Two weekends ago my job in the mornings was to draw maps. The week before that it was aliens, but luckily we returned to maps, which is good since I like drawing maps more than aliens. My six-year -old Aaron wants to draw maps along with me and enjoys this little joint activity. We make up imaginary countries, and draw in all the requisite physical features: lakes, rivers, mountains, coastlines, off-shore islands and the like. We work together, each on a different clipboard, and he casts frequents glances over at my own map. Invariably if I am drawing a mountainous country, his also ends up with a range of mountains, which we often give remarkably unimaginative names: “High Mountains” or “Black Mountains.” I seize this as an opportunity to talk about geography, and: it serves well as a mechanism for learning to read and write as well, which has emerged out of the horizon for him. “What does ‘MTS’ mean?” he will ask when looking at my map. We talk about abbreviations and he is then very pleased to be able to put them in his own map too. He asks me how to spell different words – —our conversation is likely to be punctuated by questions like “how, “How do you spell ‘lake’?” or “does, “Does your country have any deserts?” We end (or sometimes start) by giving the country a name, and a nice touch, we make a flag for it, which gets appended as a little sidebar graphic on the side of the map. If the flag is particularly interesting, we will then draw a “full -size” flag on a separate piece of paper, with the country’s symbol, often a glistening sword or a fierce eagle. We have created a good dozen different lands in the last few weeks, and they have run all the way from high mountainous inhospitable regions to series of islands, some of them with lagoons infested with pirates or sharks. Hopefully their inhabitants are as pleased with their homeland as their creators. All this happens while my wife Lucy gets a rare chance to sleep in, and Heather, age 3, has not yet surfaced.

A One of the frequently disturbing parts of being a parent is the recognition, sometimes with an inadvertent start, that kids learn an awful lot by modeling. In a semi-formal learning situation like this one, it is easy to adopt an educator’s stance, especially if it gives you a chance (very rare) of being an expert, and to be able to talk about stuff that you know something about. We haven’t gotten to cartographic projections yet, but there will be plenty time for that later. It is often much more unnerving to realize that you are being modeled in all kinds of other situations. The strangest words have a habit of being repeated, sometimes at some interval from their initial utterance, and it is helpful then to remember that kids remember a whole lot more than you usually give them credit for.

Another One of the difficult parts of being a parent is an issue that raises its head in almost every human endeavor —from work life to athletics to being a loving partner. How do you go about working to your strengths and at the same time address, or at least minimize, your weaknesses?

As is perhaps common in the contemporary overworked age, I often feel guilty when at my “day job.” Lucy has the hard part of the deal, as far as I am concerned, and as every mom knows, and plenty of single dads, it is a ferocious bit of work to be chewed upon by piranha-like children seeking attention for 12twelve or so hours a day, day in and day out. Patience reserves grow thin, you weary of the constant role playing required: leader, motivator, police and paramedic support, mediator of disputes, the model of calm, reasoned action in times of chaos. At my own work on the worst day I just need to cope with immature colleagues or uncooperative bureaucracies – —some of these problems are even solvable with energy and focus. It does not usually feel so easy at home.

One of the things that can happen for fathers (or any “non-primary” parents) is to give the other a break. Even a couple hours away can help (, although it is often is a challenge to manage the transitions. It has been very hard for me to learn that you need to give kids long lead-in times. One of my least favorite scenarios is alas all too common –: I take the kids somewhere or do projects at home while Lucy is out, only to have them descend on her upon her return and act like whiny little brats when it felt like when they were with me all was well and under control. Explaining transitions to Aaron and Heather and my expectations of them certainly help, but it never seems like enough.

This weekend our map-making adventures have gone and taken a different turn. I suggested last week that it might be fun, over the summer when I am off work, to do a scale model of the house. This followed numerous mapmaking efforts of plotting the various rooms in the house, but Aaron was intrigued by doing a 3-D effort, and he probably visualized it as a potential doll-house variety of play item. The only trouble with plotting such an activity is that for a six year old, waiting until June seems like forever, and he has been chomping at the bit to get started on some part of it. “Couldn’t we at least get our stuff at the hardware store?” he would beg, realizing that one reason given for holding off until the summer was supply procurement.

We compromised this Sunday with making a prototype living room model. It involved cardboard (my absolute favorite building material when I was the same age -- —there were precious few shapes that I could not attempt by cutting cardboard and taping it into submission with umpteen linear yards of cellophane tape) and scissors and tape. I had him measure windows and door widths, bookcases and counters, and then, of course, we had to discuss scale, and how one inch on the model would equal twenty inches in real life, and that if we measured with reasonable accuracy everything would "““look right"”” when it came time to putting it all together. Luckily, my suggestion that after cutting out windows we could cover them with clear plastic to look like real glass was met with approval. It is amazing to me how much can happen when you give a kid a real project with a concrete outcome, and then you get to pack it as heavily as possible with content (scale, measurement, design elements, material selection) etc. A good hour disappeared this morning before Heather awoke, and he happily plotted and helped think of solutions to our innumerable design problems, both potential and actual.

A lot of these kinds of activities are an effort for me. Things tend to work best when I can reach back into my own memory of being a kid and try to focus in on what was best about similar undertakings. I am very aware that once you hatch something of this sort, you have to be able to pull it off one way or another  —I remember the keen disappointment in my own life when an adult (parent, neighbor or relative) had made a promised excursion of some sort (fishing trip, backyard project) and it turned out never to come to pass. It is important just to follow through on it, even if the results are not perfect.

I remember loving “doing stuff” with my dad. Even helping in the garden was fun (for a little while) if you got to handle a real tool like a trowel or something, and I would watch him closely at work (more closely than he imagined) and try to imitate his actions. He would become annoyed sometimes at the level of my imitation, and after I had picked up his habit of spitting while at work out back of the house, he would try to correct this appropriation of what now had become a caricatured habit. “Only spit when you need to” he would correct me. How did he know when I needed to spit? I couldn’t tell when HE needed to, how could he know my own situation?

But the hours would fly by and I would return home with the warm satisfaction of doing something “real.” He taught me about hard work, and effort, and that, as we lived far into the backwoods, it was handy to be self-sufficient in repairing things and taking care of tools so that they would last. To a lesser extent than for me growing up, Heather and Aaron have some different activities with their parents. I tend to draw and do woodworking and other like projects, Lucy plays card and board games with the kids, which I find less appealing. It is an extraordinary luxury to have a situation that allows these kinds of trade-offs and the kids a chance to do separate activities with each parent.

Heather arrives, her hair tangled from sleep, and the dynamic shifts. I will get her some breakfast, maybe a second breakfast for Aaron, and we will shift to a different activity, maybe do some reading. At the times when I actually think about family life, it seems an impossible proposition. The activities and interests and methods for carrying on are always in flux. What Aaron or Heather liked for breakfast two weeks ago may not hold true this week, and once favorite books can go out of fashion overnight. How does this happen? As a parent, and particularly in our case since we have decided to be a home-schooling family (my two older kids from an earlier marriage, Gene and Maggie, went through the local public school system, and we are trying a different route for Heather and Aaron) it means you really need to pay especially close attention to your kids, divine their interests and assess their abilities while plotting a family course.

When people hear the word “home schooling,” for some reason most of them conjure up an image of “school at home” and try to graft public education policies, philosophies and organization onto the home part, and usually the hybrid image is fairly ugly. Of course, many home schooling families do not operate that way at all, and in fact find that the less of the public school solution to education they employ the better. At home you are really in a position to make the kid’s interests the focus of your efforts, and as far as learning most academic subjects, one on one tutoring remains the time-honored and often the best mechanism. Obviously this works best when you the “teacher” are a master, or at least competent, at your topic, but for younger kids it requires very little mastery of botany, for example, to be able to do things that mean allow for some learning about plants takes place.

For me, it is projects like these that make home schooling work. You do stuff, talk about it, trouble shoot problems, learn something and repeat in a different arena. On one level, since this is the approach we have chosen, it makes all projects a little more enlightening since I need to think about them from an educational standpoint. And more than I did with my first round of children, I try to think ahead and gauge how I can leverage Aaron or Heather’s interests and motivations towards learning about the topic at hand. And of course, you need to leave plenty of time free for just plain grabbing a kid on the couch and tickling them until they scream for mercy. This sounds like an important part of education to me too.

The worries of a parent make for an impressive laundry list. Will my kids grow into mature wise citizens capable of solving problems, exhibiting kindness to their fellow humans, be able to make hard decisions on political, moral and ethical challenges, and find happiness too? What can go wrong with raising kids? First are safety issues -- —watching after small kids and teaching them the mechanisms to keep the probability of self-destruction to a minimum is a full-time job itself for many years, and doesn’t generally ended even by the teenage years. It takes a lot of work to get someone to adulthood in one piece. Second in importance for me are is still a category of non-intellectual issues that could be lumped in the "moral/ethical/humanistic" series with the following outcomes: treating others with consideration,; learning balance and compromise in discussion and action; thinking first, acting second (in all but situations that call for instinctual response); thinking in large perspectives as well as individual self; understanding emotions enough to mute or deflect them and not them run amok inside yourself or be inflicted on others; stifling the urge to strike back at those who have hurt you. Finally, there is the task of learning the intellectual tools that allow for flexibility and continual education as a human. This in many ways is the easiest category, and can be accomplished in schools that are both good and indifferent, as well as done well at home. Teaching simple math and reading and writing is not hard, and methinks the best path is one that harnesses kids’ own innate interests, plays to their motivations and self-interest, and gives them the freedom to do more and more independent stuff on their own.

Right now I feel fortunate to be able to have the time and energy to focus on my kids’ futures, feed their interests, and guide, however imperfectly, their physical safety, moral progress and intellectual development. And with any luck we’ll have a splendid scale model of the house come July.