Tag: kids

The Front Seat

Sharing the front seat with your kids means more than simply yielding your traveling storage space – it’s a metaphor for growth and maturity.

I’m wrapping up this Tales from the 5th Grade series with some thoughts on sharing the front seat.  From that dreaded rear-facing carrier to resisting the booster seat, every phase signals a child’s growth, maturity, and relative independence.  

Now I’m facing the ultimate automotive accord – sharing the front seat with my kid.

My 5th grader is clamoring to ride in the front seat of my car.  As easy as it would be to allow him to move up front, I’m resisting. I’m resisting for a number of reasons. First, the great State of Texas recommends keeping children safely seated in the back until age 13.  Even at average height and weight for his age, my son has only recently started riding without a booster (but don’t mention it his friends…).  I always tell the kids that keeping them safe is our number one priority as parents, and I’m standing strong with this reasoning in the front seat debate.  I know that my vehicle is equipped with the appropriate features to secure my little man, but I still get nervous about lazy seat belt use and air bag malfunction.  

Second, the move to the front seat means I give up my personal space. And I don’t just mean breathing room.  It’s the place I always put my purse and the other sundries I collect throughout the day (library books, water bottles, yoga mat… you know the drill).  I often joke that my car is my office, and I’m not selling that prime real estate cheaply.  Co-pilot training may be necessary.  At a minimum, he’ll need to learn to juggle the dinner take-out bags with a wet umbrella under his feet.  It could take months to devise the proper training protocols; meantime the 5th grader will need to stay comfortably in the back seat with his sister and all that extra floor space.

The thing is that moving to the front seat is more than just moving to the front seat; it’s a metaphor for larger life transitions.  It represents acknowledgement that my 5th grader is big enough to sit up front – in his life and in the car.  It’s giving him permission to be within arm’s reach of the radio controls.  It’s surrendering my personal-space passenger seat to this sweet man-boy (and resisting the urge to throw my arm in front of him when I slam on the brakes).  He’s going to middle school next year.  Middle school!  I feel like it was just yesterday I buckled him into a five-point harness and glanced the crazy infant mirror more often than I checked the rear-view.  Now I have to consider him sitting next to me in the front seat, navigating his life’s roadmap while riding side-by-side.  

The boy who wants front seat privileges but refuses the paparazzi.

Please comment and share your own Tales From the 5th Grade!  And I’d appreciate any tips on managing the backseat purse situation… 

Visit the other “Tales from the 5th Grade” Posts:

Adventures in Homework

Tales from the 5th Grade – Part 2

Hey parents – can we talk for a second? How’s homework going at your house?  Is it always as tranquil and compliant as in my house?  Do you look forward to sitting down to help your little angel with essays and history and complex math problems?  Isn’t it the highlight of your evening?  Yep, me too.

Homework is not a fifth-grade phenomenon.  We’ve been at it since kindergarten.  For better or worse, our kids attend a school that stands squarely on the ‘homework builds discipline’ side of the fence.  Our fifth grader spends 30 to 90 minutes on homework every school day — 45 minutes is about average at our house — in addition to reading and other extra-curricular activities.  The thing about fifth grade homework is that it’s the first time I’ve really been challenged by the assignments.  I mean, when was the last time you labeled the parts of a volcano or recounted the battle of Yorktown*?  

Save for learning to read, fifth grade seems to be when the real ‘you may have to actually use this stuff later’ knowledge begins.  There’s definitely something to this “Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader?” business.  The teachers are doing their best to trick the students into early iterations of algebra (although they’re still calling it math) and exercising their creative writing muscles with research papers and haiku. And they’re assigned homework that corresponds with all these new and improved intellectual pursuits.  Needless to say, things have gotten real.

Here’s just a snippit of our 5thgrade curriculum:

  • The American Revolution
  • The Bill of Rights (Quick – What’s the 7thAmendment?)
  • Identifying Types of Clouds
  • The Earth’s Structure
  • Polygons, Lines, and Angles (oh my!)
  • Geometry 
  • Acrostic and Cinquain Poems
  • Research and Citations

See what I mean?  This is all serious stuff!

What’s more is that the teachers trying to prepare the kids for the independence of middle school.  Gone are reminders about turning in assignments at the beginning of class and opportunities to revisit silly mistakes. We get fewer and fewer notices about homework and long-term projects, and if parents don’t pay close attention to the teachers’ correspondence, we could miss the one and only announcement you get about test dates.  Honestly, I think the teachers know that parents need almost as much training for junior high as our children do.

Most schools at all levels assign homework to reinforce knowledge presented classroom and, perhaps, encourage/force parents to get invested in their kids’ curriculum.  I’ll explore some of the research (ahem, controversy) behind homework in a future post.  Meantime, parents, sharpen your pencils — our kids are gaining on us!  Read what they read; study what they study. Test your own knowledge. You might just (re)learn something from your 5th grader and their homework.

I’d love to hear about your adventures in homework, Bon Mot Mamas!   

Homework Machine

By: Shel Silverstein

The Homework Machine, Oh the Homework Machine,
Most perfect contraption that’s ever been seen.
Just put in your homework, then drop in a dime,
Snap on the switch, and in ten seconds’ time,
Your homework comes out, quick and clean as can be.
Here it is – “nine plus four” and the answer is “three.”
Three?
Oh me…
I guess it’s not as perfect
As I thought it would be.

*In fairness, I frequently recount the Battle of Yorktown because, as my bon mot besties know, I’m a shameless Hamiltonfan.