Contents
Introduction
1. New Parents
2. Beyond Birth: Other Ways of Welcoming Children
3. Fostering Community, Within and Around
4. Toddlers: Not That Terrible
5. Mapmaking and Apprenticeship
6. The Growing Years
7. The Art of Discipline
8. The Challenge of New Technology
9. Parenting in Survival Mode
10. Parents--and More Than Parents
11. Busy Days
12. Moving into Adolescence
13. Parents and Marriage
14. Single Parents
15. School and Other Ways of Learning
16. Later Adolescence
17. Parenting Adults
Epilogue
Suggested Reading
Excerpt
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"We can think of parent and child as involved in a process of apprenticeship...
Apprenticeship, which still survives in some of the arts and some of the trades, was once a dominant form of education. The basic form is a simple one: An apprentice works alongside a master, watching carefully and slowly moving into greater and greater participation in the work. A masonry apprentice learns bricklaying by watching and then joining in the work of a master bricklayer. In the art studio, an apprentice might be allowed first to clean brushes, then to mix paint, then to begin adding details to paintings. Apprentices to the great artists of the Renaissance did these very things. Leonardo da Vinci, for example, became an apprentice at 14 as part of a chain of apprenticeship that was eventually a chain of masters. He studied under a master named Andrea del Rocco, who himself had studied under Donatello. The apprentice eventually receives payment and produces her own masterpieces. The master, close at hand, oversees this process throughout.
Too often, parenting (and, in a sense, even the term “parenting” itself) slides toward imagining something that parents are doing to their children. Parents can get pulled into something perhaps better described as management of children. We get them ready for the day. We feed them; we bathe them; we pick them up and bandage wounds. And we try to follow all the advice. When they are newborns, we try to put them to sleep on their backs. When they attend school, we try to set up space for them to do their homework. We try to praise them more often than we criticize them. Ultimately, though—and sometimes it seems almost ceaselessly—parents are doing things to and for our children. This model has real weaknesses. It can create anxiety in children. It can erode the relationship between parent and child. And all this management, frankly, is exhausting—both for parents and for children. The model of apprenticeship, on the other hand, offers a number of fruitful emphases for parents.
The model of apprenticeship is more about parents simply being with their children, doing life together. If it becomes a guiding model, then it actually leads to less vigilance and less alarm. It involves less planning and less organizing. It involves more presence, more patience, more playfulness and more calm. The calling of a mother or a father to walk with their children, sharing work, sharing play, sharing themselves, is a richer reality.
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