Sacha Chua - category - parenting

Slowing down and figuring out my anxiety

2025-10-28T19:35:50Z

I am going through a lot. It is not much compared to what other people are going through. But it is more than what I usually go through, so it's a good idea to slow down and give myself space to learn how to handle it.

Part of handling times like these is touching base with what I know. I know that to be human is to have challenging times, so I don't find this surprising. I know that it is objectively difficult and that other people have a hard time with situations like this, so it's not a personal failure and there are no easy solutions. I know that it is temporary and that things will eventually settle into a new normal. I know there will be many such transitions ahead, and I'm getting used to the process of leaving old normals behind and focusing on the next step.

I know the way my brain tends to behave when it's overloaded. My attention hiccups. I hang up my keys on a coat hook instead of the one near the door. My fingers stutter on the piano. I can't multitask. When that starts to get in my way, it's a good reminder to get more sleep and do fewer things. There are very few firm commitments in my life, and I appreciate the flexibility that my past self planned. There's room to wobble¹ without bringing everything crashing down.

2025-09-13-05 A few of my brain's failure modes -- life

Text from sketch

Coming back to my own time

2025-09-17T13:15:19Z

[2025-09-17 Wed]: Added links to other people's posts.

2025-09-10-10 Coming back to my own time -- parenting life time

Text and links from sketch

Notes: Pottery wheel afternoon summer camp

2025-08-23T00:11:12Z

Today was the last day of A+'s week-long wheel-throwing afternoon summer camp at Parkdale Pottery in Toronto. She's focused on wheel throwing at the moment, not hand-building. It's hard to find pottery wheel lessons for 9-year-olds because of strength and safety concerns. A+'s been doing the all-ages 2-hour wheel-throwing workshops at Clay With Me independently around once a month, and she's also tried painting premade pieces. It felt like a minor miracle to find a half-day camp focused on just what she wanted.

Before the workshop, A+ wasn't sure about trying out a different studio, since she'd gotten comfortable at Clay With Me. She settled in quickly, though, and even took charge of packing her snacks and getting her clothes and apron ready for the next day. It was great to see her grow more independent.

A+ likes to work with smaller balls of clay so that they're easier to centre and handle. In Clay with Me workshops, she usually asks the instructors to divide a ball in half. Because the Parkdale Pottery camp was for kids 8-12 years old, the clay balls they provided were the right size for her hands, and the instructors also showed the kids how to prepare their own.

The first three days focused on wheel throwing. The instructor complimented A+ on her centreing skills. She's gotten pretty good at bracing herself so that she can form the puck right in the middle. She also learned about adding attachments by scoring the clay and adding slip. The fourth day was about refining and trimming, and the fifth day was about glazing. She enjoyed learning how to marble her pieces with interesting blue-and-white swirls, and I enjoyed her description of the process: layering the underglazes, then swirling them around to create the design. This was the first time she was able to trim and glaze her own pieces, since the Clay with Me workshops are one-off sessions where the pieces are all finished with a clear food-safe glaze. Parkdale Pottery will fire A+'s pieces with a food-safe glaze too, and we'll pick them up in a few weeks.

When kids finished early or wanted to take a break, they explored hand-building, drew circles with markers on paper attached to pottery wheels, worked with beads, and played the board game Trouble. The instructors did a good job of managing the occasional squabbles.

Looking at other students' work on the shelves and the instructional posters on the wall, I saw interesting ideas that we might try in future workshops. (Gotta make a face vase…)

The half-day summer camp was from 1 PM to 4 PM from Monday to Friday, and it cost $250+HST. There was a full-day option, but A+ wasn't interested in hand-building. I think the half-day was worth it, especially since I managed to squeeze in about 2 hours of consulting every day even with setting aside time to bike back and forth. We're gradually transitioning to the phase where she wants to learn about things I can't teach her, and paying for clay workshops is a great way to access people's specialized expertise and equipment. I don't know how many kids there were in the camp, but A+ was happy with the teacher-student ratio and felt like she had enough time to get whatever help she needed.

From her previous workshops, we've collected a good selection of little ice cream bowls and saucers. This camp will add a few more saucers and tiny bowls. It might be a good idea to learn how to make little treats (maybe chocolate truffles?) that we can place on the saucers for an extra-special birthday gift. ("Wrapped in plastic and tied with a bow?" she asks.)

Next steps: We'll probably continue with the Clay with Me workshops, since A+ likes the studio and is comfortable with the process. I also want to explore a little handbuilding with polymer clay and air dry clay, and some sketching to imagine pieces. Maybe she'll get into that too. When we come up with pieces we really like, we can do one of the handbuilding workshops at a pottery studio in order to make a food-safe version, or consider a clay-at-home package (Shaw Street Pottery) that can be fired. When A+ turns 10, she'll be old enough for the wheel courses at places like Create Art Studio and 4cats. They generally schedule their teen wheel courses on weekdays, though, and a weekend would probably be better for us.

A+ wants to do this summer camp again next year. She prefers unstructured time and plenty of afternoon playdates, so it'll probably be just one week, like this year. We'll see when we get there. Plenty to explore. It's nice to have a craft, and maybe this will be one of hers.

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The wobble is not the obstacle, it's the way

2025-06-21T18:18:34Z

9 PM on a schoolday, time for me to nudge A+ off to bed. A+ is clicking through the Stardew Valley wiki, slurping up all sorts of trivia that she'll probably trickle into our conversations. There are two pieces of homework left to do, one with quite a few slides to complete. And drawing. She's not a big fan of drawing assignments. "My hand is tired," she says.

I try to be calm and supportive. I wobble. Could've done this earlier, I think. I manage to keep myself from saying it. I teeter, noticing myself mentally fast-forwarding decades ahead. Oh no, she's not going to get the hang of doing things that she finds boring, she won't develop study skills or executive control, she'll cram through all the classes she can coast in, and all of it will come crashing down in university when she might actually need to buckle down and study.

She's 9! She's a long way from university.

I'm learning to embrace my anxiety and appreciate how it tries to keep us all safe. This feeling makes sense. I want to help her avoid mistakes, especially when the feedback cycle is long and the results of choices will only be seen much later.

But anxiety gets in the way of parenting. If I let the fearful part of my brain take over, I'll inadvertently teach her that mistakes are catastrophic rather than just ordinary Tuesdays. I want to hold her steady, but the wobbles are how we learn.

It's somewhat manageable now, when we can talk about these things openly. A+ can laugh off my worries ("Mom, you're fretting again,") and W- can remind me to slow down when it runs away with me. He's usually pretty chill about all this. It'll be harder when the cognitive rewiring of puberty or menopause turn ordinary conversations into minefields right when the stakes get higher. The more I tighten my grip, the more star systems will slip through my fingers. (There I go again with catastrophizing.)

Besides, I want to help A+ avoid the paralysis of perfectionism or self-recrimination. I want her to be able to experiment, and to pick herself up and try again if things don't work out the first time around. To do that, I need to learn to change my perspective from being anxious about mistakes to seeing the opportunities for re-takes.

There are many things I can't teach A+. Some things can't fully be taught, they can only be learned, like how to balance the clay on the pottery wheel. Sometimes I don't even know what the right answer would be, like what kinds of tips work for her particular brain. Some things change over time and she'll need to change with them, like how to adapt to life's situations. She'll need to learn how to learn instead of relying on one fixed answer.

Fortunately, life comes with so many opportunities to practise. The Toronto public school calendar has 187 instructional days, so she gets plenty of chances to manage her homework and get feedback. The repetitive nature of things used to frustrate me when it came to my tasks (always more dishes to wash, always more clothes to fold), but it's good for learning, especially while the stakes are low. It's her experiment, I remind myself. About half the time, she doesn't even want my help. ("I can do it, Mom.") She's sensible enough to try things out on small experiments instead of scary ones: shopping at the grocery store on her own, not skydiving.

There's plenty of stuff for me to learn while she learns. When I get the urge to correct her work ("How does that line up with the rubric?") or nag her to get her work done, I tell myself:

Is it really a problem? The teacher isn't expecting her to completely master all the skills, and the teacher is in a good place to give developmentally-appropriate feedback. I can let her experiment with how much work she wants to put into things, and she can see what that results in. Despite all my twitchiness about how she puts off her daily homework until 9 PM, she still manages to get things done. Judging from the frequent reminders her teacher gives the virtual class, she's probably ahead of the curve. So maybe it's not a problem.
Whose problem is it? Something might not be my problem. It might not even be her problem. She reads during class time, for instance. Sometimes she misses something that can't be figured out from just the homework slide deck. Maybe that's partly her experimenting to find the right balance between attention and stimulation. Maybe that's also partly a consequence of how school is designed to go at the group's pace. Not entirely her problem.

The more I let go of the small stuff, the more experience she'll be able to draw on for the big stuff. I hope she'll get the hang of thinking of life as mostly series of little experiments, and to notice when there's a bigger choice that needs more thinking because it's more long-term. The more she decides, the more confidence we both develop in her decisions.

This reminds me of how kids learn how to bike. The popular approach uses training wheels to prevent falls. The idea is to gradually raise them as the kid improves, but I usually see kids pedaling along (perhaps slightly leaning over to one side) to match the slowness of parents' walking. It's hard to balance when you're going slow. But pedaling isn't the hard part. Balancing is, and you develop balance by balancing. Maybe that's a little like how I get tempted to rescue A+ from the results of some of her choices, but letting her try things is how to help her learn.

A+ learned how to bike using a balance bike instead of using training wheels. When she was two, she toddled along on a Strider, which was light enough for her to manage. Eventually she figured out coasting. She was proud of being able to do it on her own. Then we upgraded her to a Cleary Gecko freewheel bike, with proper hand-brakes and everything. After a few attempts with us holding her under her armpits, she was ready for us to steady her with a hand on her back, and then for us to be close, and then she was off on her own. She fell and skinned her knee many times, developing an appreciation of pants for protection and ice cream for comfort. The more she biked, the more she learned how to notice that feeling of being slightly off-balance, and the better she got at correcting it. Now we can bike on the streets together.

You can't learn how to bike if the training wheels are always on, or if someone's always holding you steady. It's okay to wobble and fall and get up. You learn that you can survive a skinned knee, and so you keep going.

Sometimes, when A+'s in the middle of a meltdown, I have to remind myself not to try to fix it in the moment. That doesn't work, anyway. Just take the loss and try again next time. Sometimes, once we've both calmed down, I ask A+ to imagine rewinding back to a situation so we can play it out a little differently. Sorry, I meant to say this, not that. Would that work better? Next time.

Not mistakes. Data. Just another step in the journey.

Getting better at getting better helps me, too. I've been practising piano, making steady progress through the Simply Piano app. I've been playing for about four months now. I took piano lessons as a kid, but not to any serious extent. Back then, I got bored with the simple exercises I had to do. Now I feel slow, snail-slow, but I can savour the way my mind is beginning to get the hang of things, knowing that it will take me many tries to get the hang of it. I'm starting to be able to look at the notes and remember the phrases, imagine what the next sequence will sound like before I play it, and notice how my hands move to make it happen.

When my fingers wobble on the keys, I slow down and try again. There's no point in berating myself. If my mind keeps hiccuping or my fingers keep stumbling, I can think: ah, is this because I'm tired, or because I want to do something else, or just because I'm learning and it takes time to get the hang of things? I'm getting better at figuring out when I should probably call it a day so that I don't practise mistakes into my muscle memory and when I might benefit from just slowing down the segment.

I still stumble through pieces I've successfully played before. Remembering is hard. But I'm getting better at being patient with myself, accepting that it's because I'm still in the middle of the journey. It's not a mistake that I should grump at myself about. It's just part of a re-take. This is what learning looks (and sounds) like. Of course it doesn't start out perfectly smooth.

Here's me learning Mozart's "Rondo alla Turca", with the app providing accompaniment in the background. It's not perfect, but it's progress.

Download the audio

・・・・・

We were at the playground. I ate the remaining crackers in the snack box because I thought A+ was done. Turns out she was saving them for later. She was very upset. I apologized and promised to ask next time, but she was too far gone to hear.

That was a tough moment. A+ was already emotionally off-balance because the playdate hadn't gone as well as it usually does. Discovering I had eaten the crackers she was looking forward to was the last straw. She dissolved into tears. I snuggled her and settled in for a long wait. I think: Where's the line between comforting her and coddling her? Does my anxiety teach her this is too hard to handle? We're not quite at the point of being able to shrug off mistakes. I remind myself that she'll learn what she's ready to learn.

Looking around while A+ drenched my left shoulder, I noticed a skateboarder on the park road. Maybe a man in his thirties? He was trying to jump his skateboard over a low concrete lane divider. He had been at it for a while before I noticed. Most times, he was able to clear the divider, but the skateboard slowed down too much on the other side and he had to jump off. On the seventh try that I saw, he landed back on the skateboard and rolled on for a bit. Success! He tried again and failed. Four more failures before his next success. One more attempt–another failure–and then he called it a day. I'm sure he'll be back at it.

A+ continued to cry. My phone buzzed, reminding me that we probably wanted to get going before the rain in the forecast. I carried her as I picked up our bags and put them in my bike. Eventually I needed to gradually ease her off me. She curled up in the bucket of my front-loader cargo bike, still crying. I tucked the towel around her like a blanket, buckled her bike into the tow-bag, and walked the bikes home. She fell asleep.

A wobble, a fall. But I'm sure we'll be back at it too. (And we did; the next day, she was happily playing with her friends again.)

・・・・・

It's hard to be in the moment. Sometimes the moment sucks. It's hard to be far ahead in the future. It makes decisions feel too big. Do-overs make things just the right size. If we can get good at shrugging off the inevitable failures and treating them as data so that we can sketch out ideas for the next experiment, I think that'd be pretty cool. Instead of "Oh no!" or even "Are you sure about that?" (what kid likes to be doubted?), I can lean towards, "Hmm, let's find out."

As predicted, we had another late-night homework situation. This time she had a headache and wanted to go to bed, homework unfinished. I was able to let go and just focus on snuggling her in. The next day, after morning routines and without any nagging, she did the homework and submitted it. Late, but done.

There'll be another bedtime homework session, I'm sure. I have to trust that even though I want to shortcut the learning for her, she's got this. She's figuring things out. If we stumble, that just helps us practice for next time, and there are so many opportunities to try again. The wobble is not the obstacle, it's the way.¹

This post is yet another take on the June IndieWeb Carnival theme of Take Two. Here are two other ones: Making and re-making: fabric is tuition and Thinking about time travel with the Emacs text editor, Org Mode, and backups.

Related reflections:

Footnotes

Related: The Obstacle is the Way, Ryan Holiday's book on Stoicism; the title rephrases this thought from Marcus Aurelius's Meditations: "… and that which is an obstacle on the road helps us on this road."

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You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.

Making and re-making: fabric is tuition

2025-06-10T01:09:58Z

Sewing together with A+ is helping me learn so much about making and re-making, and about saying yes.

I'm not good at saying yes. Sometimes it's because I have no idea how to make something happen, and I don't want to overcommit. Sometimes it's because I don't think something will be practical or worthwhile. Sometimes it's because I want to spend the time or money on other things instead. Sometimes I don't know how to make it something that she can help with. But A+ asks with shining eyes, and I'm learning, slowly, slowly, to say yes. I'm beginning to trust that the mistakes don't matter as much as the memories do.

A+ has always had ideas about what she wants to wear. At five, she was all about floor-length dresses. I sewed her A-line dresses in comfortable cotton Lycra, peasant-style dresses that matched my tops. I also made a knee-length swim skirt for her. She liked it and requested a floor-length version so that she could twirl and twirl and twirl at the splash pad. She wore it into the wading pool too, enjoying how it swirled around her, trapping air under the skirt and marvelling as it ballooned. The following year, she asked me to attach a bodice to it to make it a dress. I turned the knee-length skirt into the bodice for the floor-length dress, took out the stitches that had previously narrowed the then-too-large waist, and it was good for another year of twirling.

When she was 6 and in the throes of a Cinderella obsession (we read through 50+ variants of the story from the library), I made her a powder blue charmeuse ballgown with a full-circle skirt supported by the petticoats and tutus that she layered with abandon: 19 layers of tulle in total. She loved curtsying and twirling with that whole shebang at the pretend tea parties she hosted at the playground, and it survived the washing machine surprisingly well.

A+ is nine now and has long outgrown the ballgown, which has been stashed in the closet until I figure out if it's going to become a skirt for her or for me. But she still wears the A-line dresses from years ago, which now reach her knees instead of her ankles. She still likes fanciful clothes. I made a floor-length light blue dress so that she could wear it to her cousin's wedding. She picked out some ribbon for the waist, a lace trim to place near the hem, and some ribbon flowers as embellishments, and she asked me to sew a hooded cloak with a ribbon closure. After the wedding, I trimmed the dress to knee-length and re-sewed the lace close to the new hem so that she could wear it while biking to the playground.

Inevitably, she's beginning to grow up. Her fancy is tempered by a few nods to practicality:

knee-length skirts because they don't get in the way of riding her bike
she likes stretchy fabric more than woven fabric
skorts are great for doing cartwheels or hanging upside down.

We prefer to buy fabric in person so that she can feel the fabric on her skin. At the store, A+ zeroed in on a sheer floral print organza that she had seen on a mannequin in the window display. "The organza doesn't have a border," she said. "We can make it a circle skort." She's learning to think about the characteristics of the fabric and what we can do with it. She matched the sheer floral organza fabric with a peach polyester-spandex from the swimwear section and the right colour of thread from the basement.

This will be the fourth warm-weather skirt this year. We make little tweaks each time, as she learns more about what she likes to wear. Here's the progression so far:

For her first summer skirt this year, I made a lavender knee-length rectangle skirt with scallop-edged embroidered mesh over bridal satin, gathered at a 1:2 ratio. She liked the dressiness of it, but 1:2 turned out to not be enough ease for cartwheels, so she changes into something else when she wants to be more active.
The second was a mermaid scale skort made from the swimwear fabric I ordered last year, based on one of the purchased skorts she liked. It'll be her new swim skirt.
The third one was a purple skort. I changed it from side seams to a single back seam so that it's easier for A+ to tell the difference between front and back.

I love being able to change things based on her feedback. We've browsed nearby clothing stores and bought a few pieces, but she rarely finds things that she really likes. Her last pick from the store was a peach skort with a matching top. I removed the waist elastic from the top because she doesn't like elastics, and now it's good to go. It'll be the model for the new skort, I think: a non-stretchy skirt with a stretchy fabric used for the shorts. This time she wants a knee-length circle skirt instead of the mid-thigh length of the commercial skorts. Easy enough - just a matter of drawing a bigger circle.

I appreciate how all this experience re-making things makes it easier to say yes to A+'s ideas. For example, the hat I sewed for her last year is starting to feel a bit small. I cut pieces for a new bucket hat using the free AppleGreen Cottage pattern that I'd previously used to make two other hats for her and one for me. This time, I wanted to make the outer layer from the floral canvas left over from reupholstering long-gone dining room chairs and the inner layer from the linen tea toweling that we decided not to use in the kitchen. Midway through the process, A+ asked me if I could make the hat pointy instead, like a witch's hat. I put the brim pieces together, sketched out a quick quarter-circle, sewed the outer layer, and tested the fit on her head. Then I used the inner brim layer to cover up the seams, finished with some topstitching, and it was good to go. I figured that if she changed her mind and wanted a flat hat, I could easily make one from the scraps, or I could even modify this pointy hat to put a different crown on it.

Sewing is becoming more enjoyable and less stressful. I worry less about making mistakes because I've learned how to recover from many of them. Sometimes something's more of a loss, like that lavender floor-length cotton dress with a split organza overskirt that she wore a couple of times before it was declared too uncomfortable, or the scraps that she cuts up when trying to fashion a dress for her doll. That's fine, fabric is tuition for learning.

A+'s becoming more adept, too. She's no longer limited to standing still for measurements, fetching pieces of fabric, or other make-work I could think of to keep her busy while I sewed. Now she can get the sewing machine to wind the bobbin and she can thread the needle. She can sew straight seams and stop when the machine makes an unexpected sound. She can turn straps right side out and unpick seams when we make mistakes or change our minds. She knows it isn't just a matter of how a fabric looks, but also what it feels like and how it moves. She's gradually learning what she likes and what she doesn't like. And if I have the temerity to remind her how to do something ("Make a 'p' shape with the thread when you put it in the bobbin case"), I get a glimpse of the teenager she'll become ("I know how to do it, Mom.").

We're getting better at seeing the clothes as their component parts: patterns, fabric, pieces we can recombine. "Can you copy this, but without sleeves?" she asks, and I figure it out. Looking at the yardage left, I can start to think: ah, I can squeeze a matching training bra out of this part, and I think I have enough here to make a top, and this rectangle is large enough for a headband, and I can turn these scraps into flowers while I'm waiting for her at a playdate.

I'm learning from all her requests. By myself, I tend to settle into comfortable routines. In 2015, I made 18 tops based on the Colette Sorbetto woven tank top pattern, eventually taking advantage of Hacklab's laser cutter to precisely cut the fabric so that my notches lined up every time. When I find something I like, I make it again and again. A+'s still figuring out what she likes. We're learning so much.

Sewing for A+ is a time-limited opportunity, and I want to make the most of it. There are only so many clothes I can sew for her. Eventually she may want to wear the same things as everyone else, or eventually she might be comfortable doing all the sewing herself. Eventually she'll be off on her own life. Maybe the ballgowns will turn into skirts or camisoles, and from there into headbands or scrunchies.

・・・・・

Re-making echoes through our past. My mom tells me this story of how her mom sewed, and how their family was poor. My mom rarely got a new dress, so when her mom sewed a red dress for her, that was special. She wore it until the bodice couldn't fit any more. Her mom undid the seams, sewed a new bodice onto the skirt, and gave the dress back to her. She wore it until the skirt was all worn out. Her mom undid the seams and replaced the skirt. My mom said to her mom, "Does this mean I have a new dress now?" This was not the only dress my grandmother made for her. My mom also tells a story of how one time she hovered by her mom's sewing machine, impatiently waiting for her mom to finish sewing the dress that she was going to wear to a party that day. My grandmother must have also worked on re-making, on learning how to say yes. My mom didn't make clothes for me, but she passed on the stories.

All this reminds me a little of two picture books we borrowed from the library. My Forever Dress by Harriet Ziefurt and Liz Murphy (2009, video) shows how a grandmother extended and transformed a dress as her granddaughter grew. Something from Nothing by Phoebe Gilman (1992, video) retells the Yiddish folktale about Joseph's overcoat, this time with a special blanket that gets worn down and transformed into a jacket, a vest, a tie, a handkerchief, ending as a fabric-covered button. The button gets lost, but it turns into a story. Of the two, I liked Something from Nothing more. I liked the lighter touch it told the story with, and I liked the reminder that cherished things can be turned into stories.

A+ was in the kitchen, making a grocery list on an LCD writing tablet. She wanted to buy apple sauce, yogurt cups, and mac and cheese. She wanted to do it herself, with her own money. W- will walk her to the store, let her loose, and meet up with her in front of one of the aisles. "Mama, you can stay home," she said.

Challenge: She wanted her own bag for groceries. Her backpack was too small. I rummaged through the reusable bags hanging on the coat hooks. There's this cotton tote we got from an event, but the straps are too long. When she put it on her shoulder, it threatened to fall down. When she carried the bag by its straps, the bag dragged on the floor. I shortened one strap to see if she can hold it then. The body of the bag itself was too long. I sewed a seam across the bottom. Now it's the right height for her. I shortened the other strap and serged the bottom seam to make it neat. She wanted a pocket for her purse and the KN95 mask that she'll wear in the supermarket. W- was almost ready to head out. "Give me another five minutes and I can make her a pocketed bag," I said. He waited. I opened up the scrap from the bottom, sewed the edges together in the other direction, turned it into a pocket, and sewed it to the top hem of the bag. A+ pronounced it perfect. She tucked her purse, mask, and shopping list into the bag, looped the straps over her shoulder, snugged the bag under her elbow, and headed out into the world.

・・・・・

I still sweat my way through figuring out how to sew what she comes up with, but it's good for me. I make and re-make so she can have things that fit her ideas, and so that she can dream of more. She's learning that her ideas matter. It can take several tries, but we can make them happen together. Someday she'll make and re-make things all on her own.

This post was inspired by the June IndieWeb Carnival theme of Take Two.

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You can comment on Mastodon or e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.

Things I want to learn from Stardew Valley

2025-05-23T17:19:30Z

This week A+ said she wanted to play a farming game, so we went through this list of farming games on Steam and she picked Stardew Valley. I bought it for CAD 17 under her Steam account. She got pretty good at finishing her homework before playtime. After some fiddling around, we managed to figure out how to play 3-person local co-op using our old PS3 controllers.¹

The first game we played used the basic farm layout and shared money. I realized that sharing all the money wasn't working out so well for me about two game weeks in because I was always reminding A+ to buy seeds before she splurged on gifts, so we started a new playthrough with separate money. A+ decided to pick the meadowlands farm layout, which meant starting with some chickens.

We now have a mayonnaise maker and four chickens. It's summer and I have a variety of crops growing. W- sometimes drops in to do some fishing or help out around the farm. We probably won't make it to the greenhouse bundle this year, but maybe next year. She'd been looking forward to getting a kitchen and trying out some of the recipes, so we saved up for it and worked together to chop down lots of trees.

Stardew Valley feels like a good rainy day activity with A+. It's a cozy place to practise making decisions and working together.

A+ can get competitive and envious, which can get in the way of her having fun. Sometimes she gets envious because I've been leveling up in farming and she hasn't yet. When that happens, she becomes more motivated to help out around the farm. Sometimes it's harder for her to channel that frustration into growth. At the trout derby, she got grumpier and grumpier. First it was because W- had caught a rainbow trout and she was only catching trash. Then, when she caught a rainbow trout, she was grumpy that W- had caught a rainbow trout with a golden tag and she hadn't gotten one with a tag. "I'm never going to catch anything," she grumbled, eventually spiraling into a lump on the couch. To her credit, she kept trying for a while instead of rage-quitting, so that's progress.

I chatted with her about it the next day, when she was well-regulated. "It doesn't have to be a competition, you know," I said.

"Of course it was a competition," she said matter-of-factly. "It was the trout derby."

Apparently this competitiveness and sensitivity is pretty common and totally not out of place for a 9-year-old, especially since she's an only child. Common approaches include:

Stopping the game when whining starts, in the hopes that eventually the kid will learn to avoid whining: I'm not sure about this approach with A+ because I think she might benefit from some more help and support learning these skills.
Team sports and a structured environment: This doesn't quite feel like a good fit for us, but I'm glad it works for other people.
Switching to more cooperative activities: I couldn't redirect her from the trout derby because the time-limited event was too fascinating. We had to take the loss and try again another time. This, too, is a fish on the line; sometimes it escapes and there's nothing to do but to accept it and fish again.

There's a lot we can learn together in the process of working on day-to-day things. I can put A+ in charge of most of the harvests, and she's getting better at minding the mayonnaise. I think A+ likes mining with me (I'm in charge of fighting monsters), and we can probably also chop some wood together. Maybe she'll enjoy collecting the eggs and petting the chickens now that there are more of them, especially since one of them is called Hei-hei. Then we can fish when we're in the mood for fishing, farm when we're in the mood for farming, and so on.
Getting used to losses by playing lots of games: Fishing is good for this. It's easy to start trying again, and there are plenty of little rewards along the way. Once we can cook, we can use meals like chowder to boost her skill.

I love it when games gently help me notice ways I can grow as a person. I want to get better at focusing on processes, not outcomes.² It's neat to see this in contrast. At the moment, A+'s attention focuses a lot on outcomes. She thinks about things like upgrading to kitchen or getting to a certain level, but it's harder for her to focus on the steps that will get her there. I notice there's stuff for me to work on, too. I struggle a little with trying to make sure I have seed money if I let A+ take care of harvesting and selling (somewhat alleviated now that I've got chickens and corn), that I can get everything watered before bedtime, that I've kept some of the produce back for bundles or quests, or that I'm making progress towards a silo before winter. I can also practice focusing on processes, not outcomes.

I know my job isn't to maximize the farm's profit. Maybe my job for now is to water the farm so that A+ can enjoy the harvest. Doesn't that sound like some kind of parenting thing I can work on learning in my bones… I know grown-ups are better at delayed gratification than kids are. I'm better at the grind. If she can enjoy a bit of the harvest and figure out if she likes it, then we can back up a little. Maybe she can water a small part of the field, and then grow from there. Maybe I can make her a little 1x1 patch with the season's fastest-growing crop, and then expand every time she gets it all the way to harvest. Tiny habits, right?

Also thinking as a grown-up, I can stagger the planting of 4-day crops like wheat so that there's always something for her to harvest.

There are other little ways we can use game mechanics to practise life skills. We can occasionally check the traveling cart for quality sprinklers, which will give us a reason to keep track of the days and save some money for opportunities. It would be great to practice this with virtual money before she needs to deal with real money.

I can also invite A+ to go mining and then use the copper to upgrade the watering cans. It's a multi-step process (copper ore, wood, coal, copper bar, upgrade), so it makes sense that I can handle that better than she can. She can focus on one step at a time and slowly get the hang of how everything comes together, just like when she was learning how to solve the Rubik's cube. It's also like the incremental independence she's growing into in other parts of her life. My job is to support her so that she can learn at the right level: not too hard, not too easy.³ Someday, after many many runs through this kind of process, she might even get the hang of creating those sequences for herself or finding people who can help her. Small steps to lifelong learning.

And when I start to get fidgety about how we play, like when she doesn't accept any of my invitations to do something (chop wood? carry water?), I can repeat: process, not outcome. It's okay for her to stand around waiting for the shop to open while I water the farm. She's excited, she's focused on the very next step towards her goal, and that's good for where she is. It's okay for things to take a while. I want to keep the process fun. The fun is the important part.

Also, there's this whole thing about taking time to talk to people, remember what they like and dislike (… or look that up in the notes), give them gifts, celebrate their birthdays, and so on. Right. There are even clear benefits for doing so. Plenty of things to get better at. =)

Stardew Valley seems like it would be great for practising these things. The general advice from the community seems to be to take it easy and not rush. Don't worry about making it to certain milestones by certain times, just have fun together. We've been playing for only a few days, but I have a feeling there's much to learn over the next few years.

Footnotes

PS3 controllers: On Windows, we needed DsHidMini and a powered USB hub. On Linux, we just needed the powered hub.

This reminds me of Atomic Habits.

Zone of proximal development

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Having fun with words

2025-05-22T17:10:17Z

I love strewing ideas in front of A+ in case something catches her interest. A rich source of in-jokes is the word "antidisestablishmentarianism", which I introduced to her when she was… what… maybe 3? 4? and which she decided to master with her usual determination. Sometimes, when she's in a "Mom! Mom! Mom!" phase, I joke about changing my preferred name so that she has to say "Antidisestablishmentarianism! Antidisestablishmentarianism! Antidisestablishmentarianism!", which always gets either a laugh or a groan.

One of A+'s friends is a 4-year-old. She was playing the copying game with her, the one where a kid repeats everything the other person says. Whenever A+ wants to wind the game down, she confidently rattles off "antidisestablishmentarianism" and that's the end of that.

I didn't want A+ to rest on her laurels, of course. I introduced another word: paradichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane. That piqued A+'s curiosity, so I told her about DDT and I shared the limerick I learned it from.

A mosquito was heard to complain,
"A chemist has poisoned my brain!"
The source of his sorrow
was paradichloro-
diphenyltrichloroethane.

A+ got the hang of the limerick within a few days. Apparently, she's already shared it with her teacher and her nature club counselors. I think she's even been coaching the 4-year-old through saying it syllable by syllable, so perhaps there will be two of these word geeks someday.

Since A+ liked the rhythm of the limerick and she also likes math, I looked up this other fun limerick, which is attributed to Leigh Mercer:

A dozen, a gross, and a score
Plus three times the square root of four
Divided by seven
Plus five times eleven
Is nine squared and not a bit more.

Small words, but fun to play with too.

For our next steps, I want to get the hang of saying "pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis" and "hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia" (although sesquipedalophobia is the more common term).

We also pun about whatever she's interested in. At the moment, it's all red panda all the time, thanks to her enjoyment of Turning Red. ("Which animal loves books?" "A well-read panda!") We love alliteration and rhyme. We change the lyrics to her favourite songs. I had a hard time sitting down and playing with A+ when she was smaller, but now we've got so many words to play with. This is fun!

What's the use of these things? Mostly to tickle our brains and make each other smile, but also maybe the tiny chance of bumping into someone else who happens to overhear it and who chuckles out of recognition. There are people out there who like to play the kind of way we like to play, and she'll find her tribe someday.

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You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.