One father’s journey to better understand his toddler
In this episode of the Learn With Less podcast, Ayelet chats with Joshua Morgan, a former high school teacher, husband, father, and participant of the Learn With Less® Curriculum Online Family Program.
Joshua shares his journey toward a deeper connection with his 19-month old son, and how his path to learning about how his toddler learns strengthened the bond and helps him feel empowered to do the big job of parenting his son every day.
Joshua received an advanced copy of the book, “Understanding Your Toddler,” a month-by-month development and activity guide for playing with your toddler from one to three years.
You’ll love the way Joshua shares openly about his journey, the analogies he makes between parent education and early childhood education, and his self-reflection about what works for him and for his family.
QUICK ACCESS TO LINKS FROM THIS EPISODE:
Understanding Your Toddler: A Month-By-Month Development and Activity Guide For Playing With Your Toddler From One to Three Years, by Ayelet Marinovich
Learn With Less® Curriculum Online Family Program, a parent education and parent support hub for parents, caregivers, and educators of infants and toddlers
TEXT TRANSCRIPT OF THIS EPISODE
Ayelet: How are you? Thank you so much for being here today with me. So, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself, where you’re from and your family life so that people can get a sense of who you are.
Josh: Sure. My wife and I, we live in Charleston, South Carolina area. We have one son, he’s 19 months old, and we have another little one on the way, due in July. But born and raised in the Midwest, Akron, Ohio area, moved down here to the South when I was in high school and been here ever since.
Ayelet: That’s great. And how did you find Learn With Less?
Josh: Yeah, good question. It started when I was looking for a solution to a problem that I saw. Let’s not call it a problem, let’s call it a circumstance, a situation that I saw was.. A concern, it was a concern. So, Daniel had his one year old birthday and someone bought him this, like transformer car, battery operated thing.
And it went around in circles, and it went down, went up. But that’s all I did. And so, I would turn it on, and you know, he’s mesmerized by it and, yeah, he would pick it up and play with it and try to pull in, do whatever he can with it. But then sometimes he would just sit there and stare at it and you’re like, oh this isn’t good. He’s just staring at the thing. We were like, he needs to be active. He’s just like a just like a zombie.
It just kept on going like that and I was like, well I think I should put this away and maybe there’s something that would be better at helping him in many areas – that would be a better tool to keep him engaged and keep him active and keep him exploring and learning. Yes, he was exploring and learning with this transformer toy. But most of the time he was passive with it. So I didn’t know where to go, I didn’t know where to look, and I did a lot of exploration online.
Long story short it was around Thanksgiving time and oh yeah, I was looking for music. I wanted to incorporate more music like, that will get him active. And you had your music cds and we began incorporating it and it really added a nice development to the day, really active. Then you had the Understanding Your Toddler book. My wife and I had been exploring some other areas, Montessori-like things and we wanted to get more help but we didn’t know what the best type of help would be. We tried some other things, not that they were bad, just for us in our circumstance, it probably wasn’t the most helpful. And so we then looked into Understanding Your Toddler, and we really think that’s a really good fit for us in our circumstances, and what we believe, what we have come to believe and know more.
Ayelet: Tell me more about that. So just for everyone who’s listening, Joshua, you are on the Understanding Your Toddler book launch team. So you received an advanced copy of the book. By the time this episode comes out, we’ll be just about to launch or have launched the book. So first of all, I would love to hear about, what were some of those things that you’ve come to sort of hold dear and believe about your son. And about his development and his learning. Can you define those at all?
Josh: Yeah! What I found is I wasn’t respecting him as a person because you know, you talk about the “child-led,” and you know, no one holds reign over this knowledge. This is just what is their nature and this is what we know. I mean what you talk about is exactly what Socrates talks about. It’s just our modernity age has just lost it. But I realized I wasn’t respecting Daniel as a person, you know, he knows how to learn, he knows that he wants to learn. He instinctively knows how learning should take place. And I wasn’t respecting that. “No, sit down, sit down at the table and look at these cards and match the animal with the card.
That’s what I want you to, no, don’t do it that way. Do it this way.” And I realized, oh my gosh, not explicitly, I would never want to disrespect my child, but implicitly I think I was disrespecting him, I wasn’t respecting him as, as a person. You know, one of the overall things that I see through your work is you respect the child, and you respect the environment. You value nature, you value the nature of the home, you value the nature of the world outside and that it does have pretty much everything you need. Yes, you can go out further, you can expand and go to Pinterest and get all the crafty ideas, but really you’ve got everything you need there. You’ve got it all there.
Ayelet: Yeah – it’s just a matter of figuring out how to use it.
Josh: Yes, yes, and that was the thing. It was like, I’m looking at these clues and I need a guide. I need someone to help me move through these clues to get to that higher form of understanding and knowledge, which is exactly what he’s doing. He’s looking at all these clues and integrating clues into his life. “Oh wow. That’s what happens when I bang a spoon down.
It really makes a loud noise. So then he integrates that into his conscious mind and then when he learns something else, he uses that knowledge. “Oh yeah, I remember when I bang the spoon down, it makes a really loud sound.” You respect the person, and you respect the home, you respect nature and you see the value that they have.
Ayelet: I love how you say that, that, that that is exactly what he’s doing. And I think this sort of Continuing Ed for parents is something that we’re sort of unfamiliar with, right? Because we have a baby, we have a child, and then we think, oh, okay, well I’m going to parent that kid as he or she moves through each stage of development.
I’m the parent, so I’m going to do that. We forget how much learning goes with that as far as both the child is always learning, and we also must adapt and learn ourselves about how our children learn so that we can keep up with them and so that we can offer appropriate experiences. Like you said, it’s… We have this sort of preordained idea of how learning is supposed to look.
Josh: It’s interesting. My wife is learning to drive, I’m trying to help teach her, and I’ll go, oh, this should be easy. I mean, I know how to drive, right. It’s a good analogy for the way I came into parenting. “Well, you know, this shouldn’t be hard,” but I’m so far removed. I am far removed, but I really am not because we actually go through that same process that the kids go through, that children go through in all our learning, but it’s just not at that fundamental level of elements of the thing.
So when my wife was learning how to drive, like wow, it was just so difficult to really put it in the words of what to do and how to do it. And a lot of times I was like, you’ve just kind of got to feel it. I said, “you gotta take this clue and this clue when you kind of have to just mold it together and integrate it and you’ll get the idea.”
Ayelet: That’s a great analogy because it’s second nature for you. But at one point it wasn’t.
Josh: So you, you guide them. But here’s the thing, I had to let her do it. In the driving environment, you know, it’s not like I can just sit her down at the table and give her the factual information. I had to take her out, she had to drive, and I had to let go, I had to let go. But, I could direct her, I could encourage her… And when I did that, it made for a peaceful relationship.
Ayelet: And in that process you learned so much from her: about the way that you could teach her, about the way that she learns best and about how she sees the world. So, I mean it’s exactly what you’re doing with your son. I want to just bring up something that you said recently in our community that I found, a comment that you made inside the Learn With Less LAB after starting the Learn With Less Accelerator Course [benefits of the Learn With Less® Curriculum Online Family Program]. You said, “play is the medium by which they learn and by which we learn.” You said how all along, your son has been showing you what learning looks like for him at this stage, “learning is relational, not some scripted program” and that’s it. That’s it. That’s it. Exactly.
Josh: Yeah. We turn the object into a means towards the lesson that we want kids to learn. So, we use this activity, not for them to learn the thing in and of itself, but so that they learn this over here, right. The idea is the object is the lesson, the pots and pans that he’s banging. That’s the lesson. I do like to get out, like the, those sensory bins. What you’ve helped me understand more is that the senses are beyond the five and that, even I can make the sensory bin about the sensory bin – when it’s not. “No Daniel, when you take the spoon and you poured into the toilet paper roll, no, you’ve got to do it this way.” Right? And so even with them, I have to let them go and just experience the beans however he wants. But you know, give him, create that environment where there’s a lot of senses that he can play with soft things, hard things, big things, small things.
Here’s what I think your material, it’s helped me with that. I at least, I don’t want to speak for anybody else, but just myself is: it’s very easy because we get distracted, we have a lot of responsibilities that we say, just give me what I need to teach to my kid, and that’ll be it. That’s very dangerous and it’s even harder because we, we then become a slave to that school of thought. That program, we become a slave to it, right? I need to have the Montessori toy, because if I don’t have that, then he’s not going to learn the wrist movements, and if he’s not gonna learn the writs movements then he’s not going to learn pencil grip and pencil turning. So I’ve got to have, that’s what I got to have and it’s not true!
And what you’ve allowed me to see is bringing me back to understanding my child. And the fact is, I’m learning just like he’s learning, which is, you’re allowing me to strengthen my intuition and trust my intuition and let that be all these clues. Let that guide me in what I’m, in wherever I go, right? Because when we focus on the tool, we become a slave to the tool, we don’t… One of the things that happens is we don’t move outside of that tool. So for instance, going back to that sensory bin, you know, “no Daniel, we can only play with the beans in these contrived ways.”
Well, we’re playing, and, I was just thinking, what else could we do with these beans, right? And he had his socks off and his toes. I was like, you know, and, and you’ve giving me these classifications, these classifications of play, sing, move, talk: that urges me to guide my intuition. We need classifications. So I thought, oh, let me filter it through the [four pillars you outline in your book] “PLAY, SING, MOVE, TALK.” So I thought, Oh, let me put the bean between his toes and then you know, we would, you know, you talk about TALK… “oh look, Daniel, the bean is between your toes! It’s between, you know, and your big toe and…” Whatever. Just say what I know at that moment. And then you know, he has to take the pincer movement, you know, and get the bean out, right.
But I wasn’t a slave to the tool. I wasn’t a slave to the toy. I let these classifications and understandings guide my relationship with the material. It’s like the different kingdoms, you know, in Biology and we talk about the fungi kingdom or the animal kingdom, you know, those things are only guides so that when I look at a hamster, I don’t put it in water because mammals don’t absorb things. They ingest things, right? I’m not going to put it in water and wonder why he’s not taking in the water. Well, that’s because it’s not a fungi, it’s a mammal, but it’s just those classifications that are there to help and to guide and it’s a whole lot easier.
For instance, when I was a teacher, my students, they would want to memorize the information. I was like, you can’t, you can’t memorize it. They’re learning this AP material. And I don’t know if those mothers out there if they have high school kids and know about how much information comes through the AP.
Ayelet: I think we can remember those of us that went through it ourselves.
Josh: We just have nightmares of learning all the things, right? And it’s learning about classification. So we would make mind maps, of like mind maps for them and you know, yeah, we’d take the Civil War and then put the generals and categorize them by the generals or categorize them by the wars. And I said, “let those be your anchors on which you sail out on and talk about the different things.”
So those are good anchors for me. Those classifications that you have, you know, no one taught me to put the bean between his toes. I didn’t go find that on Pinterest. It came up and you know, we talked about the experienced. He was doing a pincer grasp and, and you know, when you talk about the pincer grasp, then I can, I can be more assured and helping more guiding of him.
So yeah, it’s like, it’s these things that I kind of know, and then you come in with your knowledge because you spend all day with this, and you just pour more into me because I, I’m trying to learn software programming right now. I don’t got time to do all this research. I need to find somebody that already has done this research.
And so what’s cool is then I can learn from you and then I can see those things and then I can take advantage of those moments. And that’s what I like about this is it’s not, it can get frustrating when I look at some of your stuff, and… but what’s the activity I must do? Just tell me the activity. Okay, thank you for the information. Now, what’s the activity? And you kind of don’t do that and…
Ayelet: I tease it, don’t I!
Josh: You do! But that all goes back to, I got to be okay with not being in control. I’m a control freak, and I want to hover over him and be in control. But all that causes in him, is anxiety. Whereas what I want to develop in him, is wonder and adventure and competence and truth, and wisdom, promise, and the only way I can do that is to let go of that control.
Not let go completely, but let go and build that skill, which is hard… Of intuition, messing around with him. It’s okay that I don’t get it right. It’s okay that I don’t get it right today, or tomorrow. And if I don’t talk to him, right, guess what, I can say I’m sorry.
Ayelet: Absolutely! Because we all do that. So, you’ve said so many golden nuggets, but I want to piece it apart a little bit. First of all, Josh, you were saying some of the sort of initial skepticisms about, say the book for instance, Understanding Your Toddler, for you were maybe things like, okay, I have this information now, but you’re not telling me exactly… I mean there’s a, like, “what you can do” section as far as, you can play, you can talk, you can sing, you can move.
There’s these nice sort of pillars of things to use and the way to think about it. But what’s the one activity that I can do and that that was initially sort of frustrating, but it sounds like you had sort of a perception change about that after you actually started to really implement it and try it out and just see what happened. I would love to hear some specific example of when you implemented that. And I love the example of, of between his toes, the little bean between his toes. Can you give me an example of how that affected him, with you?
Josh: Oh, yeah, It brought… it created relationship between us. Now, we’re engaging in relationship: it’s not a pupil-students, not headmaster-student, his boss-worker. It’s a father-son, one person and another, and it’s keeping, helping that relationship grow in all sorts of areas. You know, like we like to explore outside a lot. Okay. No one told me that the activity to do is when he gets on a driveway that is an incline, have him go up and go down it. I just intuitively saw the clues, “oh, here’s an incline and he’s going up it, Oh, why don’t I talk to Daniel about what he’s doing? Well, wait, what if I sing to him about what he’s doing?” And when I did that, it’s like his face just lit up, right? He and I were relating to each other.
Ayelet: And he’s more motivated to explore his environment and to do that.
Josh: Oh yes, he did it for 20 more minutes. He just thought it was the coolest thing. Oh, here’s daddy singing. Oh, let me go down, and let me, I don’t know, maybe in his head he was saying, oh, daddy’s going to go say down. Or like, you know, we’re in the bathroom and he flips the light on, and flips the light off.
And so all I’ll say on and off, but clues as my guide, oh, play, sing… You know, you talk about talking and intonation voice. All right, so I’ll go, “up!” or “on!” really loud. And, you know, “off,” slowly or changing the intonation voice, which thing he thinks is the coolest thing and he’ll keep on doing it longer.
So it’s taking these base elements and adapting them and basically, you know, it’s not that you don’t give activities, but they’re within the context of examples. I have to be careful, though, because what I can still do with your material is turn it into “the tool is the master. The tool is the thing that has most important.” When it’s not, I can go to anybody else. I mean I just still go to Pinterest for help and ideas.
It’s just like school and memorizing. Memorizing is not bad. It’s very, very helpful. It’s when we make memorizing the chief end, that’s when all we become are robots. So using those structures, those classifications, play, sing, move, talk, as a base and thinking about examples. And then in my environment with him, it’s funny there it is, in my environment, I am learning… Of what I can do with him and that’s, and what it does then, is build a relationship between he and I.
Ayelet: And that in many cases, you’re already doing the things… Just a matter of sort of highlighting it.
Josh: Yeah, and that’s the thing. It’s like we all naturally do this but we can, I can get off track. So this helps me feel good that these intuitions that I have about these clues are, I’m on the right track and I have to question myself. Right. I don’t have to question myself. I don’t have to feel bad about myself. I don’t have to second guess myself. I have something here that can help me strengthen, nurture, and grow it. That’s what I’m doing. I’m strengthening it, I’m nurturing and growing it and I’m telling myself to stay on track.
I know what on track looks like and this is what on track looks like. So you know, it’s kind of like someone who it’s great to learn a hobby online, you know, learning to play guitar online. But if you don’t have anybody there in front of you watching you and it’s hard for you to see if you’re on track or not. Maybe that’s a good analogy. You’re there guiding me and helping me become, you know, stay on track. And that’s what I really appreciate about the material.
Ayelet: Yeah. That’s awesome. So what would you say to someone who’s looking for some resources about how to play and offer new fun things and how to keep up with their toddlers development? What would you say to someone who’s considering the book, Understanding Your Toddler amongst other books? Why is that something that they should have on their bookshelf?
Josh: Because it’s all about relationships, and fundamental to the relationship is the understanding of the person. You know, when I, when I was a teacher, I helped students with learning disabilities, ADHD, dyslexia, and it surprised me (but really should have not have) when I would share with the other teachers about the student, helping them understand, oh, you know, this is why he’s doing that. This is what’s going on in him. That makes so much sense now. Wow. Now I can be better able… So I think the most important thing is whatever you look at, wherever you go, what’s most important is make sure you get an understanding of who your child is. If that thing will help you understand your child more, then that’s great and that’s going to be a good tool. And then let that be the basis from which to go out from.
Ayelet: So this book, you think is sort of a good fundamental.
Josh: Yes. Yeah, a good, a good fundamental.
Ayelet: How is this book different from some of the other ones? For you? What stands out about this book? How does this book differ from others out there?
Josh: You know, it doesn’t tell you how to parent your child more. You know, if you’re getting into an argument… How to talk to your child, it’s very fundamental: how to understand your child. Because if you don’t understand your child, you’re going to have a very difficult time, then, talking to him and then interacting with them. There’s no use in using a tool if you don’t know the thing that you’re working with.
There are other books that help you in a lot of ways, but I think most fundamental is you’ve got to understand your child first. And what I really love about it is that you already have everything right there in your home and it’s easy for us to lose track of that reality because we see all the shiny toys. A lot of us who don’t have the means for that, we can get really discouraged, we can get embarrassed and we have to understand that it’s actually all there.
And I remember sharing with you my wife, she grew up in the Barrios of the Philippines, which is just another name for, the Spanish word for neighborhood, and she’ll say, you know, you don’t wish anybody to live in those environments, but they have nothing. They have a wok, a Saute Pan, they have a fork a spoon and a small chef knife. That’s it. That’s all they have for their kitchen utensils. You know what I’m saying? Um, they don’t, they don’t have a orange scraper or the avocado, the thing to get the avocado out, they don’t have those types of things that we have.
And we can get lost in those things, and all they had was love and attention and letting the child explore. Meaning, my wife just explored all day long. I mean, there wasn’t much else to do, but explore. And she is a software programmer. How does a person coming from a pit that none of us would want to live in, come to become a software programmer, engineer? How does that happen? It starts early and it comes with this environment. It’s all there.
The parents, it’s respecting the child. It’s guiding the child, leading the child and play, sing, move, talk. That’s about all they were able to do and yet was enough. Not that those things aren’t helpful. If I have the means to send my kid to a science camp, I’m going to do it, and he wants to, great, I’m going to do it, but he doesn’t need to go to a science camp. I think that’s the biggest takeaway.
Understanding my child and realizing not that the home is second place. No, it’s, it’s not… Well it’s just enough – no, it’s, it’s enough! Don’t you realize how awesome that idea is? The idea that your home is enough? Like wow, how freeing that is. Help me understand and learn that I can utilize it, which as much power as I can. And that’s why Understanding Your Toddler, the book, the Acceleration Course [a bonus of the Learn With Less® Curriculum], has brought me back to, and I think that’s where all the clues and my intuition was always leading.
And yeah, I, I was side-tracked, I got so side-tracked in this toy or that toy. And honestly, it made me frustrated. It made Daniel frustrated, it made my wife frustrated and this material has… No, it’s not solved everything. How, you know, another book, like, How to talk to your child so that they will listen. I’m not getting it all right. But, that book has really helped me.
Ayelet: Yeah, that’s a great book: How to Talk So Little Kids Will Listen.
Josh: That’s right, what a great book. I’ve learned so much from that book. What it has been teaching me is respecting the child. You know, don’t… Get down from that table. Do as I say, well, what? What? What type of relationship am I having with him? I’m the dictator. I’m the authoritarian, and he’s the robot, there’s no respect for his choices. Now, I’m not telling him to do whatever he wants, but “Daniel, would you like some help off that table? Do you want to do it yourself, Daniel or would you like me to help you, Daniel?”
That’s respecting the child – that he has choices and yes, if he’s still on the table and he’s bouncing around, I’m then going to grab it and then I’m not going to say, “I’m gonna get you for doing that.” No, “it looks like Daniel, it looks like you don’t know how to engage with a table without hurting yourself, so I’m going to remove you from right now and then maybe we’ll come back so that you don’t hurt yourself.”
That’s respecting the child and that’s what I’m coming back to, and it feels really good because for a long time, for many months… Which is learning, it’s struggle! Learning is frustration, learning is lots of crumbled papers for a math problem. But! When you get to that plateau, not the peak because you’re never at a peak.
At that plateau, it’s so refreshing and that’s what knowledge is. It’s a pilgrimage and it’s not cramming, which just makes you get headaches. It’s an exploration and it’s one plateau after another and it’s not a Mount Everest where you get to the top. It’s actually just a plateau after plateau after plateau, and it just keeps going and it never ends, and all along it’s one base after another and when you come to that next base it’s like, wow, look what I just did. Look where I came from and oh my gosh, look at all the possibilities that are before me.
This is just wonderful and it just, I feel like I’m at a plateau right now. I know there’s more struggles coming. They’re already have been, but it really feels good to be at that plateau. Do that pilgrimage of learning and understanding, and your, your material brought back to me what I always really knew is, which I knew teaching high school kids: before I can give them anything, I’ve got to understand who they are. If I give them too much, it’s going to go over their heads. If I give them too little, they’re going to get bored and they’re going to not like it. You know, that zone of proximal development, right. And um, so thank you so much.
Ayelet: Josh, thank you. Thank you for your time today, and for all your, your words of wisdom. I love all the analogies. I think it helps people think about things and it’s great. How are you enjoying the Learn With Less® Curriculum and the community so far?
Josh: Yeah, I like the videos, reading the transcripts, there’s so much. You are very economic with your words and you’re very precise, which is beautiful because it doesn’t take long to read, but it’s very kind of packed full of nuggets and I have to reread it and reread it. Not that that’s a burden. I do come away with an understanding, but then I, I want to grow that more. So I go back and I read and I see what I missed, but they’re in small chunks, so I get them and I don’t feel like it’s interfering too much with my lifestyle.
And I love the posts that other people make, sharing, you know, we’re all in this together. It’s relational: learning is relational and that’s hard online. It’s hard in an online community. So you know, putting comments at the end and seeing what other people say. I mean I, I forgot what the one mother said. It got me thinking and I wrote out all those thoughts. I was like, wow, that was really cool. She just helped me really solidify a lot of what was going in my mind and, look, that could not have happened if there weren’t other people involved.
Ayelet: Yes, exactly! We need each other to synthesize the information that we learn.
Josh: Yeah, and it doesn’t all come from you. It comes from all of us, and you as that guide, creating that environment, creating an environment in which we explore and we look at and poke around and get frustrated with and figure out. So I love the interaction. I love the nuggets that I can chew on and come back to. I like the video with the transcript with me. It’s just sometimes just solidifies the videos solidify a bit more for me and then I can go deeper with the transcripts. I like that.
Ayelet: Yeah. It is funny how even the same information, we ingest it totally differently when we’re watching something versus just listening or just reading.
Josh: Right. All the senses.
Ayelet: Exactly! Awesome. Is there anything else that you want to share with us, Joshua?
Josh: You know, I think first off, just thank you for all that work and dedication that you do. It means a lot to me, and I’m sure it means all the other families, but just that little small voice in your head, that’s leading you: think those through, work with them, get frustrated with them, find people, find resources that will come alongside you, that you feel comfortable with, that are nudging you forward, that are allowing the knowledge to reveal itself to you. Go in that way. And one of those nuggets, those clues is that understanding your child is very important. It’s very important.
Ayelet: That’s the basis. I love it. Thank you, Joshua for your time today and for sharing everything that you’ve experienced along the way over the last six months or so. That’s great.
