My Mom, Ctd.

A friend who read the post on lost islands commented on my observant mother, and I responded:

My mom was just great that way (and she did it without help, as my dad was gone by the time I was ten, and never assisted her anyway). Each of her three kids was an individual and got what they needed -- I got lots of educational stuff, my brother got his toy trucks, my sister got her dolls -- but she also had a baseline commitment to making sure her children's brains and better impulses were always nourished. For example, we all had globes in our rooms and world maps on the walls, so we were all aces at geography (and my brother became a true map hound -- he got the county map for every county in New Jersey). Exposure to natural life was very important; we sort of split the animal kingdom -- my brother got the birds, I got the mammals. Everyone experimented with gardening (and my brother, again, became the lifelong gardener). The arts were everywhere in our house: I was the classical music kid, my sister was a serious dancer, both my sister and brother were very active in musicals in high school. All of this occurred on a frayed shoestring, financially speaking.

As a teacher years later, I remember once telling a group of parents of 5th graders the tip about the globes and world maps, and they were simply amazed by it -- the thought would never have come to them on their own. That is too bad, because my mom's sensitive, attentive approach is not only available to upper class parents investing in Mozart for Toddlers CDs. Are we making the best of our children's birthright -- immeasurably enriched now by multicultural awareness, and more accessible than ever through modern electronic media -- available to them from the start, or are we raising them on junk culture alone? Plato was right when he wrote thousands of years ago in The Republic: "Except in the case of some rarely gifted nature, there will never be a good man who has not from his childhood been used to play among things of beauty and make of them a joy and a study."

POSTSCRIPT: My mother's pre-Internet research skills were pretty phenomenal -- she found incredible educational toys and games for me in the oddest places, and was very assiduous in her pursuit of them. There was one series of mathematical and logic games from the small Wff'n Proof company, founded by a professor, and I had every one of them. (These are still available.) I got chemistry sets, a build-your-own weather station, Viewmaster reels of world geography that went back decades in her family, and a completely awesome "Wood Study Kit" produced by the Timber Engineering Company in 1950 (who knows where she found this?) -- 54 samples of wood from different trees, with descriptive booklets and a magnifier in a sturdy wooden box. I still have this, thankfully!