What Makes Mom-isms Have Meaning?
Did your mother have certain pet sayings that she repeated to you? I call these Mom-isms. I have always wondered which ones stick, which ones we want to pass on to our own children, and which ones we would sooner forget.
One Mom-ism that I have always loved from my mother is: “If you stop learning, you stop living.”
Mother didn’t just say that, she lived and breathed it. She could wonder about everything, like how the cereal companies decided what words to put on the back on their cereal boxes. It got to be a thing in our house. We would watch to see when General Mills or Kellogg’s changed their “cereal box advertising” or the premiums they offered (designed to appeal more to boys than girls) and then think out loud about why. Whether we were eating Cheerios, Wheaties or Rice Krispies, breakfast could provoke some playful discussions.
Or if we were waiting in the car at a traffic light, we would look at people in the next car and wonder about their lives. Were they married or were they brother and sister? Did they just have a fight? Steal something from somebody? Is that why they looked so upset? Some of our stories were pretty wild.
I know there is a lot of talk today about whether kids are overscheduled, but I think the questions should be: what are kids scheduled to do, does it truly interest them, and how much “free time” do they have? Even in the 1950s in a small city in West Virginia, Mother made sure that my sister and I had some afterschool activities. Piano lessons–I was a disaster. Ballet lessons—my Belgium teacher Andre Van Damme was larger than life and a little scary to me, especially when my tutu itched and I scratched. Pottery lessons—now that could have been a calling.
What Mother didn’t do was to fill up our time completely and as I have come to reflect on her Mom-ism, I think this was intentional. She gave us lots of what kids today call “hang-around time.” Beginning in grade school, she expected us to figure out what we wanted to do in our free time—making a plan to do something imaginative, learn something or help someone. Granted it was before the days of iPods, texting, video games, and other social media, but I can imagine that spending our free time consuming media would not have been considered a “worthy plan.” Now that I have studied learning, I see that she was fostering the life skill of becoming a “self-directed learner,” as she was.
Not all of my mother’s Mom-isms were this good, but “living to learn and learning to live” has been a true gift in my life, one that I have worked hard to pass onto my own children.
Ellen Galinsky, President and Co-Founder of Families and Work Institute, helped establish the field of work and family life at Bank Street College of Education, where she was on the faculty for twenty-five years. Her more than forty books and reports include Ask The Children, the now-classic The Six Stages of Parenthood, and Mind in the Making, published by HarperStudio in April 2010. She has published more than 100 articles in academic journals, books and magazines. Don’t miss Ellen’s earlier post What are the Life Skills Your Kids Need to Thrive in the Google Age
Editor’s Note: What mom-isms have meant a lot to you? Please share your stories, good or bad. You will be entered to win a copy of Mind in the Making.
