The fourteen year-old who will sail solo around the world

By now everyone has heard of Laura Dekker, the 14 year-old Dutch girl who has been fighting a court battle for the right to be the youngest person to sail solo around the world.

She has just won her fight after a Dutch court lifted the ban it imposed a year ago. She plans to head out from Portugal sometime in the next two weeks in an attempt to beat Jessica Watson, who is the current record holder at 16. She has been sailing solo since she was ten and was actually born on a yacht. . .while her parents were on a round-the-world voyage. Looks like there's a gene for sailing.

The news source for this post is significant--CBBC, which is the BBC's children's channel. The recent trend of young people doing incredible and dangerous travel feats, like this week's 12 year-old climbing the highest point in all fifty states in record time, can't go unnoticed by children around the world. Even my four-year-old son has taken notice. These kids are inspiring kids everywhere.

Is that a good thing? As a parent I'm torn. On the one hand I applaud anyone with enough courage to go for their dream, on the other hand I have to wonder if a fourteen year old is ready for such a feat. A normal kid that age obviously isn't, but Dekker is no ordinary kid. Even so, there's the high amount of danger involved.

So if Julián wants to do something equally amazing and crazy when he's 14, should I let him? Well, if I think he's capable of achieving it, I'd probably end up saying yes. I don't think I could bring myself to stand between my child and greatness. I'd be biting my nails the entire time, though, and probably shadowing him the entire way!

Teaching children to overcome fear

Like most kids, my four-year-old son loves to climb. Whether it's trees, a jungle gym, or me, he wants to scale it.

Of course I love this. Both I and his mother were rock climbers in our twenties and we're hoping (or at least I'm hoping) he'll get into that too. Playgrounds nowadays have little climbing walls on the sides of the jungle gyms so I've been teaching him some moves. I've also been teaching him the right attitude, like when he turns to me and says, "I'm scared."

I've heard this from other kids in the playground, and the usual response from the parent is, "There's nothing to be scared of," or "Don't be a baby."

I never say that, because you should be a little scared when climbing. What I tell him is, "It's OK to be scared, but go ahead and do it anyway."

This was the biggest lesson rock climbing taught me. I took up climbing in college to cure my fear of heights. It didn't work. I was terrified every time I got on the rocks. But I learned to control my fear. It stopped affecting my ability to climb and didn't stop me from going out every weekend I could. Nowadays I'm happy to go up heights if I feel it's worth it. I even braved the Angel's Landing hike at Zion National Park and climbed up a dodgy leather rope to get to the clifftop monastery of Debre Damo, Ethiopia. I wouldn't want my son to miss out on experiences like that just because he's scared.

Yesterday we went to the "big boys park" and he said, "spot me." He proceeded to climb up a ladder that had rungs a bit too far apart for him, and then traversed some monkey bars that were twice as high off the ground as he is tall. I coached him through it and he looked pretty proud when he finished.

A few minutes later I was sitting on a park bench about ten meters away when I saw him do it himself. He flashed right up the ladder and had no trouble on the monkey bars either. I just sat there, too far away to help him if he fell, grinding my teeth with worry and giving him a thumbs-up sign.

Parents have to learn to overcome fear too.

Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Painless travel with a four year-old

I just traveled from Madrid to Oxford with my wife and four-year-old son. This involved a twenty-minute taxi ride, two hours waiting at the airport (where I photographed a cop playing solitaire), a two-hour flight, an hour bus ride and another short taxi ride.

Doing this with a four-year-old? Piece of cake.

My son loves travel. Perhaps it's genetic, but more likely it's because he's enchanted with cars, planes, boats, buses, basically anything with a motor. Plus we make sure of three things when we're traveling:

1. He has enough to eat. A hungry kid is a grumpy kid.

2. He's comfortable. Not too hot, not too cold, and that he gets enough sleep.

3. He's entertained. We always bring coloring materials and some books, as well as a surprise. Usually it's a big glossy magazine about trains or cars. This time around it was a scuba diving magazine. We've been watching Jacques Cousteau together and I've promised him that we'll do scuba lessons for his 16th birthday. Flipping through pictures of sharks and coral reefs burned up more than an hour of flight time.

If you follow these three simple steps you can be pretty sure your kid will have an enjoyable travel experience and you won't want to kill them before landing. My son has traveled a fair amount and we've had no major blowups. Of course, we didn't take him on our road trip in Ethiopia. We'll have to wait until he's at least six for that.

First photos of a three year-old

My three-year-old son Julián wanted to learn how to use our digital camera, and this is his first photo. Not bad! This is, of course, yours truly and Almudena. We're at the cafe at St. Mary's church on Radcliffe Square, Oxford. Julián wanted to take a second picture and told us just how to pose.

Yeah, we have a Ph.D. and three Masters degrees between us and this is how he wants us to be remembered. He even made Mama put on his little green hat.

Settled in Oxford

We've been in Oxford for two months now and we've really settled down, meeting the neighbors and making friends. The problem with Oxford is that it's such a nice place with so much going on that it's hard to focus on work! We've both been trying the discipline ourselves to get enough work done each day, but as you can see from some of the posts in my other blog, I've had mixed success.

Julián has been loving Oxford. His English is much better. Back in Madrid I was the only person who regularly spoke to him in English, so while he understood everything, he didn't say much. Now he's rattling on in English, even when he's playing by himself, and he's even picking up a bit of an English accent!

The school we have him at is good too. It's a Montessori school, and that allows him to pursue his own interests, mostly things related to geography like maps and animal cards. He's also producing two or three drawings a day.

I like the diversity there too. Most of the kids are bilingual or even trilingual, and his best friend is a little Nepali guy who is so much like him I beginning to think they're twins separated at birth. His school back in Madrid is mostly Spanish kids, with only a few North Africans and South Americans, so I'm glad he's getting to interact with so many different kinds of people. The best part is that he doesn't notice the differences at all; they're just the kids he plays with! Growing up in a whites-only neighborhood and a whites-only school, I had to unlearn a few things. Hopefully he won't have to unlearn anything.

When Your Child Scares You

Julián's obsession with flags continues. He likes looking at our visual dictionary because it has pictures of all the world's flags (along with lots of cars, his other obsession) and he also likes the Flags of the World site because it has an interactive map, a coloring section, and lots of regional and city flags too. I never thought a three year-old could get so focused on something. A couple of nights ago we were on the website, flying around Africa in our imaginary plane, and I showed him the flag of Chad:

He asked me, "Where's the crest?"

"There is no crest, kid," I replied.

He hopped off my lap, pulled the visual dictionary off the shelf, opened it to the flag section, and asked, "What flag is this, Papa?"

He was pointing to the flag of Andorra:

OK, now I'm worried.

Flags Of The World

Hmmm, never seen this flag before? Well, that's because it's not for a country but a website. To feed Julián's continuing interest in flags, I found Flags of the World. It's the Internet's biggest site devoted to vexillology (the study of flags) and has images for more than 75,000 flags. They have all the countries, of course, as well as regions, cities, military flags, etc. This is Julián's favorite site at the moment, even knocking demolition derby clips on YouTube into second place. The interactive world map is the best way to navigate the site, and there's a section for blank flags to print out and color. Suddenly our refrigerator has become covered in flags! Below is the flag of Greenland, a semiautonomous territory of Denmark that recently voted for more independence, but not full independence.

Below is the regional flag for the western province of Ilulissat Kommuniat, Jakobshavn. Glaciers and snowflakes. How appropriate!

And here is the flag for the big island just off its coast, Qeqertarsuup Kommuniat, Godhavn. Northern lights above a whale.

Hmmm...all these flags are on a white field, so they don't show up too well with a white background. They are all rectangles, as are most flags of the world with the exception of Nepal. Are there any other exceptions?

Learning the Flags on Embassy Row

I was a single dad for the past nine days because Almudena was off in Oxford and Bonn for work. She brought me back a nice bottle of German mead, so all is forgiven. One of the nice things about taking care of Julián solo is I get to take him to school. It's right next to where Almudena works so usually that's her job.

Julián loves the bus. He already has several "bus friends", some of the drivers know his name, and he likes to read the numbers of the passing buses. Must be his mother's mathematical mind. His school is along embassy row, so I've been teaching him the flags. There's no better way to show off than to have your three year-old shout out, "Look, the flag of Colombia!!!"

What strikes me is how much the embassies symbolize their countries. The French embassy is a marble palace. The Japanese have a clean, modern office building. The American embassy is a fortress.

And the embassy of Canada, my own country? A little office in an upper floor of a nondescript building tucked away on a side street. Ah well.

Raising A Museum Junkie

One of the best parts about parenting is seeing your kid excited about something you love, and I've discovered that Julian is a bit of a museum junkie like his papa. We're in Oxford at the moment, and I've been taking care of him in the mornings while Almudena works, and then she takes over while I work in the afternoons. Part of our morning routine is to go to the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, where he gets to touch ammonites, pet a stuffed cheetah, and stare at dinosaurs. He's even learned how to use the zoom and focus on a microscope, even though he's not yet three.

It's good exercise too, because he runs all over the place. His attention span doesn't stay on anything long (the record is fifteen minutes on the microscope) but he'll flit from display to display for an hour or more before wanting to go off to University Park to play football or climb trees. My proudest moment as a museum-loving dad came when he learned his first dinosaur word--iguanodon!!! He's also learned ammonite, malichite, and tyrannosaurus rex, although he has trouble pronouncing that one.

Do I have a scientist in the making?

Photo of Oxford University Museum of Natural History interior by Michael Reeve, 30 May, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Photo of Iguanodon Bernissartensis at the Museum voor Natuurwetenschappen in Brussels, Belgium by Paul Hermans, 28th of December 2007, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Spanglish for Africans

Last weekend we visited a friend in the Madrid suburb of Torrejón, one of the older suburbs near where the U.S. had a military base. Julián loved the ride, sitting on our laps and staring out at all the cars on the highway. He also gave a lot of attention to the two African immigrants sitting across the aisle, who were either going home to the very mixed barrio that is Torrejón or going to work in the nearby industrial park. I've noticed that raising him to be bilingual has made him very interested when someone is speaking a language he doesn't understand.

I'm not sure what he thought of these guys. They were speaking some language I couldn't identify, but every now and then they slipped into Spanish. It amazed me to hear Africans doing what us guiris do, mix our language with the local one. But a moment's thought would show that it's only natural.

So what do you call their version of Spanglish? Spahili? No, Swahili is East African, and I'm pretty sure they were Nigerian. But which of the 512 Nigerian languages were they using to make their own Spanglish? Hausa? Igbo? Yoruba? It's nice to think that there are people speaking Spausa, Spigbo and Sporuba out there. Lots of Spaniards complain about immigrants and their bad language skills, but isn't Spanglishizing the first step towards fluency?

All the other immigrants do too. The French speak Spench, I've heard Romanians speaking Spomanian, and the Germans. . .well, never mind.

Faking Divorce for the Sake of the Children

I mentioned my son's new school a couple of posts back ("The Religion Room") but didn't talk about how fierce the competition is for getting a place in public schools, which can vary widely in quality. Spaniards are are happy to falsify applications in order to get their kids in their chosen school: faking addresses, lowering incomes, creating illnesses, and now, apparently, they're faking divorces.

A kid from a single-parent home gets more points on their application, so according to a recent BBC article Spaniards are now pretending to get divorced, or sometimes really going through with it, to get their kid in the best school. The divorce rate goes up during application time, and many of these separations are miraculously patched up after the school year starts.

A long history of dictatorship followed by a succession of scandal-ridden governments has made Spaniards the most politically cynical people I've ever met in a democratic country. Many have no problems lying to a government that lies to them, and if it helps their child's education, why not? In a country where divorce wasn't even legal until 1981, the culture has now embraced separations of convenience.

Yet when the Pope died there were Catholic flags everywhere.

The Religion Room

Yesterday Almudena and I took Julián to see the school he'll be going to next year. I'd never gotten a good look at a Spanish public school before and I have to say I was impressed. The classrooms were well stocked, everything was clean, and they had some amazing computerized blackboards that immediately hypnotized all the toddlers on the tour.

One room they didn't show us was the classroom for religion. The topic is optional, although the conservative party wants to change that, and about half the parents opt for their child to have an hour of reading instead.

I'll be one of those parents. We passed by the religion class on the tour and I poked my head in. Virtually everything was Christian--posters on the life of Jesus, the Ten Commandments, a crucifix at the front of the class, etc. At the back of the class there was one poster on the "Religions of the World" that listed Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism. There are a few more than that, folks!

I told this to Almudena and she just shrugged, saying "Religion class in Spain is Catholicism."

OK, fair enough. The vast majority of Spaniards are at least nominally Catholic, but I want my kid to have a well-rounded religious education. I'm an agnostic, but I think it's important.

It'll be easy enough. We know Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, agnostics, Pagans, Bahai, and Zoroastrians. I even know one amusing little atheist who insists that his "knowing" there is no god is somehow less dogmatic than religious people "knowing" there is.

Between all these people and our well-stocked library I think we can educate him about all types of belief, not just the dominant one in his culture. Education isn't just about teaching kids the familiar, it's about exposing them to the different.