You are currently browsing the monthly archive for December, 2008.
Ben claims that my toy philosophy makes no sense, but he also admits that it works. We have particularly good toys in our house. Everyone who comes over comments on this and I don’t think they’re just being polite. Sophie has relatively few dud-toys, the sad neglected ones that you can’t remember why you bought. You know the toys I mean? The ones that look appealing briefly but quickly lose their allure. The ones that end up cluttering up your house, making you feel guilty, wondering why your child keeps playing with the box more than the toy that was inside the box.
So here, in time for Christmas, is my theory on how to select toys that will become favorites, toys that will be played with daily for months.
My sister’s rule is No Plastic, No Batteries — and although I appreciate the clarity and aesthetics of that, I do love legos which are plastic, and I do see Sophie enjoying a burbling turtle which has batteries, so it’s not the perfect rule for me. Sophie has an incredible set of plastic stacking cups that she has played with during nearly every bath this year. I wouldn’t want to give that up. Instead, I modify my sister’s rule to simply favor toys that are beautiful.
My mother’s rule is to aim for Toys that are Tools. She doesn’t mean that every child needs a hammer and an electric-drill. She means tools in a broader sense: a kazoo is a tool for making music, crayons are a tool for drawing, bikes are a tool for transportation, almost all the best toys are tools for something. But I’m not quite sure what Sophie’s stuffed dog is a tool for (a tool for hugging, maybe?) — and that’s one of her current favorite toys, though we have yet to see how long its allure will last (thanks, great-grandparents!). She also uses that cute stuffed dog as a hat, an excuse to announce “dog,” and something to tickle her parents with.
Nearly every toy is a tool for the imagination — so I’m afraid my mom’s rule stretches out into uselessly covering every toy. But I do see that some toys are better tools than others. When I was little, my mom made me a trapeze hanging from the front-porch roof (it was just a simple broomstick suspended from some strong rope: it was a brilliant toy) and a puppet-theater hanging in the living-room’s double-door (it was a curtain with a hole cut in its middle, and a stage-curtain added in), and those two tools were incredibly fascinating toys to grow up with. I still remember the hours I played with them, the foot-prints I left on the front-porch ceiling, the endless puppet-shows that I made my mother sit through.
So I keep the toy-tool connection in mind, but what I also think about is flexibility. My own toy-philosophy is to favor Toys that are like a Beach or Legos. During college, I worked one summer at the fantabulous Boston Children’s Museum, and part of our training was listening to a museum-expert talk about the then-vogue of “interactive” museum exhibits. It’s not really interactive if all that happens is you push a button and hear a bell, he said, or push a button and get a bell AND a light. That may be basically interactive, but it’s also quickly boring. The talking-Barbie, the arm-swinging GI Joe, the supposedly interactive kids’ toys are often the ones that end up gathering dust in a corner. What’s really interactive, he said, is a beach. Because there is no limit to the interactions on a beach, kids can slide on the dunes, jump in the waves, dig in the sand, search for shells, peer in the tide-pools, swim, float, skip some rocks, invent new games, and keep on exploring a beach day after day after day. A beach is much more deeply interactive than a speak-n-spell. So this museum designer told us that he aspired to make every museum exhibit like a beach. Or like legos. They’re as endlessly open to creative possibilities as a beach. They’re the model for a toy that lasts.
That doesn’t just mean a sandbox and a water-table, although both of those are good toys. It means a ball, a dress-up box full of scarves, a bottle of bubble-blowing liquid, a handful of matchbox cars, and, yes, a trapeze or a puppet-theater. It means any toy that you can do multiple things with. It explains why Sophie loves her new toy kitchen (thanks, Grandpa George!). She visits that kitchen first thing every morning and last thing every night, constantly inventing new stories as she plays with frying the wooden egg, storing the wooden carrot in the pot, hanging the ladles, baking her favorite marble, rearranging pots & tops & drawers, turning the kitchen around to look at the backside of the cupboards, constantly exploring. I’ve noticed that each person who plays with the kitchen with her makes up different stories, different ways to interact with the beautiful tools that are there.
Ben says the toy-beach rule is way too vague. I modify it by also looking for toys that have stood the test of time (collective wisdom isn’t a bad thing), toys that I myself want to play with, toys that make me smile.
So, in a way, Ben is right, my toy philosophy makes little sense, it’s just really an analogy, looking for the beach in a trapeze. But it works most of the time.
Yesterday at the post office, Sophie focussed on a lady carrying a large green box.
“It’s not for me,” the lady said to Sophie. “It’s for my daughter. I’ve been naughty this year; I don’t get any presents.”
“Don’t listen to her,” I told Sophie, reacting without really thinking about tact, because this seemed like an important point for a little girl to understand. “Every one is a little naughty. Almost everyone tries to be nice but sometimes fails. It’s mostly about forgiveness. You’ll get presents anyway, even if you’re not perfect — because no one’s perfect.”
There goes part one of the Santa myth, I guess. Sophie is only nineteen months old and I’m already modifying Santa to fit make him more about the Christianity I believe in, which is different from the mainstream Christianity I see in the media. It shouldn’t be so unusual, though. I grew up Episcopalian and that involves collectively reciting, every week: “Dear lord, we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done and what we have left undone…” That effectively covers all the bases: we’re all naughty. “We are truly sorry and we humbly repent,” the prayer ends, and then the congregation all shake hands or hug and say “Peace be with you, and also with you.”
I guess that’s what I should have said to the lady at the post office: Peace be with you.
It just makes me sad, seeing kids’ letters to Santas declaring, “Please, I’ve been pretty good.” They know they haven’t been perfect, and they’re worried far too much, when I think they should just learn about peace and forgiveness.
Of course, I also tried to convince my Episcopalian Sunday school — when I was eleven years old — that a loving God wouldn’t really sentence anyone to eternal damnation. Purgatory, maybe, but not Hell. I guess I am non-mainstream after all.
But then, last night we went to the local botanical gardens Christmas light show, and my bah-humbug mood finally lifted. Sophie wanted to touch each strand of lights wound around the palm trees. Sophie also wanted to show every other toddler the beautiful blue marble she found yesterday and managed to hold on to without dropping. The band played “Wassail” and other songs I love, while Sophie and her little friend M flapped their arms and attempted to jump. The pose-with-Santa man “ho-ho-d” with sincere cheer, near a fire for roasting marshmallows, while down the hill there were horses pulling a wagon, all surrounded by lush plants in this amazing otherworldly landscape. Streets & cars & stores seemed far away. We wandered among the magical dark garden, noticing that everything simply smelled good, enjoying our friends, admiring the night-lit waterfalls, and agreeing with Sophie saying, “Wow.”
This morning, after saying bye and walking a few feet out the back door, Ben returned for one last kiss.
A half-hour later, Sophie said bye to me, walked a few feet out of the bedroom door, then rushed back in for a kiss. She repeated this new game of one-last-kiss two or three more times. It was adorable.
I can only hope that Ben and I are being such good models to mimic more often.
Maybe we spoil her only because she is so cute.
That’s B&C’s cabin in Big Bear, just in case you were wondering.
I’ve been reading Judith Warner’s Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety and it’s making me think. She writes about moving from France to America with her two young daughters, and being bowled over by how much more stressful parenting in America is. In her idealized portrait of France, it wasn’t just that there were more of the expected support programs like maternal leave and state-subsidized childcare. France, in her experience, also had doctors who answer your phone-calls and neighbors who pitched in, so no single mother felt all alone. It had neighborhoods with a place to walk with kids, parks worth going to, but most of all it had a cultural expectation that parents would take time for themselves.
Returning to America, Judith Warner was shocked by parents stressing out over kids’ schools and friends and sports and activities and all the extensive competitiveness and what she calls trivialities of parenting. She smartly calls for more basic social supports (decent quality childcare that is a tax write-off would be a beginning) and less isolation, but mostly she calls for a change in attitude, changing from control-freaks paniced at life spinning out of control, changing from the guilt of constantly feeling like a not-good-enough-mom.
Here’s an excerpt: In France,
I’d once expressed guilt about sending my toddler daughter off to six hours a week of preschool. ‘Do you have a mini arts studio in your home?’ [a friend] asked. ‘Do you have a playhouse and a variety of tricycles? Can you provide new sources of fun and stimulation every day?’ The answers were, obviously, no on all counts. The mere idea of having all that equipment at home had seemed absurd. In fact, when she put things that way, it began to seem absurd to keep a child at home when so many wonderful opportunities existed on the outside.
But in Washington, everything was different. The homes around me were equipped like mini arts studios. Many people had backyard equipment that rivaled public parks…. I tried to do it all myself: be mommy and camp counselor and art teacher and prereading specialist (and somehow, in my off-hours, to do my own work). I tried my absolute best. And like so many of the moms around me, I started to go a little crazy.
This rings true for me. We actually went to a playdate a few weeks ago at a suburban house that held six playground slides in the backyard. I counted. Okay, one was in the living-room: and that points to another problem that Warner highlights. Not only do American parents face excessive privatization, they also assume they need to center their lives around their kids.
Warner inspired me to move Sophie’s plastic toys out of the living room, back to her bedroom. The beautiful stuff is still in the living room, the carved-wooden blocks and dollhouse that I like looking at — but the rest is in her space, and it’s also because Warner inspired me to follow my own sense of fun. Parenting should be about fun, she argues, not guilt.
Warner actually compares the situation of early 21st-century motherhood to the 1950s wives that Betty Friedan interviewed so classicly: each struggling alone, each breaking down in tears once every month or so, each convinced that she’d made her own free choices and was living a life of luxury and so shouldn’t be so desperately unhappy, all unable to live up to the feminine mystique of the 1950s or the mommyhood mystique of the 2000s.
She points out that Americans have long put ridiculously high stakes on motherhood, in the Calvinist idea that mothers alone steer children between heaven and hell, just as current parenting advice books believe that breastfeeding alone (or baby sign-language alone, mozart alone, properly attached stimulation, and all the rest of it) steers children up an i.q. category or to emotional fulfillment or whatever our current only-seemingly-nonreligious view is of heaven and hell. She points out that parenting advice manuals generalize from studies of severely deprived children (like the starving, tied-down, attention-deprived orphans in Ceasescu’s Rumania) to make upper-middle-class Americans feel that they risk exposing their children to similar deprivation if they take even twenty minutes to themselves. She points out that most moms work part-time, yet share the same ridiculously high level of parenting standards with stay-at-home moms. (She also acknowledges that she’s only talking about elite urban moms here, although I do get annoyed at her undifferentiated “we”).
She traces swings in parenting trends, from the 1940s folks who worried that mothering would turn into smothering (“A Generation of Vipers,” in Philip Wylie’s unforgettable misogynistic phrase), to 1950s Donna-Reed-models, to 1970s feminists taking time for their own personal fulfillment, to current mothers rebounding back to smothering mothering, in an unconscious reaction to their own mothers, so that we now engage in collective overparenting in a vain effort to heal our own childhood abandonment issues. Of course I don’t think it’s this simple, or that any generation ever fully follows the advice books, but I recognize an interesting germ of truth in the idea that we parent out of our own unacknowledged childhood issues. And I think it provides an interesting perspective to remember when folks worried about mothering smothering.
There’s lots more in Warner’s book: pointing out that too many of us veer between only two emotional states: overly-focussed on our children or feeling guilty for not being focussed enough. There’s also lots that doesn’t ring true for me, and there’s a recent New York times column in which Warner admits that as her children age, she too has become emotionally involved in the minutiae of their lives, despite her whole book advocating mother’s independence.
But here’s a concluding thought:
We have taken it upon ourselves as supermothers to be everything to our children that society refuses to be: not just loving nurturers but educators, entertainers, guardians of environmental purity, protectors of a stable and prosperous future. This ultimately impotent control-freakishness is the form of learned helplessness acquired by a generation of women confronted by a world in which finding real solutions to improve family life seems impossible. And it really needs to change.
Yesterday, we had dinner with a friend who is not a parent. What’s bizarre is that that is unsual for us. Actually, this weekend, both dinners were with friends who aren’t parents of toddlers — but that’s an anomaly. Our circle of friends has shifted since Sophie was born. It’s partly because lots of our friends also had babies all at once (I think we’re in a mini-baby-boom), and partly because some of our friendships were tied to sports we no longer have the time to be addicted to (surfing, rock-climbing), but mostly because asking grown-ups to adjust to our Sophie-centric life is difficult.
I always swore I wouldn’t be one of those parents who stops hanging out with non-parent friends. But who else can eat dinner at 5:15 pm because of early bedtimes? Who else can understand when I cancel plans at the last minute because Sophie’s nap was out-of-whack? Who else can put up with the distraction of a toddler at the dinner table – or the tedium of hearing me talk endlessly about parenting issues? I know there are non-parent friends who read this blog, and I love that, but I also worry a lot about myself, becoming overly absorbed in overparenting.
At dinner last night, our friend D was wonderfully interested in Sophie, but we also got to talk about things that had nothing to do with children or parenting. It was incredibly refreshing. I think we need to do less self-segregating in the parenthood ghetto — but I fear that yesterday’s dinner is more a tribute to D’s flexibility than it is to ours.
A few weeks ago, the New Yorker reviewed a couple books about overparenting:
This used to be known as “spoiling.” Now it is called “overparenting”—or “helicopter parenting” or “hothouse parenting” or “death-grip parenting.” The term has changed because the pattern has changed. It still includes spoiling—no rules, many toys—but two other, complicating factors have been added. One is anxiety. Will the child be permanently affected by the fate of the hamster? Did he touch the corpse, and get a germ? The other new element—at odds, it seems, with such solicitude—is achievement pressure. The heck with the child’s feelings. He has a nursery-school interview tomorrow. Will he be accepted? If not, how will he ever get into a good college? Overparenting is the subject of a number of recent books, and they all deplore it in the strongest possible terms.
Most of us have heard of people who pipe Mozart into their child’s room….
Overparented children typically face not just a heavy academic schedule but also a strenuous program of extracurricular activities—tennis lessons, Mandarin classes, ballet. After-school activities are thought to impress college admissions officers. At the same time, they keep kids off the street. (In the words of one book, “You can’t smoke pot or lose your virginity at lacrosse practice.”) When summer comes, the child is often sent to a special-skills camp….
A year ago, I would have agreed: these ridiculous parents shouldn’t center their lives around their kids. Now, I’m not so sure. How else should a child be soothed to sleep, if not with piped-in music? We tend to use Juana Molina instead of Mozart, reflecting my own taste, but I’m sure someone will soon mock the new-agey multiculturalism of that choice, if they haven’t already.
Later, when Sophie gets older, should we avoid camps all together, or choose a bad overly-basic summer camp, to avoid being accused of the obnoxious snobbery of “special-skills camp”? Around here, the big thing is lifeguarding camp, where kids learn beach-safety while playing with a lot of other kids and many surfboards. Really, I don’t see anything wrong with that. I myself spent the best summers of my childhood working at the kind of camp that this article mocks.
The article actually makes many interesting points: an uncertain economy, the overcompensation of mothers who feel guilty about working outside the home, and the ridiculously escalating concerns about children’s safety and self-esteem are all blamed for the latest iteration of overparenting. There’s more here.
I hadn’t known that the idea of “brain plasticity” (the more you stimulate an infant’s brain, the more you help aid brain development) is mostly a crock, since almost all infants receive enough stimulation anyway, without mobiles and special polka-dotted mirrors and all the other infant toys for sale. According to the books reviewed in this New Yorker article, the best brain stimulation is self-stimulation, initiated by the child when the parents finally let that child alone.
I’m all for kids having free time and I’m all against centering a child’s life around college admissions, but I also see myself accused in this article about overparenting. Sophie already has so many toys that it’s hard to think what to get her for Christmas. Sophie has already graduated from infant-swim class and infant-sign-language class. She already owns a half-dozen CDs of kids’ music that are supposed to enrich her, not to mention a small jungle-gym, water-table, dollhouse, lego-table, a half-dozen musical instruments (the kazoo is her current favorite), a shelf-full of books, another shelf-full of stuffed animals, and more blocks than she can use.
Worse than all those toys, Sophie isn’t great at independent play. She wants to have me close by, watching her. If I start to read a book or talk on the phone, she gets upset. I’m working on teaching her to enjoy alone-time and to give me my own alone-time, but I am embarrassed that I have to work on it. I hovered so closely in her first few months, overpersuaded by attachment parenting theory, that now I have to wean Sophie from expecting hovering.
It’s not that I’m obsessed with her future college. She doesn’t have to go to the same elite college that I went to — but I do hope for her that she’ll have a sense of curiosity and a sense of adventure, and I want to nourish that already, giving her as many opportunities as I can to explore her world. I want to pass on to her all the advantages that I had as a child. It’s not about college, alone: honestly, it’s about class. I want to pass my class status on to my daughter. I’m high-class enough to think that that goes beyond college.
So here’s the part of the article that really bothered me:
Sooner or later, all critics of overparenting get to the problem of morals—the sheer selfishness of these parents and of the children they produce. Even the pragmatic Marano makes this point. Why, she asks, aren’t parents “manning the barricades,” demanding benefits for all children? Why do they care only about their own? And doesn’t it bother them that the extra help they can buy for their children—the college-admissions courses, the tutoring—is tilting the playing field? Hovering, as most of these books acknowledge, is largely the preserve of upper-middle-class parents, and these people want their children to prosper as they did, fairness be damned.
This bothers me because I have been worrying about it ever since I was pregnant with Sophie and Ben started sneaking extra protein-powder into my food because our birth-class declared it was good for her brain. If every thing that we do for Sophie that is rumored to help her development, actually does help her development, then equal-opportunity is a lie. America only thinks that it’s an equal-opportunity employer. From even before birth, we were giving Sophie advantages — at least trying to.
It’s not that it takes a lot of money to have careful nutrition during pregnancy, enough support to give birth without pain medication, extensive breast-feeding, stimulating toys, daily trips to the park, daily book-reading, lots of organic vegetables, no tv or movies, weekly trips to the library, quality childcare, and all the rest that Sophie has — not to mention the infant sign-language class and infant swim-class. None of that is expensive, really (even the classes were at our local Y), though it does add up, and it requires a baseline of having healthcare, money for groceries, and a neighborhood with parks and libraries (not to mention terrific used-toy stores here in my rich neighborhood). That baseline excludes far too many Americans. Still, more than money, it takes time and knowledge to give Sophie this upper-class life. And I know far too many families don’t have that time, let alone the baseline of healthcare and parks.
Maybe they don’t need the knowledge, since so much of this style of upper-class-parenting is so mockable. I’m not about to impose this style of parenting on them. But I will work to create the necessary infrastructure. I sign petitions at momsrising. I try to vote for better libraries, parks, schools, healthcare, parental-leave, flex-work schedules, and all the rest that seems to me to be a prerequisite for decent parenting. I would do more, if I knew how.
So I resent the accusation that because I provide for my child, I am selfish. Taking her to her doctor’s appointments doesn’t preclude supporting healthcare for all children.
I think I resent it because I see how close I am to it.
All week, after carefully choosing which socks she will wear (they must be partly pink but mostly white, and they must be medium-high: my little fashionista has strong opinions about sock appropriateness), then excitedly choosing which shoes she will wear (I believe I have already mentioned Sophie’s shoe fetish here), little Sophie has broken down in a shrieking tantrum over the outrageousness of being forced to wear her shoes over her socks. She’ll accept pretty much any shirts and pants, but she is particularly picky about what goes on her feet, and, this week, she has been refusing to wear her favorite black sneakers with any socks at all.
It’s not a major tantrum, just a minor one, so I continue my morning activities, hoping Sophie will grow interested in something new.
Sophie wrestles her shoes off. She tugs her socks off. And then she works valiantly to get her shoes back on to her now-sockless feet.
Being able to remove her own shoes and socks is actually quite a feat of dexterity for little Sophie. I’m proud of her fine motor skills, and almost proud of her independent stubbornness — but I also worry about her feet getting cold or, worse, getting blisters.
When I mentioned this week’s sock wars to Sophie’s daycare teacher, Daycare Teacher pointed out that I myself wasn’t wearing socks with my shoes. Sophie was simply imitating me.
So today I made a big show of putting on socks with my dress-shoes.
And Sophie placidly accepted wearing her own socks below her shoes.
This discipline-through-modeling thing is astoundingly effective.
But what else am I inadvertently modeling that may become a much more insidious habit than socklessness?
When Sophie is a little mad, she lashes out, hitting whatever is near her.
We tell her no hitting. We tell her, use your words.
She gives us this look of maybe-comprehension, and she stops hitting the book or my leg or whatever it was that she was lashing out at. Instead, she turns her anger inward and hits her own head. That is her scariest habit.
When Sophie is very mad, she just starts off with this hitting-herself-in-the-head thing. She even says “Ow,” but then she keeps on doing it, hitting her own head, hurting herself on purpose.
Are all 18-month-olds just a little insane?
For all that I write here, it still doesn’t represent our lives. Lots of things happen that don’t fit themselves neatly into a story or blog-post. So here’s the catch-up post of random updates.
For Thanksgiving, we went to Big Bear, and it was wonderful — maybe because there were so many other adults all pitching in with cooking and cleaning and Sophie-playing, so it was a true vacation for me. Or maybe just because it was crisply cool weather, light snow on the ground, just how Thanksgiving should be. Or maybe because we got to go on at least one hike a day, slowly accustoming Sophie to longer and longer walks, while allowing ourselves to eat astounding amounts of Thanksgiving pie. Ben taught Sophie how to throw stones into muddy puddles. We all had a great time.
Ben has also taught Sophie to say “Yes” (she pronounces it sass: she seems to have trouble with the y sound) and also “please” (pronounced peas), so she’s far more pleasant to talk to now.
Ben has been reading a lot to Sophie lately. She prefers his wild rumpus in “Where the Wild Things Are” to my rendition of that same rumpus. I admit, his rumpus is better. I’m a bit jealous. I keep meaning to take a photo of the two of them sitting in the reading chair together, because they are absolutely beautiful.
Ben’s arm is slowly getting better. Today, he could actually touch his face with that hand, for the first time since he dislocated his elbow three weeks ago. He joked that he will soon be able to ride a stationary bike, but he fears that it will be much longer before he can change diapers or do dishes.
Yes, we still haven’t settled our basic arguments over housework, even though it’s been almost forty years since Pat Mainari wrote The Politics of Housework.
Sophie’s hair and mine have both recently reached the length where we can wear barettes. She and I are learning how to do this together.
Sophie has been resisting eating dinner lately. This wouldn’t be a big deal, except that she already slipped so much through the weight percentiles that one doctor told us to feed her butter (we don’t), and I want her to eat enough that she can sleep well at night. So we’ve started feeding her a bowl of cereal while we give her the pre-bedtime bath. I suspect there are half-a-dozen reasons why this is an unsanitary habit and I shouldn’t be feeding her in the bathroom, but, oddly, it works for us. The milk that spills down her chin falls into the bathwater. Maybe this is the inspiration for Cleopatra’s milk-bath.
There are only two weeks left in my semester. I have particularly interesting students this semester, they’re fun to listen to, but I also have a particularly exhausting teaching schedule and I’ll be glad when the semester is over.
That’s the news.
