Post-Industrial Parenthood

Piss on the Door Knobs

2011-10-04T11:46:00.001-04:00

Hello readers, Ava here. I have asked Jeff to use his blogspace to insert some reflections about parenting in the post-industrial era. While Jeff’s perspective is written from the local, household influence, I’d like to write about the political economy of parenting in these post-industrial times. What I have found is that what distinguishes us from our parent’s and grandparent’s generation are the constraints that act upon us for which we have no control.

We moved for employment a year ago. Our house didn’t sell the first week on the market, or the first month, or the first year. To sell it, we will pay an ungodly amount of money to bring our total losses to an even more ungodly amount of money. And it hurts. Polly was born there. Pip took his first steps there. There were birthdays and holidays and visits from friends. I remember the weekend that Polly learned to wave and we had pizza at the kitchen table for dinner.

We now rent a two bedroom apartment, as described in Jeff’s post, On Wildness and Sharing Our Space. And while the location is wonderful, we are tired of being exploited in the shameful renter/tenant environment that clouds most places in America. Our lease was inaccurate when signed, we are responsible for maintaining a property that the owner avoids responsibility at all costs, and we are at the mercy of someone else’s schedule.

For the past two months, we have pursued purchasing another home. After signing a contract and getting it inspected, we found that the risk of potential repairs was too great. And we’re sad, because we feel we have done “everything right” and we deserve the security and stability that marked previous generations.

And this is the chaos of post-industrial parenting: the notion of doing “everything right” as causally related to security and prosperity is a myth. I know it’s a myth, I teach hundreds of students a semester that it’s a myth, and yet I don’t want to believe it. I want to believe that I can work harder and harder and it will result in a better life for my family. I want to believe that there is a “right decision” and a “right way” and that we are, indeed, doing things right. And the frustrating thing for the post-industrial parents is that we ARE doing everything right. It just doesn’t mean what it used to.

In explaining our ups-and-downs in the post-industrial economy, a friend of ours said of our vacant house, “Piss on the door knobs. It will make you feel better.” Well, as a nation, we’d better get ready for a whole lotta piss on a whole lotta doorknobs. Because there are a whole lotta post-industrial parents doing “everything right.” And we’ve got nothing to show for it but vacant houses with pissy doorknobs and a crumbling economy.

On Wildness and Sharing Our Space

2011-09-20T12:20:00.001-04:00

In the midst of a busy and complicated part of the summer for our family I decided to take an impromptu break from my weekly blog writing. It started out as just another delayed posting, something that had become frequent over the summer. But after spending ten days in late July visiting with my parents and three of my closest friends and then taking another three days or so to recover from it all, a few items arose with the house we have been trying to sell. After more than a year, a potential buyer had finally emerged, and we made a push to make sure the house was in great shape for their decisive walk-through. In order to handle those details, I decided to let another week slide by without a blog entry. Since then we have undergone a multi-week frenzy of real estate selling and real estate shopping that continues to soak up more of my life than I wish. It has been difficult to think about anything else, including putting together a blog post.

During this frenzy, a touch of wildness has entered the play of Polly and Pip. While they have always enjoyed tracking back and forth along the straight-line that runs from their bedroom through the dining room and into the living room couch, now each run ends with an airborne child crashing face first into pillows and cushions. In addition, they have started adding odd sound effects to their lives: grunts, buzzes, and growls fill any quiet moment at the dinner table, in the bathroom, or outside playing. Stomping across the creaky hardwood floors of our apartment has also become a regular form of entertainment. One day last week they pulled out every doll and stuffed animal they possess, piled them on the floor in their bedroom, and proceeded to slide, crash, stomp, and jump on the pile.

In and of themselves these actions are not particularly new, but the energy with which Polly and Pip pursue them has intensified. The reasons for this intensification are multiple. For one thing, Polly is growing more physically adept every day. She can now jump down from 18-24 inches above the ground and land on her feet. She can slide headfirst off Pip’s bed without hurting herself. She can copy all the noises Pip makes. In all, she can do an increasing number of the things that Pip can do. This means they are playing together more and engaging in a type of mutually reinforcing play that takes Pip’s energetic ideas and ramps them up to levels I wasn’t prepared for. Ava and I have approached this development tentatively; we are thrilled that they are playing together and want to stay out of the way as much as possible but at the same time we’d like them to maintain some semblance of self-control. Figuring out when to stay aloof and when to step in has taken some time and experimentation.

Also, much of August was so hot that we were unable to get in our customary evening walks. For most of the summer, we took the kids out after dinner, put them in the double jogger and rolled them around the neighborhood for a half-hour or so. This gave us a regularly planned activity that headed off some of the end-of-the-day squirreliness that the kids get as they grow tired and gave Ava and me a few minutes to catch up with each other. Without these walks, we found ourselves at loose ends for the hour or so between the end of dinner and the start of the bedtime routine. This open, unstructured time works okay in the morning when the kids can direct themselves. But in the evening, it generally leads to craziness.

It hasn’t helped that our real estate frenzy has sucked away time that Ava and I normally spend with the kids. Over the last couple of weeks I have spent multiple hours talking on the telephone with Ava, my parents, and real estate agents while trying to cook lunch, to get Polly through the bathroom process, to take the kids to the park, and to do any number of other basic activities during which the kids usually have our undivided attention. At first they thought our distraction was fun. It was something new for them to figure out. But now that this curiosity has worn off, they quickly become unhappy and demanding whenever the phone rings. It has been a stressful experience for all of us as Ava and I know exactly what is happening but feel compelled to continue with our conversations anyway.

*****

With all of this swirling around us, I’ve come to appreciate the attraction of having a larger living space than the one we currently occupy. Our apartment consists of a living room, a dining room, a kitchen, a bathroom, a bedroom for Ava and me, and one for Pip and Polly. Within this configuration, there is really no place the kids can go play without having to constantly negotiate with their parents. Their bedroom presents some opportunity for separation, but between the two beds, a rocking chair, a set of shelves and a dresser, there is very little floor space available for energetic play or multi-day toy arrangements. This leaves the dining room and the living room for these kinds of things. However, those are spaces which we all share together, meaning the kids cannot have primacy in either for extended periods of time.

When I was younger, my sister and I were fortunate to have two such spaces. One room was a storage room running under the eaves of our house that my parents turned over to us for a play room. We had shelves, a record player, and a dresser to stuff with our things. Toys remained strewn across the floor for weeks at a time. We also had a full, finished basement that was lightly furnished. It was an excellent space to get away from our parents’ eyes and have a pillow fight or eat a bit too much candy. It also gave our parents a place to send us when we got too rowdy upstairs in the nicer rooms of our house.

And, in truth, I had a third space that fit this characterization: my own bedroom. In many respects I was not as free to do with this room as I was the playroom or the basement – it wasn’t the place for rough play and it had to be kept relatively neat and clean – but it was a place for me to retreat to, a room where I could close the door, where I could decide who would come in and who would stay out. It was a separate space of my own, one that facilitated my own individuation.

Pip and Polly do not have that kind of space (and, frankly, neither do Ava and I) in our current apartment. While I don’t think all of this shared space creates a necessarily better or worse experience than my own, living here certainly hasn’t been meaningless. Sharing this apartment for the last year has shaped the way we relate to one another. I think and talk more about ‘family’ as my primary social unit than I used to – there’s a lot more “our” and “we” in my speech than “I” now. I have also slowly peeled away the time I have designated for myself as the demands of keeping the kids and the house together have increased. Part of this is the reality of having young kids and performing my role as their primary caretaker. Part of it has to do with the shared nature of the apartment space. With an extra room or two we’d probably just designate an area for kid craziness and send Polly and Pip there when they want to bounce around. Instead, we have to constantly negotiate with one another, finding a way to accommodate our different needs for the space we have and our different ideas about what the space can and should be used for. It would seem like a recipe for frustration – and sometimes it is – but ultimately I think it has been good for us. When there is nowhere to run to and nowhere to hide, you have to talk with one another; at the very least you have to tell each other what you are up to or what you are planning to do. With all that talking we get to practice communicating with each other. We’ve had to figure out how to make requests and demands of one another in respectful and conscious ways. All that practice has been valuable when real problems have arisen.

*****

And yet, even as I write this, Pip has started carving out little bits of personal space around the apartment. Now whenever it is time to clean up and put things away, it is common for Pip to identify some creation or arrangement of things he would like for us to leave in place for the next day. Yesterday it was a fire truck by the bathroom door. Today it was a pile of LEGO pieces he had collected in a little cup and left by his seat at the dinner table. More often than not he never returns to these items. They get forgotten over the night and reintegrated into the play of the next morning. The regularity of this pattern makes me see these acts as a way of staking a more permanent claim to our shared spaces, as a way of exercising some control over them even when he is not present in them. It is his way of asserting his own individual place amidst the communal swirl of our family. I imagine there will be many more instances of this kind of activity headed our way in the future.

Sibling parents

2011-07-13T11:39:00.000-04:00

In his four and a half years of life, Pip’s dominant examples of social interaction have come almost exclusively from Ava and me. While in some ways this relationship is to be expected of most children and their primary caregivers, Pip’s bubble has a few qualities that make it even more intense. For starters, since I am a full-time father, he has had very limited experience with non-familial caregivers like preschool teachers, day care providers, nannies, or even babysitters. Our home-centered childcare model also means that he does not currently have a classroom of peers that he interacts with on a regular basis. Instead, his contact with children his own age tends to be limited to whatever casual interactions happen on the playground. Lastly, as we don’t watch television with the kids, that avenue of social observation is also unavailable to him. For better or worse, when Pip wants a model for how to handle a situation, he is largely stuck with using what he has observed from us as his starting point.

One effect of this bubble is that frequently Pip’s mode of approach to Polly has been parental. At times this has taken on a classic, bossy older sibling form where he watches Polly closely and does his best to regulate her behavior according to the rules as he knows them. He keeps her from walking out into the street without a parent. He gently chastises her for throwing something inside the house. He asks her repeatedly not to splash water out of the bathtub. He does all these things because he has seen Ava and me do them.

But other times he mimics our caring acts, whether it’s helping Polly get something that is out of her reach or finding toys to entertain her while Ava and I are cleaning up the dishes. He is particularly quick to seek out ways to comfort her in times when he anticipates she’ll be upset.
He can be very creative in these endeavors. He’ll bring her little gifts from the toy shelf or he’ll make up silly rhymes to make her laugh.

One day this past week Polly woke up from her afternoon nap in a cranky mood. This sent Pip scurrying about in search of a way to help her through this. After about half-an-hour, as Polly’s mood started to brighten, I went into their room and found all their larger stuffed animals sitting on the floor. Tigger, Eyeore, Purple Duck, Blue the bear, Soft-soft Bunny, and Woolly Mammoth were arranged in a tight circle around George, a old teddy bear that is one of Polly’s favorites. When I asked Pip what was going on, he told me he had created a “family hug” for George in hopes that it would make Polly feel better. Whether this arrangement was meant to make her laugh or to give her a big hug using George as her proxy, I’m not sure. But either way it was a gesture that warmed all of our hearts.

*****

These parenting efforts by Pip leave me feeling somewhat ambivalent. While there is plenty of historical precedent for older siblings taking on a parental role with younger siblings - particularly in larger families where taking care of younger brothers and sisters was frequently part of an older child’s core responsibilities – I feel like contemporary social expectations tell me that Pip is doing too much. He is supposed to be an independent kid, living his own childhood free from the burden of feeling responsible for someone else. It is difficult to pinpoint exactly where this feeling is coming from, but I can see some manifestation of it in the narratives of sacrifice that people use when they talk about unconventional families where older siblings take on tasks usually handled by parents or adult caregivers. In these narratives, older siblings often get depicted as martyrs, giving up their childhood so that younger brothers or sisters can have one. Such an understanding depends on the idea that the older siblings had little responsibility for their younger siblings in the first place.

Perhaps this is how it should be. I don’t know. What I do know is that I can feel the influence of this idea on my interpretation of Pip’s relationship with Polly. Early on, Ava and I tried to reduce the amount of behavior regulation work he did, telling Pip that such things were our job and that his job was to play with Polly. This did not really have much effect on him. I imagine there are a couple of reasons for this. For one thing, the distinction we were trying to make was vague, randomly applied, and at times just confusing. It was unfair to expect a three or four-year-old to really make sense of it. For another, playing with Polly was something that Pip had to figure out and to do that he had to start somewhere. As his predominant examples for interacting with his sister were parental ones, it is not surprising that these approaches were the ones he tried first. On top of that, Pip’s social inclination is to observe and analyze the activities of other people. He is constantly interested in the actions of those around him, often to the point of distraction. With respect to Polly, this inclination led him easily into a mode of parental-style surveillance where he sees when she is doing something wrong and tries to help all of us by getting her to stop whatever it is.

More recently, we have backed off our attempts to actively shape the way Pip approaches his relationship with Polly. While we still step in when we sense Pip is getting overbearing, we have mostly allowed their interactions to develop as they will. Fortunately, this seems to be working as, on a daily basis, there is more play and less bossing than before. I think much of the reason for this is Polly’s own developmental growth and her quickly expanding physical and linguistic capacities. Her increasing ability to keep up with Pip makes the power dynamics in their play more balanced which in turn is enabling the emergence of the kind of relational structures that we were initially trying to force upon Pip.

*****

All the same the power of the bubble remains in effect as Polly has now taken to doing a bit of parenting of her own. The same day that Pip built the family hug around George, Polly began trying to help Pip with his bicycle. While out on a walk that afternoon, Pip got his training wheels stuck on an uneven spot in the sidewalk. Usually when this happens, I give him a little push to get him going again. This time, Polly wanted to be the one to give him the push. She rushed forward and strained hard against the bike seat to get him moving. When he finally did inch forward again, she looked back at me with a twinkle in her eyes. She had helped Pip, just as any good parent would do.

Fundamental Problems

2011-07-07T08:11:00.000-04:00

How come so many children of well-off, attentive, and conscientious parents are growing up into emotionally fragile and narcissistic adults whose dominant feelings are ones of emptiness, confusion, and anxiety? This is the question at the center of the cover article for the Atlantic Monthly’s July/August “Ideas” issue. Entitled “How to Land Your Child in Therapy” and written by a psychologist and mother named Lori Gottlieb, the article argues that in their attempt to provide kids with a perfectly happy childhood, well-meaning parents are depriving their children of the kinds of failures and discomforts necessary for learning resilience, independence, and self-confidence. As happiness cannot be a constant state – it, like all other emotions, is only understood in comparison to all one’s other feelings – these parents, Gottlieb concludes, are preventing their children from acquiring qualities that are vitally important to living a functional and meaningful life.

Gottlieb supports this conclusion by pointing out a range of ways that contemporary parents (of a particular class standing) are paying too much attention to smoothing the ripples in the daily lives of their children. This protective mode begins early with parents swooping in to help a fallen toddler before they even start to cry. It moves on to intervening in the negotiations of preschoolers to insure a parental interpretation of fairness even after the kids who were quarreling have worked things out to their own satisfaction. It spikes with the placing of kids in noncompetitive sports leagues where no one (officially) keeps score.

As these children age, their parents constantly tell them how special they are and rarely offer a meaningful evaluation of their own capacities. They become the center of all family activity with mom and dad shuttling them from place to place and running back home when they forget to turn off their laptop. The product of this kind of attention is a blissfully/ignorantly happy child who moves into adulthood with an overwhelming sense of entitlement and a critical lack of functional resiliency. This “overinvestment” of modern parents in their children, writes Gottlieb, is contributing to a “burgeoning generational narcissism that’s hurting our kids.”

*****

An obvious question that arises from this assessment is: why are we (and both Gottlieb and I consciously include ourselves in this group) parents going to such ends with our children? Gottlieb and all the experts she quotes believe that modern parents are, at one level or another, using their children to address their own emotional issues. Whether this is the absence of other meaningful relationships, a desire to find some avenue for outstanding achievement, or to overcorrect for what they see as their own deficiencies, modern parents are, Gottlieb argues, often crossing the line between “selflessness (making our kids happy) and selfishness (making ourselves happy).”

This line, of course, is a very difficult one to negotiate. Gottlieb herself notes with a touch of bewilderment how she and other experts find themselves experiencing the same inclinations with their own children that they criticize in others. As Dan Kindlon, a child psychologist at Harvard told her, “I’m about to become an empty-nester and sometimes I feel like I’d burn my kids’ college applications just to have somebody to hang around with.”

Ultimately, though, Gottlieb declares that there is a fundamental immaturity at work in their behavior that overinvested parents need to deal with. “Maybe,” she writes, “we parents are the ones who have some growing up to do.” “Our children,” says Wendy Mogul, another expert quoted in the article, “are not our masterpieces.”

*****

It seems to me that the diagnosis of parental immaturity and, more importantly, the idea that we parents need to grow up overlook an important quality embedded in the modern relationship between parent and child. In the agricultural era preceding and overlapping with the industrial revolution, procreation carried with it a certain economic logic. While each new child represented another mouth to feed, it also added another pair of hands to do chores, gather food, herd animals, etc. Given the prevalence of large families during this period, I feel it’s safe to assume that on balance the production of children added slightly more to the family economy than their consumption took away. I think it is also safe to assume that until the advent and widespread acceptance of child labor laws, this economic logic remained an important influence during the industrial era as well. Add into these calculations the need for continued familial care as parents aged, and the rationale for having children certainly extended beyond a mere biological impetus.

Those rationales no longer exist. Having a child in twenty-first century America is an act that places a significant drain on a couple’s resources. To start with, you’re looking at almost two decades of feeding, clothing, educating, entertaining, and insuring this child. Then, if you’re lucky, you get to pay for college. It all costs a lot of money. And with retirement funds, Social Security, Medicare, and the cultural push to maintain an independent household in one’s golden years, children no longer bear the type of caregiving responsibilities for their parents that they used to. It all means that, from a logical perspective, the costs of having a child in this day and age far outweigh the quantifiable benefits.

This reality means that for a great many people the choice to have a child emerges from a largely emotional motivation. In deciding to bear a child, these parents seek to obtain something meaningful and ineffable, an experience that makes the economic costs of the endeavor unimportant. Perhaps this makes parents ‘immature,’ but it fundamentally cannot be any other way. The emotional ‘overinvestment’ of parents is embedded in that relationship from the beginning. You can’t ‘grow-up’ and change it.

And the decision aspect of all of this should not be underestimated. With the development of a pill for birth control in 1960 and the subsequent proliferation and normalization of pharmaceutical contraception, any biological impetus that might be seen as driving procreation can be largely subverted. This disjuncture between sex and reproduction (at least in populations with access to decent health care) has made having a child that much more of a considered choice. In so many more cases now than in earlier eras, childbearing is a project that a couple decides to take on, not one that they happen to fall into.

*****

What I guess I am arguing here is that I find it unfair and unhelpful to condescendingly urge hyper-invested parents to “grow up” in their relationships with their children. In that framework, the only thing one can do that would pass for actual ‘maturity’ is to not have children at all. While this would certainly solve the problem of self-entitled teacups (if they really are that much of a problem), I don’t think that is the kind of change Gottlieb has in mind.

Plus, it is not hard to find other factors that might explain, and provide avenues for influencing, the proliferation of “burgeoning” narcissists. For one thing, there is an awful lot of money to be made from perfection-seeking parents and fragile, self-centered children, particularly in an economy that is more and more oriented towards providing services of every stripe and color. And, aren’t the feelings of emptiness, confusion, and anxiety exactly what advertisers are trying to provoke? In a society where advertising saturates just about every possible experience, why would we expect people to be happy, confident, and fulfilled? I’m not sure it matters what kind of parents one has when the predominant themes of so many images we encounter on a daily basis are that we need something or that we are missing out on something. In light of this bombardment, it seems incredible to believe that people might think about themselves in any other way.

Perhaps a fuller recognition of the effects these forces are having on ourselves and our children would be a more effective start towards keeping all of us out of therapy.

Looking Back; Looking Ahead

2011-07-02T10:53:00.001-04:00

One year ago this week, I published the first post for Post-Industrial Parenthood. In honor of this anniversary here are four discoveries I’ve made in the process of putting this thing together each week:

1. Blogging is good for my parenting.

Parenting is a very gradual process containing long, repetitive stretches of maintenance punctuated by unpredictable bursts of excitement. It is a largely uncertain and constantly incomplete form of work. In the face of this open-endedness, it is helpful to have a project that is capable of providing a sense of accomplishment within a relatively short and easily defined time-frame.

The weekly posts for Post-Industrial Parenthood have come to fit the bill. Each week when I get a post completed and published, I get a little jolt of excitement. The completion of a cycle of outlining, drafting, typing, and publishing makes me feel productive and successful. It also brings me to a moment that I especially enjoy: the one just after completion where I feel justified in not doing anything for a day or two.

In addition to a sense of accomplishment, this project has made the decision-making processes of my parenting easier. I tend to think about the world in a post-hoc manner, feeling my way along and then (over)analyzing later on why I like or dislike something. Writing about the factors involved in such things as our decision not to send Pip or Polly to preschool or my enthusiasm for the kids’ interest in LEGOs has brought to my attention the things I truly value as a parent and has reinforced my understanding of how to realize those values. This understanding has made me a more confident parent as I have a clearer sense of the basic principles I want to guide my decisions in various situations. This doesn’t mean I’ll always make the right choice, but at least I have a better chance of knowing what the right choice is.

And, I get to tell stories in the process. There are frequently events that occur or thoughts that come to mind that I want to share with people but that don’t fit into the flow of everyday conversation. When this happens, these stories and ideas become like a caged animal in my mind. They pace within my skull, circling round and round looking for some way out. At the rare times when a conversation will provide the opening to unleash one of these thoughts, the experience is a mildly ecstatic combination of excitement and relief that feels much like winning a good door-prize at the company Christmas party.

Post-Industrial Parenthood has allowed me to share many more of these thoughts than I would otherwise ever get the chance to. As a result I’ve had many more ecstatic moments and become a more patient and less distracted parent.

2. The audience influences the material.

When I first started writing posts for Post-Industrial Parenthood, I wanted to publish stories that would appeal to friends and family as well as a broader audience of readers who might be interested in some of the social and cultural aspects of parenting in this era. What I did not anticipate was the importance a third group of readers would have on the topics and stories I decided to take on.

About a month or so into writing, I came to realize that I was not just interested in speaking to those who would be reading from week to week but also to those who might read these entries twenty or thirty years from now. This group would obviously include adult versions of Polly and Pip as well as much older versions of myself and Ava. The emerging awareness that I was recording a sort of family history with Post-Industrial Parenthood led me to write about more individual moments and milestones than I had originally intended. On the whole, the blog has become more personal than I initially thought it would be.

3. Kid Moments are blogger candy.

Back in February, Ava and I finished watching the fourth season of the television show 30 Rock. Organized around the interactions between the head writer of a Saturday Night Live-type television show and her boss - a businessman who has almost reached the top of the corporate ladder - 30 Rock is funny because, in addition to presenting the craziness going on behind the scenes of the television show, it satirizes many of the structures, practices, and pressures that are commonplace in large American businesses. Much like with The Office, this satire gave 30 Rock an extra sharpness that made it more interesting than the average television show.

In the fourth season this satire mostly slipped away. It was replaced by a couple cycles of dating/romantic slapstick with the businessman character. While these cycles were still funny, it feels like the originality of the show evaporated. What remained was sitcom candy – a series of storylines that were amusing but largely empty of real substance. After watching a few episodes, these storylines lost their distinction and started to taste like every other half-decent romantic comedy ever made.

In a parenting blog, Kid Moments – those stories where the kids do something that humorously reveals the parents’ ineptitude - present a similar danger. They are easy to write. The stories have a definite beginning, middle, and end. They are funny in a kind of inoffensive, banal way. And they happen just about every week. All together this makes it very tempting to write Kid Moments over and over again. But like candy and romantic slapstick, Kid Moments are largely repetitive and lacking in distinction. As an occasional break for both writer and reader, they are fun. As the main course, they quickly blend together in a mass that is basically dull and lifeless.

4. I’m beginning to figure out what it means to be a post-industrial parent.

When I started this blog last June, I chose the name Post-Industrial Parenthood because it conveyed a sense of the theoretical background upon which my writing would draw. The term ‘post-industrial’ was one I had encountered frequently in graduate school. It was used there mostly to point to a series of transitions taking place in advanced industrial economies like the United States whereby the driving force of economic growth was shifting from the manufacturing of goods to the provision of services. In such an environment jobs in government, research, education, health care, law, banking, and sales become more numerous than those in factories or manufacturing facilities. One result of this shift is the emergence of ‘knowledge’ as an important asset or measure of capacity for both individual workers and companies as a whole. Another is that the geographical location of these assets is becoming much less important than the network or web of (electronic) relations in which they operate. Ideas travel much easier than widgets.

As a parent, these developments exert pressure on me in at least one major way. When ‘knowledge’ and ‘networks’ are the most important assets my kids can obtain in their pursuit of a successful future, everything we do together takes on an extra bit of significance. Gaining ‘knowledge’ is an infinite business. Unlike developing a skill set where you learn a discrete series of operations and work to get better at them, building ‘knowledge’ is a process of constant education. It means gaining exposure to an unending array of ideas, concepts, narratives, facts, stories, and the like. And it starts from day 1. Acquiring ‘knowledge’ does not require the development of other capacities. It is something that is constantly in process. The same goes for building networks. There will always be more people to connect with and more links to be made.

The ‘responsible’ parent senses these facts and acts in accordance with their associated pressures. It’s one reason preschools sell themselves as places where children as young as two years old can gain socialization and prepare for kindergarten instead of as places to send the kids while mom or dad goes grocery shopping. Summer enrichment camps and toddler music groups both appeal in subtle ways to the same combination of ‘knowledge’ building and network development.

For me the central question of post-industrial parenthood is how much of this matters and what values we are enacting with the choices that we make. In a world where capital in the form of ‘knowledge’ and ‘networks’ is theoretically infinite, we’ll kill ourselves trying to acquire it all. The choices we make in the face of this reality and the underlying influences on how these choices appear to us will be a major theme in the year ahead.

Fire and Ice

2011-06-22T08:48:00.000-04:00

Tracking the growth and development of children can be a tricky business. There are plenty of physical traits you can measure with rulers and scales – height, weight, the progressive increase in clothes and shoe sizes – but the intellectual, psychological, and emotional ones are much less accessible. Once you get past basic things like speaking and eating, tracking these traits requires a lot of extrapolation from ad hoc events. Every once in a while, however, you do get some definite indicators regarding the kind of growth that is taking place. Saturday morning brought me one of those moments.

*****

Pip fears thunderstorms. For reasons that he cannot articulate, thunder makes him exceedingly nervous. I think it has something to do with the deep and ominous intensity of the sound and the way it makes things vibrate as a clap rolls through the house. Whenever he hears this, Pip makes a beeline for Ava or me and will follow us around from room to room until he the storm has passed and he feels safe.

On Saturday morning, we had a line of thunderstorms blow across our region just after breakfast. They weren’t bad. There were no severe weather alerts or tornado warnings; just some rumbling and a bit of rain. Pip was handling it pretty well until we went back into the kids’ bedroom to make the beds and put on some daytime clothes. While Pip was pulling up his sheets and blanket, I opened the curtains in the room. He took a peek out the window and immediately collapsed on his pillow. When he looked up at me, his bottom lip was quivering and his eyes had the droopy, searching quality they take on whenever he is about to cry.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“The ice scraper,” he said.

I looked out the window and saw laying along the path that runs beside our garage and into the backyard the black bristles and foot-long yellow handle belonging to one of the snow and ice scrapers for our car. Its presence there on the path was something of a surprise, though not because of the obvious seasonal disjuncture (both Pip and Polly have found our pair of scrapers to be highly versatile and entertaining toys). Instead, it was unusual for us to leave something out like that. We are usually very good about cleaning up all the playthings before we go inside for the evening. This scraper, however, was tucked far enough back along the path to have escaped our notice the day before.

Thinking Pip was concerned about the scraper getting wet, I said to him,

“Don’t worry, a little rain is not going to hurt it.”

To which he replied, “Yes, but it’s going to get struck by lightening.” Then he resolutely jammed his face back into the pillow. It was one of those incongruous moments with kids that are at once painful and downright hilarious. Even as his anguish resonated in my heart, I had to take a second to avoid laughing out loud.

The thing is Pip has a very clear idea of what happens to something when it gets struck by lightening. This idea is linked to a very specific experience. In the spring of last year, we had a line of brutally severe thunderstorms go through our area just before midnight. These storms brought with them a number of tornados and copious amounts of lightening. The storms were strong enough that we spent a good hour or so huddled in the basement that night sitting on blankets and checking the weather radio periodically to see when the danger had finally passed. The next morning we learned that during the storm lightening had taken down a local landmark in spectacular fashion. Up the highway from us, one of the new mega-churches had, a couple of years back, erected a building-sized sculpture depicting the arms and head of Jesus rising out of a small lake that sits in front of the church. As the highest object present in the open field in which the church was built, the sculpture was probably a magnet for lightening. Surely, it had been hit before. But this time it was different. Whatever defenses were in place were not enough to dissipate the massive amount of electrical energy the sculpture had to absorb. And, as it turns out, the styrofoam substance from which it was made was highly flammable. As such, the whole thing caught on fire, and once the sculpture was ablaze there was little to do but take pictures of the black clouds of smoke billowing up into the sky.

Pip and I saw some of those pictures the following afternoon. While he did not appreciate the variety of darkly funny suggestions these images presented, he was fascinated by the fact that lightening could create such a scene. He asked me to tell him the story of what happened over and over again that week and for several months afterwards one of his favorite ways to liven up a boring hour was to ask me about the “statue that got struck by lightening.”

Now, in Pip’s mind, the storm this past Saturday morning presented a similar threat to the yellow ice scraper. Lightening could strike it at any time, and the resulting fire would burn until all that was left was some blackened shards of melted plastic. The thought of this was just too much for him. To help him gain some relief, I talked him through a list of things that were different between the sculpture and the ice scraper. There were the obvious differences in size, the fact that the sculpture had been in an open field while the scraper was tucked away between numerous taller objects, and that, while the sculpture had a steel frame, there was no conductive material of any kind in the ice scraper. By patiently going through this list a couple of times, I began to calm him a bit and to release some of the tension from the position of fetal curvature his body had assumed.

While all of this was going on, Polly had been running back and forth between the living room and the bedroom, playing with some finger puppets and a fire truck. She finally came over to us as I was running for the third or fourth time through the list of reasons the ice scraper was not going to be hit by lightening. Looking over at her I saw that her bottom lip was protruding significantly out and downward, and I was grabbed by the sudden fear that she would be following her brother’s lead into barely contained distress.

I hesitantly asked her the same question I asked of Pip.

“What’s wrong?”

She looked up at me very seriously and, while holding that bottom lip firmly in place, said,

“Polly want to be upset, too.”

I stared at her for a moment wondering if I had heard her correctly, wondering if I had not understood what she was trying to say. Then, from down in the pillow, I heard Pip start to laugh. The laughter seemed to push his face upward, and as he turned toward us his teary eyes sparkled with glee. Seeing Pip, Polly’s face also changed. The bottom lip slipped back into its normal place, and a small grin began to emerge in place of her frown.

With this transformation I finally realized what was going on as well. Polly was obviously not upset. She had not wanted to be left out of whatever Pip was into. So, she had decided to follow his lead. For his part, Pip had picked up on the absurdity of Polly “wanting” to be upset before I had, and found it to be extremely funny. He found it so funny in fact that the ice scraper melted from his memory. He didn’t mention it again until that night at bedtime when, looking out the window, he once again saw it laying on the path by the garage. This second sighting precipitated a flashback and another small breakdown that was finally brought to an end by Ava’s going out and putting the thing away.

*****

A month ago this whole scenario would not have been resolved in the way it was. Polly would have come in to the bedroom with her bottom lip stuck out and not been able to tell us exactly why she was doing it. Pip would not have understood the humor embedded in her act even if she had been able to tell us. That they both did what they did on Saturday morning is an indication of the kind of growth and development that is happening right now with them. It is amazing, hilarious, and unnerving all at the same time.

A week away...

2011-06-16T22:12:00.002-04:00

I don't have a new entry for this week. I've spent much of my writing time helping Ava edit an article she is putting together. As it's now almost done, I'll have something new for you next week.

Training Day

2011-06-09T08:28:00.000-04:00

It may not seem like it, but holding one’s pee and knowing ahead of time when a release of that pee is forthcoming are sequential, not coincidental, skills. This is something I did not appreciate when Pip was making the switch from diapers to underwear. As he started to show interest in using a toilet and began acquiring the ability to hold his pee for longer and longer periods, I expected him also to be able to tell me when he had to go. That he didn’t was a cause of much frustration for me. I didn’t understand the sequence and, as such, every time he wet his pants it sent me into all kinds of confused deliberations. I couldn’t figure out whether I was doing something wrong or he was just trying to antagonize me. This ignorance on my part made the whole toilet training experience much more difficult for Pip than it had to be.

What I understand now is that the tired line, “Toilet training a child is really about training the parents,” is true. The sequential nature involved in developing bladder control means that even after a child has learned the first step, a parent still has to be pro-active in order to get this child to deposit their waste fluids in a toilet instead of on the living room couch.

This is where Polly and I are at this moment. She can hold her pee long enough that wearing underwear all day is a viable proposition. We can go for a long walk and not worry that she will be wet before we get home. We can even get down to the park and back on most days, though this does push us up against her limit. But, as she can’t yet tell me ahead of time when her seal is going to break, I have to make sure she gets to the bathroom on a regular schedule. If I do this, she will stay dry all day. If I fail, she will plow through four sets of clothes in an afternoon.

So, Polly’s bathroom visits are a normal part of our everyday domestic life. She goes after breakfast, before snack, after snack, before lunch, after lunch, after nap, before dinner, and usually twice between dinner and bedtime. This pattern is so regular, I barely have to think about it when we’re at home. The challenge arises when we venture away from the house. Then, the regularity of our schedule breaks down and things get more difficult. On these trips, it becomes my responsibility to keep track of how long it has been since her last bathroom visit and to make a calculated guess as to how much longer we can go before we will need to find a restroom again. As there is no visible gauge by which to measure how much pee is currently residing in her bladder, this calculation is fraught with all kinds of uncertainties. Plus, my ability to keep track of these details is frequently hampered by the plethora of additional variables that come into play when we are out and about.

Our trip to the public library last week presents a prime example of the dynamics involved in this process:

First, I love taking Polly and Pip to the library. There are books to read, computers to type on, and stuffed animals to carry up and down the aisles. And the kids always seem to run into something new and interesting. Last week it was a massive globe overlaid with a contour map that allowed them to feel the difference in elevation between our home, the Rocky Mountains and the Tibetan Plateau. They were enchanted by this globe and wanted to keep spinning it round and round.

At the same time, managing both of them and their disparate interests in this setting can be a challenge. It requires a certain amount of hedging, a certain amount of gambling, and a certain amount of willing ignorance as I keep bouncing back and forth between them. In short, I have to pick my spots and choose at any given moment which pull or request is most important to handle. Within this flow, monitoring Polly’s toilet timing doesn’t always stay at the forefront of my mind.

There is also another variable at play for me in a place such as the public library. I am very self-conscious about the counter-normative nature of my role as a full-time father. What I mean by this self-consciousness is that I know people are watching me, and I feel it is my responsibility to demonstrate what fathers are capable of. Despite the hordes of skilled and accomplished fathers out there, the bar of expectations regarding men’s parenting abilities remains set pretty low. I am reminded of this each time some stranger sees me out with my kids and says in passing “You’ve got your hands full today.” This is supposed to be a friendly and innocuous comment but, as with most pleasantries, it communicates more than the speaker necessarily intends. In this case, it says “I see you are out of your element. Good luck holding it together until you can pass those kids back to their mother.” Again, I know that the people saying this to me are not trying to be mean. They are trying to be sympathetic. And yet, they are basically saying that I, as a man, am largely incapable of handling small children, that when it comes to parenting I am a temporary stand-in, good mostly for providing the kids with some entertainment while the real experts, their mothers, get to take a well-deserved hour away.

For many men, this implication is fine. It allows them to be distanced and distracted when watching their kids. It gives them some leeway to screw up without incurring any real social penalty. It enables them to be little better than a third-rate nanny and still be praised for their efforts.

But I hate it. I don’t want to play the overwhelmed father. I don’t want to have my efforts devalued and brushed aside. And I don’t want other men to get away with shoddy parenting because that’s all that is expected of them.

As such I constantly strive to show how much fathers can handle. I work to stay calm regardless of what Polly and Pip do. I pay close attention to their questions and seek to help them with whatever needs they have. I avoid appearing frazzled or overwhelmed even when I’m tired and frustrated. I inject care and confidence into my interactions with Pip and Polly. I do all of this because I am a good parent but also as a way of demonstrating to those who may be watching that I am fully capable of parenting my children; that, no, my hands aren’t full today.

Then last week, as I am juggling the kids’ various interests while simultaneously trying to select a couple of books the kids will find fun and I will not mind reading repeatedly over the next two weeks, Polly says to me, “Polly needs to pee.” Unfortunately, what she means by this is: “I am currently hosing down my drawers and you may want to get me to the nearest bathroom forthwith.” So, I quickly scoop her up, call for Pip to follow us, and head for the restroom where I can switch out her wet pants and underwear for the dry set I always carry in my backpack.

No problem. Polly and Pip handle the whole thing very well. Polly doesn’t get upset about being whisked up and away and Pip follows us without hesitation. In the bathroom, Polly stands still while I take off her soiled duds and replace them with a clean set of pants and a pair of blue rocket ship underwear. Pip takes the opportunity to relieve himself and wash his hands. In less than five minutes we are back out on the library floor and heading back to our respective places.

I’m feeling pretty good about the whole situation until I get back to the bookshelf where Polly and I were standing. There I find a wet spot on the carpet. It’s not large but it’s clearly fresh and is certainly not water. I walk over to the spot and rub it a bit with my shoe. It does not fade any.

And now, I begin to ponder an ethical question: Do I tell anyone about this?

The proper answer would have been “yes.” It’s the children’s section of the library. Kids pee on the carpet from time to time. I could have told the librarian at the desk twenty feet away from us and she would have called someone from the custodial staff to come and spray it with some disinfectant. Then it would have been done.

But I chose to go with “no.” I didn’t want to face the female librarian and tell her that one of my kids pissed on the floor and then have her give me the sympathetic, that’s-okay-you’re-just-a-dad look. So, instead I stood on the spot for a few moments and then moved Pip and Polly to another section. I rationalized this action by saying that the spot wasn’t very big and probably would vanish soon anyway. Then I could walk away with nothing harmed and no one the wiser.

In retrospect, I realize I botched this situation in two major ways. First, there was an obviously right thing to do, and I didn’t do it. Instead, I acted like a temporary stand-in and took the easy way out. In the process I undermined my own internal credibility when it comes to all those good parenting exhibitions.

Second, I missed two demonstration moments. One of them was the opportunity to demonstrate for Polly and Pip how we should collectively care for and maintain our public spaces. While I don’t think they knew about the spot on the carpet, by not bringing it to their attention and then going to talk to the librarian about it, I missed the chance to act out the kind of responsibility that I would like for them to take on as they get older. Similar sorts of opportunities will come around again but it’s a shame to waste such a good one.

The second opportunity was a bit more ephemeral. By not bringing the spot to the librarian’s attention I missed the chance to make an active performance of what a father is capable of. All my efforts to exude confidence and care with the kids in public are done in the hopes that others are observing us and recognize on some level how well that father is doing. By going over to the librarian’s desk, I could have made a more direct and immediate demonstration of these same ideals.

The parent who handles problems well is even more impressive than the parent for whom there are no problems at all. Sadly, in this instance I was neither parent and for that I am truly sorry. It looks like I have a bit more training to do.

The Power of Eating

2011-06-01T12:53:00.000-04:00

Why do we eat what we do when we do? Humans may be the only animals in the world for whom sustenance is not the first and final answer to this question. The events surrounding Pip’s hunger strike brought this reality home to me. We don’t just eat to eat. Food – making it, serving it, eating it, cleaning it up – is wrapped up in power. All of these processes are enacted through the social relations in which we exist. We don’t just eat because we’re hungry. We eat for entertainment. We eat to show love. We push food on others in order to gain attention. We refuse to eat for the same reason. Eating is never just about getting food into our bodies. It is simultaneously and inescapably about shaping, producing even, the array of relations in which we live.

I know this because I have done all of these things. I’ve purposely eaten three helpings of turkey at Thanksgiving to impress Ava’s family. I’ve consumed stupid amounts of pizza or hamburgers or rolls or buffalo wings in order to elicit astonished laughs from my friends. I’ve pushed my homemade mac and cheese on people at numerous picnics and pot-lucks because I wanted them to make some fuss over me. I’ve eaten discernibly less food than usual when I’ve been upset with someone or something.

While these acts are sometimes consciously pursued, more often they just happen in the course of things. The strategic manipulations involved are so well-established and naturalized that I don’t even realize what I am doing. They are part of the socio-cultural inheritance that I acquired long ago.

And now, for better or worse, I am passing them on to my kids.

Like most parents, Ava and I want our children to eat well. This desire spurs a series of actions on my part that from a distance seem odd. For example, I constantly find myself telling both Pip and Polly what good eaters they are. I do this strategically in hopes that the positive-reinforcement will over time instill in them a feeling of joy when they eat sufficient amounts of healthy food. But, I wonder, shouldn’t one’s body give you that feeling on its own? Is this behavioral training really necessary? Am I doing more harm than good by pushing Polly and Pip to pay more attention to the amount of food on their plates or the reactions of the people around them than to the signals from their body?

Then there is my all-too-common practice of trying to coax one more spoonful of something into Polly and Pip. Why does it matter so much that Polly gets down two spoonfuls of spinach instead of the one she willingly ate? It’s not like the second bite is going to make one bit of difference to her body. Nor is there a real down-the-road consequence. She already happily ate one bite. She’ll eat more another day. And yet, I prod her lips. I make the spoon fly like a helicopter around her head. I keep her at the table until she sweeps the spoon clean. Then I am satisfied.

*****

As far as I can tell there are at least a couple of diabolical impulses going on here. At one level, there is the desire to have Pip and Polly demonstrate their appreciation for the work that went into preparing food for them. Ava and I work hard to make meals that are both tasty and healthy. We avoid prepackaged food and seldom get take-out from a restaurant. Given the labor involved in preparing and cooking their meals, it is gratifying to see them cleaning off their plates and incredibly frustrating when they pick and nibble. While it’s just food, these actions feel more substantial to us. They are like validations and rejections of our labor and our love.

On another level, Polly and Pip’s food consumption becomes a venue for me to reproduce my position of authority as a parent. I know that Pip and Polly sleep better when they have eaten a good dinner. I know that Polly and Pip get cranky when they don’t eat enough. I know they poop more regularly and easily if they eat the vegetables we prepare for them. Ultimately, “I know what is good for them” and mealtimes provide an excellent opportunity to remind them of this. If I think Polly should eat two spoonfuls of spinach then I am justified in pushing the second spoonful on her. (This is, of course, a trap because Polly is her own locus of power, and she rightfully pushes back against me in these moments. Caring authority is earned not imposed.)

One other force at work is my own desire to feel useful as a parent. If I am not actively involved in directing the consumption of Pip and Polly’s food, I start to feel unneeded, unnecessary even. It is a strange and awkward feeling. When this feeling is coupled with the idea that a good parent has a child who eats well, I feel like I have to stick my head in there and make sure that they eat. Their (supposed) dependence reinforces my identification as a parent, and their eating well justifies the sense I have of my own ‘goodness.’

*****

Dr. Bill Sears, the guru to whom we turn when we have child-related questions, promotes the idea that children should be allowed to eat as they choose. He suggests that early on in their child’s life parents should prepare an array of healthy foods, serve them in ice cube trays, and allow the child to nibble as much or little as she likes. The idea is that the parent can control the available selection of foods, but the child chooses what tastes good and how much of it she wants to eat. In the process, the child learns to listen to her body’s signals and avoids some of the confusion that comes from the dynamics of parent-directed eating.

While I could not quite accomplish the ice cube tray trick, I have been working hard to keep my interfering impulses at bay. I have become much better at letting Polly and Pip eat what they want from their plate and not getting worked up when they leave something untouched. I’ve also learned to bring out from the kitchen only as much of a given food as I want them to eat. With these two gestures we have been able to significantly reduce the number of struggles that take place during meal times. The power of eating remains in play, but by shifting its flows we have created happier and more enjoyable meals for all of us.

Hunger Strike

2011-05-25T10:33:00.000-04:00

People can be perplexing creatures. Shaped by a mix of social and cultural influences, biochemical fluctuations, and personal divinities, we’re creatures of routine and habit until suddenly we’re not. This irrationality seems to be a fundamental part of being human. It’s what makes each person different, lively, interesting. It is often a source of great joy. At the same time, it can be the genesis of real pain. Especially when you’re dealing with your kids.

Three weeks ago Pip stopped eating. At breakfast on that Tuesday morning he ate a half-piece of toast and then said he was full. He skipped his usual morning snack and then at lunch only ate a few bites of his sandwich before begging off with a stomachache. At dinner he said he was too distracted to eat. It was unclear exactly what was distracting him.

The next day brought the same thing, and so did the day after that. During each meal he would half-heartedly nibble a couple of bites and then tell us he was done. At first we did not think too much of it. Perhaps he was feeling sick or a little off. We figured the next day he would wake up hungry and plow through a couple days worth of food in twenty-four hours. But after three days of eating just a bare minimum of food, he showed no signs of returning to normal.

While his absence of interest in food was frustrating, what really worried us was the depressive demeanor that accompanied it. At the table, he would slump in his chair and stare blankly ahead or slowly and drearily move his food around his plate. His normal, overwhelming chatter vanished into a series of thick silences which he broke only to provide single word responses to the questions Ava and I directed at him. He asked no questions of us. He told no stories. He made no requests. He had no demands. All of the barely contained energy that makes him such a beautiful kid was drained away. What remained was an enigmatic husk.

Away from the table, things were only slightly better. He went about his normal daily activities – getting dressed and brushing his teeth, doing a reading lesson, playing with some toys, riding his bike – but there was always a crucial element missing. Every movement, every action he undertook was just slower, softer, quieter, duller than usual. It was like looking at a rainbow photographed in black and white. His form was present but his true animas, the magic dynamism of his colors, was gone.

This state of affairs continued into the latter half of the week. On Thursday and Friday I really began wondering what the hell was going on. I began periodically asking him “what’s wrong?” but this was a question he was probably unable answer even if he had been willing. I picked through my memories from the previous week searching for something that might have triggered this: was it because I had scolded him one evening for being too jumpy and out of control during our bedtime routine? Was it because I had gotten frustrated with him one morning because he woke up whiny? Was it because I had been spending more time with Polly as she was toilet-training? Was it because I had been less than understanding one night when he could not go back to sleep at 2 AM? Every little moment of negativity I had encountered with him over the past couple of weeks became, in my mind, a potential generator of his funk.

In the midst of all this pondering, I became very aware of the delicate balance I wanted to strike in my interactions with Pip. At one level, I was very conscious of the manipulative possibilities at work in his behavior and sought not to reinforce it with a heightened level of attention and special enticements. At the same time, I didn’t want to ignore the obvious and pretend like everything was just fine either. As such, I began engaging in all kinds of complex gymnastics with him, trying to do things the way we normally would do them while simultaneously probing him, asking him lots of extra questions, and trying to engage him in some kind of conversation. These efforts were not very fruitful. Ultimately, they just sucked the life right out of our house. In measuring every action and every word before moving forward with anything, I squeezed all the life out of the air around us, suffocating us in an atmosphere devoid of spontaneity.

On Friday, the situation brought me to tears. The precipitating incident came at dinner. After two bites of his food, Pip dripped slowly out of his chair and onto the floor. Then he stayed there on his hands and knees looking absently out through the windows at the front of our apartment. I got down beside him and asked,

“What are you doing, Pip?”

“Just looking at the trees,” he replied in a slow, distant voice.

I looked up at Ava and felt tears starting to build on the lashes of my eyes. I was done. Whatever it was that had gotten into Pip was now taking me down as well.

Fortunately, Ava had been working on her own theories – perhaps he needs a change in sleep patterns; maybe he is compensating for the increasing difficulty of his reading lessons; it could be he is just bored with our regular cycle of foods; perhaps he is bothered by sitting beside an increasingly active Polly at the dinner table; maybe he needs more time with four-year-olds instead of adults and two-year-olds. We talked through these and several other ideas that night and decided to take a more active approach to solving his funk the next day.

So, on Saturday morning breakfast was served with a few silly variations: oatmeal in a juice glass, egg sandwich instead of the usual egg and toast. After breakfast we moved the dining room table, pushing it from the center of the room to a position by the windows, and then rearranged the chairs such that Pip and Polly were facing each other across the table. For dinner that night we actively engaged him in the process of selecting the meal choices, preparing the food, and getting it from the kitchen to the dinner table.

The effect was not instantaneous, but there was some noticeable improvement. He ate more breakfast and seemed a touch more lively at that morning’s swim lessons. When he really perked up was later that afternoon after we ran into a new friend of his. The interaction was relatively brief - consisting mostly of showing each other how much they could hop on one foot – but it seemed to be the thing that pushed him over a threshold and returned him back to something approaching his normal vivacity.

In the wake of these changes, Sunday was a much better day. Pip ate his usual portions and went about the day with his accustomed exuberance. Then on Monday morning, he slipped. We got up at our normal weekday time – about 30 minutes earlier than on the weekends – and Ava and I started making breakfast before Pip and Polly got out of the bed. The result was not good. Pip was very upset at not being able to take part in the making of breakfast and by the time Ava left for work it looked like we might have lost some of the progress we had made over the weekend. Fortunately, Pip and I went back to the kitchen and started breakfast over again. This seemed to assuage him and, once he got some food in him, he went about things with his usual cheer.

He’s been fine ever since.

*****

I don’t know what happened that week. Maybe it was a biochemical hiccup related to a coming growth spurt. Maybe it was a necessary break from an accumulation of unspoken grievances. Maybe it was a need to wake up differently in the morning. Or it could be something completely unrelated. We’ll never really know.

But, for the last two weeks Pip’s level of food consumption has sky-rocketed. Most meals he now cleans his plate and asks for second and, sometimes, third helpings. And the pace at which he is eating has increased as well. He used to pick his way through his food at an excruciatingly slow pace. Now, he usually finishes his first helping in about the same time as Polly and me. These changes are both a relief and a curiosity. I’m thrilled to have him eating with such gusto, but I find it hard to understand how his new appetite fits into the puzzle of his previous disinterest. Was his funk really caused by the food or the arrangements at mealtime? Or is this spurt of interest just a side effect of resolving whatever was actually at the heart of this crisis? Again, we’ll never really know.

Whatever the case, I sure am happy to see him bouncing around the house again.

Losing Childhood

2011-05-20T07:59:00.001-04:00

In the April 2011 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, there were three review articles devoted to books about parenting and childhood. The first two covered various angles of Amy Chua’s Tiger Mother book. The third, written by Christina Schwarz and entitled “Leave Those Kids Alone,” posed a related but broader question: What happened to just letting kids play?

Schwarz took as her jumping off point a memoir of childhood originally published in 1957 and recently reissued called “Where Did You Go? Out. What Did You Do? Nothing.” This book, written by a man named Robert Paul Smith, simultaneously reminisces about childhood play in the early 20th century and disparages adult-organized activities of the 1950s like summer camps and Little League. It invokes a nostalgic world where a child had the space – both physical and metaphorical – to engage in kinds of play that seem foreign today, to, in Smith’s words, take the opportunity to “find out whether he breathes differently when he’s thinking about it than when he’s just breathing,” or to, in Schwarz’s words, “stare at the sky and study the imperfections in his own eyeball.” To put it simply, Smith describes a world where play was, frankly, to do nothing in particular.

In contrast to Smith’s vision of a “Tom Sawyer childhood,” Schwarz half-heartedly jokes that contemporary kids, “boxed-in by adult-imposed structure[s]” in the form of professional music lessons, high-intensity soccer leagues, and foreign-language tutoring, “apparently…have for so long been deprived of time and space to play that they no longer know how. They’re like those eyeless fish in caves.” She then argues, more seriously, that in the process of all this developmental work something of true value is being lost. “Childhood,” she concludes, “those first, fresh experiences of the world, unclouded by reason and practicality, when you are the center of existence and anything might happen – should be regarded less as a springboard to striving adulthood than as a well of rich individual perception and experience to which you can return for sustenance throughout life.”

While I might quibble with Schwarz that there is some balance to be struck between living in the now and working towards the future in all stages of life, I am in full agreement with the main thrust of her argument. Young kids get sucked into a lot of organized stuff these days, and I’m dubious that all this commotion will help them live happier lives. I say this, in part, because my own best memories from being 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 years old reflect the kind of play Smith describes: heading out with one of my friends to explore the creeks and wooded areas around my house, hopping on my bike and repeatedly riding up and down hills with other kids from the neighborhood, grabbing my sled on a snowy day and walking off in search of the best place to slide or jump or fall, playing pick-up games first of spotlight tag and later of basketball, football, and wiffleball. There were days during the summer when the only times my sister and I saw my parents were during meals and at bedtime.

Now, thirty years later, it’s difficult for me to imagine my own kids playing this way. The kind of creative play and unsupervised freedom that I enjoyed - at what now seems like an incredibly young age - was enabled and supported by a set of conditions that I believe are less and less easy to find in our present child-raising environment.

For one thing, they don’t physically build neighborhoods the same way anymore. The two neighborhoods I grew up in were both built one house at a time. Empty lots were left intact with all their trees and rocks and dips and swells. The drainage areas where the creeks ran were wooded and undeveloped. Backyards were rarely fenced in. These were the spaces in which we traveled. These were the spaces of adventure and exploration, the ones where we built forts and climbed trees, the spots where we imagined entirely new worlds for ourselves. Now, it is common practice in developing a new middle-class neighborhood to bulldoze every living thing, grade out each lot, build a whole bunch of houses at once, and fence in every backyard. The only open spaces available for play are the sidewalks, the roads, and the specifically designated playgrounds. It’s a limited and limiting terrain.

Even more important than the physical changes in neighborhood construction over the last thirty years is that the social structure that existed in my old neighborhoods is now more difficult to find. For starters, one of the things that gave my mother the confidence to let my sister and me roam was her reasonable assumption that were we to get into real trouble someone would be around to help us out. I don’t have that same confidence with my current middle-class neighborhood. So many of the households contain two working parents that people are just not around as much. The parents are occupied every day at least until dinner. The kids are in after-school programs or the assorted variety of other organized activities that fill the time until the parents’ workdays are through. This gives the space around us an emptiness that I don’t remember my old neighborhoods having. (though I can’t blame many parents for going ahead and tracking kids into focused training in music or language or sports or whatever. If you are going to have to pay someone to take care of the kids anyway, they might as well gain something from the investment.)

Another reason for this feeling of emptiness may be the labor mobility that is now so highly prized in the middle and upper reaches of our economy. The nature of the contemporary geography of employment is such that moving up often means moving out, and the constant shuffling involved undercuts the network of relations that enable us to trust our neighbors with our kids. For example, we moved into our current neighborhood last July. This in and of itself is not that big a deal. In the neighborhoods of my youth there were always a few people moving in and moving out. However, as more and more people become movers, it leaves fewer people to anchor the social community of the neighborhood. There is a tipping point where this web begins to break apart and each new family that moves in has to build a network instead being able to merge into an established one. I feel like this is the situation we are in right now.

All of these dynamics also have ramifications for our kids’ development. One of the more significant social structures among the kids in both neighborhoods of my childhood was a generational chain through which the commonly known games, stories, secret places and such of the neighborhood was passed down from older kids to younger kids. There was nothing official or ceremonial about this. It just happened as a consequence of the mixing of ages involved in our play.

If it appears that children now no longer know how to play, I would argue that this is in part because this generational chain has been ruptured. As kids have become more engaged in activities outside the neighborhood - and in the process are more and more segregated into distinct age groups – the cross-fertilization that occurs among a group of heterogeneous ages is being lost. This leaves parents like me in the awkward position of trying to fill this absence, of trying to generate games and start up adventures that stimulate and push my kids the way I was by my efforts to keep up with the older kids in the neighborhood.

Ultimately, Schwarz would see my efforts in this regard as another example of an “interfering adult” whose structures are sapping childhood of its magic. She might even see me as being just as implicated in the atrophy of childhood as the Tiger Mothers or Tennis Fathers who so adamantly drive their children toward adult achievements. In either case, her article ends with a final plea directed at people like me that we back off our kids just a bit and allow them the freedom to live as children instead of as adults-in-the-making. It is a sentiment I want to wholeheartedly embrace. Unfortunately, I think it will take more than just stepping back to give our kids the childhood Schwarz imagines they should have.

****************************************************************
Interested in stories about our family or just some thoughts about being a parent in this day and age?

Take a look at my blog at http://www.postindustrialparenthood.blogspot.com

There's a new post every Thursday.

The Power of Reading

2011-05-12T00:09:00.000-04:00

I want my kids to be a lot of things - smart, respective, friendly, inquisitive, creative, curious, happy – and I often look for ways to encourage these qualities in them. I read to them. I encourage them to use their imaginations to build things and to tell elaborate stories. I explain everyday things to them using the language of science and mathematics whenever possible. I strive to be friendly and respectful with them and others at all times. I smile and laugh a lot. I seek to model the kind of people I want them to become.

While this seems like plenty to expect, there is also another set of qualities I would like for them to possess: the ability to persevere in the face of adversity; the ability to accept their own shortcomings and work to improve them; and the ability to take on a challenge, to endure the inevitable failings that come with trying something difficult, and to ultimately do the labor necessary to find success. More than anything else, these are the qualities that will enable them to carve out a place for themselves in the world, to take their dreams and turn them into realities.

The problem I face with instilling this second set of qualities is that the situations necessary for developing them are not situations I want to intentionally create. I like to keep the environment around our house calm and happy. I like to use redirection to solve problems. I prefer to tell the kids what they can do instead of what they are doing wrong. This doesn’t mean that Polly and Pip’s lives are free of adversity. But, the post hoc nature of working through such moments does not lend itself to systematically developing the skills necessary for handling them.

Amy Chua’s Tiger Mother essay made me worry about this even more. If her kids gained nothing else from having her as a parent, they developed strategies to deal with adversity. I began to wonder if I should be doing something more for Pip and Polly in this regard. What I didn’t realize at the time was that the solution to my worries would come from something we were already doing: teaching Pip how to read.

*****

Pip and I have doing reading lessons every weekday for a couple of months now. We are using a book of progressive lessons that asks Pip to do a bit more every day. The pace is fast, and this is forcing Pip to work hard. Within two months he has gone from identifying a couple of sounds to reading full paragraphs. Fortunately, he can feel this progress, and those positive vibes encourage him to keep coming back for more.

The hardest thing with the reading lessons is that there is always something that gets him hung up. This week’s challenge has been getting out the word “tame.” For whatever reason, whenever he sees this word, all he can get out is “tam.” He knows this isn’t right, but he can’t get his mouth to hold the long ‘a’ sound through the transition to the ‘m’ sound. Instead, he starts with a long ‘a’ and then morphs into a short ‘a’ before saying the ‘m’ sound. Then when he says the word quickly the wrong sounds come out.

When the reading lessons first started getting harder about a month ago, neither Pip nor I knew how to handle this kind of challenge. After failing a couple of times to get a word right, Pip would just flop his head down on the table and say “I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.” A few tears would often follow. This display would frustrate me because I felt the amount of drama was way out of proportion to the actual problem. I would have to get him a handkerchief, give him a couple of moments to compose himself, and then coax him into trying the word again. This would eventually work, but the frequency of these breakdowns meant that each reading lesson took an incredibly long time to complete.

So, we began trying some different strategies. First, we worked on eliminating “I can’t” from Pip’s reactions and replacing it with something more positive. I suggested “I think I can” from the old children’s book ‘The Little Engine That Could.’ Pip rejected this and decided on “I’m trying” instead.

Second, I found that letting him take a break for a moment when we encounter a problem only prolonged the process of working through the problem as he was less inclined to go back into the lesson if he walked away from it feeling unsuccessful. So now, we just take a breath for a moment without leaving our seats, then we dive back in.

Third, I am working to get him to go back to his basic skill set whenever he encounters a problem. One of the great things about this particular reading book is that it focuses on teaching the process of sounding things out as much as the actual sounds and words themselves. From the very start it had us doing exercises in which I said a set of words slowly and Pip then repeated them. Now when Pip encounters a word he can’t read, I take him back to the beginning. We identify each of the sounds in the word. Then we say the sounds slowly together. Then I tell him to say them together quickly. This way I can give him an assist while not actually telling him the word. More importantly, it gives us a strategy to go to when Pip stumbles on a word and falls prey to frustrated guessing.

*****

Friday’s lesson brought together all of this factors. Pip had trouble again, this time with the word “fame.” When he did not get it right initially, he started guessing haphazardly and moving farther and farther away from his target. I stopped him and had him take a breath. Then I told him to go back to our basics. He worked the sounds again and again. He did not ask me to just tell him the word. He went through the full process, repeatedly saying “I’m trying. I’m trying.” Eventually, he got the word out and with it gained a sense of accomplishment that carried him like a wave through the rest of the lesson. I couldn’t have been more proud of him.

*****

The gains from all of this work are twofold: 1) Pip is learning how to manage failure, how to keep himself going, and how to overcome or work through sticking points; and 2) I am learning how to guide him without resorting to meanness or anger; how to keep him focused on the task at hand; and how to walk him back without just telling him the answer. The result – while still a work in progress – will hopefully be both a kid who has gained the confidence and skills to fail at something and eventually work towards a solution and a parent who understands how to push without being demanding and how to guide without disabling.

We began reading lessons because I wanted Pip to learn how to read. It turns out that the side effects of this effort may be just as significant to his long-term success as the main objective. This is a welcome surprise that makes me even more excited to get Polly started when she is ready. I could not have planned any better way to develop their abilities to deal with adversity.

POLLY!...POLLY!

2011-05-04T23:32:00.002-04:00

About once a day I find myself saying about Polly, “That’s something that Pip use to do.” Usually I say this as a reminder when Poly does something I don’t like – chucking a stuffed animal across the room, flinging her feet up on the dinner table, holding her hand against a running faucet and spraying water everywhere. These are the experiments and antics of a two-year-old, and as she grows older they will disappear. The reminder keeps me from getting too worked up about them.

But, there is at least one thing Polly does for which Pip provided no precedent: Polly always speaks about herself in the third person. Unlike some other households where the chorus of “MINE!” can pound you into the ground, our house is filled with oddly royal declarations of third-person self-referentiality like “May Polly go play with Polly’s toys?” and “Polly want to do it” or when things are slipping out of her grasp just “POLLY!” For her, there is no “I” or “me” or “my.” There is only “Polly.”

How this came to be I am not sure. I would like to blame Elmo, Sesame Street’s little red monster whose own statements of perpetual self-reference I have read over and over to Polly. Ava tells me I’m being silly, and she’s probably right. Its more likely Polly picked this up from us than from Elmo.

As I pondered this, I realized that I refer to “Daddy” a lot in talking with the kids. When we’re getting ready to do something, I tell them what Daddy is going to do. When I need to run down to the basement for a moment, I tell them that Daddy will be right back. When I put them down for a nap, I tell them that Daddy loves them. At times it sounds like I’m talking about another person or that I’m trying in a subtle way to hold the Daddy identity at arms length from me. But, neither is the case. Instead, this is mostly just a habit born of my early attempts to act cute with Polly and Pip.

Another likely culprit in this situation is birth order. Polly was born into a world in which words constantly swirled around her. Much of this was driven by discussions with or questions asked by the ever loquacious Pip. As such, before she could talk Polly heard conversations about her all the time. And within these conversations, she was obviously never “I” or “me;” she was always “Polly.”

*****

When Polly first started talking, one of the things she did was to lay claim to things by using her name. If she wanted something, she would point at it then make a clasping gesture with her hand and say “Polly.” It was so much more amusing and endearing than “mine!” that we didn’t make any real efforts to change it. Now she is two years old and in transition from speaking in sentences to speaking in paragraphs. I still find the absence of personal pronouns in her speech amusing and endearing, but it is probably time to teach her the correct way to refer to herself in everyday speech. I don’t want her to reach twelve years of age and still be talking about herself in the third person like some professional athlete with an over-inflated ego. I imagine it would not go over well with her middle school teachers when she says “Polly decided not to do her homework today. Perhaps Polly will do it tomorrow.”

Unfortunately, I don’t really know how to go about correcting her. Since this was not a challenge I had to resolve with Pip, I don’t have a blueprint to follow or a history of mistakes to avoid. I’m at square one and have to feel my way along. At first, I thought that if I corrected my own use of “Daddy” and started using the first-person more often, she would follow suit. This appears to not be working. After a couple of months of correcting myself, Polly has yet to volunteer an “I” or a “me” of her own volition.

So now I am stepping up the interference. During meals and whenever I get a chance I am asking her to repeat any sentence in which she uses “Polly” instead of the correct personal pronoun. I give her the corrected version and then ask her to say the sentence again. This is a tactic Ava and I have used in trying to get the words “please” and “may I” into the kids’ regular usage, and we’ve had enough success with this that it seems worth trying for the third-to-first person switch as well. At this point, I’m not sure what other strategy there is.

*****

Ultimately, I’m not in a hurry to erase Polly’s self-referentiality. I figure that for now if I can get her to use “I” or “me” every once in a while then I have established the idea well enough for a more sustained push later on. As she gets older and more conscious of what she says and how she says things, then we can really work on it. At four years old, Pip has been remarkable in his ability to quickly change established linguistic habits once we point them out to him and provide him with an alternative. I imagine the same will be true for Polly. When the time comes and she swiftly dispenses with "Polly" in favor of "I" and "me," I suspect I will once again be saying, “Pip used to do that, too.”

On Illness and Memory

2011-04-28T00:17:00.002-04:00

Polly and Pip were sick last week. It was some sort of minor respiratory bug that produced a lot of snot, irritated their noses with all the wiping, gave them both a low-grade fever, and kept all of us from sleeping well. It took about four days for them to get through the worst of it. Now we just have to finish off the last of the snot.

The whole experience was relatively normal except for one small coincidence: About this time a year ago, I had to take Pip to the emergency room because what I originally thought was just another cold turned out to be much more.

*****

Ava had a job interview that week. The day before she left, Pip developed the sniffles and a fever. It seemed like no big deal. He had been bringing home colds from preschool all winter long. That night his temperature went up and with it his breathing rate. We’d seen this before, so I gave him some fever reducer and did not worry too much about it.

At breakfast the next morning, it quickly became obvious that he was laboring to breathe. Every intake of air was short and quick. Every breath out sounded like he was blowing bubbles through a straw. I spent an hour watching the bit of skin between his collarbones flex in and out as he worked to get enough air into his lungs. I kept hoping the motion in this little triangle would fade back to its normal state of calm, that his difficulty was just the result of some overnight mucus accumulation that had to be cleared out. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case and, after a brief phone call to our doctor, I packed up some food and books and took both kids with me to the emergency room at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital.

The experience of walking into that emergency room in the middle of a weekday was a paradoxical one. It was a relief to be doing something, to be past the stage of weighing whether I should or should not take him somewhere. It was also comforting to walk into the ER and find the waiting area largely vacant. There were a few people scattered about the available seating but the general feeling was one of an airport in the early hours of the morning. The space was calm and still, almost in repose, as if composing itself before the rush that would eventually come. At the same time, I was anxious to get Pip in to see a doctor. He was breathing like Darth Vader, but I had to stand quietly in line as a young woman gradually signed in patients at the registration desk then trundle both kids and our stuff over to the waiting area to hang out until a nurse called us back into the ER itself. The absence of urgency in the process was unnerving.

Once we got out of the waiting room things happened more quickly. We spent only a few minutes in the nurses’ triage station before moving into an examining room. In this room the hospital staff got Pip hooked up to some monitors and a doctor started assessing his condition. After some observation and a couple of tests, they found no major problems. So they gave him a steroid inhalant to dilate his bronchial tubes in the hopes that this would give his body the chance to push back against the mucus. (In another argument for baby-wearing, I was able to do the necessary paperwork, talk to the doctor about Pip, feed both kids, keep Polly from messing with the room’s medical equipment, and eventually get her a nap by holding her in our baby-carrier the whole time.)

After administering the inhalant, the doctors left us alone for a while and Pip took a well-deserved nap. The whole time he slept all I did was watch the monitor that was tracking his respiration rate, trying to exert whatever force I could to make that number move slowly downward. I felt each slight drop as a personal success and each little rise as a horrific failure. Eventually, the drops began to outnumber the gains and my sense of crisis started to fade. Around dinnertime, the doctors released Pip from the ER.

*****

Of all the things that happened in that twenty-four hour period, there is one image that has come to dominate my emotional memory. It comes from our time in the hospital, as we were escorting Pip to the X-ray lab for a chest X-ray. A nurse was leading us. Pip was following close behind her and Polly and I were bringing up the rear. There was something about Pip in that moment. He was walking down the hallway wearing a hospital gown, brown pants, and leather shoes with thick soles and wide laces. A bit of red from the dinosaur underwear he was wearing peeked out between the overlapping edges of the gown. His body posture was relaxed but curious. He kept turning his head left and right as if briefly pondering over each of the things he passed: the beeping green monitors, the empty stretchers, the IV tubes dripping their clear liquid, the stark red bags of hazardous waste. While doing this his bright blue eyes widened and took on an angelic hue. I don’t think I was the only one who saw it because everyone we passed looked down at him and smiled.

It was a beautiful, poignant, and potentially tragic picture – the blond haired boy contentedly padding his way along, unconcerned that his lungs might be filling up with life-quenching mucus. I remember thinking in the moment that so many truly sick kids have this kind of beatific aura about them and that in some ways it is a very cruel thing for a parent to see. I hoped and hoped and hoped that it was not an indication of where Pip’s illness was heading.

Luckily, it was not. Several colds have come and gone without another trip to the hospital. It appears that this event was an outlier, an aberration of sorts, and not an indicator of some chronic or terminal disease. But the crystalline wonder and fear of that walk to the X-ray lab remains with me. I manage to keep it locked down most hours of the day, but in the middle of the night, with Pip’s snot filled nose gargling beside me it skips loose for a few minutes. I find myself comparing his breaths to mine, trying to judge if they are unusually quick or painfully short. When it feels like they are, the image comes floating back. I see Pip in his hospital gown and leather shoes walking blithely past all those smiling faces, down the florescent hallway towards a white light from which he can never return. It never fails to overwhelm me and it may be the real reason why the nights that either child is sick are sleepless ones for me.

The Effects of Playgroup

2011-04-21T14:19:00.002-04:00

On Friday, Polly and Pip went to a playgroup with some neighbors we recently met. Now, they are both snotty, feverish, and not sleeping well. As a result, I lost my usual writing time the last two nights and do not have a post ready for this week.

For a substitute, I offer the comments from last week's Daddy Dialectic post. I went back and forth with a couple of others over exactly what we should take from my post, and I thought the results were worth perusing. Here is the link: http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=23363296&postID=474601232720578166.

Hopefully, this bug won't last too long, and I'll have something more for next week.

Breaking Down a Real Lemon

2011-04-13T22:54:00.003-04:00

Two items for today.

First, I recently read a very erudite and funny spin off from the topic of Tiger Mothers by blogger Paul Rasmussen. In it he pits Tiger Mothers against the legendary mothers of Sparta and finds that the Tigers are weak by comparison. You can find the post here.

Second, this week's full post can be found on the Daddy Dialectic blog. Here's a short teaser to whet your interest:

Imagine the following scenario:

A father and his five-year-old daughter head out to a basketball court at the local playground. He has carries his regulation ball on his hip. She rolls her kid-sized version in front of her, occasionally kicking it to keep it moving. When they reach the court, the father shoots a couple of shots while his daughter proceeds to dribble her ball around the court with two hands. After a few minutes, the daughter says,

“Look Daddy.”

When he looks her direction she begins awkwardly batting at her ball with just her right hand, managing to dribble it four times before it gets away from her. After corralling the ball, she looks up proudly at her father. He smiles quietly back at her. Then he leans forward slightly and dribbles his own ball effortlessly back and forth between his legs.

You can read the rest of the post here.

Ripple Effects from a Petty Theft

2011-04-08T00:38:00.002-04:00

Last Saturday night, somebody stole our cellphone. It was a petty crime. There was no damage or injuries. Due to a change in our regular routine and some distracted carelessness on my part, the thief had an easy grab and walk away situation.

That afternoon I had taken the kids with me to pick up Ava from the airport. After confirming that she was waiting for us in the pick-up area, I put our cellphone down in a cupholder on the center console of the car. We picked Ava up and made our way home. During this time, some new neighbors were moving into the apartment above us. When we got home, their moving van was blocking the driveway. So, I parked on the street. Then, when I got the kids out of the car, Polly started heading for the truck. I hurried over to keep her from getting in the way and, in the process, failed to lock the doors on the car.

The next morning when we went looking for the phone, it was gone. At first we thought it was just lost. But after calling the phone and having it send us straight to voice mail – an indication that the phone had been turned off by someone – we understood what had really happened. During the night, someone saw the phone sitting there in the unlocked car and took the opportunity to snatch it.

After this realization set in, I spent the next couple of hours drifting around the house in a pool of impotence and frustration. While it was not my fault per se that someone stole our phone, my actions were the ones that had created the possibility. Now, all I could do about that was to file a police report and try to get over it. There was no other action to take; no way to save the day or repair the damage. I had to just sit there, chew up my mistake, swallow my ire, and push all the frustration of the morning out through the other end.

This digestion was not easy to take. But in the process, I did have two experiences that gave me a bit more insight into the dynamics that shape families in crisis.

The first showed me how easy it is for kids to become victims in this kind of situation. The second made me wonder about what trials may lie ahead for full-time fathers as our numbers continue to increase.

*****

Pip is a curious and inquisitive four-year-old. He wants to be included in everything his parents are doing and wants to understand everything we are talking about. His pursuit of this understanding is persistent and determined. He will ask questions and ask questions and then ask some more. Then he will return to the same questions again to see if the answers are different the second, third, or fourth time he asks them. From a distance it is a very impressive operation. When you are in the middle of it, it can be overwhelming.

So, as I was stewing over the stolen phone, Pip was plugging away with questions. Ava provided some buffer for a while, but eventually Pip made it over to me. His questions were the ones you would expect a four-year-old ask:

What happened to our phone? Why? What are you going to do? Where is the phone now? Are we going to get the phone back? Why are you filing a police report? What will the police do? Why did someone take our phone? What are they going to do with it?

They were the basic questions of a child trying to make sense of something that had never happened before. And yet, in my state of frustration, each question felt like a small accusation. After a while all I could hear was: Why did you not lock the door, Daddy? Why did you forget to lock the door, Daddy? How come the door was not locked, Daddy? It was like a mosquito biting me over and over, and I had to fight with myself not to lash out at him.

A couple of times I could feel my patience cracking. In those moments all I wanted to do was angrily hiss “Leave me alone.” This little outburst would have stopped him in a hurry and more than likely brought on a few tears. It would have sent him off to his mother or the couch or some other safe place until I was ready to deal with him.

While this is not the parent I want to be nor the model of what I want Pip to do in a similar situation, in that moment of frustration and anger, there was something very satisfying about playing through such a scenario. It would have demonstrated (to whom? I don’t know) that I still had power over something, that I was not helpless in the face of the world’s randomness. It would have given me a chance to regain some feeling of control over everything that was going on around me. It would have eased my pain by spreading it around to others.

It also would have been wrong. In thinking about that rush of feelings later in the evening, I began to recognize in a more substantial way how truly vulnerable kids are when the crises of life hit their families. Given their position as dependents in the family structure, kids become ready targets when the adults who are supposed to care for them are feeling powerless and out of control. In many respects it doesn’t matter what the kids do or don’t do. In the moment of abuse, it’s a question of relationships and the desire by the abuser to re-activate a hierarchy of power. It’s why people who abuse animals are also more likely than others to abuse their children and their spouses. The actual being suffering the abuse doesn’t matter. Its all about where they reside in the hierarchy.

What amazes me is that while I know all of this, the boundaries between the person I want to be and the person I abhor are shockingly thin. When the emotions generated by someone stealing our lousy cellphone can send me hurtling into a position where I had to struggle mightily to remain civil with Pip, it makes me wonder. Is this flimsy restraint all that separates me from the abusers of the world, the kickers of dogs, the beaters of women and children? I scares me some to think that such may be the case.

*****

The other understanding that came to mind as I worked through my frustration and disposed of my anger has to do with some of the undermentioned vulnerabilities that come with being a full-time father.

As I said above, while having the cellphone stolen was not really my fault, my actions were the ones that made it possible. The financial loss involved is not horrendous – about $200 – but it hurts nonetheless. This is particularly true right now as we are coming to terms with the fact that we are going to take a $30,000 - $50,000 bath on a house we bought for $150,000 five years ago. In light of this, even the waste of a dollar on something we could have gotten cheaper elsewhere brings a certain amount of anguish.

For me, this anguish is intensified because I do not bring in any income to our family coffers. In a previous life, I could make the claim that I would pay for the phone myself, thereby taking – at least in my mind - the financial hit fully on my shoulders. Then I could go to work and earn more money to pay for a new one. Now, I have to find other ways to expiate my sin. This usually means being extra conscientious about taking care of things around the house. These are things that I would be doing anyway, but in the wake of this kind of mistake, I feel the need to do them with an extra bit of hustle and attention. In this way I feel like I am demonstrating to Ava both how sorry I am that I messed up and how useful I am to keep around.

It comes back again to a question of power. In a single income family, there exists an often unstated imbalance of power. Ava has a job. She brings money into our household. I do not have a job. I send money out of our household. In this simple flow diagram, Ava can do without me. I cannot do without her.

Even more critically, if our relationship were to deteriorate to a point where we wound up separating, I would have a very difficult time getting a job. I have been out of the workforce for four years and counting. My credentials are aging and my resume shows no development of job-related skills. My local contacts are mostly other full-time parents. In order to become employable again, I would probably have to go back to school and take whatever part-time or menial job I could get in the meantime.

This all means that I feel a certain extra pressure to make sure my relationship with Ava works. While this pressure is not something that matters on an everyday level, when something goes wrong because of my choices or actions, I want to make sure that Ava knows that I am doing what needs to be done to address the problem. This is something I want to do anyway because its how a good team handles problems, but I also can’t ignore the reality that my financial dependency on Ava exerts a subtle push on my attitude and choices.

This kind of push and the other ramifications of such an imbalance in financial status are a familiar experience for many women. The choice made by many battered women to stay with their abusers is just one example of the power this imbalance exerts. But I’m not sure that men like me who are acting as the primary care-giver in a family are as cognizant of their vulnerabilities. It’s just not something that we have seen before. However, as the number of men becoming full-time fathers increases, should we expect to see the emergence of a population of men who, in the wake of divorce, struggle to maintain the lives they once enjoyed? Or is there something in the current order of things that will make the experiences of these men different from those of full-time mothers who after divorce suffer substantial rates of poverty? I don’t know the answer to this, but I imagine that we are going to eventually find out.

Thanks

2011-04-06T21:32:00.002-04:00

Thank you to everyone who took a moment over the last several days to vote for this blog in the Circle of Moms Top 25 list. With 337 votes, we (the collective, not the royal) finished in 33rd place. As there were more than 150 entries, I'm thrilled with that result and so appreciative of everyone's support.

A new post is coming tomorrow evening.

On Tiger Mothers, Class, and the Siren Song of Elite Universities

2011-03-31T01:18:00.002-04:00

Several years ago as network television was losing viewers to cable and the internet, one commentator lamented the loss of moments of collective consciousness that had been created by television shows like The Cosby Show, Friends, and the X-Files. According to this commentator the large audiences these shows commanded enabled a series of ideas and topics to filter into society-at-large, weaving threads of common knowledge into a broad and diverse population. Without these shows, he wondered, would we lose these collective moments, would the quilt of society become just a collection of fabric scraps?

The answer, we have learned, is a resounding no. While on the average day, the multiple media and multiple platforms which people use present an unfathomable array of different content, there are a few stories that manage to find their way into a huge number of them. This kind of viral spreading can be annoyingly ugly when its content is the ridiculous pseudo-dramas of people like Charlie Sheen or Brett Favre. Other times, when a story has a certain depth and its range of harmonics trigger a host of different vibrations in different people, the results can be both fascinating and enlightening. Such a story acts as a mirror, giving us a peek into the souls that constitute our collective.

Amy Chua’s Tiger Mother book is one of these latter type of stories. After a first life on the pages and blog of the Wall Street Journal and a second life in the proliferating discussions about her in blogs like this one, a third life is coming. This month’s Atlantic Monthly contains not one, but two essays reviewing her book and the conversations that have swirled around it. Regular commentators Sandra Tsing Loh and Caitlin Flanagan parse through Chua’s text and the initial knee-jerk reactions to it to pick out some of the less obvious dynamics at work in the conversations these have created. The results make for interesting reading.

*****

The most important theme that emerges from both pieces is that much of what Chua and the reactions to her book represent is less a question of cultural difference and more one of class expectations. Tsing Loh, herself the daughter of a Chinese father who pushed her to excel musically and mathematically, highlights how much “working of connections” and “financial outlay” were involved in bringing Chua’s children to the heights they achieved. This marshalling of monetary and social resources - a mention of which was conspicuously absent in Chua’s Wall Street Journal essay - takes some of the steam out of the mythological power Chua claimed for the Tiger Mother as it reveals a reality that many of us already knew: lots of people work hard; those who rise to the highest levels often have money and/or connections the rest do not. As Tsing Loh jokes after talking about all of Chua’s efforts, “I find this expense less uniquely Chinese than perhaps, dare I say,…, upper-middle-class suburban Jewish”. In other words, it is a question of class, not culture.

Flanagan’s essay approaches the question of class and the reaction to Amy Chua through the lens of the admissions processes in Ivy League-caliber universities. She conjures for us the image of the ‘good mother,’ the professional class woman who has cut back on her career aspirations in order to nurture her child(ren) into the world. The good mother, Flanagan writes, has “certain ideas about how success is life is achieved.” These ideas are built around the notion that if they deeply support a child’s natural talent the rest will fall into place.

In Flanagan’s eyes, the problem for the good mothers is that despite this belief and their desire to rein in the hyper-competitiveness that surrounds their childrearing, they also see anything less than admittance to an Ivy League-caliber school for their children as a failure, a slipping away of elite status, a “banishment to nowhere”. And in many ways they’re right. In Liquidated, her ethnography of Wall Street investment banks, Karen Ho talks about how companies like Goldman Sachs only recruit investment bankers from three or four universities, with Harvard and Princeton topping the list. The same seems to be true for the best law firms and medical positions. So when students miss out on a placement in an Ivy League type school, they suddenly find that many of the roads to the highest positions in business, politics, and society have become unavailable to them. Their ability to improve their class position – to move from the professionals to the elite - has been dealt a severe blow.

So the good mother slowly accedes to the demands of the market. She reluctantly lets the hurricane that is the childhood industrial complex engulf her child, and consequently her family, in its swirl of increasingly time intensive sports teams, music lessons, public service activities, clubs, etc. in hopes that this sacrifice will be enough for the child to snare one of those golden positions.

But, according to Flanagan, its not working. Amy Chua’s kids – the ones whose parents have single-mindedly focused on this goal since their birth - are getting those positions instead. Because their parents have pushed them from day one, kids like Chua’s have developed the singular and spectacular talents that lift them to the top of the pile of applicants in the eyes of university admissions officers. The children of the good mothers, those mothers who want their kids to have both the blissful childhood and the Ivy League education, cannot overcome their mothers’ initial reluctance. In short, they cannot catch up.

*****

As a parent and a rejectee of an Ivy League-caliber school (I was wait-listed at MIT), I came away from reading both essays with a single, depressing thought:

So this really is what it has come down to. Polly is two. Pip is four. We have to decide now whether or not they will pursue admission to an Ivy League-caliber school. It is a choice they do not get to make. If they are going to have a chance to get into Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and the like, we have to start doing things now. Because by the time they are old enough to make the choice for themselves, it will be too late to acquire the skills and experiences necessary to do the kind of spectacular things they will need to do in order to make the Ivy League cut.

It is the trap of the upwardly mobile bourgeoisie: I want to give Pip and Polly every chance to succeed in whatever course they decide to pursue. However, in order to keep all those options open, I have to push them towards the highest levels of achievement because once you start slipping, you can’t catch back up. Amy Chua’s girls have too much momentum behind them.

The only way out of this trap is to pursue what Flanagan calls the “Rutgers solution:” decide Polly and Pip will go to a regional or state university, set goals accordingly, and let any other extra stuff come from their interest and their discretion. While this doesn’t actually sound that bad, it essentially precludes the potential of either of them making the leap into greatness, into the realm of the global elite. And that potential, however small, is difficult for me – the product of upwardly mobile parents and weaned on the idea that anyone can become president - to let go of.

There is also one other trap lurking in the background of the choice between the Ivy League track and the Rutgers solution. If we give up the pursuit of grand achievement for my Pip and Polly, if we step out of the market and say no to the competition, how do I measure myself as a parent? When I don’t take my children to music lessons and sports camps and all the things other bourgeoisie children are doing, what metrics do I use to determine whether I am doing a good job? No one counts how many smiles or laughs they had this month. All the benchmarks are out there beyond the walls of my house. Inside, there is only me, Ava, and the kids and whether we feel things are going well or not. And how am I supposed to know what “going well” looks like? Its not like I’ve parented a hundred kids and have a sense of what that is. I have these two. They could be geniuses. They could be idiots. They could be the best kids in the world or the worst. If I don’t send them out there, how will I ever know?

To step out of the hurricane that is the childhood industrial complex is to leave me to my own devices when it comes to evaluation, and that is a position that makes me feel highly vulnerable and exposed. One needs a combination of self-confidence and blissful ignorance not to go completely crazy from the subsequent navel gazing. Unfortunately, that combination is hard to maintain in the face of the constant barrage of experts and products trying to sell me ways to fix any number of possible child-related problems. Our culture pushes parents hard and from many different angles.

*****

In some ways, Chua and the Tiger mothers are taking the easy route. They have picked their goal and are pursuing it with a single-minded fury that allows for no hesitation, no questions, no uncertainty, no doubts. Even as Ava and I rightly decide to go the other way, to value our time as a family over the pulls of the childhood industrial complex, to send our children to whatever university Ava is currently working at, there will always be in my mind the tiny ‘what if,’ the bit of curiosity about whether Polly or Pip could have set the world on fire had they been given the chance.

But this may be one of the most positive developments to come out of Amy Chua entering my life: that doubt is shrinking ever smaller as I see what that other life looks like. It will not ever go away completely, but every time I read something more about Tiger mothers, I become more and more comfortable with the idea that for Polly and Pip – not to mention me and Ava - the Rutgers solution is not a bad way to go.

Transitions

2011-03-24T23:59:00.001-04:00

The point of a vacation is to change things for just a little while. It is a time to change locations, change food, change schedules, change rhythms, become something different for however many days are available. With all this disruption, a vacation can also be a time of endings and beginnings. Upon returning home, the latent habits of regular life require re-activation and in this moment there is an opportunity to alter some of those habits or even to break away into something new.

We made good use of this opportunity following our recent trip to Florida.

In the time leading up to our trip, Polly had been working to finalize some transitions. She will turn two this week, and the imminent arrival of her birthday has spurred her to cast aside some of the vestigial elements of infanthood. The most significant of these is breastfeeding.

Over the last year, Polly has slowly but consistently let her regular feeding times drop away. The process has felt very organic as she gradually either replaced a feeding time with solid food or just forgot about it altogether. As such the only milestone I distinctly remember is from last July when she finally started going through the night without getting up for a bit of food.

Polly was reluctant, however, to give up her last feeding. This was the morning wake-up feeding. For several months she would pop up from sleep at 6 AM and demand to be taken to Ava. The two of them would spend about ten to fifteen minutes feeding in the big green recliner that sits in the corner of our bedroom and then Polly would happily slid down to the floor ready to start the day. Ava and I agreed that this routine had very little to do with hunger or nutritional needs. Polly likes to get up slowly, and this morning feeding was a nice way for her to transition from sleep into wakefulness. Ava didn’t really mind either as it gave her a few minutes to organize her thoughts before the day really got going.

It wasn’t our plan to end Polly’s breastfeeding during our trip to Florida. It just happened. Polly skipped her feeding on the first morning because we were in the car traveling. Then the next morning she was so wiped out that she slept late and then was too distracted by the new surroundings to remember her usual pattern. The third morning brought the same thing. By the fourth morning a new pattern had formed and while Polly did not sleep as late, she did not ask for her time with Ava. This remained true throughout the rest of our vacation.

Her one backsliding moment came during our first morning back in Lexington. It was not an immediate reaction. When she woke up, I brought her out of her bedroom while she rubbed her eyes sleepily. It was not until she saw Ava that she remembered about the morning feeding. Ava spent a few minutes cuddling with her then let her play with Pip in our bed for a bit longer while we got dressed. This alternate plan seemed to satisfy her, and it has become our regular routine in the two weeks since. All in all we could not have scripted this transition any better.

*****

With her role as a breastfeeding mother now concluded, I want to take a moment to talk about what Ava accomplished. In a country where only 13% of babies are exclusively breastfed during their first six months and only 22% are still receiving any breast milk at all through at twelve months (the percentages are even lower in Ohio and Kentucky, the states where we have lived), Ava has fed both our children from birth to weaning without any use of formula.

It wasn’t easy. Just to get started with Pip, Ava had to have the confidence and determination to ignore the poorly trained hospital lactation consultant and seek out competent resources outside the medical establishment. Fortunately, she found what she needed in the form of a La Leche League volunteer. Then, when she went back to her job at the conclusion of her maternity leave she had to figure out how to integrate pumping into both the temporal and spatial constraints of her workplace. She spent an unholy amount of time sitting in bathroom stalls trying to slip a pumping in between meetings. Eventually, she pumped her way through three jobs, at least eight academic conferences, two job interview processes, and two moves. And she did all of this while being sleep deprived from multiple years of feeding children at night.

We looked at all this effort as an investment. By giving both kids full access to the food most suitably engineered for them – breast milk – we were supplying them with the best start we could. Now, as they are both healthy, energetic, and intelligent, it feels like this investment is already paying off.

*****

There was one other major transition that reached its conclusion during our trip to Florida. For most of the last two years I have been putting Polly to sleep using a baby carrier. When it was time for a nap or to go down for the night, I would strap on our Beco Butterfly, slip Polly in between the back panel and my chest, and sing her a lullaby while pacing back and forth in the kids’ room. On the nights when she went to sleep easily, it was great. Having her drift off with her face just below my chin made me feel wonderfully close to Polly. On the (much fewer) nights when she did not readily drift off to sleep, it was tough. Walking back and forth with twenty wiggling, bouncing, sometimes crying pounds strapped to my chest for thirty minutes or more took a physical toll. On those nights I often wondered how I was ever going to move her on from this process. I even once had a vision of her at 12 years of age, still needing me to strap her to my chest and carry her around to get to sleep each night.

Then about a month ago, Polly started asking at bedtime to lay down in her crib before we turned out the light. The first night she asked I told her no. I knew that she was not going to go to sleep that way and to break our established pattern meant extending the amount of time I spent getting both children down for the night. I was tired and ready to have a few minutes of quiet time with Ava so I put her in the baby carrier and walked her to sleep.

A couple of nights later she asked again. This time, while I still did not recognize what Polly was doing, Ava had a late meeting and I felt less of a hurry to get the kids to sleep. So, I put her down in the crib and tucked her in a blanket just like I do with Pip. Before I turned out the light, I told her that she had fifteen minutes and then I’d put her in the carrier. As I expected, once the light went out, she started bouncing and rolling and moving around. After fifteen minutes, I picked her up, slipped her into the carrier, and went about our normal routine.

The next night she asked to be put down in the crib again. This time it finally occurred to me that Polly was not just playing around. After watching me put Pip into bed for almost two years, she was experimenting with this idea too. Polly was trying to figure out how to go to sleep in her bed without using the baby carrier. With this realization in mind, I strategically shifted my language, telling her that I would give her fifteen minutes to go to sleep and then if she needed help I would put her in the carrier.

That third night she bounced and rolled and moved around for the full fifteen minutes then happily reached out for me to put her in the carrier. We did the same thing again for several more nights until one evening she crashed before the fifteen minutes were up. She had not gotten a good nap that day and about five minutes after I turned out the light her movements slowed dramatically. At about ten minutes she had stopped moving completely and after fifteen minutes she was snoring quietly. Surprised by how quickly sleep had come for her, I slipped out of the room and hung the unused baby carrier back on its hook.

Three or four nights later Polly did this again. It took a bit longer this time as she was pretty well rested, but after fifteen minutes passed I recognized the signs of her coming stillness and decided to wait it out instead of putting her into the carrier. Before another ten minutes passed she was fast asleep.

Over the next several days Polly did the same the thing again and again. By the time we got to Florida, Polly and I were both becoming comfortable with this new routine. Even with all the new surroundings and the surfeit of exciting things to see and do, Polly only needed to use the baby carrier once for going to sleep. When we returned home, I gave her a couple more days then I stopped even bringing the baby carrier into the room with us at night. It now hangs motionless on its hook each night, unused and unneeded. I wonder, a bit wistfully, if I will ever strap it on again.

*****

Now that Ava and I have both been relieved of these duties, I know we’ll miss them. There is a closeness that comes with such focused attention to the needs of a young child, and Polly’s recent transitions will chip away at that. Some distance will now intervene between us and the understandings we have gained about her in these venues will necessarily drift away. For two years, I literally had Polly strapped to my chest for twenty minutes or so each night. I knew what to expect as her body slowly relaxed, went slack, and drifted off to sleep. I knew how to carefully get her out of the carrier and into her crib - gently rocking her head back and forth to get the straps unhooked, placing the index and middle fingers of my right hand behind her head to hold it still while I lifted her up, guiding her head first onto my right shoulder and then down to my left elbow as I shifted her down from the upright position, curling her body just slightly as I lowered it onto the mattress, then slipping my arms out along the arch of her back as she nuzzled into her blanket. Those skills, acquired through much experimentation and mastered through numerous repetition, are no longer needed and the knowledge they represent must now be replaced. More importantly, the intimacy we gained with Polly in the process of all that work will never quite be the same again.

At the same time, there is something comforting in knowing that the practices of infanthood will, if we don’t interfere too much, give way to childhood and eventually adulthood. It takes some of the burden off our shoulders and makes me less fretful about all the other things Polly and Pip must eventually do. So, bring on the toilet training, kindergarten, and the like. I can’t wait to see what the kids will do next.

Adventures in Public Space

2011-03-17T22:47:00.001-04:00

This week’s post can be found at the Daddy Dialectic blog. A direct link to the post is here.

Here's a teaser paragraph:

There is a difference between public space and private space. This difference has nothing to do with physical arrangements or locations or whether one is inside or outside a home. Instead, it has everything to do with how we distribute our activities and regulate our behaviors across different places.

I find myself very conscious of these differential spaces when I am out with my children. When we step outside our home I am aware that people are watching. The expectations I assume they have lead me to subtly alter what I let the children do. While Polly and Pip don’t fully comprehend the reasons for this, they certainly are aware that some difference exists. They know that outside our home they cannot do exactly the same things that they do in our living room.

During our family’s recent trip to Florida, this dynamic became the key element in creating one of those incredible, unscripted moments that make having children so much fun.

Read the rest of the post here.

A week away...

2011-03-03T22:46:00.002-05:00

Our family is going on a trip for the next seven days, and I am not bringing my computer with me. As such, I am taking next week off. I'll have a new post ready for the following week.

Shattering the LEGO myth

2011-03-02T22:49:00.003-05:00

As I’ve written before, I played with LEGOs a lot as a kid. My sister and I spent many hours constructing spacecraft, airplanes, buildings, and wheeled vehicles of all kinds. Sometimes we followed the instructions. Other times we mixed everything together to see what we could come up with. This was a special kind of play that challenged us in ways both technical and creative. It’s a kind of play that I had looked forward to sharing with Polly and Pip.

Unfortunately, this vision has currently run aground as our LEGO stash has become a central focus of a long-running tug-of-war between Polly and Pip.

Pip and Polly play with LEGOs in different ways. Pip likes to build things and have me build things with/for him. Polly likes to fiddle with pieces, swish them about in their containers, shovel them from one container to another, swim in them, and dismantle things – including the LEGO people - into their component pieces. These diverging interests seem about right for their respective ages and would not be a problem except that by the time Pip has settled down into building something, Polly has usually finished doing what interests her and is ready to move on to something else.

When this happens my tendency is to continue working with Pip and to pay only cursory attention to Polly. Ava and I have talked about this a couple of times, and my solution has been to find ways to engage Polly more when the LEGOs first come out. Now I ask her about the different colors she sees in the LEGO pile. I make small things for her to play with or dismantle as she sees fit. We roll the wheels back and forth. These efforts have gained me some extra time and have even yielded some positive results. This week one of the small spaceships that Pip and I made caught her fancy, and she spent a chunk of the morning flying it around the house. More often though, she is still ready to move on long before Pip has reached a good stopping point.

When this happens she acts out in various ways. She climbs on things she’s not supposed to. She runs around the house. She breaks down a LEGO creation that Pip had been working on. I’m not oblivious to all of this activity, but I feel torn about abandoning Pip’s projects in order to appease Polly. I find the romanticized image of a father and child bonding by building things together very appealing, and I see this dynamic at work when Pip and I are working on a LEGO creation. I hope Polly gets there one day as well but as a general rule I’m willing to put up with some acting out from her in order to have these moments with Pip.

On Monday afternoon, however, Polly got me. Pip and I were working on a project in the living room while Ava was pulling together some dinner in the kitchen. Polly was moving back and forth between the two rooms trying to decide where she wanted to play. When she would come into the living room, I would tickle her for a moment or do something to make her laugh and then go back to what Pip and I were working on. In my mind, this arrangement seemed to be working well. Then during one of her trips into the living room, Polly changed the game. This time instead of stopping in front of me, she dived into my lap. Then she slid off my legs and under the living room table. Landing on her back she pushed her feet up into the bottom of the table, tilting the whole thing just enough to knock a full container of LEGOs off it. With a sound like breaking glass, about two hundred pieces went splaying outward across the floor. Most came to a rest in the space underneath the couch.
It is difficult to judge how deliberate the specifics of this act were but the general effect was what Polly wanted: Pip and I put aside our building project and proceeded to move the couch and clean up the LEGOs, a project in which Polly could fully participate.

In talking about this episode after the kids went to bed, Ava laid out the situation for me in stark terms. She pointed out that the LEGOs have become a privileged site in Polly and Pip’s constant negotiations over how my attention is distributed between them. Pip understands at some level that by asking to build something with LEGOs he can corral my attention and tilt the distribution in his favor. Polly pulls back at this with her stunts. Dumping the LEGOs all over the place, for example, brings her back into the mix of things and dissipates the extra focus that Pip had successfully garnered.

As Ava was describing this scenario, I felt a ball starting to knot up in my stomach. The whole thing made me mad. I felt exploited by Pip and frustrated by Polly. I was angry at them for putting me in the middle of this kind of game. I want them to be better than this, to be above this kind of manipulative back and forth.

I was also mad at Ava for pointing the whole thing out. In many respects, I want to continue being naïve, to enjoy those nostalgic, Norman Rockwell-esque moments of playing with my children. For one thing, it makes me feel good. It makes me feel happy. For another, it serves a strategic purpose. By thinking of them as happy, cooperative, friendly, fun kids whose periods of misbehavior are momentary digressions I can maintain a sense of bemused calm when they do misbehave. This sense of bemused calm helps me correct them without overreacting or becoming mean. It helps me avoid creating the kind of negative reinforcement that can lead to further misbehavior. If I begin to think of them in Malthusian terms, engaging in a manipulative zero-sum competition for my attention, it becomes more difficult for me to maintain such a benevolent attitude towards them. In that scenario, each action they pursue takes on a sense of calculated motive, and it is difficult for me to find humor in that. Removing my veil of innocence in this situation makes me more cynical and less tolerant of the necessary experimentations of childhood.

Of course, this initial frustration with Ava and the kids will subside, and we will all move on. I’ll adjust how we play with LEGOs in the future – starting with daily time limits on building projects - and Pip and Polly will adjust their competition accordingly. They will probably move on to some other thing in the proxy war for parental attention. But it makes me sad to have the LEGOs covered in this kind of blood. The idyllic vision I enjoyed and nurtured of child and parent playing together will never fully recover. It will always be colored by the reality of what has taken place in the last few weeks.

Lessons in Reading

2011-02-23T23:51:00.002-05:00

Three weeks ago in my post about Amy Chua and her Wall Street Journal essay on Tiger mothers, I took her to task for the kind of bullying of children that she labeled “coercion Chinese-style.” While I then suggested that there are alternative approaches to motivation and discipline, I did not get into what such an alternative looks like. So, now I will.

During a severe cold spell before Christmas, I began to get the itch to teach Pip to read. We had spent the fall working through the alphabet, and by then Pip could easily recognize most of letters. As we were both getting bored with the alphabet process, reading seemed like the obvious next challenge. For a trial run one day, I pulled Dr Seuss’s Hop on Pop off of our bookshelf and brought it over to Pip. Each page in Hop on Pop contains two or three rhyming words and then a simple sentence created from those words. It seemed like a promising text in which Pip could try out some reading work. We sat down together on the couch and started to worked our way through the first few pages.

What became immediately apparent was that while reading is something Pip likes, it is not something he is especially interested in learning. This is not to say that Pip does not want to read. He does. But, as with most four-year olds, he is not internally motivated to grind through the steps necessary to become a proficient reader. He is quite happy to memorize the lines of stories as Ava and I read them to him and then parrot those lines back to us the next day.

During that first session with Hop on Pop, he was curious enough to play along as we sounded out a couple of words together, but when I asked him to do something on his own, he balked. He flopped over and laid down on the couch. When I encouraged him to sit up and work through it with me, he moved over to another chair. I followed him, telling him to pick out a toy he could play with after we were done. This fumbling attempt at bribery only made things worse as he became interested in the toy and was even less motivated to cooperate with my instructions. I finally got him to grudgingly work through the first three pages by engaging in a series of circus tricks, chants, and horseplay that left both of us frustrated and exhausted.

The next day we tried again, and the results were about the same. The third day I just about slipped into Tiger parent mode as Pip balked right from the start. I managed to get through one page before our allotted time was up. The fourth day brought more of the same and after about fifteen minutes I asked Pip if he wanted to keep going. Of course, he said no. The begging and pleading wasn’t fun for either of us, and it was time to give up the experiment with reading until I could find a better way to approach it.

*****

Over Christmas one of Ava’s co-workers hosted a party during which his wife showed me the book she was using to teach her daughter to read. It was a rather bland looking book. There were no cartoon characters or silly word games, only a series of regimented exercises in black and red text that gradually introduced the child to different sounds while also inculcating the process needed to sound out words. I found the simplicity and the absence of memorization lists appealing. I was also intrigued by the fact that each exercise was scripted down to the very words the instructor is supposed to say. I came away from the party thinking that this could be the next thing for Pip and I to try.

A month ago I checked out the book from the public library. On a Wednesday morning we sat down on the couch and tried the first lesson. Things went okay until the end when Pip was supposed to write one of the letters he had learned. This was a challenge for him and, as with Hop on Pop, he balked. Seeing that we were headed right back to where we started, I quickly brought the lesson to a close. Just bringing in a new book had not changed the fundamental challenge of motivating Pip to take on something that I wanted him to do. I decided to put the book away for a couple of days and start fresh with a more complete strategy after the weekend.

As I approached the reading lesson on Monday morning I decided to do a couple of things differently. First, I moved the lesson time up from mid-morning to right after brushing our teeth. That way there would be no opportunity for Pip to start playing with something and feel pulled between that something and the reading lesson. Second, I moved our lesson location from the couch to a table in the living room where we each would have our own chairs. Having never used the living room table in this way before, I hoped that the new configuration would both formalize the lesson and establish a different space that Pip would associate only with the lesson. Third, I designated a particular pencil and notebook for Pip to use only for writing exercises.

My goal with each of these steps was to make the time of our reading lesson into a special period for Pip. The arrangement of the chairs was especially for him. He got a notebook and pencil that he did not have to share with Polly (a rare thing in our house). Most importantly, he got some focused attention from me. With these things I hoped to give him some feeling of ownership over the work I am asking of him and, consequently, just enough leverage to keep bringing him back to the work when the going got hard.

That day we went back and did the first lesson again. Having done the tasks before, Pip worked through it with only two stops this time. I even managed to coax him into writing three letters. When it was all done, I gave him a big hug and kiss then told him how proud I was of him. While he was drained from the work (as was I), he had an air of accomplishment about him, a kind of giddy confidence that managed to hang around him through the rest of the day. On Tuesday morning, when I told him it was time for the reading lesson, he went out into the living room and started arranging the table and chairs.

*****

Over the last three weeks I have learned two basic things necessary to keep him invested in each day’s lesson. One is to be honest about what it is we are doing. I can’t pretend that a particular lesson is fun and exciting. There are moments of joy and pride in each day’s work, but if I hype something, Pip gets discouraged when it doesn’t turn out to be that exciting. He feels like he missed something and either I’m disappointed in him or he isn’t understanding what I’m telling him. Either way this frustration makes him less inclined to continue with the lesson.

The other thing I’ve learned is that it takes a balance of pushing and holding back to keep him going through a lesson. The key is to learn the signals and pay attention to them. For Pip, if he asks to go to the bathroom, it means he needs a short break. So I let him go. If he drops to the floor after getting something wrong, then he is stalling, and I need to draw him back to his chair. If he is feeling especially squirrelly some physical contact is in order. I can hold his hand or even have him stand between my knees as we go through the lesson. Sometimes it is up to me to stop and tell him to take a moment in order to pre-empt some of the shenanigans that take place when he begins to tire.

And then there is the imperative to let him have a little fun as we go along. This usually takes the form of rocking back and forth as we are repeating some words or making silly twists with sounds as we hold them out together. One thing he has really enjoyed over the last week or so is reversing our roles. After we have completed an exercise, he will then tell me that he is going to teach me what I just taught him. I love this turn of events both because it provides extra repetition and because I can make mistakes that he has to recognize and correct. In the process he gets to pretend to be me for a little while, something he finds especially amusing.

*****

Over the past few days Pip has had his first reading experience. The seemingly random exercises and sounds that were presented in the first few lessons of the book suddenly came together last Thursday, and Pip sounded out his first words. At first he just thought he had sounded out another combination of letters. When he realized that he had read a word, he literally buried his head in my lap. The idea that he had actually read something made him feel surprised, proud, and a little bit shocked. It was as if he understood that his world would never be the same.

I was thrilled to be able to experience that moment and even more happy that we got there in such a positive way. There were a couple of points over the past few weeks when dipping into some “coercion, Chinese-style” was tempting. This was especially true when I wasn’t sure how to get Pip to do what needed to happen next. But, ultimately, I knew this kind of badgering and intimidation would make both of us miserable. He would hate me for attacking him, and I would hate myself for the same reason. This hate might be short-lived, but it would make the next time I needed to push him that much more difficult. I would have to ratchet up the intimidation a little bit more to get the same effect. Eventually I would be like Amy Chua, screaming insults at my child in order to cower him into compliance. This is not the kind of relationship I want with my children.

Instead, the reading lessons Pip and I are doing together are having the opposite effect. That little bit that we accomplish each morning as we successfully negotiate another lesson colors everything else we do that day. It gives the rest of the morning a positive aura and makes both Pip and I more satisfied and tolerant of each other. Working together on a project of this nature is bolstering our relationship and increasing the love we have for each other. I’m not sure that Amy Chua would even believe that such a thing is even possible.

Revolutionary questions

2011-02-17T23:11:00.002-05:00

This week’s post can be found at the Daddy Dialectic blog. The front page is here. A direct link to the post is here.

Here's a teaser paragraph:

About two weeks ago, Pip dug out from the far end of our bookshelf two children’s biographies that had belonged to me as a kid and had somehow managed to survive all my subsequent moves and book purges. One recounted the life of Thomas Jefferson. The other was about Benjamin Franklin. Re-reading these books for the first time in about two decades, while popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt were toppling dictatorial governments in the background, made me very aware of the almost magical ease with which the transition from revolution to stable democratic governance occurs in America’s founding mythology. This awareness made me question whether this mythology will ultimately do my children a disservice. Will it lead them to expect at an intuitive level that any dramatic break from established patterns will resolve itself neatly and in a way that is universally good? And, as such, will this expectation lead them towards a naive embrace of revolutionary change at the expense of careful and programmatic efforts (such as happened with the Bush-Rumsfeld strategy for creating a democratic Iraq)? My own experience makes me think that this is not a totally ridiculous question.

Read the rest of the post here.

To cry or not to cry

2011-02-10T23:27:00.002-05:00

There are a few people in the world who believe that every fundamental aspect of who we are is decided by our genetics. There is another group who contend that such things are completely the result of influences from one’s social environs. All the rest of us fall somewhere in between. We recognize at some level that any argument of biology versus culture or “nature versus nurture” is a gross simplification of the complex interweaving of physiological capacity and social experience that is at work in the making of a human being.

The parents of young children repeatedly encounter instances where they must negotiate this interweaving in direct and immediate ways. When a child starts to talk depends on the development of muscle coordination within the lips and tongue and the exposure to sounds the child can mimic. When a child starts to walk depends on the development of muscle strength in legs, hips, back, and stomach and the availability of opportunities to safely practice getting up and moving around on two feet; When a child begins to eat solid foods depends upon the development of the proper gastric chemicals (and eventually teeth) in combination with cultural expectations about what constitutes appropriate nutrition for babies. When a child begins using the toilet depends on the development of the muscles necessary for bladder control and on parental choices regarding when and how to pursue toilet training.

In each of these cases, the opaqueness of how the biological and cultural influences intersect with each other created some uncertainty in exactly how I should handle them. However, as they are all skills that are basic functions of the human repertoire, I was able to approach them with the confidence that as long as I was patient both Pip and Polly would eventually get them.

Unfortunately, there are plenty of other practices, habits, and behaviors – both ones that I wish for Pip and Polly to acquire and ones that I wish they could lose - for which I have no such confidence. Saturday brought us one of the latter.

That evening, as I was preparing to put Polly and Pip into bed, Polly whacked her head against a chair. It was one of those dumb things that happen when we’re all tired and slightly off-kilter. She was standing on the floor and pulling a blanket up over her head when she stepped on the blanket and stumbled. Turning around as she fell, she crashed her head right into the seat of a big wooden rocking chair that occupies one corner of the kids’ room. The impact was solid enough to knock her head back and make her body go limp for just a moment as it slid to the floor.

After a moment of stunned silence, Polly started crying. Then Pip did, too. Actually, I think Pip, seeing what happened and anticipating Polly’s reaction, buried his head in his bedding and began wailing even before the tears started running down Polly’s face. He kept crying in a jerky and flailing fashion even as Ava took Polly out of the room and walked her around to comfort her. He only calmed down when Polly’s cries had dissipated. Then, seeing that she was no longer upset, he too smiled and asked me to wipe away the snot that was running down from his nose.

*****

Pip’s reaction to Polly’s distress was not unusual or unexpected. It is his normal pattern, one that has been in place since Polly was born two years ago. For the longest time, I have had trouble making sense of it because in the moment it feels very manipulative – Polly cries and gets lots of attention so Pip then cries to recapture some of that attention for himself. But in facing this situation over and over again, I have come to wonder how much control over this reaction he really has.

My uncertainty derives from two points.

First, Pip’s reaction to another’s tears is not limited to Polly. When he first started swim lessons, he was in a class with other kids who had never been in a swimming pool before. Two of these kids were terrified of being in the water, screaming and crying while the swim instructor gently moved them around the pool. The other kids in the class watched these two with quiet nervousness, but Pip burst out in tears the moment either one of them made so much as a whimper. When I would go to comfort him and try to show him that the kids were okay, he would just repeat over and over in a desperate voice, “Why are they crying?”

Pip encountered a similar situation during his time in preschool. One of the other boys in his class experienced significant separation anxiety during the first couple of weeks. This anxiety would lead to prolonged crying episodes each morning when his parents’ dropped him off. Again, while the other kids in the class seemed unnerved by this behavior, Pip would break out into full on tears. All it took was for Pip to hear this other boy start to cry and he would instantly go from happy and excited to apprehensive and crying. The whole situation made those first weeks of preschool very difficult for all of us. Fortunately, the teachers and the boy’s parents worked to find activities that would ease that moment of separation and eventually they seemed to develop a pattern that got him – and, consequently, Pip - into the classroom without undue stress.

The second reason I wonder about how much control Pip can exercise over his reaction to the tears of others is the intensely visceral nature of his crying. When he loses it, it’s a full-body experience. The crying doesn’t ramp up. It just bursts out of him. His feet kick. His face goes into his hands. Everything else shuts down. Then, after its done, he’s right back to normal.

This burst seems driven by the same pattern of feelings that I experience whenever I am dealing with a crying child. For example, when I saw Polly start to fall, my stomach involuntarily tightened and my breathing stopped. As her head hit the chair and her body flopped backward, I felt myself grimace and heard an audible groan come up from inside me. After the impact, I felt a frantic rush of worry as the worst case scenarios flashed through my head. Then, I took a deep breath to release that tension and slow down the rush of adrenaline before I picked Polly up and simultaneously tried to calm her and evaluate her (she was fine).

What I think happens for Pip is that he goes through the same internal tightening and adrenaline release as I do, but at the moment that I take a deep breath, he breaks into tears. His body seems to overwhelm whatever control his mind is trying to exercise.

*****

At first, I was not very sympathetic to these outbursts as they usually place me in the difficult position of soothing two crying children instead of one. I would get frustrated with Pip because I needed his support in helping to calm Polly and instead his actions were just making her more upset. Over time my frustration with him in these moments has lessened. I have watched him over and over, and now I can see that the nature of his crying is very similar to what I experience when I crack from a buildup of tension, frustration, and exhaustion. When this happens to me, there is very little I can do about it. I have to let the tears come out because my body has decided that this is what it needs to do.

And all this crying feels very well be therapeutic. I have found that in the moments when I feel completely overwhelmed some crying helps clear away enough tension to make me functional again. It is a bit like vomiting when I feel nauseated; I don’t really want to do it, but I know that if I go ahead and let it happen it will make me feel better. Pip seems to be the same way. His moments of intense feeling pass quickly and are generally not followed by a period of brooding, sullenness, or morose behavior. Once he is done crying, he pops right back to being happy and energetic and usually starts laughing about all the snot that is now running out of his nose.

All of these dynamics complicate the question of what I should do with Pip in these moments when the emotions of others overwhelm him. There are basically four options, each with its own problematic elements:

- comfort him: This poses two problems. First, it is difficult to comfort both kids at once. Bringing them close together just intensifies the crying of each. Second, it reinforces the idea that crying is a guaranteed attention getting mechanism. I want both Polly and Pip to be able to cry when they are hurt or frustrated. But I also fear the power that crying gives them. I don’t want them to learn to use it as a tool of manipulation.

- tell him to stop: This is one of those unrealistic commands that people try but never works. Once the tears are flowing, you can’t order a person to stop crying, regardless of how nicely or harshly you phrase it.

- leave him alone/send him to a safe spot to work it out: This tactic is the one I tend to use. It has the advantage of separating the crying children and allowing Pip to continue crying for as long as he feels he needs to. It also avoids the extra attention dilemma that comes with the comforting tactic. However, in using this tactic it feels like I am abandoning Pip in a time of difficulty. I worry that by sending him away from me I may be undermining his trust and his willingness to come to me in future times of difficulty.

- teach him to head off the emotions before they start: I think this is the best option. Ava and I have worked with him to create ways of holding off the tears – like moving to a different room or saying a funny word. This has worked sometimes though it is difficult to tell whether the gradual decrease in crying incidents over time is the result of our tactical deployments, Pip’s physical and emotional maturation, or just fewer instances of crying by Polly. My biggest concern here is the stigmatization of crying that is implied in the process. How do we parse when it is okay to cry and when it is not?

Ultimately, what I am running up against is the fact that in all but a few, well-defined situations (e.g. funerals), public crying is not a socially acceptable practice. It makes people uncomfortable and marks the one who is crying as incapacitated or out of control. As such part of me wants to teach him never to cry except in strategically useful situations. And yet, there is something physiologically important in crying that I want Pip to be able to access. It not only provides a physical release of internal stress but in the process it also facilitates an acknowledgement of the emotional intensity of a moment. It took me thirty years to recognize that this acknowledgement is an important thing, that it helps generate the kind of positive attitude coming out of a problem moment that makes handling the next array of challenges much easier. I see no reason why he should have to follow the same pattern as me.

So for now, I am stuck in a dilemma. I want Pip to understand when he can cry and when I need him to hold it back. But the tools I have at my disposal are too crude to teach him the nuances of this pattern. Instead, Pip and I flail about in a haze of incomplete knowledge and incommunicable frustrations with one another. It is a failure that is all too human and one that we can never fully overcome. The best I am hoping for is to not do too much damage in the process.

Tiger Mothers and their cubs

2011-02-03T00:22:00.002-05:00

Three weeks ago the Wall Street Journal published an essay written by Amy Chua, the daughter of Chinese immigrants and a law professor at Yale University, in which she presented her take on the question of why so many children of Chinese immigrants are high achievers in areas like music and math. According to Chua, the key element to the “success” of these children is the strict parenting they receive from their “Tiger Mothers” which she sets in sharp contrast to the permissive approach of “Western” parents. As it is part of a publicity campaign to sell her new memoir about parenting her own children, the essay, entitled ‘Why Chinese Mothers are Superior,’ is written in a tone that is aggressive and intentionally bombastic. It has provoked all kinds of discussion across the internet and blogosphere, to the point where one website self-servingly labeled the essay “The Wall Street Journal’s Most Controversial Article Ever.”

In the essay, Chua lays out what she sees as three principle differences in parenting styles between “Tiger” parents and “Western” parents.

- First, typical Western parents are too concerned with a child’s self-esteem to set high standards and hold the child to them. They accept B’s and C’s on report cards whereas Tiger mothers go ballistic over anything less than A’s.

- Second, Western parents do not teach their children to respect and honor their parents. Tiger mothers demand obedience because they believe their children owe their parents everything.

- Third, Western parents allow their children to think for themselves, to have their own interests, and to have their own friends. Tiger mothers know what activities are best for their children and do not permit them to be distracted by any extracurricular endeavors.

While these three points are the intellectual meat of the essay’s argument, the real hook comes from a fourth proposition that Chua interlaces throughout the text: Tiger cubs succeed because Tiger Mothers are hard on them in ways that Western parents will not or cannot follow. To hammer home this final point, Chua concludes the essay with a story about how she browbeat her younger daughter into successfully learning a particularly difficult piece of music. She relates how she forced her daughter, Louisa, to practice her violin for hours on end – using insults and withholding food at times to keep her from quitting – until Louisa finally managed to master the piece. At the end, Chua depicts Louisa as happy and full of pride at what she was able to accomplish.

While this vignette is supposed to shock and titillate, I find it amusing that it so neatly fits into a narrative that is very familiar to anyone who follows or is involved in sports. The story of the overbearing coach who through vitriol and abuse pushes players (those that are not driven off) to greatness is a regular feature of many sporting seasons. The names are easy to come by in the major sports leagues of the US: Bobby Knight, former basketball coach at the University of Indiana and Texas Tech University; Mike Dikta, former head coach of the Chicago Bears and New Orleans Saints football teams; Bob Huggins, former basketball coach at the University of Cincinnati and current coach at West Virginia University; Bill Parcells, former coach of the New York Giants, New York Jets, New England Patriots, and Dallas Cowboys football teams. All these men used their position of power as coach to frighten, humiliate, and intimidate – essentially to bully - players into doing whatever was demanded of them. Those players who would not comply were run off, traded, or otherwise ostracized.

The violence of the bullying coach carries with it a strange sort of charisma. Many people, especially those who do not experience its full glare, love it. They see nothing wrong with the piles of insults, the mind games, and even the physical abuse exacted on players. They passionately defend the actions of the coach in much the same way that Amy Chua defends hers: they argue that these trials push players to do more than they ever would on their own and in the process they make them immune to the pressure that comes with performing difficult tasks in big moments.

At the same time, there are many other people who view this violence with disgust. They see a coach who is wrapped up in a messianic vision of himself that permits all in the pursuit of victory. They see a person who employs dictatorial violence to create an atmosphere of persistent insecurity and then uses this insecurity to justify and maintain their own authority. They believe that in the process these coaches wind up manipulating and goading players in cruel, unnecessary, and ultimately counterproductive ways (The parallels between these coaches and the personalities involved in promoting the use of torture by the US military and intelligence services are not coincidental).

I am one of these latter people and my answer to the supporters of coaches like Bobby Knight is that the person many consider to be the greatest coach of all time employed a motivational strategy that was the polar opposite of Knight’s bullying violence. John Wooden, the legendary basketball coach of the University of California at Los Angeles, never dipped into the pot of meanness and degradation when dealing with his players (or anyone else). He motivated his players by treating them with respect and intelligence, still demanding the necessary sacrifices of time and energy, but doing so quietly and with obvious purpose. As a result players respected him, not because he demanded it but because he earned it. And for players like Hall of Famer Bill Walton, that respect ultimately became an outright love that lasted far beyond their years playing basketball.

My point here is that I believe the kind of meanness that Amy Chua revels in and celebrates in her WSJ essay as fundamentally important to the success of Tiger cubs is really a self-aggrandizing contingency which is more about maintaining her own power over her children than about facilitating her children’s success. The threats, insults, and abuse she employed – “coercion, Chinese-style” as she puts it – are the blunt instruments of one who does not have the knowledge or confidence to motivate her children in other ways. In my opinion, not only are these tactics counterproductive over the long term – something Chua seems to have encountered with her second child – but they also perpetuate an acceptance of banal violence in society writ large. Violence at this everyday level begets violence at other levels and we become caught in a vicious spiral where dogs eat dogs and “by any means necessary” becomes the only logic anyone understands.

What I find particularly unfortunate about Chua’s gleeful recounting of her insults and abuses is that they overshadow the other significant elements at work in her parenting style. Take a look at these three quotes from her WSJ essay:

- “Other studies indicate that compared to Western parents, Chinese parents spend approximately 10 times as long every day drilling academic activities with their children.”

- “If a Chinese child gets a B—which would never happen—there would first be a screaming, hair-tearing explosion. The devastated Chinese mother would then get dozens, maybe hundreds of practice tests and work through them with her child for as long as it takes to get the grade up to an A.”

- “And it's true that Chinese mothers get in the trenches, putting in long grueling hours personally tutoring, training, interrogating and spying on their kids.”

In Amy Chua’s characterization, the Tiger Mother spends a tremendous amount of time working with and for her children. It is extremely important to recognize this time because it – as opposed to the insults - is the necessary condition for making children successful. For example, holding kids to high standards in school is one thing, but it doesn’t really change anything until someone takes the time to get the practice tests and work through them with a child who is struggling. To take another example, banning television and video games is another ‘strict’ tactic Chua employs. What she doesn’t say is that this choice also requires extra parental time. Not only does it require the parent to avoid the TV (at least while the kids are awake) but it also means there is more time during which the parent will need to engage a child in something else. Those extra half-hours spent reading together, playing games, working on a musical instrument, or just talking add up quickly.

Ultimately, the larger argument that Chua is making in her WSJ article is one that I agree with: the prominence of Tiger cubs in areas like the performance of classical music is not a result of biology or genetics. It is also not the result of some specific cultural aptitude or advantage conveyed by some linguistic difference. This prominence is the product of very focused and determined work which is driven by focused and determined parents.

I also agree with Chua that this reflects a significant difference between Euro-American culture and many other cultures in their dominant notions of what childhood is and should be. In the US, we tend to conceptualize childhood as a time of innocence and play, a time before worry, a time of joy that should be free from the responsibilities and pressures of adulthood. “Play is a child’s work” is the mantra of many a preschool teacher. Kids who don’t get this time, who have to “grow up early,” because a parent dies or a sibling needs extra care are often treated with a kind of sympathy for the presumed bliss they were forced to give up.

As Amy Chua shows, this notion of childhood innocence is not universal. It is the product of a specific set of historical and geographical patterns (largely 19th and 20th century European thought). Recognizing these patterns is not to pass judgment on the wrongness (or rightness) of the ideas themselves. Instead, it merely brings to the fore the fact that there are other ways of thinking about childhood, what children should be doing during this time, and even what constitutes a child.

Why? Why? Why?

2011-01-26T23:10:00.001-05:00

Pip likes to ask a lot of questions. He constantly wants to know what is going on, why a person is doing what they’re doing, how something works, or why something is the way it is. As Ava and I have tended to encourage this inclination, he sees all this questioning as something quite normal, even when the person in the wheelchair about whom he just asked is sitting right beside us.

Of the many different forms this questioning can take, the most challenging, and often most revealing, is what I’ve come to call the “why cascade.” A why cascade starts off as a single, innocent question. For example, on Saturday when Pip and I walked into the locker room at the local YMCA to put on his bathing suit for swim lessons, Pip asked me,

“Why are there lockers in here?”

It was a reasonable question, particularly since we usually change him and then carry all of our stuff with us to the pool. I took a moment to start untying his shoes and then gave him a simple answer:

“So people can leave their stuff in here while they’re swimming.”

And then the cascade began:

“Why?” Pip asked.

“Well,” I replied, “they don’t want to take their stuff with them.”

“Why?”

“Because they’re afraid their stuff might get wet if they do.”

“Why?”

“Um, well, the area around the pool is very wet.”

“Why?”

“Well…when people get out of the pool they often splash water on the pool deck.”

“Why?”

“Um, you know, bathing suits and hair when they get wet, carry a lot of water with them. Water is kind of sticky in that way.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, Pip. It has something to do with water’s chemistry.”

*****

The why cascade contains two key elements. The first is that once he has started it Pip will keep going no matter how esoteric or banal the subject matter becomes. The result of this is that every why cascade becomes a kind of micro-scale analysis of both the subject matter at hand and my thoughts about that subject. Such an analysis has a way of revealing things that I had never before considered. For example, on Saturday I could have made an argument about clutter or safety around the pool or people’s concerns about having things stolen. Instead, the most immediate thought I could access while trying to get Pip out of his clothes and into his bathing suit was one about keeping everything dry. I guess that’s my biggest concern when it come to my things and the swimming pool.

The second key element of the why cascade is that it almost always concludes with me saying “I don’t know.” Unfortunately, this is an unsatisfactory conclusion for both of us. I want to win the game by providing the answer that finally makes Pip say “Huh. Okay” (a feat that I know will never actually happen). For his part, Pip wants me to keep giving him answers because he like hearing me talk about new things. Sometimes he will even get upset with me when I tell him that I don’t know something because he thinks I am hiding thoughts from him. When that happens he will ask the last question over and over again, trying to pry some more substantial answer from me.

In moments like that, I become slightly envious of those who possess a strong religious faith. If I was Christian (or Muslim or Jewish) and I faced that impending conflict at the end of the why cascade I might be inclined to resort to the all encompassing answer of “Because God made it that way.” This reply would sound so definitive and conclusive, so much more powerful than the wimpy repetition of “I don’t know.” It makes me understand better why religion is so important and so vital for a great many people. The certainty, the finality, the closure that such faith can bring is a very potent experience. Next to this, the openness and uncertainty that comes with agnosticism or atheism feels flimsy and weak. They force me in the face of my child’s questions to say over and over “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know,” an exercise that is intensely demoralizing.

*****

As he gets older, Pip is deploying the why cascade less and less. When he first started using this technique, there was a very purposeful and exploratory intent to his process. Now, when it shows up, it is usually a sign that Pip is excited, nervous, tired, or otherwise feeling too distracted to articulate a coherent question. Such was the case in the locker room on Saturday.

In place of the why cascade, he has begun to ask questions that take us in more complicated and abstract directions. Over the last two months A few of these questions have jumped out at me as particularly interesting and worthy of reflection. Next week, I’ll delve into three of these and reflect on what challenges they present to me as a parent.

Shifting Tides

2011-01-19T23:50:00.001-05:00

Since Christmastime, there has been change afoot within our household. I have felt it come to my attention gradually, like when the ocean tide reaches its lowest ebb and, even before the waves begin crawling up the beach again, you can sense a new flow of activity around you. Things that used to go in one direction, now seem inclined to follow another.

Polly and Pip have started truly playing with each other. Our world will never be the same.

*****

Two recent moments have brought this imminent change to my immediate attention.

First, the week after New Year’s Ava went back to work and Polly, Pip and I spent a couple of days engaged in the kind of undirected play that helps the kids ease back into the familiar patterns of life after all the excitement and unpredictability of the holidays. On Thursday morning this meant goofing around in Polly and Pip’s bedroom. For much of the morning Polly played amongst the blankets and pillows on Pip’s bed – alternately burying herself in them, hiding beneath them, pretending to sleep among them, and rolling around on top of them. Pip took this time to collect all the Cabbage Patch dolls and stuffed animals he could find into a pile at the foot of the bed and then proceeded to roll, slide, and fall into them in a number of creative ways. Every once in a while the two of them would take a break from their respective endeavors to perform a series of synchronized belly flops into the sky blue sheets that had become bunched up in the middle of the bed.

At about 11:30 I got up from my assigned spot along the fringes of all this commotion and went in to the kitchen to cook up the grilled cheese sandwiches we were going to each for lunch that day. Usually when I do this, Polly and Pip will play for a few moments longer and then make their way into the kitchen with me – Pip likes to find ways to ‘help’ me make lunch and Polly likes to beg for pinches of cheese from whatever pile I’m using to make the sandwiches. This time however, they stayed in the room. After about five minutes I stuck my head out of the kitchen doorway and around the corner towards their room to see what they were up to. It wasn’t anything new. They were just rolling around together in the middle of the bed and laughing about something. Figuring they were just finishing up, I slipped back into the kitchen and continued making the sandwiches.

Fifteen minutes later I was done, and they were still playing. I carried the sandwiches out to the dining room table and then headed back to their room. When I walked in, they were still situated in the middle of the bed, though now they were laying side by side in the rumpled sheets and blankets while looking up at me with big smiles. I’m still not sure what they were doing during those twenty minutes, but whatever it was they were reluctant to come out for lunch. They were having too much fun to be interested in food.

*****

The second moment that caught my attention happened last week. I was doing some dishes in the kitchen while Polly and Pip were playing in the living room. Earlier in the day I had pulled a long thin strip of wood paneling out from the basement for the kids to use as a ramp, and now the whoosh of matchbox cars, fire trucks, and LEGO vehicles repeatedly rolling down the incline and across the hardwood floors filled our apartment. In between one of the rounds, Polly’s voice came calling around the around the corner:

“Daddy, help.”

There was no urgency in her tone and I guessed that she probably needed some assistance with one of the LEGO figures she likes to play with. One of her favorite games is to pull the hats, helmets, and hair off of these figures, but sometimes she has trouble putting them back on. I called back to her that I’d be there in a minute and went back to washing the soap off the casserole dish in my hand.

As I turned off the water and set the dish on the drying rack, Polly called to me once again:

“Pip help Polly, Daddy.”

This was said with such casualness and nonchalance that I chuckled a little bit as I walked around to the living room to see what had taken place.

In the living room I found Pip setting up his fire truck for another run down the ramp and Polly, as I expected, fiddling with some LEGO figures on the floor near the base of the ramp. I smiled at Pip and told him thank you for helping Polly. Then I turned back into the kitchen to finish the last few dishes.

Standing back at the sink it struck me that while this was certainly not the first time Pip has helped Polly with something, it was the first time that such a scenario had played out in this way. Usually Pip would come running to tell me about Polly’s difficulty – either before or after helping her – in order to receive some positive attention from me for the help he did or was about to render. This time, I guess, helping Polly out generated enough of its own positive feedback that Pip did not feel the need or the desire to seek this out from Daddy. While this development came as a surprise to me, neither Polly nor Pip found it remarkable. It was such a natural act that they didn’t even look up when I first stuck my head out of the kitchen to tell Pip thank you.

*****

This changing flow in the patterns of our life is a bittersweet experience for me. On the one hand, it is very exciting to see Polly and Pip start to build a more substantial relationship with one another. Through actions like playing together in their room, helping each other work out different problems, and even just talking directly with one another during meals, they are engaging in the kinds of shared, everyday experiences that are fundamental to developing bonds of trust and understanding between them. They are learning what it means to share the world with another person and are beginning to discover the joys and compromises this entails.

Unfortunately, every ‘us’ needs a ‘them’ against which to define itself, an external other which demarcates the boundary where ‘us’ begins and ends. This means a slight change in identity for Ava and me. Up to this point, Ava and I have been in the middle of everything Polly and Pip have done. We have been playmates as well as parents. While this positionality is sometimes a burden, it has enabled us to really know our kids, to keep track of what they are up to, to understand how they are feeling, to anticipate what they are thinking. This arrangement is still largely intact, but Polly and Pip’s growing relationship has given me a glimpse of what is to come, of the time when being a parent most often will mean being on the outside looking in. Of course, there is nothing inherently wrong about this exclusion, but it still makes me sad. I love the level of intimacy I have with the kids right now and hate to think of it drifting away into the realm of memory.

One of the very few universals in the world is that today will be different from yesterday and tomorrow will be different from today. In all this difference there is some gain and some loss. Parents feel this persistent state of change with particular acuteness as our children constantly develop new capacities and leave behind old patterns. Polly and Pip’s growing interest in one another is an exciting development for Ava and me, but I can’t help mixing this excitement with a splash of nostalgia. Their time as babies is coming quickly to the final curtain, and I will miss it when its gone.

Daughters and Sons; Sons and Daughters

2011-01-15T23:51:00.002-05:00

This week’s post can be found at the Daddy Dialectic blog. The front page is here. A direct link to the post is here.

2011-01-13T20:58:00.002-05:00

This week's entry will be posted at the Daddy Dialectic blog on Friday or Saturday. It is running late because I wanted to get some extra feedback on the entry prior to publishing it. I will put up a link here as usual once the entry is complete.

Next week things should be back on schedule.

The Silliness of Santa

2011-01-06T00:40:00.001-05:00

It will be one of the enduring contradictions of our family’s identity that we “do” Santa. The jolly old elf of ‘Twas the night before Christmas’ with his miniature sleigh, twinkling eyes, and goodie-filled peddler’s pack does not easily fit into the world Ava and I are trying to build for our kids. It’s not that we find him devilish or antithetical to some ‘true’ nature of Christmas. It’s just that bringing the world of Santa into Pip and Polly’s lives means having to fudge around with some things that we usually would just avoid. For example,

1) Santa is not real.

Polly and Pip have wonderfully creative minds. They can turn a plastic crocodile into handyman’s drill and kitchen utensils into violins. Frequently, they will imagine themselves to be different animals – a dog, a bear, a spider, a woodchuck – and will crawl around the house making what they feel are the appropriate sounds and movements. They also spend a great deal of time pretending to undertake a host of real world tasks from serving food to building skyscrapers to caring for sick babies.

Ava and I love all of this creative energy and constantly encourage them to explore scenarios they have not considered before. At the same time, we strive to draw clear lines between the real and the imaginary. Oftentimes this line drawing comes into play while we are reading a book. We will come across something like a talking animal or a flying car or a Dr. Seuss creature, and Pip will want to know something more about them. At this point I will be sure to mention something about the author’s imagination in order to establish the realm in which we are working before continuing on to answer his question. I feel like this helps him better understand the workings of his mind and the minds of others as well as heads off any fear-inducing confusion about what creatures the world actually holds.

With Santa all of that care must go out the window. Elves, flying reindeer, toy factories at the North Pole all become possible and plausible because we don’t claim otherwise.

2) The naughty and nice lists

People are complicated. They do things we think are good. They do things we think are bad. Often there is a lack of consensus about which of those things fall into which of the categories. Even more frequently people do things in different ways that are neither good nor bad. They are just different.

All of this can be confusing for the kids when it comes to Santa’s naughty and nice lists: Is Santa tabulating all of these differences and deciding which are good and which are bad? How many bad things must one do to end up on the bad list? If I get fewer presents than another kid does that mean Santa thinks the other kid is better than me?

3) Santa’s ubiquity in holiday advertising.

Santa is an exquisite pitchman. During the holidays he shows up everywhere – shopping malls, supermarkets, the drug store, the bookstore. And where ever he goes his presence reminds you that you need to buy stuff for Christmas. In this he is the henchman of the market. Santa spreads happiness and cheer by showering everyone with gifts, and so you too must do the same. His presence urges us to buy more stuff because that is how we are supposed to show our love for one another at Christmastime.

And yet, Santa arrived at our house two weeks ago loaded with gifts and spreading cheer. The precedent was established last year, just as Pip was turning three and becoming old enough to remember things from one year to the next. Ava and I debated Santa’s merits and initially decided not to bring him into our home. But something about that decision did not feel right to me. I had a history with Santa, and it made me wonder if cutting the kids off from him was really the right thing to do.

*****

When I was sixteen, my mother announced that she would not be doing Santa anymore. That Christmas my sister and I were going to be playing some music for midnight mass at the local Catholic church, and Mom had decided the logistics of creating a visit from Santa were going to be more than she wanted to juggle. It seemed a good time to bring Santa to a close.

It was no secret to us that Santa wasn’t real. That had been established long ago. But through the years we had fallen into a kind of Kabuki arrangement whereby we continued to play our roles with respect to Santa in spite of his obvious immateriality. We still set out cookies and milk before going to bed on Christmas Eve. My sister still got up at 5:00 AM on Christmas morning to see what Santa had brought. My mom still wrapped the Santa presents in their own special wrapping paper. All of this was part of our Christmas ritual, and we played our roles with knowing smiles and only a few judiciously selected side jokes.

Mom’s declaration of the end of Santa ripped through all of this, and I wasn’t ready for it. Though I could not have articulated this at the time, I really enjoyed the process of a visit from Santa. It added an extra bit of mystery and excitement to Christmas morning. It filled those early morning moments before my parents woke up with a feeling of exuberant expectation that often outlasted the excitement generated by the presents themselves. It also added an element of playfulness to the day and the season. Talking about what Santa brought and what Santa did was like being in on an inside joke – we all knew what was going on but could have fun talking with each other as if we didn’t. It was a bit of silliness, but a silliness that we created together.

My immediate disappointment at Mom’s bringing the era of Santa to a close must have been obvious because the moment I said something about enjoying Santa’s visits with us, she began to backtrack. She had thought that this decision was going to be no big deal and that my sister and I had stopped caring about Santa a long time ago. If we still cared, she said, then she would figure out how to get Santa to come around that year as well. I told her that I would really like that.

That Christmas Santa made his regular visit to our house. We played our roles and had our fun. I don’t remember what I got that year, but I do remember being particularly happy. Santa continued to return to our house each Christmas for the next decade or so, stopping only when I no longer made it to my parents’ house for the holiday.

*****

I think it was this idea of Santa as an enabler of silliness that made Ava and I reconsider doing Santa with Polly and Pip. Beyond everything else that Santa is or has become, having him visit brings us together into a shared world where playfulness is the rule. He encourages us to be fanciful by leading us to talk about elves and flying reindeer. He allows us to be silly and coy at a population scale that few other idioms can reach. In many respects Santa really is the spreader of merriment and cheer during Christmas, not because he brings gifts, but because his presence tinges everything with a layer of childlike playfulness that may be the true magic of the season.

As a parent this kind of playfulness seems like a quality worth passing on to our kids.

From the bucket...

2010-12-30T20:43:00.002-05:00

Due to a virulent puking bug that has worked its way through our entire family, I do not have a post ready for this week. Come back next Thursday for some post-Christmas thoughts on Santa.

Lord of the Legos

2010-12-23T08:29:00.000-05:00

December in Kentucky is supposed to be chilly, with thirty degree days and twenty degree nights being not unusual. But over the last three weeks Old Man Winter has given us a full display of his wares. We’ve had snow. We’ve had ice. Temperatures have consistently remained at least ten degrees below normal. We’ve even had a couple of days where the mercury couldn’t push its way up into the double digit markings.

As a result of all this, Polly, Pip, and I have spent very little time outside of our apartment. It’s just been too cold. Each morning I’ve looked through our kitchen window and thought maybe I should take the kids out to at least walk around in the snow. But then I’ve felt the harsh blast of air rush in as Ava leaves for work and decided that even playing in the snow would not be fun for long enough to justify all the effort it takes to bundle the kids up and keep them warm. So we’ve made due with what diversions we can find inside.

In past years, this kind of confinement has been an unpleasant experience for Pip and me. We could usually make it for a couple of days without incident, but by day three or four we would start snipping at each other. Little annoyances would then become magnified and our frustration with being stuck inside would build up into a full-fledged tension between each other. Ava would then have to spend a couple of nights working to defuse things in order to restore harmony in the house.

That has not been the case this year. In fact, I have come to enjoy this time together. One reason for this is that I have gotten better at heading off moments of frustration and at anticipating when Polly and Pip need a shift in their activities. Another reason is that Pip is becoming less dependent upon me for direction and more capable of creating games for Polly and himself. A third reason can be located in the emerging prominence in our household of one my favorite childhood toys: Legos.

******

Between the ages of six and twelve, I spent a great deal of time playing with Legos. I had a moderate amount of these finger-sized interlocking blocks, and from the wings, wheels, lights, and bricks of solid green, yellow, blue, black, grey, and white I built an ever-changing array of different structures and vehicles. I had a particular affinity for space-themed constructions. The several Christmases of this period netted me a pair of spaceships, a space station, a moon rover, and a couple of smaller exploration vehicles. It was great fun to work through the instructions for one of these sets and have the picture on the box come to life in my hands. It was even more fun to then tear the thing apart and see what I could build on my own. I have fond memories of running around our house flying the armada of unusual vehicles my sister and I had created.

After my Lego fascination was replaced by other interests during middle and high school, my mother packed all my accumulated parts away in an 8” x 8” x 12” box and put it on a shelf for me to rediscover some day. I left it there when I went to college. Then, while I was in graduate school, my parents moved, and the box came into my hands once again. It has remained amongst our stored things ever since, waiting, a bit like Tolkein’s ring, for the right time to re-emerge.

******

When Pip was eighteen months old, we bought him a basket of wooden blocks at a yard sale. I spent much of that summer and fall trying to convince him that building something with them was fun, but he was only interested in knocking things down. In fact, he was so eager to wreck whatever I tried to build that I rarely could get more than two or three blocks stacked on each other before he would come barreling towards me with hands and feet flailing. This got so frustrating for me that I eventually put the blocks away.

From that starting point, he has gradually progressed towards a more constructive relationship with building toys. This development started with a sack of Mega Blocks (basically a toddler version of Legos) that my parents gave him the following Christmas. He took some interest in stacking these together but was still much happier ripping apart the creations of others. The next spring, Ava found a small bucket of Legos at another yard sale and brought them home for Pip to try out. Through the summer we would get them out periodically, and Pip would fiddle with a couple of pieces while I built a helicopter or a tractor or a locomotive or an airplane for him. Over the winter as he turned three years old, he began asking me to make specific things for him – a ship, a dog, a dinosaur, a sailboat. He started paying more attention to how I was putting things together and began being more protective of these creations. He also started making a few creations of his own with the Mega Blocks. These usually consisted of a single large block topped with a few stray pieces that jutted out to the left or right.

When we moved to Lexington this past summer, Ava and I put the Mega Blocks away and shifted Pip’s creative energies towards the small bucket of Legos. With these pieces he began imagining more complex structures – a railroad station, an airport – and asking me to build them. He wasn’t ready for a full project of his own, but he hovered around me and quickly began adding his own pieces to the foundations I created.

In late November, he was ready for more. One day he saw a picture of a cargo ship in one of his books and decided that this would be his first independent Lego creation. He worked on it sporadically for a couple of hours, adding some pieces here, pulling others off there, and then brought it over for me to see. In his hand was a solid 4” x 4” x 6” block cobbled together from Legos of various sizes and colors. The block rested on a small grey platform and was topped by a pilothouse defined by a pair of Lego windows. His face radiated pride.

******

Watching Pip work on his cargo ship, I could feel the time for the big box of Legos was at hand. Before we moved Ava had found a full cache of basic building pieces at a thrift store and had added those to the box from my childhood. Now I was anxious to see what Pip and I could do with such a massive collection, and I began to look for opportunities to finally crack into this stash.

In that respect this cold snap could not have come at a better time. After a couple of days inside we needed something new and exciting to keep us from getting stir crazy. The Legos were a perfect solution. So two weekends ago I went down to the basement during the kids’ naptime and dug them out.

When he saw them, Pip dug into the pile immediately. He was particularly attracted to the old brochures and instruction manuals I had kept because all the pictures they held gave him a flurry of new ideas. After about twenty minutes a common refrain began: “Daddy, can you make this for me”; “Daddy, I want you to make this thing”; “Daddy, do you know how to make this one?” It was like the song of the Sirens. I couldn’t, nor did I want to, resist. I happily plowed in with him and started giddily building away.

******

The cocktail of novelty, nostalgia, and the constant possibility of building something cool has carried us a long way over the last two weeks. We’ve made it through several days inside that might otherwise have driven us crazy. (In truth, Pip and I have probably benefited from this more than Polly. She likes the little vehicles we have built for her but gets frustrated that she can’t build more with us. I forget sometimes that she’s not even two years old yet) But what has really made these days enjoyable for me is not seeing what Pip is creating with the Legos but observing the larger developmental moves that his play with the Legos brings to the foreground. Pip’s creativity is expanding. He is asking more sophisticated and complex questions. He is learning how to share things and take turns with Polly. He is developing an awareness of how to politely communicate his interests and intentions. He is even proactively engaging Polly to keep her happy by bringing her new toys when he starts playing with something new and by finding ways to redirect her when she is beginning to bother him.

All of these things point towards the idea that Pip is becoming a person we hoped he would become. It gives us confidence that we are making sound choices in approach our parenting and makes us feel positive about both Pip and Polly’s futures. Confidence and the vague sense of certainty that comes with it can carry us a long way. They have made the last three weeks more enjoyable than I would have ever expected, and they make me feel like this winter will be a little bit better than the ones that have come before.

2010-12-16T00:38:00.001-05:00

This week’s post can be found at the Daddy Dialectic blog. The front page is here. A direct link to the post is here.

Getting Through the Two's

2010-12-09T00:39:00.001-05:00

By every standard I can think of Pip was a wonderful two-year-old. At home, he was talkative and playful. He loved to read books. He loved to run and climb. He was always interested in helping me with yard work or cooking or cleaning. He was very gentle and cooperative with Polly when she came along. That’s not to say that he did not have his moments, and unfortunately, its those moments that come to my mind first whenever I think back to that time in his life. The brief periods of a given day where Pip was whiny or irritable or stubbornly uncooperative triggered in me some of the worst emotions I have ever felt. I learned a great deal about myself during the six months surrounding Pip’s second birthday and much of it was ugly.

Now Polly is entering into this same period of her life. As is normally the case, she is doing a boat load of new, fun, and astounding things: stringing four and five words together into coherent thoughts; doing simple shape puzzles without any help; building block towers that go ten or twelve high; engaging in all manner of creative play with Pip. She is also getting coyly rambunctious at bedtime, periodically tossing silverware at the dinner table, banging things repeatedly on the oven, head butting, climbing on tables, and requiring regular reminders to keep her feet off the table during meals. Last night she was showing some rare form around bedtime by first being decidedly uncooperative while we were brushing her teeth and then by giving Pip a few swift kicks to the head just before it was time to turn out the lights.

None of this behavior is malicious or mean-spirited. Sometimes it is just the result of being tired or hungry. Other times it is spurred by boredom or impatience. Regardless, it is all very experimental. Even the head kicks from last night were enacted while looking at me with a half-smile and a wide, searching look in her eyes. She knows when she is crossing a threshold and pushing out into uncharted lands. And, with each step she takes, she is watching us to see what happens.

When Pip started doing such things, I had no strategy for handling them. I had read some parenting books that made me aware of what was happening, but the books did not offer me any tools to manage these experiments in the context of getting things done in daily life. “Avoid getting into a battle of wills” is a fine suggestion but does me little good when I need to get clothes on a recalcitrant child. Walking away and coming back later was not a good option. I needed something more interactive to get me through such moments, a couple of strategies to fall back upon when our family train had jumped its metaphorical track. I didn’t really get them.

With the six to eight months of experimentation with Pip and the subsequent eighteen months of reflection time, I think I am now positioned to better handle whatever may come with Polly. My strategy is based on two principle ideas:

1. Adrenaline is my enemy

I was a competitive swimmer in high school. In college, I got into long-distance hiking. In graduate school, I ran a couple of marathons. As such, I am friends with adrenaline. It brings me a rush when I’m at the peak of exertion and follows this with a period of latent joy when I’m all through. It makes me feel more alive, confident, creative, vital, and potent. It tempts me to go running even when the temperature outside is ten degrees.

Unfortunately, adrenaline – or whatever cocktail of chemicals that are actually at work in all of this – also complicates my attempts to manage an uncooperative child. The pattern is very predictable. An initial moment of frustration with the child’s behavior prepares the stage. As I repeatedly fail to alter the child’s actions, a pressure builds up. I can feel it pulsing in my brain and pushing against my skull, crowding out all other thoughts, calling for me to explode, to shout or stomp or do something violent that will create an ecstatic release of adrenaline into my bloodstream. I can sense that the child is feeling this too, its body seeking the release that comes with unshackled tears. When we reach this point there is no painless way out. Most of the time I can hold it back, but this effort leaves me a simmering wretch for hours afterwards. Every once in a while, the beast slips loose, and I must deal with the recriminations - both external and internal - that follow.

The first few times I went through this cycle I had no idea what was going on. I would get frustrated with something and then before I knew it I would become a barely caged monster. Then, somewhere along the way, Ava suggested thinking about the role adrenaline was playing in all of this. At the time this suggestion just made me more frustrated because I had no idea how that was supposed to help me. But, gradually I came to see that by focusing on heading off my own adrenaline build-up at the outset of a potentially frustrating situation, I could keep these situations from spiraling out of control on me.

One of the early products of this realization was a modified time-out method for bringing Pip back into balance when he gets out of control. With Polly I am attempting to deploy an even more pro-active strategy. This consists of trying to be as boring as possible whenever I need to correct or alter her behavior. For example, Polly likes to climb on tables. From time to time she will sneak up on one and wait for one of us to notice. Now when Pip would do something like this, I would first politely ask him to get down. When he didn’t comply, I would ask again and again with my tone of voice getting increasingly more strident with each repetition. This would set the whole adrenaline cycle in motion. With Polly, I will start by asking politely for her to come down from the table. When she doesn’t, I walk over to her, pick her up slowly, and place her down on the floor. The key to this action is to make the picking up and putting down process so slow and so long that it become boring for both of us. This way there is no rush that might make the removal process ‘fun’ or ‘interesting.’ Polly usually kicks her feet around a little bit and hangs out without too much aplomb. By the time she makes it to the floor she is happy to run off and find something else to try.

2. Counting is my friend

One of our neighbors has a son who is about the same age as Polly. Every once in a while when we are out in the front yard, they will come over to talk and play for a few minutes. During one of these visits, the boy’s mother mentioned to me that she was having a harder time lately getting him to do what she asked of him. In particular, he would become very agitated whenever it was time to leave a place or go inside. We chatted a bit about this and then a few minutes later it was time for her to go. She went over to her son, who was playing on one of Pip’s bicycles, and told him it was time to leave. This set off a cascade of tears that eventually concluded with the mother picking up her son and hauling him away.

As they disappeared through their front door, it struck me that this mother had failed to do one simple thing that might have completely changed how the situation played out. She had not given her son a five minute warning. She had waited until it was time to go to tell her son that they would be leaving. As such, her son had not had a chance to prepare himself for the coming change. He had not had a chance to wrap things up. He had not had a chance to mentally say goodbye. The kid was basically whiplashed from one state to another. It’s no surprise that he was so upset.

Fortunately, I learned this trick early on with Pip, and we have hardly ever had a problem leaving one place for another. It doesn’t even matter how much actual time passes. Sometimes five minutes is really two. Other times it can stretch to ten. The point is to create a moment for him to get ready. Once that is accomplished, changing states has usually not been that hard for him.

I also learned over time that I could use this process for smaller state changes by announcing a number and counting up to it. This started out as a sort of threat along the lines of “I’m going to count to 10 and if you don’t come here by then you are going to be in real trouble.” Eventually I realized that there was no need to use it as a last resort. Instead, it could be a game. Whenever I required Pip’s attention or needed to move him from playing with something to getting a task done, I could tell him what action needed to happen and announce a number upon which that action would commence. Then, instead of angrily counting, I could make silly noises with each passing number. This way the counting would be fun. I could use it to get his attention, give him time to change his state, and maybe, down the road, facilitate his ability to count.

With Polly, I have started employing this strategy for almost everything – eating food, going to the bathroom, brushing teeth, putting on pajamas. Any time I need to move her from one thing to another or just move her along in a process that we’ve already started, I tell her what we’re going to do and pick a number that I am going to count to. It’s astonishingly effective. I can tell her over and over to do something without success, but if I give her the silly counting terms she will at the very least allow me to pick her up and carry her along to whatever it is that needs to be done.

*******

These two principles and the strategies they encompass are obviously not full-proof. They work within a context of established and predictable patterns where both parent and child know what is going on and are comfortable with what will happen next. This will not always be the case with a two-year-old. At the same time, having them at hand gives me a first step, a place to go when things start to break down. They give me confidence that I have something to try and sometimes that confidence is all I really need.

I am looking forward to the next year of Polly’s life. It will be interesting. It will be fun. I imagine I will learn things good and bad about both her and me. My biggest hope when it is all said and done is that the good things will be what comes first in my memory.

Rocket Science

2010-12-02T00:27:00.001-05:00

If someone had asked me in elementary school what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have answered: “an archeologist.” I don’t exactly when I decided this, but sometime around age 7 or 8 I developed an interest in anything ancient and especially anything that was or could be discovered by digging around in the right place. This interest began with the pyramids and all the wonders contained therein. It continued to be stoked by my discovery that our world contained full Roman cities preserved under volcanic ash, a buried Chinese tomb containing a complete army of life-sized terra cotta warriors, and ancient Mayan temples hidden under the jungle growth of the Yucatan peninsula. For a brief period my family purchased a subscription to National Geographic Magazine, and I remember flipping eagerly through the pages in search of articles about the next recently discovered ziggurat foundation or the next Viking ship found sunken in the mud near the mouth of a German river. I also remember being confused whenever I came across one of the magazine’s articles on small towns in the Great Plains or stories on Hindu dancers in Bali. These were of no interest to me. I wanted to see jeweled daggers, large earthen walls, and hieroglyphics carved into stone.

As I moved into middle school and high school, the thread to which this interest in archeology was tied quietly slipped through my fingers. I’m not really sure why. Perhaps other, better opportunities came along. Perhaps the job ‘archeologist’ did not show up on the career matching sheet used by my high school’s guidance counselors. Perhaps I merely suffered from a lack of imagination about what was possible. I was still intrigued by things ancient and buried, as evidenced by the five years I spent learning Latin, but I filed this interest under the tab of personal interest, not professional aspiration. The idea of pursuing archeology as a career had vanished from my consciousness without really putting up a fight.

I feel like this kind of thing happens to many people. As kids we wanted to be firefighters, astronauts, pilots, teachers, mechanics or chefs. Then over time these fancies drifted away to be replaced through the forces of practicality, necessity, inertia, distraction, or opportunity by careers like accountant, business manager, engineer, and chemist. It’s not like we gave up on some firmly established dream. It’s just that our ideas about what a good career would be and what is really possible for us within the range of options out there changed, subjected as they were to influence by a variety of powerful forces that felt subtly beyond our control.

While thinking about this in relation to the people I know, I could only come up with two people who had a stated career interest at an early age and went on to pursue that interest as they grew into adulthood. One wanted to become a doctor. The other wanted to be a fighter pilot. Both had clearly established visions of themselves in these careers and, more importantly, a well-defined Ur-moment, a point in their memory where they could say “that was when I knew I wanted to do this.” My doctor friend points back to a childhood visit with a pediatric allergist who was able to substantially improve my friend’s life by getting under control the wide array of debilitating allergic reactions from which he suffered. My pilot friend got hooked on the idea of flying fighter jets after watching the movie Top Gun.

This second friend and his slightly ridiculous, yet undeniably powerful Ur-moment came to mind this weekend because Pip and I experienced something together that, were he a touch older, had the potential to capture his imagination in a similar fashion.

As is our family’s custom, we spent the Thanksgiving holiday at Ava’s parents’ house. Her parents live in northeast Ohio where the weather during late November is almost unfailingly miserable. Snow is common. Cold is just about guaranteed. This year we were treated to a combination of mid-thirties temps, strong winds, and a dash of bone-chilling rain that kept us cooped up inside for all of Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. While Ava and I eventually went a bit stir-crazy, Pip and Polly handled this confinement quite well. With all the different people and unfamiliar things to play with, they mostly avoided that nagging boredom that drives children to climb on tables or swing electrical cables around over their heads.

Ava’s parents also do a good job of engaging the kids in various ways like letting them help with cooking, building play houses and caves out of pillows, blankets, tables, and chairs, and having a variety of books on hand that the kids have never read before. One of the books they had put out this year contained a story in which the main character, Alex, uses about twenty different forms of transportation to get from his house to the place where he works. The book was designed to be overflowing with things to look at, and all the cars, trucks, airplanes, trains, helicopters, hot air balloons, cruise ships, ferry boats, and submarines commanded Pip’s attention for multiple hours.

On the next to last page of the book, we learn that Alex is an astronaut and see that preparations are being made to launch his space shuttle. When Pip and I were reading this book together for the sixth or seventh time on Saturday afternoon, Pip started asking questions about those preparations. In particularly he asked why the workers had to take cover just before the shuttle lifted off. I tried to explain about rockets and all the fire and smoke created when they are launched, but I could see that he was having difficulty imagining what I was talking about.

Then I remembered YouTube.

I’ve used YouTube a couple of times over the last several months to show Pip and Polly video clips of things that I can’t describe to their satisfaction. We’ve watched hang gliders riding thermals along a California cliff and giant airport fire trucks putting out fires on airplanes. As the videos play, I usually provide some commentary, pointing out things about which I was trying to tell them or talking about how something works. As they don’t watch television regularly, the opportunity to see any video is a special occasion, and in these moments they tend to be willing listeners to anything I have to say.

On this evening, Ava’s dad was working on his computer in the opposite corner of the room. He happily plopped Pip on his knee and together the three of us flipped through the YouTube archives in search of a shuttle launch to watch. There were plenty of clips to choose from. We ended up watching one of Discovery and another of Atlantis, all the while talking about the forces at work and the immense energy needed to get one of those ships off the ground and into space.

Then we found some footage of a Saturn V rocket. This was the multi-stage launch vehicle used for all of the manned moon shots made by the United States space program. The particular footage we found was for the launch of the first successful moon shot, Apollo 11. The footage was taken using a high-speed camera that was mounted on the launch platform and whoever had posted the video had slowed everything down to about a quarter of real time speed. In the background, they had also added a soundtrack using a violin and some synthesizers whose timbre rose and fell dramatically in accordance with the action taking place on the screen.

And that action was mesmerizing. It began with the ignition of the engines. The camera frame was focused tightly on the exhaust cones and the anchors used to hold the rocket steady until all the engines were ignited and their upward thrust was properly balanced. Sparklers were fired and a massive flame leapt downward from each of the cones. Then, the anchors dropped away and the whole massive cylinder started moving upward through the screen. Passing through a halo of vapors created during the ignition process, the white rocket rose gradually up the screen, eventually giving way to a blotchy plume so intense the screen became pixilated, the computer roughing in boxes of flat red and yellow when it could not fully process the dynamics of the colors present. This plume was followed by a moment of blackness as the smoke from the flames engulfed the camera. At this point, the footage moved to another camera which tracked the rocket as it shot higher and higher into the clear blue firmament, flames spewing forth in such a way that the whole thing resembled a giant squid squirting upward from the depths of the ocean.

The three of us watched all of this in silence. We stared at the screen transfixed as the second camera struggled to keep the burning rocket within view. It slid up and bounced down and rattled back and forth for a couple of minutes, sometimes managing to show only a blackened tip or a fiery tale for seconds at a time.

The whole time I was hoping that we might get a glimpse of the second stage ignition before the rocket passed out of visible range. Near the end of the eight minute clip, a second ball of fire appeared about a third of the way up the rocket. This ball dripped orange flames down along the shaft below until a steady flow was established between it and the similarly sized ball of fire at the tail of the rocket. This blazing barbell hung around on the screen for a few seconds before moving off the screen for good, seemingly moving too fast for the camera to catch up.

The footage concluded with a second look at the initial moments of the launch from a camera perched higher up on the launch tower. This time after the rocket passed through its vaporous ring and the footage continued on through the swatches of white, red, and black, no second camera picked up the lost feed. The blackness of the smoke became the blackness of a screen gone dead.

The intensity of this footage seemed to sap all the energy from Pip. Once the clip concluded, he softly proclaimed that he was done looking at movies for now and was ready for dinner. He slid down from his grandfather’s lap in a slight daze and took a couple of shuffling steps. It was as if he was not totally sure his legs would carry him. At the same time I was coming to realize how profoundly thrilling I had found that video and how, in this random moment, I had instantly become incredibly curious about how it all worked. How, I wondered, does one create that much force and how does one actually go about harnessing it to propel an object into space?

It struck me that at some level Pip was probably wondering about such things as well. He certainly could sense the visceral excitement this video generated for both his father and grandfather. Perhaps channeling that excitement to a certain extent, he had focused steadily on the screen for the full extent of the video. As he made his way towards the dinner table, I suddenly had a vision of him in thirty years talking about how this was the moment when he realized he wanted to be a rocket scientist.

Do I actually think this will happen? No. In the four days since watching that video Pip has not mentioned it once. And, given that he is not yet even four years old, I imagine that he is too young to project himself into the future in quite that way. But that age is coming and watching that video was a reminder of how simple and unpredictable things can play such a significant role in the ways we know ourselves and, consequently, in the things we choose to pursue. Human beings may strive for logic, for coherence, for a rational and meaningful course to their lives, but serendipity, randomness, and chance are truly the kings of our experience. We ultimately build our order from the masonry that they provide.

Drugs, Sex, and Money

2010-11-24T23:33:00.002-05:00

On Wednesday, we took Polly to the doctor for her eighteen month check-up. On the way there, I watched my speedometer closely and used cruise control on the highway because I was nervous, and I always drive too quickly when I’m nervous. Every trip to the doctor carries a bit of tension for me - there’s always the possibility that they’ll find something wrong – but this trip had some extra worry added to it. This was the first trip to a new doctor for us, and I wasn’t sure how it would go. You see, Ava and I have chosen to use a non-standard vaccination routine for Pip and Polly. This makes us less than ideal patients for many physicians, and it takes some work to find one that will work with us. I had spoken to this one on the phone a couple of weeks earlier about our choices. At the time, he was amenable to working with us, but I was still worried that once we were actually there, this willingness would come with some caveat or a lecture about how we were needlessly exposing our children to death or dismemberment.

*****

The question of vaccinations is a tricky one. Prior to the mid-1990s, medical authorities recommended that children receive a diptheria, tetanus, and pertussis (DTaP) shot, a measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) shot, and a polio vaccine. Since then, the number of vaccines recommended for children between the ages of 0 and 6 has more than doubled (see here for each year’s recommendations). That’s a lot of shots and a lot of foreign substances being pumped into little bodies. It makes me nervous, especially because we don’t really have any long-term data on what all these new vaccines will do. These vaccines can be tested for safety over relatively short time periods, but there are no long-running studies on how something like the early use of the Hepatitus B vaccine might relate to levels of cancer, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s or other diseases later in life. And now that so many vaccines are being pumped into kids all together it will be very difficult to untangle the mess if something does come up in another twenty years. Given this uncertainty and the historical experiences with drugs like Vioxx, Ava and I are hesitant to over-vaccinate our children, especially for things like Hep A and B which are diseases associated with drug use, high risk sex, and poor sanitation and ones like chickenpox (varicella) and flu for which the most significant harm is usually the loss of work hours for a parent.

Compounding our hesitation is the reality that vaccines are big business for drug companies. Getting a vaccine included on the list of recommended shots can generate a large chunk of relatively consistent money for the company that produces the vaccine. This gives drug companies plenty of incentive to get as many vaccines included on the list as possible. Where there is incentive, there is money. It seems hardly coincidental that the rise in the number of recommended vaccines corresponds relatively well with the explosion of big money politics over the last fifteen years. Money talks in many different arenas whether it’s spent on lobbying, marketing, clinical trials, or handouts.

The drug companies are also pushing these vaccines at the individual level as well. We got a reminder of this the first time we skipped a scheduled vaccine. About a week after our doctor’s visit we received a postcard in the mail from our insurer. The postcard helpfully suggested that we had missed one of the normal shots. At the bottom of the card was a disclosure statement. The postcard had been paid for by Wyeth Pharmaceuticals.

In thinking about this recently, I’ve come to realize that I don’t blame the individual drug companies for any of this. They exist in a profit driven system where survival is predicated on selling as much stuff as possible. A good company is going to use as many ways as it can to stay in business. It is unfair to demand that they act as some kind of public trust when their ultimate survival is not protected by the public. This doesn’t make me any less suspicious of their influence. It only acknowledges that this influence is a product of structural constraints, not individual avarice.

*****

Our concerns about vaccines and the influences at work in their usage have made finding a doctor a challenge. In Cincinnati we got very lucky. After a bad experience with Pip’s first pediatrician, we went to the internet and tapped into the social network discussions around alternative vaccinations to find a doctor who would be willing to work with us. We were pointed to one who turned out to be better than we could ever have expected. His entire practice bespoke a certain skeptical distance from the normal business of medicine. First, all appointments were scheduled for thirty minutes. Second, he had no nurses so that entire half-hour was spent with him. He did all his own measurements. He administered all his own shots. Third, he had no drug company paraphernalia or hand-outs lying around his office. There were no posters on the walls, no pens with drug ads on them at the reception desk, and no freebie drugs stashed away in a drawer of the examining room. Fourth, he made careful distinctions between conditions that should be treated with drugs and ones like common ear infections or pink eye which given the right attention and a reasonable amount of time, the human body can take care of by itself. All of these things gave us confidence in him and made us very comfortable in following his advice when it came to vaccinations (his preference was to administer the older vaccines – DtaP, MMR – and hold off on the newer ones unless a specific reason suggested itself (i.e. rotovirus for kids in daycare)).

When we moved to Lexington we had to start all over again. Going back to the internet, we searched again through the local internet discussions. Not surprisingly, there were very few names that came up as possible candidates. But again we got lucky. There was a newer family physician in one of the outlying towns who was willing to work with families like ours. After calling him up and discussing our preferences with him, we made an appointment for 10 AM on Thursday.

We got there a few minutes early so that I could fill out the new patient paperwork that is always a part of the first visit with a new doctor. There was no one else in the waiting room so I let the kids wander around and check things out. The office was a new one with cream colored walls and benches upholstered in dark green leather. On the magazine rack were several current issues of popular weeklies like Sports Illustrated and Newsweek, a requisite copy of the children’s story of the Bible, and a book on the palliative properties of different foods. Pip and Polly picked through each of these in turn while I worked my way through the various forms. During that time another family came in with a little girl about Pip’s age. The two sized each other up from opposite corners of the room.

And then came a reminder that replacing our doctor in Cincinnati will be almost impossible.

As I was filling out the final form in the stack, another person walked in the door. I looked up long enough to see that it was a woman, tall and thin with thick blonde hair that hung down past her shoulders. She wore a fashionable camel hair coat and the pressed black pants and black heels of a well-paid professional. I did not see her face, but I imagine her makeup and jewelry matched her obviously expensive and well-tailored clothes. Now, the office in which we were seated was that of a family doctor in a smaller town in central Kentucky. Most of the vehicles in the parking lot were either small sedans or large pick-up trucks. The family sitting across from us in the waiting room was dressed in jeans and sweatshirts as was the receptionist behind the desk. None of us looked like this woman. Before she said a word, I decided that she was a drug rep. This guess was verified when she asked the receptionist if the doctor was in and whether the office needed any more of something that sounded like ‘hyproxin.’

*****

In college I spent two semesters working in the engineering division of a medium-scale electronic components factory. About once a month, a salesperson would come in and spend the day in our office. I think his name was Harry. He would usually bring us lunch and a few trinkets to share and would spend the day making his way around the office to the different engineers. He would ask what they were working on and suggest, or give a demonstration of, products he had that might be useful. Harry was a doughy guy, short and slightly unkempt, but with a likeable smile that allowed you to blow him off if you needed to. Every once in a while someone would seek him out to ask about a particular component, but usually his mode of operation was to start a conversation and see if it would lead to something. In general, the longer he got to talk with an engineer, the more likely it was that he could find a sensor or motor or electrical component that the engineer could use.

After seeing this drug rep, I pondered what would have happened in that engineering office if she had come in instead of Harry. The fundamental pattern probably would not have been different, but the promise of face time with a woman from whom these men would normally get no more than a few seconds of attention is a powerful force. I imagine the amount of time she would have gotten with all of those male engineers would have been noticeably greater. And, as a result, she probably would have sold more stuff than Harry.

Like that engineering office, the medical profession is a male heavy arena. This leads me to believe that the same principles I know to be true in that engineering office are applicable to doctors, namely an attractive female salesperson is likely to get more time and more attention from a doctor than her position as a drug salesperson might merit. And as with the engineers, more time equals more possibilities for finding or convincing doctors that she has something that they ‘need.’ As I discussed above, the potential for that kind of influence is worrisome. It’s also a troubling reminder of how screwy our health care system is that the prescription drugs we buy are being pushed to doctors using methods very similar to those used to sell sports cars and beer.

When I mentioned all of this to Ava, she brought up another salient aspect of this situation. The drug rep has access to the doctor in ways that are difficult for a patient to discern and evaluate. There is a fundamental lack of transparency about these relationships that makes it impossible for a patient to make an informed judgment. We can’t know how drugs are being marketed to the doctors, what information the rep is providing, or what the doctor does with this information. There is essentially no way for the patient to parse the influences at work in the doctor’s decision-making process. The doctor may hand off all the drug rep interactions to a third party in the office in order to keep some distance from the sales pitch. The doctor may lap up every free meal and golf outing the drug rep can provide. We just can’t know. It’s another one of the pitfalls of our current system. We are forced to trust that our doctors have the time, patience, and self-awareness to filter through the wash of information provided by a drug rep. Such trust is difficult to justify. Human beings are just too susceptible to suggestion and impulse. And the drug reps spend plenty of money and effort to sway things their way (see this article from The Atlantic for some examples).

*****

Despite all of this, I will go back to this doctor. For one thing, the appointment went fine. The doctor was friendly and comfortable talking about our options and choices. He was good with the kids and did not try to constrain Polly too much in the process of examining her. It was a straightforward and no-nonsense visit to the doctor. For another, we don’t have that much of a choice. If we want to do the vaccinations our way, this is our guy. We too have our structural constraints. We sacrifice one set of choices in order to exercise another.

2010-11-18T00:25:00.000-05:00

This week's entry can be found at the Daddy Dialectic blog. The front page is here. A direct link to the entry is here.

The Challenges of Children's Literature

2010-11-11T00:03:00.000-05:00

While living in Cincinnati, I used to walk Pip and Polly down to the library about once every two weeks or so to check out some books. It was always a treat to have a couple of new stories to mix in with our own collection of kid titles. Since moving to Lexington, we had not done the library trip quite as frequently, mostly because I didn’t have the identification paperwork necessary to get a library card.

Two weeks ago I finally finished the steps necessary to get a Kentucky driver’s license and with it, my very own library card. The first thing the kids and I did after the clerk placed the new driver’s license in my hand was to walk down the street from the county clerk’s office to the rounded, multi-story black granite building that houses the downtown library. Pip was the first one through the door, and he headed immediately up the stairs to the second floor where the children’s section is located. Polly followed close behind. Walking past the computers and their games for a moment they stood quietly looking at the long wall of shelves holding all the children’s books, trying to decide where they wanted to dig in.

For all our experience with libraries, the book selection process itself is still a real challenge. First off, there is the difficulty of physically handling the books. I usually start picking up books at a random point in the shelves and flip through a couple to see if anything catches my eye. Following my lead, Pip and Polly do the same thing. As such we can pull a pile of ten to twenty books off the shelves in a matter of seconds. Keeping this from getting completely out of control requires a good bit of juggling and redirection.

More significantly, children’s literature can be an insidious product. The idea of a ‘children’s book’ carries with it a certain expectation that the content is safe and sensitive to the impressionable nature of young children. While this assumption may be true relative to the content found in adult fiction, Ava and I have found plenty of stuff in children’s books that don’t align well with what we want to teach Polly and Pip.

So over time I have learned a few shorthand keys to help ease the process of selecting out the couple of books that will actually leave the building in our hands. I tend to look first for things we have enjoyed in the past – books that rhyme, books with animals doing silly things, books about how things work. Farm settings and counting books also tend to be reliable. I then look to see if a given book has any of the material we have idiosyncratically deemed to be hazardous for our children. This includes excessive violence, romantic love, overt nationalism/patriotism, hypermasculinized things like giant cartoon trucks or military themes, and hyperfeminized things like princesses or prissy girls. If I find any of these, I slip the book down on to a table for reshelving and grab another one.

This pick and filter process works well for most books, but there is one group that continually causes me fits. These are children’s books which take a story or idea that is familiar to parents and give it an innovative twist. In some cases this twist is a flip of the protagonist-antagonist binary such as turning the three little pigs and the big bad wolf into the three little wolves and the big bad pig. In other cases the hook is that the story begins from the point where a familiar fairy tale like the Frog Prince ends. I’ve also read another particularly clever book where familiar songs, ranging from Old Susannah to the Battle Hymn of the Republic, were used as the foundation for poems about science.

I find these kinds of books to be very entertaining. In many respects they remind me of the old Warner Brothers cartoons with Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Yosemite Sam, etc. Those cartoons were great because they contained such a diverse range of possible amusements. You could get slap-stick comedy, sophisticated cultural critiques, and self-reflective experiments in artistic creation all within a five minute segment. As an adult this sort of subversive playfulness feels like being let in on an inside joke, one that pokes fun not so much at my children but at what I remember as the overly serious adults of my own childhood.

At the same time, as a family our experience with these books has been largely unpleasant. Either they are pitched too far towards adults for Pip (and very soon Polly) to enjoy them or I end up trying to explain the parental focused references that Pip picks up on but doesn’t have the context or background to understand. In both cases, sitting down with these books usually resulted in a mixture of confusion and frustration that did little to help Polly and Pip enjoy our time reading together.

Despite these problems, I kept bringing these books home with us, always hoping that the next one would not suffer from the same deficiencies as the others. It took Ava’s intervention and some tears from Pip to bring home to me the reality of what was going on. The production, marketing, and selling of children’s books is an industry like any other. To sell books, publishers target the people who actually purchase the books: adults. Sometimes this means creating something that kids want and subtly encouraging them to beg their parents for it. Other times this means creating something that parents think they kids would or should want. And sometimes, it means creating a product in the kid genre whose real audience is intended to be adults (e.g. Toy Story 3). I apparently have a soft spot for that third category and was making choices accordingly. In the process my own interests were overwhelming my evaluations of what Pip and Polly would find enjoyable.

I have since gotten much better at recognizing when such a breakdown in the selection process is taking place. All the same, the temptation is still there. This past visit I came across a book entitled “The Secret Life of Walter Kitty.” I picked it up and flipped through it because of the Walter Mitty reference. The book was about a cat who, like Walter Mitty, imagines himself taking part in a whole range of adventures while barely straying from his house. It was clever and amusing so I put it into our take home pile. Then I caught myself and took another look. The pictures were complicated. The text was disjointed and scattered around all over the page. I guess Pip and Polly will get used to this kind of presentation as they get older but for now it was definitely too much. I reluctantly put the book down on another table for the librarians to reshelve.

We came home from the library that morning with a book by Dr. Seuss, one called ‘Me and Robot,’ one about a big dog on a farm, and one where a boy imagines seeing a dragon floating in the clouds. Pip spent all afternoon with this last one. He is in the process of learning what it means to imagine things and was determined to work out what in the book was supposed to be real and what was supposed to be a product of the boy’s imagination. It’s a challenge, and we worked it through page by page. I still don’t know if it really makes sense to him, but at least it’s a project that he chose and one that he is learning from.

Opportunistic educations

2010-11-04T00:17:00.003-04:00

Last weekend we took Pip and Polly to the local horse track. While in most places this would represent a moment of questionable parental judgment, in Lexington, KY it is a common and popular thing to do. The racing and breeding of horses is a significant industry in central Kentucky. The areas outside the city limits, particularly to the north and east, are filled with the rolling treeless fields of green grass encircled by double-layered white or black wooden fences that are the signature landscape of a horse farm. The lodestone for all of these farms and the local industry more broadly is the racing and auction facility at Keeneland. Going to the races at Keeneland is a bit like going to a golf tournament at Augusta National. It is immaculately kept and intentionally old-fashioned. The grandstands are made of painted black steel that is framed with grey limestone – the bedrock of the area. The grounds are all trimmed with dark green hedges and lots of flowers. The track officials, mostly older men, all wear kelly green sports jackets and slightly rumpled pants that make them look like friendly uncles. The facades of the betting windows are made of stained wood and contain directions handpainted in a script from the 1940s. It is a place that attempts to transport you to another world, and it largely succeeds.

One of the programs that Keeneland runs during its fall and spring race meets is a Saturday morning breakfast where people can come and watch the horses train while scarfing down scrambled eggs, sausage, and biscuits with gravy. While the food is decent, the real draw of the program is being out there early in the morning and watching the horses run as the rising sun begins to burn away the pre-dawn mists. It’s thrilling to stand at the rail as a pair of jet black thoroughbreds come sprinting down the track toward you. You can hear their hooves clomping in the dirt and their breathing pulsing louder and louder as they get closer. Then they fly past so quickly, your eyes have a tough time keeping up. Fortunately, you will get another chance as a second pair and then a third and a fourth will following in short order.

That thrill of standing at the rail is as powerful for kids as it is for adults. As such, we, along with a couple hundred other families, dragged our kids out of bed before sunrise this past Saturday morning to go have breakfast with the horses. Once we got there, Pip and Polly dutifully ate their eggs and biscuits and then reveled in trolling around the collection area by the rail, alternately watching the horses and watching the other kids watching the horses. After a while, we decided to take a walk through the stables to see what else was happening, and during that walk Pip gave me another of his ongoing lessons about teaching, learning, and the education of a child.

Every week Pip, Polly, and I designate a letter and number to work on during the week. Last week these were ‘L’ and ’10.’ Some weeks when we have some extra time we also add a shape or a color to the agenda. Last week was one of those weeks so on Wednesday morning out came the shape-sorter box and its 12 accompanying blocks. Pip fished around in the box for about a minute and then came up with a parallelogram in hand. We traced the block on a piece of paper while talking about the two main properties of a parallelogram: 1) it has four sides and 2) the opposite side pairs must be parallel to one another. I showed him that in addition to the common parallelogram that he pulled out of the box, squares, rectangles, and diamonds also fit this definition. Then I pulled a trapezoid out of the box and asked him if this shape was a parallelogram. He hesitantly said no. Then I asked why it wasn’t. I did this as a little test, both to see if he really understood what I had been telling him and to see if he could take an additional mental step by looking at the trapezoid and pulling out the significant difference between it and a parallelogram.

His response was to turn his metallic blue eyes towards me with a wide, helpless stare that I have learned means “I am no longer interested in taking part in this game. Just tell me the answer so we both can move on.” But I wasn’t ready to accept this. He had not even made a guess yet, and I really wanted him to give it a try. So, I let him play for a few minutes then came back at him with the trapezoid. He again gave me that pleading, blue-eyed stare before getting up to play with something else. When I tried to come at him a third time, Pip finally refused to sit still at all and I had to concede that he was not going to even try to answer the question.

It was a moment of classic parental overreach on my part. Correctly answering this kind of question would mean that he understood the concept and that his mind is agile enough to think around this kind of idea when it comes at him from another angle. It would also, most importantly in retrospect, validate my own efforts to teach him something. In this, his success would be my success, his failure would be my failure. Somewhere I vaguely I heard the Sirens singing.

Fortunately, by the time we went to breakfast on Saturday, this trapezoid episode had slipped from my mind. As we made our way away from the collection area and walked along the gravel drive between the track and the stables we passed a Ford F150 with an unusual horse trailer attached to it. The trailer was white and had a large half door at its midpoint. Over the top of the door we could see a series of pulleys and arms and straps hanging down from the underside of the roof. Along the side of the trailer were printed the words “Equine Ambulance.” When Ava read this out loud, it immediately caught Pip’s attention. He is an avid observer of emergency vehicles and has developed a keen ear for the subtle variations in the sirens of the fire trucks, ambulances, and police cars that regularly go down one of the busy roads near our apartment. An ambulance for horses was something Pip had not considered before, and he spent a minute or two looking this one over. Then he turned to me and said, “Daddy, why doesn’t this ambulance have any flashing lights?”

It was one of those simple, perceptive questions that require a series of verbal gymnastics to answer in a way that is satisfactory to both parent and child. The full answer is that an equine ambulance doesn’t have lights or sirens because if a racehorse is so badly injured that it would need to be rushed to a hospital, it is usually put down – i.e. killed - right there at the track. But how do you explain to a four-year old that horses aren’t cared for in the same way as humans? We opted not to and instead decided that this ambulance was for getting a horse off the track and that a second ambulance – one with lights and sirens – would be used to take a horse to the necessary medical facility. Pip seemed satisfied with that.

It wasn’t until several minutes later as we were strolling past a big chestnut horse being hosed down by a groom that I realized what Pip had done with the equine ambulance: he looked it over, compared it to what he already knew, and began asking questions to determine what meaning could be found in the similarities and differences. It was exactly what I had wanted him to do earlier in the week with the trapezoid. Now at one level I know that he does this kind of mental work all the time. But with the trapezoid failure still relatively fresh in my head, Pip’s evaluation of the equine ambulance was a welcome reminder of what he is capable of. Once I recognized this, I immediately brought up the equine ambulance again in order to compliment Pip on asking such a good question and to talk through the thought process indicated by the question. Hopefully, by making him aware of what he did, it will make it easier for him to harness that process again in the future.

Pip’s assessment of the equine ambulance also reminded me that I had gone about the whole trapezoid question the wrong way. While I have written in a previous post about the ability of parents to act as opportunistic teachers, I still possess an inclination to approach teaching as a direct linear process whereby the initiation of an educational moment is my responsibility (and also my privilege). This is largely a question of power and control. By reserving for myself the power to initiate an educational moment, I maintain control over the process and can feed the illusion that my contribution to my children’s learning is greater than it really is. The opportunist model turns this structure on its head. It is driven by the explorations of the kids. They show interest in something, then I figure out how to talk about it. With this, teaching becomes much more of a post facto and ad hoc activity, one in which I try to contextualize for Pip or Polly what they saw or did instead of instructing them beforehand on what they should see or learn from a particular experience.

The main benefit of this model of education is that I can capitalize on something which has already piqued their interest instead of trying to generate enthusiasm in them for something which I think is important or interesting. The main challenge of this model is relinquishing control over the immediate direction of learning and the vague feeling of power that goes with that control. It also means that I constantly have to scramble to keep up with them - though I am finding that with practice I can often find a way to make most things about some preferred set of ideas or concepts. It just requires being prepared with a range of ideas and finding which one fits best with the current object of interest.

This model is not fool proof or necessarily more productive than the teacher directed model. But, as a parent interested in taking part in my children’s education, it does mean fewer battles over trapezoids. Ultimately, I also hope it means more interesting conversations with my kids as we stumble together through the forest of possibilities that is the world in which we live. I just need to get better at staying out of the way.

What's the Difference?

2010-10-28T00:16:00.002-04:00

Before having children, I never put that much thought into how variable they are or how those variations might come into existence. Now that we have Pip and Polly, I am constantly amused and fascinated by the differences between them.

The lens that reveals all of this difference is Polly. As the second child in our family, we cannot seen her except in the context of our previous experiences with Pip. She may follow his precedents. She may tack away from them. But she can never exist separately from them. Everything she does necessarily prompts a comparison. Everything she does becomes known to us in part as a similarity to or a difference from what Pip did before.

Our knowledge of Pip is not left unchanged by this comparison either. As Polly has passed through the various stages of childhood, the wake of our memories regarding Pip has gotten disrupted. Basic certainties have become open for re-evaluation. Maybe Pip isn’t that good of a sleeper after all. Maybe Pip’s aptitude for language is more significant than we initially realized. The comparisons that Polly’s life invites have a way of turning statements about Pip into questions.

What does all of this mean for Pip and Polly over the long haul? In light of this question, I thought I’d do a light-hearted birth order comparison for this week’s blog entry. My initial idea was to find some lists of famous (and infamous) first and second born children then extrapolate a series of characteristics from them to make a fanciful projection of Pip and Polly’s respective futures. Google gave me a good start on this by providing a couple of websites dedicated to spelling out correlations between personality traits and birth position, but none of them had the comprehensive or extensive lists of well-known people I was hoping to find.

All the same, these websites did make for fun reading. The consensus that seems to arise from them is that Pip will tend to be more confident, patient, conservative, organized, authoritarian, rank-conscious, defensive, logical, ambitious, and scholarly than his sister. This puts him in the company of US presidents, astronauts, and entrepreneurs (though I wonder if these commonalities are due more to historical inheritance practices that favor the first-born son than on shared personality traits). Polly, on the other hand, will be more creative, adventuresome, rebellious, fair-minded, social, immature, liberal, and unconventional. She will follow the path blazed by a variety of entertainers (again inheritance practices?) and such luminaries as Bill Gates, George Soros, and Fidel Castro.

If I want, I can see a bit of the ascribed qualities in Pip and Polly. Pip is certainly more cautious and interested in the details of how things work than Polly is (right now). And Polly definitely is more willing to dive into a crowd of people she doesn’t know than I imagine Pip will ever be (though he does well in familiar locations). But, the more descriptions I read, the more traits like “sensitivity,” “jealousy,” and “attention-seeking” started to overlap with one another. Taken as a collective, the descriptions I found in these websites read more like the vaguely suggestive characteristics found in a horoscope than the distinctive general traits each individual site would initially lead one to believe. Some of the sites essentially indicate as much by devoting a page to caveats and exceptions. (see here and here) These pages basically say that the birth order traits discussed previously do not mean much because so many variables – like gender, culture, socioeconomic status, etc. - go into constructing an individual’s personality.

None of this vagueness is surprising or unexpected. The ability to take these definitions with a grain of salt is part of the fun. We all know that life is too complicated to assent to easy generalization since every situation can play out in such a wide variety of ways. Will Pip’s two years of single childhood may make him upset with having to share parental attention or will this sharing relieve him of some of the pressure that comes with constant surveillance? Does Polly’s consistent inability to do all the things Pip can do may make her resentful of him or does it challenge her to achieve things she otherwise might not have? Over time I imagine that we will be able to find examples of all these possibilities coming true.

The only thing we can really say for sure is that Pip and Polly will be different. Their lives will not and cannot be the same. This is partially because of their relationship to one another. It is also partially because Ava and I are not the same parents we were when Pip was born. This fact is something that particularly excites and amuses me in my dealings with Polly. In short, the second child presents me with a second chance.

I’ve been thinking about the benefits of a second try a lot recently as Polly approaches the “terrible twos.” When Pip underwent the transition from toddler to kid that kicks in between 18 and 24 months, I was unprepared. I knew about the “terrible twos” and had read about the kinds of physical and emotional changes that would be at work during that period. But psychologically I was not ready. I had really enjoyed being with Pip as a 12 to 18 month old. During that time, he learned to walk. He began to talk. He started playing in lots of new ways. And, most importantly for me, he was so excited about understanding my words that he readily did just about everything I asked of him. As he moved passed the 18 month mark, this excitement began to wear off. Pip began to develop his own set of interests and ideas. He wanted to try out things that I wasn’t crazy about – playing with light switches, climbing on chairs, running around without pants on, et cetera, et cetera. He was no longer willing to drop whatever he was doing in order to take a bath or put on a clean diaper. He also began seeking out ways to delay or avoid doing what I asked of him. While I knew that much of this was a matter of testing out my reactions to all these situations, I didn’t handle them all that well. The cumulative frustration of trying to get him to do what I needed and being unsure about what new strategies to try, what balance of praise and punishment to deploy, and what kind of relationship issues I was creating in the process of just getting through basic household chores really had me tied in knots.

The solution to this was largely a matter of adjusting my approach to Pip. First, I had to accept the reality of his personhood and the fact that he was developing his own agency. This meant working to treat him as a person and not a baby, trying to understand how my instructions would sound from his perspective, and being willing to negotiate and talk through things with him instead of just telling him what to do. It meant learning to say yes to things he wanted to do that I found annoying. It also meant preparing him before a change was coming by giving him a notice a couple of minutes beforehand. Lastly, it meant letting him win some, or at the very least allowing him to do things like sliding off the bed one or two more times before shutting him down. By letting go of my attempts to control everything all the time, I found a way to get through. I still got frustrated but not in the boiling and uncontrollable way I had before.

Polly is now 19 months old, and she has begun to wander off at bedtime. Before when we would tell her that it was time to put on her pajamas, she would happily go to the room she shares with Pip and sit down on the floor. Now, she goes to the bedroom, but consciously stays just beyond my reach for a while, tunneling into a pile of stuffed animals, sneaking around the backside of her crib, or trying to climb up on Pip’s bed. I am able to watch this with a sense of amusement because I know what to expect now. I’m ready for the change and understand that the sudden willfulness and absence of immediate obedience to my instructions are signs that her mind is growing. I also know how important my own reactions are to Polly’s behavior. My goal is to overreact to the positive things and underreact to the negative. I will still draw lines in the sand, but I don’t want to get upset when she crosses them. Instead, I will just quietly and slowly bring her back to try again. My idea is to create consequences without drama, correction without the adrenaline rush of confrontation. This has certainly helped thus far to keep me from getting worked up and hopefully it will do the same for her.

I don’t know exactly what the long-term effects of this will be, but I hope it will make Polly’s experience of the “terrible twos” different from the one we went through with Pip. Maybe it will even be an experience that is enjoyable for us all.

And if not, Polly can talk about all of this when she fulfills the destiny of the second-born child by becoming the host of her own television show.

Notes on Living and Dying

2010-10-21T00:07:00.001-04:00

Several things have happened in the past week or so, and I’d like to catch them before they slip away. They each could probably be extended into a full post, but the nature of things is such that I fear they will get lost or forgotten or buried by the next event that comes along. So, this week’s post consists of a couple of vignettes that provide a collage of where our family is right now. It will serve to time-stamp some thoughts that I may want to come back to later on.

- Pip has hit a growth spurt. A month ago he was comfortably wearing 3T pants. This past week we had to clean them all out because they are now too small. In addition, he is reaching light switches he couldn’t before. He is washing his hands at the bathroom sink without standing on a stool. He is able to easily see now into the highest drawers in the kitchen.

All of these things seem to have given him a sense of power. It is the power of feeling more in control of himself. He is more capable of helping Ava and me with various tasks. He is less recalcitrant when required to do something he doesn’t really want to do. He is more confident in a broader variety of new situations. He is not just growing bigger, he is growing older.

- In the past three weeks, Polly has entered the zone during which she will shed the ‘toddler’ label for good. We know this because she has crossed the threshold with two big development milestones: the true start of toilet training and a sudden explosion in her experimentation with words.

First, the toilet. Polly has benefited in many ways from being the second child in our family, and the process of learning to use a toilet will be no different. We struggled mightily in training Pip to use the toilet. He handled peeing okay, but we could not get him to poop in the toilet. He would hold it and hold it until his body literally could not take any more. Then he would drop it all in his underwear. At the time we thought he just was having trouble figuring out how to get his muscles to do what they needed to do. Later we came to realize that this was probably our fault.

Pip never had a child’s toilet. He learned using a trainer seat that fit over the seat on an adult toilet. It turns out that because his feet were not touching anything when he first started using this seat, his body was never in a position to correctly use his muscles for pooping. Basically, every time we sat him down to poop, his muscles were positioned such that they could not push anything out. It wasn’t until he grew a bit more and his feet could reach a stool while sitting on the training seat that suddenly he ‘figured out’ how to poop.

Now we almost made the same mistake with Polly. About six weeks ago she started showing interest in the toilet. So, we put her on Pip’s trainer seat. As luck would have it, the second time we did this she pooped into the toilet. Over the next several days we tried to replicate this pooping with little success. Instead, she got all out of whack and seemed to be headed down the same road that Pip had traveled. Fortunately, we were in no hurry and had the presence of mind to just stop trying to use the toilet for a while. Within a week Polly was back to her normal schedule.

Last week Polly showed interest in using the toilet again. This time we got her a child’s size toilet that allows her to put her feet on the ground. Hopefully this will make the whole process easier on us all.

And now for words. Polly has been adding new words to her repertoire each day for almost two weeks now. Today she said ‘crocodile’ and ‘raspberry’ for the first time. Sometimes these words come out so clearly on the first try that it feels like magic. Other words require work. When Polly is working on one of the harder words, she sometimes kicks her head back and stretches her mouth out into different shapes. It appears that she is physically working out what configuration her mouth needs to be in to make the sounds necessary for a given word. I don’t remember Pip doing this kind of work in such a visible way. Its really fun to watch.

- On top of all of these developments, we decided it was finally time to eliminate Polly’s nighttime feedings with Ava. Polly doesn’t need to eat with Ava at night, but she was in the habit of coming to check in and suck a couple of times each night. We were waiting over the last couple of months for her to give this up on or at least drop down to one visit a night. Unfortunately, Polly showed no signs of changing her patterns on her own. So, its my job to coax her into it.

As a result, it’s been a rough week or so for me in the sleep department. Polly will go back to sleep with me, but it has taken several nights to figure out the best arrangement for doing this. I spent the first couple of nights walking for multiple hours with her half-asleep in my arms. She did not really like this and frequently called out for me to take her to Ava. The combination of physical labor and the stress of trying to keep her quiet enough for Pip and Ava to sleep left me exhausted and frustrated. It turned me into a miserable person and a very short-tempered parent.

We have since tried a couple of different configurations. The one that seems to work best is for me to suit her up in the baby carrier. This is how I put her down at naptime and bedtime, so it makes sense that she would be most comfortable falling back asleep in this way. I didn’t do this initially because it is slightly cumbersome to get into the baby carrier while half-asleep. But Polly is more patient with me in this respect than I had expected. She doesn’t cry out for Ava if I am coming to put her in the baby carrier. Kids (and people more generally) are creatures of habit. I’m not sure why I tried to do anything else.

- Finally, we have been facing some questions of life and death over the past couple of weeks. Two of my dad’s siblings, his brother and sister, recently died within two weeks of each other. Their deaths were not tragic. Both had lived fully for more than 80 years and when the time came for them to pass away, they both seemed to be at peace. As such, their deaths felt like an appropriate conclusion to lives well spent. I can only hope that my own life follows a similar course.

Unfortunately, this sense of rightness was missing from two other situations that we learned about this week.

First, a cousin of Ava’s recently found out that she has an advanced case of breast cancer. She had visited a doctor over a year ago complaining that something did not feel right. The doctor did not find anything immediately wrong with her and decided not to order any tests. Last month, one of her vertebrae ruptured, an unusual injury for a 33-year-old woman. In looking for a cause, doctors discovered her cancer. Her prognosis is not good.

There is a historical pattern whereby patient intuition is regularly downplayed or even ignored by professional medical personnel. This is particularly true when the doctor is male and the patient is female, as was the case for Ava’s cousin. Now I don’t know the details or any of the people involved so I am not pointing this out as an accusation of negligence or malpractice by the doctor. But, this pattern does exist. It generally does not operate at a level within the cognition or immediate control of individual people. Instead, it emerges in a cumulative way from the collection of unthought inclinations to do some things and not do others that is part of being human. It is a pattern of culture working largely at the subconscious level.

And so, I want to take this tragic opportunity to bring this pattern into consciousness in hopes that it might make a difference for someone else down the line.

Second, a co-worker and casual friend of Ava’s from her time working as a domestic violence advocate died this past week. I’ll call her Denise. While suicide was identified as the official cause of death, Denise was a victim of domestic violence. Ava and others here believe Denise’s ex-husband was responsible for her passing. Ava has felt Denise’s death with particular intensity because she admired the intensity and the intelligence Denise brought to her work. She also feels that Denise’s death is being discussed in completely erroneous ways. Most cases of violence are not an individual matter. They are not merely the result of bad decisions. They spring instead from the inability of a society to provide the kind of support needed for people who find themselves in desperate situations. Denise was a highly educated social worker with experience as a domestic violence advocate. Despite this, she became a victim of domestic violence. While I do not know the circumstances of her victimization and I don’t know any details regarding her relationship with her ex-husband, I do know that she did not “bring this upon herself.” She did not die because of some ‘flaw’ in her character that brought her together with her abuser. To think this is to excuse the abuser and to disclaim any broader social responsibility for a phenomenon that is neither random nor unpredictable.

2010-10-14T00:08:00.001-04:00

This week's entry can be found at the Daddy Dialectic blog. The front page is here. A direct link to the entry is here.

Veggie Delight

2010-10-06T23:39:00.001-04:00

I don’t like vegetables. They don’t taste good to me. I eat them because I’m supposed to.

As a kid there were countless evenings when I would sit at the dinner table looking at the three spoonfuls of green peas my parents required me to eat and pretend they weren’t there. After eating everything else on my plate, making at least two trips to the bathroom, and watching my mother unhappily clean up all the dishes around me, I would finally relent and choke down those cold, slimy little balls. Usually, I gagged a bit on each mouthful.

It wasn’t until I turned sixteen that this approach to vegetables began to shift. That summer, I dated a girl two years older than me. Her family always ate a salad with their dinner. While I never touched a salad at home, I thought it would look childish of me to not eat a salad when I had dinner with them. Much like drinking beer, the first couple of times I ate their salad it did not taste very good. But, I gradually learned what to expect and got used to the taste and texture of all those leaves in my mouth. Eventually, I even came to enjoy a good salad on occasion (though I still can’t stand that iceberg lettuce you get at low end restaurants and in cheap bags of salad. Why does anyone willingly eat that stuff?)

My relationship with other vegetables followed a similar trajectory. After getting started with salad, I took on some of the other plants – broccoli, carrots, spinach, green beans, etc. I quickly learned to eat them first, the flavor of fresh, hot vegetables being much more tolerable than lukewarm, soggy ones. I even found that a few raw carrots or slices of bell pepper could be enjoyable when I am feeling adventurous. They’ll never take the place of a piece of beef or slice of cheese, but veggies have now found a regular spot in most of my dinner selections.

I bring this up because I am actively trying to keep from passing my vegetable aversions on to my children. To this end, once Pip and Polly started eating solid foods, I made a concerted effort to ply them with as many vegetables as possible. My hope was that by flooding them with spinach, broccoli, sweet potatoes, squash, and the like, we could align their taste buds to favor a range of vegetables and avoid the kind of drama that I subjected my parents to.

This has not really come to pass with Pip. During the past year or so, he has been gradually dropping various vegetables from his list of acceptable foods. Avocados went first. Then zucchini. Then spinach. Then broccoli. Then carrots. We’ve been able to hold the fort with green beans, green peas, corn, and butternut squash, but I live in fear of the time when these too will drop away, leaving us completely dependent upon multi-vitamins to keep Pip functioning properly.

This past week, however, things took a turn for the better. For reasons that are not fully clear to me, Pip suddenly took an interest in trying some new (and previously dropped) foods. It could be that he is trying to keep up with Polly, who ravenously demands a piece of just about anything that shows up on our plates. It could be that he has recently seen adults besides his parents eating and enjoying these foods. It could be that he has just entered into an exploratory period, one of those developmental sweet spots when suddenly he is more willing then usual to try new and different things.

Whatever it is, this week Pip happily ate broccoli and carrots again, tried spanakopita and like it, and willingly put meat sauce on his pasta for the first time. Just like that four more foods - including three vegetables - were added to his ‘will eat’ column. I felt like celebrating.

As I heated up some more broccoli for Pip on Tuesday, three different things came to mind:

First, it’s nice to have our patience rewarded. Ava and I have worked hard to not make a big issue out of Pip’s diminishing vegetable preferences. We have tried to let him be, offering new possibilities when he shows some interest, but not pushing him or punishing him when he says he doesn’t like something. Our hope was that this would enable Pip to feel in control of his food choices and leave him more willingly to try new things on his own. It is gratifying that this strategy seems to be working.

Second, this success with Pip gives us more confidence to follow the same strategy with Polly. This confidence already is paying dividends as Polly is more willing to try things than Pip ever was at the same age. She will even demand food - like lasagna, for example – that we had never even thought to give her. So, even though she has dropped a couple of foods recently – most notably, avocados – we’re not that concerned.

Lastly, I’ve been thinking a lot about teaching and learning since posting a few thoughts about preschool a couple of weeks back. One of the comments I received on that posting included the conventional wisdom that you can’t teach your own kids as well as someone else can. I’ve been pondering this question and the theory I’ve come to is this: We teach our kids things all the time – from how to address people to how to eat with a spoon to how to use a toilet. Why would formal education be any different? I’ll grant that I can’t teach my children things the same way a school teacher would. But that has less to do with a stranger vs family dynamic and more to do with a class vs one-to-one dynamic. A school teacher can do drills or regimented lessons with a class because no one student has to be ‘on point’ the entire time. The responsibility for answering questions and producing work can get passed around. Parents and children do not have the same kind of buffers. So, a different approach is in order. As a parent, I have to be an opportunistic teacher, coming at subjects like reading, writing, geography, history, or math from an oblique angle, taking advantage of moments of curiosity in my children to introduce and tie together these things.

This is how Pip came to eat four new foods this week. Ava recognized that Pip was showing extra interest in what we had on our plates. She offered some of those new foods to Pip, and he decided to give them a try. If we had played the classroom teacher, bringing out these same foods and employing our authority to make him eat them, I suspect he would not be willingly consuming those foods again for a long time. Then we would be stuck waiting for someone else to convince him that vegetables are worth eating, just like me some seventeen years ago.

Leading and Being Led

2010-09-30T00:55:00.000-04:00

Thursday was a difficult day. For a variety of reasons, I had a negative afternoon. For one thing, I waited too long to process some avocados for Polly, and when I cut into them they had turned soft, brown, and largely inedible. For another, we were dealing with the initial onset of a cold for the kids which always puts me on edge. Then, in the background of all this, our house in Cincinnati has failed to find a buyer despite some very promising possibilities.

Finally, I really made a hash of dinner that night. I was making spanakopita (basically a spinach and cheese mix that you spread into layers between some sheets of pastry dough). To cook it up correctly, you put the finished casserole in the oven uncovered so that as it cooks the top layer of pastry gets nice and crispy. Well, I didn’t do this. Instead, after I made the thing up, I covered it with tin foil and put it in the oven. While this mistake did not ruin the spanakopita, it did create a soft, spongy mess on top that didn’t look very good to me. Now, the right thing to do would have been to admit my mistake and just serve the spanakopita as it was. I, of course, thought I could fix the problem by throwing the thing back in the oven uncovered and broiling it for a couple of minutes. This may or may not be a good idea. I still don’t know because I left the spanakopita in there too long and burnt the top to a crisp.

When I pulled the blackened dish out of the oven, I began to lose it. I started banging around the pots and crashing the silverware together as I went about trying to salvage the spanakopita and fix up the rest of the meal. Hearing an unusual amount of noise coming from the kitchen, Ava stuck her head in followed closely by both Pip and Polly. She took one look at me and, with her ever present wisdom, turned to Pip and said, “Why don’t you go reset your daddy.”

Now, resetting is something I do with Pip when he is mad, overly frustrated, misbehaving, or out of control for some reason. It is a variation on the idea of putting a kid in ‘timeout,’ except instead of sending Pip away to a corner somewhere when he gets out of control, we both go together. Once we find a quiet spot in our house, I wait for him to climb into my lap. Usually this requires some initial coaxing on my part, but once settled Pip remains in place. Then we sit quietly for a while. We don’t have a specific amount of time for this. It is just a matter of feeling out when each of us has calmed down enough. Then we talk about why we are doing a reset and what we may need to do to fix things once we’re done. Then we sit a bit longer until Pip gets ancy. Finally, we go apologize or clean up or do whatever else is needed to get things moving again in the right direction.

I developed this technique during my struggles to deal with Pip’s emerging sense of self. Starting at about eighteen months old, something changed with him. Pip didn’t become a terror. He just wasn’t as happily compliant as he used to be, and I just wasn’t ready to have to negotiate every single thing with him. As such, the process of adjusting our expectations of each other was bumpy. I can see now how parents end up bribing kids, grounding them, withholding desserts, and doing whatever else they can think of to get them to do one thing or another. I also comprehend now how such confrontations between parents and children can sometimes spiral into emotional and physical abuse. There were moments with Pip when I was so frustrated over something (usually innocuous like him taking forever to brush his teeth at bedtime) that the urge to erupt in some kind of angry display was difficult to suppress. Once that urge appeared, I could barely think of anything else to do.

I have found the reset process to be really good for me in this respect. Whenever I feel this kind of urge coming on, the reset process gives me an automatic out. We stop everything and, after calming down, talk through the situation together. It gives me an opportunity to tell Pip why I was frustrated as well as to apologize to him, if necessary, for not handling something correctly. This process of explaining my own feelings to him is more palliative than I ever would have thought possible. Over the long haul it has made me a much calmer and more empathetic parent.

With all of that said, on Thursday I didn’t want to be reset. I am the one who initiates the reset process and, for all the quiet back and forth it entails, that initiating power gives me a certain control over things. In the back of my mind, resetting was still something of a punishment, one that I use to reign Pip back in. But the moment Ava knowingly made her suggestion, that dynamic changed. Pip’s eyes brightened immediately. He slowly and solemnly walked over and took my hand. Then he gently led me back to our bedroom and over to the corner occupied by our big green recliner. After I was seated, Pip pulled out the footrest for me. Then he sat down on the floor and waited quietly while I closed my eyes for a minute or two. I did a long, slow count to ten, taking deep breaths and trying to let go as much of the frustration as I could. It was the thing that I needed to do. It got me back to a place where I could function again.

And, Pip was so proud that he was the one to get me there. When I was ready, he put the footrest back down. Then, smiling, he took my hand again and led me back into the kitchen to present me to Ava. I was his charge, and he wanted her to know that he had successfully completed his task.

Ava and I have a phrase that we use regularly when working with Pip and Polly: “You can’t lead from behind.” We cribbed it from our child-rearing guru, Dr. Sears the Elder, who, given the phrase’s koan like nature, probably pulled it from Winston Churchill or some Zen Buddhist master. For us, the phrase is a reminder. It means that the kids (and people in general) are more likely to do what we show them than what we tell them. But, just as importantly, it also means that sometimes we need to allow the kids to lead us. Independence and self-worth do not come from always being behind.

Pip got an opportunity to lead on Thursday. The pride and seriousness with which he took on this task made me realize how important such moments are. I spend an awful lot of time showing Pip and Polly what they should do. Perhaps I need to recognize how valuable it is to let the roles be reversed a bit more often.

Credit

2010-09-23T01:06:00.000-04:00

One of the great things about parenting young children is that every once in a while they hit one of those unmistakable developmental milestones – rolling over, sitting up, walking, talking – that marks their progress towards becoming fully functional human beings. Right now Polly is coming up on one. She is beginning to try out a whole series of new sounds and words. The words ‘dog’ and ‘frog’ have become consistently recognizable. ‘Purple’ and ‘mommy’ and ‘daddy’ are starting to round into shape. She used the word ‘home’ for the first time today. Each time one of these words comes out of her mouth I get a little thrill followed by a briefly flashing sense of accomplishment. It’s as if every word she speaks provides another bit of confirmation that I’m doing okay, that my parenting is getting her to where she should be.

While it’s nice, this sense of confirmation and accomplishment is way more substantial than is probably justified. Human beings walk and talk. They do these things regardless of how well or poorly they are cared for and largely on timelines that are their own. Certainly, the care I give them matters in a whole range of ways. But for me to take their new ability to roll or walk or talk as confirmation of my value as a parent is to grandly overestimate my role in their learning these particular skills.

(And yet, I can still barely contain myself whenever a new word comes floating out of either kid’s mouth).

On the flip side of this, there are a whole array of moments for which I tend to grossly underestimate the level of my influence on Pip and Polly. I was reminded of this recently when I took the kids to get passport photos.

Ava and I have been talking about taking the kids overseas for a while now and, after a couple of opportunities popped up on our radar screen, we decided it was time to start the process of getting passports for them. One of the more worrisome elements of this process for me was getting the necessary pictures done. Passport photos have to be arranged in a particular way. The subject has to be standing alone against a blank background and looking directly at the camera. Pip is old enough to follow instructions and not get freaked out by having some stranger with a camera standing between him and me. With Polly, I wasn’t so sure. I had visions of her being nervous and uncooperative. Then, I imagined, I would have to try and hold her while ducking down low enough to be out of the frame of the picture as the photo clerk struggled to get her to look directly at the camera long enough to get a good shot. It was not a situation I wanted to deal with. But, we needed the pictures so I packed up Pip and Polly and took them down to the local Walgreens.

Stepping inside the door, I grabbed a shopping cart and put Polly into the fold out seat. Pip hopped on the end, and we rolled over to the photo counter. When I told the hulking, 22-year old clerk that we needed passport photos for all three of us, he took a deep breath. Then, he dug a digital camera out from a drawer and pointed us over to the end of the counter where a small projector screen hung down beside a desktop computer. While we waited for him to set things up, I explained to Pip that he needed to stand up straight in front of the screen and look directly at the camera when the clerk took his picture. I then asked him if he wanted to watch me first. He said yes, so I stood in front of the little screen, looked right at the camera, and held still while the clerk took a couple of pictures.

Then it was Pip’s turn. His head did not quite reach the projector screen so the clerk set out a blue plastic milk crate for him to stand on. To my relief, Pip did exactly as instructed. He stepped up on the crate, stood straight and still, and looked directly at the camera while the clerk took a couple of shots.

After Pip hopped down, both the clerk and I looked anxiously over at Polly as she sat quietly in the seat of the shopping cart. She perked up some as I unbuckled her, pulled her out, and dropped her down on to her feet. Before I even tried to explain to her what to do, she walked over, climbed up on the milk crate and looked straight at the clerk. She didn’t move. She didn’t flinch. She stood there serenely, two small orange hair clips holding the wayward strands of her bangs away from her face. The clerk leaned over to get a level shot. She stared calmly at him as he took a first, then a second, and then a third picture. Then, she promptly stepped down from the milk crate and stuck out her arms for me to pick her up. I hauled her in, gave her a hug and kiss, and slipped her back into the seat of the shopping cart. My worries had been unfounded. Polly had obviously watched what Pip and I did so when her turn came, she knew exactly what to do.

This experience with Polly and the passport photos reminded me that it isn’t the big ‘photo-worthy’ moments to which I should be paying the most attention and for which I should be feeling the most satisfaction and/or blame. It’s the daily, quotidian situations like going to the grocery store or playing on the playground. While there are certainly some biologically given inclinations in Pip and Polly’s personalities, how they encounter, trigger, express, interpret, work out, and negotiate these inclinations are all learned through a process of constant observation and careful imitation. As the primary caregiver, I am frequently the initial data point in this process, establishing a precedent against which Pip and Polly measure and evaluate their subsequent observations. This requires me to be constantly aware of what I am doing and what I am saying because they are always watching.

I have slowly come to appreciate this and am learning how feel the same sense of accomplishment from successfully executing a passport photo as I got from seeing Pip and Polly’s first steps. In the grand scheme of things, I think I had much more to do with the former than I did with the latter.

2010-09-16T00:37:00.002-04:00

I've posted this week's entry on the Daddy Dialectic blog. A link to the main page is here. A direct link to the entry is here.

Making Contact

2010-09-09T00:31:00.001-04:00

Ava and I have worn both Pip and Polly since each was old enough to handle life in a baby carrier. While neither kid could ever settle into an infant sling, the moment their necks were strong enough to keep their heads from falling to the side, I threw a carrier over my shoulders and used it to strap them to my chest. For Pip I first used a standard black Baby Bjorn, then a purple wrap, and finally a black and purple Beco Butterfly. I carried him around when I did housework, during trips to the grocery store, and just about anytime a stroller might be in order. As he got bigger we got a backpack for me to carry him. I used that to take him hiking, to mow the yard (with a mechanical mower), and to make frequent trips to the zoo. When Polly was born, Ava bought a brand new Beco with an infant strap that allowed me to carry Polly around even earlier than I had with Pip. It was wonderful because I could drop her in there and still be able to move around with Pip. I still use it every day to put her down for naps and to get her to sleep at night. Eventually, Polly also took over Pip’s position in the backpack and this spring she probably spent as much as two hours a day riding around slung across my shoulders.

All of this baby wearing and baby carrying has turned the physical act of touching Pip and Polly into one of the more important tools in my parental toolbox. At a purely functional level, it has made me aware of how much information a simple touch can transmit. I frequently use a light hand on the shoulder to remind Pip of something I told him earlier. He often puts his leg over mine during meals as a way of letting me know he needs a bit more attention. Sometimes Polly will do the same. Each of these gestures is wordless, and their relative subtlety is key to their effectiveness. It is tough to feel nagged when you are the recipient of a soft touch.

There is a feedback loop at work as well in these gestures that adds to their effectiveness. To be in such close and frequent physical contact with someone is to obtain an certain intuitive understanding of that person. For me, it means I gain an extra layer of sympathy for Pip and Polly. Our daily contacts - from roughhousing, to rubbing their backs as they go to sleep, to having them playing around my knees, to holding hands when we cross the street- give me constant input on how they’re feeling and what state of mind they’re in. And, just as important, they get the same information from me. When it’s all working well, this back and forth exchange helps keep us all going in the same direction.

This connection is subtle and often times not really noticeable until its gone. Every once in a while Pip and I have passed through periods when we haven’t been in contact as much as normal. It usually is not a conscious choice. It’s just a change in life patterns that we have to catch up to. When these periods occur, I usually notice that Pip is acting out in some way. He’s louder than usual. He’s more aggressive. He’s less patient. And I am more easily frustrated by all of it. The combination makes both of us unhappy. During these periods, we lose the ability or the willingness to work together, and it just makes every task we need to accomplish that much more difficult. I viscerally feel the lack of contact in much the same way that I feel it when I forget to brush my teeth. I get a nagging sense of missing something important before I even know what it is. Once I realize it, I make an extra effort to rub his back or have him sit on my lap while reading in order to get ourselves back in sync.

As I still get to carry Polly on a daily basis, this kind of conscious effort has not yet been necessary with her. But, I can feel the end coming. Since moving to Lexington, Polly has been in the backpack only a couple of times. Much of this is because Peter rides his bike every day now, and I have to put her in the jog stroller to keep up with him. But there is also the factor that as Polly wants to be more involved in everything, she is less willing to be tied down in a backpack or carrier. Throw in the reality that in the next year she will probably start going to sleep without being walked in the carrier, and I can see the end of the line for my child wearing days. This makes me aware that my days of frequent contact with them are numbered as well. The hugs, the kisses, the random collisions, the quiet back rubs will all diminish as Pip and Polly get older. It makes me sad to think about it.

And so, I’m already thinking about substitutes, ways to literally stay in touch with them without being awkward or overtly smothering. In this, I have come to recognize the value of the high-five.

I employed high-fives frequently when I used to play basketball and soccer. It doesn’t seem like much, just a simple slap of the hands or even just a quick tap of the fingers, but that contact often had the effect of creating a bit more connectivity between me and my teammates. A quick high-five after a good play made me feel more invested in them and enabled us to transmit the accomplishments of individuals throughout the team as a whole. This investment in each other seems like a decent approximation of what I’d like to maintain within our family.

Pip learned what a high-five was from our neighbors in Cincinnati. As a two-year-old, he was not ready to shake hands with people when we would stop and talk with the folks who lived around us. Some of the men introduced him to the high-five, and he liked it immediately. The opportunity to joyfully slap hands with adults thrilled him. He quickly developed a technique whereby he would straighten out his right arm and swing his hand through the fullest possible arc before making contact. His intent in doing this was to make a really loud pop. If it didn’t happen the way he wanted, he would swing his arm again and again until he got it just right.

Polly learned to do a high-five from my dad during my parent’s visit to our house last spring. I imagine she had watched Pip closely because it only took Dad a couple of tries to get her to open her fingers and hold her hand up for him to tap it. She was so proud of herself that whenever Dad entered the room for the rest of the weekend, she would hold up her little open palm for him to give her a high-five.

With both kids getting a kick out of doing high-fives, I started using them to dole out praise and to acknowledge their accomplishments. At first it was just another fun way to connect with them, but now I am thinking strategically. I’ve started trying it out in various situations – at the playground, during meals – to see where it will work best. I hope that as other points of contact start to disappear, the high-five can slide in and provide me with that little something extra that makes our family a cohesive and functional operation. It’s certainly no replacement for the kind of contact we had while I was carrying the kids around on my chest, but every little bit of extra knowledge, every little bit of extra trust that we can glean from each other can do nothing but help us live more happily together.

Daddy, I'm Scared

2010-09-02T00:51:00.001-04:00

Each night it is my responsibility to put the kids to sleep. And each night, after the lights are off and Polly is starting to fall asleep, Pip gets antsy. I don’t know exactly why but at that moment when Polly’s head starts to nod, Pip seeks out ways to avoid settling down. Sometimes it involves rolling around on his bed. Other times he complains about being too hot or too cold. Many times he asks random questions for which I have no answer. All of this activity is usually harmless. Pip will eventually go to sleep. He just has to get this last something out.

But, one night a couple of weeks ago, he brought out something new:

“Daddy?”

“Yes?”

“I’m scared.”

“Scared of what?”

“There are strange noises out there and its dark.”

While this exchange felt straight-forward, the sound of his voice suggested otherwise. There was none of the halting nervousness that Pip gets when he is frightened by a bad thunderstorm. Instead, there was this tinny, searching quality, a trait that usually shows up when Pip is looking for some kind of attention.

I had expected something like this might be in the offing. Earlier that day I had spent more time than usual cooking while the kids were awake. I was trying to get some eggs and some potatoes made up so we would have them for later in the week. Pip and Polly are used to having my undivided attention, but for a time they found ways to occupy themselves without involving me. Eventually, Pip began to feel the effects of my neglect. His voice got louder. His movements became more jumpy and exaggerated. He started getting into things on the shelves that he normally doesn’t touch. The situation did not spiral out of control, but for the rest of the afternoon, I was very cognizant of Pip’s state of mind. As such, it wasn’t a surprise when he sought some extra attention at bedtime.

The substance of his complaint was not that surprising either. One of the books in our regular rotation contains a story about a little girl who is afraid of the dark. She hears sounds she can’t identify and calls in her mother to explain them away. The book ends with the little girl realizing that there is nothing to be afraid of, but its difficult to know exactly how a kid interprets the ‘lesson’ of such a book.

Oftentimes, when we encounter a situation in a book that suggests ideas we’d rather not have Pip and Polly chewing on or mimicking, we attempt some counter-programming. This usually consists of changing a few words here and there or just skipping over the questionable pages altogether. Our most successful counter-programming effort to this point has been with a Sesame Street book in which Elmo’s class takes a field trip to a doctor’s office. During the field trip, Elmo’s teacher winds up getting a shot. Before the doctor administers the shot, Elmo and his classmates are scared and they talk about how brave their teacher is. After the shot is finished, they relax and mention how much the shot will help him feel better. When Ava and I read this book to the kids, we just skip over the parts about being scared. We reason that if the kids don’t know they are supposed to be scared of a shot, they are less likely to make an issue of it when they have to have one. Since we first started reading this book, Pip has received multiple shots and has handled each one without a single tear. Also, whenever he pretends to be a doctor, he gives all his stuffed animals shots and makes no extra effort to comfort or reassure them. In his mind, they don’t need it. A shot is no big deal.

Of course, counter-programming isn’t really possible when, as with the story about the little girl in the dark, the whole premise of a book is based around a particular fear. In this case, our challenge is to present the proper reaction if and when the subject comes up.

I have learned over time that managing my reaction is one of the fundamental skills of parenting. This is because all human knowledge is based on a series of experiments. You try something. You see what reaction occurs. Perhaps you do it again and again and again to establish a sense of how repeatable that first reaction is. If the reaction happens with some consistency, you assume the presence of a pattern. Knowledge is essentially the assumption that pattern one observes will continue to hold true. With kids, this process of knowledge creation is amplified. They don’t have a large backlog of experiences to draw upon, so each act they make takes on a heightened importance. Their actions and the reactions that follow establish precedents for their future assumptions about the world. In other words, if Pip tries out the ‘I’m scared of the dark’ line and gets a reaction like the little girl in the book got, he is well on his way to learning that being scared of the dark will get him attention.

The real trick is that with something like being scared of the dark, it is very easy to overreact. Standing there in the darkened room, it was very tempting for me to either pacify Pip (“It’s okay. I’m here”) or deny his statements (“What’s wrong. There’s nothing to be scared of.”). However, both choices essentially would provide Pip the extra attention he was seeking. Silence was not option either. Pip is very intuitive. He can sense my uncertainty and will internalize that reaction. He will also still demand that I respond to him in some way. He is very tenacious in that respect.

So, after our initial exchange, I paused trying to figure out how best to avoid creating a downward spiral where Pip’s experiment with being scared of the dark eventually morphs into an actual, attention-seeking fear. Hoping to prompt a touch of self-awareness, I decided to take an indirect angle. I asked Pip if he said he was scared of the dark because of the book.

“Yes,” he said.

“Maybe we shouldn’t read it again for a little while.”

“Okay,” Pip said.

After a brief pause, he continued. “Daddy, I’m still scared.”

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s get your sister to sleep.”

The next night after the lights were out and Polly was once again starting to fall asleep, Pip said to me again,

“Daddy, I’m scared.”

I realized then that the night before I had made a mistake. By suggesting that we not read the book for a while, I had managed to provide feedback to Pip’s search for attention. By saying “Daddy, I’m scared,” Pip had made something new happen. The feedback was negative, but it was feedback just the same. He wasn’t sure how or why it came, but now he was trying again to see if he could get a similar result.

Fortunately, because knowledge is not an instantaneous thing, because it is the result of doing something again and again until the outcome feels given and predictable, I had a second chance. This time I wanted to acknowledge his words without giving them too much importance, a situation perfectly suited for the frustratingly bland “Okay, I understand.” I’ve used this many times before when Pip or Polly wants something that I am not prepared to give them. It always feels a bit insidious coming out of my mouth, but it’s an effective way to avoid saying the word “no.” And it worked this time as well. Pip and I went through the cycle a couple of times that night before he fell asleep and again every night for the next two weeks. He tried the idea a couple of different ways, but I did not waver from my blandness. Finally, Pip got bored and, to my relief, dropped the question of darkness in favor of requesting an extra trip to the bathroom. This allowed me to put ‘fear of the dark’ back on the shelf with all the other silly things I don’t want him to get hung up on.

Now, if I can just get him to eat some broccoli, we may really be on our way…

Inside the Bubble

2010-08-27T00:09:00.001-04:00

“Ted Stevens died in a plane crash last month. Oh yeah, and Daniel Schorr died too.” Ava said this to me casually as we sat by a duck pond on Saturday morning feeding the kids a snack of raisins, crackers, and blueberry muffin bits. “I thought you might want to know.”

This is how I get my news these days, in little tidbits that slip out during moments of idle conversation. It’s how I learned about the BP oil spill, the final passage of healthcare legislation, the earthquake in Haiti, and just about anything else that has happened outside the confines of our new neighborhood. I effectively live in an information bubble. Partially a matter of circumstance and partially of my own making, the bubble is a powerful filter that keeps me largely ignorant of just about everything going on in the world right now: politics, the economy, technological developments, trends in popular culture, you name it. I can tell you astonishingly little about any of these things.

And I love it.

The bubble started forming with Pip’s birth. The TV went into a cabinet. The computer went on a shelf. They only emerged for a few minutes each night after he went to sleep. Following Polly’s birth, the increased demands on my attention gradually weaned me from a regular consumption of NPR and sports talk radio as well. Now, aside from an ongoing subscription to the Atlantic Monthly, almost all my information of the outside world comes from Ava.

In place of the global array of news and stories that I used to get from various sources, I have the intensely local experience that is caring for Pip and Polly. They provide me with such a focused, first-hand array of comedy, drama, excitement, suspense, heartwarming moments, achievements, and thrills that the second and third-hand accounts of the world that come in through the news media, Facebook, movies, and the like all feel hazy and very far away. For example, in the last twenty-four hours, Pip completed a thirty-piece puzzle of the world practically on his own, asked me to talk about car wrecks over and over (this became a physics lesson), gave Polly an actual and unprompted kiss on the cheek for the first time, and melted down into tears on at least four different occasions. For her part, Polly added the words ‘cat,’ ‘yellow,’ and ‘purple’ to her vocabulary, happily gobbled so much macaroni and cheese that I thought she would burst, pooped in the toilet for the first time, and subsequently decided to celebrate by waking up at 11:45 last night and refusing to go back to sleep until 2 AM. There is nothing that I can read or watch that will ever match all of this.

In the last month, I have had an extra chance to ruminate on the bubble. I have made two trips up to Cincinnati to check in on our house, mow the yard, and do some basic maintenance, and each time I spent the entire 90 minute journey north listening to NPR. It was like briefly visiting a place I used to live in. So much was familiar and comfortable: the voices, the music, the regular sequence of the news segments. But, as has been the case anytime I have returned somewhere after a long absence, I noticed two things that I hadn’t felt before.

The first is that with all the reports and updates and commentary and analysis, it’s difficult to tell on a daily basis what is signal and what is noise. I used to think that I could filter through all the incoming material and figure out what mattered and what didn’t. Now, after my return visit, I don’t think that’s possible. So much of what is important in any given news narrative is determined post facto. The stories I heard on my way up to Cincinnati may be critical or may be worthless. For example, did the large drop in the Dow Jones Index signal a bad turn for the economy or did it just make more room for it to pop back up? The odds are with the latter, but it all depends on what happens the next day. There is no way of knowing beforehand. If I want narratives that are efficiently meaningful, I’m better off with history books. The daily (or hourly or minute-by-minute) news is just a giant crapshoot.

And that leads me to the second thing. When I turned off the radio upon arriving in Cincinnati, I felt somewhat informed but mostly just primed with anticipation about what will happen in the coming hours and days. I wanted to listen to more news on the way back to Lexington to see how things had changed during the two hours I was away from the radio. Then I wanted to check back in the next day. It was a compulsion that while not overwhelming was significant enough to make me think, “Was I addicted to the news?”

Usually upon hearing the word ‘addiction’ I think of things like alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, etc. But the withdrawal process I went through after each trip to Cincinnati had all the patterns of a person coming off an addiction. It makes me wonder. I’ve always thought of addiction as something abhorent and outside the bounds of normality. But if something as simple as listening to the news creates this kind of attachment in me, maybe I need to reconfigure my understanding. What if the propensity to addiction is a fundamental property of being human and the only real differentiating factor is the value placed on the things you are addicted to? If I substitute the word ‘addiction’ for ‘habit,’ how does that change my view of the world? I guess these are questions for another time.

In the meantime, I know that there is a balance to be struck between the world and my kids, a certain meeting point to be found between global and local knowledges that would make me a more socially functional person. But right now I am really happy with my bubble. The kids have less than five years before we release them into the wilds of the public school system. It’s a limited time opportunity. So, I’ll take some global ignorance in exchange for a little extra sensitivity to the local details. There’ll be plenty of time to catch up on all that other news later.

2010-08-18T23:10:00.002-04:00

In an effort to interest a few more readers I'm posting this week's story on the Daddy Dialectic blog. The link to the main page is here. The dedicated address for the post is here.

On the Playground

2010-08-12T14:22:00.001-04:00

I had trouble getting my head around things this week, so here’s a story from just before we moved out of Cincinnati.

Marlin: I promised I'd never let anything happen to him.
Dory: Hmm. That's a funny thing to promise.
Marlin: What?
Dory: Well, you can't never let anything happen to him. Then nothing would ever happen to him.
- From the movie Finding Nemo

I took Pip and Polly to a playground a couple of weeks ago. The one we went to is in a great spot, set up on a bluff overlooking the Ohio River on one side and the local general aviation airport (i.e. private and corporate planes) on the other. The playground itself is set back off the bluff about fifty yards in a pocket underneath some large oak trees. It’s a nice playground because it’s not that big and all those trees create plenty of shade on a hot day. As an added bonus, the park is a bit tricky to get to, so it tends to be less busy than some of the others nearby.

We met some friends up there for a playdate. The kids are the same age as Pip and Polly and, they all enjoy following each other up, down, and around the playground equipment. Slides are a particular favorite for Pip. He can do the slide route over and over and over until he finally wears a hole right through his shorts.

This day it had rained the night before, and we were trying to determine the best way to dry the slide so that Pip et al could get rolling. I went back to my backpack to see if I had left any hand towels in there from a previous playground trip when I noticed the appearance in quick succession of about eight to ten SUVs and minivans. Within five minutes we were engulfed in a wave of children spewing forth from what seemed like every direction. Some preschool had decided to do a summertime ‘meet-and-greet’ at the park that morning and every parent there had brought multiple children with them. Suddenly there were kids all over the place, flooding the playground equipment and running around with the frenetic energy of ants after someone kicks over an anthill.

Pip was not pleased with this development at all. He likes focused play that is generally free of interruptions or distractions. He does not like a chaotic environment unless he is the one creating it. Whenever there is a lot going on around him, his inclination is to back out of the way, to seek out a spot of relative calm from which he can take a measure of things. In the past this spot has often been right between my knees. If things felt crazy, he would just swing in between my legs and hang out there until he found a zone of comfort or a satisfactory way to venture out beyond my shadow.

This day, that option was not available. The week before Polly had taken the training wheels off and started walking on her own. Up to that point I had always carried her around a playground in our backpack while Pip played. But now that she was walking on her own, it was time for her to get into the playground action as well. Unlike Pip, Polly does not mind crowds. She just dives in and goes about her business as if there was no one there at all. This day her business was attempting to climb up anything she could get two hands on. This forced me to follow her around very closely so that I could help her navigate the various steps and ladders while also keeping her from turning the wrong direction and falling on her head from a couple of feet up.

My unavailability left Pip confused. One second he wanted me to stay with him and the next second he was asking me where Polly was going. With all the chaos and the constant challenge of keeping track of Polly, Pip’s whole understanding of what a playground morning was supposed to be was upended. This new world as it was left him jumpy, uncertain, and slightly manic.

And then came a moment I had long dreaded while never fully appreciating how complicated it was going to be.

One of the pieces of playground equipment on this playground is a little single person spinner. It consists of a small circular platform set about a foot above the ground with a vertical pole coming up through the middle. The whole apparatus is mounted on a rotating joint that allows it to spin freely. During a moment of calm, Pip sat down on this platform to take a drink of water. I bent down to get Polly something out of my backpack about ten feet away. While rummaging around in there, I heard the voice of an annoyed little girl say “Get up.” I looked up to see this four-year-old girl standing over Pip with her hands on her hips. “Get up” she demanded once again. Pip looked over to me in confusion. This is not how we interact at home nor is it how we have taught Pip to interact with other kids. So, he was looking for me to intervene, for me to politely tell this little brat to wait her turn. He had no idea how else to respond to the aggressive entitlement of this little girl. But I couldn’t. This wasn’t my child, and the only words in my mind at that moment were not suitable to be used with children. As such, I was frozen in place as Pip stumbled up from the platform mumbling pitifully “I wasn’t done with my turn…” As soon as he slunk away, the little girl promptly sat down on the spinner looking slightly disappointed that Pip didn’t put up more of a fight.

The whole experience left me feeling pretty shaken. On the drive home I replayed everything a couple of times in my mind, and I realized two things:

First, I can’t always protect the kids from that kind of indignity. The world has its ugly moments. They are unavoidable, and my kids will have to figure out how to deal with them. I had known this logically but until that moment I had not known it experientially. There is no teacher like experience.

Second, I have not done a good job preparing the kids to handle such moments. It’s something of a double bind because the experience that they need to learn to handle is the very experience from which I am trying to shield them. There’s no reason to knowingly subject kids to barbarity, however small, just to ‘toughen them up’. But I do need to give them some tools to try out when such a situation arises again. Pip had no possible strategies to draw upon except walking away from things and, while that is an effective strategy in many instances, in this case it felt like a huge failure. He should have had an opportunity to defend himself and his place on that spinner.

Later that afternoon, Pip and I talked about the incident with the spinner and what he might do in future situations like that one. I told him that it was okay to say no to that little girl and then politely tell her to wait her turn. I’m not sure that he really understood what I was trying to tell him. The real lesson of the day – that Daddy can’t always intervene to create fairness in the world - was still too present in his mind. But I didn’t know what else to do. I guess the best I can hope for is that he’ll remember that the next time something like this happens to him.

Adventures with Children and Boats

2010-08-04T23:30:00.000-04:00

Ava and I are both first children. We got the first crack at most things and didn’t have to bid our time until we were big enough to do something our siblings were doing. The significance of this experience wasn’t fully appreciated by either of us until the arrival of Polly, our second child. Now, each day we get a reminder of how influential that birth order is…

My parents live in a house on a lake. As such, they have the requisite dock and a pair of vehicles for moving around on the water – in their case a jetski and a 21 foot cruiser. The boat used to spend its weekends pulling around skiers and crazy teenagers on inner tubes. Now, it mostly leaves its cradle for a nice sunset cruise or to ferry people from one place to another.

How the kids would handle the boat had been an item of discussion between Ava and I prior to our trip to my parents’ house. The last time we had visited them Polly had not yet been conceived and Pip had been too young to go out on the boat. So this would be their first opportunity to take a ride and we could only guess how they would react to it. With the noise of the engine and the force of a twenty mile an hour wind hitting you in the face, a ride on the boat hits a lot of senses pretty hard. I felt like Pip would be okay, but was not sure that Polly would understand enough to be able to enjoy it.

The first full day of our visit with my parents brought us the opportunity to find out. We decided to visit some of my parents’ friends on the lake and make use of a small, shaded beach these friends had created on their property. The quickest, easiest, and cleanest way to get there and back was by boat. Pip had gotten the chance to go out on the boat for a short while the evening before and, after a warming up period, had found that he liked it. As Polly did not get this kind of test run, we debated some over whether to drive Polly over by car. Ultimately, we decided to let her give the boat a try. It turned out to be a somewhat rough experience.

To start with she did not like her lifejacket. It was a black and yellow infant model designed to keep a young child’s head upright should they accidentally fall into the water. This made it extra bulky, particularly around the neck. When Ava first attempted to put it on Polly, Polly made her displeasure well known. After a few minutes however, Polly settled down enough for us to continue on with the experiment. She waddled down to the dock looking uncomfortable, top-heavy, and quite suspicious about what was to come next. We hoisted her into the cabin area of the boat and set her up on my lap so that the windshield could block much of the wind. As we slowly pulled out from the dock her little chocolate eyes flipped back and forth between Ava and I letting both of us know that this was not her idea of a good time. When my dad ran the boat up on to plane, Polly went to a special place. She let her legs and arms go limp. Her face held no expression. Her only movement was to periodically squint when I inadvertently let too much sun hit her face. It was as if I was holding an inanimate doll on my lap.

Once we got to our destination and got off the boat, Polly came back to life. At the beach she happily got out of her life jacket and set off to play in the sand. She spent a good hour digging holes with a stick and splashing in the first few inches of water at the edge of the lake. But when it was time to go, she went through the same process again. She fussed while we put on her life jacket and then went to her special place while the boat was in motion. I guess that’s what she needed to do to make it through the ride.

A couple of days later my parents wanted to take Pip by boat to see one of the lake’s long-standing institutions. One of the marinas has over time built up a herd of a large catfish like fish called carp. On the back side of the dock where this marina has its gas pumps is a eight by ten foot area where people have for at least thirty years fed popcorn to these fish as a way to pass the time. The herd now is a couple hundred in number and when you throw a handful of popcorn to them the fish start jumping and splashing all over the place in their efforts to suck up every last floating kernel. Its quite a sight, and my parents rightfully thought Pip would get a kick out of it.

We talked about whether to bring Polly as well but given her discomfort with her first boat ride, I decided to keep her back at the house. While Pip and my parents went out, I would give her a bath and spend some one-on-one play time with her.

So, when the kids woke up from their nap that afternoon, my parents told Pip what we had planned. He was very excited and ran over to where the life jackets were kept. Polly was sitting on my lap at the time. When she saw Pip coming back to us with his life jacket in his hand, she quickly got up and, without making a sound, toddled over to the life jackets, picked hers up, and brought it back over. She stood directly in front of me and dropped the jacket into my lap. My parents barely held off a peal of laughter, but Polly was determinedly matter of fact about things. The look on her face said, “He’s not going anywhere without me.”

For a moment I considered trying to dissuade her but quickly realized how foolish that effort would be. So, we got both kids suited up. Polly grimly allowed us to once again buckle up the jacket around her neck and once again she went to her special place until the ride was over.

Both kids enjoyed the carp immensely. Pip threw popcorn, and Polly watched intently as the bodies and tails of the fish flopped around the surface of the water. My mom got some great pictures. But there was one picture she did not get that I wish she had. It was of Polly walking back up from the dock after we had returned home. Bobbling along the sidewalk with her life jacket still in place, there was a look of accomplishment on her face and almost a swagger to her movements. I could easily imagine her saying “I am the second child, and I will not be left behind.”

Guilt

2010-07-29T23:52:00.000-04:00

I read a post in the Daddy Dialectic blog the other day about gender equality at home and it got me thinking...

As I've mentioned before, our family is moving. Ava recently got a new job, and, as such, we are extracting our lives from Cincinnati and transferring them to Lexington, KY. However, before Ava got the new job, she had applied to and been accepted for a research methods training course that would take place at the end of July. To manage the kids in her absence, we had decided back in April to take them to my parent's house for the week of Ava’s training. That way, I would get some help with the kids and my parents would get some extended face time with their grandchildren. So when Ava got the new job, we had a decision to make. Do we cancel the training and the trip in order to handle the details of moving or do we just tack another event on to the previously scheduled ones?

We weren't thrilled with the first option - we knew that the training was going to be a good one, and I didn't relish the idea of disappointing my parents. So, making the second option work became our focus. After a while of discussing how to fit both the trip and the move into the month of July, we realized that this arrangement presented us with an opportunity. We were worried about what to do with the kids while the movers were in the house. Pip likes to be involved in any house related activities and keeping him out from under the feet of the movers without upsetting him was going to be a challenge. The obvious solution to this was right there in front of us: schedule the move for right after Ava's training and keep the kids at my parents for an extra couple of days. The kids were going to be there anyway and by keeping them with my parents for a bit longer, Ava and I wouldn't have to bounce them from house to hotel to new apartment on the day of the move.

And yet, Ava and I were uneasy about the idea of doing all of this at once. The week away was already going to be a big undertaking. Adding the move was going to draw very heavily on our physical and psychic resources. Plus, Ava and I both felt a certain amount of guilt about our assigned roles. Ava felt guilty for leaving me to manage the children without her for so long. I felt guilty that Ava would have to drive twelve hours from the site of the training in order to meet the movers and chaperone all our stuff down to Lexington.

We eventually put the guilt aside. Keeping the kids with my parents for the extra days was the best available plan and, in practice, it worked out very well. But all our uneasiness did get me thinking about where that guilt came from and what it means for us.

My first thought was that our guilt emerged from the reversal of industrial-era gender roles existing within the plan – i.e. more often the wife/mother would take the kids to her parents while the father would do the moving work. In this theory, our guilt would be a result of our blatant violation of an established cultural inheritance. This kind of violation, even when I know it’s insignificant, still makes me feel strange. For example, having Ava mow the yard seems odd to me. That’s my job. More importantly, it’s my job because my dad mowed our yard and his dad mowed their yard. It’s just what I am supposed to do.

However, this theory would also lead us to expect that neither Ava nor I would experience any guilt about the plan if our roles were reversed. I don’t think this is true. If Ava took the kids to her parents and I handled the move, we would both still feel guilty about not being able to help the other with their task.

Which leads me to another consideration…

In our family we have established a certain expectation that most household tasks are shared. At various times, Ava and I both take the lead in doing laundry, cooking food, cleaning bathrooms, or bathing the kids. While we certainly have our own tasks, the lines that divide one person’s responsibilities from the other’s are much less distinct than they were in my parents’ household. I get the sense that this increased scrambling of household tasks is true for many families now. In many of the families that I know, each parent ends up doing a little bit of everything and in the process the traditional domestic roles of husband and wife, father and mother become pretty hazy.

Now our moving plan ran completely counter to this sharing framework of organization. Instead of spreading out each job across us, it demanded that we undertake our tasks wholly and completely for a number of days without the ability of the other to assist in any physical way. It was in essence an old school division of labor that took advantage of our individual skills and played to our specialized foundations of knowledge. By the standards of basic economic theory, it was rational and it was efficient. Each of us did what we could do in order to accomplish the larger goal of moving our family from one place to another. As such, one could argue, it was a plan based in the idea that equality can be found in diversity. It was just not the kind of equality we were used to.

Bedtime renewal

2010-07-14T23:59:00.002-04:00

So often it’s big things that make me frustrated and little things that remind me how great it is to be a dad. Here’s one of the latter that I didn’t want to let slip past.

Pip has been taking swim lessons for about six months now. Last fall we started going to a ‘water babies’ session at the local YMCA where kids and parents putter around a pool and get the kids used to the idea of being in a giant tub of water. Pip liked it a lot so when he turned three in January, we signed him up for the full scale, learning to swim version. He’s been going every week since. Last month, the swim instructor invited me to come into the pool with the class under the rationale that if I was there and wanted to help with my kid, he was happy to have the extra set of hands. This has worked out great for us. Pip gets to splash and frolic with daddy and I get to swim a little bit each week. As such Tuesday afternoons have become one of the most highly anticipated and ultimately enjoyable blocks of our week.

Unfortunately, there was one week that did not live up to our expectations. About a month ago we had one of those days when things just did not go the way we wanted them to. First of all, the instructor bailed on us by making the entire hour a ‘free play hour’ instead of going through the set exercises like we usually do. The other kids loved this, but Pip is not immediately comfortable in chaos that is not of his own creation. He prefers to have a certain order around him or at the very least a space separate from the jumping and splashing and shouting of the others. Secondly, the instructor also moved all of us to the facility’s outside pool for our hour of play. This would have been fine if the weather was hot and sunny. However, we had enjoyed some beautifully cool weather over the previous few days and the pool temperature as a result was chilly at best. To compound this, a thin veil of clouds kept the sun out of view for much of the afternoon and a slight breeze frequently blew across the pool area. Thus, we had cool water, cooler air, and a whole mess of kids splashing, jumping, and getting in the way. Not a good recipe for us.

Pip tried to make the most of it. He gamely waded into the shallow end to practice putting his face in the water. Then, he did a couple of doggie-paddle laps before deciding that he would like to do some jumping in instead. I was in the water the whole time bouncing up and down trying to keep warm. After about twenty-five minutes, the chill finally won out and with blue lips and shivering legs we headed into the locker room to take a hot shower.

We came home that evening in a mildly somber and distracted mood which Ava managed to keep from getting worse. She got Pip through dinner by telling him stories about when he was born. There is nothing fancy or outlandish about these stories but an extended version of the basic who, what, and when was enough to distract him for the time necessary to consume most of his food. In this way, we made it through dinner and on to the bedtime routine without any major breakdowns.

Our bedtime routine has evolved over time into a series of shifts and handoffs between Ava and I that finally ends with Pip, Polly and I all together in Pip’s room. Once Ava leaves the room, Pip hangs out on his bed while I walk Polly – happily strapped in a baby carrier - back and forth until she falls asleep. Once Polly has fully crashed, I take her into her room and put her into her crib. Then, I go back and lay down with Pip until he falls asleep, too. The whole process runs about 45 minutes to an hour.

Usually Pip comes with me to put Polly in her crib. He likes to come into her room, turn on the baby monitor, and roll around on the floor while I perform the steps necessary to carefully remove Polly from the baby carrier and get her down into the crib. Oftentimes, Pip will make some kind of low-level noise during this process like kicking his feet on the floor or whispering questions to me or scraping himself back and forth along the edge of the rug. I’m always worried he’s going to wake Polly up with this fidgeting. Usually it’s a silly concern because Polly is out and can’t be roused with a 20 piece brass band. But every once in a while she doesn’t play by the established rules. For some reason, she hears or feels something that catches her interest and she decides to open her eyes and take a look around. Then we have to start the bedtime choreography all over again and its 10 PM before everyone is finally asleep. I never know exactly when such a night is coming so Pip’s noise making constantly worries me.

This particular night Pip added an extra hurdle to getting Polly down on the first try. As we were heading out of his room and into Polly’s, he informed me that he needed to pee. When he said this I thought he was just going to go straight to the bathroom but instead he followed me into Polly’s room and went to turn on the monitor as usual. Then, as I was beginning the delicate process of shifting Polly’s head around to unclip first the left carrier strap and then the right, Pip headed for the door. He passed through the doorway, grabbing the doorknob and pulling the door quickly behind him. As he did so, I tensed up involuntarily in anticipation of the door slamming against the jamb. I could hear the noise coming. I could see Polly’s eyes popping open. I could feel my spirits deflating that much further after the disappointment of the afternoon. All this passed through me as the door swung to meet the frame.

Then, Pip, without apparent thought or effort, caught the door with his hand and skillfully eased it to a stop with about half an inch to spare. No bang. No click. Just the sound of little feet padding down the hallway into the bathroom. It’s a move I’ve done a hundred times but one that I never considered Pip to be aware of, much less capable of executing. And he did it so naturally and with such nonchalant fluidity that I wonder if he was even conscious of what he was doing in the moment itself. All I know for sure is that after putting Polly down, I walked into the bathroom to find Pip sitting on the toilet, dinosaur pajama pants around his ankles and a big smile on his face. He was so proud of himself that I couldn’t help but smile too.

Taming the Wildebeest

2010-07-08T00:32:00.003-04:00

We are in the process of selling our house and, given the nature of the current housing market, it is a real struggle. So, we are doing everything we can to get that one magic person to walk through our door. This is includes doing open houses on as many Sunday afternoons as possible.

Early on we decided that the best way for our family to deal with an open house day was to set things up the night before and then get out of Dodge after breakfast the next morning. That way we don’t spend the entire morning trying to corral Pip’s and Polly’s natural inclinations towards chaos or fretting about what other little things Ava and I might do to make the house look just a touch nicer. To accomplish this, we have taken to going on day trips.

The past two open house days we have ventured out to a state park that is about an hour from our house. The state park has a small lake, a nice wooden, A-frame lodge, a few hiking trails, and a nature center with some rehabing raptors and a live mountain lion. We take a picnic lunch with us and go play in a creek that runs along the side of one of the hiking trails. It’s a wonderfully peaceful spot. The creek runs down between two hills and is just deep enough to cover your ankles. The running water and the shade of the summer foliage overhead keeps things cool even when the temps are breaking the 90 degree barrier. And the kids love having the freedom to play. They throw rocks in the water, traipse up and down through the shallow areas, float sticks through the mini-rapids, and look under rocks for crawdads. Throw in a few nostalgic memories of creek-walking from my own childhood and the general absence of other people and this excursion has become one of my favorite things to do as a family.

All that fun does take its toll, however, and when we get back to the house in the afternoon, everyone is exhausted. Now, this type of exhaustion can be really nice if you have the chance to languish in it - maybe have a beer or some ice cream, then put your feet up and watch the sun set. Unfortunately, the kids are not ready for that kind of recovery process yet. They are more in the coax-some-food-into-me-then-put-me-in-the-bath kind of stage. This is a fine process, too, though much less relaxing for Ava and me than the beer and sunset version.

So, two weekends ago, we had an open house, we went out for the day to the state park, and we returned home tired. We dragged the kids into the house, and they set about acting out in their established ways. For Pip this means that he becomes whiny. He wants this, he wants that. If something isn’t exactly right, tears will follow. Polly, in contrast, becomes mischievous. She’ll push the limits on things, letting her impulses to bang, throw, or yell run even more freely than usual.

One of the tricks Polly has developed over time is this high pitched screech. Modeled after a scream Pip uses when he is overly excited, the screech starts quietly and seems like it is going to build into a full scream, but as her voice gets louder it starts to break apart. Instead of a single clear tone, the sound rattles around in her throat, giving the final pitch a slight gargle at its apex. She usually deploys this screech during meal times after she’s had her fill and is starting to get bored with being strapped into her chair. The sound echoes around our kitchen and effectively ends any other conversation taking place. It also has the power to bring Pip to tears.

Pip has never been able to make sense of the screech. To him, it seems random and unpredictable. He can’t correlate it with any other regular happening and so the screech doesn’t have a set place in his knowledge of the world. Sometimes he finds it funny. Sometimes he finds it annoying. Oftentimes, it scares him. All he knows for sure is that he can’t ignore it. He has to react in some way. So, when Polly looks directly at Pip in the instance before she lets loose, you can feel Pip tense up in expectation. He doesn’t know what’s going to happen but more often than not it all ends with him huddling up on his chair with his hands covering his ears – a reaction that Polly finds very amusing.

And so, on this night when Pip was tired and whiny and Polly was acting especially mischievous, the conditions were ripe for some theatrics. About halfway through dinner Polly let loose with a full throated screech. Pip dove for cover. After about fifteen seconds of this, I got up and took Polly out of the kitchen in order to move her away from Pip. After a couple of minutes or so when Pip began to calm down, I walked with Polly back into the kitchen to continue with dinner.

Then Polly took things to a new level.

Walking back into the kitchen, she went around the table to the chair where Pip was sitting. She does this frequently during mealtimes. Usually she just wants to say hello or see what Pip is doing up close for a moment. This time, however, she walked over, looked straight into Pip’s eyes, and let out the screech again. This caught all of us off guard and sent Pip into a whole new round of convulsions that were capped off with him wailing, “Why? Why? Why did she do that? Why?” I finally hustled over and carried her once again out of the kitchen.

After Pip had settled down again, Polly and I came back into the kitchen to try and finish off our meal. Polly had different ideas. She walked right back to the same spot from which I had whisked her away a few minutes before. I didn’t move to stop her because I couldn’t imagine that she would do the same thing again. It was such a brazenly deliberate move that I didn’t think she was capable of it. And yet, there I went hauling her a third time out into the living room while Pip shed still more tears. With this, we mercifully brought an end to dinner for the night.

Ava took Pip on to her lap and tried to explain to him what was going on. She told him that Polly was tired and was using her ‘wild animal noise’ to get a reaction out of him. Its tough to know exactly what Pip understood but as we talked it through several more times, he was able to calm down. Also, as we repeated this explanation over and over, the ‘wild animal noise’ morphed into the ‘wild beast noise’ and then finally into the ‘call of the wildebeest.’

This last phrase, ‘the call of the wildebeest,’ seems to have tickled his funny bone, and in doing so may have finally enabled him to fit Polly’s screech into a fixed locus of meaning. Because today at lunch when Polly broke out the screech once again, I asked Pip, “Is that a wildebeest I hear?” and he responded with a smile and a short laugh. No tears, no nervousness. Just a confident nod of bemused acknowledgement. Polly, ever watchful, decided to try banging the table with her sippy cup instead.

2010-06-30T23:32:00.000-04:00

I had planned on launching this blog a bit later but sometimes an opportunity comes along that is too good to let pass…

This Father’s Day (2010) Tara Parker-Pope, the blogger who runs the New York Times Well blog, published a short article entitled “Now, Dad feels as Stressed as Mom.” Drawing on some recent fatherhood research done at Boston College, Parker-Pope related how many new fathers are experiencing heightened levels of stress as they attempt to negotiate between the demands of the workplace and their own desires to be significantly involved in the lives of their children. These ‘nurturing’ dads, according to Parker-Pope, are taking on greater childcare responsibilities than did the ‘provider’ dads of the past. As a result, they are encountering many of the same issues commonly raised by working mothers – a desire for greater flexibility in their work hours, questions from co-workers and superiors about their commitment to their jobs, frustration with having to navigate the expectations of constant availability from both work and home. Parker-Pope called these experiences ‘strange and frightening territory’ for these dads. And she’s right, though the dads are not alone.

Our family sits squarely in the middle of this ‘strange and frightening territory.’ Ever since Ava and I decided that I would stay home with our newborn son while she continued to work, we keep encountering these instances of awkwardness and disorientation around who is supposed to being doing what in our domestic lives. It made us think that there is something interesting and unique about raising kids in this historical moment, something we’d like to capture and share while we can. And so, with Pip now three, our daughter Polly closing in on 18 months, and our family unit largely solidified, it seems like a good time for me to start a blog.

We chose to name the blog ‘Post-Industrial Parenthood’ because both Ava and I spent too many years doing graduate work in social science disciplines. Within our respective fields, the changes wrought by globalization on the landscape of American work and family life are often collected and analyzed under the label of ‘post-industrialism.’ This seemed a broad enough descriptor for what I wanted to include in the blog and when I put it in combination with the word ‘parenthood’ the nicely rhythmic alliteration of this admittedly over-serious title was too good for me to pass up. My hope is that the stories that follow will simultaneously live up to and undermine that seriousness in ways that are interesting and entertaining regardless of whether you have kids or not.

So enjoy reading. Write comments. Share this with others. We’ll see where it all leads.