Ignite the Light: Empowering Children and Adults to Be Their Absolute Best

CHAPTER 1

A BRIEF MOMENT IN TIME

Childhood is a short season.

— HELEN HAYES

Early one cold November morning, I walked into a local coffee shop and said hello to some of the regulars. As I waited in line to order my yummy mocha latte, I noticed a toddler with his dad. He was a jovial child with an inquisitive look in his eyes. His father sat him in a wooden high chair and stood close by to give the barista his order. I noticed that the sun was shining in the little boy’s face, yet he was mesmerized by the design on the chair and appeared unaffected by the brightness. His hands gently caressed this newfound object, and his eyes were intense with wonder. I caught myself in the moment, staring at this beautiful child in the sunlight, and then glanced around. I smiled when I noticed that the majority of the people in the coffee shop were doing exactly what I was doing: marveling at this little boy who was basking in the sun and filling himself with the wonder of life. It was as if time stopped for a moment and we were all connected as we watched this young child simply be.

Why is it that no matter where you go, or how many people are present, when you see a child laughing, giggling, or exploring their world with joy, you can’t help but turn and look? The instant your eyes settle on the child enjoying the moment, you feel a sense of calm and comfort. You’re taken back to your innocence, to a time when things were simple and new. It is moments like these that take us beyond our thoughts and connect us to something buried deep within.

Childhood: A Dwindling Era

Childhood is a brief time period that begins at birth and ends at puberty. Considering that the average life span is about 80 years, some might conclude that childhood, which lasts about 13 years, is insignificant in the grand scheme of things. After all, it’s short and occurs very early on. However, the truth is that childhood is the most critical time period of our entire lives because it sets the stage for our journey into adulthood.

Intellectually, we know just how brief childhood is when viewing it in the context of an entire lifetime, but how mindful of this short time period are we? It seems that we rush our children through their days and try to turn them into miniature adults as soon as possible. As a parent and a teacher, I have come to realize that oftentimes we aren’t even cognizant of how our actions affect our children. In our fast-paced society, adults expect young children to sit and listen for long periods of time. This has led to the elimination of play breaks in elementary school and the overprogramming of students both in school and through extracurricular activities during their free time. Today’s students are constantly on the go, pressured to learn more, do more, achieve more, and be more. And at the end of grade school we heap more stress on these kids, reminding them just how difficult middle school will be and how important it is for them to get it together by the end of the year. This continues as they transition into high school as well. It’s difficult for these children to quiet their minds, because they never have true downtime.

Perhaps this busyness is just a reflection of adult life in our society, because it’s very common for children to see their parents running from one activity or commitment to the next, not taking time to quiet their own minds. The media also contributes to the untimely rush into adulthood, as it becomes more and more difficult to shield our children from news of shootings, wars, and overall violence sweeping the planet.

As clichéd as it sounds, I do believe that the children are our future. More important, I believe that our childhood determines how smooth or difficult our journey through adulthood will be. Everyone talks about the need to make changes in our schools and in society to bring out the best in our children, yet actions speak louder than words, and it’s safe to say that it’s time for action.

Life experience has taught me that you can’t solve a problem when you are simply reacting to that problem. As Albert Einstein said, no problem can be solved from the same level of the consciousness that created it. When your focus is on the issue at hand, you are unable to see the light in the darkness. You have a tendency to react to life instead of responding to it, and your mind becomes cluttered with fearful thoughts. Therefore, you can’t truly solve a problem until you are aware of its roots. I believe that these roots take hold in childhood. Therefore, the first step in bringing out the very best in our children is awareness.

If we want to bring out the very best in our children, then we need to take a look at the foundations we are laying for them during childhood. We must ask ourselves if we are giving our children the tools they need to navigate life successfully and find their own truth. From this strong foundation they will learn to believe in themselves and above all, speak their truth, even when their voices shake.

When the School Bell Rings

In American schools, we currently spend our time racing to the top, yet we say we want no child left behind. I invite you to read that sentence again and take a close look at the words. When was the last time you watched a race in which someone was not left behind?

Now, let me say that this next section of the book contains material that is specific to the American education system and which you may or may not be familiar with. This section is certainly more cerebral than the following pages. However, I encourage you to read through it to gain an understanding of how our current education system will affect our children in the future by adding unnecessary pressures to their childhood today. I assure you that it is brief but necessary information to heighten your awareness of issues that our children are currently contending with.

In the American education system we have two seemingly contradictory government initiatives that started out as intentions to help children but ultimately have created a great deal of stress and anxiety.

The United States Congress set into motion education reform that was built on the belief that setting high standards and establishing measurable goals through standardized testing would improve individual outcomes in education. This was the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001. The act required all states to establish assessments (or tests) focusing on basic skills and provide these assessments to all students at a specific grade level in order to receive federal school funding. Standards were set by each state individually, but NCLB expanded the federal role in public education through annual testing, annual academic progress tracking, report cards, teacher qualifications standards, and funding changes.

Race to the Top is a United States Department of Education contest aimed at closing the education achievement gap and spurring innovation and reform in the country’s poorest school districts. States are awarded points for satisfying certain educational policies including performance-based standards (often referred to as an annual professional performance review or APPR) for teachers and principals, complying with nationwide standards, promoting charter schools and privatization of education, and computerization. Grants are available to those who qualify.

Both of these education reform acts (No Child Left Behind, signed into law in 2001, and Race to the Top, passed in 2009) originated with good intent, but they have led to unfair practices and pressures in our classrooms that contribute to the disintegration of childhood. Through the push to close the gap and increase test scores, we have lost sight of the importance of childhood—of the need for children to play, grow, and learn at their own pace.

Today, teachers are constantly asked to prove the effectiveness of their teaching and are not necessarily trusted to make decisions as to what’s best for their own students. They’re currently being instructed to spend significant amounts of time documenting their instruction in order to prove it works, while students are given more rigorous tests to show standardized growth. Students are being tested at the beginning of the school year in areas they can’t possibly do well in, only to ensure they will improve throughout the year and measure a certain percentage of growth. Teachers are required to track this growth in order to be deemed successful and keep their jobs.

The sad truth, in my opinion, is that not much of this testing enhances the student. Instead, all of this data collection puts unnecessary pressure on the teachers and students to compete for government funding to provide necessary school resources. The primary issue with all of this is that our children are not necessarily getting the education that they deserve because there is too much time spent on documentation and testing and not enough time connecting with our kids and teaching them how to believe in themselves. There is something unique and amazing about every child, and standardization hides their innate splendor.

Stress levels are high and morale is low for both the students and faculty when fear is leading the way. Students quickly become numbers when data collection takes precedence over educating the whole child. With all of this data collection, testing, and pressure, there is little time for kids to just be kids and enjoy the learning process. In trying to improve our education system, somehow we’ve managed to damage it further. The clear message many children are getting from all of this is that they’re just not good enough. In my experience, the result of all of this pressure is an increase in everything we don’t want: bullying, depression, anxiety, and stress.

Distinguished teachers take the time to get to know their students and how they learn best. They discover what motivates them and what makes them feel inadequate. However, oftentimes when teachers share their findings from this authentic assessment and suggest a solution that’s best for the individual student, they’re told that the child doesn’t qualify for services or that resources are unavailable. Resources are low and expectations are high, yet much of the data that teachers are responsible for collecting is not leading to the support children really need.

Is It Playtime Yet?

As we continue to push our children to race to the top, we find ourselves wondering why it is that they can’t seem to sit still, follow the rules, or get along with others. Our children spend less and less time playing outdoors and more and more time sitting at their desks struggling through assessments. Gone are the days when teachers were able to spend the first six weeks of the school year establishing classroom rules, teaching kids to get along with one another, and practicing the art of problem solving. These days, we are so busy testing our students and collecting data on them that we’ve been forced to cut the most important lessons of all—believe in yourself and speak your truth. And what about learning through play? With so much pressure on teachers to ensure their students are meeting test-score standards, there’s little time for free or even organized play.

At the beginning of first grade, my son came to me and firmly stated: It’s just not fair, Mom. I’m only in first grade, and I never get to play. All we do is work, work, and more work. It saddens me to hear this, because play is one of the greatest learning tools children have. And when we fill young students’ days with too much programming and structure, we deprive them of this great opportunity to learn and grow both socially and emotionally.

In his 1986 work All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, minister and author Robert Fulghum artfully depicts the lessons learned in kindergarten as life guidance that should never be forgotten. Some of these include share everything, play fair, and say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody. My personal favorite was live a balanced life—learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and work every day some. Unfortunately, our kids are missing out on this lesson and so much more when we rush them through their childhood with an excessive amount of testing and data collection. We are far too busy trying to categorize our children and measuring their successes (or failures) to notice that what they really need is to be seen, heard, accepted, honored, supported, and guided with unconditional love, so that they can be their absolute best and shine that inner light.

If we truly want to teach our children effectively, we need to begin by touching their hearts before we even attempt to teach their minds. Children have an innate love for learning, but they will not open their minds to you unless they trust you. Sure, they will learn some of the curriculum by default, but if we are aiming for our children to learn depth instead of breadth—a deep understanding instead of surface learning—then we need to connect with them. We need to get to know them and allow them to know us. We need to accept them and teach them to accept others. In a system where we are focused on data collection and number analysis, we lose connection and ultimately diminish our children’s natural love of learning.

If we continue to spend so much time testing our children instead of building character and teaching them how to tap into the wonder of learning, we are dimming their light instead of igniting it. The anxiety created by this race to the top and leave no child behind mentality is causing children and teachers to feel inadequate. This increases the frustration of both students and teachers and leads us down a road full of fear. When demands increase and children feel inadequate, they lash out at one another; and before you know it, you have a bullying crisis on your hands.

On September 13, 2010, New York State signed into law the Dignity for All Students Act (commonly referred to as the Dignity Act), and it took effect on July 1, 2012. According to the state department of education, the act seeks to provide the State’s public elementary and secondary school students with a safe and supportive environment free from discrimination, intimidation, taunting, harassment, and bullying on school property, a school bus and/or at a school function. Many schools across New York State are now implementing new bullying programs in line with the mandate. But I believe they’re failing to see the big picture. We are causing a great deal of the frustration and stress these students are feeling, and we’re not teaching them the skills they need to cope with these feelings or to thrive in spite of them. Of course they are going to lash out at one another. A bully is generally a person who feels inadequate or lacking in some way. If we spent more of our time connecting with our children (seeing their magnificence) and less time evaluating them (categorizing their failures and successes), perhaps bullying wouldn’t be the enormous problem it is today.

Children are experiencing stress at a much younger age, and it’s leading to poor socialization skills and health problems. Educators are also experiencing high levels of stress, leading them down the same road. The pressure to document effective teaching strategies while planning interesting, thought-provoking, differentiated instruction that meets the current standards of education for all students is becoming almost impossible to handle. There is little time for collaborating with fellow teachers and creating units of study to pique student interest, yet we wonder why our children are not easily engaged and are struggling in school.

Behind Closed Doors

Sadly, the education system isn’t the only area where we’re overlooking the importance of childhood. Within the home, many children spend more time engaging with electronics than they do engaging with real people. They aren’t playing outside like they used to, and quality family time has become a foreign concept to many. We have reached a point where family members may be sitting in the same room together, but instead of enjoying each other’s company, they’re busy playing on Facebook, searching the Web, or answering e-mails on electronic handheld devices. We are raising the iGeneration, and I’m not so sure that’s a good thing. Technology can be amazing, but we seem to have lost sight of moderation.

Parents are working hard to support their children and give them everything that they never had. Regrettably, much of their focus is centered on the material things in life instead of matters of the heart. Like their children, parents are pulled in many different directions and feel that there is just not enough time. We live in a busy, fast-paced world and in order to keep up we often find ourselves returning e-mails, texting, talking on the phone, or sitting in front of a computer while our children are by our sides. We adults spend an awful lot of time in our heads and not a lot of time connected to our hearts. This isn’t intentional. We’re simply trying to keep up. But while we’re treading water in this way, we are missing the messages that our children are sending. We’re disconnected from their true feelings because we’re not in touch with our own emotions. Of course, our lack of connection teaches our children how to disconnect—from themselves and from each other—which can only lead to more problems.

Most people have a tendency to spend significant amounts of time thinking about the past, especially the events that have caused stress or heartache, and a good deal of time dreaming about the future. Consequently, we don’t spend enough time in the present moment. It’s fair to say that most of us are mind full but not mindful. In other words, our minds are cluttered with thoughts, yet we aren’t taking time to quiet our minds, connect to our hearts, and ignite our own light.

When it comes to responsibilities, we take on too much and do far more than anyone needs to in any given day. We unfortunately forget that we are human beings instead of human doings. We get it in our heads that if we do more, then we’ll be more successful and able to provide more for our families. The truth is, when we do too much, we lose contact with who we truly are and we ignore the most important part of our being—our higher self. We totally disconnect from our inner light and put on our tunnel-vision goggles in order to simply make it through our days. It’s as if we aren’t truly living, but instead just existing.

The heartbreaking part of all this is that we aren’t deliberately setting out to harm our children or minimize the importance of childhood. Instead, it’s as though we’re sleepwalking. We seem to be completely unaware that life’s critical moments are passing us by. Before you know it, the child you once held in your arms or the little ones who looked to you for guidance are all grown up and burdened by baggage you never intended to send out into the world with them.

Do you ever feel as though you’re walking around in a haze and simply doing life instead of living? If so, it’s not too late to do something about it. You can make a positive change. You can create a strong foundation for your children by igniting the light within them—but first you must become aware and take a look at your own foundation.

Your Foundation

Just for a moment, imagine your life as a building. What if you were in charge of creating this massive structure from