Kathryn Hutton
Although my siblings and I had a rocky childhood in some ways, I send up a silent thanks to my mother Kathryn Hutton (wherever she may now be) for creating an early connection of art to life. As babies we dozed to Brahms and a little later toddled around to the dramatic score of Beethoven and Vivaldi. Our walls were covered with original art and bookshelves sagged under the weight of Renaissance and modern art tomes.
Mom was a professional free lance artist. My earliest memories place her in the studio, bespectacled and working intently on her latest greeting card creation. She was a fine artist, but to pay the bills Mom worked for Gibson. Somehow she managed to raise four children and maintain an art career through the decades it took to launch us into adulthood. Our father, a closet writer and visual artist himself, had a lesser impact during those same years. Mom was a burning inferno of emotion and creation, a parental presence difficult to compete with. Our father passed away in 1969, leaving some unpublished short stories and several paintings.
Mom encouraged us to create. She hated coloring books, insisting that we draw from our imaginations. We also sang when we were children; my brother Jeff had perfect pitch, triumphantly humming The Battlefield of the Republic at the age of three. My sister and I sang harmonies while we washed the dishes , belting out bawdy songs we’d learned from our favorite groups, The Chad Mitchell Trio and The Limeliters. And we wrote our own songs about the celebrities of the day. “Marilyn Monroe’s the Queen of the Screen” was our most notable.
An idyllic childhood? Far from it. But the artistic moments of my childhood offset the agonizing ones. Being raised by artists planted my feet firmly on a path of creativity, still my greatest joy. – Merry
Wow, that’s great! I remember my father telling me about his childhood. Each dinner their father would propose a debate subject and they would all take turns discussing it. It sounded like high tension to me, but I think they all enjoyed it!
Helping children to be creative is so important. I plan to teach the kids at Delphi about haiku as soon I understand it better. 🙂
Yes, it is so natural to them, and as long as it is encouraged and not suppressed…
I worry about kids today spending so much time with computer related video games and so forth. I’d love to know what you think about that?
I worry about that too. I see kids play and play and then want to play some more. A friend of mine wasn’t convinced, so as an experiment she allowed her 6 year old son to play Game Cube as much as he wanted one day. She was curious when he’d stop. Well…he didn’t. He played the whole entire day (something like 14 hours).
She really got how addictive it was and that she needed to regulate like crazy.
Yep, just as I thought.. Think if all those precious hours were spent reading, writing, drawing, etc. I remember when David hounded us for a “game boy” when he was a kid. It gave me a weird feeling, like I was losing him a little. But he was pretty self-regulating. It still disturbed me, though!
I think that many kids will self-regulate but whether it takes a few hours, days, weeks, or months before they do so is dependent on the kid. Kids are pretty smart though, and generally need less regulation than we’d like to think (I think). That said, I don’t want video games in this house. Personal choice 😉
But so much better to surround them with more productive and creative options! To me, there is something creepy about video games, and they way they can suck attention for hours and hours. – Merry