Primary School Confidential

by Woog

  Our school immediately placed a bulk order for Stackhats and instituted a policy whereby all children who rode a bike to school must be wearing one. And because there was always a reason to celebrate a mandatory policy, we had a special Bike Day with a representative from Stackhat on hand to show us how to put on a bike helmet. (Clearly we must have been considered deadly stupid.)

  I can’t say that Bike Day was a raging success. To begin with, because this was the day on which the Stackhats were to be given out, we all had to walk our bikes to school, as we were no longer allowed to ride lid-free. Then, once we were given our Stackhats, mayhem ensued. Face it, if you put 200 or so kids in clunky hats they are not used to and encourage them to ride around a fairly small area of concrete, you’re just asking for trouble.

  There were many, many accidents.

  Luckily, we were all wearing Stackhats.

  And then there were the school visitors who caused the most chaos ever.

  Billets.

  A call would go out from the school to let everyone know that a busload of kids were coming into town to attend some sporting event. Would anyone be prepared to host one of the visiting kids for a few nights?

  You didn’t need a police check, or a working with children check. All you needed was a signature and a spare couch. Looking back on it—and it still goes on—the whole notion is fraught with bad possibilities.

  My mum never volunteered to billet anyone; she is a very smart woman. Now that I am a parent, I totally get it. Looking after someone else’s kid is okay, but it was a bit of a lottery as to who might turn up at the door. At the time, though, I was very pissed off about it, because all my mates now had instant live-in best friends and I was stuck with my bitchy sister and my annoying brother.

  The billets were always granted instant celebrity status, and my lucky school friends who were matched with the very coolest of the billet kids would ride that wave of coolness by association for all it was worth.

  I’m sure having some kid from Walgett staying would have made my life richer.

  30

  PROGRAMMING THE PERFECT CHILD

  You and your child are invited to an information evening for all 1012 prospective new band members, to take place in the school hall on Tuesday at 6.30 pm. This is an important occasion and both the Junior Band and the Concert Band will be performing for you.

  My immediate thought: ‘How the fuck am I going to get out of this one?’

  Extracurricular activities are important for a child’s development as a well-rounded person; I know this, and I am all for them. But I have imposed a strict limit of two activities. The only mandatory activity is swimming lessons. I see this as a life insurance policy.

  Ask any of your mates, ‘How are you?’, and I guarantee that they will answer: ‘Busy.’

  It starts when your baby is born. You get busy. Busy trying to get out of the house so you can cure your loneliness by meeting with a group of other mothers, known as a mothers’ group. This is a bunch of women with whom you have only one thing in common: that you all enjoyed a root at roughly the same time. You spend your time at mothers’ group discussing how busy you are.

  As your baby grows and becomes mobile, you can add playgroup to your busy list, and over the years you can add ballet, piano, footy, Mandarin lessons, yoga, karate, extra tuition (to make up for the fact that your kids are falling behind in reading because they’re spending all their time doing extracurricular activities instead of reading a book), T-ball, tennis, cricket, musical theatre and chess.

  Think back to your own childhood. What did you do after school? I’ll bet it didn’t involve being ferried from pillar to post.

  Modern parents need to collectively calm the fuck down.

  BUSY PARENTING

  I put the following questions to parents from all over the country:

  Do you think that there is a link between childhood anxiety and over-programmed children?

  Do your kids have an organised activity on most afternoons?

  What do your kids do after school?

  My kids are too little for all that, but as a former teacher, I like to remember that all children need down time and even boredom. Boredom stimulates creativity; over-programming does the opposite. It stifles creativity. Creativity is important if children are to learn to think ‘outside the box’, to come up with new solutions and to develop self-confidence.

  I absolutely think there is a link. I firmly believe my kids need down time to just be kids and play. Currently my kids have no organised activities (aside from weekend swimming lessons) as I felt like the start of the school year needed their full attention. I plan to let them start something now that we are into second term. After school, my kids play . . . that’s it.

  I try to keep weekday afternoons free for homework and relaxing. Friday nights we have footy, Saturday morning swimming lessons. That’s enough for us.

  My two boys, ages ten and six, do homework after school, swimming on Saturdays and Nippers on Sundays in summer. We can have our own fun without it being an organised activity.

  We underestimate the value of unstructured play . . . It’s when children learn how to deal with conflict, and about cooperation, turn-taking and fair play.

  My kids play one sport (soccer) and do one social activity (guides/scouts). That’s it. So that’s two afternoons a week; the other three weekday afternoons we are all at home. Any more than that that would definitely lead to anxiety; as it is, my highly strung daughter worries that she won’t get all her homework done.

  If children love what they’re doing, then I can’t see how after-school activities would make them anxious, but if they’re not really invested and it’s more the parents who want them to do it then, yes, it could very well be making them anxious. My six-year-old does ballet one night a week and my ten-year-old does ballet one night and tap another night. Two nights of activities is enough and she knows that if she wants to do something else, then either ballet or tap has to go.

  My eight-year-old has netball training one afternoon, a game on Saturday morning, and has piano lessons one afternoon plus fifteen minutes’ practice every morning before school. My six-year-old has scouts one afternoon a week and an activity one weekend a month. Perfect for us, not too much running around and more than enough ‘free days’ for non-organised stuff.

  As children’s freedom has declined, so has their creativity, it seems.

  Child behaviourist and all-round legend Nathalie Brown has this to say about the over-programmed child:

  After twenty years’ experience, one pattern I have really noticed—and it saddens me to say that it’s on the rise—is that children as young as four are showing signs of stress: stress that is debilitating in exactly the same way as it is for us grown-ups. The stress the children are demonstrating is showing up and reflected in their behaviour, such as being exhausted at school, being overemotional, having meltdowns and general ‘misbehaviour’. Of course you have to take into account a child’s individuality—while one child may cope really well with four after-school activities a week, not all will. Some children are not coping with having so much on their plate. Too often I hear:

  ‘I’d like to make an appointment for you to see my six-year-old daughter.’

  ‘Sure. How about next Wednesday at 4 pm?’

  ‘Oh, we can’t do Wednesday—she’s swimming.’

  ‘What about Thursday?’

  ‘Thursday she does gymnastics, Monday she has keyboard and dance, and on Tuesdays and Saturdays she does netball.’

  I feel for both the child and the parent who is ferrying this child around.

  Observing children is a major part of what I do; I watch them at school and at their after-school activities. I am all for children having interests, participating in competitions, learning through play, but not to the level where it becomes detrimental to the child. Waking your child at 5.30 am for a relaxing and mindful yoga lesson five times a week before school only to have them dozing a
t their desk by 10 am is somewhat missing the point of the mindful yoga class.

  If you can picture how well a child keeps it together at school for over six hours in a structured environment, which I find incredible, plus homework, they will also need unstructured time to just be. To just be a child.

  We all have dreams for our children, we all want the best for them, we want them to have opportunities to flourish, but it is crucial to remember the child too, that their dreams are not our dreams and not every waking moment has to be filled with something for them to do.

  Amen, Nathalie! *fist bump and a high five for common sense!*

  So I must ask the question: Why do we wear our busy-ness like it is a badge of honour?

  I grew up in an era where there was no homework. You had your little reader in the early years, but afternoons were spent playing. Playing with your siblings and neighbours. The word ‘play date’ wasn’t even a thing.

  I try to keep it simple with my kids. They have boundaries, and it is up to them what they do within those boundaries to keep themselves amused. They have to be home by 5 pm. If they end up at a mate’s house, they know to make a quick call home to let me know where they are. They are free to roam the streets on their bikes and explore the bushlands that surround our suburb. They know my phone number by heart and are well versed when it comes to stranger danger.

  I believe that by giving kids their freedom—at the appropriate time, obviously—you are handing them the keys to so many of life’s lessons that are more important than playing the oboe. They will learn to take risks and experience the consequences of their actions. This is important when learning about decision-making.

  My good pal Mrs Goodman and I quite often discuss this topic. She once told me: ‘Life is always going to knock it out of you, so you’d better start with a full tank.’

  Never a truer word was spoken. You start at 100 per cent, and as you get older you take the knocks. How much those knocks diminish you is in your hands. I believe in teaching your kids confidence while they are under your roof, because once they are gone, they have to deal with the knocks on their own.

  One afternoon, I saw Harry wheeling his bike down the driveway, his backpack on his back.

  ‘Where are you going?’ I asked him.

  Without missing a beat, he looked at me and said, ‘Wherever the wind takes me.’

  It turns out he was off to the house around the corner for a dip in their pool . . . but good answer!

  31

  SCHOOL EXCURSIONS

  When my son was in Year 6, he brought home a note from school that, naturally, I found in his bag covered in leftover lunchbox contents.

  ‘What is this?’ I asked him.

  He shrugged. ‘I dunno. Something about a school excursion.’

  I read the note and then fell to the floor in a dead faint. I was expecting something about the zoo, or the Opera House. But no. The school excursion was to South Korea. Apparently my kids’ school has a sister school there, so someone came up with the great idea of popping on over to say g’day.

  When I’d regained consciousness, I gently broke the news to my son that he had as much chance of going to South Korea as I had of winning Mr Trump’s Miss Universe competition. He asked me what my chances of winning such a competition were and I told him. Zero. He protested for a bit, listing for me which of his friends’ parents were happy to fork out upwards of $3000 for this ‘culturally rich’ experience, but I shut the whole conversation down in a mature fashion by simply leaving the room.

  It is probably worth noting that my kids did not go to an expensive private school where trips to Paris are the norm, but to the local primary school down the end of the road.

  While I look back on my own school excursions fondly, they could be decidedly bizarre. One time, when I was a slogging through a course called Maths in Society (commonly called Maths in Space because it was for those of us who were having trouble counting up to one hundred), we were told that we were going on a very special excursion—a maths excursion!

  And where do you go on a maths excursion?

  McDonald’s!

  The educational objective of the excursion was to study the tessellations on the tiles in the restaurant. Hey, that was fine by me! All of a sudden we were the envy of our brainier peers; it turned out there was a silver lining to being dumb.

  So the seven students of Maths in Society and our teacher, Mrs Prescott, went along to the nearest McDonald’s and looked at tiles before chowing down on cheeseburgers and fries. I do believe that was the best day at school I ever had.

  One of the things we really got stuck into when I was in primary school was good old-fashioned Australian history, which now goes by the rather more glamorous moniker of Human Society and Its Environment. (That is what HSIE stands for, if you have ever wondered.) An excursion was arranged to Old Sydney Town (now defunct, as there were no longer enough bums on seats to make it a viable concern).

  Old Sydney Town was about a three-hour bus ride away. From memory, it was a collection of ye olde buildings, including a kiosk at which you could buy a carton of Ribena or a packet of Toobs from a busty wench.

  It seemed that everyone who lived back in the olden days was either a soldier or a convict. We watched as a crime was committed, followed by a chase scene and an arrest. A courtroom drama was acted out, and the punishment delivered. A flogging!

  The criminal was tied up with his hands above his head while some sadist went to town on his back with a cat-o’-nine tails. I had my eyes closed and my hands squished firmly into my ears the entire time.

  When finally the crowd’s lust for gore was satisfied, it was revealed that the deep red welts on the criminal’s back were in fact caused by food dye that had been liberally applied to the whip. And the bloke had not been writhing in real pain but was, it turned out, a mighty fine actor, whom we later saw smoking a cigarette and chatting to his erstwhile tormentor.

  After watching a lady make a candle from beeswax and another lady spin some wool, we were hustled back on the bus for home. I cannot recall it being a fantastic excursion, but it sure beat the time we went to see a sewage plant . . .

  I will never forget the excitement I would feel when my teacher announced to the class that we were going on an excursion. A day off school! YES! But these days, the fun of an excursion comes with a little something called a risk management plan, in which any potential risk must be identified and assessed.

  But while I might roll my eyes at this prim expression of pessimism, it does occur to me that educational authorities might have good reason to make these plans mandatory.

  There was no risk management in 1991 when I, along with the rest of the Year 12 art class, boarded a bus and travelled eight hours and forty-three minutes from Sydney to Melbourne to visit some art galleries. Though, being seventeen, we were less interested in art than we were in shaking off the teachers and painting the town red.

  So after a day of looking at art, we had dinner with the teachers and demurely bade them goodnight. (They were no doubt desperate to get rid of us so they could get stuck into the gin.) But what they didn’t know was that we had a cunning plan that involved one of Melbourne’s famed nightclubs, which happened to be not far from our digs.

  It was like a whole new world. The music was completely doof-doof and I knew none of it. What was wrong with Color Me Badd? Cher? Heavy D & the Boyz? Nuh. This edgy Melbourne nightclub was having none of that. This was house music. And I was not a fan.

  I sat with my friends, sucking back on a Sub Zero (with grenadine because I was at a funky Melbourne nightclub, trying to be cool), while men approached and tried to crack on to the prettier girls in our group, little realising that we were all under eighteen.

  But that was no problem. We were all in possession of a folded, creased, dirty piece of paper created to assure the authorities that we were of legal drinking age.

  Did I say ‘created’? I did.

  So, either you bribed your ol
der sister to photocopy her driver’s licence for you or, if your older sister was a bitch face from hell and refused, you did it the hard way. You photocopied your birth certificate and typed up a new birthdate on a fresh piece of paper, then, with the steady hand of the brain surgeon you were not destined to become, you carefully cut out the new date and pasted it over the original date on your birth certificate. After a few minutes’ drying time, you photocopied the result. Then you studied the photocopy. Were there any shadows? Was the new date perfectly aligned? Yes? Then let’s get back to that nightclub . . .

  After a while, those Sub Zeros kicked in and, all of a sudden, I fucking loved house music! The lights and music throbbed through my veins as I spun around that dance floor, bumping into people and doing some exceptional interpretive dance with complete strangers. I spied a few of our posse doing shots of tequila at the bar. The night wore on, and our group of bright-eyed and bushy-tailed teenagers became less bright-eyed and less bushy-tailed.

  And then I saw something so outrageous that I immediately raced over to the bar and screamed: ‘Kirsty Owen is PASHING A GIRL!’

  Kirsty was one of my friends. She was very cool, exceedingly beautiful and now, apparently, gay. We watched her suck face for an eternity on that dance floor. Was this a cool thing? Was this what you did in Melbourne?

  After a while, Kirsty came up for air and I realised that she had not been pashing a girl, but pashing a beautiful man with long flowing locks. Long flowing locks on a man was not something that you saw every day on the streets of the conservative North Shore in Sydney. The fact that she’d pashed a man with long hair just made Kirsty even cooler in my eyes. Long hair! Who would have thought it?