It’s a Big Bad World Out There

The husband had a work-baby at the same time that we had G. This left me (mostly) all alone at home with an infant for the first two years of G’s life. While she was happy on her own for short stretches when she was at home, any time a stranger was introduced, or we…

After the Fall

When you do a Montessori program, you are required to do a certain number of hours of observation. They ask you to pick a child whom you don’t know, so that neither you, nor the child, get distracted by familiarity. You are essentially meant to be like furniture, melting away into the background and making…

Failure-Proofing Our Children

Dr. Montessori believed that normalized children were joyful, self-regulated people who could make choices, concentrate, and work together respectfully. She said that the ultimate aim of the pedagogy was to get children back to this state, wherever necessary. If you saw something in a child that was a ‘deviation’ from this state – inability to…

The Perfectionist Daughter

I fed G until she was old enough to crawl… after that, I figured she could climb on to me and help herself to breastmilk on her own (especially at night, I had a good 9 months of sleep to catch up on after all 🙂). Needless to say, I adopted the same ‘help yourself…

Whose Opinion Is It Anyway?

It’s human tendency to categorize and sort information in ways that we can meaningfully process. Classifying things helps us be efficient – it’s the reason behind aisles in supermarkets, categories in libraries… even our houses have rooms which group objects functionally. So I can understand the temptation to apply this kind of classification system to…