Kids Need To Dance: The ABC's For Parents

Saturday, August 9, 2014

Kids Need To Dance: The ABC's For Parents

It’s that time of the year again when we see the signs of back to school wherever we go. The usual symbols of yellow buses, apples, and ABC's seem to saturate the retail market, as if apples were grown across the country and we all need to learn the alphabet.

As it turns out, Seth Godin’s picture book, V is for Vulnerable: Life Outside the Comfort Zone, is an ABC book for grownups. Hugh MacLeod illustrates each letter, and Godin’s word choice for each one will ring loud and clear for educators.

Source: V is for Vulnerable

We could not help thinking of ways to incorporate this resource into our parent conferences, or ways to motivate our students to understand the difference between effort and impact, taking initiative, or working safe.

One of our favorites is Quality. It’s not about reliably meeting specifications, it needs to matter. “Quality of a performance is a given, it’s not the point.” It reminds us of the students who think it’s good enough.

There are plenty of others including More is not better, Heroes take risks for the right reasons, and Feedback can be either a crutch or a weapon. So many of our students won’t “Dance with fear,” because they're afraid of not being the best, scoring the highest on a test, or getting a B+. Godin’s definition for anxiety strikes at the heart of what adults project when a child doesn’t hit the high note.

Source: V is for Vulnerable

“Anxiety is experiencing failure in advance.”

We recommend taking a look at the post by Maria Popova on her blog, Brain Pickings, to read the highlights of Godin’s interview about the book with Debbie Millman, host of the show Design Matters. In it, he talks about why he wrote this book for adults as a picture book.

Source: V is for Vulnerable

“I wanted to capture the way I felt as a three-year-old when my mom read me a book. I wanted to capture the way, as a parent, I felt when I read a book to my kids. And that feeling isn’t something we get when we hand a kid an iPad in a restaurant and say, “Don’t bother me.” Something magical happens when we read a book to a kid, when we’re read a book.”

Perhaps this is why this book strikes such a chord. Adults identify with that feeling. Make no mistake, the design is purposeful; the message succinct.

It hits at the heart of vulnerability and the limits adults cast on children. For Godin, “Design, at its core, thrives when a human being cares enough to do work that touches another — it doesn’t thrive when it gets more “efficient.”