A Lifetime to Love Learning

It is amazing how much the attitude at home influences a child's opinion of learning. For some it is an obligatory task that must be endured from kindergarten on through highschool and possibly college but then it is over; you can go on to "live life". For others, the family gives lip-service to the idea of "life-long" learning but it is a teacher's job to instill that because the parents don't feel they are qualified to do so. There are other permutations of this but it is the rare family, in my opinion and experience, that truly embraces the attitude of living one's life to learn new things. This is the attitude we strive for in our home and the differences in that show up repeatedly in the goings on of our day to day life.

My daughter loves to learn and it is evident in the way she interacts with me and others and in her interests. She will still and listen to story after story. Will drop pretty much any other activity to listen to one. She enjoys talking about letters and numbers. Learning the phonems is exciting to her because she knows that it is bringing her closer to being able to read a book by herself. She makes up addition and subtraction problems (not that she knows those terms yet) when she eats grapes or M&Ms or is playing with blocks or other small toys. She looks over her dad's shoulder when he is reading a textbook or on a website and asks about the pictures. Flashcards, workbooks....anything that has to do with learning she can't wait to get her hands on.

This is so much like how her brother was when he was little too. We are now beginning to fight the teenage apathy he wants to have but I think he will lose that battle--school is just to challenging for him to be apathetic for long.

The conflict within me is this: Why is it so easy for my husband and I to develop this in our children and others seem so lacking in it? What do we have that others don't? We don't have lots of money, far from it. We have struggled in that area all our adult/married life. We aren't terribly highly educated, well, at least I'm not altough I wish to do so eventually.

My child psych professor made a comment that he could tell how a child would do in school based on the number of books in the house. Maybe that's it! If you've ever been in our house you would find that every room sans the kitchen and bathroom have bookshelves in them. We love to read. Fantasy, adventure, classics, some romance, science, anthropology, history--you name it we probably have at least one book on the subject.

But what made my husband and I such zealous learners? Certainly not our parents! Perhaps our teachers? Doubtful. But there is something in our family that makes learning fun and it part of our lives that I wish I could share with others. If only I knew what it was and how to share it.