Schools shouldn’t eliminate Mother’s Day crafts

Diversity of families is no reason to end practice, Julie Anne Pattee says.

Mother’s Day always seemed to bring out the best in my son’s elementary school teachers.

Over the years, I’ve received a bouquet of bright yellow daffodils with egg carton faces, a carefully folded blue paper flower with a Popsicle stick stem, and a poem comparing me to a superhero.

My favourite Mother’s Day gift is still sitting on my kitchen counter. My now 13-year-old son made it for me when he was in kindergarten. It’s an old baby food jar decorated with tissue paper and filled with fake flowers. There’s a plastic fork sticking out of the flowers, with a recipe card held between its tines. The card reads: “My mom makes the best rice crispy squares.”

I remember being concerned that my five-year-old didn’t have the wherewithal to recognize that my popcorn trees or melted snowman cookies or Easter bunnies with coconut fur were true culinary tours de force. Instead, he’d picked the recipe that took the least amount of time, effort and skill to make.

Back then I thought motherhood was something Martha Stewart could help me out with. It took me a while to figure out that the time I spent drawing icing smiles on marshmallow snowmen was actually better invested in playing with my son.

Still, one of the reasons I love the recipe card craft best is that a lot of time must have gone into making it. When I look at it, I imagine a loud classroom full of kids with glue on their fingers and tissue paper in their hair, and the teacher moving from seat to seat, waiting patiently as kids hemmed and hawed over what they wanted their cards to read.

What I love most about this gift is the idea the teacher had to celebrate something your mom makes for you. When I think back on all the stuff my mom did for me when I was younger, the things I remember most fondly are her creative expressions of love: the birthday cakes stuffed with coins wrapped in aluminum foil, or the clothes pin dolls that she made for us herself.

Every year, when my son handed me his Mother’s Day card or craft, and pointed out that he’d chosen blue construction paper because blue was my favourite colour, I knew the project had taught him less about using a glue stick, and more about the thought that goes into making something for someone.

In the last few years schools have started to banish Mother’s Day crafts.

A school in British Columbia sent a notice to parents earlier this month stating that in recognition of diverse families, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day wouldn’t be commemorated at school anymore.

Certainly, this is a considerate gesture in classrooms where there are children who’ve lost a mother or father. In these cases, the parents and the more fortunate children can deal.

But for children of single parents and same sex-couples, the move feels a bit off the mark.

Schools could be turning these holidays into an opportunity to educate kids about the many different types of families there are.

Moreover in non-traditional families like mine, grandparents, aunts, uncles and friends often take on greater roles. Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are a chance for kids to make something for someone who’s important to them.

I hope teachers will be allowed to decide on their own whether to celebrate Mother’s Day with a craft, and that the banning of Mother’s Day from schools never becomes a trend.

Mother’s Day craft making distils one of the essential elements of mothering and helps teach it to kids. It’s showed my son that making something yourself is one of the best ways to express love. By last year, my son was already in high school. But on Mother’s Day there was still a homemade card waiting for me on the kitchen table.