Contents
Testimonial from a crazy mom
Source of information for some or questioning for others, books on motherhood and education abound in bookstores. What is it really? Elements of answers with humor and tenderness.
The first thing my parents did when they knew they were going to be was run to the bookseller. As a pragmatic woman, my mother rushed to Laurence Pernoud, a timeless childcare bible in which she hoped to be able to learn how to take care of a newborn baby like a choux pastry. While my father, eternal romantic, opted for an obscure thinker of the new education, a little hippie on the edges, whose discoveries he hoped to be able to adapt on the adorable baby that I was. Much more concerned with the mother’s breast than with acquiring a scientific outlook on the world.
Motherhood and literature: the discovery
When I knew myself that I was sheltering a little man, I wondered if the book would be my friend or my enemy … For a long time, I refused to open just one, for fear of finding as many peremptory points of view as there were authors, also for fear of seeing the few educational certainties sacked there that, sleepless nights after nights white, I had tried to build. Finally, for fear of transforming myself, once a few lines have been assimilated, into an odious shrew who would brandish the scraps of her knowledge as the ultimate proof of her accession to the rank of perfect mother.
And then I started long, very long studies in educational sciences. I discovered there that a book was made to be discussed, that none of the authors would ever describe the “truth” but rather, through a distorting prism, the different facets of the same object. I also discovered there that the vast majority of parents were afraid of books, afraid of the authority of the one who had written them, afraid of discovering (as painfully as at school) their own ignorance, everything desperately looking for “recipes”, “tips”, solutions to their everyday problems.
The “Smart Fridays” project
This is how the project of… A word that is a little scary to ward off bad luck was born, the one that made us believe that thought belonged to some and not to others. A project where everyone enters, with or without knowledge, with or without experiences, with or without kids, just with their neurons. Some days, we talk without complexes to the great authors of education, we remake the world there, with a kid on the hip and a spinning machine. We joke about the latest information gleaned from pediatrician waiting rooms, we share our galleys, our questions, our hesitations on the long road to parenthood.
The books imprison or release according to the use which one makes of them, Januz Korczak, great thinker of childhood, said on this subject: “The book, with its ready formulas, dulled our glance and made our thought lazy. . By dint of drawing on experience, seeking the results of the opinions of others, we have lost confidence in ourselves to the point of denying ourselves the right to the slightest personal gaze. The mother is ready to transform the book into a handbook as if, by the mere fact of being printed, it contained revelations. ”
Let’s become the first thinkers of the education of our children !!! And see you soon, I hope on Smart Fridays!