Almost every time we speak or make a presentation on parenting, and no matter where we are in the world, moms come up afterward and tell us their experiences with "Joy School."
Joy School is a preschool curriculum and program that got its start back in the 1980s and has been evolving ever since. Moms form Joy School groups and rotate as teacher to form twice-a-week do-it-yourself preschools for their 3- and 4-year-olds. Most Joy School groups start in the fall and go through the school year with three to six moms taking their turns as teachers. The idea was (and is) that rather than push early academics on their little kids, the best thing parents can do is teach them the social and emotional "joys" that can make their lives fuller and happier and that prepare them for kindergarten better than knowing how to read or add.
In other words, children deserve a real childhood before they get to the pressure of academics. And well-structured play and social skills will do more to help them succeed in school than trying to have them know everything before they get there.
So in Joy School there are units on "The Joy of the Body," "The Joy of the Earth," "The Joy of Imagination and Creativity" and "The Joy of Sharing." There are also units on things that may at first sound too advanced, like "The Joy of Goal Setting" and "The Joy of Individual Confidence and Uniqueness."
As it turns out, 3- and 4-year-olds have an amazing capacity to grasp the basic components of happiness in their simplest forms, and putting them in situations where they feel a certain kind of joy increases their interest in repeating the behavior that gave them the good feeling.
And more and more moms would rather find the time to take their turn as teacher and to have the other mom-teachers be their best friends than to send the kids off to an impersonal, more expensive professional preschool.
The origins of Joy School go back to the time we were raising the first of our own kids and happened to be living in the Washington, D.C., area. Our Northern Virginia suburb seemed to be a hotbed of early childhood education ideas, and we would get mailings and see posters and ads all the time for "Teach your 3-year-old to read" or "Get your child ahead before kindergarten." There were also art and dance and music preschools — everything a parent could ever want to choose from. Some preschools apparently got access to doctor's office obstetrician records, because while we were pregnant with a child, we started getting mailings that essentially said, "Get on our waiting list now (before your child is even born) or he or she won't get in, which will pretty well ruin the rest of his or her life."
It got us thinking about some very interesting questions: "What do we most want for our very young kids?" "What will really prepare them, socially and emotionally, for school?" and "While they are so receptive and open, what is the most important thing we can teach them?"
For us, the answer kept coming back to JOY! Most of all, we wanted them to be happy. We wanted to expand their natural capacities to feel different kinds of joy. That, we felt, was the best gift we could give them and the best preparation we could give them for starting school.
Joy Schools started out with bulky manuals and teaching and visual aids and cassette tapes that had to be mailed out to participating moms all over the world. It was, to say the least, a bit unwieldy.
Things are so much easier now. Since the Internet, moms just download their lessons online, along with the songs and music and the visuals that go with each "joy lesson." Hundreds of thousands of parents and kids have now participated in Joy School, and the phenomenon just keeps on growing.
Of course, the lessons and materials keep evolving, embracing the ideas from moms all over the world who keep finding better and more current ways to teach each of the joys and to help kids internalize them.
For us, the fun thing is to now meet moms who were in a Joy School back when they were little kids and who are now teaching the same joys to their own small children.
To learn more, go to www.JoySchools.com.
The Eyres' next book is "The Entitlement Trap: How to Rescue Your Child With a New Family System of Choosing, Earning, and Ownership." Richard and Linda are New York Times No. 1 best-selling authors who lecture throughout the world on family-related topics. Visit the Eyres anytime at www.TheEyres.com. For information on preordering "The Entitlement Trap," see www.valuesparenting.com