Journal Keeping for Young Children

The palest ink, the old proverb says, is better than the best memory. Journals and personal histories are an important part of creating a personal record and creating and valuing individual identity. These types of records are not just for conscientious adults. Children, too, can reap rich benefits from the experience of keeping a journal.

My oldest son Joe is five years old. In that short time he has lived in four homes in three countries. A biracial child, there is a certain risk that he will fit in nowhere or, hopefully, fit in everywhere. Luckily, it appears to be the latter. He approaches other children, people with disabilities, and folks on the street who are down on their luck with a casual confidence and innate interest. He hasn't yet learned that he will have to be careful. There is evil out there.

This is an eventful time in his life: moving back to America, getting reacqauinted with cousins, starting school, and taking taekwondo classes. As I have made frequent business trips around the world, he has stayed close to his mother who has gone through a difficult and debilitating pregnancy. He recently saw his first snow and was so overjoyed that he played in the yard until his fingers were red and his body trembeled. He's made friends with a boy from Peru, two children from the Marshall Islands, an older boy who is deaf and autistic. He enjoys new friendships but strives to recall the friends he has left across the islands of the Pacific.

"Papa," he'll say, visibly concerned, "what was the name of my friend next door that I used to play with out in the rain?"

"Marina," I'll say.

"Marina," he repeats, pleased to have recaptured that piece of memory before it slipped away.

That's the point: Joe is five-years-old and already has things in his life worth remembering. He'll be poorer if what has happened and is happening to him is lost and forgotten.

Some time ago, the idea struck me that we would start keeping a book: a book of memories, a book of written notes and recollections, a book of the high adventure of this little boy's life.

He dictates, I write.

Tuesday, 28 August 2007:

"Today was my first day of school. I go to kindergarten at Westmore. I am going to introduce my teacher. She is an old woman named Mrs. W. She has rules. Now I will tell you the rules because she said we have to always remember them.

"Number 1: Be kind. Number 2: Raise your hand when you need to go to the bathroom or get a drink. Number 3: Listen and obey. Number 6: When you hear the bell, you stand up and zip your lips and fold your arms.

"I skipped 4 and 5 because I forgot about them. You're not going to show this journal to Mrs W., are you?"

Does that Tuesday in August really mean anything? Yes, it does. It's a milestone. It's the beginning of a chapter in his life, and mine.

This is how Joe and I make journal keeping for kids work:

1. We don't make it a drudgery. We don't do it every day. I'll ask casually at dinner if there's anything Joe would like to add to his journal. "Nah, not tonight." I 'll say that's fine and we talk about other things. Last week, though, there was a problem in Mrs. W.'s class. Joe was sent to time out. He was upset and disappointed that somehow his mom and I had found out. As I put him to bed later that night, he said: "Papa, if I tell you something to write in my journal, will you promise not to read it?" He shared his first experience with academic discipline - and managed to put off bedtime for another 20 minutes.

2. We have a special book to keep the journal in. It doesn't have to be particularly unique or expensive (we use a common notebook kept in a pretty binder). It's the way the book is treated, the way it facilitates some time between parent and child, and the memories it contains that make it special. But keeping it in a specific place and treating it as something special gives it value.

3. When we sit down together to write, I'm prepared to ask some questions or other prompts to keep the dictation going. "If there were two things that happened today that you would want to remember forever, what would they be?" I might ask. On one occasion, after Joe had had an unusually bad day with his mom, we did the reverse: "What did you hate about today? What did you do that you wish you hadn't done?" Tearfully he recounted the day's events. Once I had written some of those things down, I suggested he tear that page out, crumple it up, and throw it away. He came back from the garbage with a wise insight: "We wasted that paper and we wasted this whole day."

4. We re-read past entries. Sometimes going through past entries constitute our bedtime story. We laugh and talk and remember. Joe becomes the central character in his own story.

5. He already knew how to sign his name when we started the journal, so he signs off on each entry. (One night he wrote some indiscipherable squiggles in a vertical line. "That's my name in Egyptian," he informed me.) To his signature we have added opportunities for him to write other words he is learning as they pop up in the ongoing narrative. With time, he won't need me to take dictation. But I hope the habit of journal writing is a part of his life by then.

Some day in the future there may come a time when life is not as rich and care-free as it is now for Joe. I know it will come and I know it will be hard. Off at school, or working, or raising a family of his own, it may mean something to him to be able to open the journal we kept together when he was a child. Perhaps he'll realize that his life did not begin when he failed an important exam, lost a job, or broke up with a girlfriend. Maybe forgotten episodes - "golden sessions," C. S. Lewis called them - will reemerge and play themselves out again. Hopefully he will realize that his story began before the cold realities of adulthood crowded out the people, places, and experiences that filled his childhood.