbolic sets of skills are paramount. Making and doing things that we need in later life are not included or valued. So, few have experienced how to care for a child before they hold their own. Few today can cook a meal, make, fix or grow anything. None of us have learned how to work with others. That is called cheating. With no mastery and no real skills, we are truly helpless. Being so helpless, we are the ideal consumer and the powerless worker.

Spiritless - To fit in, you had to deny your experience and your body. So all learning was presented in a symbolic form. So how you really learn, by copying and by trying was excised.Your internal wisdom was cut off. You had your spirit taken away from you and all you can do now is to complain. You pose no threat to the masters. You are truly a child. You are domesticated.

This is what this looks like in one picture. Can this system be reformed? I don’t think so.

We need a new purpose. I think that this new purpose is to grow up.

All our expectations about how we will be looked after by the state and our employers will collapse. All our expectations about cheap food, secure energy, pensions and stable climate will be revealed as dreams. Only an adult culture has any chance of coping with this turbulence ahead.

How will this new system be organized? Just as school system modeled the job world, its target, so our new approach to learning will have to model how we become capable full adults. We know what this is and we see signs of new approaches and organizations emerging that all share this adult model.

This is the non job world. This is how humans have always been before civilization. This is who we really are. This is the social structure that has enabled mankind to deal with all the challenges of millions of years. This structure took us through the ice ages. This structure enabled us to develop all the key foundation technologies that enabled us to survive anything.

This is the structure of the primal tribe and, also in a more modern context, the structure of how pioneers coped with life on the frontier in American in the early 1800's.

Some of us live on this frontier now. It is a time when not much of the new infrastructure is built yet. But it is a place where you can be who you really are. It is also a place where you will have to be able to cooperate with others. It will be a place where you leave the hierarchy of the old world behind.

It is a place of great uncertainty.

So what kind of person prospered in a frontier society? They were men and women who had:

A Sense of Adventure and Hope - They wanted a better life. If not for themselves, then for their kids. They knew that there was no going back home to the old world. They knew that no one could, or would, help from outside. They knew that they would have to do it themselves. They learned that being with others who also dared and shared made the adventure better.

They were going to make their place and their world. They were MAKERS.

A sense of a future - They knew that if they cleared 2 acres this year, that they could clear another 2 the next year and that, by the time their kids were adult, there would be a real farm. They could see the future in the today. They could see in the clearing by the water’s edge, a town. They could see in the oak grove, ships.

They knew that there was going to be no instant success. They had foresight. They moved to the future step by step.

Good Coping skills - Pioneers accepted that there were challenges out there and were not put off by the first problem or failure. They became mentally tough. They could lose a crop and a child and still keep going.

They were resilient. They knew that they could not succeed all the time. They knew that perseverance would get them through.

Technical Skills - They developed deep mastery. They quickly developed technical skills that would help them be as self sufficient as possible. Having mastered some skills, they knew that they could master others. The more real skills a person had, the greater their social standing. Men and woman became famous for being capable.This gave them a natural self confidence.

Mastery. They had real skills learnt, as all real skills are learned, by copying masters, doing and repeating.

Social Skills - It was clear to all, in a pioneer state, that no individual could thrive on their own. Much of the work that had to be done had to involve others. So establishing and maintaining family and community were centrally important building blocks for success. Marriage was not a romance but a means of survival. Community was not a buzz word of the week but a means of survival. The stakes were high.

Community was was life or death. They were interdependent.

Literacy - It was clear to most people then that the more you knew, the better off you were going to be. Literacy was paramount. At the time of the revolution in America, literacy was about 90%. Literacy was rooted in what happened in the home.

Most read by 6 and learned this at home. The home was the primary school. The parents the primary teachers. The Home & the Family was the School.

They were adult - When you look at pictures of pioneers, do you see how they look? At 22 many look 35. It is not only because they have had a hard life, it is because you can see their maturity shine through. By 16 you were a real adult in your spirit. There were no "teens" then. There were only children and adults.

At an early age they had responsibility. By 6 they had real roles. By 12 they were contributors. The Home and the Family was the Workplace.

I think that each of us now have to think about how to become pioneers again.

I see three elements in the new way that is ironically the old way.

A focus on the person - It is so easy when we think of the new to think about what new institution we need. This is the trap. The hard work is to unlearn our conditioning and think of how a system might emerge that will help each person find their way. The job world was all about the mass market. This world will all be about you as an individual.

Experience - Our old pedagogy was instruction. It is hard to lose this idea as it is so hardwired. But instead, we have to return to our natural learning style and that is experience. That is how we learned to talk and walk. We learn by seeing, by copying and by doing.

Development - Our old result is a credential that is used to put us into a slot in the job world. Our new result has to be to reach our full potential as a human. Now this is true life long learning. And being a true adult when we have children is the key to putting our kids on a path so that they too can reach their true potential. The right first 3 years of life sets you up for life.

For only a community of adults can give our young the best start that they need so that they too can find their true potential. It's all connected.

The book will explore these issues. I will go back in time to see how we all learned before the age of the institutions. I will pay particular attention to the family and its role in the early years in setting the trajectory of each of us. I will look at the the new experiments in learning. I will connect all of this to the new world that is here now where most of our young today will never have a “good” job.

Posted at 12:30 PM in Books, Education | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 24, 2013

Paleo - Paradise Lost and Now Found

Source: infographic.paleolithicdiet.com via Ginny on Pinterest

Posted at 02:19 PM in diet, Food, Food and Drink, Food Systems, Paleo | Permalink | Comments (0)

A measure of why we are F**ked

The system is rigged to divert our wealth into the "Casino" - why do anything worthwhile if you can make money by playing the game?

More here

This is also a huge driver of the health epidemic - More here

So what to do?

Disconnect yourself as much as possible from the system which is run as part of the game. For instance look at how the health system itself is run in America:

"Mercy Hospital is owned by an organization under the umbrella of the Catholic Church called Sisters of Mercy. Its mission, as described in its latest filing with the IRS as a tax-exempt charity, is “to carry out the healing ministry of Jesus by promoting health and wellness.” With a chain of 31 hospitals and 300 clinics across the Midwest, Sisters of Mercy uses a bill-collection firm based in Topeka, Kans., called Berlin-Wheeler Inc. Suits against Mercy patients are on file in courts across Oklahoma listing Berlin-Wheeler as the plaintiff. According to its most recent tax return, the Oklahoma City unit of the Sisters of Mercy hospital chain collected $337 million in revenue for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2011. It had an operating profit of $34 million. And that was after paying 10 executives more than $300,000 each, including $784,000 to a regional president and $438,000 to the hospital president.

That report doesn’t cover the executives overseeing the chain, called Mercy Health, of which Mercy in Oklahoma City is a part. The overall chain had $4.28 billion in revenue that year. Its hospital in Springfield, Mo. (pop. 160,660), had $880.7 million in revenue and an operating profit of $319 million, according to its federal filing. The incomes of the parent company’s executives appear on other IRS filings covering various interlocking Mercy nonprofit corporate entities. Mercy president and CEO Lynn Britton made $1,930,000, and an executive vice president, Myra Aubuchon, was paid $3.7 million, according to the Mercy filing. In all, seven Mercy Health executives were paid more than $1 million each. A note at the end of an Ernst & Young audit that is attached to Mercy’s IRS filing reported that the chain provided charity care worth 3.2% of its revenue in the previous year. However, the auditors state that the value of that care is based on the charges on all the bills, not the actual cost to Mercy of providing those services — in other words, the chargemaster value. Assuming that Mercy’s actual costs are a tenth of these chargemaster values — they’re probably less — all of this charity care actually cost Mercy about three-tenths of 1% of its revenue, or about $13 million out of $4.28 billion."

If you play in the system, you will be squeezed - it is how it all works today.

Posted at 09:44 AM in Corporatism, Cracks in the System, Current Affairs, Econolypse | Permalink | Comments (1)

February 22, 2013

Teens spend only 16 hours a week with an adult #schoolfail

We are shaped by our environment. So if we are put in an age cohort from 6 - 18 and separated from the adult world, then why should we be surprised that kids leave school ill equipped to cope with being an adult?

Here is today's choice of good writing on the poor design of our schools:

Until the Great Depression, the majority of American adolescents didn’t even graduate from high school. Once kids hit their teen years, they did a variety of things: farmed, helped run the home, earned a regular wage. Before the banning of child labor, they worked in factories and textile mills and mines. All were different roads to adulthood; many were undesirable, if not outright Dickensian. But these disparate paths did arguably have one virtue in common: They placed adolescent children alongside adults. They were not sequestered as they matured. Now teens live in a biosphere of their own. In their recent book Escaping the Endless Adolescence, psychologists Joseph and Claudia Worrell Allen note that teenagers today spend just 16 hours per week interacting with adults and 60 with their cohort. One century ago, it was almost exactly the reverse. (My italics)

Something happens when children spend so much time apart from adult company....

.... Absent established hierarchies and power structures (apart from the privileges that naturally accrue from being an upperclassman), kids create them on their own, and what determines those hierarchies is often the crudest common-denominator stuff—looks, nice clothes, prowess in sports—rather than the subtleties of personality. “Remember,” says Crosnoe, who spent a year doing research in a 2,200-student high school in Austin, “high schools are big. There has to be some way of sorting people socially. It’d be nice if kids could be captured by all their characteristics. But that’s not realistic.”

Posted at 05:24 PM in Children, Education | Permalink | Comments (0)

Can a conventional organization become a network? A Case Study

I have been posting a lot recently about how networks work. My new book is all about why and how the Network model will take down all those that organize traditionally. So what to do?

You have a traditional organization. Can you change to become a network and so survive the revolution? I think in most cases the answer is no. But with the right leadership - FROM THE TOP - you can do it. This post is about the context of one organization that had had the right leadership and has made this transition.

It is The Nine Network for Public Media in St Louis - Formerly KETC Channel Nine.

TV as we know it is the typical traditional organization. You watch what we think is good when we choose and all you do is watch. Appointment media like that is dying. But The Nine Network of Public Media in St Louis is no longer that kind of station. Yes they still do TV but the choice is massive and you can watch it all on your terms and you can also participate. But this is still nothing.

The Nine Network is much more than a TV station that has taken advantage of the digital realm. It is doing more.

First of all it is becoming the local community convenor to deal with important local issues. It started by helping people tell their own stories such as what they did in the war. The breakthrough project was when Nine took on ther Mortgage Crisis at the outset. It called the meeting of all who could help and created the space to help the community help itself. This was so successful that CPB funded a national program where stations, radio and TV, in the worst hit parts of America became the local facilitator of the community. Now Nine is involved in Education and Healthcare. Many other stations see this role as Connector as their future too. Here is Ideastream in Cleveland - another leader.

Secondly it is putting the public into Public TV. It has a school that teaches the public how to tell stories on video.

Thirdly it is connected to the St Louis Public Radio station. St Louis Public Radio. The two stations are physically linked in adajacent buildings and are building a Commons between them to enhance their role as Connectors of the Community.

Fourthly, 9 hosts the local online newspaper - The Beacon - that is full of journalists who could no longer work for a paper!

These local relationships are not one organization but are a real network. They are separate but together. They share resources. They look after each other.

So what was the context for this change? First of all there was the leadership issue. Jack Galamiche at then KETC was a man who saw what had to be done. Tim Eby, who had been chair of NPR, was the new leader at St Louis Public radio. He had sponosored the project that had all the stations in the NPR system look into the digital future. It is my experience that without the right kind of leadership at the top, traditional organizations have no chance.

The second was having the right kind of context. What would success look like? What could be the goal and so what then was the work to get there.

This was the context that we worked from. I think that any traditional organization can look at these slides and find a goal and so a path for themselves - provided that the leader wanted to do this AND could bring their board along too.

You will see that at the heart of this work is a shift in culture. There is no harder work. You will also see how, if you can agree to make this shift, how you then schedule work to help you make the transition. For we cannot change our culture by an act of will. We can only acquire new habits. We have to work our way into the new.

Culture map copy from Robert Paterson

Posted at 10:07 AM in Books, Commons, Community, Complexity, Consultation, Consulting, Current Affairs, KETC, Natural Organization, Organizations and Culture, Paradigms, Public Media, Public Radio, Public TV, You Don't Need a Job | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 21, 2013

Would you fly with a pilot who has never flown before? How did you learn to parent?

How do we learn how to be parents today? We might read a book. How did Hunter Gatherers learn? They practised on the young. Would you rather fly in a plane captained by a pilot who has read a book or done 10,000 hours?

One of the worst things we do in our culture is to put kids into age cohorts. They just learn to be as stupid as all the other kids. That is not how school used to be until 1900 and it was never how kids were before school.

Here is Jared Diamond on HG child care experience: Link

A typical hunter-gatherer band numbering around 30 people will on the average contain only about a dozen preadolescent kids, of both sexes and various ages. Hence it is impossible to assemble separate age-cohort playgroups, each with many children, as is characteristic of large societies. Instead, all children in the band form a single multi-age playgroup of both sexes.

That observation applies to all small-scale hunter-gatherer societies that have been studied. In such multi-age playgroups, both the older and the younger children gain from being together. The young children gain from being socialized not only by adults but also by older children, while the older children acquire experience in caring for younger children.

That experience gained by older children contributes to explaining how hunter-gatherers can become confident parents already as teenagers. While Western societies have plenty of teenage parents, especially unwed teenagers, Western teenagers are suboptimal parents because of inexperience. However, in a small-scale society, the teenagers who become parents will already have been taking care of children for many years.

Posted at 01:25 PM in Children, Parenting | Permalink | Comments (2)

How did you learn before school? We copied & we tried things #Paleoparenting

I am getting ready to write the 4th book in my series on the shift from a mass market institutional world to a personal and networked world. The next book will be You Don't Need a School to get an Education.

As in the other books, I will go back and look at how we all did things BEFORE we accepted that only an institution could help us. We forget that we learned to talk, to walk and to do all sorts of things before we went to school. We forget that play is how ALL young animals learn. They look at their elders, copy them and use play and experience. The adults stand back! No helicopter parents in nature.

But that is not what happens now is it? Here is Peter Gray talking about what our Hunter Gatherer ancestors did instead of programming their kids. This link takes you to an excellent article by Gray on this topic of how HG's parented and what we can learn from them.

Peter Gray, PhD-The Role of Play in the Development of Social and Emotional Competence: Hunter-Gatherers, 1950s America and Now from Ancestral Health Society on Vimeo.

Here is more from Jean Liedloff who wrote a book called theContinuum Concept.

In this book she shows us how traditional people raise children. To summarize her findings, she notes that traditional people keep their kids very close physically but they do not put them into the centre of their lives. They show their kids the adult world. In this world the adult is the centre. The child is attached and along for the ride but the hierarchy is clear. Mum's needs and her work comes first. The child witnesses all of this for the child is nearly always present.

Here are her words of advice for Western parents. (More here)

It appears that many parents of toddlers, in their anxiety to be neither negligent nor disrespectful, have gone overboard in what may seem to be the other direction. Like the thankless martyrs of the in-arms stage, they have become centered upon their children instead of being occupied by adult activities that the children can watch, follow, imitate, and assist in as is their natural tendency.

In other words, because a toddler wants to learn what his people do, he expects to be able to center his attention on an adult who is centered on her own business. An adult who stops whatever she is doing and tries to ascertain what her child wants her to do is short-circuiting this expectation. Just as significantly, she appears to the tot not to know how to behave, to be lacking in confidence and, even more alarmingly, looking for guidance from him, a two or three year old who is relying on her to be calm, competent, and sure of herself.

A toddler’s fairly predictable reaction to parental uncertainty is to push his parents even further off-balance, testing for a place where they will stand firm and thus allay his anxiety about who is in charge.

He may continue to draw pictures on the wall after his mother has pleaded with him to desist, in an apologetic voice that lets him know she does not believe he will obey. When she then takes away his markers, all the while showing fear of his wrath, he — as surely as he is a social creature — meets her expectations and flies into a screaming rage.

If misreading his anger, she tries even harder to ascertain what he wants, pleads, explains, and appears ever more desperate to placate him, the child will be impelled to make more outrageous, more unacceptable demands. This he must continue to do until at last she does take over leadership and he can feel that order is restored.

He may still not have a calm, confident, reliable authority figure to learn from, as his mother is now moving from the point of losing her temper to the point at which guilt and doubts about her competence are again rearing their wobbly heads. Nevertheless, he will have the meager reassurance of seeing that when the chips were down, she did relieve him of command and of his panicky feeling that he should somehow know what she should do.

How does this feel to you?

There is of course so much more to her work than this statement. If this intrigues you - please go here.