Category: Children

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Hedonic adaptation to sabbatical

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The human ability to quickly become used to dynamically changing surrounding conditions, which is known as Hedonic adaptation, is extremely useful in the evolutionary sense. It makes us resilient to adversity. On the other hand, it can easily rob us of enjoying the positive experiences.

Here is how Hedonic adaptation works, step-by-step, in the case of enjoying (or not) an academic sabbatical:

  1. My last class is over. I have no teaching or administrative commitments for the entire year. I can chose exactly what I will work on every day. It’s positively fantastic!
  2.  Things get even better: I travel to Milan, together with my family, for the second half of the sabbatical. “Wow, six-months in Italy! Sounds like something straight out of a romantic novel!”, says an acquaintance, and I agree. Milan is a beautiful city. There is a lot see and do in addition to all the exciting work I get to do with my Italian colleagues.
  3. After a couple of months, things get better still: We discover more places to see and things to do, as we explore Milan and its surroundings.
  4. And here comes the catch: the sabbatical itself, the freedom to do whatever I wanted every day that initially excited me so much, is not so exciting anymore. It becomes an expectation, something that is taken for granted. What is enjoyable now are all the things that are bundled on top of the sabbatical: delicious Italian food, museums, La Scala, the lakes, the mountains,..

I notice that Hedonic adaptation happens with nearly everything that we do. It is particularly devastating when accomplishment comes into play, when achieving a certain result becomes the expectation.

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I watch my five-years-old daughter learning to draw, and I see the tremendous excitement of just being able to express herself on paper: “I can draw anything I want! And I can use whatever colours I want, because it is my drawing!” Then, at some point as we mature, we learn too draw better: “Great! Now, not only I can draw whatever I want, but I can draw it in a way that it actually looks like the object I wanted to draw!” Then, things get better yet: “I can draw things in a way that other people like them! (I must really be an artist now!!)” And here is the trap: it’s no longer the drawing itself that is enjoyable, but the external approval that comes with it…

So, what do we do? Is the trap of Hedonic adaptation unavoidable?

Perhaps, some people are in more danger of falling into it than others. It is easy to become used to a nice environment, develop expensive or extravagant tastes, become addicted to approval… I think that our ability to resist Hedonic adaptation comes down to awareness. In any case, appreciating our current life situation, whatever it happens to be on the absolute scale of “niceness”, and being conscious about the effects of Hedonic adaptation is a healthy practice.

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Using colours

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My daughter likes drawing. We brought her colored pencils, markers, crayons and watercolors with us to Milan, and she has been using it gen at every opportunity. She even sketched sculptures in museums and churches. My wife and I are both delighted and a bit surprised, because this kind of drawing requires genuine concentration, which we don’t generally expect from a five-year-old.

Naturally, we are encouraging her interest as much as we can. In fact, it is easy to do, because there is a nice confluence between her and my interests. Lately, I also have been working on getting back to drawing – I use sketching as a memory-training exercise.

I have my own set of pencils and greyscale markers, and my daughter is always delighted when she gets to borrow them. However, grey is not a very useful colour, when one’s main subjects are princesses and unicorns. Still, she naturally wants to reciprocate and always asks if I would like to borrow her colourful markers.

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This past Sunday, she offered her markers again, and she also said that it would make her particularly happy if I used as many of the colours as possible. My initial impulse was to say “Thanks, but no thanks”, but then I decided to consider this as a creative challenge. In fact, using as many colours as possible is the opposite to restricting one’s palette, which is a common creative technique.

So, as a reference for my sketch, I chose a photo that I took the day before at the Carnival Ambrosiana. On it, my daughter is throwing a handful of confetti into the air. Here is the result – I satisfied the condition of using a whole bunch of colours in a single drawing!

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MUBA – experiencing the world first-hand

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We thought that Milan children’s museum (Museo dei bambini – MUBA) would be a good place to visit as a change of pace from more conventional museums we’ve been to in the past couple of weeks.

The MUBA is a neat place. The building itself stands in the middle of a garden, enclosed by a hexagonal baroque colonnade, Rotonda della Besana, which used to be a cemetery. It has multiple gates, but only one of them was open, so the inner courtyard was like a quiet oasis in the middle of a busy neighbourhood. Groups of teenagers were sitting on the steps of the colonnade, listening to music, hanging around, chatting, doing nothing. There was also a playground for small kids, but no-one was there, so our daughter had it all for herself, until she became cold, and we moved on.

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I realized that we’ve been pre-conditioned by our North American lifestyle to view teenagers hanging around as kind of delinquents by default – “Don’t they have anything better to do?” If there would be a bunch of 5-year-olds running around the playground, this would be another story – they would be playing, and playing is what 5-year-olds do. It is their job. They learn about the world through play.

I think this is not fair to the teens, though. Actually, hanging around in groups is what teenagers are supposed to do too. This is social networking in the best sense of the word. Teen years is when people learn to interact within the social groups, so hanging around together is, in fact, the best thing those guys and girls could do with their time. They were also learning about the world.

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The MUBA concept itself reminded me of Montessori system of education – the kids get to touch, scratch, push, kick everything, and through all this get some sort of educational input. The show, if it is the right term, that we went to was called “Forbidden not to touch”. It was design to showcase the ideas of tactile and kinesthetic learning developed by Bruno Minari, an artist and inventor, who was a native of Milan.

The museum website implied that it would be well suited to English speakers, but it turned out to be almost entirely in Italian. That was not a problem, though. The nature of the activities the kids were doing and the body language of the group leader were so self-explanatory that our daughter had no trouble following along with the group. That in itself was an impressive illustration of Munari’s concept with its departure from the conventional instructional mode.

Initially, our daughter was missing the group leader’s feedback. In fact, the leader was encouraging the kids to share their impressions after exploring each station. At that point, she did realized that our daughter did not understand Italian and switched to English with her.

To be fair, the crawling-touching-rubbing nature of the activities gave plenty of tactile feedback. It was certainly fun to watch, photograph and videotape (does anyone actually use tape anymore?). Incidentally, each child has to accompanied by an adult in these shows and vice versa – an adult is admitted only with a child.

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One serious drawback of this hands-on group activity is that it is a very efficient way for kids to contract and spread viruses. In fact, our daughter came down with a nasty stomach bug the next day after the visit to the museum. We even had to call a doctor for her. A home visit from a pediatrician is a luxury that doesn’t exist in Canada, so we were pleasantly surprised by how smooth and ‘human’ this experience had been.

It does put things in perspective when I think about he quality of life in Europe and Canada.

There is no way to say which place is better for living in the most general sense. The dottoressa, who treated our daughter was very nice and caring (and did I mention she came to our home right away?!)

That is all very nice, but the doctor said that the winter is not a good time for kids in Milan. The pollution is so high, that she said she always suggests leaving the city and going to the lakes “to breathe fresh air” at every opportunity. There is certainly a nasty flu going around the city. The doctor said the things would improve by March, when the weather changes. There is no ignoring the fact that we now live in a large, noisy, crowded, polluted city. The contrast with Victoria is particularly striking. Over there, we take the cleanliness of the air and the streets for granted.

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Drinking water is another thing that is very different here. A waitress asked us after learning that we were from Canada: “Is it true that the water in BC is so delicious that you can drink it right from the tap?” Yes, you actually can. Here in Milan, this is an impossibility. No restaurant serves tap water, and people use enormous numbers of plastic. Empty plastic bottles is the main material that children use for DIY projects in our daughter’s school.

It is a curious disbalance: the European lifestyle is distinctly more progressive, socially responsible, cultured and sustainable than the North American one in some respects, while distinctly backward in others. Some of the details that make up the country’s way of life are impossible to notice during a short visit. It takes living here over a substantial time period to start interacting with the place in more meaningful ways: finding were to buy good food, how to get plain point A to point B efficiently, how to call a doctor and where to go with a child on a rainy weekend.

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Favourite colours

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Our daughter has been attending a new school while we are in Milan. They asked the children to bring their own sets of coloured pencils to be used in art classes.

Here is the state of our daughter’s set after one month of use. I thought that the remaining length of the pencils is a nice visual representations of which colours she favours and by how much.

I wanted to take this picture, because it seems to me straight out of “The Day the Crayons Quit” by Drew Daywalt, and illustrated by the great Oliver Jeffers. Our daughter received this book as a birthday present, but I might have enjoyed it even more than she did.

Not to over-analyze our daughter, but I think the picture shows that she prefer bright colours overall. The exceptions are the white, which is not a very practical colour for drawing on white paper anyway, and the dark yellow, which is a bit redundant, given the that there are two other yellow pencils in this set, both of them well-used. And of course, pink is still the strong favourite.

Incidentally, I once heard in popular science television show in Japan that there was a correlation between the preference for pink colour and health of middle-aged and elderly women. The hypothesis was that liking the pink colour, which is traditionally associated with youth, encourages women to maintain a youthful state of mind, which in turn leads to better health.

Even if there no causation here, I am glad that our daughter sees the world mostly in bright colours. I hope this trend continues as she grows up, and her brightly-coloured pencils and crayons will always be stubby.

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Victoria to Milan with a five-year-old

Here are a few notes for travelling half-way across the globe for sabbatical with a five-year-old.

No matter how far in advance we wanted to start packing, we finished the night before our flight. Actually, my wife and I didn’t get much sleep at all that night, because we also had to prepare our house, which was being rented during our leave. Fortunately, our daughter is a good sleeper, so she had a good rest before the trip. She also likes travel – all aspects of it from packing to going to the airport to the flight itself to getting settled in the new place. This is her sixth major overseas trip, so she is a seasoned traveller by now.

Also, we learned from experience that no matter how efficient the airport workers look from a distance, luggage gets delayed far more often than we would like. This time, unfortunately, was not an exception, and one of our bags did not arrive to Milan with us. We know from experience not to pack all my stuff into one bag, all my wife’s stuff into another, etc. Instead, we pack a little bit of each family member’s clothes into each peace of the checked luggage, so if one suitcase gets lost (or hopefully just delayed), none of us is stranded without clothes. When the missing bag did show up three days later, our daughter was delighted to finally have her coloured markers, which she had already started to miss.

In terms of keeping the the child entertained, we were quite lucky and didn’t have to do much, because as I mentioned, our daughter is excited about the trip itself. She is also not a picky eater, but during the trip especially we make a point of letting her choose whatever she wanted, even if it meant pizza three times in a row.

DSC02929_01-03-2017Nothing helps the child’s mood as well as a new stuffy toy! We picked up a toy kitten at the Frankfurt airport, and our daughter didn’t let it go until the following day. We also brought another toy with us, one that was new to our daughter. It was a construction set, where you can build various shapes out of small plastic balls with hooks that attach to each other. I remember playing in a similar way with dried burs. Probably, the designers of the toy used burdock as the inspiration. Anyway, it’s a great toy for travel – lightweight and can be used in many configurations. Our daughter received it as a present for the New Year, but we asked her to keep it specifically for the trip.

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I also find that I need to entertain myself during the long trip. Usually, when I travel alone, I find that I can work quite productively on the plane and while waiting for connecting flights at airports. This time, I did not want to work because we were travelling all together, and because I was too tired from the lack of sleep to be productive anyway. Taking pictures and shooting video was a perfect way to stay somewhat focussed and entertained at the same time. I am delighted that our daughter is taking interest in photography too. She always wants to check the photos on the camera screen, asks me to take a picture of something she finds interesting and even sometimes does so herself.

We checked into the rental apartment nearly 24 hours after we left home. The first thing we did is to go out for some pizza (naturally!), and found it to be decidedly better in Milan than in Vancouver. On the way back to the apartment, we picked up some groceries, and I was once again surprised and how upbeat and positive our daughter had been despite literally falling asleep in the taxi just a couple of hours earlier. At that point in the day, it was I who needed to maintain my mood, and she was being an excellent example. So I can say that at least based on our experience, long-distance travelling with kids is not only feasible, but in many ways more enjoyable than travelling alone or as a couple.

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No big deal

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At my daughter’s birthday party, which was held at a local art studio, the children were reminded about one of the “rules” of conduct at the studio. The rule was “No big deal!”, as in “If I accidentally get paint on the floor, it’s no big deal” or “If I mess up my clay dragon and have to redo it all over again, it’s no big deal.”

For a creative process to be effective, it is important not to take things, particularly your own work, too seriously. That is why it is sometimes useful to choose disposable media for your work to avoid putting excessive emphasis on the result, where the process is inherently more valuable. Julia Cameron wrote in “The Artist’s Way” that in order to make art, we must be ready to make bad art, at least initially. I heard some writers say that if you work for hours to write a thousand words, and then end up throwing out everything except the last couple of sentences in revisions, the hours spent on this should not be considered a wasted time – writing the text that was ultimately thrown out was a necessary step in creating the last two good sentences.

In other words, it’s no big deal that it takes longer than what we thought it should have taken to create something of value. We should just accept it and enjoy the process. After all, they said at my daughter’s party that the main rule of the art studio was “Have fun!”

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Why bother

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Achieving expertise, perhaps even mastery, in some area is rewarding in many ways, and the process of getting to the highest level is fascinating by itself. However, as Anders Ericsson, the author of “Peak”, points out, if our notion of what top-level expertise is becomes relative, i.e. we become competitive with other people, we quickly realize that becoming better than everyone else, or even better than, say, 90% of people, may not be possible to achieve in a lifetime under our specific circumstances.

The natural question is then, “Why bother trying to get to the top at all?” And this is an important question, because, as Ericsson argues, motivation is the grease that makes the mechanism of training working.

A possible answer that resonates with me personally is that we should continue to train in order to become better teachers for others, particularly, for our own children. Even if the student’s level of performance is objectively higher than that of the teacher (e.g. the student is a better golf player, because she is younger, stronger and more flexible), the teacher still plays a crucial role, because his/her experience in the field extends beyond the particular case of the given student. A good teacher has sufficient expertise in the subject and sufficient breadth of experience to be able to provide relevant feedback on the student’s training. And this feedback is what makes the difference between deliberate practice, in Ericsson’s terms, and mechanical repetition of already known patterns. Conversely, mindless repetition (not in the sense of the Japanese mushin, but opposite to deliberate practice) is what makes most people stagnate at a mediocre level.

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Monkey see, monkey scoot

Scooters are a big thing among my daughter’s preschool friends. Some time ago, we offered to buy her one, but she was not interested. Then one day, she saw a friend riding a Micro kickboard, and she could not wait to get one of her own. The next day, she rode it to school, and the following day, two more girls convinced their parents to buy the very same scooters (including the colour – it seems that pink and purple are the only two choices worth considering for four- and five-year old girls).

Naturally, a scooter had to be incorporated into the illustrated story that my daughter and I are making with a lot of help from my wife, who is the main actress in the re-enactment, playing the roles of nearly all characters (sometimes, simultaneously.

Here is the scooting episode.

“The Girl lent her scooter to the Baby Dinosaur, so that she could keep up with her friends. It was a purple scooter, with pink handlebars – Ella’s favourite colours! It turned out that Ella was a natural at scooting. It was handy to have four legs – when one of them got tired of pushing, she would witch to one of the other three.”

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Bare essentials

Derek Sivers gave this advise on making a hit TED talk: cut out everything that is not surprising. The audience always wants to learn something. Even is their goal is pure entertainment, as it is often the case with cartoons or children’s books, there must be something novel in the storyline and/or in the artwork to keep the readers/viewers engaged.

My four-year-old daughter’s make-believe games, which are the basis for the picture book I have been making, are incredibly repetitive. Every day, and sometimes several time a day, the story of the hatching egg and its caretakers starts at almost the same point. There is no “Previously in the show..” type of summary. For children, this repetition is essential for training the memory. At the same time, as my daughter is re-playing the story over an over again, little details are being added, which eventually bring the characters to life, make them her own.

In the picture book, I am trying to maintain the balance between expressing my daughter’s childish, in the best sense of the word, approach to storytelling (keeping the characters and their appearance consistent) and maintaining the viewers’ interest by either introducing new characters or developing the main ones by showing their traits (clumsiness, resourcefulness, etc.)

Here is the latest episode:

“Ella was brave little Dinosaur for a one-day-old, so she left the eggshell and took the first step. Unfortunately, her legs were still not strong enough to hold her, so no matter how hard she tried, she ended up on the ground. But she wanted to play and run around with her friends so much!

The Girl had an idea: maybe Ella would run before she could walk after all!”

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Ups and downs

Any serious athlete would tell that motivation is easy to attain but difficult to sustain. This is true in creative activities too. For example, writers are famous for elaborate rituals they design to avoid procrastination and to ensure regular productivity. And quantity is indeed important if we hope to generate quality at some point. Adam Grant gives an example in his “Originals“, showing that most popular composers were also the most productive, with very rare exceptions.

Sustaining motivation in the audience is a slightly different matter. In order to keep the readers/viewers evaded, they should be exposed to a more-or-less continuous flow of material that is, at the same time, familiar and novel.

My four-year-old daughter and I are working through these issues in the picture book that we are making up (she creates the storyline through her make-believe games that she plays with her mom and I sketch it up). Sometimes, our motivation wavers, but we know that if we keep going, interesting things are bound to happen, just as in the book itself. Here is the latest episode about the newborn dinosaur discovering the world and her place in it.

“Baby Ella wanted to play with her new friends, but first, she had to learn how to walk. That was not easy, especially because she didn’t want to leave her cozy eggshell. The Girl gently nudged her to place one foot on the ground…”

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