In the glow of the
kitchen table lamp, as though interrogated by officers of procrastination, your
son or daughter sits slumped. The table is covered with the detritus of an
evening of frustration—crumpled paper, a plate from a snack enjoyed hours ago,
marked-up handouts and the grading rubric.
Your child is stuck on
repeat: “I don’t know what to say” and “I don’t know what the teacher wants.”
From upstairs, the sounds of other household members brushing their teeth and
preparing for bed, the happy murmur of siblings untormented by an essay.
It
would be so easy to helicopter in rescue sentences that start, “how about
saying this here?,” but you refuse to write the piece for them. You just wish
you knew how to make this process smoother.
Short
of plagiarism, your child may be willing to do anything to exit this
predicament, yet it’s precisely right now that your son or daughter
needs to finish this homework.
The
reason your child is suffering through this assignment is that they’ve been trained
to miss out on the present moment in order to prepare for a future moment when
their work is critiqued and graded. Mindlessness, as Harvard professor Ellen J.
Langer has documented, hurts learning. It’s harmful to critical thinking and
the ability to perceive alternatives to move beyond rigid views.
I believe that
mindlessness (future- or past-oriented thinking that overlooks what’s happening
now, in real time) is specifically consequential to learning how to write.
Writing becomes an entirely different experience if children focus on what’s
happening in the moment.
The
main pipeline for this mindlessness instruction is a bit of routine advice.
Students are constantly told to “consider their audience,” which really means
visualizing a person in the future. After absorbing this traditional advice,
your child unconsciously invites the teacher (their biggest audience) into your
home. Ms. D from sixth period or Mr. K from Language Arts are not sitting on
their couches binge watching Netflix: they’re in your kitchen.
The
student hasn’t had time to compose that polished draft—it’s strictly a
hypothetical object in the future—so what this teacher-reader “sees” is your
child at their most vulnerably imperfect time—in the rough draft stage.
To
avoid disappointing this teacher-reader, children delete and correct
in-progress writing. Often it’s preferable to not write anything because that’s
seemingly the most foolproof way to avert negative feedback.
#1 Settle into the Moment
The
most important step is to help your child settle into the moment and steer
attention away from that writing future. It’s a sort of mental CPR you need to
perform on your child. Pick and choose from the other measures explained in
this article, but this part is fundamental.
The
best way for your child to more aware is to reengage with the body by observing
the breath for 1-2 minutes. Breathing in, here, breathing out, now. The
physical benefits of mindful breathing are the slowing of the pulse and the
petering out of adrenalin.
As young writers redirect their mind to follow the
breath, self-talk downshifts from that stressful racing of I can’t write I
have no idea what to write I am in big trouble.
Breathing is a free and
readily available method to switch perceptions of the time of writing—no
special equipment required.
In my
classroom, I’m partial to what I call “yoga for hands,” directing students to
focus on the sensations of typing (wrist bones, musculature, pistons of the
fingers). It’s impossible to obsess on a tricky audience and simultaneously
stay aware of your hands.
#2: Take Charge of Reader Proximity
To
evict future-based imaginary readers, switch writing materials. Notebooks and
pens install the teacher in the back of kids’ heads. To gain breathing room,
avoid writing materials associated with final products.
Instead
of a Word document or clean notebook, gather Crayons, magic markers, Post-Its,
a coloring book, food stained paper from the recycling bin, a grocery
bag—materials not normally shown to teachers. This automatically marks the
writing as “private”—buys your child distance from critics. For instance, I
write poems in the early hours of the morning with a $1 composition notebook
and a pink magic marker precisely because I will never ever show an editor that
copy.
#3 Start Where You Are
Young
writers often make the mistake of believing they must start from the literal
beginning of a document (title, first sentence, introduction). They’ll stare at
the screen forever. The student erroneously equates the timing of reading (in
English, we read from the top left corner to bottom right corner, rinse and
repeat) with the timing of writing (as we write, we move all around a
document).
Any final document is actually covered with the ant tracks of time—what looks
like the opening sentence to us might have been the final touch before
submission to a publisher.
Instead
of waiting for perfection, help your child start anywhere. A mindful and more
prolific approach to writing means accepting whatever the moment offers in
terms of material. Ask your child where he already has something to say and
start freewriting about that spot—it doesn’t matter if it’s in the dead center
of the research project.
#4 Go for Quantity over Quality
Help
your child mute her tendency toward correct writing in favor of lots of
writing. Between the two of you, agree that she’ll complete a number of rapid
freewrites of a reasonable word count, for instance 100 to 300 words. Quality
doesn’t matter—fillers, repetition, poor grammar, incomplete sentences are all
fine for now.
Withhold
rewriting, edits, and proofreading for later, even if only for the last fifteen
minutes. When your child is deeply stuck, the focus should be on creating a
full, messy first draft. It's much easier to operate from a position of
abundance than scarcity.
You
can improve your child’s writing experience through mindfulness—as long as you
keep two principles in mind. First, you should write with your child. Reach for
scrap paper or the back of a bill and write alongside him. Write about
anything—scribble pajamas and novel in bed pajamas a dozen times—as long
as you’re seen writing. This sends an important message that while you won’t be
writing their essay, you’re engaged in writing.
Second,
abstain from any criticism whatsoever—not a single misspelling,
comma-gone-wild, or out-of-place sentence. Your kid is struggling because she’s
crouched in a mental huddle, anticipating corrections on content and grammar.
For her to access the present moment, it’s important that she writes as freely
as possible from anticipated correction.
It
might be tempting to tweak your child’s writing once it starts flowing—don’t.
It’ll only do more harm than good. Take a breath—I bow to you—because if you’ve
followed even a few of these steps, you’ve already done a world of short- and
long-term good for your child writer.
