Unconditional Parenting, Children's Rights and the Parental Prerogative

(This is a continuation, more or less, of last week's post The Problem with Evil.)

Let's say you were out shopping one day and you saw a man and a woman walking toward their car. The woman said to the man that she'd like to stop for ice cream on the way home. The man grabs her by the wrist, hauls her towards their waiting car, and hisses at her that he's had enough of her constant demands and they're just going to go home RIGHT NOW and she'll be lucky if she gets ice cream ever again.

Now imagine that the woman is a little girl, three years old, and the man in question is her father.

Does his behaviour become more acceptable?

Why?

I just finished reading Unconditional Parenting by Alfie Kohn, a book that argues that parents need to move from "punishment and rewards to love and reason." I'll be honest: the book drove me kind of nuts. It conflated the mildest of consequences with emotional abuse--believe me, it's not the times I missed a bedtime story or didn't get a treat at the store that made me question my parents' love for me or my worth as a person, it's the times they told me they hated me and wanted to get rid of me, and putting the two in the same category can be counted on to be fairly enraging to anyone who has actually experienced the latter. Furthermore, I question his evidence: while he quotes studies right, left and centre I don't have much trust in his honesty in doing so, if only because in one section he claims that all relevant research consistently shows only negative effects from competition for children: and, as anyone who has followed the scientific debate on this questions even peripherally over the last few years already knows, this is a highly contentious position and there is a substantial amount of research marshalled for the opposition (including a recent study on the benefits of organized sports for school readiness, as Ann blogged about recently). I'd like to do a full review of the book at some point in the near future, hopefully after I start school and have access to a glorious fully-stocked university library again, so that I can dig up the studies he references for myself to see what they say. In the meantime: there's this book, see, called Unconditional Parenting? And I read it, and it drove me kind of nuts.

But there was a lot of good in it, too. At the same time that I was enormously frustrated with the author's seeming extremism, I couldn't help but see how relevant and applicable it was to my own upbringing (which, as described above, was not precisely ideal in several aspects). The most interesting--precisely because it's missing from so many parenting manuals--is his baseline assumption that kids are actually people.

You might think this is a given, but I'd argue that we live in a society that claims to believe that children are real people, but rarely acts like it. Consider: It is not legal to pay someone less to do a given job based on their race, sex, dis/ability or sexual orientation, but it IS legal to pay someone less to do a given job if they are under sixteen. You can't restrict someone's access to public space dependent on race, income, gender or dis/ability, but you CAN restrict someone's access to public space if they are a child. Children can't own property and can't vote. I'm not saying there aren't good reasons for some of those restrictions, but it seems pretty clear that on the whole, we regard children as something like persons-in-waiting.

The clearest example to me that we don't really think of kids as people is that behaviour that is considered completely unacceptable if directed towards an adult is considered defensible if is directed against a helpless, dependent child; that, moreover, we consider it more important to preserve the parent's prerogative to do whatever they like with their children than to interfere on the child's behalf unless the parent is clearly engaging in the worst excesses of physical, sexual or emotional abuse.

If we actually thought that children were people with full human rights, then it would be self-evident that kids are entitled to respectful treatment and good parenting. Not that their parents are entitled to treat them like shit so long as they're trying their hardest and haven't done anything illegal yet so far as anyone can prove.

Think back to that example I posted at the top: would we care if the man said, "But I love my girlfriend, and I'm doing my best. I only pop off and hit her a few times a year but I never hit her hard, and I know I lose my temper and call her names sometimes, but she just pushes my buttons and I can't help it!" Would you buy it? No. His behaviour would be clearly inappropriate; we couldn't force his girlfriend to leave him, but we'd all be pretty united in our belief that he's a shitty, abusive boyfriend. We wouldn't care that he loves her and he's trying his best but he's really tired and his job is stressful.

Yet when it comes to children, these are exactly the justifications that we accept.

I am not a perfect mother. I have sometimes said things to Frances in anger that I regret. But I fully realize that on some level losing my temper is a choice, that I am responsible for it, that Frances deserves better, and that it is my job to change my behaviours, not her job not to trigger them. Even when she is being whiny or clingy or obstinate or slow (it does happen, even with Frances).

I also fully realized that if we lived in a society where people need to have permission to get pregnant, Frances wouldn't be here. Genetically and in terms of my own history, on paper, I am a bad risk for motherhood. Yet I like to think I'm doing pretty well. So I'm not saying that we need to license people for being parents--any more than we license them for being boyfriends, aunts, siblings, or any other type of relationship.

What I am saying is that parents do need to have more restrictions on how they can treat their children, that avoiding the very worst forms of abuse is not an acceptable guideline, that children are entitled to respectful treatment from everyone in their lives (which is a very different thing from legal treatment), and that parental prerogative and children's rights are mutually contradictory--we can't have both. That in a society that truly believes children are people who are entitled to the full spectrum of human rights, parental prerogative would not exist. That yes, there are good ways of raising kids, and there are bad ways of raising kids, and as a society we are entitled to draw and enforce those distinctions.

Just don't ask me how. I haven't figure that part out yet.

I'd like to be very clear in stating that I'm not arguing that society should legislate ideal or optimal parenting--any more than we should legislate ideal or optimal nutrition. Actually nutrition is not a bad analogy: we all know what we "should" be eating, we all know we're not eating it, but we also have a pretty good idea of where the line between "acceptably non-optimal" or "good enough" and "neglectful" is. That a baby is being acceptably cared for if he or she is being fed formula but is not being acceptably cared for if he or she is being fed pork rinds or orange juice. What I'm arguing here is that it's possible to draw a similar line for parenting styles that is somewhere above "doesn't beat, rape, starve or turn children into actors in child porn films."

Listen, we're the parents, right? We're the grown-ups. It's not our kids jobs to suffer in ways large or small so that we can avoid asking ourselves hard questions like "Am I a good enough mother?" or looking bad in front of other people or feeling uncomfortable when they question our parenting styles.

We're the adults. This is our burden to carry, not our children's. And I believe that when we abdicate our responsibility to figure out what acceptable parenting is and do something about it, we have collectively decided that it's more important for parents to feel good about themselves than it is for our kids to be well-cared for.

Posted by Andrea at 9:58 AM | Comments (9)

The Problem with Evil

It's been a bad news week for kids again. Bad enough that my extremely judgmental side is banging on the sides of the box where I'd packed her away and demanding a hearing. I'll uncover her slowly, Dear Readers.

First, a known sex predator abducted and sexually assaulted a twelve-year-old girl in Peterborough. There's enough triggering material in that one article to put at least a dozen people I know out for a week, so be careful--not to mention enough in the family subtext to keep dozens of psychologists (un)happily employed for a decade, and novelists and playwrights mining it for fifty years. Seriously. The whole thing is that bad. The accused's wife and their kids and his mistress and their kids are all sitting in the courtroom together with the accused's mother to watch the trial. The five-year-old daughter is watching her father be tried for rape. And this is just the beginning.

Then, a seven-year-old abused and murdered by her foster family. The mother of Katelynn Sampson was apparently trying to get her life back together and recover from an addiction when she signed her daughter's custody over to a friend temporarily. The 'friend' later went to court to get Katelynn's custody signed over to her permanently. This 'friend' also had convictions and arrests for violence, drugs and prostitution which didn't seem to raise any red flags; Katelynn stopped attending school and no one can figure out whether or not anyone followed up on it; and two months later the little girl had been beaten to death, from what it looks like in the articles. I expect the more comes to light the more I will hyperventilate about the whole thing. Possibly here. Because something like this should not be able to happen. There are safeguards, checks and balances, how many pieces of legislation? How many professionals involved? And the courts signed permanent custody of this little girl over to a woman who killed her.

But there aren't enough details yet--mercifully--for it to be the stuff of nightmares and flashbacks. No. For that, we have this story, The Girl in the Window, which I found over at Rob's blog Fighting Mosnters With Rubber Swords. He didn't know what to say about it; fortunately, I can think of plenty.

Ready for the Extra-Judgmental Andrea? Here she comes:

"Plant City Detective Mark Holste had been on the force for 18 years when he and his young partner were sent to the house on Old Sydney Road to stand by during a child abuse investigation. Someone had finally called the police.

"They found a car parked outside. The driver's door was open and a woman was slumped over in her seat, sobbing. She was an investigator for the Florida Department of Children and Families.

"'Unbelievable,' she told Holste. 'The worst I've ever seen.'"

I suppose the bright side is that if you feed, clothe, or toilet-train your children, you no longer qualify for the World's Worst Mother Award:

"First he saw the girl's eyes: dark and wide, unfocused, unblinking. She wasn't looking at him so much as through him.

"She lay on a torn, moldy mattress on the floor. She was curled on her side, long legs tucked into her emaciated chest. Her ribs and collarbone jutted out; one skinny arm was slung over her face; her black hair was matted, crawling with lice. Insect bites, rashes and sores pocked her skin. Though she looked old enough to be in school, she was naked — except for a swollen diaper.

"'The pile of dirty diapers in that room must have been 4 feet high,' the detective said. 'The glass in the window had been broken, and that child was just lying there, surrounded by her own excrement and bugs.'

"When he bent to lift her, she yelped like a lamb. 'It felt like I was picking up a baby,' Holste said. 'I put her over my shoulder, and that diaper started leaking down my leg.'

"The girl didn't struggle. Holste asked, What's your name, honey? The girl didn't seem to hear.

"He searched for clothes to dress her, but found only balled-up laundry, flecked with feces. He looked for a toy, a doll, a stuffed animal. 'But the only ones I found were covered in maggots and roaches.'"

This is a girl who was seven years old and who had been so thoroughly neglected she didn't know how to talk.

"'The mother's statement was: 'I'm doing the best I can,' ' the detective said."

She did the best she could!

This is what I am getting stuck on.

"So the detective carried the girl down the dim hall, past her brothers, past her mother in the doorway, who was shrieking, 'Don't take my baby!'"

Do you know what this means?

That mother thought that how she interacted with her daughter was love.

She loved her, and she was doing the best she could.

It gets better:

"Her caseworker determined that she had never been to school, never seen a doctor. She didn't know how to hold a doll, didn't understand peek-a-boo. 'Due to the severe neglect,' a doctor would write, 'the child will be disabled for the rest of her life.'

"...The doctors and social workers had no way of knowing all that had happened to Danielle. But the scene at the house, along with Danielle's almost comatose condition, led them to believe she had never been cared for beyond basic sustenance. Hard as it was to imagine, they doubted she had ever been taken out in the sun, sung to sleep, even hugged or held. She was fragile and beautiful, but whatever makes a person human seemed somehow missing."

"Bernie and Diane already thought of Danielle as their daughter, but legally she wasn't. Danielle's birth mother did not want to give her up even though she had been charged with child abuse and faced 20 years in prison. So prosecutors offered a deal: If she waived her parental rights, they wouldn't send her to jail."

Did not want to give her up! She loves Danielle, remember. She did the best she could.

"Michelle Crockett lives in a mobile home in Plant City with her two 20-something sons, three cats and a closet full of kittens. The trailer is just down the road from the little house where she lived with Danielle.

"On a steamy afternoon a few weeks ago, Michelle opens the door wearing a long T-shirt. When she sees two strangers, she ducks inside and pulls on a housecoat. She's tall and stout, with broad shoulders and the sallow skin of a smoker. She looks tired, older than her 51 years.

"'My daughter?' she asks. 'You want to talk about my daughter?' Her voice catches. Tears pool in her glasses.

"The inside of the trailer is modest but clean: dishes drying on the counter, silk flowers on the table. Sitting in her kitchen, chain-smoking 305s, she starts at the end: the day the detective took Danielle.

"'Part of me died that day,' she says."

Because she loved Danielle!

"For hours Michelle Crockett spins out her story, tapping ashes into a plastic ashtray. Everything she says sounds like a plea, but for what? Understanding? Sympathy? She doesn't apologize. Far from it. She feels wronged.

"Danielle, she says, was born in a hospital in Las Vegas, a healthy baby who weighed 7 pounds, 6 ounces. Her Apgar score measuring her health was a 9, nearly perfect.

"'She screamed a lot,' Michelle says. 'I just thought she was spoiled.'"

SPOILED!

Yes, I'm shouting. SPOILED! All the baby's fault, you know.

She loved her, and she did the best she could. Other people had no right to interfere in her parenting decisions. Danielle-the-infant was SPOILED. She feels wronged.

"She goes to the boys’ bathroom, returns with a box full of documents and hands it over.

"The earliest documents are from Feb. 11, 2002. That was when someone called the child abuse hotline on her. The caller reported that a child, about 3, was 'left unattended for days with a retarded older brother, never seen wearing anything but a diaper.'

"This is Michelle’s proof that her sons were watching Danielle."

A) Someone reported it, and nothing was done.

B) Michelle Crocket believes that this constitutes good parenting.

"When Danielle was in the hospital, Michelle says, she and her sons sneaked in to see her. Michelle took a picture from the file: Danielle, drowning in a hospital gown, slumped in a bed that folded into a wheelchair.

“'That’s the last picture I have of her,' Michelle says. In her kitchen, she snubs out her cigarette. She crosses to the living room, where Danielle’s image looks down from the wall.

"She reaches up and, with her finger, traces her daughter’s face. 'When I moved here,' she says, 'that was the first thing I hung.'

"She says she misses Danielle.

“'Have you seen her?' Michelle asks. 'Is she okay?'”

It's the mother's obtuseness that makes me so angry I can't breathe.

She loved Danielle. She did the best she could! And I have no doubt that she means it sincerely, that in her own light she really loved that little girl and wasn't capable of doing better. It wasn't her fault, see? It was Danielle's fault. She was "retarded," she couldn't be toilet-trained, schools wouldn't take her! She was born spoiled. And I have no doubt she means that too, and couldn't be convinced otherwise even if you told her that in the one year since her adopted parents took her in she has already been taught how to use the potty and eat by herself and make eye contact and all of the other things that Danielle couldn't do because she was "retarded."

That's the thing with abusive parents. They don't actually know that they're abusive. Ordinary terms like "good" and "evil" don't apply. They don't enjoy inflicting torment on their kids; they don't know that they are inflicting torment on their kids. They love their kids. They're doing the best they can. And who are you to judge how they choose to raise their children? Could you do any better? Do you know how difficult this kid is? How angry? How out of control? Abusive parents are broken; they don't understand what love means, they don't know what kids need, and they can't give it to them in any case.

So you can spare the parents' feelings or save the kid. Those are your choices. You can talk to them as much as you want. They will blame the kid or the circumstances. If you grew up in a normal family and have no other experience of abuse, then there may be no way that you can understand how an abusive parent's sense of what's normal is so desperately skewed that they can believe they are being loving.

Posted by Andrea at 10:10 AM | Comments (19)

The burden of perfection

There is, sometimes, such a thing as too good.

I used to have Frances's little lion chair set up with a stepstool placed beside it to hold snacks and drinks when she is watching a dvd. This ended on a day in the winter when we were both ostensibly home sick, yet Frances had, as always, a seemingly inexhaustible supply of energy. She was suspending herself off the big comfy chair beside her little set up, kicking her merry feet, and knocked her glass of apple juice all over the floor. Then she did it again.

I was tired and sick and did not want to drag myself off the couch to mop apple juice off the floor (again) and decided that we were going to get rid of the stepstool. (It wasn't the first time this had happened, just the first time this had happened twice in one day when I happened to be sick.) Her snacks and drinks could go beside her lion chair on the floor. Then they would be out of range of her feet when she was on the big comfy chair. I was, I'll admit, snappish and waspy when delivering this information to her--that's it! It's going, I'm getting rid of this thing, I'm not mopping any more apple juice off the floor because of this stepstool!--but the worst that was directed at her was that she should be more careful of where she was kicking.

This was several months ago and she still periodically assures me that she will never knock the apple juice over again.

It is, I think, a combination of traits: a high level of sensitivity, a very good memory, an eagerness to please which makes her miserable whenever anyone is unhappy with what she has done, and a blooming perfectionism relating to her own behaviour. She is determined to be flawless; then everyone will love her and be happy with her and she can be happy too.

It is the hardest thing about being her mother.

Now, I know that all my mother-readers are dealing with temper tantrums, a desire not to please, what seems like deliberate obtuseness, and so on; and so dealing every day with a child who is bound and determined to behave perfectly does not seem like such a great trial, and it does make the day-to-day management of the household much easier. But it can't possibly be healthy for her.

I ask myself if I am doing anything to contribute to this, and the answer is no, I don't think so. At least I can't think of anything. I try to be cheerful and stable around her; on the rare occasions that I'm not and she tries to comfort me, I thank her and tell her that it isn't her job to make me feel better. (Including headaches and stomach bugs.) If I snap at her, I apologize and tell her that it wasn't her fault; I've tried to reassure her all along that the divorce had nothing to do with her. I do everything I can to support her relationship with her father. I listen whenever she wants to tell me how much she misses him, and how she loves him most. I don't tell her everything will be all right or she will feel better soon; I let her be sad whenever she needs to be. I reign myself in constantly in those rare instances when she approaches misbehaviour: when she whines or stalls or doesn't listen, which is as bad as it gets, the most I've ever had to do is count to three. Even that is often very upsetting for her. All the while I'm telling her that even when I am upset at something she's done, I still love her more than anything; and yet she still acts as if she believes that love will be withdrawn from her and she will be abandoned if she is not perfect.

When, the other night, she was not listening to me and putting her pyjamas on, and I counted to three and she still didn't listen so lost her bedtime story, and I put her to bed, the first thing she said to me the next morning when I woke her up for school, even before "good morning," was, "I promise I will listen to you today, Mummy. Do you love me, even when I don't listen?"

The burden of perfection is far too great for her thin shoulders, but how do I get her to put it down?

The literature on children and divorce presupposes a normal child--an obstinate and wilful creature who frequently and joyfully experiences anger. I was told to expect regression, difficulties with potty training, tantrums, problems sleeping, regression in language abilities, feeding problems.

"Preschoolers can display a wide range of emotional behaviour in a short time. Anger is the most common way for preschoolers to show pain and distress. Hitting, kicking, throwing things, pinching and spitting at other children are common ways for young children to express anger. ...

"Fearfulness is also a sign of anxiety or tension in preschoolers, particularly when it is in response to events the child used to feel comfortable with. Troubled preschoolers may also show sadness, withdrawal or lack of energy." http://www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/publicat/mh-sm/divorce/4_e.html

But Frances is not a normal child. She just rolled with the punches and kept on going, a little sadder and more subdued sometimes. She misses her Daddy and her old house. Sometimes she has nightmares that he came to get her, and then left again. They wake her in the middle of the night, inconsolable. I miss her old nightmares about dragons who burn her up.

"Despite their considerable physical and emotional achievements, preschoolers have a limited ability to understand separation and divorce. For example, because they understand relationships in self-centred terms, children may feel that they are the cause of certain events. Children often believe that a parent's worries and anxieties, and perhaps even the divorce itself, are their fault....

"Children may think that they are being abandoned by their mother, unloved by their father or that they are being punished for angry feelings....

"Children experience a significant loss when one parent is less involved in their lives. Not only will they often miss that parent's presence and affection, but some of their physical and emotional needs may not be met. They often have overwhelming fears that both parents will leave them."

I wonder, sometimes, if that is why she so needs to be perfect. Why those tiny words, those little grains, lodge so deeply and stick in her memory for months. Does she think she is being punished, that she was bad? Is she afraid that she will lose one of us for real if she is not good? If so, where did it come from? Does she really think that if she doesn't listen to me for a few minutes I will stop loving her?

"Personality is a major factor in development and plays an important role in a child's reaction to divorce. By the time children are 3 to 5 years of age, most parents can recognize the ways their children cope with stress. Some children sulk, others 'talk back' or get angry, still others become overly submissive or obedient."

I remember when she was a baby with reflux and everyone else seemed to think she was difficult, that her crying was temperamental, but I could tell that she was actually a very happy baby who only cried when she was in pain. Sure enough, when the reflux got better and she learned to sleep on her own, the crying stopped almost overnight. Ever since she has been that unnervingly obedient, well-behaved, happy, sociable, affectionate little girl I write about so often. So I'm not claiming that the divorce or our reactions to it or the way I parent or Erik parents are solely responsible for her continual struggle to be perfect. But I worry that the sensitivity and the good memory and the desire to please have made it very easy for my particular little girl to blame herself for what happened, believe she is being punished and be terrified that if she is not always good from now on, she will lose one of us forever.And how do I know? How do I look inside that beautiful little blond head of hers to see whether she is really just the most resilient and naturally well-behaved child who has ever existed, or if locked in there somewhere is a void saying it's all my fault?

Posted by Andrea at 9:57 AM | Comments (11)

Mid-Year Resolution (or: another one of Andrea's Bright Ideas)

This week, I did a possibly dangerous thing. I asked Frances what was one thing that she wished I did more of. Her face brightened. "Surprises!" she said.

Indeed. She does love surprises, my girl, especially the kind that come from the t-o-y-s-t-o-r-e. They don't have to be big or expensive or branded or shiny, they just have to be new and unexpected. "I have a surprise for you!" I say. "Oh goodie!" she says. "What is it? What could it be?" And it's just as wonderful if it's a new $4 bottle of mega-bubbles or a $3 ball as if it's a $20 calico critters set.

So. Why not? More surprises for Frances. Preferably, the free kind. Plus, the Happiness Experts say that one reliable way to be happier yourself is to do nice things for other people, which seems reasonable considering how much I love to make her smile.

Free surprises for four-year-olds. Any suggestions?

Favourite dinners. And deserts. Rearranging the toy area. Playdates, maybe. Day trips to the farm. Picnics in the playpark. Renting a movie I think she might like. Homemade cards. Balloons. What else?

Posted by Andrea at 12:29 PM | Comments (16)

Bad Mothers

All mothers have days or weeks or months when our parenting sins are many and we find it difficult to believe that our children will ever make it to a healthy adulthood, when exhaustion grinds us down and all we can see are our mistakes; and we all know of the women eviscerated in the news for abandoning or neglecting or killing their kids. But today I don't want to talk about the common mothering mistakes we all make, or the women who, for whatever reason, turn monstrous. I'm wondering about the liminal place where light and even medium grey shade into charcoal; where no one is being beaten, everyone is being fed, there is genuine love and the parents are trying their best, but mistakes are being made that you can't help but think are going to break those kids one day.

It's a hard subject. After decades of propoganda that seemed almost consciously designed to make every mother feel like crap if she once fed her child food from a can for supper, or was ever less than perfectly patient or responsive, the mood amongst groups of mothers in my experience (online and off) is a sharing of mistakes that results in well-deserved relief and a kind of rah-rah boosterism. Thank god I'm not the only one. We're all fucking up. It can't be so bad after all.

But we all know that there are bad parents out there, and they don't necessarily come with red flags or bloody hands; sometimes bad parents are good employees, good citizens, good friends.

There's value in celebrating our imperfections and our humanity, but I wonder sometimes if it doesn't stifle us when we see something that truly is damaging happening to a child not our own at the hands of his or her parents.

A few weeks ago, Moxie posted about a 70/30 rule. As long as you're doing the right thing about 70% of the time, you're being a perfect parent--as perfect as any parent is capable of being. That's probably true, in most instances. But doesn't it depend on what's in that thirty per cent? You could be flawlessly perfect for 95% of the time and if the other five per cent is incest, that kid's going to be traumatized. There are some things surely that are never ok no matter how rare they are.

I know of a family, for instance, with two little boys, both of whom are a little violent, a little wild, and from everything I can tell completely undisciplined. I've seen times where the mother puts a boy in time out--and the father tells him he can play--and the mother puts him back in time out again--and the father tells him he can play--both of them in the same room, at the same time. The younger boy, who is four and the more violent of the two, is rewarded with very violent video games rated for adults when he does what they ask him to. Is this abuse? Is it neglect? No. Is it illegal? No. Do they love their kids? Yes, undoubtedly. Do I think this is going to harm them? Yes.

I am possibly too aware of my own imperfections as a mother to want to offer unsolicited advice. Frances never eats dinner from a can, but she did have an unconscionable number of cookies on Wednesday, and I let her watch Shrek 3 for the second day in a row because she had blisters on her little feet after wearing new sandals I'd bought her, and I didn't think it would be right for me to force her to play. Still, not a set of stellar parenting moments. I don't have as much time with her as I'd like these days, and when we are together I am often tired and impatient, pressing her to hurry hurry hurry. I know I'm not a bad mother. I love that girl, and I push myself hard every day to be the mother I think she needs as opposed to pushing her to be the kid I want; but I am human and sometimes I fail.

Something in my gut tells me that this is different than rewarding a physically violent child with games that can only reinforce a trait that is already getting him into trouble (he has been kicked out of daycare).

I've known women who spectacularly flounder during their transition to motherhood because after decades of expecting everyone else to take care of them, they can't manage to take care of someone else. It's a horrible thing to say, I know; and we all struggle during that first year to become less selfish and more nurturing than we thought we were capable of. Again, it's not black. It's a shade of grey. Yet when I see someone who is beginning to resent her child for not taking care of her, I don't know what to do. If the child were being beaten, I would be legally required to report it; instead, he or she is only being asked every day to fundamentally alter themselves and parent their parents to meet the emotional wounds of the persons who are meant to care for them. And here the right thing to do is to let it happen.

I'm mindful of the many ways in which the charge of child abuse can be and has been misused--against parents who formula feed or use a form of sleep training, for instance, or who allow the mother to selfishly go to work when they could afford to keep her at home. Does that mean that anything that isn't actually illegal should be ignored?

None of us are perfect parents. Very few of us are monsters. But that doesn't mean that everyone who isn't a monster is good enough, does it? Where does our responsibility to support other mothers' right to be imperfect end? Where does our responsibility to children begin? Only when they're being beaten, starved, raped? What about the child who is fed and housed and has two parents who love him or her very much, who are trying their level best to be good parents, but who can't seem to stop calling their beloved child horrible names whenever they lose their temper? Kids believe everything their parents say, up to a certain age.

You see a child who is being hurt. The way they are being hurt is not illegal, but it could easily affect their future health or happiness in serious ways. The person who is hurting this child loves them more than anything else in the world and is trying their best and is already consumed by guilt over their failures, but chooses to deal with it by reminding themselves that they are trying their hardest and kids are resilient and has never seemingly entertained the idea of asking for professional advice or assistance. It's not a one-time thing; you don't know everything but you know enough to be certain that it's a pattern. Do you have a responsibility? How do you balance your affection for the parent with your concern for their child? Is there anything you can do?

Posted by Andrea at 9:05 AM | Comments (14)

Validation, of sorts

Yesterday when I dropped Frances off at her daycare there was only one other little girl there so far, A. The two of them have one of those peculiar preschool friendships where they love each other and play together all the time and fight all the time because they can't agree on how the playing should be done--Frances has very definite opinions, and A often disagrees and ignores her, and sparks fly. As I was walking out of the room, Frances said to her, "A, I really love my Mommy."

"Aww," said A's mom. "That's so sweet."

"Yes it is," I said by the door, and turned to grin at Frances. "I love you too, sweetpea. I'll see you this afternoon."

I've said before that the only judgment of our parenting skills that counts is the one given by our children. The strangers in the playground and our own parents and in-laws and our friends and doctors and the parenting experts are simply not the relevant audience. If our kids love us and we have a good relationship as adults then we were good parents, case closed. (Which isn't to say that if they don't love us and we don't have a good relationship as adults that we were necessarily bad parents; there are outside factors that could influence this.)

Still, I'm not sure I want to accept the judgment of a four-year-old at face value, even if it was immensely grafitying and made me feel like a Rock-Star Mommy for at least several hours afterwards. (Further reinforced by an article in Scientific American Mind I read yesterday about how traumatic or positive experiences alter the expression of genes involved in emotional regulation. Apparently, physically affectionate mothering (fathering was not mentioned) actually assists the genes involved in stress and anxiety regulation to function more effectively, so if you give your kid a lot of hugs and tell them you love them all the time, give yourself a pat on the back. I might blog this article later.) Like most mothers, I spend more time feeling badly about all of the things I'm not doing than feeling great about the things that my daughter obviously thinks that I am doing.

Like letting her play by herself so long as she's not asking for me. Oh, we've raised the practice of benign neglect to a high art at our house; I tell myself it's a step up from Malignant Neglect, the kind where kids don't get shoes or coats or food or any sort of positive attention or feedback, then I mostly go back to reading or writing. I love my daughter, she is my favourite person on earth and the best thing that ever happened to me, I am dreading our summer schedule when she will be at her father's half the time; it still happens that I hate playing with her Calico Critters and manufacturing the super-squeaky Mommy Toy voice that says "I love you!" fifty gazillion times in a row while jumping up and down and rescuing baby toys who somehow managed to get on the roof of the dollhouse again, and I hate making the baby lion jump up and down for five minutes, and I hate making all of the Little People into cast members from Shrek the Third. I do it when she asks me to, but when she doesn't ask, I don't do it. I give myself all kinds of reasons to believe it's good for her too (it gives her privacy! helps her foster her imagination! allows her to develop independence!) but the truth is, I do it for me, as evidenced by the sinking feeling of dread I experience whenever she does say, "I don't want to play by myself now. I want a friend to play with me. Won't you play with me?"

Oh, god. If I have to. You want me to be the Mommy Dalmation? We're going to take her clothes off again? And put them on again? And take them off again? Can't we just leave them on?

Bea's post yesterday about Benign Neglect in kiddie lit and how it is, of course, adults writing about how great benign neglect is for kids, and whether it's really great for the kids or if we just want to think it is because it lets us off the never-ending entertainment hook, touched a nerve in the comments section. Evidently, it touched mine; even when Frances brags about me to her friends, I still feel guilty about exactly how much time she plays on her own, and how much I dislike playing the kinds of games she likes to play, and how much I would rather it if she enjoyed being silently curled up on the couch with a good book or engaged in some little low-mess crafty project. Like me.

On the way home from school yesterday we passed C on her way to a party. "I want to go to the party!" said Frances.

"We weren't invited, sweetie," I said. "I'm sorry."

"But I want to be invited!"

"I know, but we weren't. It's hard to be left out, isn't it?"

"Yes! I want to be invited! I want to go to the party!" (This isn't a girl shy about expressing her wants, let me tell you.)

"Honeybun, I don't even know where the party is. I don't know whose party it is. I don't know when it's starting."

"But I want you to know where the party is! I want to go to the party!"

Ah, the Omniscient Mother. If only. I knew what to do! I'd be supermom! "Sweetie, I'm sorry, but you can't go to that party. I know it's disappointing. But if you'd like, we could have a Mummy and Frances party."

"Ok."

"What do you think we should do at our Mummy and Frances party?"

"Cake."

"Ok. I have a little cake in the freezer, we can have that. What else should we do?"

"Macaroni and cheese!"

"Sure, you can have some leftover macaroni and cheese for supper. But what would you like to do?"

"Umm...raspberries!"

"That's fine. But besides eating. What would you like to do?"

"A drink?"

This was going to be a dinner party, I could tell. Macaroni and cheese and a bowl full of raspberries, and then when that wasn't enough a bit of leftover spaghetti with homemade sauce, and then a cake. Four candles in the top ("Mummy, you have to put fire on it") that she blew out, and then we shared a little cake before her Daddy called.

While she ate and I waited for my dinner to heat up, do you know what I did? I read a few pages from a book, ironically, about how to use creativity to boost family closeness and the happiness of children. Benign neglect + hyperparenting = a winning combination every time.

I'm not sure mothers can ever do enough to silence the critical voices in our heads, voices that come mostly from media and experts and family. We had a Mummy and Frances party and I spent part of it ignoring Frances to read a parenting manual.

I snapped out of it and we talked, instead, until she asked to watch a few minutes of Bambi before bed, when I went back to my book.

On balance, who knows. Ask Frances when she's 22. In the meantime, I'm really hoping this new parenting manual will give me some ideas of things my daughter and I can do together that don't make me feel like my brain is dribbling out of my ears. Gardening, maybe. Simple crafts. Frances wants to help me paint the living room red. She has not yet convinced me.

Posted by Andrea at 10:29 AM | Comments (9)

Next time you're about to give yourself the World's Worst Mother Award, remember this

I had a different post planned for today, but I posted several months ago about the baby who was abandoned in a parking-garage stairwell here in Toronto; she was assumed to be eight months old, and named Angelica-Leslie by CAS workers after several days had passed with no clues coming forward about who she is. I thought that those of you who don't live in the area and so would not otherwise hear the end of the story might appreciate knowing that two people have been arrested in connection with her abandonment.

Her parents.

Left her in a freezing stairwell in a parking garage like a used kleenex or an empty candy wrapper.

I don't want to imagine what it's going to do to her to know that her parents thought so little of her, but I do.

Posted by Andrea at 9:57 AM | Comments (5)

Break My Stride

Julie's topic for the Hump Day Hmm this week is walking out of stride.

I've mentioned, oh, about five thousand times (in my 1342 entries), that I've wanted to be a writer since I was five years old. I've blamed the diabetes for not going after it approximately 4,993 times. But the more I think about this lately, the more I realize--it's not true.

There are type 1 diabetic writers out there. I read their books. They even freelance. They are not dying of complications at horrendously young ages nor finding themselves lapsed into comas every morning over their breakfast cereal. So where did I get the idea that this limitation applied to me?

I'm glad you asked. I'll tell you: from my Mom. On the one and only occasion that I can recall her saying, "If you try to be a writer, you will end up a waitress."

We could spend all day unpacking the various value statements in that sentence (Oh my god, a waitress! Then how will I ever afford that big suburban house and all the fixings that will give my life meaning?), and at times I have, but translated it roughly means: "If you try to write you will fail and end up poor."

My mother and I have a complicated relationship and at times we have not gotten along, but I know that when she said that (and probably forgot it in about five minutes, telling herself it was a momentary unkindness that was outweighed by the blah blah blah, all the stuff we all tell ourselves all the time when we say something to our kids that we regret), she was not trying to hurt me. She was trying to help me. She was trying to protect me from failure and poverty. She was telling me not to run too fast, or I'd hurt myself. She was trying to help me live within what she perceived as my limitations.

After all, how many people try to become writers, and fail? How many writers are poor? There aren't a whole lot of superstars in writing, and the ones who run with the pack are notoriously underpaid and, I'd imagine, stressed about it.

I've been told by teachers that I can write since I was a little kid. I had a highschool teacher threaten to track me down and beat me if I didn't take english at university (thankfully she did not make good on her threat) and my undergrad thesis advisor (who also taught journalism) said I was the best writer he'd ever taught in fifteen years at the school. Friends have always said I could write; enemies have occasionally accused me of plagiarism.

But I didn't pay any attention to them. I already knew that if I tried to be a writer, I'd end up a waitress. The commentary of a single mother apparently outweighs that of several supposedly-objective experts.

Here's what I'm not claiming:

I'm not claiming that I would have ended up a superstar. That's an arbitrary and unpredictable process that depends too much on luck and too little on effort or skill. (I still remember an essay submitted by one of my classmates that a first-year teaching assistant picked to read to the class; it was a collection of body shop t-shirt slogans typed up and submitted as original work. I was horrified by her bad taste.) I'm not claiming I would have made as much money as I do now. I'm not saying I would have been a household name. It's possible that the 1/15 year environmental studies student is an average writer so far as professional writers are concerned, I don't know.

What I am claiming is that I could have been a writer.

Possibly an average, middle-of-the-pack writer. Possibly not.

But I never even let myself try because of one casual offhand remark my mother made when I was a teenager that convinced me that if I tried, I would fail, I would end up poor, and then (the extrapolation supplied by myself) I would not be able to pay for my insulin or test strips and would end up dying of starvation, possibly in a gutter.

Even though I know better. There are plenty of writers who pay the bills from their writing. Mostly not novelists and poets, but writers nonetheless. Some of them are even diabetics. And, you know, in the midst of all this being a not-writer who does something Practical and Applied (and Altruistic/Helpful) for a living, I'm writing a novel, a few essays, two blogs--I did the mature, realistic thing and found work that was "safe" only to discover, fourteen years in, that I have not only been walking out of stride with myself all along but that it's been a strange, lurching, awkward kind of walking-out-of-stride-with-myself because I can't manage not-writing. I still write, compulsively and constantly.

There's worse:

See, the person I am currently dating is unconventionally employed and spends lots of time working (for money) on various art projects, and while I found this very cool for the first few dates it also terrified me. An artist! You can't be an artist! If you try to be an artist, you'll end up a waitress!

Oh, oops, wait a second: that's not me thinking about the boyfriend. That's my Mom talking about me. In my head. But you know for a few days there it felt like me. Thank goodness I figured out it wasn't.

I think this happens a lot. I think a lot of the seemingly-objective, supposedly-reality-based value statements and judgements we make about the people we care about are actually echoes of the voices of influential people in our own lives talking about us. For all I know that statement my Mom made so long ago was a reflection of something her parents had said to her (I already know they told her that girls can't go to college).

Just because it feels like an objective, reality-based, loving assessment of our children does not mean it is accurate.

I think this is very important.

The value judgements of our parents especially can feel like received wisdom that we question late, if ever. Then it gets pasted all over the world around us whether it's appropriate or not, including our kids, who will take it as received widom in their turn and spend their lives trying to match their stride to our own hobbled gaits, not knowing that we ourselves are stumbling along with our ankles tied together.

I don't think there's any way around it: we have to untie our own ankles before we can begin to help our children find their strides, or even avoid constraining them ourselves. They'll tie that rope around their own legs to emulate our example; and then thirty years from now we'll all wonder why our kids never reached their potential, just as we never reached ours.

Posted by Andrea at 9:03 AM | Comments (25)

Tag, I'm It

The lovely Chris over at Mombie tagged me with a meme that (I think) she invented for Mother's Day; and you know me and memes, but I think this one is special. The instructions are simple: what are three things you do well as a mother? Unfortunately I'm sick today (who gets a flu in May?) so it's a challenge to corral my thoughts in a positive direction. Which probably means it's even more necessary. Here we go:

1. Not hovering. Frances plays outside by herself now that the weather is nice; she's been told to stay where I can see her and I pop out occasionally to make sure she's ok, but I figure if she wants to sit in the back yard area and play with a stick in the mud, that's great.

2. Pretending to be stupid. You know what I mean: when they hide somewhere you can totally see them, or put the surprise in the same hand and ask you to guess where it is again, or play a silly word game where they are obviously trying to trick you. "Hmm, where could Frances be? I could have sworn she was here just a minute ago.... I'll be so sad if I've lost her forever. Oh no! I can't find her anywhere!" All the while with gales of laughter escaping from behind the curtain, just above a pair of small white socks and two little pink shins.

3. TV. Most of the week will go by almost entirely TV-free. (Until she becomes fascinated with a new movie and wants to watch it all the time, but that does mean that when this happens I don't feel particularly bad about it--averaged out it's still Not Much.) Yet somehow she has still figured out who the Bratz are. I blame her classmates.

Although she has still to figure out that she can ask me for a particular toy--she's completely not acquisitive.

I won't tag, but only because I can't narrow it down to just a few people I'd want to see tackle it. How's this: are you reading this post? Yes? You're tagged.

Posted by Andrea at 8:29 AM | Comments (5)

Truth in Mommyblogging

The other day, Frances asked me for a stepdad.

Before I go any further, let me be absolutely clear that Frances has no idea what a stepdad is or what having one would entail except that her friend C has a stepdad, so she wants one too. Still, it gave me pause. As you can imagine, as anyone would feel when their child asks them for something that they're not sure they're ever going to be able to give them.

Now when I say "the other day" I sort of mean "sometime last week or the week before, I can't remember exactly," and this is the kind of minor dishonesty that the blogosphere expects and condones. It's the "I'm doing the best that I can, this is an irrelevant detail" kind of dishonesty. The important part is that Frances asked me for a stepdad, and it stabbed me in the heart--a very minor stab, like a thorn--to hear her question and try to answer her.

There were two articles in newspapers yesterday that touched on blogging enterprises both motherhood and marital, and as I've run into most of the barricades related to either in the last few years, they hit. Well, let's see: Frances's photographs have been stolen and photoshopped, I've received death threats, I have a gag order in the separation agreement so censored, I've participated in panels on mommyblogging, done studies on it, had a few celebrity sightings, the whole gamut. I've seen the good, the bad, and the inhuman.

The first article was about--what else?--the ethics of mommyblogging. There were a lot of things that were potentially objectionable in this story--such as the belief that using "innocuous" tags protects photos of kids. Listen, the photo of Frances that was stolen and photoshopped and posted on fark had no tags and its name was numeric. It was not at all googleable. It was found anyway, on a blog that at the time had 100 readers a day. But this is what I want to discuss:

"Knowing that our mothers had a hard time and loved us anyway isn't the worst thing that can happen to this generation.

"But they may only believe that in their 20s. There may be some very angry adolescents along the way."

This is true, I think; our kids may benefit from knowing us as real people who struggled with parenting but loved them anyway. But I wonder why they need to read about it on the internet. There is no reason they can't hear this from our own lips at the appropriate time.

Frances, sweetie? I love you. I love you very, very much. I love you even when you're driving me crazy. I tell you this every day so hopefully you've figured it out by now. If not, well, here you go.

In any case, writing about parent-blogging as an enterprise that is primarily beneficial for the kids is self-serving dishonesty. We're doing it for ourselves, and crossing our fingers that it won't hurt the people we love most. Sort of like adding bisphenol A to baby bottles without being sure that it won't leach out, or lining kids' lunch bags with lead for insulation, or using vaccines that haven't been thoroughly tested.

We put our kids in carseats, feed them organic food, make them wear helmets on bicycles, give them no choking hazards before the age of three, limit their television viewing, slather them with sunblock and consult the advice of self-appointed experts on every issue from when to start school to how to deal with nightmares, all in the name of keeping our kids safe and protecting their physical and emotional health; then indulge in an experiment whose long-term effects on mental and emotional health are completely unknown.

Most of us are cognizant of this, I think; and the range of stances on the subject is broad as befits any community composed of diverse human beings with different agendas. But if you tell me that you never cringe when you find a blog that you think has crossed the line, I won't believe you.

What scares me, and keeps me even more cautious than I would otherwise be, is remembering how Madeleine L'engle was publicly attacked by her children after her death for her innaccurate representations of them and of their family in the novels that we all love so much--attacked, because those misrepresentations had lifelong consequences for her children. I am willing to believe that L'engle meant well and tried to be truthful. That didn't save her kids from the consequences of her writings. And that was fiction, good lord; we're writing (or claiming to write) memoir.

Frances asked me for a stepdad not long ago; and then I told you that she didn't really mean it. But the fact is, I don't know. I can't know. And then I told you anyway. One day, that may hurt my little girl, even if I am being careful and trying hard and love her more than anything. I see her as a sunny, impossibly good-natured, well-liked golden girl who handled the end of her family with resilience and optimism well beyond her years; she may remember this time as a horrific, painful, traumatizing mess when she felt she couldn't confide in anyone, for whatever reason. By then it will be too late because I've already told the world otherwise.

So, that's maternal.

Now marital, courtesy of the New York Times. Or, more accurately, post-marital.

Until the morning her husband, David Sals, told her he “was done” with their marriage, Jennifer Neal had portrayed him so lovingly on her blog that he was called DearSweetDave. By the afternoon of that October day last year, Ms. Neal had shared what she portrayed as his perfidy with the 55,000 regular readers she says visit NakedJencom.

Soon after, readers came to know him by a far less flattering name, and as the guy whose insensitivity made Jen so sick that she was throwing up every day and so poor that she lost her house in Santa Cruz, Calif.

And when a despairing Jen discovered in February that her ex-husband had put his information up on Match.com, an Internet dating service, she linked to it from her blog, giving her readers a chance to share their thoughts.

I can't tell you I haven't been tempted to follow suit. Very tempted. There is that gag order, though; and even before I tried to be circumspect. However--isn't that the way it goes? Depictions of marriage that are cloyingly sweet and utterly false until the whole thing goes cock-eyed, them bam! and there's ugliness lying bloody and ragged all over the internet.

I wonder--and don't you?--why husbands and partners get that consideration, and our kids don't. If we don't expose our husbands etc. to that form of public scrutiny because we know they won't like it and we don't want to hurt them or harm that relationship, why do we think our kids are going to be ok with it?

We know we can't blog about our colleagues, we agonize about blogging about parents and siblings, yet we post photos of our kids in the bath. Why?

Is it because, despite what we say, we really view these little creatures as our own (until they begin telling us otherwise)?

Is it because we don't want to claim ambition and fame for ourselves, for our own stories? It's easier to say "look at my great kid!" than it is to say "look at me!"

Is it because our children are too young to complain about violating their privacy? Is it because at this age they wouldn't mind because they still don't understand what privacy is?

Whatever it is, it seems that we extend the least consideration to the people we say we love most.

Motherhood is a subject worthy of honest exploration. I'd be the first to defend that. But I think a few things are missing from this venture:

1. We need to be honest about the fact that we don't know what our kids are going to think about this or how it is going to affect them, and not blithefly affect a public stance of "I'm sure it won't cause any lasting damage" that is based essentially on wishful thinking. We need to be ready to apologize or make reparation if in fact it does hurt them in some way, down the road.

2. We need to be aware that the best memoirs and the best personal reporting does not happen immediately--it is told with great reflection, sometimes years after the fact. Our stories of motherhood and our exploration of motherhood may actually suffer in honesty from being too immediate.

3. I think we need to strive for greater consistency. If our spouses, siblings, parents and colleagues deserve not to be laid open on the blogosphere for the entertainment of our friends, then so do our kids.

I recognize this is a bit of a different stance than I've taken previously on the privacy issue, and it's true that our kids' generation may well find that privacy is an outdated concept. But after thinking about it for a good long time and watching my daughter's growing capability to structure her own story and find meaning in it, I now believe that I need to give her the right to determine that for herself. My story is mine to share; she is a character in my story, and as such my experience of her is part of my story, and mine to share (though hopefully in a sensitive and tactful way); but her story, the meaning she finds in her own life, her inner world and experience, her feelings, her attitudes, her friendships and loves and longings and dreams? Not mine.

Anyway, I think it will be more fun to help her learn how to tell her own story.

~~~~~

(This post was a very loose interpretation of Julie's Hump Day Hmm topic for the week--truth and honesty.)

Posted by Andrea at 9:33 AM | Comments (17)

Because it's not the stuff you know you're doing that you need to worry about.

I don't remember ever playing with dolls. I must have, I had dolls, but I don't remember playing with them. It didn't register in the long-term memory ganglia or whatever neural part it is they reside in.

I had a cabbage patch doll. My Mom bought me one for Christmas the year they were all the rage--remember that? Parents trampling each other to buy one for their kids for Christmas?--and she bought it just before they took off, when there were plenty on the shelves, and watched in amazement as it became the It Toy of the year. Her name was Frederica and she had two fat brown braids, and my Mom made her an entire little wardrobe of Cabbage Patch Clothes so she would have outfits.

She made me another doll, too, that I named after the Little Matchstick Girl because we learned about her in school that year. She was long and thin and had long, straw-coloured yarn hair and a long blue print dress.

I had a little puppet baby doll that had a blanket sewn to her so that when you put your hand inside you could wrap the blanket around her and it would look like a baby, sleeping.

I had a dollhouse that my father made; the second floor was removable and it was vaguely patterned after my childhood home. It had doors and windows and white stucco paint on the outside, black sandpaper shingles; when I was a teenager I took to redecorating it as a hobby and it has a few nice pieces in it now. The house itself, though, is a shambles, because in my early twenties my pet ferret took up residence in it and could not be evicted.

I had Barbies. I know this because I have found their headless, limbless torsos, blond plastic hair knotted and ratty, at the bottom of toy bins.

I must have played with them in the regular fashion at some point; but the only games I remember playing with the Barbies were the ones where I paired them up with my brother's GI Joes and sent them off to battle evil and save the world.

I remember lego. I remember my brother's construx and his transformers. I remember constructing elaborate role-playing games complete with hand-drawn currency, rulebooks and manuals that centred, again, on battling evil and saving the world. I do not remember playing with dolls. My parents tell me I did, and treasured them. They have no reason to lie. But the doll-playing wasn't formative.

I didn't grow up believing that I had to be a mother.

I did grow up believing that I had to save the world.

~~~~~

My bedroom in the new house was blue, sky-blue, and it had one of those wallpaper murals on one wall. I think it was a rainbow. Girly, but not pink. My brother's room was painted grey and black and his mural was a moonscape. Cool, but I had the same aversion to black as a decorating scheme at that age as I do now.

I had a microscope somewhere in there. It came with glass slides and solutions and tweezers and a little black scalpel.

My parents signed me up for jazz dance when I was little, I can't remember the age. I can remember wearing leotards and dance shoes, and learning to sashay. I took it until I was allowed to quit, sometime late in elementary school.

My parents signed my brother up for football. I can't remember the age. I can remember his yellow and black uniform. He took it until he was allowed to quit.

I can remember lots and lots of crafty projects from a young age. I had a toy singer sewing machine that really sewed, and knitting tubes that I used to make little round rugs for my dollhouse, and a sewing kit with a pattern for a tiny tiny felt teddy bear smaller than my thumb. I had an easybake oven and used up all the little mixes quick. I had books, of course; reams and reams of books. Narnia and Anne and tons ordered from Scholastic through the school.

I love making things, and I love knowing how to do things, now as then; this applies equally well to hanging shelves with a cordless drill, stripping and refinishing furniture, painting, as well as baking, sewing, knitting, etc. But I'll let you guess which were sitting under the tree at Christmas.

I'm not saying I didn't ask for these things (except the dance lessons). Maybe I did. But who (knowing the adult I turned into) could argue this was innate?

~~~~~

I remember having two favourite colours in elementary school: red and blue.

I remember loving Anne and Narnia and all the rest of my childhood library, until I discovered my father's science fiction and fantasy books in senior public school. And even though The Coming of the Quantum Cats opened up a whole other universe to me, I dropped science after grade 10 and I don't remember anyone complaining.

Now I read astrophysics for fun.

Now, according to my job classification, I am a professional scientist.

~~~~~

When I visited my parents over the holidays the conversation turned to one of our favourite topics of conversation: Frances. How adorable, how sweet, how loving, how kind, how active, how bright, how thoughtful, how funny. How generally perfect.

Also--how girly.

How she loves to play with dolls (this is brought out as evidence of girlishness, but her love of lego is not).

How caring and nurturing she is of all her little toys.

How she loves pink. How she adores to be beautiful in her party clothes. How she thrives on being admired in her party shoes.

Not how she loves to try to scare people with tales of the bloodthirsty T Rex.

Not how she, too, structures so much of her roleplaying games around saving people or animals.

But there it was, that conversation. Frances is such a little girl.

"Just like you," said my Dad.

(I'll let those of you who've fainted wake up before I continue. Take your time.)

"We tried to raise you gender-neutrally, but you just always wanted dolls and your brother wanted trucks."

All I could do was stare.

~~~~~

It's not the stuff you know you're doing that you need to watch out for.

It's the stuff you don't know you're doing, the stuff you would swear you weren't doing but are doing anyway, because you can't help it, it's unconscious.

I don't think my dad is unusually clueless. I think he's normal. Most of you probably have similar tales about your own parents.

Our kids will have the same stories to tell about us one day. One day, Frances will be telling her friends how I practically programmed her to love pink and baking and never take the driver's seat when she can avoid it.

I hope, when it happens, that I'm not sitting around telling my friends about how hard I tried to be gender-neutral in parenting Frances, but she loved dolls and pink anyway, I guess that stuff is just innate.

Posted by Andrea at 7:10 AM | Comments (6)

Moral Dilemmas II: where I answer my own rhetorical questions, or start to

Him: What do you think about dating more than one person at a time?

Me: I think it's fine, so long as everyone is being honest and knows what is going on.

Thinking: And even then...

When do you owe someone that honesty?

While before the first date is too much too soon, and after marriage is too little too late, there is a wide grey area in between where potential misunderstandings, hurt feelings and awkward conversations abound. This is probably why most people either a) avoid dating more than one person at a time or b) avoid having the conversations, thereby cheating by default.

But: is it the expectations that lie at the root of those misunderstandings and hurt feelings--that is, that people date one person at a time, and therefore only exceptions to this rule require communication--or the lack of honesty? If we expected people to be dating more than one person until hearing otherwise directly from them, how would that change?

~~~~~

Last week I read a column in the Globe and Mail titled The Other Woman, all about those poor sad dupes who believe the married guy loves them because he buys them lingerie.

Before I get to the part where I choked, I'd like to point out that any woman in any relationship who believes that a guy loves her because he buys her stuff, regardless of their official relationship status, is a poor sad dupe. This is not an affliction that holds only for The Other Woman. All of us are in the position of attempting to judge someone else's intentions and honesty based on a combination of gifts, actions, words, looks, consistency, and so on; none of us will ever fully penetrate or understand the heart of another.

Here are the choking hazards:

It's true there are women who profess not to care if their man leaves his wife.

...aha, but they are miserable, self-deluded wretches, engaged in a pathetic pretense. Deep down all women want the diamond ring and the white-picket fence. We have chosen to disregard what the women have to say about themselves, and will shortly share with you instead the musings of a group of self-proclaimed 'experts' who have not a shred of evidence among them.

But I would suggest that's an unhealthy display of defensiveness and self-degradation, and it points to the problem that many psychologists say underlies the reason single women settle for a part-time man. It's that old bugaboo: low self-esteem.

...because there's no such thing as a psychologically healthy woman who doesn't want to be married or partnered, would rather have several casual relationships over one serious one, enjoys being single or has tried marriage and didn't like it. Since we can't find a mental illness common to all women sleeping with married men which can be treated pharmaceutically (pity, it's so much more profitable), we'll just shame them all into silence or compliance by telling them it's their low self-esteem.

Here's one way to see things clearly. Think of yourself as a Ferrari in a garage that you are offering to him to use any time he wants. You fill it up with gas. You keep it clean, finely detailed for his pleasure.

...because clear thinking in relationships always involves objectifying yourself and seeing yourself primarily as a man's ticket to orgasm. This, by the way, also defines high self-esteem (see above).

The best advice, however, is the pre-emptive kind. Channel Barbara Amiel: When she was between husband No. 3 (David Graham) and husband No. 4 (Conrad Black), she was in London, moving among the great and the good. There were plenty of men, but she knew what she wanted and what she deserved.

...because Conrad Black may be a felon, but he's a rich felon and he was all hers. Good thinking, Barbara!

Ready for more? Let's read a few comments.

On second thought, I'll let you read the comments. Except for this one: "Here's one thing I know to be true: Cheaters cheat. It's what they do."

Too true. Scientifically proven. DNA studies have in fact found that these types are a separate sub-species, the Homo Sapiens Infidelus.

I have been both the jezebel and the frigid bitch. I was the same person both times. Wasn't I?

My self-esteem was not sky-high the one time and rock-bottom the other. Being the jezebel, if anything, reduced my sense of myself because what the hell was I doing? Why was I doing this? A scenario that strikes me as more likely (if you believe women are people) than a wilting wallflower waiting for a married man to make her feel complete. My ethics and morals were not substantially different. I was the same person--not, in either case, wholly innocent; not, in either case, wholly to blame; in both cases the same mix of insecurities and strengths, blind spots and clear thinking, wishes and fears, smarts and stupids that I am on most other days. I was me.

Anyone can become at any time the person they are sure they will never be, doing the thing they are sure they will never do. What sort of hubris allows one to think they are exempt from human failings? At the very least any woman who's ever been through the first year of motherhood, when all of our precious notions of what sort of mothers we can be and will be crumble into a haze of sleep-deprivation and expert-laden guilt, ought to know better. She ought to know that all of us are capable of failing those we love most on earth simply because we are sometimes not the people we thought we were or wanted to be.

Most of the science I've read on the issue of infidelity concludes that both men and women are not lifelong monogamous pair-bonders, but opportunistic adulterers. That is, we will remain faithful so long as we are convinced that this is our best deal (in a modern society, factoring in the cost of divorce, the impact on children, and so on); but once we are presented with something we think is a better deal, we'll take what we can get, for as long as we can get away with it.

It's not a flattering portrait of human nature; but then, science can also explain most of our altruistic and nurturing behaviours including within our immediate families through mathematical formulas based on ratios of genetic relatedness. It feels noble, spiritual, pure, high-minded, and it's not.

From the gutters of humanity's primate nature (ask any female chimp how many males she fucked per offspring and, if she were human, she'd give you a wicked little laugh) to the heights of romantic idealism in the next installment, since this one is getting long enough, don't you think?

Posted by Andrea at 9:03 AM | Comments (4)

Apocalypse for One

Out of the nineteen photos of Frances on my desk at work, three show her around eight to ten months of age.

In one of them, from October that year, she is sitting facing Lake Ontario in a park, wearing orange corduroy pants and a white onesie with flowers embroidered around the neck. Her blond hair is shining in the Indian-summer sun and the grass is as green as green gets, the lake a calmer and darker version of the summer-blue sky. She is holding her arms out to either side for balance; in the moment after the picture was taken, she had fallen over backwards and bumped her head on the ground, and started to cry.

In the second, she is in one of those bucket-style baby swings at a parkette, very clearly much too small for it (with the top digging into her armpits) except for the grin on her face, chubby little legs stuck straight out, hands clasped together. I remember, as she rode that day, her legs kicking, so unable was she to contain her excitement.

In the third, also from October when we visited relatives in Montreal for Thanksgiving, she is being held by her Auntie. Her hair pokes out from underneath the hood of a burgundy velour jacket with "cutie" spelled out in buttons on the front. This is one of my favourite pictures of her, ever, her eyes crinkled and her cheeks round with the huge grin on her face. There never has been a smilier smile. That gleeful face still makes me happy.

This face should look the same.

I can't even tell you who she is, because nobody knows. Well, someone must know, but they're not telling.

I look at Frances in my photo, face all stretched out with smiling, and wonder what would have had to happen to her to put that despair in her eyes. It doesn't bear thinking of, but I can't help thinking of it. I look at that nameless, joyless little face, and imagine her wearing the same grin, secure in the midst of a tribe of adults who adore her. So secure she never considers it; it's her birthright, as constant and consistent as air. I imagine her kicking her feet for joy in a baby bucket swing, precariously balancing on the soft grass in the sun of an Indian summer day. I imagine Frances lying face-down and bleeding in a cold stairwell for two hours, knowing that no one is coming back, and so filled with despair that she doesn't even cry.

I hate to think that my little girl is fortunate simply for being loved and cared for, coddled and cosseted, with parents who celebrate her triumphs and are there with a cuddle and kiss when she needs to be unwedged from the toilet seat or has bonked her head on the ground. I hate to think she is lucky for the white onesie with the flowers embroidered on the neck, the red velour hoodie, the bucket swing. It ought to be a birthright. These blank eyes should never exist in a baby's face.

But there they are. And if we can't even get this right, what good are we?

Posted by Andrea at 10:49 AM | Comments (20)

A Near Miss

Frances does not go over to play at C's house as often as she would like, for various logistical reasons, the most important of which to date has been the toilet. Specifically, their bathroom is not equipped for a person of such small stature to use it on their own (and why should it be?), and I don't know who would help her in my absence. There was, on one of their earliest playdates, an Incident; and it caused Frances great shame and embarassment, so since that time the rule has been that she can go to play for an hour, after she uses our bathroom, and then I go pick her up, because that's about as long as I can count on her bladder lasting. Which is fine; she's my kid, it's my job.

But. Over the holidays, C was pet-sitting her aunt's pomeranian, a round furball that looked more like a stuffed toy than a pet and, as you can imagine, Frances was entranced. I let her go over to play and started the laundry, counting myself lucky to have some unforeseen free time to do it in. As I've mentioned before my apartment does not have in-suite laundry but the laundry room is right across the hall from my upstairs door, so except for its hours (8 am to 10 pm daily) there is no inconvenience.

A couple from Russia (there are many, many Russian immigrants in this apartment complex) was doing their laundry at the same time; the man turned to me and says, "Is that your baby?" I look out and, indeed, there are Frances's face and hands pressed to the glass door separating our block from C's--this glass door is right outside C's upstairs door, so she can't have been there for more than a moment. I grab my laundry room keys and open the door for her; "Why aren't you playing at C's?"

"I had something very important to tell you," she says.

We go into our apartment. "Oh? What was that?"

"C likes her dog a lot. It is a very cute doggie. It kissed me! Kisses are nice." (We'd had the dog and C over for a bit before Frances went to her house, and Frances walked the dog--small enough for Frances to walk on a leash--around the ground floor. When the dog stopped to lick Frances's fingers, she looked positively ecstatic. "He kissed me!" she said, voice full of wonder, and held her fingers out in front to contemplate them. Her first boyfriend (or girlfriend) is going to be hard-pressed to top that reaction.)

"That's true, I can see that."

"Maybe someday I can get a doggie."

My lips twitch. Earlier that very day, on hearing about this situation, a friend of mine had predicted that this request would be forthcoming. He was right. "Maybe someday. When you're a little older."

"OK."

"Are you done at C's?"

"No, I told her I was coming back."

"OK. I'll walk you back there."

I do this--two doors down in the upstairs hallway, and thank the gods for that hallway in wintertime. Only be for long enough to finish the laundry--to get everything out of the dryer and back into the apartment, and then I will go get her. But before the laundry clock is up there is a heavy knock on the upstairs door. I expect it to be C, or maybe C's grandmother (her mother is working) with Frances, and so open it with a smile.

It is not C, nor is it C's grandmother. It is the newest apartment complex superintendant or whatever she is, she helps out in the rental office and I've met her once or twice. She is tall, very slim, with long blond hair of exactly the shade you imagine when you hear "blond"; very pretty, in a Cover Girl cosmetics way. One can imagine the faux-Manhattan skyline behind her in a print advertisement exhorting one to buy their newest mascara or lipstick, with a wholesome toothy smile on her face. Beside her is Frances.

"Frances!" I say. "Why aren't you playing at C's?"

"Well I was," she say. "And then I wanted to tell you something."

"OK. Come in." I don't know what I am feeling. Missed dread, maybe. The joint revelation that something very bad could have happened; but it didn't, because there she is, wanting to tell me something. The new superintendant-or-whatever stares at me, obviously expecting some greater reaction. "A man found her," she says, "wandering around in the L block. He called me."

"Thank you."

Frances comes in past my legs. "I wanted to tell you, Mummy. I have something to tell you."

"Just a second." My heart is beating fast. This woman is expecting something from me; it's clear on her face that she thinks I'm a terrible mother right now, from whatever response it is I am lacking. I should be effusive? But she's fine, isn't she? Standing by my legs, wanting to tell me something. I should be relieved? Was I supposed to think she was missing? But she was playing at a friend's, and I thought she was supervised.

"You forgot your camera again." A stupid thing to say. "Why--why aren't you still at C's?"

"I left."

"Clearly."

I should be afraid? But she's fine, she's right here. I should be apologetic? But she was playing at a friend's! She shouldn't have been playing at a friend's, maybe? Am I supposed to feel caught out, guilty? Because she looks only two, I should have been there with her, supervising her myself?

Once when I took her to the Zoo, and brought her into the kid's area where there is a big treehouse with a big slide, and I walked her to the top of the slide and then taken the stroller to meet her at the bottom, she went missing. I stood there and she did not emerge, although other children did. Checked the top again--not there. Checked the bottom--not there. Checked the top and the bottom again--not there. How does a child go missing between the top and the bottom of an enclosed slide in a play structure? I checked the entire kid zoo, every exhibit, imagining myself explaining to her father that somehow I had lost Frances at the zoo, somewhere between the top and the bottom of the slide. Frances was nowhere. How could she be nowhere? I checked the top and bottom of the slide again; growing frantic. Where could she be? She had to be somewhere. I approached a few strangers and asked them, have you seen a girl about this big, blond hair, glasses, wearing an orange t-shirt? No, they all said. I ran around again, checking every exhibit, and coming around a corner saw a cluster of adults gathered around a child. "Where's your Mommy?" one of them asked.

"Frances!" The crowd parted and I hugged her. "Where were you? Where did you go?" The terror broke and I cried; I'd been so worried and now there she was and now I was crying.

"She was at the bottom of the slide," one of the strange adults said.

"I waited for you and you didn't come," said Frances, crying too.

I said nothing. I couldn't speak, in any case. I just hugged her. And I remembered (and maybe you do too) all the times when I was a small child shopping with my mother, following her boots or shoes around the mall, and looking up to realize that it wasn't my mother after all I'd been following, and trying to find her, and failing, and wondering if I would never be found again, and maybe I would have to live somehow in the shopping centre, maybe sleeping on the mattresses in the department store and eating the free samples in the supermarket; until I was found. I'd never before understood the violence of my mother's reaction when she found me. "I was worried sick," I finally said.

This was different. I'd only found out she was missing in the very instant she'd been found, both halves of the dramatic tale presented in the denouement. Yet this very pretty woman expected the traditional conclusion, me clutching Frances to my breast and telling her I was worried sick.

What I am, at that moment, is furious--she was at a friend's, she was supposed to be supervised, she was not supposed to be sent to walk home on her own--she can't open those big glass doors separating blocks so how she got all the way down to L is a mystery, someone else must have opened all of them for her--and if she walked out of C's house on her own someone should have come to tell me. The first time--she wandered out the upstairs door and no one had time to notice, maybe, and were waiting for her to come straight back in; but two times in an hour? I can't show that to this beautiful girl with her own two daughters at home who clearly, clearly, is thinking I am not right in the head right then. But I am furious. I want to know why my little girl was wandering around L block by herself, when I thought she was safe at her friend's. I want to know why no one walked her down the two doors to find her house, when she is only four for god's sake, and just learning to read; I want to know why no one made sure she got home safely. I do that when C comes to play at my house and C is eight. And I know C's family is Russian and (from Ponderosa Jennifer) that Russian culture is a little different when it comes to child-rearing and C's grandmother successfully reared children there presumably with much less supervision than I have come to believe is necessary. However. None of this is helping, in that moment.

"Thank you," I say again to the superintendant-or-whatever. With the shock still rigid on her face, she walks away, and I close the door.

I am still furious. Furious at them, or myself? Not sure at that point. Why did I walk her back over? Why didn't I ask why she'd been allowed to come out into the hallway by herself? Why did I assume it was a fluke and they knew better? Why didn't they look at that glass door separating our blocks and realize she could not possibly open it for herself? But the fury is certainly not Frances's, who can't be expected to know better, so I calmly sit down and let her tell me this very important thing she needed to say.

"The doggie is so cute, Mummy. C really loves her. It is really C's doggie, not her aunt's. I would really like a doggie, Mummy."

"Maybe someday," I say again. "When you're older."

I imagine going down the hall to bang on their door and demand an explanation; but C is a child, and C's mother is at work, and C's grandmother's english is poor. It would not be a fruitful conversation. It would lead to bruised feelings without hope of resolution and possibly a rupture of Frances's one friendship in our apartment block. And after all, isn't everything fine? Isn't Frances at that very moment asking me for a pet doggie? C is a good kid; it's just that she's a kid. She can't be expected to be responsible for Frances's welfare.

I'll have to speak to her mother, I think, dreading it already. Lord, the potential pitfalls in such a conversation--the potential for misunderstanding and self-righteousness and hurt. But she speaks english and she's an adult and I know her fairly well by now, so C's mother it will have to be, even though she wasn't even there. Because it's clear to me that the one thing I can no longer do is allow Frances to go to play at C's house, not even for an hour. Not until I can be sure that someone will make sure she gets home safely if she decides she wants to leave.

Posted by Andrea at 7:36 AM | Comments (11)

Wanted: Confidence

Parents have a new weapon in the battle to hush demands for $500 handbags and $250 jeans this Christmas: compliments.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota have found that a child's need for material objects is tied to his or her self-esteem. The weaker their self-esteem, the greater their desire for the material trappings of adolescent popularity, according to the study published in the current issue of the Journal of Consumer Research.

That's the good news, as reported in The Globe and Mail.

"This is the good news, Andrea?" Well, yes. Because it means there might be something you can do to curb the litany of 'I want I want I want': try to build your kids' self-esteem a little.

(By the way, while the study only looked at 8-9, 12-13 and 18-19 year olds, I would expect the same to hold true for any age group: if you are relatively comfortable with yourself as a person than you aren't going to want a lot of stuff to advertise to everyone else how cool you are. You don't need to. I'm not sure what age this would kick in but I am sure it's before eight. And I don't think it stops at 20.)

Here's the bad news:

"I'd always wanted to know why all of a sudden a child can hit 12 or 13 and become an absolute pester machine," said Dr. John, who has two former pre-teens of her own, now aged 17 and 21. "Well, it's because they have this low self-worth and they've figured out that they can use brands and possessions to signal certain things about themselves."

When Dr. John saw the correlation, she wanted to devise a surefire method of curbing that pre-teenage materialism. As a second part of their study, researchers discovered that propping up a child's self-esteem is as simple as giving them a well-earned compliment.

In the second study, she looked at 12-to-13-year-olds in summer camps and found that children who were given paper plates bearing compliments such as "smart" and "fun" immediately reined in their materialistic tendencies.

"It really surprised us to see how much a small compliment can make a difference," Dr. John said.

Which directly contradicts Carol Dweck's three decades of research, showing that giving your kids (or anyone) unearned compliments would reduce, not enhance, their self-esteem--which I tend to believe. Self-esteem is earned, it does not come pre-printed on a dessert plate. Although there may be some temporary effect in materialism, surely such a short-cut is not the best solution.

Dr. Ungar suggests including kids in holiday cooking and decorating as a way of propping up a child's self-esteem. "We have to offer them a way of asserting an identity," he said, "rather than buying one."

And see--that is spot on. Asserting an identity, rather than buying one (would probably work for preschoolers through geriatrics). And you assert an identity, of course, through what you do, not what you have. Sometimes you need to have stuff in order to be able to do stuff (hard to paint without brushes--or paint--or a surface), but a focus on the doing rather than the having would probably weed out a lot of extraneous and useless stuff.

It reminds me, too, of a study I read about several years back that found that people who spent their money on experiences (courses, vacations, etc.) rather than things were, on average, happier. Maybe they were happier because they were more satisfied with themselves and their lives, and therefore didn't need a lot of things to fill them up.

In the meantime, it gives me an excuse for an almost-certainly unjustified pat on the back, after all I could coax Frances to ask Santa for Christmas was a little yellow duckie.

Not sure what it means that I can't walk into a bookstore without walking out with something.

Posted by Andrea at 9:26 AM | Comments (6)

Going

Tuesday morning we walked to school because I wanted to take the subway to work. Frances decided to run; inevitably, she tripped hard and skinned both her knees. I had no kleenex in my purse (bad mother) and only one bandaid, and that for blisters (extra bad mother), but we cleaned her up and kissed her owwies better and continued on our way, more carefully, the small soft fingers of her right hand wrapped around my left index finger. As warm and soft as a cat's belly. I hope I remember it always, the feeling of her tiny trusting hand, the sheer pleasure of it, even if constraining my steps to her gait does feel like tripping over my feet constantly. I walked her into her classroom, and while I hung up her lunch bag she walked fearless up to a table of larger kids and asked to be included in their game. I kissed her hair and walked out--she did not even notice my leaving--and as I walked back down the hallway again, I smiled at the tempera paintings already lining the hallway (still lifes of purple flowers in a vase, childrens' families, colour wheels), and peeked through the open door of her junior kindergarten classroom. This afternoon she will sit there in a circle with her friends and learn about letters and numbers from her teacher. One day soon she will know how to read.

What hits hardest about parenting, in my experience, is how joy and loss, pride and grief, are mingled in every moment of it. Every one of their accomplishments is another step on a road that leads them away from you. We want them to be successful, we want them to grow and to learn, but oh how much we also want them to need us, to come to us when they are frightened, to put their small warm hands in ours.

One day when Frances was an infant, I decided to plop her on her tummy on the big bed for some photos. Every time I put her on her tummy, she'd stick her butt in the air, and it was so cute and funny, I wanted to remember it. She lay there, squawking and hollering and crying (but as every good mother knows, they need tummy time, so I didn't feel too guilty), writhing in helplessness, until--shift--over she rolled. I was so taken by surprise, I didn't even get a picture of the significant moment, but sat there staring until I thought, "She just rolled over. I should take a picture." Then I put her back on her tummy, and she did it again, and I took some more pictures. I was thrilled, of course. (She rolled over! No baby has ever rolled over that way before!) I was proud. I wanted to show everyone. I can't remember if I knew then, if I saw, that the first roll would become the first creep would become the first crawl, the first steps, the first jump, the first run, all leading inevitably to the moment when she has all her things packed into boxes and a moving van is in the driveway to take her away from me altogether. I can't remember if I knew, then, that every instance of her developing mastery and independence would be an instance of my loss of her.

I see it now. She comes in the door from daycare, sits down to take off her shoes and puts them by the front door. She asks for television. She plays with her friend C until it is time for supper. She climbs into her chair and drinks out of a regular cup, uses regular utensils to feed herself supper. She talks to Daddy on the phone, telling him what she did in daycare, and who her friends are, and how much she misses him. She picks out books at bedtime. She can recognize her name, written down. She can type it on the computer. Tomorrow morning she will pick out her own shirt and ask to wear her brown shoes with the flowers and decide she wants to wear the pink jacket and off we'll go. For ten hours she will be away from me, learning things, becoming bigger and smarter and stronger. Then one day, she won't pick a book at bedtime; instead, I'll come into her room that night to find her reading under the covers with a flashlight. One day, she will pick up the remote, pop a dvd in, and plop down on the couch with a handful of cookies that I specifically did not say she could eat this close to dinner. One day, she will open a free email account with some godawful handle and use it to write letters to her friends about how horrible I am. One day she will sneak out of the house to see a boy (or a girl). One day she will come home with clothes she bought with money from her own job. One day she will ask me for help with homework and I won't be able to. One day her beautiful little hands will stop making houses for the baby mole.

Everything she learns to do is a step she takes towards her true self and away from me. I was warned, you were warned, we were all warned. "Treasure every moment, it all goes by so fast." What we thought they meant was to find joy in the sleeplessness and vomit and screaming and exhaustion and tedious repetition of it all. We thought they were crazy. But that's not it. What they meant was to treasure their needing us, their belonging to us wholly, for the incredibly short time that it lasts. Already it's over. Frances is as much the world's as mine, and even more her own. It's right, it's good, and it's happening too damned fast.

~~~~~

(This is my contribution to Julie's "Hmm" for this week, reinterpreted from "A good thing going" to "A good thing, going.")

Posted by Andrea at 6:49 AM | Comments (11)

Happy Mother's Day

The moment a child is born, the mother is also born. She never existed before. The woman existed, but the mother, never. A mother is something absolutely new. ~Rajneesh

OK, so the last thing any of you need or want today are more meaningless platitudes. It's all I've got.

Happy Mother's Day. You are still all superheroes.

Posted by Andrea at 9:36 AM | Comments (8)

Self-Help: A Review of Mindset by Carol Dweck

Last Sunday I was sitting at the kitchen table reading a book. You might guess that this is not a rare sight in my house.

It had been two hours since lunch, at which I had consumed an entire Laura Secord easter egg--the big ones--without bolusing properly. I'd guessed the dose, then looked at the grams of carbs on the box, and saw that I'd underdosed myself by two units. If I'd been on the pump that weekend, I would have just bolused another two units immediately, but it's an entirely different proposition when you have to stick yourself again. So I didn't.

And there I sat, two hours later, reading a book called Mindset. The blood sugar meter was on the table by my right hand. I looked at it. Should I test? Or shouldn't I? I knew it would be high. I knew I would fail.

~~~~~

Do you remember that Po Bronson article about how to praise kids properly making the rounds of the parentosphere a few weeks back? Some thought it was great, some thought it sucked, some thought it was a mite unrealistic to tell parents not to tell their kids how great they are. And then there were the some (like me) who didn't write about it at all, or even comment on sites where it was written about. And some of you have no idea what I'm talking about, so I'll provide the key quote from the article to ground the discussion:

"When parents praise their children’s intelligence, they believe they are providing the solution to this problem. According to a survey conducted by Columbia University, 85 percent of American parents think it’s important to tell their kids that they’re smart. ... The constant praise is meant to be an angel on the shoulder, ensuring that children do not sell their talents short.

"But a growing body of research—and a new study from the trenches of the New York public-school system—strongly suggests it might be the other way around. Giving kids the label of 'smart' does not prevent them from underperforming. It might actually be causing it."

I didn't write about it not because I thought it was unimportant, or untrue, or uninteresting. I didn't write about it because I think it's premature to talk about parenting before we talk about the parents.

I was labelled smart. Sure. It started before kindergarten, when (according to my parents) I taught myself how to read when I was three. In kindergarten, I was pressured to learn arithmetic so I could skip grade one (I refused). In grade 4, I was streamed into the "enhanced" class for smart kids, which necessitated a school change. I stayed in them until the end of highschool. And I've written about the detrimental impact of being told how smart you are on social integration (short version: being segregated sucks. Putting a bunch of kids in a room and telling everyone how SMART they are is a recipe for isolation and bullying). But I've never considered how the labelling affects the kids, or the adults we grew up to be. The intention was clearly to make us super-achievers who rule the world, instead of getting terminally bored and dropping out of school at fifteen.

Only it failed. On all counts. For one, we are not super-achievers in adulthood. We're very normal, very boring, mostly solid middle-class professional types. For another, while no one dropped out in highschool, so far as I know, several kids from my class flunked out--not dropped out, flunked out--of university. We're talking kids with IQs in the 140+ range. On the surface a textbook description of exactly the forces Bronson wrote about.

Penguin Unearthed wrote a post on this topic which links to a Stanford Magazine article that digs deeper into this research and its applicability in areas beyond parenting, and mentions her recent book: Mindset.

From the article: "...what makes students focus on different goals in the first place? During a sabbatical at Harvard, she was discussing this with doctoral student Mary Bandura ... and the answer hit them: if some students want to show off their ability, while others want to increase their ability, “ability” means different things to the two groups. ... People with performance goals, she reasoned, think intelligence is fixed from birth. People with learning goals have a growth mind-set about intelligence, believing it can be developed."

I think if I'd been left alone, I would have ended up in the 'learning goals' camp. But I wasn't left alone; for ten years I was thoroughly tampered with in an educational system that made it its express mission to tell me every day how innately intelligent I was. No one ever taught us that we could be smarter if we worked at it: our intelligence was fixed. The point of our extra-special education was to enable us to reach the pinnacle of achievement pre-determined by our fixed level of innate intelligence. Umm...this didn't work.

But I'm a change junkie when it comes to personality. Every year I make an insane list of New Year's Resolutions, and every year I believe that if I work hard enough, I can do it. Every year I fail to work hard enough, but that doesn't stop me from trying, and I think if I didn't try then a lot of what I consider to be important about me today wouldn't exist.

Here's a graphical Dweck's model of the mindsets. I fall in both camps (you all know I can't ever pick one of anything).

Challenges? I LOVE challenges ... except in sports, and then I will avoid them at all costs. Persisting in the face of setbacks is my middle name when it comes to changes to my living situation, but when it comes to my career, it's time to pack it in and go home. Or how about seeing effort as the path to mastery? For writing? Absolutely. For art? Forget it; I have no talent.

"But what if you’re raised with a fixed mind-set about physics—or foreign languages or music? Not to worry: Dweck has shown that you can change the mind-set itself.

"The most dramatic proof comes from a recent study by Dweck and Lisa Sorich Blackwell of low-achieving seventh graders. All students participated in sessions on study skills, the brain and the like; in addition, one group attended a neutral session on memory while the other learned that intelligence, like a muscle, grows stronger through exercise. Training students to adopt a growth mind-set about intelligence had a catalytic effect on motivation and math grades; students in the control group showed no improvement despite all the other interventions."

I was on page 62 of the book (quotes so far are all from the article) when I sat at the table and stared at the glucose meter and thought: a fixed mindset could take years off my life. If I see these tests as something that tells me whether I've been bad or good, succeeded or failed, deserve to live or die, then of course I won't test. The stakes are too high. But if I see it as something that will allow me to improve in the future, I will.

Has anyone ever told me that I'm a bad diabetic?

No. Quite the opposite. I've always been a "good" diabetic, a "well-controlled" diabetic, who passed her tests with flying colours. I've always received a smile and a virtual pat on the hand from the diabetes professionals I've dealt with. Yet somehow I still learned that everything was on the line at every test. This is exactly what Dweck found in her work on intelligence and achievement:

"We praised some of the students for their ability .... We praised others for their effort. ... Both groups were exactly equal to begin with. But right after the praise, they began to differ. As we feared, the ability praise pushed students straight into the fixed mindset. When offered a choice, they rejected a challenging new task that they could learn from. ... In contrast, when students were praised for their effort, ninety percent of them wanted the challenging new task.... Then we gave students some hard new problems, which they didn't do so well on. The ability kids now thought they were not smart after all. ... After the experience with difficulty, the performance of the ability-praised students plummeted, even when we gave them some more of the easier problems. Losing faith in their ability, they were doing worse than when they started. The effort kids showed better and better performance...."

In other words, telling smart kids that they're smart makes them dumber. Telling them that they worked hard makes them smarter. So: telling a person with a chronic illness that they are a "good" sick person will make them a worse one--if you want them to learn good habits and improve, you have to praise their efforts. Which means saying, in essence, "Good for you! You tested!" And not interpreting the results as any sort of reflection on them or their effort--as all diabetics know, sometimes you can throw yourself into it heart and soul and not see good results.

Don't I wish more doctors knew this.

I was afraid, before I'd read it, that it would be one of those socially-blind, everyone-can-do-anything-if-they-put-their-mind-to-it books that ignores the realities of prejudice and bigotry and the very real impediments to achievement that these systems can place in our paths. It wasn't. She acknowledges that stereotyping creates real barriers that cannot be overcome with effort; but then details how people with a growth or learning mindset are not as affected by stereotyping as people with fixed or ability mindsets. And she acknowledges that natural talent is also important--that some people can achieve more with the same level of effort; but the point isn't that everyone can be number one. It's that any one person will do better in any one endeavour with a growth mindset than with a fixed one.

For instance, most of you will have much, much better blood sugar numbers than I do, without effort. That's because you have a pancreas. I don't. That's your 'natural ability'; the point isn't that effort will ever give me the equivalent of a perfectly functioning pancreas. It won't. The point is that if I believe that testing is to learn and improve then I will be healthier and have better sugar numbers than if I believe that testing measures my discipline, motivation, or worth.

I read Po Bronson's article. I read it, and I tried it on. For a few days I tried to praise Frances in process ways, telling her what she did well instead of how brilliant she was; and you know something? It felt like an affectation, because it was an affectation. I couldn't talk to Frances that way because I can't talk to myself that way. I need to learn to talk to myself that way first, or at least at the same time, or that smart kid of mine is going to see right through me and learn the lesson my actions preach while my words tell her something else.

But let's step outside the rarified world of privileged families and consider the work done on this subject elsewhere. In the chapter on education, she describes a number of teachers who were assigned classes full of children labelled bullies, emotionally handicapped, mentally disturbed, learning disabled and even retarded by other educators, and made them brilliant over-achievers in a few months. These were kids from bad neighbourhoods with few financial resources and poor familial support. And I think, too, about the revolution in attitudes towards Down syndrome over the last few decades--how babies who were thought to have no potential and no hope because of their fixed attributes were left in institutions to rot and die, and how now those very same children with those very same attributes are busting expectations right left and centre today because people who care about them are determined not to be limited by a diagnosis.

In the workshop chapter in the back (which admittedly I found a little skimpy--more on that in a minute), there is a section on fixing the mindset of a preschooler who believes that ability is innate. The very first sentences of the solution state:

"You decide that, rather than trying to talk him out of the fixed mindset, you have to live the growth mindset. At the dinner table each evening, you and your partner structure the discussion around the growth mindset, asking each child (and each other): 'What did you learn today?'"

The very first thing--fix you.

Or me. Whatever. You know.

Ninety per cent of the book summarizes research on mindsets in various fields (education, parenting, sports, coaching, business leadership, the arts). Only the last chapter is devoted to figuring out how to change one's own fixed mindsets; and the how-to is a little sparse. In that it doesn't exist. (A variety of scenarios with potential responses are listed and discussed.) But then, it can't. How can you present someone with a ten-step program for overcoming a fixed mindset when it can be present in so many endeavours? You can't.

I tested my blood sugar, by the way. The ideal is 3.7-6.5. It was 12.0.

Posted by Andrea at 6:43 AM | Comments (16)

Outmatched

There's nothing like having your own eagerly-anticipated sick day (following an exhausting week of caring for one's offspring's sickness) being upstaged by one's spouse's much more dramatic illness (in a bodily fluid sort of way) to make a mother very cranky.

At least, it makes this mother cranky. After a week of no sleep, followed by a developing cold on Saturday, to be then solely responsible for child care on Sunday while one's spouse recuperates in the guest bedroom is no fun. On Monday, following the weekend that wasn't, to be solely responsible again for getting the child up, fed, drugged (her cough lingers), dressed, jacketed, strapped in, and delivered to the childcare facility that is twenty minutes out of one's way, while one's own cold develops apace and one wishes only for one's own comfortable bed is one definition of misery.

What pushes a mother over the edge, however, is when one's darling child chooses that very morning to practice their developing tantrum skills. I still can't it a temper tantrum, as there was no temper; however, the sobbing, coughing and projectile snot over not being given more time to finish the orange juice that she had to that point refused to touch was most impressive, as was its continuation through dressing, hairbrushing and jacketing. Twenty minutes later, when oen had her strapped in the car and was already twenty minutes late for work, not counting the driving-out-of-one's-way part, while a mother starts the engine and Frances continued to wail in her carseat, the edge of her blue winter coat pucked up around her face becoming damp and dark with tears, a mother might be a little frustrated.

A mother may, in fact, shout: "For fuck's sake, Frances! All this over a cup of orange juice!"

Then a mother may, while driving, remember the snowpants hung on the hook of the laundry room door, the toque on the front hall table, and the lack of object for show and tell. One may tell oneself that if one is going to throw a fit over a glass of orange juice one does not want to drink, one may perhaps need to face a consequence of not being able to play outside or participate in show-and-tell that day.

Ten minutes later, when the wailing has ceased, the mounting irritations no matter how legitimate will not spare a mother from a truckload of remorse and guilt, when one's offspring calmly says from the back seat:

"You shouldn't shout at me, Mummy."

Well played, Frances.

Posted by Andrea at 6:31 AM | Comments (13)

Another Mystery

I keep my daughter's hair long. It's a practice so routine that it hardly bears mentioning; except for how keenly aware I am that it is inconsistent with my feminism. Consider: the longer the hair, the more it requires maintenance. No "wash and go." Moreover, it tangles easily and as Frances shrieks at me every morning, "tanglies hurt!" What I should do and should have done since the beginning is cut it as short as I can. No mess, no maintenance, no pain. And while I do cut it regularly and kept it shorter than shoulder-length for the first two years, that's as far as I've gone.

Why? Because she's a girl. And no matter how much I intellectually understand that the messages this teaches are all wrong (beauty is pain, it's your job to be beautiful because you're female), her long golden hair is so pretty and shiny and the way her big blue eyes pop out of her face beneath her sideswept bangs when her hair is in a ponytail just makes me want to dish her up in a big bowl and eat her with a desert spoon. So pretty, so pretty. I can't resist it. If she were a boy, it would hurt me to chop it off, but chop it off I would.

This is the most glaring of the weaknesses I am aware of, but I do not believe for a second that it is the only one. I am certain that unconscious expectations about girls form a large part of our interactions, in ways that only Frances will be able to tell me, when she's old enough to do so.

As I've watched my feminist friends turn into feminist mothers, I've seen how our own gendered expectations and beliefs express themselves in our parenting practices, consciously or not. He really likes bright colours but I can't let him wear that, it's for girls and his hair is so beautiful long but people are starting to think he's a girl, so I've got to cut it off and she hates wearing dresses; how am I going to get her dressed up for our family photo shoot? and I never thought I'd buy pink for my daughter, but it just turns out it's the most beautiful colour on her. And then, sometime between the age of one and two years, when our children begin to express stereotypically gendered behaviours, we observe in shock and conclude that it must be biological. But we are not solid and impervious stones in a garden of gaseous influences. We are more similar to rags in a pond, soaking up whatever is nearby, until our brains are hodge-podges of known and unacknowledged ideas and motivations. There's a lot of stuff in the skull of your average Good Feminist Mother that would make her cringe, if she were aware of it.

I've based most of my own thinking on two books: Mother Nature, which I've already reviewed ad nauseum; and An Unconventional Family by Sandra Lipsitz Bem, an American gender-researcher and theorist. The latter book is based on her experiences in egalitarian marriages and feminist child-rearing, and includes not only her own recollections but also interviews with her ex-husband and children.

Lipsitz Bem writes of her efforts as "retarding their gender education while advancing their sex education." This ranged from the easy (or at least obvious) such as egalitarian divisions of labour within the home and exposure to non-traditional working arrangements, to the exceptionally difficult:

"Another way we retarded our children's gender education was to monitor--even to censor--books and television. I had no qualms about limiting television to three hours a week [three! hours! a week!] .... Books, in contrast, I hated even the thought of monitoring because I love books and I wanted our children to love them too. The problem is that if young children are allowed to sample freely from the world of children's literature, they will almost certainly be indoctrinated with the idea that girls and boys are not only different from each other but, even worse, that boys are more important. What else can one conclude, after all, when there are approximately ten boys in these stories for every girl and almost a hundred 'boy' animals for every 'girl' animal? (I'm not exaggerating.) [She's not, either. Go read your kids' Dr. Seuss books.] Or when the few females who are in these books almost always stay indoors and at home--no matter what their age or species--while the males go outdoors and have adventures. Or, perhaps worst of all, when the females are so unable to affect their own environments that when good things happen to them, those things just fall out of the sky, whereas when good things happen to males, their own efforts have usually played a part in making them occur.

"...although I have no artistic talent, I was handy with my whiteout and magic markers, which I used liberally to transform one main character after another from male to female by changing the character's name, by changing the pronouns, and even by drawing long hair (and, if age-appropriate, the outline of breasts) onto the character's picture. Nor did I limit my doctoring to the main characters."

Do you know anyone who does this? I don't. I don't want to elevate one person's ideas about feminist parenting to yet another impossible-to-achieve standard; but what I learned primarily from this book is what exactly I am up against, as a feminist mother, and what real anti-sexist parenting would entail--that it's not simply buying dolls for boys and trucks for girls; that it is, in fact, completely beyond me.*

One of Frances's favourite games right now is to make a "whole play-doh family." She got a set of play-doh cookie cutters for her birthday, and five of them are a mom, a dad, a little girl, a little boy, and a baby. We roll out the doh and make them all up, and a bed and pillow and blanket, and everyone takes turns putting everyone else down for a nap. It's a sweet and lovely game. And every time I notice how the little girl and little boy are differentiated from each other by the presence of a skirt and pigtails on the girl. Part of our conversation, now, is for Frances to note that "the little girl has ribbons in her hair and the Mummy has ribbons in her hair, too! But the little boy doesn't have ribbons in her hair."

Besides the adorable mangling of personal pronouns (which I do not correct), I hate that she is already learning that females are decorated. Thank you, play-doh manufacturer. Sadly, I am not as handy with whatever tools one might use to refashion plastic cookie-cutters as Lipsitz Bem was with her whiteout and magic markers; and I don't even know what to do or how to begin undermining this cultural message. Except to say, "That's true, this little boy doesn't wear ribbons in his hair; but some boys do. And I never wear ribbons in my hair." If Frances would stand for it, I'd make a family entirely of the undecorated play-doh shapes and we'd make up a new, non-nuclear family narrative. But right now she wants a WHOLE FAMILY and she's already learned that this means one Daddy and one Mummy and one Little Girl and one Little Boy and one Baby, and the Little Girl and the Mummy wear skirts and have ribbons in their hair.

That's not genetic. And (see first paragraph) I am not blameless.

"The third thing we did was to help them to understand that all cultural messages about sex and gender ... are created, whether now or in the distant past, by human beings with particular beliefs and biases. The appropriate stance to take toward such messages is thus not to assume that they are either true or relevant to your own personal life but to assume instead that they merely convey information about the beliefs and biases of their creators."

I was fortunate enough to have read this book a few times before Frances was born, so I was able to think about some of these things before they became issues. I'd determined fairly early, for instance, that I would buy toys my child asked for, and not care what side of the aisle they came from. That I would buy her comfortable, practical clothing--Frances owns and wears boys' clothing when it makes sense to do so. But the newborn gifts temporarily stumped me--four pink teddybears, plus other stuffed toys.

Knowing that the default sex in western culture is "he" and that without some forethought all of her toys except the pink ones would end up being boys, and that this was not what I wanted her to learn, I gave half of them boy names and half of them girl names. Including the pink teddybears, one of whom, named "Stuart," Frances particularly loves. She has latched on to this; almost every stuffed toy she owns is a "she"--not just the ones with long eyelashes, pink fur, or clutching babies.

But there's plenty I can't control, or at any rate, don't: Ruby's zealous femininity and Max's precocious masulinity, in defiance of any little girls or boys I've ever met; the toys and clothes picked by relatives, which are nearly uniformly pink and feminine; how every girl in Timothy Goes to School wears a skirt; how all toy girl Calico Critters and nearly all girl Little People wear skirts, even the farmers and mechanics; how, no matter where I look, the imaginative world presented to toddlers and preschoolers is more gender-codified than the real world, more rigid. Even the worst of adult women's magazines with their incessant and relentless gender-programming do ocassionally show women in pants.

And there's still me.

You, me, all of us; we're all products of our upbringing. My mother is a staunch feminist who has spent two decades in a job she loathes essentially to prove to the Old Boy's Club that she can; yet I think I could turn her grey with stories of what I remember learning about women from her when I was a child. Actually, she would flatly deny it; and if there is one mistake I am determined not to repeat, it is to turn away from the consequences of my parenting decisions when they were both unintentional and undesired. If my actions are making it harder for her to test gender boundaries, I want to acknowledge that.

Frances is very girly in some respects. She plays with dolls, and even her non-doll toys take turns as "babies" and get carried around on her shoulder while she soothes them down for naps. She likes to cook in her kitchen, and specializes in microwaving plastic strawberries which her Daddy is then forced to enjoy, over and over. When she plays with the dolls in her dollhouse, it's usually to make them all have a big happy family hug and tell each other how much they love themselves. Tea parties are fun; and when we have them, each of us has to use the spoon and cup and saucer that match. She loves pink. And it's true that while she has blocks and trains and trucks, she doesn't play with them as often as she plays with dolls.

But she loves frogs and worms--for anyone used to the familiar tableau of a little blond girl in a frilly pink dress screaming EWWW over the earthworms on the sidewalk, I imagine Frances holding one reverentially and saying "it's so cute" might be jarring. She was a scary lion for Hallowe'en, and loved to roar at people. She likes to lounge around the house in jogging pants, stomp in mud-puddles, pick up sticks and stones on our way to the park through the woods, use the hammer from her doctor's kit to pound pretend nails into the floor (or into people, depending), and put together her dinosaur puzzle. She likes to play catch. She prefers her blue kitty-cat-and-fish placemat to the pink Barbie ballerina one my SIL gave her for Christmas. Her current favourite shows are Scooby Doo, Spongebob Squarepants, WonderPets, Horton Hears a Who, and Clifford the Big Red Dog.

If she were a boy, which set of attributes would be dominant? Which set of attributes would people see as dominant?

Here's a better question: why do we have to divide these attributes into sets in the first place?

Why is it that as soon as our children start to evince a personality, we need to parse out whether or not they are behaving according to gendered type? Doesn't that say something about our expectations and their source? As long as Frances isn't tearing the heads off of ducklings or expressing affection for people by bashing their kneecaps with tire-irons, I couldn't care less if she's feminine or masculine. I celebrate everything she does because it's Frances who's doing it. A thousand naps an hour for Ella the Ellephant? Fabulous! Frog hunting in the backyard? Fantastic!

Because the last thing I want to do is teach her about gendered expectations by deciding whether any particular activity is "girly" or "boyish," or whether she as a person is behaving according to type.

Because I don't want any of my early assumptions about the "naturalness" of her interests and skills to become a trap she has to break out of later. This seems to me a real danger of looking at our children at this young age and saying "she likes pink--it must be biological after all." Once we've decided that our children are displaying proof of the biological essence of certain sex differences, where does that leave them if they change their mind in a few years?

Moreover, where does it leave us when working to eradicate those sex differences which are truly harmful? If we decide before they start school that they are simply girly and that's why they don't assert themselves, how do we teach them to be assertive? Conversely, if we decide that aggressive behaviour is proof of the unruliness of boys, how do we teach them to treat others with consideration? Haven't we given up before we've begun?

Our kids come into the world with their own temperaments. Our personalities are formed by some combination of nature and nurture, and which part of us comes from one or the other can never be fully known. And I think all mothers, at one point or another, are astonished to realize how little influence we have over the people our children become. But it's not the same to realize that I have nothing to do with her shoe-shopping predeliction or her physically affectionate dolls as it is for me to assume that these traits reside on her X chromosome. Maybe it was one too many viewings of Max and Ruby. Maybe she got it from her Dad. Maybe she picked it up from the girls in daycare, along with that atrocious and thankfully temporary stage of everything beautiful being "just like Barbie." Maybe I am completely wrong and I did teach her this, without knowing. Or maybe all of the above. There's no control-Frances, so who she would have been in the absence of these influences can never be known.

Ultimately it doesn't matter, and I don't want to find out. People are tightly-knotted mysteries; unravelling the wherefores, putting cause to effect and determining how-much-mine and how-much-not-mine would ruin it. Why does she cry sometimes when I knock on the tent, when most of the time she begs me to? What rule of her expanding universe have I violated? What is it she loves about pretending to be Ruby on that episode when they are trying to catch the bus, and why does she laugh so hard when I pout and cry "Stay home!"? Why doesn't she want us to call her gorgeous or cute or beautiful or smart or strong anymore? Why does she insist on being "just Frances"? Why must Bella Bear sit on that chair during the tea party? Why must Boots the Monkey and the Whole Play-Doh Family always be made out of the red tub? What does she see in my mole, anyway? Why does she like pink? Why does she so often insist that pink is her favourite colour and want to get the pink version of whatever is on offer, and then reject it in favour of some other colour for days at a time? Why does she prefer to eat her cereal as two separate food items: cereal as finger food from a bowl, and milk in a glass beside it?

Maybe one day she'll tell me. Maybe I won't like it. Maybe she won't tell me. Maybe she can't. Could you sit down and determine which of your traits and interests are due to temperament vs. upbringing vs. genes vs. sex chromosomes? Would you want to? Aren't we mysteries even to ourselves? Isn't the unknowableness of human beings part of what makes us human?

Reading the interviews with her children in the back of the book reveals a fascinating glimpse of two people who regularly violate gender norms and consider it a a basic human right to be able to do so. I found this question and answer set particularly interesting because both their son and their daughter answered it in similar ways, though here I am including the daughter's voice:

"Someone else could easily categorize your interests as feminine and Jeremy's as masculine. And they could even go further and say that this is an example of how your parents' gender-liberated child-rearing 'failed' because it produced a boy with boy interests and a girl with girl interests. How would you respond to that?

"Why bother classifying our interests that way? It's just so obvious who is talented where. If you listen to me sing, you can't help but say, 'This girl has a great voice.' And if you look at Jeremy when he's doing math, it's clear that he is a mathematical 'genius.' People just have talents where they have them, and you're not going to get a boy who hates math becoming a great mathematician any more than you're going to get a girl who has no voice taking opera seriously. We don't do what we do well because Jeremy's a boy and I'm a girl. And I think it's absurd to talk about any kind of child-rearing failing when it produces children with interests and even passions that are guided by talent." (emphasis mine)

Why bother classifying our children this way? Next to the harm it can do--to the harm we ourselves have experienced when being boxed in or out of this or that because of our sex--where is the benefit to be gained by deciding whether our children are feminine or masculine, especially at this early age?

~~~~~

* Though I intend to write and make storybooks of my own for Frances, and have made one already that stars Frances playing with the animals in our backyard. It's not even hard, so if anyone is curious about how to make a book, let me know.

Posted by Andrea at 6:54 AM | Comments (17)

Mom Jeans

All over the print and online media these days, I see people yammering about how babies are the coolest accessories and it's now de rigeur to be a mom. This is nonsense.

There is undeniably a fascination with Hollywood bellies--is it a bump or isn't it?--but I have yet to see any evidence that it makes the starlets in question cool. What it seems to do rather is make them safely uncool; it reduces their status and makes them more like us. And there is a lot more overpriced kiddie gear, but I don't think this has anything to do with how cool it is to be a Mom. In fact, it's the opposite: having a kid is so incredibly uncool that you need to spend a small fortune on designer baby duds to prove that you haven't lost your style sense in the transition to motherhood. "I still got it! Maybe I can't wear those clothes now but I still know what's cool and I still care about what's in style, and I will prove this by not putting my child in something with butterflies on it."

And in what way does this reflect how cool it is to be a Mom?

It's not.

Think about it: Mom jeans.

No one wants to wear Mom jeans. Girls don't want to wear Mom jeans. Wives don't want to wear Mom jeans. And especially Moms don't want to wear Mom jeans.

Why not? If Moms were cool, if being a Mom was cool, if a baby was the ultimate accessory and giving birth mandatory for today's young overachieving woman, Mom jeans would be the ultimate status symbol. You have arrived at Momdom, and have the jeans to prove it!

Instead, Moms go out of their way when buying clothing to get whatever seems most likely to make them look like a young, single, skinny girl who just happens to be babysitting her sister's kids. The very phrase "Mom jeans" calls forth a whole host of stereotypical associations of a woman who's let herself go, doesn't care about her looks anymore, isn't up on the latest styles, is maybe a bit mushyheaded or overly sentimental, has lost her identity to her kids.

It's not exactly evidence of Mom Pride, is it?

I remember reading about a culture, I can't remember their name anymore, but one of those cultures typically featured in the National Geographic of old where women went around topless. The journalist (a man) was admiring a young woman's breasts, which was noticed by his guide (also a man). "Very nice," he said, "But here, women want their breasts to sag. It proves they've had kids." Now that's Mom Pride.

And what have we got instead? A culture where every body change associated with pregnancy and childrearing is reviled, a culture where every form of display (clothing, accessories, vehicle) is carefully chosen so as to mask one's parenthood. You don't want the minivan. You don't want a diaper bag; it's better if it looks like a purse. You don't want sensible shoes, gods no. You don't want an easy care haircut; you want to emulate the hairstyle of a 21-year-old club girl. And most of all, you do NOT want Mom Jeans; you want low-cut bootleg jeans with a nice wash, just like the highschool girls are wearing.

Every day we're surrounded by this nonsense that it's so cool to be a Mom now that it takes tremendous strength to stand up to the cultural onslaught and resist the pressure. That parents have taken over the cultural discourse with their self-centred whining and the childless are courageously fighting back. Bull. Shit. I say.

Yes, there's pressure to knock out a kid of your own, these days; but as part of some dizzying new celebration of the awesome power and coolness of motherhood? Not likely. More like a part of the backlash against women, a constant reminder that we are, after all, wombs with legs, and if we try to be anything else we are working against our basic natures; more like a way to put us all back in our place ("Shut up and have a baby so I can ignore you, all right?").

But that this is any indication that Motherhood is getting some kind of respect or admiration or recognition? Please.

If it were, every girl in North America would be dying to wear a pair of Mom jeans; they'd sell out at $5,000 a pair from the fanciest hoity-toity department stores that I don't even know the names of, because I am not cool. If it were, the starlets wouldn't be flaunting how exactly unchanged they were by pregnancy and breastfeeding, they'd be dying for sagging breasts and tiger bellies and plastering those on the covers of major women's magazines.

So there.

Posted by Andrea at 9:51 AM | Comments (16)

Love Song

edited to add: This post is in reply to a recent post at Her Bad Mother

There was a time, when Frances was between nine months and a year old, when I didn't take her outside of the house.

She wasn't sick, and neither was I. Or maybe I was. I didn't take her out because I was too afraid of other people.

It had been, by then, almost a year since the first scary ultrasounds--a year of being told by medicial professionals from the family doctor to a few fancy genetics practices that there was something wrong with the way my daughter looked. Her legs were too short. Her thumbs were too broad. Her ears were too low. Her eyes were too big. Her chin might be too recessed. Her hands and feet might be too large. Her collarbones might be too short. Every new doctor took their own measurements and made their own pronouncements, and they used them to make misdiagnosis after misdiagnosis.

At one appointment with my endo--for gods' sake, a diabetes specialist--he asked, "So what's the story with Frances?"

"Nothing. Well, she's a bit small and we've had to take her around a bit, but no one's been able to come up with anything, so..." I shrugged.

"What? But you can tell just by looking at her, she has that fairy-face syndrome."

And I'll ignore the strangers, the ones who asked me at the store, "What's wrong with her? Why is she so small? Don't worry, she'll be perfect someday."

My maternal confidence held up for about nine months, and then it was just one diagnosis too many. Maybe they're right. Maybe she is ugly. Maybe I'm the only one who thinks she's beautiful.

Maybe all those nice old ladies and teenaged girls who stopped us at the mall all the time to rapturize over her big blue eyes and tiny body were just being kind. Maybe that jerkface who stole her photo and put up a comment on his LJ about her looking like she has FAS was right, or had the right idea. Maybe I was the only one who thought she was beautiful.

So I kept us home. I couldn't face it. My skin was worn right away, I had no defences left. There are too many doctors who think my baby looks funny for them all to be wrong.

This is what I have to be ashamed of, and I am. Deeply. But ashamed for adoring my daughter's beauty, for finding pleasure in it? Never. I would settle us on the rocking chair and kiss the top of her head, smile ruefully over the way her two crowns made her short hair into the world's smallest mohawk, marvel at how my left hand covered her entire torso, at how her feet were shorter than my hand is wide; I'd trace the line of her cheeks with my eyes and try to memorize it, that beautiful swell, that trace of baby fat on my skinny little baby.

In her book Mother Nature, which I am going to cite yet again because it really is that good, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy writes that the sensual pleasures of sex almost certainly evolved after the sensual pleasures of motherhood. A species can reproduce without enjoying sex at all (look at cats), but especially for a species that takes as long to mature as we do, if you don't physically enjoy at least some aspects of motherhood, none of your offspring will survive. There has to be a payoff for staying so physically close for such a long time. She even suggests that the reason they feel so similar sometimes is that sex borrowed the chemistry and hormones of mothering. Think of that the next time you're feeling frisky and your partner is looking at you with a sparkle in their eyes.

For a long time, I helplessly added "to me" as a suffix to every statement of Frances's beauty. I could never see her as anything but beautiful. But to this day, the pronouncements of those doctors ring in my ears and when I look at her, I am aware that part of my mind is analyzing the angle between her eyes and her ears, the shape of her jaw, the width of her little fingers. I pay it much less mind than I used to, but those weeds have taken root and at times have crowded out everything else in the garden. It's taken a lot of ruthless pruning to turn them back.

I love the way her baby toes curl under the rest.

I love the slight rough edge of callus along the outside of her big toes.

I love the muscles under her calves and thighs. Sometimes I ask her if I can eat her leg; and she normally says no, but when she says yes, I take a big mock mouthful and growl and pretend to chew, and she howls with laughter until tears run down her face.

I love her belly, still soft as velvet, and her ridiculously trim belly button. I love the way she sometimes drags her shirt above her head and goes walking around, thinking herself hidden, belly on display.

I love her two tiny arms; when she is sitting quietly, I love how she folds them and clasps her hands on her lap. I love asking her, "Frances, can I see a beautiful little hand?" I love how she holds it up in front of my face, five fingers spread wide; I love that she inherited my hands, with the ring fingers longer than the index fingers, and the tiny tiny little pinkie fingers. I love her pinkie fingers; I love to bite them and make her laugh.

I love the dimples just beside her elbows.

I love lying behind her when she is sitting down, my chin just over her shoulder; I love to breathe in the smell of her hair. I love it when she presses one round, firm cheek against my face and says, "I love you Mummy."

It tickles her when I kiss her just under the ear.

I love her blond hair. I love studying its highlights, the very ends on the very top layer that are white white white against the medium blond underneath; I love running my fingers through it and then twisting it up so I can see the curve of her skull and the back of her neck.

I love her big blue eyes.

I love it when she says, "Can I hold you, Mummy?" Then she wraps her little arms around my arm and lifts her feet off the ground so I have to carry her; I pick her up, supporting her weight with my right arm, and settle us into a chair or the couch, and she buries herself into me. She asks, "Can you tickle my back, Mummy?" And I oblige, tracing the stumps I have for fingernails in circles on her impossibly tiny, beautiful, strong back; I touch each little bump on her spine, each rib, her shoulder blades, the curve beside her neck, the soft parts of her waist. She rarely laughs. I think she finds it calming. But if I stop: "Tickle my back again, Mummy!"

"All right."

She leans into me, a soft and warm bundle, small flyaway hairs tickling my nose, one hand patting the mole. I tickle her back, lean my head close to her, and close my eyes.

Posted by Andrea at 2:42 PM | Comments (11)

Please note: This entry is fiction

You can't imagine my surprise when, after having the IUD removed, my doctor presented me with an application form.

"What's this?" I asked.

"There's a new Ministry of Parenting," she replied. "Now you have to apply for a license to be a parent. You'll have to have it filled out, submitted in triplicate, and sent to the address listed on the back with the required application fee. Better do it quick. The waiting times are expanding every day and there are serious fines if you get pregnant before they approve you--and jail if you get pregnant and they don't approve you. Plus, well, there's what they do to the pregnancy."

I've tried to fill it out, Dear Readers, and I am stumped. Here it is. How would you do it?

*********************************************************

MINISTRY OF PARENTING
PREGNANCY AND PARENTING LICENSE APPLICATION FORM

Accompanying brochure:

All good citizens know how important it is to safeguard both the physical and emotional health of future generations. We feel that the time of Pregnancy and Parenting Licenses has finally come. What better way to ensure that all people are born and raised in healthy, supportive, stimulating and productive homes?

FAQ

1. If I fail one question, will I still get a Pregnancy and Parenting License?

Yes! Well, probably. But if you fail two questions, probably not. We have standards. You are required to accumulate no more than five points in order to receive your Parenting License. This will demonstrate that you meet the necessary financial, emotional, psychological, genetic, medical and demographic criteria for safe and successful parenting.

2. What happens if I am not approved?

You will either be required to be on doctor-monitored and -approved birth control until such time as you reapply, or you will need to be surgically sterilized. The choice is yours.

3. What are the penalties for having a child without a license?

If you submit an application and are approved, there is a fine of $1000. If you either do not submit an application or submit one and are not approved, you will go to jail for a period not less than six months and the pregnancy will be terminated. You may be sterilized at that time.

4. Can you do that?

We tell the police what to do, and they have guns. What do you think?

The Form

please check one option for each of the following questions

1. Have you ever been treated for mental illness?

a. Yes, more than five years ago. (1 point)
b. Yes, currently or within the past five years (2 points)
c. No. (0 points)

2. Are you married?

a. Yes (0 points)
b. No (2 points)

2.1 If you answered 'yes', is your spouse:

a. The opposite sex (0 points)
b. The same sex (2 points)

3. What is your current age?

a. Under 15 years of age (5 points)
b. 16-21 years of age (3 points)
c. 21-28 years of age (0 points)
d. 29-35 years of age (2 points)
e. 36-45 years of age (3 points)
f. Over 45 years of age (4 points)

4. What is your current household income?

a. Under $20,000/year (5 points)
b. $21,000-$30,000/year (4 points)
c. $31,000-$50,000/year (3 points)
d. $51,000-$70,000/year (2 points)
e. $71,000-$90,000/year (1 point)
f. Over $90,000/year (0 points)

5. What is your highest completed level of education?

a. Highschool or less (5 points)
b. Some college, incomplete (3 points)
c. College diploma (0 points)
d. University degree, post-graduate degree (0 points)

6. Are you currently:

a. Unemployed (5 points)
b. Employed part- or full-time (2 points)
c. I am not currently in the waged workforce, but I have chosen to work as a full-time caregiver at least until all children are in school full time (0 points)

please check all that apply for the following questions

1. Are you currently being or have you ever been treated for any of the following? (1 point for each prior condition, 2 points for each current condition)
a. Asthma
b. Hypertension
c. Diabetes, type 1 or type 2
d. Cancer
e. Arthritis
f. Infertility
g. Heart disease
h. Organ failure
i. Hearing loss
j. Vision loss not treatable with corrective eyewear
k. Degenerative Diseases

1.1 Please check all conditions your spouse is currently being treated for or has been treated for in the past. (1 point for prior condition, 2 points for each current condition)
a. Asthma
b. Hypertension
c. Diabetes, type 1 or type 2
d. Cancer
e. Arthritis
f. Infertility
g. Heart disease
h. Organ failure
i. Hearing loss
j. Vision loss not treatable with corrective eyewear
k. Degenerative Diseases

2. Please check all that apply (1 point each)
a. I have an autosomal-dominant or -recessive genetic syndrome
b. I have a child with an autosomal-recessive genetic syndrome
c. I was previously pregnant with a child with an autosomal-recessive genetic syndrome
d. I have or my spouse has relatives with an autosomal-recessive genetic syndrome (biological parents, siblings, siblings or parents, grandparents, siblings of grandparents, nieces, nephews, cousins)
e. My spouse has an autosomal-dominant or -recessive genetic syndrome

3. Please check all that apply (1/2 point each)
a. I sometimes yell when I am frustrated or angry
b. I do not function as well when I am tired
c. I enjoy freedom and independence
d. I have not selected a discipline method or parenting style
e. I think naming children after cartoon characters is a perfectly acceptable practice
f. I am not on good terms with my family of origin
g. I am adopted, and do not know who my family of origin is
h. I believe that it is sometimes ok to let children cry
i. I do not believe that any want of a child automatically trumps a parent's needs
j. I think it is acceptable for a parent to continue to work outside the home for pleasure or satisfaction
k. I hate it when children whine
l. I think parents should be able to bring difficult or hyperactive children into public, adult places
m. I think kids can be just fine if they share a room
n. I do not find school plays or children's sports leagues interesting
o. I don't deal well with other people's bodily fluids
p. I think it should be each woman's choice whether to feed her baby breastmilk or formula

Congratulations! You're done!

Please submit this form in triplicate to the address on the reverse, along with the $200 application fee, three character references and a medical reference from your primary care physician. Processing times on average are six to eight weeks. You may call 1-888-FUC-KYOU for an update on your file at any time.

If you received a score of less than five, you can expect to receive a license once we have processed your application. Please keep it on you at all times to present to officers of the law upon request once you have become pregnant.

We respectfully request that any applicants with a score less than five give serious consideration to having at least five children. Dropping birth rates promise to gut the economy and seriously compromise our current quality of life. It is up to each and every citizen with the necessary qualifications to parent to ensure that this eventuality does not come to pass by having as many children as you are physically and financially capable of rearing. If you would like more information on this initiative, you may call 1-888-WOO-PSIE during regular business hours.

Thank you.

***********************************************************

I got 14. Can that be right?

What about you, Dear Readers? What's your score?

~~~~~

In the "I really hope I don't need to point this out but just in case category," you all understood this was satire, right?

Posted by Andrea at 9:33 AM | Comments (26)

Blogs, Cliques, Activists, Educators and Difference

When a project about blogging as the mom of a kid with physical differences (and there has GOT to be a better way to say that) collides with a recent obsession about the nature of blogging and a blogger's persona and that tangled wreck bangs head-on with posts by more well-known folks about the politics of mommyblogging and BlogHer--first, one's head explodes; then, the bits reassemble themselves into a potentially incoherent and sure to be lengthy post.

In no particular order, but hopefully able to come to some sort of conclusion eventually:

1. If you want to know about cliques in the blogging world, as in highschool, don't ask the popular kids. Ask the outcasts. They are the ones who will have the most honest and objective reports on the politics of membership in different groups.

Every discussion I've ever had about cliques, online and off, has degenerated into two sides; one going, "There's a clique and it's horrible and I can't get in and you're being exclusionary!" The other going, "Nonsense! There's no clique. Anyone's welcome. Just start talking and you'll fit right in. Why, look at so-and-so, who just moved here/joined up last week, and we LOVE her." I've been on both sides of that argument at different times in my life and when I'm being honest, I'll tell you that in almost every case, the first group was right regardless of which group I belonged to.

"Clique" sounds awful, as if there is a group of mean-spirited girls gossipping about new and arcane ways to cause mental and emotional anguish to newcomers, and I wonder if that's why those in them become so defensive because, of course, they're not doing that. (I hope.) But it still does happen that a well-established group will have rules of behaviour and relating and humour that some newbies will get much faster than others, leading the others to feel excluded.

In any case, if you really want to find out about Mommy Blog cliques, ask an "Insignificant Microbe," not a "Maurauding Marsupial" or "Adorable Rodent."

2. I think Mom-101 is on the right track when she talks about mommybloggings, as in, more than one type or subculture; unsurprisingly, I think she's wrong to say there's only two, mom/writers and writer/moms. It's a useful way of thinking about it, but incomplete, because off the top of my head I can think of at least one group of mothers who won't fit into that dichotomy: educator/moms. That is, those moms who have a unique experience or story they think people need to learn about, who approach their blogging primarily as a way to generate exposure for a particular issue. Is that honing craft, or finding a community? Neither. It's going on crusade.

I thought of this, of course, because one of my own reasons for Beanie Baby awaaaaay back when was, "There has GOT to be someone else out there who is going through what I've been going through, and if there isn't, by god, I'm going to be that someone for someone else."

I am, too; google searches for "prenatal diagnosis dwarfism" and "short femurs" and "is it possible for a prenatal diagnosis of dwarfism to be wrong" still lead people here every day. I don't hear from them, usually (sometimes I do)--we don't form a community--but I do hope they will find my story and the joy I find every day with Frances to be a comfort.

I think (Mom-101, I hope you don't take this as a criticism) that her dichotomy presupposes a normal experience. You are in a straight relationship and you decide to have a baby and you get pregnant with relatively few surprises and then at the appropriate time you give birth to a child who is mostly normal. Then, when/if you approach blogging, you indeed may have only those two choices: honing your craft as a writer (the writer/mom) or looking to share stories and experiences with other moms (the mom/writer). But if any one of those things is not true--if you are not straight, not partnered, if you do not get pregnant easily, if you adopt, if you form an adoption plan for your child, if your child is born very early, or if there might be "something wrong"--then a third option presents itself: you can decide to educate. You can approach a blog as a way of raising awareness, of dispelling stereotypes.

(I'm sure there are other motivations as well, and if I'm any example then many of us are a conflicting mash of many motivations, any one of which might be prevalent on any given day.)

3. My post about "special needs" (I HATE that phrase) mommy blogging generated some interesting comments along these lines:

"I feel really badly, I'm sorry, I don't have a child with special needs; is it ok if I read this?"

Which raises an intersting question:

Why would something written by a mom with a kid who has special needs be considered off-limits to those in different circumstances?

One part of racism is that stories of white people are assumed to be universal and represent The Human Experience, while stories of other people are assumed to be special and represent The Minority Experience; it is presumed that they are of interest primarily to other people in the same situation, as opposed to stories about white people, which are presumed to be interesting to everyone. One part of sexism is that stories about men are assumed to be universal and represent The Human Experience, while stories about women are assumed to be special and represent The Female Experience; it is presumed that they are of interest only to women, as opposed to stories about men, which are presumed to be interesting to everyone. (Hence the interesting trivia that while the majority of readers, both child and adult, are female--over 70%, I think--the majority of fictional characters, both children and adult, are male--over 75%.) And so on with every form of prejudice: stories about the privileged few are assumed to be interesting to everyone and to represent the Human Experience while stories of the disadvantaged majority are assumed to be interesting to and representative of only that particular situation.

So. Is it the same deal in blogging?

Are stories about normal moms and normal kids assumed to be universal and representative of The Motherhood Experience while stories about moms or kids who aren't normal, in whatever way, are special and representative of only their particular situation? Is it that moms of Special Needs Kids are not supposed to be interesting to moms of regular kids? Are we presumed to be talking only to each other? (In which case, I should have a very small audience, since I still have yet to meet anyone, adult or child, with Frances's particular mix of symptoms.)

And I am not directing this to you, any of you, in particular; but as a general question, does it seem a reasonable explanation for the relative lack of cross-fertilization, so to speak, between the mommybloggers and the special needs flavour?

If so, I'd like to echo Carrie here and say: One of the reasons I'm writing this publicly, making it accessible to people, is because I want it to be read. If I wanted to restrict my readership to other women who had kids who are different, I wouldn't write here; if I felt that my experience had no applicability beyond the limited scope of women who have daughters with undiagnosed forms of dwarfism, I wouldn't write, period. What our kids look like or can do or how they behave is like the landscaping around the houses we live in; yes, it's different, but in the bigger scheme of things those differences are ultimately trivial, compared to the bedrock underneath those houses of being mothers, being female, being human.

I'd like to say that my story about Motherhood has more in common with yours than not, even if your child was walking at twelve months and got to sit in a forward-facing carseat right on schedule; I'd like to say that Frances's story will have as much to say about the universal Human Experience as yours will, that her loves and passions and hatreds and disappointments and failures and successes will be as keenly felt and as celebrated or grieved as yours; I'd like to say that I talk about her dwarfism because I want to confront other people's preconceptions on the subject and work them out for myself, too, but if it turns people away because they assume that the story of a dwarf girl can have nothing to say about their own life or because it must be interesting to or meant for other dwarf girls, then I have failed utterly.

And I'd like to say that I'm preaching to the converted, or you wouldn't be here, reading this; but who are the unconverted, and how do I preach to them?

Posted by Andrea at 1:47 PM | Comments (18)

Top Secret

Do me a favour: after you read the following paragraph, wadd up the neural cells wherein you remember it and burn them, ok? If it were a paper note I would ask you to destroy it--but such a technique doesn't really lend itself to the blogosphere.

Sometime this fall I ought to be presenting a discussion to a group of academics and experts, as part of a panel, regarding mothering on the blogosphere. I know. I can't yet say it with a straight face myself, so I don't blame you for laughing. Me! On a panel! Talking to experts! My particular angle on this project is the experience of blogging about mothering a child with a physical difference--in our case, dwarfism. Or something that is presumed to be a medically unknown form of dwarfism since she's still doing a damned fine job of tracking the 50th centile line on the achondroplasia charts. (This is the paragraph I'm asking you all to forget--I'm not ready yet to talk about this panel thing and my plans and how it came about and who else is involved, etc., so from now on--I'm not involved in any panel and you didn't read it here, right?)

As a result, I've been spending a fair bit of time thinking about this, this mothering a child with a physical difference and then writing about it on the blogosphere. My conclusions so far are painful and upsetting, and not particularly flattering to the momosphere as a whole. Snap me out of it, Dear Readers. Convince me I'm wrong. Please?

One of the best things to come out of Beanie Baby so far is meeting the momosphere in all its flavours--single and adoptive and biological and post-infertility and through pregnancy and up to adulthood and especially, especially, the other parents of kids with differences. I am so thankful to have met them, even virtually, you can have no idea. In real life I am the only person I know who has a child who is anything but completely normal in every way, excluding one friend and her daughter who were also met online. Without this sector of the blogosphere, I would feel utterly alone. Who else would understand the special worries about bullying or teasing, about aids in the classroom, about milestones?

If you look under Kindred Spirits, in the sidebar on the left, you will see this reflected. Beanie Baby is the Baskin Robins of the momosphere: thirty-one flavours and then some. I feel like a bridge, not to switch metaphors abruptly from ice cream to infrastructure. One shore hosts the moms of kids who seem to be completely normal in every way; the other hosts the moms whose kids are different, in different ways and to varying degrees. Sometimes, moms from both sides walk the bridge, talk and laugh; but it seems to me, reflecting on this, that the regular-moms and the special-needs-moms (to use a completely patronizing term, but I can't think of a better one) still split themselves off, each to their own kind, and rarely mingle. I know a few other bridges--Moreena comes to mind--but on the whole, there is little mixing.

I find myself wondering if the thought of having a child who is different isn't maybe a bit scary for a mom with "normal" kids (in scare quotes because, really, what's normal?). I find myself wondering if we moms of kids who are obviously different in some way aren't a bit invisible. I find myself wondering if Beanie Baby is a bridge because Frances is different, but not too different--small, but not disabled, no behavioural or cognitive issues, and thus relatable. I wonder if maybe disabled kids on the internet don't elicit the same reactions that disabled kids in real life do--either people look right through or past them, or stare.

I think a lot about my Audience. It sounds pretentious, I know. But I've been writing stories since I was five years old and, after a certain point, you can't help it, the audience is there riding your shoulder whether you invited them or not. I might as well make it conscious. And when I think about Beanie Baby's audience, it looks like a whole lot of overlapping circles: Hey, it's a venn diagram! And Casey loves venn diagrams, so why don't I post one? There's an enormous circle in the middle of women who woke up one day, decided to be pregnant, got pregnant, had a normal pregnancy, a normal birth, and a normal child. Then there are all these smaller circles that overlap to varying degrees: adoptive moms, birth moms, women in the infertility world, not-moms, diabetics both mom-flavoured and otherwise, and, off in the corner, moms of special needs kids.

Why yes, I did go a little crazy with the picture tubes. Why do you ask?

There you go. Beanie Baby's Various Known Audiences, all colour-coded for your viewing pleasure. There's the other diabetics--some of whom are undergoing infertility treatments, some of whom are moms, some of whom are not and might not ever be. There are the moms who either are now or at some point have undergone infertility treatments; some of them are still there (Lyrehca), some of them became pregnant and are now moms (Danigirl, MUBAR), some of them are moving off into the adoptive mother realm (artificially sweetened). There's the adoptive mothers, which has a substantial overlap with the infertility circle but also includes women who are not infertilie (Yankee Transplant) and who have biological offspring as well (Gawdessness). There are the birth moms (Kateri), some of whom have additional children they are raising as well as the child or children being raised in another family. There are lots of folks who are not-moms and who don't intend to be, either because of their sex (Hi, Moe!) or lack of interest (Rachel). And then there are the moms who might have gotten pregnant easily, might have had a normal pregnancy and normal birth, but who ended up with a child who is different. Who has Down syndrome, or skeletal dysplasias, or profound developmental delays, or cerebral palsy, or any one of thousands of other conditions or syndromes.

There's the blog ring of families of children with T21, like Emma Sage and Lovely and Amazing. There's Postcards from Holland. There's Bad Mama and Big Blueberry Eyes and This is Me and Cerebral Palsy Baby. As far as I can tell from my admitedly non-scientific survey, the moms of special-needs kids are out in the momosphere in force, but largely invisible and unacknowledged, read almost entirely by other people in the same boat.

Crises within that community stay within that community. Breastfeeders will pick up the charge on formula-feeding guilt, and SAHMs will come to the defence of WOHMs, and regular mommy-bloggers will follow along breathlessly when a woman who has been dealing with infertility either becomes pregnant or adopts, but I have never seen a mom of a normal healthy kid post about the insensitivity of using the words "retard" or "lame," never seen them take on magazines or companies who exploit T21 kids, never vituperatively attack a TV show or movie that promotes hurtful stereotypes of disabled kids. When a major motion picture uses the word "retard" in dialogue, there is no outcry outside of the T21 community. When a magazine posts a picture of a T21 kid on the cover and inside includes an article on how one author was saved from the horrors of parenting a T21 kid by prenatal diagnosis, the vitriolic reaction is confined to the community. When disabled kids or their caregivers are mentioned, it is usually in laudatory tones, casting them in the role of heroes or saints or tragic figures, instead of regular people leading slightly different lives that are nevertheless full and happy. Hurtful slurs such as "retard" or "lame" are casually thrown about with seemingly no awareness that mothers with kids who actually are retarded or lame or both are almost certainly reading (and perhaps forming a corresponding opinion of that blogger's character).

Even worse, I know of bulletin boards where members lurk on lists of parents of kids who are different, or blogs of such families, to reassure themselves that they made the right decision in terminating their own pregnancies where a prenatal diagnosis revealed the same condition. That's right. They read a family's stories of daily life, which sometimes includes surgery or therapy and a lot of times includes laughter and joy, and retreat to their own spaces and post a big "Phew! There but for the grace of god go I--can you imagine what a narrow escape I had?"

Modern western society is ruthlessly anti-disabled. We believe in the perfectability of humans and insist on physical perfection and mental prowess. If the world is a harsh place to be when you are twenty pounds overweight or a little on the short side, imagine facing it with a disfiguring condition, or a skeletal dysplasia; if "retard" can be hurled as an epithet against a person with perfectly normal intelligence who says something disagreeable, imaging facing the world down when you truly are mentally retarded. In other words, modern society is hard enough on those who are normal but not perfect; for persons who are not only not perfect but also not normal, modern society is brutal. The vast majority of public places are accessible only in the legal sense. Consider Frances's difficulties in navigating a playground, and that is a relatively minor difference. Where do you go to even see children with disabilities, besides a hospital, and what kind of picture of their daily lives can that give you?

I don't want to believe that the momosphere is the same. I don't want to stand up in front of a roomfull of experts and academics and harangue us for our anti-disabled attitudes. I want to believe that the marvelous community we all speak of extends to everyone, I want to believe that our blogs and our communities and our cliques include not only the regular moms, and the post-infertility moms, and the adoptive moms, and the birth moms, and the single moms, and all the moms of kids who are healthy and normal, but also the moms of autistic kids, moms of kids with Down syndrome and other trisomies, moms of dwarf kids, all of us. I want to believe that we are not only able to access the momosphere through the technical accessibility of the internet, but that we are all welcome, all considered. I want to believe that we are not only feminist because women's equality benefits us, but because we believe more broadly in the concept of human equality, period, including equality for people and children with differences, including in our own spaces, including on our blogs. I want to believe that we see all people as people first with their own unique stories that can't be encapsulated by a diagnosis, I want to believe that we see moms with kids who are "not normal" primarily as moms who love their kids, and not as tropes or morality plays, not as TV Movies, not as Oprah fodder. But do we?

~~~~~

Yes indeed, I do need to do some research before I give my talk. But I would like that research to begin here, with all of you. You marvelous mommy-bloggers are the real experts. What do you see?

I'm especially interested in the answers of moms whose kids aren't perfectly normal and healthy in every way. Feminist theory has long argued that the most knowledgeable persons are those on the margins of society, because they must understand not only how their own groups work, but also how to rich and powerful groups in the centre work; whereas the groups in the centre can freely ignore and remain ignorant of those on the margins without any negative consequences whatsoever. I think this extends handily to the circles of Mom Society as well: If you are a woman who woke up one day, decided she wanted a baby, got pregnant, carried to term, had a normal delivery, and went home with a perfectly healthy and normal child, you can remain totally ignorant of infertility, prematurity, and disability/difference issues for your whole life and never even notice. But, obviously, the more that process is complicated for you, the more you must learn.

Convince me I'm wrong. Show me how wonderfully integrated we really are. Open my eyes. Please.

~~~~~

Depending on if my fellow panel presenters protest this post (nice alliteration, Andrea; perhaps you could put another p in a pithy postscript?) and how loudly, it might disappear. I have no idea how these things work and so no idea whether or not such a post is Bad Form. If it does vanish, you'll know why. Fellow panel protesters, feel free to complain.

Also, if anyone would be interested in being involved further as I put these ideas together, drop me an email (andrea AT athenadreaming DOT org) or a comment to that effect. I might want to ask people some questions on their momosphere experiences, or do a survey.

Posted by Andrea at 10:28 AM | Comments (43)

Parenting Heretic

Have you noticed I'm not so much down with the parenting experts? You might have. I try to reign it in but I know that sometimes it leaks through, a little. Experts! Bah! Oops, there I go again.

But, well, I have reason. When have they ever been right about anything? And you, in the back row, with the kid who always developed exactly according to the books? Shut up. I don't want to hear about it. Among my acquaintance I do not know of a single child who developed exactly according to Expert Advice, once you factor in milestones, temperament, response to discipline, acquisition of literacy and other abstract skills, and so on. Gods know Frances hasn't. She was early with the rolling and then didn't bother to walk until she was 19 months (a fact which all the books assured me was certainly disastrous, because all babies walk by then, you know); we've fed her a variety of foods from four and a half months on and she was breastfed but she is still a stickler for texture (a trait she gets from me, I am convinced), her brain is obviously working since she's learned her letters etc. you're-bored-of-hearing-me-brag-about-this but her drawing skills are a bit behind, and standard disciplinary measures such as time-outs and natural consequences do dick all, because she's so freaking easy-going that most of the time she simply doesn't care. 'Sit in a chair for two minutes? I can't play with that toy anymore? Oh well. I'll just sit here and laugh and sing myself a song and everything will be a-ok!'

So, the advice of the Experts carries a weight of exactly zero with me, and I mean that in the most scientific way possible. If you took the advice of the Experts into a Room of Andrea and let go of it, it would float in the air.

And this applies too to the subject of toilet training, a subject I've noticed on which diverse Experts have diverse Opinions, and each Expert is morally and scientifically certain that his or her Opinion is the correct one, and the other Experts are therefore advocating child abuse or are ignorant of children's bodily functions. In fact, it reminds me a great deal of the Attachment Parenting vs. CIO debates, and I've come to a similar conclusion.

Each of the books and articles I've consulted has a different age for bladder control, from 32.5 months to five years. Each talks about the acquisition of social and physical milestones such as the desire to please and the ability to pull down one's own pants and recognize when one is about to pee. Yet each still comes to drastically different conclusions. I have concluded that none of them know what they are talking about.

And we all know that we were toilet trained at much younger ages, though the consensus today seems to be that it was "too early" and it probably wasn't really training. I'm not convinced of this, considering that all of the information I've found to support it has been subjective and anecdotal. By and large the attitude seems to be that since we do it differently now, and since everyone knows that time has marched on and this means progress so that whatever we do know must be better than what other people did before, then this later training must be better.

Of course, each of the Experts uses the magic word in their writings: "research." "We have research that indicates," they say, and the continue on to write whatever it is that I've just quoted above. I'm sure they do have research. I'm also sure that research can be slanted, misrepresented, or poorly conducted so that the results are not useful. I prefer to read the research myself. So that's what I did:

J Pediatr. 2004 Jul;145(1):107-11.

Why is toilet training occurring at older ages? A study of factors associated with later training.

Blum NJ, Taubman B, Nemeth N.

Division of Child Development and Rehabilitation, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania, School of Medicine, Philadelphia, 19104, USA. blum@email.chop.edu

Recent studies suggest that children are completing toilet training much later than the preceding generation. Our objective was to identify factors associated with later toilet training. Children between 17 and 19 months of age (n=406) were enrolled in the study. At enrollment, parents completed the Parenting Stress Index and the Receptive-Expressive Emergent Language Scale. Follow-up parent interviews were conducted every 2 to 3 months until children completed daytime toilet training. Information obtained at follow-up interviews included steps parents were taking to toilet train their child, child toilet training behaviors, presence and frequency of constipation, birth of a sibling, and child care arrangements. In a stepwise linear regression model predicting age at completion of toilet training, 3 factors were consistently associated with later training: initiation of toilet training at an older age, presence of stool toileting refusal, and presence of frequent constipation. Models including these variables explained 25% to 39% of the variance in age at completion of toilet training. In conclusion, a later age at initiation of toilet training, stool toileting refusal, and constipation may explain some of the trend toward completion of toilet training at later ages.

BJU Int. 2002 Sep;90(4):456-61.

Results of a questionnaire evaluating the effects of different methods of toilet training on achieving bladder control.

Bakker E, Van Gool JD, Van Sprundel M, Van Der Auwera C, Wyndaele JJ.

Department Urology, University of Antwerp, Edegem, Belgium.

OBJECTIVE: To analyse if family situation, personal habits and toilet training methods can influence the achievement of bladder control. SUBJECTS AND METHODS: A questionnaire with 41 questions was distributed to 4332 parents of children completing the last 2 years of normal primary school. The questionnaire had been tested for reproducibility of the answers in a random subgroup of 80 parents. The aims of the investigation were explained in an accompanying letter and the response rate was 76.7%. The result were analysed using the chi-square test (Yates corrected). RESULTS: Two groups of children were identified, one with no lower urinary tract symptoms (3404) and one with complaints of daytime and night-time wetting, and urinary tract infections (928). The groups were termed the 'control' and 'symptom' groups, respectively. There were no differences in the family situation between the groups. The symptom group reported more 'below average' school results and less independence in homework and hygiene. The age at which toilet training started was significantly higher in the symptom group and scheduled voiding was used significantly less. The reaction of the parents when the attempt at voiding was unsuccessful was significantly different; in the control group most parents just postponed the effort and had the child try again later, whereas in the symptom group more parents asked the child to push, made special noises or opened the water tap. CONCLUSIONS: These data show significant differences in toilet training between children with and with no lasting problems of bladder control. Postponing the onset of the training after 18 months of age and using certain methods to provoke voiding (asking to push, opening the water tap) probably increases the risk of later problems with bladder control.

So here we have two recent studies that seem to fly in the face of all the advice we currently receive: not only might later training result simply in later control, but it might also have a higher risk of later bladder control and uti problems (note: as with every study that finds a "higher risk," do remember that it might be an increase of 1% or 100%, and so this is not meant as a judgement of any kind; and I only have the abstracts so who knows if the studies were any good). More interestingly, I found a few articles from the Journal of Pediatrics, also recent, on this question:

This one, from 2002, discusses the skills necessary for children to learn in sequence from the beginning of the process to mastery. I'm going to quote from it liberally because I found it very interesting:

"A critical review of the literature reveals 2 broad categories of readiness skills: global readiness skills, which include achievement of motor milestones (eg, sitting, walking), understanding and use of words for elimination, positive relationships with caregivers and the desire to please, identification with and imitation of parents and significant others, and the desire to be autonomous and master primitive impulses; and specific toileting readiness skills, which include bladder control (eg, staying dry for 2 hours), physical awareness (eg, appearing uncomfortable in soiled diapers), and instructional readiness (eg, indicating a need to urinate). Several authors have stated that these skills are present by 18 to 24 months in normally developing children, yet normative data are lacking.

"The broad sequence of achieving toileting "milestones" has also varied across studies. For example, Brazelton studied upper-middle-class children in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and found that approximately 80% of children attained daytime control of bowel and bladder function simultaneously at an average of 28 months, with no difference between the genders. In 12% of children, daytime bowel training occurred first; in 8%, bladder control was achieved first. Stein and Susser noted that children who attended day nurseries in Lancashire, United Kingdom, typically acquired nighttime bowel control before daytime control and daytime bladder control before nighttime control."

Consider: first of all, non of the literature agrees. Secondly, the research the literature is based on doesn't agree. Thirdly, Brazelton found that children can achieve daytime control by the age of 28 monnths, and what was he, a raving fascist lunatic?

Further on: "The median age when parents rated their girls as "stays dry during the day" was 32.5 months (95% CI: 30.9–33.7). The median age when girls could independently enter the bathroom and urinate by themselves was 33.0 months (95% CI: 31.2–34.4). The interquartile ranges varied from 6.9 to 11.4 months for girls for the age at acquiring each skill."

Frances will be thirty months in a few days; she will be adjusted-thirty months (which might count for potty training, I don't know) near the end of July. I don't expect her to adhere to the schedule--she never has for anything else up to this point, why would the potty be any different?--but I do expect, given her temperament and personality, that without some coordinated action on the part of her parents that Frances is one of those children who would otherwise become old enough and smart enough to decide that she would rather wear diapers--because it's easier, she can keep playing, and she enjoys having us care for her. These are traits of hers I have seen time and time again and, while in many instances they make her a sweet child and a joy to parent, they can also delay the acquisition of needed skills. Erik and I have learned that when anything presents itself to Frances that might be difficult to learn, that might involve embarassment or falling down or a concentrated effort, that we need to actively prevent ourselves from rescuing her and we need to encourage her to do it by herself. Even now, when she has been walking for almost a full year and when we have witnessed her walking and running for hours at a stretch when it's fun, she will beg us and cry and plead with us to carry her if we go to a mall or to a park (the kind with flowers, not the kind with slides). Oh, she's absolutely adorable when she begs ("Can I give you a lift?" she asks, with tears in her eyes and her arms stretched high), but the fact is that we know she can do it and she simply would rather not because she prefers to have other people do things for her.

All of which adds up to: I am eager not to miss the window of opportunity if I can possibly help it. Frances will not let us know when she is ready. We have to encourage her to be ready. Not with threats or punishments or consequences, which would be bizarre, abusive and completely non-productive, but with lots and lots of potty time and as much inducement as we can manage.

That she is as small as she is makes me feel that this is even more important. She is discouraged enough by ordinary, every-day barriers like falling down while she is running. Extraordinary barriers present themselves to her like Himilayas: at a staircase, she simply rebels. But she must learn how to climb them by herself because Erik and I are not always there to help her. Erik and I are both saps who frequently do give in, depending on the situation (if she is very tired, or not feeling well, or already upset), but if Frances had her way she would climb a stair by herself once in a week.

And I can't help but compare this to my family of origin: I was always self-motivated, and it made me a helion in my parents' eyes. A straight-A extra-curricular clarinet-playing volunteering kind of helion, but we all have our cross to bear. My brother, on the other hand, was not a helion. He was the Easy Child. He was also supremely unmotivated to do anything for himself. He would only get a B in school if my parents paid him for it; he demanded and got drives from my parents to whatever he wanted to do until his late teens, and was only induced to get his license when my parents paid for it in full and gave him a car. It was a combination of factors, where my brother's easy temperament and willingness to have others do for him what he could do for himself matched with my parents willingness to do things for him whenever he asked because at least he wasn't difficult, to the point where my parents discovered only when my brother entered his twenties that they were effectively stuck with a son who would, by his own devices, never get a job, never graduate from school. At 28 he's still in university, by the way, and refuses employment that is not intellectually stimulating enough. He is currently getting a Masters in Psychology because that is what his wife is doing, and because he can set his own hours as a shrink. For god's sake, they co-signed on his mortgage! They're still paying for his car repairs! When he talked to me about how he would support kids if he had them, he asked to borrow Frances's crib--the one she is still sleeping in--and assumed that we would be happy to lend him anything we have because of course we would not be so inconsiderate as to have another child of our own when it might conflict with his schedule.

And, god help me, that's not going to be Frances. Potty training may seem like an odd place to start (though it's been a conscious part of my parenting her since this aspect of her temperament became obvious), but I want her to learn from an early age that when she can manage something for herself, I expect her to do so at least a statistical majority of the time. Undoubtedly sometimes I will really fuck up. That's part of parenting. But as much as I don't want to end up in my parents' position, with a son who would absolutely move back home and live in their basement if they let him, I really, really don't want Frances to end up in my brother's position (as enviable as it sometimes strikes me because he definitely has had much of his comfort handed to him on a silver platter).

OK, back to the article:

"Contemporary literature has maintained that toileting readiness skills typically develop between 18 and 24 months of age. Our data challenge this conventional wisdom. In only 2 of the 11 readiness skills were the median ages for girls less than 24 months of age: "stays BM free overnight" (22.1 months) and "understands potty words" (22.8 months). The median ages for boys were over 24 months in all 11 readiness criteria. Although some boys and girls acquire readiness skills before their second birthday, most do not. As practitioners advocating that parents wait until their children are ready to start toilet training, we should now revise our ages upward to 22 to 30 months when children are typically ready for toilet training."

And Frances is? Thirty months, almost, or at the tail end of what this research indicates is an average age range for readiness for toilet training. Not that the age ranges mean squat when your girl only learns to walk at nineteen months, but this is different. I can see the readiness signs are almost entirely in place, and when I look at the chart (for which you will have to click through to the article) I can see she is learning the skills in sequence and at appropriate ages, with the exception of hand-washing and that's because she can't reach the sink even on a stepstool. And I'm not starting now in the expectation that she will be out of diapers in a month or two (since anyway what would I put her in? I still haven't found any underwear in her size) but simply so that when everything clicks in her little head the potty is there, she knows what to do with it, and Erik and I are already practiced at encouraging her to use it--it's a part of our routine, in other words.

This article explored the relationship between the age when training was initiated, the age when intensive training (defined as parents asking the child to use the potty more than three times per day) was initiated, and the age of successful potty training completion. A quote: "We found that the age at initiation of intensive toilet training correlates strongly with the age at completion of toilet training. However, this correlation is not present when the group that began intensive training between 17 and 27 months is evaluated alone. Other studies have also found that age of initiation of toilet training is an important predictor of age at attainment of bladder control or completion of daytime training but have not reported data on this relationship at different ages of initiation or on the relationship between age at initiation and duration of toilet training. A study that examined the relationship between parental pressure to train and age at completion of training in a sample that often began training before 18 months found no relationship between parental pressure to train and age of completion of toilet training. Our study suggests that there is little benefit to beginning intensive training before 27 months of age, although we could not find any toilet training problems, other than a longer duration of training, that were associated with earlier initiation of intensive training."

Or in other words, starting before 27 months was associated with a very long potty training process and no earlier achievement of the desired result, but after 27 months, the earlier the parents started, the earlier the kids were done. On average. Kids, being individuals, delight in bucking these statistics with a casual smear of one poop-stained hand; so there will always be kids who train very quickly before 27 months and kids who train very slowly after 27 months no matter what the parents do. But sitting here with a thirty-month-old daughter, I can find little reason to wait. According to the handy charts, a child begun between 27 and 33 months will be completed sometime between 36 and 40 months, whereas a child who begins at 33-36 months will be completed sometime between 38 and 41 months and a child begun after 36 months of age will be 43 to 47 months by the time they're done (on average).

Could Frances defy these experts as readily as the other ones? Absolutely. But at least I know how these experts came to their conclusions, what their sources were, what research they undertook and how, and I can take that and apply their statistics to my own situation to come up with a solution that seems to make sense for my family. I'm not expecting it to be a magic bullet, I'm not expecting it to be easy or convenient, I'm expecting it to be the probable best option of a field of options for how to potty train my particular little girl. If it takes eight months or ten months, it takes eight months or ten months. I just want the potty to be there, and I want Frances to know what it's for, and I want her to have some experience in using it, and I want her to know that her father and I expect her to use it when she can. That is the sum total of my current goals.

All of our kids insist on being individuals. It's part of what makes parenting such a challenge--from day one, they're determined to be themselves, not the more predictable creatures we've read about in the books. For some kids this means that no matter what their parents do, they simply will not use a potty until after a certain age. For others this means their parents can't keep them off of a potty from the age of twenty months or so. I am certain that everyone reading this has done whatever research they feel is necessary and has come to a reasoned and compassionate solution that works for their own particular family and their own idiosyncratic child with his or her own inclinations and preferences, and I'm sure also that those solutions are as varied as any other trait one might expect in such a large group. Please understand that I don't think that it is bad to postpone potty training in general; but I also don't think that it is bad not to. There's no one way to do this.

But I do want you to understand that my own choices have also been thoroughly researched and made with the best interests of my family at heart. This doesn't mean I can't be wrong, gods know that happens often enough. And if I am, well, you can all organize an Internet Laugh at Andrea Party, and I'll buy the balloons. I want you to understand that we are starting now because I think it is best for Frances.

~~~~~

This morning after breakfast I enticed her on to the potty by saying that she could bring her newest toys, the Calico Critters twin baby kittens, with her. We bought them yesterday morning when we went shopping because we went into the Mastermind store where they had a whole Calico Critters house set up with a set of the kittens out, and she wouldn't leave them alone. She hasn't left them alone since we got home yesterday, either, and keeps putting them down for a nap and then getting them up again. It's adorable. So of course, there would be no pottying without the little baby kittens, and they came along.

Frances sat there and demanded that I "talk to the boy kitten," which means pretend to be his voice so that he and Frances can have a conversation, which they did. At one point, Frances looked at me with complete pride and happiness on her face and said, "I'm going to make a pee!" And then she did. When she decided she was done, we got up and got dressed.

Frances is ready, and so am I.

Posted by Andrea at 9:02 AM | Comments (11)

Safe

In 1960 in the industrialized world, 39 of every 1000 children died before the age of five from all causes.

Today, that number is:

1. Three
2. Six
3. Twenty
4. Forty-five
5. Sixty

The correct answer is: Six. The mortality rate for children under five has been reduced by almost ninety per cent in forty years. That is a tremendous accomplishment, and largely due to improvements in public health as well as accident-prevention such as child seats for cars.

In 1994/95, over 221,000 people were admitted to hospitals in Ontario as a result of injury, a rate of 76.9 admissions per 10,000 population. In 2000, that number was:

1. 207,000
2. 204,000
3. 195,000
4. 197,000

The correct answer is: 197,000, resulting in an admissions rate of 61.9 per 10,000 population--a rate which steadily declined each year in the study period. (The actual number went up in 2004, but not by as much as the overall population grew, so the rate is lower.) In five years, safety gains were made that spared fifteen people out of every 10,000 of Ontario's residents an injury requiring emergency treatment.

The leading cause of preventable death for children 0-14 in Canada is:

1. Homicide
2. Vaccines
3. Food poisoning
4. Car accidents

The correct answer is: car accidents.

The number of abductions reported to police in 2004 was 635. What change does this represent over the previous decade?

1. Up 30%
2. Up 10%
3. Down 10%
4. Down 30%

The correct answer is: None of the above. The change from 1994 is actually a 48.9% decrease in abductions.

In 2004, there were 67,266 missing children cases in Canada. Eighty per cent were runaways. In 671 cases, children wandered off. In 332, children were abducted by a parent. How many of the 67,266 missing children reports were kidnappings?

1. 15
2. 31
3. 73
4. 102

The correct answer is: Thirty-one, and most of them were kidnapped by someone they knew. Relatives, friends, aquaintances.

So why does it feel like we live in a more dangerous world?

Specifically, for parents, why does it feel like our children are living in a more dangerous world than the one we grew up in?

Patently they are not: our children inhabit a world so safe that no other population in the history of humanity has ever seen its like. Prehistorically, 50% of a woman's children would die before adulthood. In some places in the world, more than one quarter of all children will die before the age of five. Whereas here, so few children die so young--only six per thousand, less than one per cent--that each can be considered as the tragedy it rightly is.

Yet somehow it feels as if, were we to let our children wander out of eyesight for a few moments in a busy shopping centre, we will lose them to the predator certain to be lurking by the escalator.

I blame three things: the media, a very hazy public understanding of the nature of risk (which is where Casey will pipe up, I imagine), and a modern culture that holds parents (i.e. mothers) responsible for anything that befalls their children.

First, the media: Raise your hands if you are a mother and you find it easy to change the TV or radio station when a story involving a child comes on. Admit it. Every time you hear of the death or injury of a child, every time you hear of a child's sorrow, every time you hear of a kidnapping or an accident or a death, your heart stops. How did it happen? How could it have happened? Could it happen to yours? How can you make sure it doesn't?

The media, not being entirely populated by idiots, understands rightly that this translates into viewers/readers and therefore advertisers. Reassuring stories on how these crimes and incidents are declining every year does not. The world was as dangerous during our childhood; more of our generation were kidnapped and abused and assaulted and hurt and died in car crashes and broke legs at the playground than of our children's generation. But it wasn't considered to be news, at least in part because it was so common, and because the tell-all nature of our modern times would have been considered rude.

Either they were overly ignorant, or we are overly informed; but either way the effect is the same. We have this perception that we are swimming in a cesspit of danger and vice, that toxins and poisons and perverts and drunk drivers are menacing our wee loved ones from behind every shady tree. But they're not. It reminds me, actually, of a study an enterprising academic carried out in a small town on Canada's east coast following the introduction of cable news channels there. The crime rate continued to decrease, but everyone started locking their doors, because these small communities which heretofore had heard only of the crimes actually occurring in their own neighbourhood started getting news reports from New York City and suddenly had the perception that thieves were everywhere.

Responsible reporting of actual tragic events is hard enough; then they jump into the fray with the occasional trumped-up junk story about a freak accident that is supposedly being communicated to "raise awareness," such as the one about how you shouldn't use baby swings because they might trigger your pets to attack the baby, or that all TVs should be bolted to the surfaces they sit on because three children in five years had been killed by a toppling set. Three children in five years is a tragedy; but it is not a public health crisis.

Which leads us nicely to a discussion of risk: Putting your children in a car is about the riskiest thing you can do. They are more likely to die there than almost anywhere else; they are certainly more likely to die in a car on the way to school than they are to be abducted by strangers if they walked to school themselves. Yet the number of parents who drive their kids to school continues to increase (with all the attendent problems that creates). Why?

Because most people don't treat risk rationally. This isn't a criticism, by the way; reason isn't the be-all and end-all of human existence, and risk is a highly subjective concept no matter now you approach it. People respond to risk viscerally, and those responses rarely correspond to the actual risks involved. It's a truism in risk management circles that people prefer things that are more likely to happen and also more familiar than to mysterious and catastrophic consequences even if they are almost certain not to happen. Which is why we keep building coal-fired electricity plants instead of nuclear plants--though the former kills tens of thousands of people every year, the high-profile occasional accidents of a nuclear station seem scarier, riskier.

The fact is, parents feel like they are more in control in a car. They feel like they are doing something, managing the risk. Even though what they are actually doing is increasing the risk because it is much more dangerous to ride to school than to walk. Neither activity is particularly dangerous, but letting your child walk to school by themselves feels much more dangerous because there is no subjective sense of control, of mangement.

It doesn't help that parents today are made to feel as though they are supposed to be able to control and manage their children's risks. The message is not-so-subtly conveyed that if only we are vigilant enough, we can guarantee our children's safety. If you are present enough, aware enough, educated enough, persistent enough, you can reduce the risk to zero.

You can't.

I know, I hate thinking it too, but you can't. I can't. We can't keep our kids safe. We can't guarantee it. We can't manage the risk to zero. Hey--we've already managed it down to 0.6%! That's pretty damned good, you know. We should be patting ourselves on the back for that, not flogging ourselves because it's marginally higher than nothing. Maybe we can get it down to 0.4% or 0.3% (though it would probably require letting our kids walk to school and accepting the scariness of not feeling like we are managing the risk to do so), but it is never going to be 0%.

That's not what we see all around us, though. What we see are "safety superstores" that sell us more products and gizmos for managing that 0.6% risk down further, horror stories on the news at night about a child who somehow undid the child-proofed latches on their tenth-storey apartment window and managed to climb over the balcony railings, all while the mother put a dirty cup in the sink (and the outraged callers afterwards: why was that mother putting a dirty cup in the sink? Couldn't she do that after the child went to bed?), advertising campaigns advising us that answering the doorbell means accepting the possibility that your child could climb into the clothes' dryer and suffocate (and if you want to make your blood boil, visit that page and click refresh a few times so you can see all of the ads). What we get is the message that we can and should manage the risk to zero, such as that mother whose two sons drowned last summer at a Conservation Area near Guelph while she watched on the beach: How dare she watch on the beach? many letter writers in newspapers wanted to know. Why wasn't she in the water with them? Didn't she know that you should never be out of arm's reach of your swimming children? Clearly the letter-writers believed that it was possible to manage the risk to zero; and since something had happened to the children, it must therefore mean that their parents had not been vigilant enough, had not managed the risk.

It sucks, because it means we live out our lives as parents as a kind of hyperactive due diligence exercise.

"Due diligence" is a legal standard in the environmental field (and other fields as well; this is just the one I'm familiar with). It means what a reasonable and well-informed person would reasonably have done in a certain situation. The environmental field is not without risks, and being in the field carries the innate risk that you one day may have your ass hauled into court by people saying they got sick because of something you did or didn't do. There was contamination you should have known about and cleaned up, or there was a spill you didn't inform them about. And now they're sick. You can't do everything, you can't know everything, so it's always a possibility: and so as a professional environmentalist, you are always asking yourself, have I done everything that a reasonable person would have done in these circumstances? You want to be able to answer yes, just in case. In fact, a tremendous number of conversations in my office revolve around determining what the standard of due diligence is in any given situation. We live a great part of our professional lives in front of an imaginary court, and try to conduct ourselves professionally so as to be able to claim that we did everything we could reasonably have been expected to do.

As parents, it seems we are also living much of our lives in front of these imaginary courts; we live to be able to defend ourselves to the jury: "I did everything I could do." Only we've taken out "reasonable." We (and the imaginary jury) mean not just everything a reasonable person would do, but everything physically possible that could be done. Anything less and we sense, rightly, that we open ourselves up to judgement if--god forbid--anything should happen to our children.

So we pad our furniture with styrofoam, make our kids wear helmets to the park, stand underneath the monkeybars saying "I'm just here to catch you if you fall, honey," shadow their first trips around the block 'by themselves,' drive them to school 'just in case,' write articles about bolting televisions to tabletops and welding our windows shut, and not letting our children out the front door or out of our eyesight even though we need it because the fraction of the 0.6% chance that actually represents the dangers to our children is perceived as too great. (Remember that the 0.6% mortality rate for children under five represents death from all causes, not just preventable deaths or deaths from injury or accident or foul play.) We act like crazy people, as if any risk at all is too great, and thereby actually increase the risks because what we're doing feels safer even though it isn't. We teach our kids this crazy way of dealing with risk, and turn them into housebound couch potatoes, doing them far more damage than if we and they could accept that a baseline level of risk is a part of being alive.

I'm not advocating that we ignore risk; but that we try to deal with it reasonably. And everyone's definition of what's reasonable is going to be different. That's ok. Car seats are a good example: cars are dangerous, car accidents are dangerous, so as a society we've decided to take the reasonable precaution of using child seats to reduce the risks of driving. But a lot of what we do today around child safety and risk (and many of the messages we receive, as per that atrocious campaign I linked to) are more like putting the car on blocks and hiding in the basement with the windows blacked out.

"Stranger danger" is a good example: we teach our kids to be afraid of everyone they don't know, even though if they are going to be hurt it will almost always be by someone they do know, and even though the overwhelming majority of strangers will be good people. Instead what we should be doing is teaching them about particular situations, and signs that someone can't be trusted, and how to respond to particular requests, and what to do if they get lost. We should, in other words, be teaching them intelligent ways to reduce the risk without driving them crazy with unreasonable fears in a futile attempt to manage the risk to zero. (I met my first fiance, by the way, by flagrantly ignoring advice about strangers and climbing into the truck of a 21-year-old German guy who didn't speak English when I was a 17-year-old foreign exchange student who didn't speak German. And I'm glad I did. Aren't many of your best stories and adventures of times when you took a risk?).

It's safer now to let your kids outside to the park to play all day than it was when we were growing up. The playgrounds have stricter construction and materials standards and there are rules for inspecting and maintaining them regularly by Parks staff. The overall crime rate is lower. People are more aware of bullying. We have sunblock. There are cell phones everywhere.

But it feels so much more dangerous. Why? Because we know about the ozone layer, and smog, and heatstroke. Because we know about bullies and pedophiles and perverts. Because we heard about that one park in Burlington where some assholes glued broken glass to a slide, and even though no one got hurt, we now feel like we have to look at the slides before our children use them, just in case. Because we don't know who our neighbours are anymore. Because we've been told that it's an unacceptable risk to answer the phone when we are caring for our children. Because we feel like we can keep our kids safe, and like we should. And what we know feels safe: keeping our kids inside watching TV, where we can see them, feels safe; but it's not. It is a real activity with real risks to physical, mental, and emotional health, that can compromise their self-esteem and their development of skills and capabilities. These risks are almost certain (unless you sign yourself up for the crazy train of daily lessons and clasess in different sports and activities to avoid it, and that too carries risks and consequences), and they are lifelong.

What's tragic is that too many parents have literally no choice--they live in neighbourhoods without yards or safe parks or outdoor play spaces. The solution is not always or even mostly an individual one: we can't will away our current culture or the legacy of decades of urban planning that made a mess of the most disadvantaged areas of our cities. But I do not believe the answer is to accept that our children should be virtual prisoners in their own homes until they are old enough to have a home of their own. Our actions, individually and collectively, to keep our kids safe, are making them sick. It has to change.

(I actually read Silken Laumann's book over the weekend, and another one on a similar topic; so this is going to turn into one of my trademark multi-post extravaganzas. Lucky you!)

Posted by Andrea at 10:38 AM | Comments (13) | TrackBack

Milestones and Normal

If you're anything like me, the pages in your several child-rearing manuals that detail normal developmental milestones show signs of frequent reading--coffee or tea stains, smudged print and the ability to fall open to that page if you drop the book from a tenth-storey window.

This is one of those subjects I don't normally discuss around moms of normal kids, because when I do, the response is usually something like: "Yes! Why, little Joanna didn't crawl until she was 10 months! I just freaked right out." Or, "Tommy didn't walk until he was thirteen months old! I brought him to the pediatrician and he refused to do anything, can you imagine?" Or, "You're sooooooo lucky it took Frances so long to walk. It's exhausting to care for a walking toddler." And I gotta tell you, my heart is not bleeding in sympathy.

Frances rolled front to back right on time, around four months; thereafter she became progressively lazier with her milestones: rolling the other way many months later, crawling just past twelve months, walking at nineteen. She spent the great portion of her first year on this planet content to lie on her back, feet kicking in the air, grinning dizzily. "What's the rush?" she seemed to ask. "Look how happy I am!"

What's the rush? What's the rush? The rush is that if you're not crawling by your first birthday, kiddo, the doctor's going to think there's something wrong with you, and haven't we had enough of that already? A statement which, for the curious among you, I shared with frequently and sometimes in a tone of voice that bordered panic. "Don't roll onto your back!" I would plead with her. "Stay on your tummy. Look at this great toy! See this great toy? Come on, come get it!" Then she'd roll onto her back and ask for it with an outstretched hand.

I don't recommend this approach, if you can avoid it. I spent a lot of time scared, Frances spent a lot of time with a scared lady, and in the end she still learned to crawl and walk and talk on her own schedule.

But, as you all already know, I research everything I'm interested in to within an inch of its inarticulate cogitative life, and this was no exception: Those milestone charts. What are they worth, exactly?

Well, you can rip them out of the book and use them as toilet paper, if you're desperate, but the paper quality doesn't really lend itself. The last thing they can be used for is assessing milestones, and here's why:

1. There is a huge variation in the range of normal, and that range is not given.

2. Not meeting one or two milestones is not a problem in and of itself, only an indication that there is a slightly increased risk of a problem.

3. Developmental milestones have nothing to do with intelligence.

4. Developmental milestones have a lot to do with temperament.

Normal Variation

If you look at the chart, you'll see that most babies start purposefully reaching for objects around five months. Technically, this is almost true: what they should say is that the average baby, the 50th percentile baby, will start reaching for objects around five months. What they do not say is that the 5th percentile baby will start reaching for objects around three months, and the 95th percentile baby will start reaching for objects around seven months, and anything within that range is normal. The same can be said for each of the milestones: The average baby begins crawling at ten or eleven months. But the fifth percentile baby will start at seven months, and the 95th percentile baby won't get around to it until after their first birthday, and anything within this range is normal. In exactly the same way that anything between 17 lbs and 25 lbs (or whatever the upper end is--I've never looked at that portion of the growth chart) is normal for a one-year-old. There is no cause for concern.

Risk

So what happens if your baby is meeting a milestone outside of this broad range of "normal"? Nothing much, probably; it is not a diagnosis, only a screening mechanism. In the same way that most of the babies below the fifth percentile on the growth charts are just fine, most of the babies above the 95th percentile on the development charts are also just fine. A very small proportion of them will have some problem, a symptom of which is developing on the slow side. It's just like those screening tests when you were pregnant, the ones where "high risk" was defined as a chance above 1/270.

That's why the books (they usually get this part right) will say that being slow in one or two areas doesn't mean anything, but being slow in many or all of them--or learning a skill and then forgetting it--is more of a cause for concern. What's unfortunate is that, because they've left out the range of normal, they give the impression that walking at 13 months is slow--it's not. Walking at eighteen months is slow.

Intelligence

In What is Going on in There? I came across the only statistic I've ever seen that ties developmental milestone achievement to intelligence. And the correlation is: 20%, when comparing babies who develop within the normal range. Which is mathematically the same as saying that there is no correlation, and the baby who walks at 18 months has as much of a chance at winning the Nobel Prize as the one who walks at nine months.

Furthermore, early intervention services have not proved themselves to be effective. Oh, they can teach your kid to meet their next milestone, all right; but if you compare a group of children who received the services with a group of children who did not, all of whom started off at the same place, by the age of three they're equal. No long-term benefits have been demonstrated.

She described, in some detail, how it is that milestones are reached and why, and it all has to do with wiring up the brain. As you probably already know, when babies are born their brains are a soft grey pudding with remarkably few functioning connections; the brain wires itself up over the first few years, starting at the back near the brainstem and working towards the frontal cortex. (This is why the first few years are so critical to a child's development and have such lifelong impacts: the brain wires itself up in part as a response to early environmental cues, and that wiring can't be undone.) A baby is not capable of learning a skill involving a particular body part before the portion of the brain controlling that body part is wired up to the rest. As it turns out, the portions of the brain controlling the head, face and trunk are closer to the base of the brain than the portions controlling the arms and legs, which is why development occurs in the stepwise fashion it does.

But the thing to keep in mind is that the speed of this wiring up says nothing about the quality of the brain that will result, or its eventual intelligence. Kids don't learn to walk fast or slow because they're smart or stupid: they learn to walk fast or slow because the portion of their brain that controls their legs is wired into the rest either quickly or slowly.

Temperament

In that very same book (one I highly, highly recommend to any parent interested in or concerned about development) the author describes some studies where temperament could be described as soon as nine days after birth. Even by that early age, characteristics such as easy-goingness, high-strungness, adaptability, and so forth (and I'm sure you're all gaping at the beauty of my technical terminology) are already apparent, and show little signs of changing over the rest of one's life.

And, of course, temperament influences development as it influences everything else. A child who needs to be independent and do things on their own is going to be highly motivated to use those new neurons and synapses as soon as they become available. A child who is easy-going and content to be cared for may not.

~~~~~

None of this helped, did it?

If it did, you are a more rational person than I was: I knew all of this, and I still panicked, because of that microscopic increase in the risk of something being wrong. Nineteen months is a long time to wait for a child to walk, and it's a long time to listen to other mothers say, "You're so lucky she isn't walking yet!" (Something I'll come back to.) Other mothers reading this whose children have taken longer to walk are probably sitting there wishing it had taken only nineteen months. Child development is a crazy thing; even when we know it doesn't really mean anything, we want it to happen quickly just so we can be reassured that nothing's wrong.

So you're still worried, I expect. But I'm going to tell you what I learned anyway. Frances took nineteen months to walk because:

1. She's got small legs and a big head. As any parent of a child whose body proportions are different than average can tell you, it complicates the coordination of basic tasks.

2. Her brain probably wired itself up that way, but given her many examples of smarts, it can hardly be said that there's anything wrong with it (something I found much more reassuring after she learned to walk).

3. She's an extremely easy-going little girl who enjoys being cared for. And this has turned out to be nothing but a blessing: that trait that caused me so much panic and grief during her first year (and entirely my fault to boot) is what has made her toddler years such an unalloyed pleasure. She is ok with sitting in the carseat for an hour in traffic; she likes to cuddle; she can go up and down the stairs herself but if we are in a rush she doesn't mind if I carry her; she'll eat just about anything we put on her table; we can still change her diaper lying down on the change table; we've had no temper tantrums, no fits, no epic monumental displays of frustration when her ability to do something is outstripped by her interest. A baby who was more determined to walk would not be such an adaptable and easy-going toddler.

Things brings me back to "You're so lucky she isn't walking yet!" which, just in case you've ever been so unfortunate as to ever say this to another mother, I'd like to caution you on ("you" in the general sense, Dear Reader).

A mother with a child who is not meeting developmental milestones is sick with worry and envious of your baby's early development, so just don't say it. That's the first thing.

The other is that if their child is meeting those milestones slowly because of temperament, then it isn't going to matter when that kid learns to walk, they will still be easy to care for. Walking does not make for difficulty.

Last summer my in-laws came to town with Frances's cousins, as some of you may remember; you may also remember the catatonic shock those two quite large, demanding and wilful little boys put me in for days afterward. The younger one (whom I nicknamed Bruiser Boy) is very big for his age, not much given to paying his parents any attention and interested in everything; so at one point, I was shoving all the knives back from the edge of the counter because he was going after them. BIL laughed and said, "Just you wait! Frances will be like that soon."

I thought, but did not say, "No, she won't."

And it's true. She isn't. She just isn't. Being a wilful and demanding and tantrum-throwing toddler is not inevitable, but not because of parenting (IMO), because of temperament. Frances just isn't like that. She's not always after the next new thing, she's not demanding, she doesn't need to do things for herself, she isn't drawn to what she isn't supposed to have or do.

It makes her a dream of a toddler. The difficult moments are so rare with her.

It also meant it took her a long time to learn how to walk.

If that's the terms of the trade, I'll take it; and you, if you are so fortunate as to have a baby like Frances was, who develops a bit slower than average seemingly because they can't be bothered to go any faster, take heart. You get the best of both worlds: A child who is bright and inquisitive and easy. It just takes a little longer for their lights to shine.

Posted by Andrea at 7:43 AM | Comments (14) | TrackBack

Mom and Pop, Part IV: Daycare (Also known as: The End)

I'm going to wrap this series up now because there are several other posts half-baked that want to be published, and if I do them first this one will never get out there.

Recently here in Canada, there has been a fierce debate over daycare: should we have a state subsidized daycare system that has good standards and relatively low costs for families, or should we give money to parents to use as they see fit and trust that they will use it towards childcare if needed, or reducing the cost of staying home?

The Daycare side marshalls evidence: more mothers of young children are working than ever before; more of their children are spending time in daycare; we need to make sure that daycare is of high quality and is affordable to safeguard the next generation and improve Canadian society in the generations to come.

The "Choice" side marshalls evidence: mothers are working, but not by choice; many of these mothers are working part-time; many of the children of working mothers are not in institutional daycares; besides daycare has never been proven to benefit anyone (I didn't say it was rational or sound evidence, but that's the best they've come up with).

Something huge is missing here, don't you think?

Niether side has bothered to ask parents what they want.

The Daycare side has never bothered to ask whether all those working mothers are there because they want to be; and if they are not, what they would prefer to do instead. They never raise the fact that a tremendous number of them are working part-time, that the number of mothers of preschool children working full time is not even half. They've never bothered to ask if institutional daycare is what those families prefer for their children, or simply the best of what was available. (This last could go both ways: I imagine many families of children in home or unlicensed daycares would probably prefer the institutional kinds, if only they weren't so expensive--but still, they've never bothered to ask.)

The "Choice" side (and I put it in scare quotes because a good number of them are amazingly transparent in their desire to put mothers back at home en masse) has also never bothered to ask if women want to be at home, if the women at home might work if they could afford childcare. They've never bothered to ask families of children being cared for by relatives or in unlicensed settings whether they chose that, or if it simply was the best of the options available to them. And apparently they've never bothered to read the substantial scientific literature showing cognitive advantages of high-quality daycares.

They are fighting pitched battles over a constituency that they've never bothered to consult. Mothers want this! Mothers want that! Fathers want this! Fathers want that! Based on what, exactly? Where is the study saying that 80% of Canadian families would put their children into a licensed institutional daycare if an affordable spot were available? Where is the study saying that people not using licensed institutional daycares wouldn't even if they could afford it, so strengthening and subsidizing them is an unfair infringement of their "free choice"?

There aren't any. They don't exist.

Neither side actually cares about what families want, about what parents want. They have their own agendas and this whole childcare debate is a front. Some of them want every available person in the workforce, to boost taxes and increase household incomes and consumption levels and keep downward pressures on wages; it's great for the economy. Some of them want a return to a mythologized past of Happy Nuclear Families, a return to Father Knows Best where women have little control over their own lives and few resources. Some of them want what they believe is a high-quality early learning system to increase future productivity and lessen other social ills, like poverty and crime. Some of them want government minimized in this sphere because they want government minimized, period. But all of them disguise these intentions in a cloak of discourse of "what mothers want" and not a one of them has ever bothered to ask mothers what they want.

So given that the people paid to represent us and our interests are failing spectacularly in their intent and ability to do so, I think it is a good first step to ask ourselves: What do we want?

What would choice look like to you? What would you need to be able to do what you want to do?

Forget about what's available in your community--pretend right down the street there is a fabulous licensed daycare on one side that is affordable and has full-time, part-time, evening and weekend spots. And on the other side of the street is a home day care with a wonderful caregiver and a great, safe home that is also affordable and has full-time, part-time, evening and weekend spots. And your parents or your in-laws parents live close by and are people you might want to leave your child with. You can also have the world's most perfect in-home babysitter or nanny who, again, is affordable and available at exactly the hours you require.

Pretend you could easily get exactly the job you want by next Wednesday--full-time, part-time, regular hours or shifts, days or evenings, weekends or weekdays.

Pretend that there is a government program in place which would make it financially feasible to stay home. Pretend that if you did stay home, you would continue to build up some sort of financial credits you could use in retirement. Pretend that unpaid work in the home is a valued part of our national economy. Don't worry about the details; it just is for the next few hours.

Pretend that your partner, if you have one, is in complete agreement and total support of all of your goals and desires, and has goals and desires him or herself too that you support. Pretend that you have the partnership you want. Go crazy. Ten women living together? A marriage of five, three guys and two girls? All by yourself with a weekend lover? Lifelong monogamy with one? What would make you happy?

What would it look like? What would you do?

This is completely make-believe. We live in a perfect country and a perfect town or city and we can have exactly what we want. So--what do we want? What do you want?

What kind of work would you want your partner to do, if you have one? What kinds of hours? How much time would they spend with the kids? Doing what? Would they stay home while you worked?

Would you work for pay? What kind of hours? What supports would you need from your workplace to be the kind of parent you want to be?

Would your children spend time being cared for by someone else? Who? When? What is your dream care situation?

How many children would you have? How would they be spaced?

How much time would you want by yourself, with your friends, with your partner, with your child, with your work?

~~~~~

We pay our government to do this, but they don't. They take whatever information is easily available and use it to construct tremendous edifices out of sand and air: More mothers are working and some of their children are in daycare, so that must be what mothers want! Or conversely, many mothers work only part-time and some stay home and many of their children are not being cared for in daycares, so that must be what mothers want! We mothers (and fathers) know this is bullshit. But our lovely "leaders" either do not know or do not care.

If we want there to be improvements, it is going to be up to us. And the first step, before anything else will happen, is to know what we want. Don't be limited by current realities, because as soon as you are you fall right back into the traps our politicians are currently spinning their wheels in.

First question: What do we want?

And only after we know that: How do we get there?

I've already moaned and bitched a lot about what I would like for myself: the ability to work three days per week for the next several years, without losing the house. If Erik continued on a compressed schedule so he had a day off every two weeks, that would be fine--it would be just enough flexibility so we could work in some alone time for ourselves in amongst the child care. I'd like to be able to work from home a few days a month, to reduce commuting time and costs; I'd like to spend some of my non-career time in paid writing gigs to build up a secondary career in that field.

I'd like my kids to be in a small daycare setting while Erik and I both work, either a licensed centre or a licensed home-based caregiver. I don't care which, as long as it's not too big and has good resources and a good caregiver:child ratio. It would be great if there were some flexibility, if I could sign up for a part-time spot and there were a way to get an extra day here or there if work demands require it. Otherwise it would be good to have a back-up babysitter or other childcare option that could provide short-term emergency childcare in those situations.

I'd like to have the option of an afternoon to myself every week, even if I wouldn't normally use it.

In terms of work environment, what I have is already pretty ideal--5 paid days off every year to care for sick kids, the ability to work from home on occasion, flexible hours, compressed workweek schedules, and so on--so I'll leave that alone.

~~~~~

(I did a lot of this in my university undergrad, where it was called "backcasting." The idea then was that you spent some time imagining the perfectly ecological society, in balance with non-human nature and all human needs met. You described it as well as you could; you determined the differences between the dream and the reality; and then you plotted the steps necessary to transition from one to the other. Of course, in real life it would never actually work out the way you'd planned, but that wasn't the point. The point was that if you didn't at least sit down and consider what you really wanted first, what "perfect" looked like, you didn't have a hope in hell of even getting close and in fact you would probably make things worse. First is the goal or the dream; THEN comes the plan. Over and over. Because as soon as you have the plan and implement part of it, a problem with it will present itself, and you will need to correct. But if you don't have the dream or the goal in mind, you can't plan; you can't implement; and you can't correct.

I should add, too, that it's perfectly ok to have more than one dream in a society. We don't all need to agree. And in fact if we wait until that happens before we do anything, then we'll never get anywhere at all.)

Posted by Andrea at 8:26 AM | Comments (15) | TrackBack

Mom and Pop, Part III: Isolation

(Continued from yesterday.)

The saving grace of the nuclear family in history was the extended family that surrounded it, the dense webs of female relationships that allowed women to bear and raise children in conditions of such privation. A woman was surrounded by sisters, cousins, aunts, mothers, grandmothers, nieces and daughters from birth to death. She had a huge community to count on to make it through her difficulties. (Note: I realize I am leaving out the thousands or millions of women who historically were slaves in more than the marital sense, and who had these relationships ruptured time and time again. The history I am describing is not universal; it is a very broad outline of how it was for many women, but not all.)

Then along came the Industrial Revolution, which chewed the extended family to bits and spat out its bloody remains; and it's only become worse since then.

An extended family, a community deeply rooted in one geographic place, is anathema to a modern economy, which demands that workers be able and willing to relocate for their jobs. People move for work, on average once every few years. One's extended family of origin is often hundreds or thousands of kilometres away, and not much use for childrearing; it takes time to build a non-familial local community to replace it, time that many nuclear families don't have because they move so often, and because they can't know for sure that they won't soon move again.

It's funny, because the modern economy benefits from those extended families. The services that used to be provided by extended family members for free (child care, cooking, cleaning, and so on) now must be paid for on the market, which raises worker salaries hugely. In fact, a book from ten years ago (The Judas Economy) documented how the global economy, in taking advantage of relatively inexpensive middle-class salaries in countries which still have those extended family networks (eg. China and India) is, in the process, destroying them, so that the middle-class salaries will rise and the modern global economy will once again have to either shell out more money or find yet another place where they are still intact.

But once again, Kateri's longing for a world in which we are surrounded by other women is anything but odd. That's exactly where we would be, in fact, if it were 500 years ago. Oh, men would be there too; but they wouldn't be any help and no one would expect them to be. Women would do all the heavy lifting: but they wouldn't be doing it alone.

This is precisely the situation that many modern women find themselves in because of the isolation of the modern nuclear family. If you have a good partner with a job that allows him to be present, you are blessed with an extra set of hands to lessen the work. But if your partner is absent, whether by choice or by necessity (or both), there is no one else.

I am blessed with a partner who believes in equality; but it did me little good in Frances's early days, when he still worked shifts. He worked twelve hour day shifts for two days, meaning a return at 8:00 at night; then he had two days off to prepare for his two twelve-hour night shifts, when he was absent even when he was there. He literally was not there at nights; and then during the day he was trying to sleep. He would then have a few days off to recover from the night shifts (if you've never worked shifts, this might not sound too hard; but I have, and night shifts are terrible. It would take me a week for my sleep schedule to return to normal after night shifts; of course, I only had two days). And then there were the occasional mandatory overtimes, for people who had called in sick, or who had scheduled vacation. The extra money was nice but it left me on my own for unbearable stretches of time with a premature reflux infant who could not be put down. All of his family lives hours away by car, as does my brother, and my parents (who do live nearby) are in upper management themselves and not available to help during the week. It was a bad time. For months I ate only one meal a day whenever Erik was at work or asleep, which was most of each week.

I cannot imagine how much worse it would have been if Erik had believed that Frances was my job, that he was not required to do his share of the parenting and I should not expect it. Or if he had travelled for long stretches.

Human beings did not evolve to parent their young in isolation. All of the available evidence demonstrates the opposite--that it was the presence of helping hands in a child's early months and years which allowed us to become a species with such a protracted period of dependence, and which in turn led to our remarkable achievements as a species. Without the aunts and grandmothers, the sisters and cousins, around to help a mother out, there might be no homo sapiens as we know it.

It should be the opposite of surprising that so many mothers, parenting in isolation, end up depressed. We are like lions in a little cage in a zoo, entirely out of place, a million miles away from our natural habitat. No wonder we pace, and go mad, and cry.

~~~~~

None of this helps us today, unfortunately. I cannot see how extended families could ever reform in a socially useful way on the economic terrain that we've built. You need to be able to stay somewhere for a few generations. You need to be able to put down roots. You need to know that your children and their children will be able to put down roots, that they won't need to leave to chase a good job in an industry with a future. Can we ever have that?

So we need, somehow, to replace it. And there I'm much more hopeful, because if there's one things humans have going for them that most other animal species don't, it's cultural evolution. We can be remarkably inventive in adapting our rickety biology to environments utterly unlike the ones we evolved in. We may never again have extended female kin networks around to help women become mothers; but that doesn't mean we can't have something to fill that gap. Only it will be up to us to create it.

Posted by Andrea at 7:23 AM | Comments (9)

Mom and Pop, Part II: Patriarchy

There were a few threads in the discussion from the last post that I wanted to pick up and take a bit further:

1. Kateri of Wet Feet's discussion of the problems of the traditional nuclear family.

2. Emmie of All This's point about how nuclear families are isolated.

3. The utility of determining what it is we want.

And I don't even know where to start. So I think I will take the chesire cat's advice: begin at the beginning, go to the end, then stop.

Unfortunately, the beginning is a hell of a long time ago, so this could take a while.

~~~~~

I can't remember whether I initially read this in Guns, Germs and Steel or A Short History of Nearly Everything, but in one of them, the author makes the claim that because human infants are born frail and dependent, OF COURSE, there must have been nuclear families so that the mothers of new babies could be fed and taken care of.

Of course!

It's just like the 1950s never ended, isn't it?

It's too bad that the Prehistoric Nuclear Family Hypothesis has absolutely no evidence to support it, and a fair bit of evidence to contradict it, including the interesting fact that in existing hunter-gatherer societies, men give a miniscule proportion of their hunts to their potential children and the mothers of those children. Social structures dictate who gets what cut of meat; and the purpose those structures serve is to enhance the hunter's reputation and status, so the largest and choicest portions of meat go to people distant, biologically speaking, from the hunter in question. There is no reason to believe that prehistoric groups would have been any different; so most likely, a hunter's caloric contribution to his children's survival would have been slim to none.

In fact, the whole practice of hunting in existing hunter-gatherer societies is entirely suspect from a survival point of view. It brings in a fraction of the calories brought in by gathering, which is typically done by women, and what hunting does bring in is only a fraction again of what it could bring in, if it were done with some sense. The vast majority of hunters spend tremendous time and effort in bringing down big game that could not possibly all be eaten or preserved before it rotted, resulting in far less edible meat than they could get if they devoted the same time and resources to trapping rabbits or other small animals. The enterprise of hunting turns out to have much more to do with status and reputation than food: the men involved dedicate all this time to normally unsuccessful and typical not very useful hunts of large and dangerous animals because it makes them look like better hunters and braver men, thus enhancing their ability to father more children with more women. They specifically choose NOT to provision or protect the children that they may already have.

And if this sounds like it could be taken right from a modern-day newspaper's rant on the demise of the nuclear family, perhaps this should tell us that the modern-day equivalent of this (men pursuing status-building activities with abandon to the detriment of their existing progeny in order to enhance future progeny-making opportunities, such as sports or music or most high-status careers) may have a lot more to do with biology than with feminism, which is where I've usually seen the fault laid. In fact, the truly amazing story may be the extent to which we've been able to mitigate this, how many fathers today choose to go out and bag rabbits to feed their children instead of chasing mastadons to impress the pretty young childless things in their skimpy skin bikinis.

(An aside: If you are a pretty young childless thing in a skimpy skin bikini and you are evaluating men for the potential to be life-partners and good fathers who believe in sharing the work of parenting, avoid the one who chases mastadons and go for the guy who's ok with spending his days bagging rabbits.)

(A further aside: There are, as always, exceptions. If there weren't, then we wouldn't have any rabbit-baggers. I'm not sure if I've ever seen a numeric or proportional comparison of the numbers of mastadon-chasers and rabbit-baggers, only that the former outnumber the latter in hunter-gatherer societies and so form the basis of hunting practices and social expectations around them.)

It is true that newborn babies were helpless and it restricted their mothers' abilities to gather food for themselves and maintain the milk supply, so how did that work?

My favourite hypothesis? Grandmothers.

Yes, grandmothers. Think about it: Why do women live so long past menopause? Or alternatively, why don't we keep our reproductive capacity until death, the way men do? Our ovaries kick out at about the age of 50, but our hearts keep going until 75 or 80. What's that all about? Other animal species, even other primate species, have ovaries that die when they do. Men don't stop producing sperm before they die. There is simply no Darwinian point to staying alive when you can no longer have babies.

Unless staying alive those extra decades allows you to collect enough calories to make a decisive difference in the survival chances of your offspring, which it does, since women do give food in excess of their own caloric needs to their children, unlike men who prehistorically would not have known who their children were (I would like to point out particularly that in the study I linked to, it is maternal relatives who make the difference in infant survival rates--the presence of a paternal grandmother makes no difference to a child's survival). Studies have confirmed that while a grandmother's contribution would not have made a difference in times of plenty, in times of famine it would have made the difference between survival and death for human immatures.

In fact, some researchers argue that maternal grandmothers made the human species; that it was their contribution to the survival of human immatures that allowed the later maturing and slower cognitive development required for a truly creative and intellectual animal species.

So Kateri's model of women living together and helping each other out has a long and storied past, considerably longer and more storied than the Nuclear Family, which is only a few millennia old. In fact, if one wants to be inconvenient and scientific, one could even argue that it is more natural for women to live in that way than it is for us to live in nuclear families (not that I would make such an argument, oh no, when I spend so much of my time arguing that anything a human being does is by definition natural. But I would say that such a living arrangement is at least equally natural).

~~~~~

Fast forward a few eons, to the dawn of Patriarchy.

How exactly did this institution come to pass? Beats me. Unless you believe that we descended from the trees already convinced of our inequality, it must have come from somewhere. Some theorists argue that it originated in the desire of men to know who their children were which, in the vast eras before the advent of DNA tests, could only be done if men owned women. If that is the case, then you can see in those distant millennia the origin of the modern phenomenon of "My feelings matter more than your rights!" However, from what I understand, this idea is heavily contested.

Wherever patriarchy come from, it is a puzzle. It is not universal amongst primates; the titi monkey, for instance, is known for lifelong pair-bonding and a family in which the female slavishly dotes on the male while he takes care of the children, except to nurse. They remind me of Ayelet Waldman and her infamous essay.

Bonobos are matriarchal and take non-reproductive mating and sexual activity to heights which humans can only dream of (or perhaps not, since incest is a feature of it). Really, among our closest relatives, only chimps come close to human patterns of male dominance--but in that species, males are 50% larger than females, rather than our own comparatively meager 10-20% difference. And chimp males still do not dominate females in the way that human males do. While chimp males like to think they control a territory and have exclusive rights to determine who sleeps with who, in fact, chimp females are notoriously promiscuous and will risk their lives to leave the troupe near estrus to mate with males outside the territory. Furthermore, chimp males don't control a territory's resources, so a chimp female is never dependent on any male for access to food for herself or her children.

We are, in many ways, less socially progressive than chimpanzees. Kind of takes the fun out of being human, doesn't it?

But however it got here, the Nuclear Family is surely patriarchy's greatest defender in our modern society. It provides men with as close to a guarantee as possible about paternity; it allows them to patrol and police women's sexuality and penalize any that threaten paternity (a right that historically has gone only one way); and its historical structure which is changing only slowly also gave them control of the entire family's financial resources and ultimate decision-making authority for anything that any family member might want to do.

Today we've masked this ancient tradition of female slavery with a gloss of romance; but female bondage was its purpose and its effect. Women were owned by men, sold by men, forced to do work by men, the products of their labours owned by men; the children were considered to be solely the man's and if the marriage dissolved he had custody; sometimes the mother would never again see her children. Men could have their wives committed to a mental institution for just about any behaviour they didn't like.

Female suffrage and the right for women to be educated, have employment, own their own assets after marriage including their own employment income, not be abused or raped by a spouse, and in general to be considered adult human beings, is exactly why marriage and family today are considered institutions of romance and love. I think it's remarkable the way in which we've actually been able to effect such a change, turning something with such a terrible history into something which can actually be good for many people; but slavery is where it started.

(I decided to take pity on all of you and publish the post in three parts, which will end up posted sometime over the next week. Believe me, it's better this way.)

Posted by Andrea at 2:22 PM | Comments (5)

Mom & Pop

Last June, my husband and I both signed up for compressed work weeks at our respective work places, where we would work an extra fifty minutes per day and take an extra day off every two weeks. We arranged it so that we had our days off in alternate weeks, and agreed that most of the time Frances would stay home with us, thus reducing her time in daycare (from 40 hours a week to 36 hours a week--not a great difference, but something).

Only it didn't work out that way. Frances almost always ended up in daycare on Erik's days off, and usually for the whole day--I had to cajole him into dropping her off even an hour or two later than the normal 7:00 am time, and then I picked her up myself at 4:20. I treasured picking her up, but it really bothered me that a scheme which was to reduce the time she spends in daycare became one in which instead she spent considerably more time in care overall.

Every two weeks, the day before Erik's day off, we would discuss it. I would remind him that she was supposed to stay home at least sometimes. I would remind him of the last time she had done so on his day off (usually months in the past). I would ask him what his plans were. He'd say he was going to bring her in. I'd ask if he could at least bring her in a few hours later. He'd say that if he waited much past 8 the traffic would be too bad. I'd point out that if he waited until 11 the traffic would be great. He'd bring her in for 8.

We ended up needing to have a fight about it. I had to yell and scream and cry before he actually began to hold to our agreement. "You have a week of annual leave left unused. Take one of those days for yourself and let Frances stay home with you. The point of compressed days was NOT for her to pay the price for your time off!"

Before we had Frances, I could not have envisioned this conversation.

I personally believe that men and women are so much more alike than different that it does not make much sense to talk about the differences. That there are differences apparent today seems obvious; but how much of them are the result of socialization vs. biology is an open question.

Motherhood has knocked some of that out of me.

.

The difficulty with talking about differences between the sexes is that too many people seem to imagine it so:

And so as soon as you start talking about differences between the sexes, it is too easy to descend into Mars and Venus and imagine the Other as an incomprehensible entity. Most studies of sex differences find something more like this:

Or even this:

The centre of the circle, or the average, is clearly different for each; but both centres are within the vast overlap area of "average," and for any trait there will be more difference within the sexes than between them. So, for instance, the average scores of women on math tests are far more similar to the average scores of men on math tests, than are the lowest and highest female math scores. Or that, while men tend to finish sprints faster and women tend to finish ultra-marathons faster, the fastest female sprinter is still a hell of a lot faster than the average male, and there is a lot more difference between the slowest and fastest male ultra-marathoners than there is between the average male and female ultra-marathoner. In this context it truly does not make much sense to talk about the differences between the sexes, because it doesn't tell you anything worthwhile: the averages are slightly different but you can't make any claims or assumptions about any individual person based on those averages, and you can't base public policy on them. Say, sports funding: you couldn't decide who deserves more money based on that venn diagram.

Before I had Frances, I frequently assumed that men and women could be equally nurturing and equal participants in parenting. I assumed that, in an ideal world, both parents would scale back their careers more or less equally and take on more or less equal shares of parenting, childcare and housework, on average--that different families would have different patterns but if you examined the whole you would see equality. I assumed that the reasons this didn't happen were almost entirely social and could be resolved through intelligent policy and a more equitable society.

I still believe that men and women can be equally nurturing and equal participants in parenting: I believe that we can make a lot more progress towards that than we have so far; but I'm not sure that I believe any more that quantitative equality is likely.

I miss Frances more than Erik does. Tremendously more. I resent every hour above the forty I've committed that I occasionally need to spend at work. I no longer want promotions or increased responsibility because it would take time away from Frances. It would never have occurred to me to bring Frances into daycare for a full day on every one of my days off, which was most of our problem: I kept thinking that if only I explained to Erik how much he was missing and how he could so easily just take her in even at 11 and get a block of hours for himself while also spending more time with her, that he would find it as attractive as I do. But he doesn't. He also doesn't want part-time work or a scaled-back career, not even a little bit. He enjoys his work. He has never spent hours at the computer doing and redoing the family budget looking for a way to reduce his hours so he can spend more time with her. It doesn't bother him when he has to go out of town on business overnight; he misses us, but not as much as I miss them when I have to go away.

He loves Frances. He's a wonderful, hands-on father who has a great bond with his little girl and who enjoys many of the daily repetitive tasks of parenting, and he does half the diaper changes and most of the endless loads of laundry. But he simply doesn't need or want as much time with her as I do. At least in the case of our relationship, it is not just socialization.

In Mother Nature by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy (yes, again! I know, but it's the only book I know of on the subject which is based on science and not speculation or wishful thinking), she too concludes that it is possible for men to be as nurturing as women--but that it takes a lot more work. That a man's biological threshold for involvement with children is set higher, on average. For instance, in one experiment, men and women sat and listened to two recordings of infant cries--one of a hungry infant, one of a male infant being circumcized. While both male and female subjects showed a strong response to the second recording (measured in terms of the release of stress hormones), only female subjects showed a strong response to the first. (p. 212) She also showed how the hormones of pregnancy and breastfeeding, and the intimacy created by nursing through the first year, further lowered that threshold for women so that they are predisposed to taking on a greater share of the nurturing and parenting work. She hypothesized that this makes perfect sense in an evolutionary context where men were never entirely sure which children were theirs, but women were.

"Just because the mother is more readily galvanized to respond to infant demands does not mean that fathers are not able to do so, or that they cannot become adequate caretakers, 'good enough' caretakers, or that baby primates cannot form primary attachments to a male. Rather, a seemingly inignificant difference in thresholds for responding to infant cues gradually, insidiously, step by step, without invoking a single other cause, produces a marked division of labor by sex." (212-213)

The danger in talking about this is that people will envision right away that first venn diagram of two separate and parallel circles, which puts us right back in the 1950s (if we're lucky) where women have sole and total childrearing responsibilities and men have none. When we presuppose that women want more work and men want more family (that is, when we envision one of the other two diagrams) I think we are very likely right; but when I read articles on policies designed to level the playing field it seems as though the authors are arguing for congruity, for a single purple circle, and I don't think we are ever going to get that; I don't think women or men on average want it.

When I was pregnant with Frances, I convinced Erik to take one month of the 12 for parental leave. I argued for two, but one was all I could get from him; I believed strongly enough in the concept of equality in parenting that this seemed the best thing to do. I wouldn't do it again. Erik enjoyed his month with Frances, but not as much as I missed it, not to mention the inconvenience of the pumping involved in maintaining the breastfeeding relationship to the magical 12 month mark. Next time, I would take the whole 12--maybe even a month or two more, if I could manage the money--I would find another way for Erik to get the time with the kids by himself he would need--and if I could manage the money, I would go back part-time. I found three days a week ideal when I was working on my Masters. It was enough time away from Frances working on my own thing that I enjoyed every moment I was with her.

If Erik and I had pursued the single purple circle, he would have taken six months off. I would have been pumping, then, for six months: I would have been exhausted and miserable and he would have missed work. We would both be planning to work part-time. Say, four days per week. Erik would bring Frances in to daycare on his weekday off, and I would still miss Frances. Neither of us would be happy. Hrdy argues that it is possible to make men into mothers--make them as nurturing of their children as women are--by making sure they have lots of time around their children and responsibility for caring for them. Proximity and opportunity are the keys. This is true. But if a baby is being breastfed--not breastmilkfed, but breastfed--for the first 12 months of the baby's life, this is simply not likely to happen.

When I read (largely from certain American feminists) that congruency, mathematical equality, is the only valid standard of an equitable world--I cringe, because I think it is precisely wrong and more likely to make women unhappy than happy. So what if we live in a world where 70% of elementary teachers are women and 70% of mechanics are men, as long as no one is penalized for being in the minority in either case and both professionals are adequately paid? (Note that I'm not saying that we live in that world yet: only that if we ended up in that world, it would not strike me as a failure of feminism.) So what if women are more interested in staying home with their kids either full- or part-time, as long as they are not financially penalized for doing so? Do we need to break the domestic glass ceiling and convince men that they want to spend more time at home than perhaps they really do so that women can spend more time at work than perhaps they have an inclination to? It's a truism that men, too, want to spend less time at work and more time with their families, and I believe that: but if for the average man that translates to a 40 hr/week job that is really 40 hr/week and for the average woman that means 25 hr/week, than pretending that we all really want the same thing seems disengenuous and possibly dangerous. Because it will only create a new set of expectations that people will feel chained to.

It also seems from reading many of these articles that people believe our world or social structure is unique in its ability to disrupt father-child attachments. I would argue rather that it is the opposite: historically, in what evolutionary biologists and psychologsts refer to as the EEA (era of evolutionary adaptation or adaptedness), fathers are likely to have had much less idea of which children were theirs and therefore much less inclination to be what we would consider today a "good father." Hrdy discusses this in the context of "hero fathering"--someone who descends once in a while, performs some feat of nurturing, and then reascends to a more distant place, a kind of fathering that is easy and relatively risk-free when you're not exactly sure if the kid is yours or not. Indeed, many such societies that still exist (as well as those we still have records for) show a disturbing pattern of infanticide--men killing infants they knew were not theirs in order to cause the mother to stop lactating, resume ovulating, and then impregnating her so they could get a kid by her that might be theirs (in fact, she argues that this is the reason that so many infants go through a developmental stage where they fear strange men). It was certainly not a world of good fathers, the world we evolved in. Hrdy hypothesizes that this environment probably favoured female promiscuity, since then many men would think they might be the father, and so both reluctant to kill her children and predisposed to make the occasional gesture towards provision. This model makes a lot more sense to me than the Prehistoric Nuclear Family, and it has more evidence, too.

If this is the case, we may be almost as close as we can get to good fathering, involved fathering, already, since so many of the environmental cues making bad fatherhood possible have already been addressed: modern men can know with certainty whether or not a child is theirs, and they can live in intimacy with the child's mother, giving them many opportunities to spend more time with the child, which is what would trigger the nurturing tendencies (apparently in hunter gatherer societies fathers spend about 2% of their time holding their newborns--a figure today that surely even relatively career-oriented fathers surpass). Hrdy argues that we could level the playing field completely by ensuring that men spend exactly as much time with their infants as the mothers do, when the mothers aren't around to interfere (and my limited experience with families where men spend a bulk of each week caring directly for their children while the mother works leads me to believe that this is indeed the case); but in order to make this a societal goal, we would need public policies to encourage or enforce women to get out of the house away from their kids while the father is home for twenty hours each week or so. Is this a good idea?

Natural variation will already make this a desirable goal for many families; but should we force families to do that who don't want to? If we don't, then the lower threshold for response of women and the greater opportunity they have for proximity to infants (on average) will continue to mean that mothers want to spend more time with their kids on average than fathers do. Breaking the domestic glass ceiling will only partially address this.

Did you know that studies have shown that money given to women in third world countries is more effective than to men? You have to give $7 to a man for every $1 given to a woman for the same social impact, because men will choose to spend such a low proportion of that money on their kids and families.

And maybe the equivalent scenario in first-world countries is the number of women who choose to sacrifice their career prospects and future financial security to spend more time with their kids. It's insulting to say that those women simply are unaware of how difficult it will be to reenter the workforce and how much more likely they are to be poor. Maybe they are not perfectly aware. Maybe they are, and still choose to do so, because they have performed a personal cost-benefit analysis and decided that those future risks are less costly than the pain or unhappiness they will experience at separation from their children. Maybe it has nothing to do with what's better for the kids. Maybe that's a justification for what's better for them.

Daphne de Marneffe spends most of her book, Maternal Desire, discussing exactly this issue:

"When the discussion of child care fails to recognize what it means to mothers to care for their own children and to relinquish that care, it misses the impact of maternal desire on the process of finding day care solutions. For the psychologist and day care advocate Sandra Scarr, for example, anything that interferes with women's equal participation in the workforce operates to the detriment of gender equality and women's interests. [ed: sound like another article you've read recently?] She rejects the advantages of family-friendly policies such as those in Sweden that 'help mothers to balance work and family life....' because they 'support maternal absences from the labor force' and thus have negative effects on women's careers. Scarr implies that such arrangements are put in place by outside forces that have nothing to do with women's own desires. 'Unequal child-care responsibiliites lead mothers to be less invested in career development and less motivated to maintain continuous, full-time employment,' she writes. These innocently declarative phrases, 'lead mothers to be less invested in career development' and 'less motivated to maintain continuous, full-time employment,' treat the mother as a completely pasive actor, somehow 'led' to certain courses of action by her 'unequal' time caring for children. Her own desire is entirely erased. There is no place to introduce into the equation the evidently less palatable possiblity that the mother may want to shoulder greater responsibility for her children's care."

It's hard to write about this without sounding like you're trying to draw universal conclusions. While I currently do believe that in an ideal world where everyone is free to follow their personal inclinations without economic or social penalty more women would still choose to spend more time with their kids, on average, this does not mean that all families would follow a husband-40hrs/wife-20hrs model, even if nuclear heterosexual families were universal (which they clearly are not). Even among heterosexual married couples, there would be tremendous variation, including a sizeable number of families with female breadwinners and male full-time parents or two parents working more than 40-hrs/week on jobs they love.

But this is where I think the danger lies:

If we tell ourselves--as certain American feminists have lately done--that our goal is congruency, is for men and women to spend identical numbers of hours in identical tasks, then we are off the hook for validating at-home work because the risk is supposedly shared. If everyone has paid work and no one is solely responsible for unpaid work at home, then there's no reason to remove the economic and social penalties for doing unpaid work at home. Which has the effect of reducing women's (and men's) choices rather than expanding them. This is in fact exactly what some of them have argued for, most recently in that Newsweek article where the authors concluded that because there were fewer women in upper management positions in Europe, Europe's family friendly policies must be to blame and therefore they must be anti-feminist. A humane policy would require an acknowledgement that some people prefer to do unpaid work in the home, that not all of us are equal in our desires, and so the economic and social penalties of unpaid work at home need to be eliminated.

Why did we decide that gender parity is the goal, anyway? Why is 50% across the board representation in everything the holy grail? Does it make sense? If we eliminate socialization will such a world result?

I'm inclined now to believe that there will always be more women than men who want to spend as much time as they can afford with their children, and who are willing to make a larger personal and financial sacrifice to do so. Maybe that's ok. And maybe family-friendly policies are the most feminist thing to do because they enable a woman to make that choice without making such a sacrifice.

If I had lived in a country where there were only six weeks of maternity leave (not naming any names) when Frances was born almost 5 weeks early, I would have quit. How could I have returned to work when she was developmentally only one week old? What daycare would have taken her, with the prematurity and the refusal to eat from a bottle and the reflux? Impossible. I would have quit. The lack of a humane maternity leave policy would have absolutely torpedoed my career.

Why me, why not Erik? Assuming there was no financial consideration, and assuming that it would have been remotedly possible considering her nine-month boob fixation, because it would have hurt me more to be away from her. He did, after all, go back to work within a few weeks of her birth; and it did not seem to tear him apart.

~~~~~

I use myself as an example a lot, so it would only be fair for a reader to wonder if I'm not misinterpreting my impulses: perhaps the things I want so badly are actually socialized expectations.

Maybe. But I don't think so. For one thing, it was too unexpected: I really believed that a bit of planning would make Erik and I equal parents, equally invested in all aspects of parenting, and this has simply not proved to be the case. I expected to want to return to work full-time; I expected to want to go out of the house by myself every week for a few hours. That this did not materialize was a shock. That Erik is not equally affected, that he can spend much less time with her than I do with far less distress, was also a shock.

I looked forward to going back to work--until I got there. The difficulty of missing so much time with her has not really lessened in the 14 months I have been back--half of her life now.

Also, I would think that if it were socialized, there would be some ambivalence. I might feel as if I ought to want to be home. I might feel guilty about being here, or guilty about daycare. But I don't, and I'm not. If someone is so unwise as to suggest to me that a home is a woman's place, they have the privilege of witnessing a human being bristle like a porcupine. I'm terrible at housework, and I hate it. I have no standards for it, either, and will happily tolerate a mess that would drive Erik to distraction. I expected to enjoy being a full-time working mom, until I became one. I don't feel any guilt about daycare. Frances loves it there and is thriving; they love her and care for her very well. I think it's decidedly better for her to be there 40 hours a week than with me all the time, since I get impatient and ornery at home full-time and that's not good for either of us. It's better to have multiple patient and loving caregivers than one distracted and frustrated one. I'm just sad. I miss her.

I also run the danger of generalizing from my experience to everyone else--but again, I don't think so. I mean, women do spend more time with their kids. This is undoubtedly partially due to socialization, but perhaps not entirely. Of the nine months of leave available to both parents in Canada, men take very little--in 2001 only 10% of eligible fathers took leave. The vast majority of persons working part-time to meet family responsibilities in Canada are women. Once again, how much is socialization vs. biology is an open question. Undoubtedly, socialization plays a role. But when does it become insulting to use that as the answer? When does it become code for, "You only THINK you want that; if you were educated and enlightened, you would want this instead."

~~~~~

Our new Canadian government keeps talking about Choice in Childcare, as if $100 of taxable income every month for a child under six is going to do anything of the kind. But what would choice--real choice--look like to you? If you could structure your family's work & leisure lives in any way you wanted, how would you do it? How many hours would you spend at work, how many would your partner, how much time would you spend with your kids, how much time would they spend in care?

Be imaginative. What is your dream?

Posted by Andrea at 8:54 AM | Comments (23) | TrackBack

Guilt-Free TV

Turns out TV doesn't make kids dumber after all.

From the study:

"We use heterogeneity in the timing of television's introduction to different local markets to identify the effect of preschool television exposure on standardized test scores later in life. Our preferred point estimate indicates that an additional year of preschool television exposure raises average test scores by about 0.02 standard deviations. We are able to reject negatives effects larger than about 0.03 standard deviations per year of television exposure. For reading and general knowledge scores, the positive effects we find are marginally statistically significant, and these effects are largest for children from households where English is not the primary language, for children whose mothers have less than a high school education, and for non-white children. To capture more general effects on human capital, we also study the ffect of childhood television exposure on school completion and subsequent labor market earnings, and again find no evidence of a negative effect."

So what they did--instead of comparing modern kids who watch TV with modern kids who don't, where you get all kinds of correlation problems in a similar way as comparisons between breastfed and bottle-fed infants when you fail to consider household income and socioeconomic status--was compare the test scores and other outcomes for children PRE television and POST television in specific cities. So say Denver got TV in 1948. For those children who started kindergarten in 1947 before TV got to Denver vs. those who would have had five solid years of couch potatohood by starting kindergarten in 1953 (averaging 4 hours of TV watching per day)--are there any differences?

The answer is? NO.

Good news, Frances! You're off the hook. Take that, AAP. OH, I can't tell you how much better I feel right now.

Thanks to Mother Shock for posting the article--oh, three weeks ago. So I'm late. But so what? What a fabulous Friday Afternoon Surprise.

Posted by Andrea at 3:04 PM | Comments (4)

Heartsick, indeed

TheStar.com - Child care splits parties, parents

This is one of those rare occasions when the two main political parties are duelling on terrain so close to my life, it feels like their pointy-toed shoes are charging and retreating right over me.

Child care.

A pox upon both their parties.

Liberals: A few billion dollars a year for a nationally-funded childcare program, subsidizing the costs of institutional daycare spaces for families that need them.

Conservatives: $1200/year per child under six, regardless of income, and tax breaks for companies that create daycare spaces on the worksite.

NDP: Double the liberal plan in cost for double the spaces, but the same basic premise.

(Bloc: Just so long as you don't touch the Quebec system, we don't care what you do.)

Blah.

I want choices for parents. I don't want there to be a standard of childraising imposed by economic fiat for all families; I want to recognize that some parents want to stay home with their kids, and that this is a valid choice. But $1200/year for a child under six wouldn't pay--as they say--for even one month of daycare in a place like Toronto, and according to analyses the actual funds after taxes etc. would be substantially less, especially for lower-income families.

From the article:

"However, the Conservatives' allowance is actually less than $1,200 because it would trigger both reductions in federal/provincial income tested benefits and increases in income taxes.

"As a result, working-poor and modest-income families would get smaller benefits than middle- and upper-income families. And it would favour one-earner families over single-parent and double-income families.

"Most middle- and upper-income earners would get only about $800, he said.

"The biggest losers would be modest-income families earning between $30,000 and $40,000, who would end up with just $388 a year."

This comes from a report from the Caledon Institute of Social Policy, which does a detailed analysis of which families would get how much money. Completely contrary to any notion of progressive taxation or income redistribution, low-income dual-earner families would receive the smallest benefit, while high-income families with an at-home parent would receive the most. In the middle- and high-income brackets, single-parent families would actually receive less money than either dual-earner families or single-earner families with an at-home parent.

Ain't that just peachy? And on their commitment to creating daycare spaces through tax breaks, analysts note:

"When Mike Harris's Ontario Tories introduced tax incentives to employers in the 1990s, not a single new space was created. Similar programs in Saskatchewan and New Brunswick didn't spark much construction either, said association executive director Monica Lysack."

According to the Child Care Advocacy Assocation of Canada (CCACAC), "Pledging $250 million to create child care spaces through tax breaks to businesses is an old idea that Mike Harris tried in Ontario. No business took up the offer and not one space was created. Tax incentives will not create a child care program. It’s the same patchwork approach that has left so many parents scrambling to make child care arrangements without access to regulated child care services."

So much for that idea.

Which leaves the nationally-funded daycare system. Which is fabulous, for parents who want to use daycare centres. Like me, except that I'd never qualify for a subsidized spot. Regardless, more daycare centre spaces would be a good thing. Except:

"The Liberals' pledge to spend at least $1.2 billion annually by 2015 is a far cry from the $10 billion annual cost child-care experts say a fully developed program would cost..."

This is because $1.2 billion invested this year to create new spaces will be required next year just to keep them operating--in order to continue creating new spaces, funding needs to go up, as the CCACAC points out.

The NDP plan at least would dedicate more money to a national child-care program, but who seriously thinks they're going to win?

Both major parties are hitting working parents where they are most vulnerable: Who is looking after my child, and are they doing a good enough job? They're dangling hope in front of parents, but no matter who wins next Monday, it's not good news for most of our children. Damn them all.

Posted by Andrea at 10:27 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

The Background

Tuesday at midnight (or Wednesday, if you prefer) we awoke to the sound of Frances crying. Erik got up to comfort her, and I was just about to doze off again when Erik called out: "Andrea, can you help me? Frances threw up everywhere."

This began two hours of changing the sheets, changing her pajamas, sponging her off, combing chunks out of her hair, only for her to throw up again and start the whole process over. Towards 2:00 am--both of us only minimally coherent--Erik wondered aloud if we should give her a bath.

"What? No!" I said. "It's the middle of the night. She's already tired and sick. We'll just do the best we can right now and she can have a bath tomorrow morning."

"But if she has a bath tomorrow morning I won't be able to get her in to daycare on time," he said.

"I think you might want to consider that she won't be going to daycare tomorrow."

Both of us were too tired to take it any further at that time of the night (morning), and at 2:00 am when we put her back onto another set of clean sheets in her crib, dressed in a diaper and jogging pants because her pajamas were all soiled, neither of us had much confidence that the night was over yet. But she slept through, and we both staggered out of bed at 5:45.

Erik went to get her up at 6:00, her normal time for getting up on weekdays. She lay tiredly on his shoulder, her left eye wandering badly as it always does when she is exhausted. "You are not seriously going to make her go in today, are you?" I said.

"Well, I don't know yet."

This depressed me. I am out of family leave for the fiscal year (which runs April to April in my organization) so I couldn't stay home with her unless I called in sick myself--Erik, however, still had 1 1/2 days left. My Dear Readers are very clever, so I know they will have put together that Erik had 1 1/2 days left because I am usually the one to stay home with her when she's sick (we have both used up 1 1/2 days going together to various of Frances's specialist appointments).

To my mind, a two-year-old who has been up half the night spewing half-digested food and stomach acids all over everything is entitled to curl up on the lap of a loving adult and enjoy a day of undivided attention and untaxing activity. No questions asked, no thought process necessary. I know that it was hard enough to drag myself out of bed the next morning just from lack of sleep; the thought of my wee one sitting half-stoned in daycare, with only 1/4 of an adult's attention, much larger children barelling around her, limited food options, bright lights and loud colours everywhere, and so on--made me deeply sad. It would not have occured to me to send her in, under the circumstances.

But I wanted to see what other parents thought. I just assumed that vomiting=too sick to go anywhere.

My Completely Neutral Question, though, wasn't as neutral as I thought--I should have been clearer, because it should be obvious that not everyone makes that decision in the same context. Not everyone has a partner, not everyone has family leave. Without a partner and without family leave, I'm not sure what I would do, but the whole process would be vastly complicated. So my apologies to anyone who may have felt (or who does feel) that the whole scenario takes for granted a certain family structure or lifestyle that is actually not all that common. You're right. Ooops.

I am SO looking forward to sleeping in tomorrow.

Oh, and if you're wondering: Frances stayed home with her Daddy yesterday. She got to watch lots of television and have a nice extra-long nap, after which she was full of beans. She'd ask for "tloklat" while bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet, she ate a good supper, she made a lovely fingerpainting and commissioned two play-doh boot sculptures, and slept soundly all night long.

Posted by Andrea at 8:07 AM | Comments (9)

Synthesis

Did you know I have another cold? It's true. This is now four--FOUR--in six weeks.

As a result, I make absolutely no claims to coherence in this post. I try hard, but the sore throat and congestion and dizziness conspire against me. Damn them.

I have read every single blog post and comment on that Hirshman piece I can find. How many is that, Andrea? God damned if I know. It's a lot. It's well over 300 comments at Bitch PhD's alone at the moment, and six trackbacks there, and contributions from the lovely and talented Half Changed World, Angry Pregnant Lawyer, Playground Revolution, MUBAR (in her regular guise and in costume at Literary Mama), Expectant Waiting, and … uh … a lot of others. A lot. I can't list them all, but please don't be offended, not that many of you are going to read this, but if you do and you wrote something I probably did read it, but it's this damned cold. Really.

While I stand behind what I originally wrote on the article, the more I read the more I realize that it needs to be substantially refined. So here we go: Synthesis. I’m going to try to put it all together. Emphasis on "try." AND! As Jennifer pointed out, I do have a webzine. Many of you have written beautifully concise (a skill I aspire to but seldom achieve, alas) and damning pieces on your own spaces that I would love to publish. I realize that you would naturally be concerned about giving her advertising. So don't. Rewrite it as a stand--alone piece that makes no reference to her or her article or her forthcoming book; and I'll publish it. There are too many examples out there in Blogosphere to be able to say specifically how that could be done here, but if you are curious and interested, let me know and I'll tell you what I thought of when I read your piece. By the by, this is not dependent on agreeing with me in the slightest.

Hirshman, essentially, argues that women ought to change the system by climbing to the top of it and altering it by fiat. Elite women (who ought to be feminists, apparently) should get a marketable degree and use it without ceasing to attain both promotions and raises in constant succession until they can retire without any fear of poverty—I'm not sure when that is, so maybe they can't retire after all. They ought to marry someone with poorer financial prospects than their own (she assumes it will be a man, which I know is heterosexist, and because it's her article I'll fight it on that territory, so apologies for the substantial number of women out there who have no interest in marrying men). I'm not sure what she assumes the women on the bottom of the economic ladder are to do--and since there are more women there than men (substantially more) there will be an awful lot of women who can't marry at all.

One ought to work in a field with substantial monetary reward. Work is good on its own because it is there that one can achieve the ability to "use reason" (she has never worked anywhere that I've worked, where "reason" is often twisted up like a balloon animal); but it must be financially rewarding also. Working for personal reward is no good, and it's antifeminist. One must then climb to the top of the corporate ladder. Of course, one can only do so by limiting one's offspring to one, because the family and the workplace really are inherently mutually exclusive. Once a relatively proportionate number of elite women have managed this trick, Feminist Change Will Happen. Because women really are a package unit who all want the same thing, and the sorts of women who can do this--marry down, have only one child, work in financially rewarding and politically powerful professions and find it personally rewarding to do so--won't have any more in common with each other than they will have with women at large. So the changes they implement will naturally be changes that benefit all women. Feminist Utopia Arrives!

There are too many problems with her argument to number, but I'll point out the biggest and see where it takes me.

1. Women at the top have never altered the system in favour of women at the bottom. Everybody's favourite poster girl: Margaret Thatcher.

Can anyone name an elite woman who climbed into a position of power and altered her domain or society at large in a way that benefited non-elite women? Just one? Please?

And if we need to have women in decision-making positions in order to see change, then how the hell did women get the vote, anyway? How did we even manage to get into these professional schools? How did we win the right to an abortion? How did Canadian women manage to finagle maternity and parental leaves out of a parliament that is only 20% female? How did any disadvantaged group ever make any advances at all if they needed to have members of their own groups in positions of power and authority?

What good has Condoleeza Rice done for women in the US?

Even my Mom: Who was actually born working-class, married very young (17) to someone with better prospects than her own, and decided to have two children in the 1970s--but then saw Hirshman's light. She went to school (which my Dad, that awful man with better prospects who must inherently want to keep her in her place, paid for), and switched out of the field she liked for a field she hated because of the better earnings potential. She got a job and worked at it like a slave, hating every moment; she climbed to an upper management position where she wields substantial authority over many subordinates and can implement workplace policy fairly flexibly; and she is miserable. She is sticking it out until retirement because she doesn’t want to give the "boys" who think women can't hack it any more material.

Do you think she is agitating for reform to make her workplace more friendly to women with families?

Ah, no. Would you? If you knew the position you'd fought so hard for was dependent on continuing to appear as the perfect worker, always available, supportive of the company's direction?

She is a feminist much as Hirshman herself is (except that she definitely wants more grandchildren) and, from what I can see, it has made her miserable. Mind you, she wasn't much happier in the nine years she was a SAHM, living under her father’s rules. Sure would have been nice if she'd felt for a moment that she could have made her own rules up for herself.

2. "Choice Feminism" is a conservative chimera, not a real ideology. Constructing and destroying it reinforces conservative and anti-feminist ideologies.

What the hell is "choice feminism," anyways? It's something people make up, is what it is. It's the name people give to what feminist women do when they disapprove of their choices.

Criticizing "choice feminism" presupposes that women ought not to have choices. As Half Changed World points out, the opposite to "choice feminism" (if it actually existed) is "litmus test feminism": Be a Feminist by Following These Ten Not-So-Simple Steps.

But more fundamentally, it is anti-feminist because it presupposes that women are actually making choices--freely exercising their will in selecting one option from many. To how many women does this apply? Even for the elite women she criticizes, the options are constrained: You may work 80 hour weeks at a grueling job or you may sacrifice your career to stay home with the children. These are not "choices," they are horror stories. Criticizing individual women’s "choices" when they are forced to choose from a bad hand like that? Is antifeminist.

Now, if we lived in a world where a woman was free to either work in a grueling 80-hour/week career job, stay home with the children, or design the perfect blend for herself and arrive at a part-time position that is well-paid and allows her to have a family life while her husband is equally free to do the same, and then from those three options selects staying at home, one might be able to criticize that woman's choices--but even then, there will always be families where that is the option that works the best for all members involved. Always. Just as there will always be families for whom it works best when all members work full-time, even in a conservative utopia. This is the magic of human variation.

Even elite women frequently do not have good options. The options for other women are worse; but that doesn’t mean that the options for elite women are good.

Finally—have you ever met someone who called themselves a "choice feminist"?

Ever? Even one?

3. The article isn’t so much another salvo in the mommy wars, as anti-mommy, period. She's against reproduction (but if you really have to, you can have one--just one!

Here's a thought: People decide how many children they want to have, generally speaking, outside of their political philosophy. It might be based on how much they like being around children of a specific age, or health problems, or financial resources, or what kind of resources they would like to be able to devote to each child. It is also related to a strong, biological urge to reproduce. These desires are generally not plastic. Telling women that it's feminist to have ONE child doesn’t mean that most women will decide to have fewer children in order to be feminist. It means women will have as many children as they were going to have anyway, and if it means they're not feminist, then screw feminism. I wonder how Hirshman would respond to a suggestion that feminists ought to have lots of children in order to breed the decision-makers of tomorrow? Keep pumping them out, ladies! We need to breed all the feminists we can! Would she have had more? I doubt it.

It seems most readers of the article read it as meaning that it's not ok to stay home, and we should all go out to work. It's true that she wants us all out there working, but the article is by no means pro-working-mother. She would hate me. I got a "useless" degree in Environmental Studies so I could make the world a better place; I intend to have more than one child; if I could scale down my hours, I would, because I miss my little girl; I'm going to have another child if I can manage it; I'm not angling for promotions because the risk that they might require overtime is too great, and I already miss my little girl too much; I obtain practically zero mental stimulation or opportunity to 'reason' from my work (my hobbies are far more gratifying that way) and I am, supposedly, in a professional field; in short, besides working, I’m not doing a single thing she advises, nor do I intend to.

Furthermore: She is either dispensing advice solely to elite women, and ignoring the rest of us; or she is dispensing advice she feels is useful to all women but directing it in particular to elite women in this article. It's one or the other. Yes?

Both are flawed.

If the advice is solely meant for elite women, then what does that mean for the rest of us? What does that mean for me? I suppose I'm allowed to do whatever I want with my life, and the feminism (or lack thereof) of my choices doesn't matter, because all I need to do is sit around and wait for "elite" women to climb to the top and institute changes that will benefit me from above. They will do this, of course, because they are women. And all women are the same, and want the same things. OF COURSE those elite women who climbed to the top will immediately recognize my need for on-site daycare. Just because they all hire private nannies doesn’t mean they wouldn't innately sense that some of us can't afford it. OF COURSE they will recognize that I can't afford the $15 dollar charge for every one minute late after the six o'clock daycare closing time, and never require me to work late. OF COURSE they will recognize that I can't go on every business trip they'd like because sometimes my spouse is out of town too. Why wouldn't they understand? Aren't they all women?

And that's not paternalistic, is it? I shouldn't be at all offended.

The substantial and basic flaw in the entire premise is that any woman who has followed her advice (to marry down, earn lots of money and have only one child) to climb to the top will not have had to make substantial sacrifices--or, perhaps, any sacrifices--to obtain that position because she ordered her life to achieve it. I see no reason to believe that she would have any understanding therefore for the sacrifices that other women would and do make.

The other option is that she is talking to all of us, but that this article in particular is addressed to elite women. Unfortunately, in this context her advice becomes absurd: We cannot all marry down, since many of us have no "down" to marry to; some of us have twins; even if we wanted to, schools do not have the capacity to accept all women into the professional fields and, if they did, the economy could not absorb all of the graduates; and most obviously, not everyone can be at the top. It is a basic characteristic of hierarchies that there is only one person at the top. We cannot even all be near the top. In hierarchies, most people will be at or near the bottom; that's how they work, it's inherent in our whole social and corporate structure. If we were to follow her advice, all of us, to a woman, we would simply have a much better educated class of people staffing temp agencies. It would not change our social order by a hair.

4. It throws out every advance feminism has made within its own ranks in the past twenty years--inclusiveness, diversity, focusing on the feminization of poverty and women on the margins, etc.

Raise your hands anyone who has read an article, paper or book by any feminist of any standing in the last twenty years (besides this one) which has claimed that what feminism needs is more focus on the elites.

Yeah. That's what I thought.

Everything I’ve read in about feminism published since the 1980s has agreed that the exact problem with feminism historically is that it has focused too much on elite women and ignored the needs and desires of the substantial proportion of women who aren't elite, who already had to go to work because their income was needed, who had to put their kids into substandard daycares because their jobs were not optional, who couldn't afford to go to school regardless of whether or not they qualified, who never expected to get "mental stimulation" out of their work, just survival.

5. It's focus is completely insular, totally American, and misses easily available counter-arguments close at hand--say, in Canada. Or any other country, really.

Here's how it seems to have worked here:

1. Make it easier for women to combine paid employment with family responsibilities by instituting things such as adequate maternity leaves.
2. Women take them, and keep working, by and large.
3. Women realize they could work more if these policies were available to men.
4. They're made available to men.
5. Men start taking them.
6. The work of caregiving becomes valued--yes, it’s fucked up because it's becoming valued because men are doing it, but hey, it's becoming valued.

No, this isn't based on anything but my own supposition, but it's a good hypothesis for the Canadian situation, in which a brief maternity leave policy was implemented, Canadian women agitated for more (and got it, from an overwhelmingly male Parliament), that was implemented, Canadian women took it, and Canadian women and men starting agitating for an extended leave period that was available to both women and men, and got that too.

Today anyone who qualifies (the qualifications are restrictive and limit it to middle class women/men and above, which is incidentally another case against focusing feminism on elite women), 50 paid weeks of leave are available. The first 17 weeks are reserved as maternity leave, for women, to recover from pregnancy and childbirth. The rest is equally available to women and men (It's also available to adoptive parents, up to the full 50 weeks).

There has been recent talk of extending it to two years. Before I had Frances, I thought that was over the top. Now I'm all over it. Give me two years! Please!

While in most families all of the leave is still taken by the mother, a substantial number of families split it to a greater or lesser degree. Erik took one month, a friend's husband took two, several colleagues took several. One man I know was gone for six months. Now, I work in the public sector, but still: It was accepted as a wonderful thing for him to do. Everyone was happy for him. He came back to his management job, and no one thought less of him for being gone for six months to care for his baby girl. And I'm sure that having done that for six months, he has a far different conception of housework and childcare than he once did.

There seems to be this idea in the US that if you implement policies that make it easier for women to combine paid employment with family responsibilities, that they will give up on paid employment and it will reinforce traditional gender roles--but it doesn't work that way. Maybe you have a different hypothesis for why it doesn't work that way, but it doesn't. Personally, I believe that the act of making it easier to combine paid employment with home responsibilities gives value to home responsibilities--in our case, 55% of your previous income up to approximately $30,000/year. This very action begins to erode the traditional devaluing of house care and child care and makes it more palatable for men to assume a greater share.

According to her argument, this would mean that Canadian feminism "succeeded" while American feminism "failed." Let's consider for a moment that Canadian feminism did not demand or advocate that we all assume the traditionally masculine life course and was far more socialist and accepting of government interventions in family life, so that perhaps her advice--putting the burden on individual "elite" women and insisting on gender parity in every sphere--is actually not necessary. Let's also consider that it focused on collective solutions, funded by taxation.

The "domestic glass ceiling" can be broken collectively; it does not depend on women being willing to be a bitch about housework. In Canada in 2000, the transition year for parental leave, 3 per cent of fathers took leave. In 2001, it was 10 per cent. I tried to find a more recent statistic, but couldn't; regardless, that's a significant increase and, while it is still not enough, was largely the result of a government policy. I would argue that this is at least partially the result of the policy being interpreted as "childcare is really important work, and we are willing to pay you to do it, at least for a year."

It is also important to add that the numbers of mothers taking leave are just around 55%, due to the limitations on qualifying for the program, so that the 10% of fathers taking it is much more significant than it initially may appear.

6. It doesn't mean to be part of an anti-working-mother backlash, it doesn't mean to be part of recent movement to haul women up by their beltloops and escort them back to the kitchen--but it is.

Yes, I mean that.

Because the basic assumption of her article is that these women are choosing to go home.

And for whatever reason--whether it is argued as sociological or cultural or biological--if it is cast as a choice when in fact it isn't, when it is a result of changes in the economy leading more people of all groups to leave the workforce, it reinforces the idea culturally that women are less committed to work, that especially mother-employees are not committed to their jobs, that they don’t "deserve" them as much as men do, that they don’t "really need" promotions or more responsibilities, which makes work even less appealing or desirable to mother-employees, which causes them to really start "choosing" to be at home. And then it's the fucking 1950s all over again.

Whether one argues that women need to be at home working for their families for fulfillment, or that women are selfishly choosing to be at home instead of slugging it out in the corporate world for their feminist sisters, it comes down to the same thing: Economic restructuring recast as the stereotype of the mother-worker who is only putting in time until she can afford to quit, and who is thus more disposable and less rewardable.

I'll say it again: If terrible books and articles based on terrible research and flawed assumptions are being easily published as long as they assume that women are choosing to work at home (whether they see it as a good or bad thing)--that means something. It means that the people who choose what to publish easily accept the idea that mothers don't really want to work, and they don't ask for a lot in the way of evidence.

There is no evidence that mothers, as a group, don't really want to work. There is evidence that they work less than fathers do, for all kinds of cultural reasons already discussed elsewhere. But there is no evidence that as a group they don't want to, elite or not. If mothers as a group were less inclined to work than any other group, one would expect that in the context of a rising economy and increased support for family responsibilities, less mothers would work while more of every other group would work--yes? But that describes the Canadian condition to a T, and instead, more women of every category are working, and working full-time, than ever before, even after the increase in parental leave from six months to one year in 2000.

If an economic downturn in the US leading to job losses for everyone is being recast in the US as empowered, enlightened elite women "choosing" to leave the work force because they would rather be at home raising children--even though that undoubtedly describes the situation for some elite women--and this being taken as proof for what all women want, and feminism has failed, etc.--that is really, really bad news for women. All women. Period.

Posted by Andrea at 9:58 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

Welcome to the 21st Century, Ladies: Here's Your Apron

Hi: My name is Andrea, and I have chosen my career over my children, bringing the WBBE, BN into this world only to pass her into the hands of virtual strangers to raise while I indulge myself at a frivolous and unnecessary career so I can buy pretty gewgaws and spend too much money on toys to assauge my tremendous maternal guilt.

I thought I should get that out of the way, since I'm about to take a few measly strings of information and construct a grand conspiratorial edifice out of them.

Has anyone else noticed that the tone of the popular media towards working mothers these days is decidedly ... chilly?

According to news stories I've come across or those introduced to me at various mother blogs, Proper Mothers of our brave new century are supposed to: Breastfeed (and know how to do so instinctively, without assistance), have the baby in the mother's room at night (but not in your bed--this from the AAP), not use any sort of diapers at all but instead build up a baby's dignity by holding them over a toilet to void their wastes from birth, not allow their children to watch TV until the age of two, make their own baby and toddler food using organic vegetables, be a Yummy Mummy and make a second (third?) career out of being fit and looking fabulous, watch Alpha Mom TV to learn how to turn your ambition and drive towards making Babies Ben and Bella the absolute best human beings possible, and attend an Ivy League school to obtain advanced degrees then devote themselves to staying home while the children are young (although your perspective on whether this is Good or Bad may vary).

Is it just me, or is this totally incompatible with work? Are women not supposed to want to work after having children anymore?

I know--we all know--that all those articles were crap. Based on terrible research and faulty premises that a kindergartener should be ashamed to produce. But this is only more alarming--if even crap, horrible baseless crap, is being published in reputable (or at least widely-read) news sources so long as it promotes a new ideal of the Stay At Home Mother As Feminist Icon or Proof of the Failures of Feminism--umm--that tells you something.

It is--pardon the hyperbole--it is terrifying to me. I am feeling just a wee bit hunted.

It used to be that we all looked down on SAHMs. Anyone else remember that? The 80s disdain towards women who weren't getting a paycheque from somewhere? Wasn't that considered a feminist issue even just a few years ago? Weren't there television shows with working mothers in them? Fashion magazines with power suits? Murphy Brown? Is it just me? Now we have Deborah from Everybody Loves Raymond, who is clearly twice as smart as her husband but still better suited to staying home (and I've always believed that they portray her housewifery as sub-par because she was intelligent and sarcastic and used to work and that was the only way to make her palatable to modern audiences).

I am not (I want to stress this) saying that the "Everybody Get Out There and Work for Money!" regime was a good or healthy thing, and I am not saying the disdain for mothers who stayed at home was a positive development. What I am saying is--it's gone. When was the last time you read an article that put working mothers in a positive light? The last thing I read about working mothers was about how to transition from the workforce to the home without losing your mind--that was in a mainstream parenting magazine.

So--so--what the hell is going on?

I feel an ill wind coming, ladies, and it bodes us no good. We are the proverbial footballs of the modern economy, and that ill wind is the invisible foot of the marketplace coming full force to punt us right back into the private sphere, whether we want to be there or not.

But the articles have no proof, they're based on interviews with small samples of elite women, women's participation in the workforce is still increasing, feminism has not failed, women are not "opting out" but being forced out by the economy! I know all that. I'm not looking at those articles as reflections of current reality, but as harbingers. I mean, women have always worked--even the 1950s weren't the 1950s. That doesn't mean that the 1950s, as a decade, were friendly to working mothers.

And since when have changes in women's lot not been governed by the economy, anyway? It's a cliche, isn't it?

1930-1939: Women at home. Economy in the toilet, so no jobs for women anyway, although women do work in this period (because economy is in the toilet) just for shit pay with no family allowances. Mantra: Women Have Always Wanted to Be At Home.

1940-1950: Women in the workforce. Lots of family allowances because women economy needed women in the workforce in a big bad way. Mantra: Women Have Always Been Capable Workers, It Just Wasn't Needed Before, and Working Mothers Are Good Mothers.

1950-1960: Women at home. Men came back from war, so since the men "needed" the jobs more, they got them. Women continued to work, of course, just for shit pay with no family allowances since it was assumed that "proper" wives and mothers would quit upon getting married/having babies. Mantra: Women Have Never Wanted to Work, It Was Needed For the War, Aren't You Happier At Home?

1970-1995(ish): Women at work. Economy sinking, needed women's additional incomes to keep consumer economy afloat. Incomes falling, families need women to work to pay the bills. Mantra: Women Never Wanted to Be At Home, They Were Forced There and Kept Doped Up on Valium.

And now?

Of course, each of these stages (with the possible exception of WWII mandated female participation in the workforce) was presented as a "choice": In each instance, millions of women spontaneously "chose" to participate in the workforce, or not, either because that's what proper wives/mothers did, or because that's what intelligent/ambitious women did. In each case, it was actually just what the economy demanded, and the "choice" was a window dressing to make it palatable. And in each case, the "choice" was only real for elite women anyway, and anyone from the middle- or lower-middle class down simply made do with reduced expectations and options.

So while the critiques of these articles and their findings are correct--that is, while it is true that these are explorations of a small sample of women who have options the rest of us only dream of--I don't think we need to see a mass exodus of women from the workforce for all these articles and books and magazines and new TV channels to be Bad, Bad News for women. Because once the cultural assumption becomes "Proper Mothers want to be at home with their kids, but it's ok to work if you have to," the options for all women in all stages of life are pretty much going to suck.

For SAHMs, it means reduced support. Sure it does: You want to be at home, right? You chose it, right? So if it's hard and lonely and frustrating and crazy-making, suck it up! You're beng a Proper Mother Who Wants to Be At Home, remember?

For WOHMs, it also means reduced support. You shouldn't be at work, you should be at home, so we're going to make it hard for you to work: Less childcare that is more expensive and less reliable and harder to find, for instance. And since of course we all want to be Proper Mothers Who Want to Be At Home, give a goodbye kiss to good hours, good pay, flexibility, promotions.... I mean, you're a Mom, right? You don't really want to be here, so why should we give you the goodies when a Man Who Really Deserves It also wants them?

This is bad news. It isn't bad news because the articles and books and TV shows are accurate in their assumptions or conclusions, but because they signal a cultural shift in attitudes towards women. (Hello, Grand Conspiratorial Edifice!)

And I don't think it's the same old backlash, either. Not quite. Then it was just a few kooks on the fringes ranting about the evils of feminism and how it's making women into men and women can really only be fulfilled while baking chocolate chip cookies for the school fundraiser and we would all rue the devastation wrought on the nuclear family, just you wait and see! There were mainstream examples of competent, loving working moms. Roseanne, Murphy Brown, the Home Improvements sitcom, Thirtysomethings, and so on. But now--now it's not just the right-wing kooks and fundamentalists. Now it's newspaper articles and books BY FEMINISTS and magazine articles and new TV channels and prime-time TV and the pregnancy fetish and the incessant constant neverending focus on when Famous Woman X is Finally Going to Have a Baby and doctors and parenting trends that exclude working parents (especially in the US with the paltry maternity leave) and how it is all being packaged and sold with pretty pictures as the choice for empowered, educated, post-feminist women who really wanted this all along. Not as one reasonable option among many for those who can afford it, but as the ideal to which we should all properly aspire. Now our working mom examples are Rachel on Friends, who never actually seems to be a Mom but just brings out Emma for the proper plot twists on a show that celebrates rigid gender roles and ... who else? I never watch TV, so I have no idea.

I can't help but feel that I am not supposed to want to be here.

And I can't help but believe that this trend--this mythological trend that doesn't exist yet but will soon, I bet--spells a temporary end for family-friendly workplace reform.

I think I will erect some barbed wire and a security camera at my cubicle entrance, and spend the next decade hyperventilating. Where is that Mother's Movement?

~~~~~

Update:

Of course the latest employment and mothers flap is about that piece in the American Prospect.

While reading it, it occured to me--if the argument is that women's employment is not really falling specifically but just generally as part of a sluggish economy, then it should not be reflected in Canada where the economy has been quite robust for the last several years. So I looked it up, and guess what? Women's participation in the labour force in Canada has increased every year from 59.4% to 61.3% between '99 and '04, and from 79.9% to 82.3% for women ages 25-44, who are most likely to have childcare responsibilities. However, 33.7% of the 733,400 women in the 25-44 age group working part-time did so for child-care reasons, as opposed to 3.2% of 189,700 men. And furthermore, while women's part-time work has declined in those years and their full-time work has increased, men's full-time labour participation has held steady and the part-time work has increased (given the stats on the reason for part-time participation, I would venture to guess that for most men this was not a voluntary option).

Of course, more men than women overall are active in the labour force--in 2004, approximately 9 million vs. approximately 8 million, a difference that is almost non-existent in the 15-24 age group (670,000 vs. 665,000 or thereabouts) but quite pronounced for the 25-44 age group (924,000 vs. 822,000) when presumably childcare and other family responsibilities begin to be more keenly felt.

On the one hand--thank the gods. Not that the women are marching into the labour force, but that the reductions in participation seen south of the border aren't happening here. And not because Working Is Better, but because it indicates that Canadian women are not "opting out"--employment is up, full-time employment is up, part-time employment is down. Canadian women still take on a heavier childcare burden than Canadian men and participate less in the labour force as a result, but we have seen no abrupt reversals of overall trends.

No offence--but sometimes American trends become Canadian trends for no very good reason except that American culture kind of takes over and we get swept along in the American zeitgeist.

However--and you knew there was going to a "however"--actually, there are two "howevers"--

However Part I: If the economy is against the working mother in the US, that is Bad News for American women. For all the reasons I've already outlined. I mean, you all know what happened the last time a seachange in the American economy was cast as a choice of millions of women to return to the home and full-time mothering.

However Part II: While there is no statistic to prove the Opt Out Revolution up here, there is still increasing media coverage of parenting styles that exclude working mothers and a fetishization of housewifery, which is alarming to me. If mothers are not dropping out of the workforce to tend to their children, then why are Canadian parenting magazines offering articles on how to manage the transition? If more Canadian mothers are working than ever before, why are Yummy Mummies and Alpha Moms being covered in our Lifestyle pages? If so many of us are working full-time, then why are articles on working mothers so scarce, why are services for us being cut? Why are we being treated to treatises on diaper-free baby rearing?

Are we going to talk ourselves into it?

I'm going to make a suggestion, too, and I've love to hear your thoughts on it:

Does the increased participation of Canadian women in the labour force mean that Canadian feminism, then, is a success, since the decreasing participation south of the border is so often cast as a "failure of feminism"? How much do you think this has to do with Canada's maternity leave policy and a form of women's issues activism that has been more socialist and less capitalist overall? It seems strange but fitting somehow that, here in Canada, we made it easier for women to manage their family responsibilities and have seen labour force participation continue to rise. Often when I read articles such as the one in American Prospect, the assumption seems to be that any policy designed to enable women to combine paid work with family responsibilities in the US (like decent mat leave) would be a death blow to feminism because it reinforces gender roles and takes women out of the workplace for an extended period.

But it doesn't seem to work that way, does it? In fact, it seems to be the exact opposite.

Posted by Andrea at 12:29 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

Hoarding Compliments

For the longest time, I was incapable of giving compliments to other women's babies.

It was too hard. I felt like Frances needed them more than other kids did--although I knew it was ridiculous, that saying something nice about someone else didn't take away from the nice things they said about her. I knew it was stingy and mean. But I couldn't be generous, and I hated it.

It's hard to talk about this. It's hard to explain it in a way that makes sense, especially I think if no one has ever thought your child to be different, or ugly. It's just that all those little comments built up, all those observations about her small size and the ones who would ask me "what's wrong with her" and the idiot group leader who told me she would be pretty and perfect "someday" and that doctor (may she burn in hell) who said her eyes were too big and we had to see genetics.

"She has her father's eyes," I said.

She blathered on about how she took courses on genetics in medical school, and the whole thing was based on very precise measurements of facial features, and she couldn't do it herself but she felt that Frances ought to have "grown into" her eyes by then, but she didn't think there was anything wrong with her eyes "functionally."

"But ... if it's just that her eyes are big, then...." I said, confused.

"Oh, I agree," she said cheerily. "Who cares if it's just the way she looks?"

There are many worse things than being told your child is ugly, but it is still terribly hard. The phrase "a face only a mother could love" is not one you want to hear when you are the mother in question. She was so beautiful to me, but every one of those comments just chipped away at that belief until I was afraid to bring her out in public with me, afraid of what I might hear, afraid even that the nice old ladies who stopped to compliment her big blue eyes were just being kind. Afraid that everyone but me thought she looked funny.

There was a time when every "You are so beautiful" that came out of my mouth was tagged with an involuntary "to me."

And so I hoarded every compliment I got, as if they were gold coins and I could store them up to someday prove her beauty to the rest of the world, and I kept all compliments about other babies to myself, as if complimenting them would spend those gold coins and devalue my own child.

As I said, it was stupid. But I'd open my mouth to say something nice and it would hurt so much I'd just close it again.

It's only been the last little while that the grip of this has lessened.

It took the craniofacial diagnoses being wrong (which proved that that doctor didn't know her face from her ass, genetics course or no). It took four other doctors saying how her eyes were fine, not proptotic at all, and that yes she probably got them from her father. It took all those kind people who would stop us to exclaim over her beautiful big blue eyes; it took the warmth they approached her with. And it took the comments by every one of you, here. It took all of that to undo the damage done by a few thoughtless jerks who thought that different must be wrong.

This could all have gone another way. She might have had Crouzon or Pfeiffer syndrome, in which case, the comments about her "funny face" might never have gone away, might only have gotten worse. I'd have had to develop a way of coping with the idea that my beautiful child was not seen that way by others, and you would all have read a lot more rants on the tyranny of the beauty standard along with my rants on our preference for "big" and "normal." That would have been a good path, too; but the path I'm on is the one where I can now relax, let my breath out and say, "It's not just me, she really is beautiful."

I know there are a million things wrong with that sentence. I know that beauty shouldn't matter, that no matter what face she has she will always be beautiful to me, and that I shouldn't care whether others agree with me or not. I know that the beauty standard is tyrannical and that having beauty is a mixed blessing. I know that it says nothing about her worth or humanity or anything of value.

But I can't help it: I want the whole world to see the magic of her face the same way I do, and I am so happy and relieved now that I can believe they really do. Maybe one day I'll have grown enough as a person not to care anymore.

Mostly, I'm happy that I can now easily and happily say nice things about other people's babies and children.

Posted by Andrea at 8:55 AM | Comments (15)

Baby Einstein Vs. Looney Tunes (metaphorically speaking)

My favourite anecdote for development and intelligence is Albert Einstein--he didn't talk until he was three, and his parents thought he was a little slow. I guess they changed their minds when he developed the Theory of Relativity while a clerk in the Swiss Patents Office.

It's surprising to me that we as a society and individually as parents still equate development with intelligence. From what I've read, the speed with which a baby or toddler aquires developmental milestones only correlates with intelligence about 20%--or, statistically speaking, is correlated so weakly it doesn't make much sense to talk about a correlation at all. And beyond development, all kinds of other things are assumed to be correlated with intelligence in babies and toddlers as well--fussinesss and independence, for example.

I can still remember so desperately trying to calm Frances through the worst of her reflux fits as a very young baby and reassuring myself that hey--at least this meant she was smart. Right?

Right?

Well, then what does it mean now that she's so ridiculously easy-going that a stranger could assume we keep her on sedatives? Is she stupid? But she's clearly not stupid, because she's counting and knows her letters and colours and shapes already, right? Except doesn't that bring us back to the lack of correlation between intelligence and development? If she had an equal chance of being a genius when she was 19 months old and not walking yet, doesn't she still have an equal chance of being slow now that she's 22 months and conversing in full sentences? ("Go upstairs have breakfast now," she told me yesterday morning. OK, so it’s missing a few conjunctions.)

I don't have this anything like straightened out in my own mind, but I wonder if all these theories we have about intelligence in babies don't say way more about us than they do about our kids.

Take this idea that fussiness in babies and willfulness in older children is a sign of a fledgling genius:

As far as I can make out, the idea is that fussiness and willfulness are signs of independence, and independence is a correlate of intelligence. Intelligent people are independent people (given, I suppose, to public fits of temper), so therefore independent people must also be intelligent people. (Or, at the very least, this independence must signal other equally wonderful things.)

I googled this, using a few different search terms, and I came up with nothing. Absolutely no scientific basis for linking independence and intelligence; and the closest I could come for proof of fussy babies or willful toddlers being smarter than your average bear was our old dear friend Mr. Sears advising mothers that attachment parenting makes babies smarter: "the quality of the parent-infant attachment (such as skin-to-skin contact) [predicts later iq scores]" Mr. Sears, the quality of the parent-infant attachment has NOTHING to do with skin-to-skin contact, as I'm sure you're well aware. Shame on you for twisting research to suit your own ideology.

Sorry, couldn't resist. That really had nothing to do with my point.

Back on topic: The closest I could find to proof on the whole thing is a study that linked excessive crying with cognitive deficits (abstract at the end of the post--and please note that this was "excessive and uncontrolled crying that was not colic and persisted beyond three months of age," and only represented 3-5% of infants) of about 9 IQ points at 5 years. So if there is no proof or scientific evidence that independence and intelligence are correlated, and that independence is predicted by the degree of fussiness in babies or willfulness in toddlers, then how did we end up with this idea?

Here's my hypothesis:

Western culture values both intelligence and independence highly, so we like to think that they go together. And as utterly depleted new parents of babies who won't stop crying, we want to believe that there will be some reward for all of this--we want to believe that at some point, the fussy babies will prove to be "better" than the easy babies who sleep several hours between feedings and play contentedly on the floor all day. And maybe throw a little bit of that old cliche about the Tortured Genius in too.

Case Study: Frances. If independence and intelligence are correlated, she should not be able to breathe without assistance. She is still quite happy to lie back and let me change her diaper, on the change pad in her room, no less. She doesn't mind if I carry her around. If she's making a mess with her dinner because it's more fun as a toy than as food, she won't complain if I take the spoon and feed her myself. She likes to comb her own hair and brush her own teeth, but she won't throw a fit if I do them for her.

She likes developing self-care skills, will play by herself for relatively long periods (as long as we're close by and spend at least some time appreciating her play-abilities), and has distinct preferences of her own, but absolutely does not mind (and in some cases prefers) if we do things for her. Not the slightest bit independent. Only the merest traces of willfulness.

And fussiness? Well, yeah, she was a fussy baby; she had reflux. She was in pain. And she needed me to carry her around a lot, but as long as I did so she was a very contented little baby and hardly made a peep. Once she started sleeping on her own, she became the world's easiest-going baby of all time.

Not that it would make much difference. I cheer on Frances's accomplishments because it's fun to see her do new things; and I am relieved when they happen early or on time because it's a good sign that there are no underlying issues. But even if the fussiness-independence-intelligence theory turned out to be true, and Frances's willingness to be dependant and her ability to charm meant she was dumb as a rock, it wouldn't make a whit of difference to her worth as a person, or her eventual happiness.

It is troubling to me, though, to see those assumptions in action; I think it says something about how we value people who are more dependant or less intelligent than others. For one thing, independence isn't all it's cracked up to be, nor is it as readily achievable as so many people would like to think. Unless you are growing your own food and your own cotton which you harvest, dye and weave to sew clothes of your own, while living in a house you built yourself made of materials you mined or logged yourself, you are dependant on other people. The independence our culture so values is actually limited to a rather restricted field: The ability to purchase one's own toys and flush one's own toilet, for instance. It is a kind of emotional and financial independence underscored by total economic dependence—so we end up valuing people who can achieve this as “independent” and people who can’t (due to poor health, disability, employment status and so on) are devalued as “dependent.” The “independent” person might not have cleaned their own toilet or cooked their own food for three decades; the “dependant” person might have their own garden in which they grow all their veggies and be a whiz-bang at whipping up a nice outfit on a sewing machine out of fabric ends, but as long as one person is living in a place they pay for with proceeds from their own employment and has the emotional markers of “independence,” well, who cares that if the apocalypse came tomorrow he’d be as helpless as a newborn kitten? And it all begins in infancy.

Secondly, intelligence isn’t exactly a reliable determinant of human worth, either. Very intelligent people are over-represented among criminals, for example; as far as I know, they are no less likely to be suicidal and no more likely to have satisfying personal relationships or be proud of their accomplishments. And yet we are all so determined to have the brilliance of our children validated. We want to hear that they achieved x milestone earlier than anyone else, learned to read sooner, talked in sentences faster, walked up the stairs on their own and learned how to use a fork way before the other babies and toddlers were thinking of it—why? Aren’t the abilities to make friends, share, laugh at a joke and have a lot of fun without a lot of money more likely to be germane to their future happiness? How many parents do you know anxiously consulting developmental charts for those milestones?

What does that say, if not that on some level we believe that intelligent people are better?

Is it possible that I’m overanalyzing this? Oh, yes. It wouldn’t be the first time.

What do you think?

~~

Rao MR, Brenner RA, Schisterman EF, Vik T, Mills JL. Long term cognitive development in children with prolonged crying. Arch.Dis.Child 2004 Nov;89(11):989-92.
Abstract: BACKGROUND: Long term studies of cognitive development and colic have not differentiated between typical colic and prolonged crying. OBJECTIVE: To evaluate whether colic and excessive crying that persists beyond 3 months is associated with adverse cognitive development. DESIGN: Prospective cohort study. A sample of 561 women was enrolled in the second trimester of pregnancy. Colic and prolonged crying were based on crying behaviour assessed at 6 and 13 weeks. Children's intelligence, motor abilities, and behaviour were measured at 5 years (n = 327). Known risk factors for cognitive impairment were ascertained prenatally, after birth, at 6 and 13 weeks, at 6, 9, and 13 months, and at 5 years of age. RESULTS: Children with prolonged crying (but not those with colic only) had an adjusted mean IQ that was 9 points lower than the control group. Their performance and verbal IQ scores were 9.2 and 6.7 points lower than the control group, respectively. The prolonged crying group also had significantly poorer fine motor abilities compared with the control group. Colic had no effect on cognitive development. CONCLUSIONS: Excessive, uncontrolled crying that persists beyond 3 months of age in infants without other signs of neurological damage may be a marker for cognitive deficits during childhood. Such infants need to be examined and followed up more intensively.

Posted by Andrea at 11:38 AM | Comments (7)

Just when you think you have the bleeping critters figured out, they go ahead and change on you

For three out of the past seven days, Ms. Frances has declined to take a nap.

Now. In true WBBE, BN fashion, she does not cry, moan, whine or scream while she is refusing to take her nap. Oh no. No indeed. Instead she rolls around, bangs her feet on the slats of her crib, laughs, talks to her stuffed animals, and performs what Erik and I refer to as a "core dump"--a meaningless and constant repitition of all her new words and phrases. We assume she's practicing, but gods only know.

For two hours.

Yes! Two hours. Two whole hours of:

"Bunny rabbit. Bunneeeee RAHbit! Purple bunny. Hello! Hello! See you later. Bye bye! Bye. Bye bye Mummy. Mummy! MUMMY! MUMMEEEEEE! Elmo! EEEEElmo! Elmo. Macaroni cheese. Yogurt. Yummy. Naptime. Sleep. Sleeeeep. Bed. Yellow. Clock! Book. Green book! Belly button. BELLy BUUUUtton. Markers! Markers. Hello! Helloooo!" Thump thump thump thump thump (laughing) thump thump thump "Little Bear. Big blue house bear. Tutter mouse! Birds sing tweet tweet. Frogs say ribbit."

Honest to god, it sounds like she's cramming for the Baby SATs. For the first ten, maybe even twenty or thirty minutes, it's adorable, and I lay on the bed in the next room wiping silent tears of mirth from my face. For the following hour and a half, it's agonizing. Why won't she just sleep?

It used to be that we could put her down at 12:00 or 12:30 and, like clockwork, she would fall asleep and be out for two hours. Not. Anymore. In fact, she is even falling out of the daily nap habit at daycare where, we have been told, she has taken to roaming the nap room discussing how much everyone else needs to nap. All of her little friends need to nap. The toys need to nap. Even the daycare workers need to nap. But not Frances! Oh no.

I can picture it, too, my wee maternal girl wandering around the floor mats whispering, "lie down. Nap time. Night night."

However, I have a trump card. Mr. Weissbluth's book informs me that 95% of kids her age need one nap a day, and 5% need two. Thus the experts assure me that she does in fact require some daytime sleep. It's all laid out in black and white. And furthermore, when she doesn't nap, she is obviously very tired. She doesn't whine, stamp her feet, or throw tantrums, no; she just sits on her Dora chair looking glazed and semi-conscious for an hour or two before bed. And then goes upstairs and throws books around the room for fun.

Frances has never been a "typical sleeper." I still remember when we went to the Spring OOAKS when she was three months old and she did not sleep all day--she was awake for 12 hours, happy and alert the whole time. Apparently, the experts tell me, this is impossible and a baby her age will just sleep wherever she is whenever she needs to. When she did start sleeping regularly, at about 12 months of age, she was way on the bottom of the sleep charts, requiring several hours less sleep than most children her age. She used to sleep 10 hours at night, two hours during the day (variable--some days 1 hour, some days 3).

And now? About 9 1/2 hours overnight and two hours during the day if we're lucky--some days no sleep at all.

I am almost as certain as a person can be that she will be done napping for good by her third birthday, but I'm going to keep it going for as long as I can. The experts (a pox on them!) can only suggest playing with bedtimes but, dear experts, this is something we cannot do. Her father and I work very early in the morning; Frances must be up by 6; we put her to sleep at a time when she will be naturally waking up just as we need to go get her. There is no flexibility with bedtimes.

Which leaves the naps. Yesterday, we tried putting her down at 1:00 instead of 12:00. After One. Full. Hour of nonstop babbling, she finally slept, and then stayed asleep for another two hours.

There is hope.

Posted by Andrea at 7:19 AM | Comments (9)

I am a wimp

Some of you may have noticed the slightest, smallest bit of whingeing and groaning over my enforced Franceslessness for two days this week and for the last week of October.

And truly, it was very hard. I knew she was fine, and that Erik was fine, and she'd be having fun without me the whole time, and there would be no ill consequences--it wasn't guilt in the slightest, I just missed her terribly. I missed having her slight weight on my lap, her head just under my chin, her fountain-head ponytail tickling my nose, and one tiny warm hand gripping a shoulder or tugging at a mole. I missed the "Mummy hug!" and the "bananatime!" and the "read the book" and "wee!" when a toy goes down the toy slide and the sight of my itty little girl zipping around the kitchen and the living room distributing her fridge magnets to all and sundry. I missed her big dramatic kisses. I missed her nuclear smiles. I missed watching her kiss her own feet, and hug her bear floor pillow with her bum in the air.

If I didn't have those three people to keep me distracted, I would have gone absolutely bananas. (The hotel didn't help.)

But at the same time, I thought of Moreena and all the other moms like her, who have to leave one of their babies behind for weeks or months on end so the other one can get life-saving medical treatment. And I wondered if I could ever stand it (though rationally I know I would if I had to).

I thought of the women MUBAR writes of, the ones from poor countries who leave behind their own families and children to come to Canada under the Live-In Caregiver program and for three years care for someone else's children instead. And I thought--how do they do it? How is it they don't just die?

Am I just incomparably weaker than these other women?

Or is this just another form of systemic pain we gloss over with the rubric of "choice"?

Posted by Andrea at 9:48 AM | Comments (12)

Let's Blame the Mothers! Part 952 in Our Ongoing Series

TheStar.com - Prisoners of fear

To read the article: userid francesATathenadreamingDOTorg password beaniebaby

And here I go:

I wonder where we "neurotic" parents got the idea that you can't be too careful?

Could it be from nightly newscasts of parents who turned their backs "just for a second" only to have their child disappear, or drown, or be hit by a car? Could it be from the parade of experts who follow advising parents that if they are going to take their children to swim, they must remain within arms' reach the entire time, or if they are going to go for a walk, their child should be on a leash?

Could it be from articles in this very newspaper informing parents that televisions kept on TV stands are too unstable and should be kept on the floor, lest it topple and crush a hapless toddler to death? On the basis of half a dozen fatalities in several years?

Could it be from manufacturers eager to push wares meant to cushion every possible sharp surface in your home? (I still say it's easier to use baby teflon spray.)

Could it be from public health agencies running advertising campaigns telling parents that if you turn your back for three seconds to answer the telephone that your child could learn how to climb into the clothes dryer and die? (If you visit the link and hit "refresh" a few times you should see some of the many ads that ran where I used to live--and they were everywhere--in shopping malls, bus stops, sides of buses, everywhere.)

I don't know. I guess we're all just mentally ill, as this article further describes:

Geez, everyone, just loosen up! Sure they're the most important thing in the world to you, and sure you've gotten the message since before they were born that you, and you alone, are responsible for every risk, real or imagined, every consequence, every scrape. Sure you've watched media reports of abducted or murdered or abused children and heard the eternal chorus, "Where was the mother?" Sure you know when kids were killed by their caretakers that the mothers received hate mail for daring to go to work and leave their babies in the care of others. But you can't let trivial stuff like that get to you! Why, that's almost as stupid as letting the stick-thin supermodels that surround you every day make you think that you're fat. Be strong! Resist the onslought! Otherwise, you're neurotic, plus your kids will be helpless and obese.

Or like televisions toppling on toddlers, maybe? Or water coolers? Or baby swings triggering dog attacks? Or never allowing your baby to sleep on their stomach or with a blanket or stuffed toy? Just a thought.

I could spit nails.

This newspaper, and every other I've ever seen, has directly contributed to building the climate of fear that surrounds parenting these days--the idea that nothing is safe, no one can be trusted, and you are totally on your own--no one will help you, not the government, not society, not your neighbours, and if anything ever happens to your child, it is your fault. They have built this cage, wire by wire, barb by barb, and now they're standing on the other side shaking their fingers at the mothers trapped inside.

Posted by Andrea at 7:41 AM | Comments (12)

I've got the guilt monster in a chokehold. Anyone wanna sock him in the eye?

This past weekend and last week, well, they weren't good. And before you put your hands over your ears and say, "We know! We know!" I'd like to say that this has absolutely nothing to do with Katrina. It would have been a bad week and a bad weekend even if Katrina had dissolved into a gentle swirling mist of roses and scented bath oils. Not for any particularly glaring or obvious reason; only because I am, basically, a selfish and introverted person who starts getting twitchy if she doesn't get any time to herself.

Did I say twitchy? That might have been too charitable. "A pent-up mess of resentment, bitterness, anxiety and undeserved crushing retorts" is more accurate. If you ask Erik, he'd probably have another mouthful, at least, after he stops shaking.

This, my dears, is why I waited out most of my year of maternity leave in an unwashed and self-pitying state of OH MY GOD I CAN'T WAIT TO GO BACK TO WORKness. This is why I could never be a SAHM. This is why the bare idea of being a SAHM is enough to start me twitching and shivering all over again. This:

I. I am an introvert. I am really the most introverted person you are ever likely to meet. I am so introverted that my lawyers are campaigning to have my picture (or at least a reasonable caricature) put up on wikipedia under "introversion." I am so introverted that, as soon as an enterprising and intelligent young psychiatrist has a moment to think about it, I'm sure they will invent a mental illness with myself as the inspiration. You may think I am kidding. I am not. I know I'm a chatterbox on the internet.

But I. Am. An introvert.

I am the person who you see walking in the hall, and you smile and say hi, and she smiles at you and you're never quite sure if she heard you or not. I am the person who always seems to be looking about ten feet beyond the back of your head in a conversation. I am the person who enters the servery with her frozen lunch, reheats it in the microwave, listens to the ongoing conversation about The Apprentice with a vague smile, and then leaves, all without saying a word. I am an introvert. What does this mean?

It means that if I don't get a substantial amount of alone time, I get twitchy.

It means that paradise, to me, is a deserted island with no rescuers in sight and a whackload of books I haven't read before.

It means that my regular life builds up something close to panic in me. I get up. I go to work, and there are people there all day. People who want something from me. People who expect me to be able to listen to them talk about their weekend and then have something to say in return. People who, believe it or not, don't yet know that Frances came a month early and has a growth disorder of some kind, and who don't know that my husband turned 40 this year and I'm taking him to Vegas. Why? Because I haven't told 'em.

Then I come home. And I miss Frances terribly, so I spend every moment I can in the same room with her. This generally means the main floor of our house, where the TV is also on, which I can't stand because of the incessant and meaningless chatter of it, but there it is. It's on, and I miss Frances, so I cope. Even if I spend an inordinate amount of it sitting beside her kissing her just behind the ear while she plays with her BUS! or DUCK! or BOOK! and I read something about astrophysics or the midwinter celebrations of the Iroquois (I know you think I'm kidding, but I got that one out of the library just this week), periodically surfacing to say, "Wow! Very good! You're such a smart girl. You're right, that IS yellow!" and so forth.

The twenty minutes we spend in her room getting her ready for bed are the best part of my day. We get her into her jammies, and she looks so sweet, and she careens around, collapsing on the bear floor pillow I sewed her while I was pregnant in a fit of giggles, rearranging her books from one shelf to another, trying to open her diaper cupboard, and reacting to my flung-open arms and pitiful cries of "I wanna hug!" with uproarious laughter and a good game of tag. But by the time she's been tucked into bed, my dears, I am DONE.

Done.

So done that if I were any more done, I'd be did.

Erik, understandably, figures this is our time to reconnect as a couple. This makes sense, eh? But at this point of nearly fourteen hours of continual peopleing, I am getting twitchy. He wants to watch something on TV and talk about his day. I want to run away to a deserted island with a whackload of books I haven't read before. You can see how this might create conflict. He tells me what his boss said to him today. I scowl, and bury my head in a book. He repeats to me something he just heard on television. I snarl, and feel my shoulders bunching with repressed outrage. He asks me what I might want for supper tomorrow. It's all I can do to keep from shouting, "JUST LEAVE ME ALONE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD IS IT SO MUCH TO ASK TO HAVE A WHOLE FIVE MINUTES TO MY FUCKING SELF?"

Which, twitchy though I am, I do recognize is unfair, so I force myself to a semblance of civility, but it is a mighty thin veneer, my dears.

So let me tell you about the last two days I've had! When I was on vacation, and Frances was in daycare.

Bliss. Bliss bliss bliss. BLISS.

I had sixteen, count 'em, SIXTEEN hours when no one wanted anything from me. I read blogs and typed replies and answered emails (and queries for thewholemom.com! very exciting) without having to maneouver the keyboard out of the reach of tiny fingers or answering constant calls of "PEN! PEN!" I finished a few layouts of Frances's scrapbook, and they're cute, if I do say so myself. I did another draft of the story I posted on Drafts a week or so back, and when I've got it typed up I'm gonna post it again. I read a book. I went for a few nice walks and took lots of carefully arranged close-up photographs of common weeds, which I think are nice, anyway. I went shopping. I did nothing of any practical use or value whatsoever.

Well, ok, the shopping trip did consist of Frances's fall wardrobe and some new pajamas. But except for that. Frivolity. Decadence. Lunches of cheesies, breakfasts of eggos, lots of lolling about with bonbons. All of those things the pundits say SAHMing is about, but it's only about it without the M. I was a SAH for two days. GLORIOUS.

And you know what happened in the evening?

I was happy to see Frances, and spent hours playing with her. I was happy to see Erik, and was able to reply to his remarks about the idiocy he deals with on a daily basis at his wage slavitude with something approaching patience. It was, you know, nice. I wasn't twitchy. I didn't snarl. I didn't snap. I didn't have the vibrating and troubling impression that if I opened my mouth I'd start to scream and wouldn't be able to stop again.

Yes, it gets that bad when I'm around people all the time. You are lovely folks, all of you, and I treasure you; but know that if we ever meet up or go on vacation together, I will need a substantial amount of time and space on my own. And it's not you, it's me.

So up there somewhere I mentioned something about guilt, I think. Here it is:

I DID NOT FEEL GUILTY.

Not once.

It is possible. It is truly possible to spend time by yourself, for yourself, on yourself, without feeling as if you ought to be sacrificing this current happiness for someone else because you are, after all, a mother now; and gods know that mothers aren't supposed to be ENJOYING THEMSELVES. I mean, mothers have had sex, you know. Girls who have sex never come to a good end, even if they are nice girls who keep the babies and devote themselves single-mindedly to stripping every source of joy they possess in their own lives and transferring it to the fruits of their loins.

I have got to do this more often. Not just because I'm a better wife and mother for not being twitchy and snarly and mean, but because I, too, am a person and dammit, I deserve not to feel twitchy and snarly and mean.

What am I doing tomorrow, you ask?

Frances and I are going to the zoo. I can't wait.

Posted by Andrea at 10:05 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

News Flash: Crack Babies a Cruel Media Hoax

And yet somehow, a group of people has not only missed this, but has decided to direct its anti-crack-baby passions toward forming a group intended to eradicate this non-existent plague.

Their ploy?

Paying poor female drug users $200 to be sterilized .* Why, what would you do?

The program was born when Ms. Harris, the founder, who had four foster-children in her care who were born to the same drug-addicted mother, attempted to pass legislation in California (where she lived) to punish women who gave birth to addicted children: She worked to create and introduce a piece of legislation called the Prenatal Child Neglect Act, thus creating the crime of prenatal child neglect which would, if the legislation had been passed, have been categorized as a felony.

The problem?

Pick one:

1) Crack Babies don't exist. They are a media construct with no basis in fact. These project prevention folks, which their incessant targetting of "crack mothers," are chasing unicorns.

2) The program has no interest in babies who really are suffering; instead, it focuses on policing the sex and reproductive lives of poor (primarily black) women. If it really cared about preventing the births of "damaged children" and their lives of misery, it would target addictions that cause severe, lifelong effects in children. Namely: alcohol.

Seriously. A bit of digging in reputable sources will show within about ten minutes that there is no such thing as crack babies. The "damaged children" born to crack addicted mothers, as it turns out, grow up to be productive members of society with an average IQ deficit of under 5 points--about the equivalent difference of breastfeeding vs. formula feeding. They are born weighing, on average, 200 grams less than other babies--or about 6 1/2 ounces.

Story found via I Blame the Patriarchy. Happy Monday, all.

* The group also offers $200 for choosing another long-term form of birth control, such as depro-provera or an IUD, but according to other published reports sterilization is their preferred method, as they believe an addict is in danger of relapse at any time. Also, they claim that their services are for men and women; but all of the contraceptive methods listed under their program are for women only.

Posted by Andrea at 7:44 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Worst. Online. Article. EVER.

Thanks to Lovely and Amazing for posting the link to this story (scroll down to "Changing Downs Syndrome kids..."), which is so abhorrent on so many levels that I don't even know where to begin.

Emily has already pointed out how awful and untrue it is for the author to say that Down syndrome is ugly:

"EVERY parent dreams of having beautiful offspring. Naturally so.

"Nothing is more soothing to the ear than to have relatives, neighbours and friends remarking just how beautiful your baby looks or how her eyes are as beautiful as her father's.

"But for Down's Syndrome babies, such comments will never be heard. It would not only be grossly untrue but unkind.

"They have flat noses, protruding lips and even tongues and slit eyes. Their IQ is under 70."

Could you imagine putting such words into print?

Believe it or not, worse follows:

"Besides the ethical question of consent, there are the long-term consequences of such surgery, especially when performed on a female with Down's Syndrome.

"It is a fact that the IQ of such a child will always be low, but that in no way will hamper his learning process and his ability to be independent.

"An 18-year-old Down's Syndrome girl who has had cosmetic surgery would probably look like any other girl her age who is normal.

"But the 18-year-old Down's Syndrome girl will probably have the mentality of a 14-year-old or younger. When alone with a male stranger, she runs a higher risk of being taken advantage of. She may be too weak-minded to know what is happening to her to resist any advances.

"But if she still retained the appearance of someone with Down's Syndrome, there is a better chance that the stranger would leave her alone perhaps even for the simple reason that he would not have the heart to take advantage of someone who is disabled."

In other words: Well of course they're ugly, how could you think otherwise? But better to leave them that way, otherwise someone might rape them.

Because god knows, scumbags have a long history of not taking advantage of disabled girls and women. Right?

I want to pound this woman's head in. Give her a disability of her own to deal with.

It is tragic that our society is so narrow-minded about beauty that even small deviations from the ideal make one average. I remember a magazine article I read about this wonderful model, who was born without legs! And this model who was born without legs just proves that the beauty industry is diverse, so there. Except that this model-born-without-legs was tall, very slim, stacked, had a gorgeous face and long blond hair. In fact, when fitted with the prostheses they shot her with, you could not in any way distinguish between her and any other model. It struck me at the time that the beauty industry would rather admit a woman to the club who was born without legs (as she should be, she was stunningly beautiful) than a woman with five extra pounds or a hooked nose.

That the cosmetic surgery industry is gearing up to transform a whole new market into the same image of nordic good looks is not surprising. It's sad. It's stupid. But it's completely predictable.

On the one hand, you have parents signing up for this, hoping that it will give their children a more normal life and spare them some discrimination and heartache (and it might). On the other hand, you have parents who love their children desperately just as they are and who could never picture their beauties looking any way other than they do.

And in the middle, you have this asswipe pointing fingers at both camps, denouncing the ones who choose surgery for endangering their (female) children and subjecting them to possible rapes, and on the other hand telling parents of Down syndrome kids that the loves of their lives are hideous. Who is, on both counts, dead wrong but is dispensing advice without care, as sage and sane as a certain harebrained sci fi actor we all know and hate.

Forget cosmetic surgery for faces and bodies. We need some serious aesthetic pruning of some folks' ugly, narrow-minded, judgemental hearts.

Posted by Andrea at 2:31 PM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

Something to make you feel better on the "worst mother ever" days

Yesterday's posts and the comments reminded me of something my Mom told me, several months ago, when we were discussing Frances's smallness and various possible causes of it.

She said, "One of my colleauges at work does business plans with her children. Every year she sets a goal together with each child, and if they reach it, they get a bonus."

"That's interesting," I said.

"Yes, they get two thousand dollars if they reach the goal they set around Christmas."

"Hmm."

"And she was telling me that her daughter is also very small. Not as small as Frances, but small. So one year the goal they set was for her to grow six inches."

"They ... WHAT?"

"My colleague decided that if her daughter grew six inches that year, she would get two thousand dollars."

"She ... WHAT?"

"Yes."

"That's insane! Who would do that to their child? What's that going to do to her self-esteem? She can't control how much she grows!"

"I know. But my colleauge thought that this would encourage her to make healthy food choices, and she would grow as much as she could that way."

"But ... still. That's awful!"

"I know."

Posted by Andrea at 8:02 AM | Comments (10)

Frances is Taking a Stand

Frances has decided, over the past day or two, that she wants nothing to do with this walking business. If we try to hold her hand to walk across the room, or encourage her to take a few steps on her own, she will wail "no," sit down and cry. She's also decided she'd rather not spoon feed herself, but would prefer it if we'd do so indefinitely. She's scared, I think, of her burgeoning independence. Frances has never been one of those babies charging on to the next exciting milestone and insisting on doing things for herself when she's nowhere near capable of it. She enjoys being taken care of, and in most respects we enjoy taking care of her, and it certainly makes her a more easy-going baby, so there's been little to complain of. Until now, when on the very threshold of walking, she pulls back with a shriek and says NO.

I've been trying not to push her. I've been excited to see her finally progressing towards these milestones, but I've been trying to keep them fun and not pressure her or make her feel that she MUST walk or use her own spoon. But I guess I haven't been doing all that well, eh?

I shouldn't blame myself right off the bat, I know--all kinds of things could be happening at daycare that could be making her upset, and we know that her special friend (the woman who normally cares for her) has been away on vacation for a few weeks, and this has been making her less than her normal cheery self. But I do blame myself. Because I'm the mother. It's all my fault, isn't it?

I'm also trying not to get frustrated. I'm not a patient person by nature, and seeing her get so close and then back off is, well. An opportunity for personal growth.

I know I am just going to have to accept it, and that the better I accept it and relax and the more I'm prepared for this just to take as long as it (!^#$%@#$&#$) is going to take, the faster it will end and we'll resume our meandering onward path to full mobility. I know that. It's just so hard. I was so excited.

She wants to be babied for a bit. That's ok. She's a baby.

~~~~~

Fortunately, she has not decided to be frightened of the independence offered her by speaking, so new words are still being added daily. Recently she's learned hat (ah). This morning's additions were leg, v u l v a, and (in a completely different, not-anatomy-related incident) beaver.

Posted by Andrea at 10:37 AM | Comments (7)

In Which I Invite the Wrath of the Internet

I am one of the lucky ones: I loved nursing.

Breastfeeding was the best part about early motherhood for me. It's been several months since I weaned Frances, and I still miss it. And this affection for it sustained me through nipple confusion, bottle rejection, early teething, and many other typical and not-so-typical nursing mother woes. When it worked, it was beautiful and amazing; and if I hadn't loved it so much during those times, I'm not sure I would have made it through the other times.

Even so, it was tough going, and sometimes the only thing that got me through a feeding (with clenched jaws and shallow breath) was my family health history. I have type 1 diabetes, several allergies and asthma, and Frances was suspected to have some kind of funky genetic/growth issue. I wasn't going to fuck around with anything that could affect her health one way or the other if I could possibly help it. I compared the (sometimes very real and significant) present misery of trying to tough it out for a few more days or weeks while trying a new solution with the potential misery of seeing her struggle with a chronic illness I know all too well in the future, and the present misery never seemed as bad.

So I may be the last person you'd expect to see this from:

"First, breast milk provides protection against selected diseases. This adage is by no means new, but past evidence for protection against infectious disease in developed countries has been less than adequate. .... Second, supplementing breastfeedings with small amounts of formula does not eliminate the protection afforded by breast milk. Clearly, this is not meant to discourage mothers from practicing exclusive breastfeeding, but, in a society where the mother has to meet many responsibilities in addition to feeding her infant, exclusive breastfeeding may not always be practical. Finally, breastfeeding is not an all-or-none phenomenon; the more breast milk an infant receives in the first 6 months of life, the better." (emphasis mine)

Maybe this is unique to me, but:

Did you ever have a health professional, lactation consultant, or other person involved in caring for you as a new mother attempting to breastfeed tell you that breastfeeding is not an "all or nothing phenomenon," and that even partial breastfeeding has immunological benefits? That some breastfeeding is plenty good enough?

I never did. I heard that I should, at all costs, continue to breastfeed exclusively for at least six months; and I heard that it was "ok" to give it up and switch to formula. At no point did I ever hear that there was any valid middle ground. As with every other front in the Mommy Wars, our options are presented as black and white, all or nothing, with tremendous consequences for the future health and well-being of our precious children should we make one false (read: selfish) step.

Welcome to the real world of research on infant feeding practices, where hyperbole and hype are elbowed out of the way for a little while so we can have some breathing space and consider the real risks of formula.

Of course, I am not a doctor nor any kind of medical expert; I try to be thorough in my research but I present no claims to being completely correct or completely unbiased. While I have tried to collect credible, reliable research, I have not had the time to investigate and review these studies as thoroughly as I normally would have liked to do; if you know of failings in any one of them, by all means let me know.

People have strong emotions when it comes to what women should do with their breasts; strangely, after everything mine have gone through in the service of Perfect Nursing, I don't. I know exactly how much work and sacrifice is required to serve one's baby the perfect food, and I would never tell any other woman that she should, just because I did.

Current research is focusing on many areas to determine the precise benefits of breastfeeding in various situations: immunity, obesity/overweight, intelligence, development, allergies and asthma, diabetes, cancer, and more. It would take a book to explore them all, so I’ve focused here on just a handful, and present on a short précis of what’s available. But don’t take my word for it: Visit pubmed and read the abstracts for yourself.

Immunity (ear infections and diarrhea)

Mainstream media do a shit job of reporting on science, any science. In the area of mothering especially it's filtered so to cause maximum stress, self-doubt and guilt. When was the last time you saw a headline proclaim, "Formula supplementation increases risks of ear infections by 20%, but this result is not considered statistically significant"?

It is worth mentioning, by the way, that the decision of the statistical community to use the word "significance" to mean "not likely resulting from chance alone" was unfortunate, to say the least. Most people hear "significant" and they interpret it to mean "meaningful," "important" or "large."

In the study I linked to above, it turns out that the difference between exclusively-breastfed infants and infants who received a moderate amount of formula supplementation, in terms of ear infections and diarrhea, was not statistically significant--that is, it could not be concluded from the study that the differences between the groups were not due to chance in the sample selection. The only groups that showed a statistically significant difference in infection rates from exclusively breastfed were the groups that received no or almost no breastmilk. These groups were 60-70% more likely to contract an infection.

Sixty to seventy per cent. That sounds like a lot, eh? Except that when you translate that to the individual level, it's really not very much at all because most infants are not likely to have an infection at any one point in time.

Shopper's drug mart says that over 60% of babies have had one or more ear infections by their first birthday. This leaves 40% of babies who had none; 0x1.7 still equals 0, so for them, it makes very little to no difference (in terms of immune resistance to these particular diseases) whether they were breastfed or not. And for those babies who had one or two ear infections, the difference between formula feeding and breastfeeding (even exclusively either way) will again be very subtle. Say, three ear infections instead of two.

The difference is more significant for infants who have immunity problems for whatever reason--who would have a significant number of infections even if they were exclusively breastfed. For them, formula feeding may make a very real and very problematic difference.

IQ

According to the published research I've seen, the difference in IQ for an exclusively-breastfed vs. exclusively-formula fed baby some years later is two to five points. It is "statistically significant" in that, again, the difference was unlikely to result from chance alone. But that doesn't mean that a difference of two IQ points is significant for your child's quality of life or future opportunities.

What is really interesting is that the data on infant feeding and IQ appears to be largely accepted, even though IQ testing is itself a highly controversial and divisive subject. What does it mean to say that breastfeeding confers IQ benefits if IQ itself is a meaningless statistic?

Even if we pretend that IQ is all that its proponents say it is and more, an increase (or decrease) in IQ points of 2-5 is hardly cause for international alarm. For a person of average or above-average intelligence, such a difference is likely not to even be noticeable, let alone destroy one's future opportunities for happiness. (I think it’s worth it to mention here, somewhat tangentially, that maximizing IQ is not a route to success or happiness either. I’m not sure how this became such a focus for current parenting practices, this “maximizing your child’s future potential,” business; but of course, every parent makes choices every day that help to maximize some of their child’s potentials while minimizing others. It is impossible to maximize all of your child’s abilities—you can offer intellectual opportunities while sacrificing social opportunities, offer athletic opportunities while sacrificing artistic opportunities (or whatever combination thereof pertains to you or your family’s situation) but maximizing IQ is not the be-all and end-all of maximizing potential or of good parenting. IMO, accepting as an ultimate goal of parenting the maximization of IQ depends greatly on accepting current cultural norms of “success” defined as professional attainment, salary, class, and social prestige. This is not the route to happiness for everyone.)

Of course, even small differences can have a great impact on the lives and opportunities of infants who are on the margins, cognitively speaking: those who are significant premature, disabled, or suffer from some other difficulty. It is possible that for some people, a difference of five IQ points can make the difference between living independently one day, and ... not. It goes without saying that a subway advertisement advising passengers that “every baby deserves breastmilk” will not be able to determine which category your own infant falls into.

Allergies

All of the data I have seen on this subject are highly conflicting, with some studies that report more allergies for formula-fed infants, some reporting no relationship, and some reporting more allergies for breastfed babies. Here's a representative abstract:

American Journal of Epidemiology. 2004 Aug 1;160(3):217-23. "Breastfeeding and risk of atopic dermatitis, by parental history of allergy, during the first 18 months of life."

Benn CS, Wohlfahrt J, Aaby P, Westergaard T, Benfeldt E, Michaelsen KF, Bjorksten B, Melbye M.

"The role of breastfeeding in allergic diseases remains controversial. The authors studied the association between breastfeeding and development of atopic dermatitis during the first 18 months of life among children with and without a parental history of allergy. A cohort study of 15,430 mother-child pairs enrolled in The Danish National Birth Cohort was carried out between 1998 and 2000. Data on breastfeeding, atopic dermatitis, and potential confounders was obtained from telephone interviews conducted during pregnancy and when the children were 6 and 18 months of age. The cumulative incidence of atopic dermatitis was 11.5% at 18 months of age. Overall, current breastfeeding was not associated with atopic dermatitis (incidence rate ratio (IRR) = 0.91, 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.80, 1.04). Exclusive breastfeeding for at least 4 months was associated with an increased risk of atopic dermatitis in children with no parents with allergies (IRR = 1.29, 95% CI: 1.06, 1.55) but not for children with one (IRR = 1.11, 95% CI: 0.94, 1.31) or two (IRR = 0.88, 95% CI: 0.69, 1.13) parents with allergies (test for homogeneity, p = 0.03). The authors found no overall effects of exclusive or partial breastfeeding on the risk of atopic dermatitis. However, the effect of exclusive breastfeeding for 4 months or more depended on parental history of allergic diseases."

It wouldn't make very good copy, would it? Headline: "The risks of formula feeding vs. breastfeeding depend on parental health history!"

Diabetes

Type 1 Diabetes (or juvenile onset) has also been linked to infant feeding practices, with a moderate increase in risk associated with formula feeding. But again, in the most recent studies I've seen, the actual risk associated with exclusive and early formula feeding (weaned before three months) is about is about 1.5 times greater than for the baseline population. In other words, if 1/400 people contract Type 1 diabetes, then a person who was fed exclusively formula from three months of age or before has about a 1/300 chance. (About. Not using my calculator.)

For me, this was worth it; Frances's risk of developing diabetes as my daughter is on the order of 4%, and (to me) increasing this to 6% was unacceptable. (Please note: It has been a long time since I looked at the odds for a child of developing Type 1 depending on their parents' health status, so don't quote me--I think it's around 4%, but I am not sure). But again, the risks of formula feeding are dependent on health history. It is difficult to impossible to know whether or not your child contains a genetic susceptibility to this (or most other) autoimmune disease, since even those who carry the gene won’t necessarily develop the disease. But it’s very unlikely; type 1 diabetes is rare. And if your child doesn’t have the genetic susceptibility, they can’t develop the disease no matter what you feed them.

Have you actually read through all of this? Congratulations!

If you have, you might be scratching your head by now, wondering: But why on earth are governments and organizations spending so much money to convince women to breastfeed their babies exclusively when the studies show such a tenuous, subtle benefit to the babies from doing so? If the benefits are, as so many studies show, dose-dependent (that is, that any breastfeeding at all confers benefits), then why don't they promote partial breastfeeding as a reasonable alternative for women who can't or don't want to exclusively breastfeed, for whatever reason?

Because despite the advertising, governments are not worrying their pointy little heads over the health of your baby. They're worried about the economic impacts of these small differences when totaled up over a population.

They're not worried that little Johnny might get three ear infections rather than two. They're worried that the 2,000 babies born this year will get 3,000 ear infections instead of 2,000 ear infections--they're worried about their parents' lost work time and the cost of the drugs and doctor's visits. They're not worried that little Abigail might have 3 IQ points shaved off her adult total--they're worried that sixty per cent of adults will have 3 IQ points shaved off their totals, and the loss in total productivity and innovation that represents for the economy. They're not worried that Frances might have had a 50% greater chance of developing diabetes, which might or might not ever manifest itself for her. They're worried that over a total population of 30 million, they will have fifty per cent more diabetics than they needed to and, you know, Type 1 is an expensive illness. Every extra diabetic costs them something.

And breastmilk? Free. Not only free but, crucially, private.

So our lovely elected officials did a little bit of math:

The costs of formula feeding to the Australian economy (in terms of hospital costs) in the capital region were calculated at a few million dollars per year (the only study I saw which did so--I'm sure they exist for other countries and regions as well, but they would be government policy documents and I was not able to find them online). Say that a breastfeeding educational campaign influences an extra five per cent of women to breastfeed. Five per cent of two million dollars is $100,000. So any campain which costs less than $100,000 and increases breastfeeding by at least five per cent is a benefit to this economy.

Here is where it gets tricky, and for a moment, I'm going to borrow Twisty's Patriarchy Blaming hat:

The reason this math works is because what women feed their babies is considered private. Thus, the costs are borne by women, and the government (and society and the economy as a whole) is a free rider.

It's ingenious, really. For a few thousand dollars you print up some brochures and posters extolling the many benefits of exclusive breastfeeding and promoting current medical advice that all babies should be exclusively breastfed for at least six months, and preferably 12. Intelligent scientific analyses aren't included, leaving mothers to imagine that the benefits are tremendous and the costs of not doing so staggering to the health of their individual baby--that if they feed formula to their infant they are condemning them to a sub-par intelligence, a lifelong struggle with obesity, and an early relationship with an asthma puffer. They staff a hotline with a nurse or two and pass some laws saying that it's legal to breastfeed in public to make it look like they're "doing something." None of these initiatives costs a lot of money, but if breastfeeding rates go up, the economy benefits tremendously.

And if women are left by themselves in a house alone with a baby who wants to suck on a very sensitive body part every hour all day long? Not their problem. They don’t have to pay for it. And if it gets too much, they’ll prescribe antidepressants for the mothers and encourage them to keep breastfeeding because most of the drugs won’t get to the baby. You pay for the drugs, so again, it costs them nothing.

Imagine for a moment that there was some groovy new gizmo that, if every pediatrician had one and used it, would cause ear infections to go down by 33%, IQ to rise by 5 points, type 1 diabetes and other autoimmune diseases would decrease by a third, obesity and overweight would go down by 20%, and so on. Imagine this new gizmo is nearly free, but will increase the workload of pediatricians substantially and require them to work in isolation for much of each day.

Now imagine the government sending every pediatrician a little flyer that says, “If you’re a good doctor and you care about your patients, you will get one of these machines. Look at all the benefits! Call our hotline if you need to find out where to buy one.”

I respectfully submit that this would never happen. There would be funding. There would be programs to hook every pediatrician up with one of these machines, probably for free. There would be funds to hire assistants and more doctors to help with the workload and isolation. The pediatricians, in short, would not be asked to privately bear the substantial cost of such a task for a public good.

And yet this is exactly what governments do with breastfeeding mothers. Why? Because what pediatricians do is “public,” and what women do in their own homes is “private.” The state never shies away from legislating or regulating what women can and can’t do with their bodies, especially their reproductive organs: what children they can have, when they can have them, when the state will assist in rearing them, what options there are for birth control, who can access them, whether or not you can have an abortion and—if so—when and by who, what clothing must be worn in public, when and where women can have sex for pay—if they can at all, and a dozen or more other examples I’m sure any one of us could think of at the drop of a hat. The State regards the regulation of women’s bodies and reproductive functions as its business.

BUT it doesn’t regard PAYING for the CONSEQUENCES of those functions as its business—even if it mandates them. Thus states outlawing abortions don’t help those women raise the babies that result, states outlawing divorce make no efforts to save women from abusive husbands, and so on.

In this case it’s subtler, as we live in a putatively egalitarian society. But really, when you think about it, we have the State telling women what good mothers do with their breasts and making no real efforts to help them in doing so, even though the personal costs of exclusive breastfeeding for six or twelve months can be very high indeed—especially for women who need to return to work beforehand, who are essentially told that they “can always pump,” without any honest information about how time consuming this is and how difficult it can be to maintain a good milk supply while exclusively pumping. Certainly no one helps them out with the purchase of the breastpump, or reimburses them for the coffee breaks and lunch breaks they spend hooked up to a machine.

This is what I am not saying: I am not saying that we should all give up breastfeeding as a patriarchal exercise in control of women’s bodies and switch to formula. No. I know that if and when I have another baby (if and when being large factors, but anyway) I plan on breastfeeding again. But as I said, I’m one of the lucky ones: I loved it. And there are health benefits, as subtle and difficult to see as they may be in the life history of any particular person. I firmly believe that natural selection and Mother Nature are better chefs than engineers and scientists.

What I am saying is that for as long as our governments see the costs of breastfeeding as private ones, then the decision to breastfeed must be regarded as absolutely private, and the decision to formula feed as a reasonable and healthy alternative. After all, the difference between formula and breastmilk is not comparable to the difference between a mcdonald’s hamburger and milkshake vs. freshly prepared organic veggies sautéed in a light oil. It’s more like the difference between the organic veggies and a bag of prepared salad from the supermarket. A real, noticeable difference, to be sure; but both are actually healthy.

What I am saying is that if government wants to keep telling women what Good Mothers Should Do With Their Bodies/Breasts, then they had better pony up some real assistance. Something tangible, like free breast pump rentals, house visits by baby care specialists so women can catch up on their sleep, assistance in preparing healthy meals and snacks so nursing mothers can keep up their milk supply, some form of recognition or recompense for personal time spent at work pumping, incorporating nursing areas and support into events and locations that do not revolve around shopping, and public recognition and acceptance of the fact that even partial breastfeeding confers many benefits. It should not be portrayed as an all-or-nothing, black-or-white, breastmilk-or-formula decision.

Until then, it’s just the same old, same old game of the public benefits of women’s bodies being taken as free, when really, women are shouldering the private costs. And I don’t know about you, but I am so tired of it.

The Research (for those who would like to see and read some of the abstracts I based the above diatribe on)

Diabetes Res Clin Pract. 2004 Sep;65(3):283-92. Related Articles, Links

Infant diet and type 1 diabetes in China.

Strotmeyer ES, Yang Z, LaPorte RE, Chang YF, Steenkiste AR, Pietropaolo M, Nucci AM, Shen S, Wang L, Wang B, Dorman JS.

Department of Epidemiology, Graduate School of Public Health, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15261, USA.

Infant milk and food introduction may be linked to type 1 diabetes risk in high incidence populations. Dietary data through age 12 months was collected for 247 type 1 diabetic cases and 443 controls in China, a low incidence population, to determine if milk and solid food intake differed. Age range at introduction to milk and formulas was similar in cases and controls but solid food introduction more often occurred before age 3 months in cases. Logistic regression analyses showed soy milk formula consumption at 4-6 (OR = 2.0; 95% CI: 1.1-3.4) and 7-12 months of age (OR = 1.5; 95% CI: 1.0-2.1) was associated with a twofold higher risk of type 1 diabetes, while steamed bread consumption (4-6 months, OR = 0.44; 95% CI: 0.28-0.68; 7-12 months, OR = 0.48; 95% CI: 0.34-0.69) and higher SES (4-6 months, OR = 0.55; 95% CI: 0.39-0.78; 7-12 months, OR = 0.57; 95% CI: 0.40-0.83) were negatively associated. Drinking cow's milk at 7-12 months (OR = 0.60; 95% CI: 0.43-0.85) was negatively associated with type 1 diabetes while consuming vegetables at 4-6 months (OR = 1.5; 95% CI: 1.0-2.2) was positively associated. Results suggest that infant milk and solid food intake are associated with type 1 diabetes in China. Prospective studies may determine how these dietary factors impact disease etiology, particularly for at-risk-populations.

Diabet Med. 2004 Sep;21(9):1035-40. Related Articles, Links

Type 1 diabetes mellitus in childhood: a matched case control study in Lancashire and Cumbria, UK.

Marshall AL, Chetwynd A, Morris JA, Placzek M, Smith C, Olabi A, Thistlethwaite D.

AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals, Macclesfield, UK.

AIMS: The aim of the study was to identify environmental risk factors for insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (Type 1 DM) in childhood. METHODS: A matched case-control study of Type 1 DM conducted in Lancashire and Cumbria, UK, using a structured interview. Cases (n=196, participation rate 83%) were children under 16 years of age diagnosed prior to October 1998 and attending diabetic clinics. Controls (n=381) were healthy children from the community matched by gender and by age (within a few days of birth). The data were analysed by logistic regression using the technique of Breslow and Day for matched case control studies. RESULTS: The multivariate regression model showed that the following factors were significantly associated with the risk of developing Type 1 DM (odds ratio, 95% confidence intervals): sharing a room with a sibling (0.458, 0.290-0.721), social contact with other children when aged 6-11 months (0.439, 0.256-0.752), consumption of sugary food (0.080, 0.024-0.261), parental insulin dependent diabetes mellitus (10.651, 3.086-36.761), maternal thyroid disease (4.861, 1.681-14.058), consuming more than one pint of milk per day prior to school entry (0.498, 0.310-0.802), maternal smoking during pregnancy (0.373, 0.218-0.636), a father with no academic qualifications (0.504, 0.278-0.913), maternal age at time of birth (0.900, 0.854-0.948), maternal infections in pregnancy (2.453, 1.011-5.948), other maternal illnesses or conditions in pregnancy (2.007, 1.139-3.535), belonging to an Asian family (0.104, 0.028-0.394), and regular contact with pets and other animals (0.552, 0.309-0.987). CONCLUSION: Many of the results are consistent with the hygiene hypothesis which links improved living standards with decreased exposure to microorganisms and increased risk of immune mediated disease in childhood. These findings challenge the idea that improved hygiene acts exclusively through a Th2 mechanism leading to atopic disease as Type 1 DM is mediated by a Th1 reaction. The association with maternal smoking could be due to recall bias but a causal link cannot be excluded with confidence.

Public Health Nutr. 2003 Dec;6(8):773-83. Related Articles, Links

Social inequalities in infant feeding during the first year of life. The Longitudinal Study of Child Development in Quebec (LSCDQ 1998-2002).

Dubois L, Girard M.

Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and Institute of Population Health, University of Ottawa, 1 Stewart, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1N 6N5. ldubois@uottawa.ca

OBJECTIVE: The aim of this paper is to describe the source and the scope of social inequalities in infant feeding practices. It examines the extent to which different recommendations are followed in different social groups and highlights the main factors influencing the total adherence to three recommendations at the population level. DESIGN, SETTING AND SUBJECTS: The study follows a representative sample (n=2103) of the children born in 1998 in the province of Quebec (Canada). Detailed information on breast-feeding and complementary feeding was collected at 5 and 17 months by face-to-face interviews with the mother. The independent variables were mother's age, mother's education level, poverty level, family type, socio-economic status (SES) and living area. Odds ratios (adjusted for baby's rank in the family, birth weight and premature birth) are presented for breast-feeding, and for formula and cows' milk consumption, at different ages. The adherence to a combined indicator cumulating three recommendations (breast-fed at birth, complementary food at 4 months or later and cows' milk at 9 months or later) is also presented. RESULTS: The analysis indicates that adherence to the recommendations is low in Quebec. Breast-feeding initiation, duration and its exclusivity improved with mother's age and education level and SES. Adherence to the different recommendations was interrelated, indicating an accumulation of bad nutritional circumstances for children in low-SES families. The odds of being fed in accordance with the three studied recommendations, when living in a family with the highest SES, was 2.3 times higher than when living in a family with the lowest SES. When living with a highly educated mother, the odds ratio was 2.7 times higher than when living with a low-educated mother. For mother's age, the odds ratio reached 3.7 for children from mothers aged > or =35 years, in comparison with children from mothers < or =24 years old. When SES or mother's education level was combined with mother's age, the children in the best situation were >8 more times likely than the least privileged children to be fed in accordance with these recommendations. Living area was not related with infant feeding during the first year of life. CONCLUSIONS: Breast-feeding and nutrition could be related with different health and cognitive outcomes in childhood and later in life. Consequently, social disparities in diet during infancy could play a role in the development of social and health inequalities more broadly observed at the population level. Intervention to improve adherence to breast-feeding and nutrition recommendations in infancy should be prioritised and evaluated for its impact on the reduction on infant diet inequalities over time.

Am J Epidemiol. 2004 Aug 1;160(3):217-23. Related Articles, Links

Breastfeeding and risk of atopic dermatitis, by parental history of allergy, during the first 18 months of life.

Benn CS, Wohlfahrt J, Aaby P, Westergaard T, Benfeldt E, Michaelsen KF, Bjorksten B, Melbye M.

Department of Epidemiology Research, Danish Epidemiology Science Centre, Statens Serum Institut, Copenhagen, Denmark. cb@ssi.dk

The role of breastfeeding in allergic diseases remains controversial. The authors studied the association between breastfeeding and development of atopic dermatitis during the first 18 months of life among children with and without a parental history of allergy. A cohort study of 15,430 mother-child pairs enrolled in The Danish National Birth Cohort was carried out between 1998 and 2000. Data on breastfeeding, atopic dermatitis, and potential confounders was obtained from telephone interviews conducted during pregnancy and when the children were 6 and 18 months of age. The cumulative incidence of atopic dermatitis was 11.5% at 18 months of age. Overall, current breastfeeding was not associated with atopic dermatitis (incidence rate ratio (IRR) = 0.91, 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.80, 1.04). Exclusive breastfeeding for at least 4 months was associated with an increased risk of atopic dermatitis in children with no parents with allergies (IRR = 1.29, 95% CI: 1.06, 1.55) but not for children with one (IRR = 1.11, 95% CI: 0.94, 1.31) or two (IRR = 0.88, 95% CI: 0.69, 1.13) parents with allergies (test for homogeneity, p = 0.03). The authors found no overall effects of exclusive or partial breastfeeding on the risk of atopic dermatitis. However, the effect of exclusive breastfeeding for 4 months or more depended on parental history of allergic diseases.

Pediatrics. 2004 Jul;114(1):27-32. Related Articles, Links

Early infant multivitamin supplementation is associated with increased risk for food allergy and asthma.

Milner JD, Stein DM, McCarter R, Moon RY.

Department of Pediatrics, Children's National Medical Center, Washington, DC, USA. jdmilner@niaid.nih.gov

OBJECTIVE: Dietary vitamins have potent immunomodulating effects in vitro. Individual vitamins have been shown to skew T cells toward either T-helper 1 or T-helper 2 phenotypic classes, suggesting that they may participate in inflammatory or allergic disease. With the exception of antioxidant protection, there has been little study on the effect of early vitamin supplementation on the subsequent risk for asthma and allergic disease. The objective of this study was to determine whether early vitamin supplementation during infancy affects the risk for asthma and allergic disease during early childhood. METHODS: Cohort data were analyzed from the National Center for Health Statistics 1988 National Maternal-Infant Health Survey, which followed pregnant women and their newborns, and the 1991 Longitudinal Follow-up of the same patients, which measured health and disease outcomes. Patients were stratified by race and breastfeeding status. Factors that are known to be associated with alteration of risk for asthma or food allergies were identified using univariate logistic regression. Those factors were then analyzed in multivariate logistic regression models. Early vitamin supplementation was defined as vitamin use within the first 6 months. RESULTS: There were >8000 total patients in the study. The overall incidence of asthma was 10.5% and of food allergy was 4.9%. In univariate analysis, male gender, smoker in the household, child care, prematurity (<37 weeks), being black, no history of breastfeeding, lower income, and lower education were associated with higher risk for asthma. Child care, higher levels of education, income, and history of breastfeeding were associated with a higher risk for food allergies. In multivariate logistic analyses, a history of vitamin use within the first 6 months of life was associated with a higher risk for asthma in black infants (odds ratio [OR]: 1.27; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.04-1.56). Early vitamin use was also associated with a higher risk for food allergies in the exclusively formula-fed population (OR: 1.63; 95% CI: 1.21-2.20). Vitamin use at 3 years of age was associated with increased risk for food allergies but not asthma in both breastfed (OR: 1.62; 95% CI: 1.19-2.21) and exclusively formula-fed infants (OR: 1.39; 95% CI: 1.03-1.88). CONCLUSIONS: Early vitamin supplementation is associated with increased risk for asthma in black children and food allergies in exclusively formula-fed children. Additional study is warranted to examine which components most strongly contribute to this risk.

Aust N Z J Public Health. 2002 Dec;26(6):543-51. Related Articles, Links

Hospital system costs of artificial infant feeding: estimates for the Australian Capital Territory.

Smith JP, Thompson JF, Ellwood DA.

National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health and Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, Australian Capital Territory. julie@coombs.anu.edu.au

OBJECTIVE: To estimate the attributable ACT hospital system costs of treating selected infant and childhood illnesses having known associations with early weaning from human milk. METHOD: We identified relative risks of infant and childhood morbidity associated with exposure to artificial feeding in the early months of life vs. breastfeeding from cohort studies cited by the American Academy of Pediatrics in 1997 as establishing the protective effect of breastfeeding. Data for ACT breastfeeding prevalence is assessed from a 1997 prospective population-based cohort study of 1,295 women. ACT Hospital Morbidity Data and DRG treatment costs were used to estimate the attributable fraction of costs of hospitalisation for gastrointestinal illness, respiratory illness and otitis media, eczema, and necrotising enterocolitis. RESULTS: Although initiation rates were high (92%), less than one in 10 ACT infants are exclusively breastfed for the recommended six months, mainly due to supplementation or weaning on to formula within the first three months and the early introduction of solids by breastfeeding mothers. This study suggests the attributable hospitalisation costs of early weaning in the ACT are about $1-2 million a year for the five illnesses. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS: Early weaning from breastmilk is associated with significant hospital costs for treatment of gastrointestinal illness, respiratory illness and otitis media, eczema, and necrotising enterocolitis. These costs are minimum estimates of the cost of early weaning as they exclude numerous other chronic or common illnesses and out-of-hospital health care costs. Higher rates of exclusive breastfeeding would reduce these costs. Interventions to protect and support breastfeeding are likely to be cost-effective for the public health system.

JAMA. 2001 May 16;285(19):2461-7. Related Articles, Links

Comment in:
JAMA. 2001 May 16;285(19):2506-7.
JAMA. 2001 Sep 26;286(12):1448; author reply 1449-50.
JAMA. 2001 Sep 26;286(12):1449-50.

Risk of overweight among adolescents who were breastfed as infants.

Gillman MW, Rifas-Shiman SL, Camargo CA Jr, Berkey CS, Frazier AL, Rockett HR, Field AE, Colditz GA.

Harvard Medical School/Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Department of Ambulatory Care and Prevention, 126 Brookline Ave, Suite 200, Boston, MA 02215, USA. matthew_gillman@hms.harvard.edu

CONTEXT: Overweight during adolescence predicts short- and long-term morbidity as well as obesity in adulthood. The prevalence of overweight among adolescents is high and continues to increase. Physiological and behavioral mechanisms and preliminary epidemiologic data suggest that breastfeeding could lower the risk of subsequent obesity in adolescence. OBJECTIVE: To examine the extent to which overweight status among adolescents is associated with the type of infant feeding (breast milk vs infant formula) and duration of breastfeeding. DESIGN, SETTING, AND SUBJECTS: Survey of 8186 girls and 7155 boys, aged 9 to 14 years, who are participants in the Growing Up Today Study, a nationwide cohort study of diet, activity, and growth. In the fall of 1996 we mailed a questionnaire to each of the subjects, and in the spring of 1997, we mailed a supplemental questionnaire to their mothers, who are participants in the Nurses' Health Study II. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE: Overweight status defined as body mass index exceeding the 95th percentile for age and sex from US national data. RESULTS: In the first 6 months of life, 9553 subjects (62%) were only or mostly fed breast milk, and 4744 (31%) were only or mostly fed infant formula. A total of 7186 subjects (48%) were breastfed for at least 7 months while 4613 (31%) were breastfed for 3 months or less. At ages 9 to 14 years, 404 girls (5%) and 635 boys (9%) were overweight. Among subjects who had been only or mostly fed breast milk, compared with those only or mostly fed formula, the odds ratio (OR) for being overweight was 0.78 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.66-0.91), after adjustment for age, sex, sexual maturity, energy intake, time watching television, physical activity, mother's body mass index, and other variables reflecting social, economic, and lifestyle factors. Compared with subjects who had been breastfed for 3 months or less, those who had been breastfed for at least 7 months had an adjusted OR for being overweight of 0.80 (95% CI, 0.67-0.96). Timing of introduction of solid foods, infant formula, or cow's milk was not related to risk of being overweight. CONCLUSION: Infants who were fed breast milk more than infant formula, or who were breastfed for longer periods, had a lower risk of being overweight during older childhood and adolescence.

Proc Nutr Soc. 2000 May;59(2):273-7. Related Articles, Links

Food allergy and nutrition in early life: implications for later health.

Chandra RK.

Memorial University of Newfoundland, Janeway Child Health Centre, St John's, Canada. rchandra@morgan.ucs.mun.ca

Allergic diseases are a common cause of illness in most industrialized countries. Diet during early childhood is an important determinant of the development of allergy, particularly in high-risk infants who have a parental history of atopy. Maternal avoidance of highly-allergenic foods during pregnancy and lactation, prolonged exclusive breast-feeding, the use of a hydrolysed milk formula, and delayed introduction of dairy products, eggs, fish, nuts and soybean are associated with a lower incidence of allergic symptoms and signs. These beneficial effects are observed for as long as 18 years of age. Similarly, nutrition and physical growth are important factors that influence immunocompetence and morbidity due to infections. Small-for-gestational age low-birth-weight infants show prolonged impairment of cell-mediated immunity, antibody responses and phagocyte function. Recent studies indicate the beneficial effect of moderate amounts of Zn given in the first 6 months of life. Thus, diet and nutrition in early life are crucial for the development of allergic and infectious disease throughout childhood and into adulthood.

Singapore Med J. 1998 Dec;39(12):551-6. Related Articles, Links

Breastfeeding at 6 months and effects on infections.

Chye JK, Lim CT.

Department of Paediatrics, Faculty of Medicine, University Hospital, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

AIMS: To examine the pattern of and the influence of some socio-demographic factors on infant milk feedings, and the protective role of breastfeeding against infections. METHODS: Mothers who breastfed their infants (exclusively or partially) at 6 weeks postpartum, and who had singleton pregnancies and healthy infants at birth, were interviewed when their infants had reached 6 months of age. RESULTS: Of the 234 mothers studied, only 31 (13%) mothers were practising exclusive breastfeeding (EBF) and 133 (57%) mothers were using exclusive infant formula feeding (EIF). Solid and semi-solid foods were introduced between 4 to 6 months of life in 89% of the infants. On logistic regression analysis, mothers who were in paid employment [OR 0.25, 95% CI 0.15, 0.42] and not breast feeding at 6 weeks [OR 0.32, 95% CI 0.19, 0.54] had decreased odds of EBF. Antenatal plans to breastfeed, breast-feeding difficulties, ethnicity, level of parental education, parental ages, fathers' income, primigravida status and infants' gender were not significant co-variates. In comparison, EIF was more likely in mothers who worked, practised mixed feedings at 6 weeks and of Chinese descent. There were no significant differences in the rates of upper respiratory tract infections (URTI) or diarrhoeal illnesses between the infants who were or were not being breast-fed. CONCLUSIONS: Most mothers were unable to breastfeed their infants exclusively in the recommended first 4 to 6 months of life. Complementary changes outside the hospital and maternity services are essential in improving breastfeeding rates. Breastfeeding does not appear to confer significant protection to either URTI or gastrointestinal tract infections.

Pediatrics. 1997 Oct;100(4):E7. Related Articles, Links

Exclusive breastfeeding protects against bacterial colonization and day care exposure to otitis media.

Duffy LC, Faden H, Wasielewski R, Wolf J, Krystofik D.

Department of Pediatrics, Children's Hospital, School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, State University of New York, Buffalo, NY 14209, USA.

OBJECTIVE: We followed a cohort (N = 306) of infants at well-baby visits in two suburban pediatric practices to assess the relation of exclusive breastfeeding, and other environmental exposures, to episodes of acute otitis media (AOM) and otitis media with effusion (OME). METHODS: Detailed prospective information about the exclusiveness of breastfeeding, parental smoking, day care attendance, and family history was obtained at scheduled clinic visits. Tympanometric and otoscopic examinations were used in the diagnosis of otitis media (OM). Nasopharyngeal cultures were performed at 1-6 months, and at 8, 10, 12, 15, 18, and 24 months of age to detect colonization with middle-ear pathogens. RESULTS: Between 6 and 12 months of age, cumulative incidence of first OM episodes increased from 25% to 51% in infants exclusively breastfed and from 54% to 76% in infants formula-fed from birth. Peak incidence of AOM and OME episodes was inversely related to rates of breastfeeding beyond 3 months of age. A twofold elevated risk of first episodes of AOM or OME was observed in exclusively formula-fed infants compared with infants exclusively breast-fed for 6 months. In the logistic regression analysis, formula-feeding was the most significant predictor of AOM and OME episodes, although age at colonization with middle-ear pathogens and day care (outside the home) were significant competing risk factors. A hazard health model suggested additionally that breastfeeding, even for short durations (3 months), reduced onset of OM episodes in infancy. CONCLUSIONS: Modifiable factors in the onset of AOM and OME episodes during the first 2 years of life include early age at colonization (

Pediatr Clin North Am. 2001 Feb;48(1):159-71. Related Articles, Links

Breastfeeding and brain development.

Reynolds A.

Child Development Unit, Children's Hospital, University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, Denver, Colorado, USA.

Although biochemical evidence seems to support the fact that more DHA is incorporated into the brain of breastfed infants compared with formula-fed infants, whether the levels of DHA in the brain are clinically significant is unclear. Because randomized trials cannot be done, this issue is difficult to study. The effects of breastfeeding on developmental outcome in term infants seems to be small or insignificant. For otherwise healthy children the potential differences are not clinically relevant; however, these small differences distributed over an entire population might have a significant effect on society. Although significant methodologic concerns exist, the effects of breastfeeding on preterm infants may be greater than those for term infants. Extremely low birth weight, premature infants (< 750-1000 g) have been found to have IQs that are 13 points lower than term controls and a 50% to 60% risk for requiring special-education services when they are in school. In these infants, small improvements in IQ and neurologic function could have a much greater effect. Further study of neurodevelopmental outcome in premature infants fed breast milk compared with those fed preterm formula are indicated. This information should not change the practice of encouraging breastfeeding of term and preterm infants because other advantages to breastfeeding exist

Paediatr Perinat Epidemiol. 2000 Oct;14(4):349-56. Related Articles, Links

A critical evaluation of the evidence on the association between type of infant feeding and cognitive development.

Drane DL, Logemann JA.

Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208-3570, USA. d-drane@nwu.edu

This paper presents a critical evaluation of 24 studies on the association between type of infant feeding and cognitive development published over the past 20 years. Validity and generalisability of study findings were assessed according to three methodological standards: clearly defined outcome, specification of partial vs. exclusive breast feeding and control of confounding. Only six of the 24 investigations met all three standards. The most frequent study flaw was failure to distinguish between partial and exclusive breast feeding. Studies which made this distinction found larger IQ advantages to breast-fed infants than studies that did not. Four of the six studies meeting all three standards found an advantage in cognitive development to breast-fed infants of the order of two to five IQ points for term infants and eight points for low birthweight infants. We conclude that the question of whether breast feeding and formula feeding have differential effects on cognitive development has not yet been comprehensively answered. Research to date provides only an indication of the effect of relatively brief durations of partial breast feeding and even briefer durations of exclusive breast feeding. Future studies should measure breast feeding as a continuous dose-type variable, examine longer durations of breast feeding and control for a full range of confounders using techniques that deal appropriately with multicollinearity.

Posted by Andrea at 11:48 AM | Comments (12)

One of many, many things not advertised in the baby brochure

Baby Girl,

Do you mind if I ask what it is you find so appealing about my mole?

I ask this because if I were to rank my body parts in order of preference (something I try very hard not to do), that mole would sit right at the bottom. It's big, it's dark, it sticks out a lot and it has an unfortunate tendency to catch on the underwire in my bras. Ouch. Yes.

And yet this old, familiar pain is becoming inconsequential next to the abuse you regularly afflict upon it whenever you're near enough to touch it; even more baffling to me is that it is quite clearly the result of affection. Or at least some positive emotion. That hideous thing on my arm that I've been planning to remove for the last ten years at least (what can I say, I procrastinate) seems to bring you some warped, twisted comfort. It offers endless possibilities, apparently; you can poke, pull, pinch, pick at and twist it, even to the point of removing pieces of it from time to time (and then the blood offers such entertainment, too).

Why?

When I was contemplating my rosy-hued misty-eyed internal vision of motherhood during pregnancy and before, not once did it include a little girl sitting on my lap sobbing from some real or imagined hurt who immediately calms when she is allowed to grab the mole on my arm. It was not in any of the books or brochures. I was prepared for soothers and thumb-sucking, blankies and teddy bears, hugs and hankies, even nail-biting. I remember reading that some babies and young children calm themselves by banging their heads on the sides of their cribs, and I thought that was plenty odd, but it has nothing on you Sodapop.

You go for mole-pulling.

These days I can't pick you up at all without that little hand with all its razor-sharp fingernails darting right to my mole. Whatever we're doing together, you must be in constant physical contact with the mole. When you're sitting in my lap, or lying next to me in bed, or snuggling in my arms while you have your bedtime bottle. There is the mole! Its siren call cannot be refused.

It's to the point now where it is in more or less constant discomfort changing to pain when it's touched. Which leads me to the second imponderable: Even stranger than a young baby who cannot live without her Comfort Mole is the Mama who lets her mangle it. What does it say about me that I would rather be in physical pain than listen to you whimper?

Is there any chance I could persuade you to pull my hair instead? Or my ear?

I think I will simply have to resign myself to outwaiting you. Someday surely you will get tired of this odd passtime of yours and pass it up for trendier pursuits. Say, macrame. Until that blessed day arrives, I will have to live with the small red bloodstains on the right side of all my shirts, just under the arm.

And when you're old enough to understand English well, believe me, I will tell you all the time:

I let you mutilate my body so you wouldn't have to cry.

If that's not mother love, I don't know what is.

Posted by Andrea at 11:46 AM | Comments (6)

At the risk of beating a dead horse into a bloody, gluey pulp:

During the recent CIO debacle, I've noticed a lot of comments on many blogs saying: "Wow, with global poverty, serious malnutrition, abuse, neglect, abandonment, conscription into armies, and trafficking of young girls into the sex trade, it seems somehow frivolous to be worrying about parents who feed and provide for their children and care for them well but allow them to cry for a few minutes a day or who feed them formula instead of breast milk."

Can I say to this: Amen. Expending such tremendous time, energy and effort into determining the exact number of minutes which it is ok to let a child cry for is the product of a wealthy society that no longer needs to worry about securing food sources or finding a place to hide from genocidal troops. We're right back to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs: We all feed, educate, clothe, provide medical care for, and entertain our babies and children; instead of basking in the glow of living in a society where most of us can take that for granted, we stand at the top of the pyramid lobbing spitballs at each other over the correct degree of maternal self-effacement and -sacrifice.

And so I offer the following Reality Check:

Zimbabwe:

According to UNICEF global estimates, child (under five) mortality rose more than 50 percent, from 80 deaths per 1000 live births to 123 (between 1990 and 2003).

Today Zimbabwe suffers from one of the world’s highest rates of HIV infection (at 25%), together with plummeting life expectancy, and a catastrophe in orphans unlike any the world has seen (almost one in five children have been orphaned by HIV-AIDS). Combined, this has led to a marked deterioration in all social sectors, greatly impacting upon children.

By 1990 primary school completion rates in Zimbabwe had peaked at 83 % (a first-class performance in Southern Africa), however by 2003 they had dropped to 63%. The overall effect is reduced enrolment and increased dropout rates, re-emergence of gender disparity, and deterioration in the quality of teaching.

Sadly, the same is true of nutrition. Whilst marked improvements characterized the first decade post independence, chronic malnutrition levels are now around 27%. Malaria too is resurfacing as a major challenge to child survival and health.

As such, the situation of children in Zimbabwe remains dire. Coping mechanisms of most Zimbabweans have been exceeded and they are increasingly relying on dangerous or damaging survival strategies such as poaching, prostitution and theft, which will have severe medium-term effects on the population, the natural resource base and the environment.

South Africa:

However, income distribution in the country is among the most unequal in the world. In 1996, almost 57 per cent of the population were living in poverty, and of these, two thirds were Africans. Racial inequalities do persist, with white per capita income being almost nine times higher than that of Africans.

The infant mortality rate, estimated at 45 per 1,000 live births, is higher where maternal literacy and other socio-economic conditions are poor. The country's aggregate under-five mortality rate is 59 per 1,000 live births, but the rate for Africans (63) is four times higher than that of whites (15). There is a high rate of stunting among children under five years old. The maternal mortality ratio remains high at 150 per 100,000 live births. South Africa has a high school enrolment rate of over 80 per cent, but there are high repetition rates at all levels, high drop-out rates and a high rate of adult illiteracy (33 per cent ).

Kenya:

Previously declining infant and child mortality rates have risen and remain significantly higher than average in Western, Nyanza and Coastal provinces.

Diarrhoea, respiratory infections, malnutrition and the rapid spread of malaria and HIV/AIDS are major contributors to young child deaths and illness.

The maternal mortality rate is estimated at about 650 per 100,000 live births.

The nutritional status of children under five years old has deteriorated, with 34 per cent estimated to be stunted and 25 per cent under weight in 1995. Malnutrition rates are highest in the eastern, western and coastal regions, which include the more arid lands.

Access to safe water and adequate sanitation has declined and ranges from 26 per cent in some rural areas to 44 per cent in squatter settlements.

Primary school gross enrolment has declined from 95 per cent in 1989 to 76 per cent in 1996.
While 35 per cent of children participate in early childhood education, only 44 per cent complete primary school, and education participation in arid and squatter settlements is low, especially among girls.

A 1997 survey identified over 109,000 children in need of special protection in 13 districts. This is in addition to an estimated 500,000 children nationally, including roughly 300,000 children living or working on the streets, neglected, lacking protection or engaged in hazardous labour.

It is thought that about 300,000 Kenyan children have already lost one or both parents due to HIV/AIDS.

Thailand:

There is growing concern, however, about 9 million children in the second decade of life, increasing numbers of who are at risk and in need of special protection. Estimates of the number of children engaged in prostitution vary from 60,000 to 200,000. A government estimate reveals that five per cent of child prostitutes were found to be boys. Although child labour has reportedly declined from about 2.6 million in 1992, it is estimated that about 1 million children were still engaged as child workers in the first quarter of 1999.

In Thailand, mother-to-child transmission of HIV/AIDS already infected 30,000 children, resulting 7,500 AIDS cases in children, and increased overall mortality rates among children 0 to four years of age in some areas. The prevalence of HIV infection among the 900,000 women who become pregnant each year is one to two per cent. Approximately 13,000 children are born at risk for mother-to-child transmission annually. Without interventions, 4,000 children would become infected each year, about one seventh of all new infections.

Developing World in General:

640 million children do not have adequate shelter
500 million children have no access to sanitation
400 million children do not have access to safe water
300 million children lack access to information
270 million children have no access to health care services
140 million children have never been to school
90 million children are severely food-deprived

And, just in case it seems like I'm letting the first world off the hook:

Canada

Over 20% of Canadians under 18 live on a low income (whether provided by themselves or by parents).

Abuse and Neglect

United States:

For all children under 18, the poverty rate increased from 16.7 percent in 2002 to 17.6 percent in 2003. The number in poverty rose, from 12.1 million to 12.9 million.

~~~

Do you care about other people's children?

Then why not take some of that fantastic energy, time, commitment and resources and devote it to a child who really needs it?

Be a Big Sister (or Big Brother). Foster parent. Donate to UNICEF or a similar organization. Volunteer at a food bank (most of the users are children). Volunteer or donate to a shelter. There are so many things an intelligent, well-informed, comparatively well-resourced woman who is passionate about child welfare can do to make a real difference in the life of a child who will otherwise lead a marginalised and impoverished existence. SO MUCH. Please don't waste it on the well-cared-for, well-fed kids of well-off parents who don't need it.

Posted by Andrea at 9:48 AM | Comments (14)

Addendum

One of the truly fascinating things about having your own site is being able to track down your referrals. After an incident involving one of my photographs on an LJ entitled "I heart Retards" (a truly obnoxious and detestable word that I would only use to point out how odious this other person is), I make it a point to check my referrals each day to make sure that whoever is coming to visit my site, isn't doing so with any intention of harm towards myself or my family.

This means I check back every referral I don't recognize. Every day.

Today, this led me to Yet Another Alternative Parenting Site, where my blog entry about my journey through AP was posted and discussed.

Hello! I'm sure it's a shock to discover that it's not a private conversation. Incidentally, your discussion was very interesting. And in case other readers from other places had similar comments and questions, I thought I would answer them here:

"I've taken a ridiculous number of anthropology classes, and while the Inuit do have issues with poor nutrition/health problems even among infants (mostly due to FAS and poor maternal diet, and environmental contaminants), I've never read anything that suggests they give raw fish to newborns."

I got that little tidbit from a televised interview of the director of the Motherrisk clinic. I have no print sources to verify his claim, but I assume he wasn't lying; it is possible that he was mistaken.

My point, of course, was that many aspects of traditional parenting practices from many cultures fly in the face of what we currently believe to be Best Parenting Practices from a scientific point of view; just because it's indigenous somewhere doesn't mean it's GOOD. Just because the Kung do something, doesn't mean it's the right thing to do.

"She's also wrong in stating that there's no evidence that any other hunter-gatherer societies raised their babies like the Kung, with babies being carried constantly etc. I've seen countless hours of videotaped footage of other groups like the Yanomamo in Brazil that show babies are kept in close proximity to their mothers almost constantly at least until about age 2."

Ah, but that's not what I said, is it? What I said was: "Here is my question: Why is it that the AP movement has selected as its model a number [definition: more than one, NOT just the Kung] of hunter-gatherer socieites from marginal and extreme environments? There's no evidence that these peoples parent their children in a way that is representative of global ancestry in general. Of course they are going to have some things in common if they are all parenting in locations without reliable supplies of clean drinking water, plentiful and safe foods, and sources of shelter. There is no evidence that hunter-gatherer peoples who lived in more plentiful environments parented their children anything like the Kung do."

Translation:

All of the hunter-gatherer societies extant today live in marginal, extreme environments. This includes the Yanomamo. All environments plentiful in resources have been COLONIZED. This has led to the eradication of any hunter-gatherer peoples in landscapes that could be considered plentiful. Thus, all hunter-gatherer societies still in existence today share a few things in common: lack of safe, plentiful drinking water; dangerous environments; and so forth. These restrictions necessitate a certain commonality to their approach in rearing children. For example, any population living in a place without regular access to safe drinking water is going to practice extended breastfeeding because it is their only option.

This does NOT mean that ALL hunter-gatherer societies historically practiced extended breastfeeding. For all we know, the only ones who did are the ones still existing today in marginal, extreme environments. Like the Kung. And the Yanomamo. For all we know, nomadic peoples historically transitioned their babies onto goats' milk at six months. We have no data.*

"While she's right that some aspects of modern culture make the more intensive forms of mothering less practical, and to some degree less necessary, that doesn't mean that by detaching from your child to make them less demanding is a healthy or even natural state for humans."

That's not what I said either. What I said was: We've surveyed the landscape of available traditional mothering practices worldwide and picked the very hardest one, not because there's any evidence that it's best for babies, but seemingly because it's the hardest. There is no sense to this.

Yes, yes, I know. Liedloff went and looked at the Yanomamo and declared, "By God! They never cry!" I consider this to be less than complete evidence.

By the by, one of the books I have on the anthropology of mothering has this to say about the Yanomamo:

One of the most reliable accounts of infanticide by tribal raiders comes from Elena Valero, a Brazilian woman kidnaped by Yanomamo warriors when she was eleven years old .... No sooner was she kidnaped than Elena Valero's captors, Kohoroshiwetari Yanomamo, were themselves attacked by rival Yanamamo, the Karawetari. ... She would spend the next twenty years among the Karawetari, marry twice with different captors and bear three children before finally escaping. She would witness, and hear about, many more raids. But none were so horrifying as the second one:

"They killed so many. I was weeping for fear and for pity, but there was nothing I could do. They snatched the children from their mothers to kill them, while the others held the mothers tightly by the arms and wrists as they stood up in a line. All the women wept."

... With ease and absolute callousness, one of the Karawetari raiders "took the baby by his feet and bashed him against the rock. His head split open and the little white brains spurted out on the stone."

...

"the men began to kill the children; little ones, bigger ones, they killed many of them. They tried to run away, but [they] caught them, and threw them to the ground, and stuck them with bows, which went through their bodies and rooted them to the ground. Taking the smallest by the feet, they beat them against the trees and the rocks. The children's eyes trembled. Then the men took the dead bodies and threw them among the rocks, saying, "Stay there, so that your fathers can find you and eat you." " Mother Nature, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy

Later in the book, she shares another part of Ms. Valero's story:

"Recall that in some South American tribes, too much or too little hair is considered a sign of maternal misconduct, dooming the neonate--but not necessarily. 'This is not a human being, the child has no hair,' Elena Valero was told by other woman after she gave birth among her Yanomamo captors. 'Kill him at once,' they said...." p. 469.

Looks like maybe the Yanomamo aren't perfect parents either. Maybe it's not so bad that we have a bit of CIO, if we've done away with that kind of infanticide.

I'm lazy today, so I'll restrict myself to sharing further quotes from Ms. Hrdy's excellent book:

Regarding John Bowlby's theory of attachment: "What is important to keep in mind, however, is that even if Bowlby's personal shortsightendess caused him to be slective about the evidence he cited, it does not invalidate the central premise of his model: infants seek secure attachments and need a secure base for healthy emotional development. Bowlby focused on a Kung-like ideal of an all-indulgent mother who provides exclusive care for her infant for the first four years of life. Alternatively, he might have chosen a less indulgent Hadza mther, who weans after two years, or even looked at infant-sharing primates instead of totally possessive chimps. Today we have much more extensive data on people like the Aka and the Efe, where infants from birth are passed among multiple caregivers with whom they become very famliar and are quite at ease. Far from growing up less secure, such infants are if anything more so." p. 495

On "detachment": "No attention was paid to the possibility that there might have been fluctuating circumstances, or more than one adaptive path, depending on the conditions during infant development. Insecure attachment to the mother was assumed to be maladaptive, period.

"It never occured to the first generation of attachment theorists that high proportions of insecurely attached infants (ranging as high as 30 to 80 percent in some populations studied) could be anything other than aberrations produced by unnatural rearing conditions in the modern world. But the fact is, no one knows what proportion of insecurely attached infants existed during the most relevant periods of human prehistory, when the genetic makeup of our acnestors was being forged. Where a fraction of orphans survivors? Were some abandoned infants rescued? ...

"Since Bowlby formulated his attachment theory, anthropologists and historians have learned a great deal more about just how often mothers deviated from Bowlby's Pleistocene ideal. Many infants were left with allomothers for extended periods of time. Others were neclected to varying degrees, even abandoned. Indeed, as we have seen, during some periods of human history, children were neglected and abandoned on a massive scale. And a broad spectrum of maternal distancing resulting in outcomes less drastic than abandonment must have been far more common." p. 517

on maternal instincts and "natural" human mothering:

"Whether or not a female produces offspring depends on her age, status, and phyiscal condition. Whether or not, and how much, she commits to such offpsring as she bears depends on her circumstances, and--in cooperative breeders like humans--on who else is around to help her." p. 79

"Still, there is little doubt that over the last million years or so, infants have always striven to remain in continuous contact with their mothers for at least the first few years of life. This was the infant's first choice, but living up to this 'Pleistocene ideal' of mothering may have been tough for a mother to do--even in the Pleistocene. The human mother in continuous contact with her infant for four or five yeras more nearly represents a primate infant's favored scenario, the scenario most compatible with its well-being. But this preferred scenario is not the only one mothers employed. Wherever reasonably safe alloparental options were available, human mothers made use of them, as many mothers in ofraging socities in Central Africa and South America still do." p. 101

"This unconditional commitment to her infant, irrespective of its sex or other physical attributes, is, as we will see, one of the key differences between monkey and ape mothers and human ones. ... But when women cause someone else's death ... that person is most likely to be her own newborn baby. In this respect, women are utterly different from other primates that, like us, produce one baby at a time." p. 179

Incidentally, I have no problem with attachment parenting. There is nothing wrong with cosleeping, extended breastfeeding, baby wearing, or any of the other tenent of AP. I do not believe it will produce deranged, dependent or otherwise dysfunctional children. Go to.

However, I do take exception to having my parenting style labeled as "detached." I am not detached from my daughter. I love her more than my own life; and CIO was good for her as well as for me. It became very clear after the first night that all my attempts to "soothe" her were stimulating her and keeping her from sleeping--everything I was doing in the name of being a good Attachment Parent was working against her well-being. The eighteen minutes of whimpering followed by seven solid hours of sleep was much better for her than the hour or two of in-arms crying followed by several hour- or two-hour-long sessions of broken sleep, combined with more crying and fussing.

As I listened to her cry those few hard nights, it was more and more apparent to me that what she was crying about was--"I'm tired! I'm so tired!" And what she needed was sleep. Me rushing in to pick her up because "a good mother never lets a baby cry" was exactly the opposite of what she needed. It was focused on my need to see and think of myself as a Good Mother; not on her need for sleep. Dr. Sears and Dr. Gordon be damned--they don't know my baby. I do.

*I grant this is unlikely, but the fact stands that we have no evidence either way.

Posted by Andrea at 9:32 PM | Comments (5)

In Which I Remember Why Other People's Parenting Practices are None of My God-Damned Business

Did you all know that I used to be an Attachment Parent?

It's true! Really! Not exactly by choice. We bought a crib (a really nice one, that converts into a toddler bed and then a double) and a bedside bassinet and fully intended to use them. Ditto the stroller. Co-sleeping was out--Erik has sleep apnea and needs a CPAP to breathe at night. Frances was going to be left with her Dad one night a week or so with a bottle of expressed breastmilk, and I was going to see my friends and retain my sanity.

That was the plan. Or I should say, that was my plan. Frances, my precious wee tidbit, she had a plan of her own.

In the Frances Plan, mama never stops touching baby. Baby is held 24 hours per day to allow baby to remain upright so baby does not vomit everything she eats, a considerable issue considering the Frances Plan also included a stubborn unwillingness to put on the appropriate ounces. Baby would not sleep flat and would not sleep wherever mama was not. The Frances Plan also included very definite ideas about eating: The first version was a complete and total addiction to the nipple shield with a bottle as a distant second, and an actual breast being nearly useless. The second version, which kicked in after we dealt with the nipple confusion the hospital staff assured us was impossible as they shoved bottles in her mouth, was a total unwillingness to accept anything into her mouth that wasn't flesh. Bye bye bottles.

Completely against my will, I became an Attachment Parent; although to be fair, since my priority was to adopt whatever parenting style the baby seemed to need, it is also true to say that I did exactly what I said I was going to do. Frances needed to be carried and held constantly, exclusively breastfed, and to sleep with her wee feet digging into mama's soft belly? That's what Frances got.

I, never being one to pass up an opportunity to be judgemental and stupid where one presents itself, and also being completely devoid of any sleep (one day I'll post a photo of the wrought-iron "headboard" against which I propped myself while Frances slept on my chest--finding a spot for your head to lean on that doesn't dig a knob into your skull while also providing something almost straight for your shoulders and back is sort of impossible, and you just kind of pick one--head or back, not both), I dedided that everyone should be an Attachment Parent!

I did all kinds of research into the importance of Attachment and the dire consequences of children not being properly Attached. I think I mostly managed to keep my trap shut during this unfortunate stage, but in case I didn't, I apologize to anyone I may have offended. CIO was BAD. Formula was BAD. Strollers were BAD. All kinds of things were BAD. What I did was GOOD. Good maude, I was obnoxious.

Then I hit The Wall.

It took nine months of Frances getting up up to ten times per night, which I think is pretty good, actually. A lifelong history of insomnia gives you an increased tolerance of sleep deprivation which held me in good stead under the circumstances. But still. There was The Wall, and I ran smack-dab right into it, with enough force that it left a nice brick pattern in my forehead.

The Wall went something like this:

Every time Frances woke me up at night, I swore. I muttered angry nothings under my breath. Every day if Frances wouldn't nap (and I wans't even trying the crib, it was the bjorn for every nap) I cried. I cried when she woke up. I cranked at my husband constantly. I was miserable in both senses of the word. And one day when I found myself shouting at my precious, so-beloved baby to just SLEEP GODDAMIT WOULD IT KILL YOU TO SLEEP, there it was. A nice brick wall.

And on that wall was a sign:

"Do you really think this constant anger and exhaustion is a benefit to your attachment to your baby? What's better: a few nights or weeks of crying and a happy, rested mommy all day forever, or a quick and bitter response at night every night with a mommy who is muttering death threats? THINK, WOMAN, THINK."

And I bought a book on CIO. Actually, I bought several. Well, while we're being honest here, I'll admit it: I bought every book in the bookstore and borrowed a few from the library. Hey, if I'm going to be a turncoat, I may as well be thorough. I read them all. I selected from each author the parts of their approach that seemed to suit my wee girl. And while Erik was in Montreal on business, I put it into effect.

I was fully prepared for the worst. When Frances was six months old I tried CIO in total desperation one night and she screamed for THREE HOURS. After the three hours of screaming I gave up, and she fell asleep as soon as her head touched my shoulder. Yet here I was contemplating it again because even screaming for THREE HOURS or (heaven forbid) six or eight for a week or two had to be better if the end result was a rested baby and a mommy who wasn't swearing and crying and miserable all the time.

What happened?

Umm. She mumbled and whined for 18 minutes. Then she fell asleep and slept for seven hours. This was the first time she had ever slept more than three hours in a row. She then woke up; I went in and nursed her for fifteen minutes and put her back in her crib. She fell asleep and slept until morning. I, of course, didn't sleep a wink until 2 am because I was so sure she was going to wake up miserable any second. In any case, that was our experience with CIO. Eighteen minutes of whining followed by seven blissful hours of sleep. The next two nights were even better. By the time my husband came back from his business trip of three days, Frances was a crib sleeping baby.

The effect of this was everything I had hoped. I was much more well-rested and a much happier, responsive, more affectionate and more sane mommy. And Frances was a much happier and more well-rested girl. I can't even say how happy Erik was in English.

While we're at it, and since I'm sure a few readers are curious, I'll just answer the questions you have in mind before you ask:

1. Don't you feel terrible?

Umm. No.

2. But what about your Attachment?

It's very healthy, thank you. She hardly ever fusses or cries; she's one of the happiest people I know. And she loves me and her Daddy more than anything.

3. But I read in my book that when the baby stops crying it's because they gave up.

Uh huh. Well, I suppose such despair could account for the not-crying. But then how do you explain the smiling, laughing, giggling, playing, hugging, kissing, snuggling, foot-stomping full-body grins?

You see, when I say that Frances is the happiest person I know--I mean that Frances is the happiest person I know. When she sees our cat Roxie, her whole body goes rigid with excitement and she smiles and points like a star-fucker who's just seen Angeline Jolie kissing Brad Pit at a frat party. When she sees her Elmo puppet she squeals "EEEEElmo!" in a register just below the upper limit of the human ear and gives him the biggest hug she is capable of. And when she sees her mama after a nice long nap in the crib, she holds up her arms for a hug and gives her mama a big wet kiss on the cheek and snuggles into her shoulder and then turns around and points to the door meaning--"Woman, it is time for you to carry me to my toys." She greets me every time with a smile that I often confuse with a nuclear sunrise. If you saw it, you would understand. She is the happiest person I know.

The workers at her daycare, by the way, adore her because she is so happy and so easy-going. They are sad when she leaves on vacation. When we pick her up at the end of the day it isn't unusual to find Frances firmly ensconced in the arms or on the shoulder of a daycare worker in the toddler or preschool room who just missed her and wanted to hold her for a bit. She is a thoroughly charming, very social and personable, and unnervingly obedient and helpful little girl.

4. But CIO is supposed to make them cry more and be less willing to obey adults!

Technically that's not a question, but I'll answer it anyway:

Yes, that's what I read too, but it certainly didn't have that effect on Frances. She is extremely easy-going and wants only to please the important adults in her life. The other day she further cemented her World's Best Baby Ever, Bar None status by handing me each of 18 cans of pop to put in the fridge when I asked her. When she has had a fussy day, and I look at her and say "Frances!" in a particular tone, she will stare at me silently with a quiverling lip, as if to say: "All right mommy, I won't cry, but I'm VERY sad." And then I feel like a heel and apologize.

5. But there are studies that show that CIO is bad for babies, that it ruptures attachments and makes them cry more!

Actually. There aren't. Did you read the studies themselves, or the AP books that told you there were studies?

Yes, well, I read the actual studies.

The ones that talk about how bad it is for babies to be left alone to cry it out? They were based on children who were hospitalized in the 1950s. Now, maybe you don't know this, and why would you, since the AP books don't talk about it: But in the 1950s, babies who were hospitalized had no visitors. They were kept completely isolated. Family weren't allowed to see them in case it spread the infection. Nurses and doctors saw them only to attend to their physical needs.

So here you have a baby who is a) sick, b) in a totally foreign environment, c) being cared for by strangers who d) don't pick them up or show affection and e) without any interaction with their family until they get well.

Is it any wonder they felt betrayed by their parents and showed ruptured attachments and no ability to trust? This is not the same thing as a child who spends 16 hours a day playing happily with parents and caregivers, 7 1/2hours sleeping and thirty minutes crying by themselves. There is no comparison. That AP authors use this study to further their ideological agenda on CIO is, IMNSHO, evidence only of dishonesty.

The study about how babies who are attended to quickly as infants will cry less at one year was conducted in the 1970s and has never been duplicated. Other studies which attempted to duplicate it found conflicting results: some found no relation between speed of response and crying at one year, and some found an inverse relationship (that babies who were attended to quickly cried MORE at one year). In any case, this is far from a settled question. I humbly propose that it depends on the temperament of the baby, the temperament of the parents and caregivers, and the nature of the response they receive--which is far more complex than just "fast" or "slow."

6. But isn't AP the natural, instinctual way of parenting? Aren't you ignoring your instincts by using CIO and strollers and cribs and all that other modern junk?

According to who?

Here is my question: Why is it that the AP movement has selected as its model a number of hunter-gatherer socieites from marginal and extreme environments? There's no evidence that these peoples parent their children in a way that is representative of global ancestry in general. Of course they are going to have some things in common if they are all parenting in locations without reliable supplies of clean drinking water, plentiful and safe foods, and sources of shelter. There is no evidence that hunter-gatherer peoples who lived in more plentiful environments parented their children anything like the Kung do.

Why is it that we don't assume that the Inuit are parenting their children in an instinctual way when they give their three-day-olds raw fish to munch on?

Why don't we assume the Spartans were being instinctual when they sent their 8-year-old boys out to join the army?

Why is it that we have selected the most intensive form of mothering that any people in the world has to offer and packaged that one as the "natural, instinctual" one?

I don't know what it is, but somehow when I read books that are written almost exclusively by men, directed towards women, and that say, "Of course, you should follow your instincts with your baby. And if you're a right-thinking, modern woman who loves her child, your instincts will tell you to breastfeed, co-sleep, and wear your baby," I kind of have a problem with that. I must be overly sensitive.

7. But aren't insecure attachments a terrible thing that are a root cause of much human misery? Who wants a poorly attached child? Who WOULDN'T attachment parent when the stakes are so high?

Who, indeed?

But here's the thing: Attachment theory is not attachment parenting.

In fact, if you read a few attachment theory journals, you will quickly see how readily they disavow themselves of attachment parenting, to what lengths they will go to to stress that this has nothing to do with attachment parenting. Why?

Because there are an infinite number of ways to form a healthy attachment, that's why. Because breastfeeding, bedsharing and baby-wearing are no more a shortcut to a happy family than footrubs, candles and holding hands are a shortcut to a happy marriage. No relationship can be boiled down to Nine Magic Tricks that will work in all or even most situations. People are individuals; they are complex, and what works for you is almost guaranteed not to work for anyone else.

Yes, insecure attachment is a terrible thing. The risks of a poor attachment are high and potentially long-reaching in the life of your child. But most parents don't need to worry.

How many parents do you think follow AP? Maybe 10%? 20%?

And yet psychological studies repeatedly show that 60% of American one-year-old infants are securely attached to their mothers.

Sixty per cent.

If Dr. Sears's bag of tricks were required to guarantee a healthy attachment, a secure attachment would be a rarity, not a commonplace. And yet instead we find that the majority of kids and families are doing just fine--even the ones who bottlefeed, use strollers, and CIO.

Once my own thick head let some of this in, I found it much easier to adopt my current parenting philosophy, which is:

"As long as it doesn't involve actual child abuse, I don't care what it is."

Solids before four months? Cereal in the formula bottle? CIO at six weeks? Bedsharing at six years? Weaning at preschool? Toilet training at 8 months? Flaschards for newborns? Baby sleeping in a laundry basket? Cloth diapers? Disposable diapers? Newsprint diapers? Drinking from a bottle at three years old? Eating cheesies and kraft dinner? Why the fuck would I care?

Does the mom love her baby?

Does the baby love its mom?

Are they happy to be near each other?

Is the baby mostly healthy, mostly happy, mostly on track developmentally speaking, in the ways that might be under a parents control (i.e. no major congenital health issues that could slow things down)?

Yes?

Then that family's decisions are just fine.

And everyone else should just but out.

Posted by Andrea at 1:27 PM | Comments (29)

Welcome to Holland?

A great article from one of my favourite magazines:

Have a Nice Trip: Metaphors for parenting a special-needs child

Just a little something to remember the next time you might be tempted to say something "comforting" to someone who is having a radically different parenting experience than you are.

Not directed to anyone here, though yes, I have been the recipient of this odd piece from time to time. Not all of us deal with things the same way or use the same metaphors to understand our lives. And that's ok. Right?

Edited to add: Frances is not disabled, and she's not sick; she certainly is not autistic. I don't want to seem as though I'm trying to put my experience into the same category. Clearly it's not. But just because it could be (much, much) worse doesn't mean I need to feel and demonstrate gratitude all the time to the expectations and satisfaction of other people who have normal, healthy, full-term, normally growing, typically developing kids.

And yet, from time to time, such parents have felt free to let me know (in subtle and not-so-subtle ways) that my emotions and my reactions to my experience are inadequate or wrong, because I'm not as happy or as positive as they think I should be. Sometimes that involves sending me a link to or giving me a copy of the ever-famous "Welcome to Holland." Sometimes it just involves telling me that I'm "too negative" or that "things could look better depending on YOU."

Welcome to Holland is a lovely piece, and Moreena I know has used it to great effect on a blog that I read just about every day and thoroughly enjoy. Many parents derive comfort from it and find that the metaphor is appropriate to their lives. But I still resent the judgementalism of anyone who is having a normal experience and feels free to tell me how I should feel about something that they have never and will never live.

This article is for them.

To them I say: If you haven't walked a mile in my shoes, then stop complaining about my pace or telling me that I should transport myself to Italy through sheer willpower.

Or at the very least, think before you say something similar to someone else.

Posted by Andrea at 12:58 PM | Comments (6)

More About Mothers

Hi there. My name is Andrea; I have no experience with adoption. I have not been adopted. I have not adopted a child myself. I have not given a child up for adoption. I know some people who were adopted as children who are healthy, well-adjusted adults; I know other women who have adopted children and formed healthy, well-adjusted families; I know women who have given up their own babies for adoption and are healthy, well-adjusted people. That is the extent of my personal experience.

This means that I am fully aware that everything I am about to say might be dead wrong; but on the other hand, maybe because I'm not personally involved but have been part of the lives of so many people who have, that I can say something new. Probably not. We'll see, and I'm sure the ever-honest internet will let me know exactly how wrong I am.

See the thing is, when I was a teenager, I thought I would probably adopt if I wanted kids some day. I'm a type 1 diabetic; pregnancy is not an easy thing for me. It's a highly monitored, very medical, somewhat risky enterprise with no certain outcome. Those of you who have been reading my blog since the beginning will know what I'm talking about; those of you who haven't unfortunately can't find out because my site crashed a few months ago and those entries are no longer available (but if you google athenadreaming.org and sprout you can find some cached entries).

But then I didn't.

Part of that is very selfish. I wanted to be pregnant, I wanted to experience childbirth, I wanted to breastfeed. It seemed like this huge, momentous facet of female experience and I wanted to know what it was like, even if only once. As it turned out what I experienced was far from the norm in many respects and now I'm wondering if I should do it again or if it's a sign from the Universe that really, I'm not meant to be doing this. But anyway.

Part of it is that I'm kind of squeamish about adoptions.

I don't mean "squeamish" in the "but will the kid look like me, can I handle open adoption, can we afford it" kind of way. I mean that the adoption system in general raises serious ethical considerations for me that I haven't been able to resolve to my satisfaction.

Note: This does not mean in any way that I judge women who pursue adoptions. Every adoptive mother I know personally is a bang-up mom with healthy, smart, wonderful kids. I applaud you and the choices you've made. That is sincere.

But the adoptive system is fishy. To me. And (to me) this is mostly a result of a very fishy economic system.

It seems, on some level, like a system designed for transferring babies from the poor to the rich. Whether adoptions are domestic or international, birth parents most often give up their kids not because they want to, but because they can't afford to keep them.

This is a terrible world we live in if so many women who would like to be mothers are barred from doing so because of economics. Money does not make a good mother, but without some money, it is almost impossible to do the things for your children that you want or need to do. Many women who find themselves in this position have abortions. That is the option I chose myself. Other women in that position, for ethical or other reasons, pursue adoption.

I knew when I was pregnant unintentionally that I was not brave enough or strong enough to give my baby away. Now that I've actually had a baby, my estimation of the amount of pain involved has skyrocketed.

For those of you who have not given birth, I'm going to run down some of Mother Nature's hormonal tricks for mother-baby bonding.

Sometime in the second trimester, fetal cells begin crossing the placenta and circulating in the mother's bloodstream. It is theorized that these fetal cells are there to familiarize the mother with her baby's scent; because they are fetal cells, they endlessly replicate. Fetal cells have been found in the bloodstreams of once-pregnant women decades after they have given birth. It is a part of the baby that never leaves you.

Similarly, the baby becomes familiar with the mother's scent from the amniotic fluid.

Levels of oxytocin begin to rise in the third trimester and peak during labour, when this hormone is implicated in contractions. Oxytocin is called the "love hormone." It causes people to want to spend time with their love-object, to crave their presence in a physical way. The sight, smell and touch of the beloved is the drug that oxytocin addicts people to. Neurological research has shown that oxytocin is similar to narcotics in its addictive capabilities, and it is at the moment of delivery that oxytocin levels will be at their highest during pregnancy.

The young of most mammalian (and some bird) species have something called a "natal coat," or distinctive forms or colouring that make them especially attractive to adults, and even moreso to the adults they are related to. In some species, infants have special bright feathers or different colours of fur (think of baby chickens with their bright yellow coats). The purpose of these adaptations is to ensure that the parents will be attracted to the infants and find them irresistable, and want to take care of them. In humans, the natal coat is fairly subtle: it consists of the soft newborn skin and scent, and the body proportions of large heads, short limbs and lots of baby fat.

Post-delivery, a woman has many physical reminders of the baby that will not leave her for months. She is still bleeding. Her breasts are hard, hot and leaking milk. The contractions of her uterus back to regular size are releasing oxytocin into her bloodstream still. Her belly is bloated and when she feels gas she may momentarily think that it is the baby kicking.

Research has shown that infant abandonment almost always occurs within the first three days after birth, because the continuing action of the mother being near the infant further increases the levels of oxytocin in the blood. If the mother is nursing, that will release more oxytocin and other hormones that have a similar effect. After three days have passed, it is almost impossible for a mother to abandon her baby; she is, neurologically, addicted to it. For anyone who wants a more complete scientific description of these phenomena, I cannot recommend Mother Nature by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy highly enough.

Now imagine going through all that and not having the baby there, having given it up of your own "free will"--or more likely having given it up because you couldn't choose abortion and you couldn't afford to keep it. Having given it up because of pressure from parents, friends or cultural institutions. Having given it up because authority figures placed you in a home for unwed mothers where you were never given a real choice. Your entire body is shrieking out for the presence of this baby you just gave birth to and they're not there. They're gone. Someone else is the mother now.

When Frances was born one month early, I got to spend only a few seconds with her after the birth. I have two visions of her in the delivery rooms that will be forever stamped in my memory: one, right after she was born--"Look, we have a baby!" Erik said, and I looked, and there she was, tiny--her whole body clenched like a fist, dark hair plastered to her head with amniotic fluid, big eyes staring wide in shock and amazement and fear; two, a few minutes later after she'd been cleaned up and wrapped in a little pink blanket. A nurse placed her on my chest and I held her and stared at her, and I heard her breathing was a little wheezy. "That's nothing to worry about, she's just learning how to breathe," said a nurse. "But we have to take her now." And take her they did, down the hall to the NICU to put IVs in her little hands and a feeding tube down her little throat and oxygen sensors on her little feet and heart sensors and monitors on her little chest and put her whole little body in a plastic incubator.

I delivered her at ten in the morning and, except for that too-brief glimpse in the delivery room, I did not see her again for several hours as they set her up. I cannot describe to you how agonizing those hours were. I cried. Here I had just become a mother to a beautiful healthy baby girl, and I sobbed--because she was down the hall and it had been three hours and I hadn't seen her yet.

When I try to put myself into the shoes of women who have given their babies up for adoption, I realize that for me it would have been impossible. I would have been one of those selfish, awful women who reneged and kept the baby. If such a brief separation over such a short distance desolated me so thoroughly, cutting her out of my life would have been ... impossible. My entire life would have fallen apart. I hate to think how self-destructive, angry and depressed I would have been.

I think, culturally, we don't want to look that pain in the face.

We have many ways of avoiding it. We say the birth mothers "chose it freely," when most often it is a subtle form of societal, religious and economic coercion that narrows their field of options to one. We tell ourselves it is "best for the baby," and I have to ask, in what sense? Certainly when a mother is unable to provide good emotional care, I think we can all agree--if she has psychological or emotional or other issues that make it impossible for her to love and be present for a baby, then it is better for that baby to be with someone who can. Absolutely. But if the question is one of financial resources--then in what sense is adoption the best of all possible worlds? Why isn't it better to have stronger governmental programs and supports for women in crisis so that no woman has to abort or give up a wanted baby because they can't afford a stroller?

Worst of all, we say the adoptive mothers are "deserving" and the birth mothers are not. We cast negative, ugly stereotypes against them--a shadowy figure who maybe drinks, maybe does drugs, maybe is on welfare, is young or single, would probably beat or abuse this precious child. And the adoptive parents are cast as saints and angels, taking in some poor unfortunate child and "giving them a better life." Financial resources are recast as parental fitness.

I know of too many adoptive parents who were crappy parents to believe that load of tripe. Adoptive parents are no more likely than any others to be good parents; in fact, I've seen some statistics that suggest that adoptive fathers in particular are MORE LIKELY to kill their own children than biological fathers.

I also know of many excellent adoptive mothers, but none of them believe that crap. None of them comfort themselves (to my knowledge) with the idea that the baby is necessarily better off with them than they would have been with their own mother in better circumstances. None of them believes the mother deserves it, or doesn't deserve to experience pain over the situation, or wouldn't have been entitled to change her mind after the baby was born.

And I know a birthmother, who is getting a lot of grief right now because a lot of other people--some of them adoptive mothers--do believe this garbage. That because she gave the baby up she shouldn't feel devastated; that because it devastated her and threw her life into a tailspin that it proves she wouldn't have been a good mother; that this was a "choice" and because she has negative thoughts and perspectives on the adoption system she "hates adoption and adoptive parents." A lot of ugly, hateful stereotypes have been thrown her way by people who don't know her from Eve, but think that because she's a birthmother they know all about her and are free and competent to judge her.

So I'll tell you what I see:

I see someone who made a promise to herself about abortion, and kept it. I see a young woman who had never given birth before and was unprepared for the chemical and hormonal firestorm that new moms are bombarded with to make them want to be with their babies. I see a new mother who spent the first night with her daughter, and who with that action probably further increased the levels of addictive hormones to something that made the separation even more painful and difficult than it would have been otherwise. I see someone who desperately wanted to be a good mother and do right by her child, even if that meant giving them up; who loved them so much that she pursued an open adoption so that she could still have a relationship with her and be a resource for her. I see a woman who thought the open adoption was going to be different from what it turned out to be, and for whom the resulting pain, confusion and resentment (and other emotions I am not qualified to name) plunged her into a self-destructive cycle for several years as she struggled to recover. I see someone who was struggling with grief and loss.

I see someone who managed to overcome this, and go on to form a good, solid relationship and bring another two babies into the world that she kept to raise herself. I see someone who is thoughtful and passionate about her mothering choices, determined to do the best by her little people, thoroughly involved in their welfare and their lives. I see someone who is struggling to realize and take responsibility for her own part in the way her life has gone.

I see a good person and a good mother--to all her children, including the one she isn't raising.

I see someone who has seen the ugly side of the adoption process and hopes to inform people of it by being honest about her experiences as a birthmother. I see someone who has done a lot of research on this issue and has strong opinions as a result. I see someone with courage and passion.

I see a lot of good things. I don't see any of the ugly things that the trolls apparently saw.

As far as adoption goes....

In many ways, it still seems to me like a system designed for transferring babies from poor women to rich women, and too often the difference is in the mother's relationship to a man (or lack thereof). This is deeply troubling to me.

This is NOT a comment on the families who adopt. In the world as it is, often parents can't keep their babies and someone has to give them a home, and adoption is the best solution.

This IS a comment on an economic and social system that creates huge disparities in wealth and measures parental fitness based on financial resources. This is a comment on a world in which we would rather rip babies from the bosoms of their poor birthmothers and "give" them to wealthier and more "deserving" families than address the structural inequalities of our economy. In such a system, it seems to me, adoption as we currently know it is inevitable. In even an ideal world adoption would be required; parents die, after all, and some people are not equipped to deal with children no matter their material circumstances. But the system that we have right now is not right, and anyone who can look at it and honestly say that it's all about the welfare of the children ... well ....

I am still thinking about adoption myself for future children, for health and now for various genetic reasons that are probably known to most of you. I struggle with resolving my feelings about the adoption system and how it reflects an unjust economy with my feelings that it is probably the right thing for me to do--with what kind of adoption I would be comfortable with, if that's the path we go down. I haven't done anything like enough research to say.

Posted by Andrea at 10:04 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

In Praise of Tracy Barlow

I see all the Americans blinking their eyes and saying, "Who the hell is Tracy Barlow?"

Tracy Barlow is a character on a British working-class soap opera called Coronation Street. Erik got me addicted to it many years ago. Tracy Barlow is the grown daughter of Ken Barlow and Diedre, who got pregnant on a one-night-stand with a bloke she had a big crush on, told another local man (who is partnered with a MTF transsexual) that it was his baby (she'd had him drugged and pretended she'd slept with him to win a bet--it's a complicated storyline) and then offered to sell the baby to them for several tens of thousands of pounds. They agreed and got all excited about it, because they'd wanted a baby for many years; but once the baby was born Tracy went all maternal about it and said the deal was off. The baby is now a few months old (in the Canadian version of the show, which is always a few months behind the British version; thanks to Canadian content regs here the CBC can't show it every night).

Please note: I am not condoning this fictional characters actions up to the point the baby was born. Offering to sell it to a man who you've tricked into believing has cheated on his wife has, to put it mildly, dubious ethical qualities. However.

I think the show's writers are, perhaps unintentionally, using her character and the Tracy storyline to push a Mommy Guilt agenda; and I'm not having it. Instead, I say, we can learn a lot from Tracy.

Was Tracy a good girl during the pregnancy? No; she drank like a fish, continued smoking and complained that no cute guys were checking her out anymore. No glow, no warbling about the miracle of pregnancy and birth, lots of angst about how she couldn't possibly be a mother, she was too selfish, this was an awful idea (her mom and grandmother were pressuring her pretty heavily to keep the baby).

Wasn't it awful of her to renege on the deal and keep Amy instead? No; that's the right of any birth mother. All of the bitching and name-calling I've heard about how awful it was of her to deprive poor Roy and Hailey of the baby they've wanted for so long really left me cold. No one has an ethical obligation to go through with an adoption. It's a horrible, wrenching decision to make; one I know I could never go through with. I could so easily see myself in Tracy's shoes, banging down the doors of the church at a wedding to get to Roy and Hayley and get her daughter back. Those maternal hormones--do you know what they do to you? No? Read Mother Nature by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy; you'll get a good appreciation of exactly what hormones are involved and what they do.

And hasn't she been a wonderful mother?

Well, yes.

Mind you, she hasn't been a traditional mother.

She goes out, and leaves the baby with her parents, or her grandmother, or even the couple who were going to adopt her, so she can go shopping or hook up with a guy she met. She drinks. She still hangs out at the bar. She says things like "I've got row-row-row-your-boat stuck in my head and I'm about to go absolutely bloody insane." Or, "I love her, but if I don't get some time away from her I'm going to lose my mind." She does not have a maternal glow. She does not bring out the photos of Dear Amy in public and gush over her many new tricks. She is still herself. She feels no guilt.

I submit that more traditional mothers could learn a lot from Tracy's approach to mothering. Amy is being well cared for. Her babysitters dote on her; she is thriving. And her mother hasn't lost herself, isn't going slowly insane under the weight of what mothers are supposed to be like. Who cares if she's not supposed to leave Amy with her grandmother twice a week so she can buy shoes and pick up guys? She doesn't. Amy doesn't. Her grandmother does, but whose problem is that?

I think the writers of the show are trying to use these activities to drive home how awful Tracy is: Look at her! She doesn't want to spend all of her time with her daughter! She has no maternal instinct! She's a whore; she's shallow; she's manipulative! Hate her!

Tracy is supposed to be a villain, definitely. And I think the writers mean, intentionally or not, that because she doesn't want to spend all of her time with her girl, and because she's not feeling guilty or conflicted about not spending all of her time with her, that she's a Bad Mother.

But she's the only mother on the Street I think I'd have any fun with.

I'm not saying she's a great person. She's selfish, she's manipulative, she's spiteful. But she loves her daughter and little Amy is well looked after; and she's doing it in such a way that she hasn't lost herself or her mind. She's a great mom. Sometimes it's good to be selfish.

Posted by Andrea at 7:57 AM | Comments (7)

Being Mother

Today is going to be a day of borrowing other people's posts to springboard mine, starting with Wet Feet's post on being a birth mother.

She's made the point many times in her blog that birth mothers are the only mothers routinely left out of discussions about mothers. Not by everyone and not all the time--I know some amazing adoptive mothers who (in my totally non-expert view) try to give the birth mothers their due.

But by and large it's true. The birth mother's drama is central as the pregnancy unfolds and as she gives birth, but most of the time the focus is "has she taken care of the baby?" and "will she change her mind?" Occasionally there is sympathy to the choice she is making and the difficulties that entails, but most of the time, once the adoptive mother has the precious bundle securely in arms--her time in the spotlight is over and she is expected to adjust and move on as a once-mother.

But is anyone ever a once-mother? Is it a relationship that can be terminated? And when?

The popular view in the media seems to be that the mother is the woman who takes care of the baby or child. If you adopt a baby, if you have a baby through a surrogacy arrangement, or if you get pregnant and bring up baby in the old-fashioned way, this makes you a "real" mother. If you have a baby and give them up for adoption, if you are a surrogate and carry a child not "yours" for nine months, if you are a foster mother, then you are not a "real" mother. If you become pregnant and lose the baby, ditto. Not "really" a mother. If you have a child through whatever means and don't spend the socially prescribed correct amount of time directly caring for that child (it seems the common consensus is either full-time SAHM or non-career-related part-time paid work, unless you are poor, then get your butt out there and work full-time at whatever job will take you)--your status as a "real" mother is tenuous. You can make up for it by banging storebought mince pies at 2 in the morning to make them look homemade.

This can't be right. Whatever a mother is, it's not just whoever physically cares for a child.

Here is my theory:

A mother is the woman who takes responsibility--financial, physical, mental, emotional and otherwise--for seeing that the child's needs are met. A mother is the woman who makes sure that all of the resources that child needs are available to them, to reach adulthood healthily, safely and happily. A mother is the woman who considers the needs of that child and makes plans for their future.

A mother is the woman who says, "I love you, and you are my responsibility."

I think intuitively we all realize this. That's why we recognize in language the motherhood of all these different kinds of women, and then qualify it with the exact nature of the relationship. Birth mother. Adoptive mother. Foster mother. Mother. Grandmother. Surrogate mother. Biological mother. Stepmother. Any other kind you can think of--what they have in common, what unites them, is making the interests of the child central and working to make the resources that child needs available to them.

So when I sit here, and think of how Cathy is providing such good physical care for my little girl so that she will thrive and grow--I am not for a minute confused or conflicted that she is "mothering" her. And neither is she. Because the truth is that while at work her charges occupy her full attention, I expect that once she leaves she goes home to her own family and doesn't give mine much thought. Whereas while I sit here, not directly caring for Frances, I am working to obtain resources that she needs--health insurance, money, a nice home, a role model--and I still have responsibility for her. If she gets sick and needs to be taken to the doctor, it will be myself or Erik who takes her, not Cathy--because we are her parents and it is our responsibility.

In fact, I think one of the resources that I provide her with by working is an environment filled with attentive and caring adults. I couldn't provide that if I were with her all the time. I know my limits--24/7 baby care is beyond me. Not to do it, but to do it patiently and with love. This way she gets patient and loving adults almost 24/7.

If this sounds like a justification, it's not. I really do wish I could work only part-time, but that's because I like being with Frances more than I get to at present. I enjoy all the little tasks involved with baby and toddler care, to a point, and I don't get as much of them as I would like. It's not because I think I should. Frances is happy and thriving and she loves her mom and dad, and a whole pile of other adults besides. Proof positive that I made the right decision.

My point is: I am her mother not because I spent a year personally wiping poop off her tushie and mashing up steamed veggies with expressed breast-milk, but because I work (in the classical sense) all of the time to make the resources she needs to reach a happy and healthy adulthood available to her. Sometimes that resource is me, my presence and direct physical care. Sometimes that resource is money for her RESP. Sometimes that resource is a nice playroom in a nice house in a nice neighbourhood. Sometimes that resource is a good relationship with her grandparents, or finishing a book on toddler care, or an excellent daycare filled with good toys and fun activities, or nutritious food, or a walk to the park. I take responsibility for providing her with those resources.

And to me--an adoptive mother is a "real" mother because she does the same, from the point of adoption (and probably beforehands) onward. A foster mother is a "real" mother because she does the same for the children currently in her care. The relationship may be temporary (though I bet they often think of their little charges after they leave) but the taking responsibility is the same. A birth mother is a "real" mother because she provides the baby within her with the resources that child needs--though in her case, she's determined that the way to do that is by procuring another parent for her child.

What happens when a woman abdicates this responsibility--when she directly harms her child, abandons them, allows them knowingly to come to harm? We react with disgust and horror, and rightly so, because the relationship between mother and child is central to civilization and the human species, because children are so helpless and defenceless.

If I've stepped on any toes in my rambling, please know that it was unintentional and then point it out so I can avoid it in the future.

Posted by Andrea at 8:47 AM | Comments (3)

Happy Mother's Day!

You are all superheroes.

Posted by Andrea at 6:30 AM | Comments (1)

Translation Errors

Here is a dilemma:

It's easier to write about the good stuff than the bad stuff of parenting; but then, it's much harder to write about the good stuff.

Yes, well, I did say it was a dilemma. What do I mean?

Socially, it's much easier to write about the good. There is that pesky expectation, after all, that if you're a mother you really love all aspects of mothering almost all the time, and if you dare complain, you will of course remove all emotional weight from your fatigue or despair by making it into a joke. (Don't believe me? Then consider the next time you are reading a popular book on mothering: What is the tone when they are discussing changes in identity, body image, level of exhaustion? Humourous? I thought so.)

It's scary to talk about the hard parts, it's scary to write about them honestly. Writing about it well means exposing yourself to a certain level of risk that someone who is reading it will take issue with complaints not composed a la Bombeck. There is nothing wrong with Erma. But sometimes, motherhood isn't funny.

But it is a tremendous technical challenge to write about the upside to motherhood without descending into trite hallmark sentimentality. The Forces of Evil (as determined by me, naturally) have thoroughly colonized the territory of Peekaboo and Ittybitty. They've slapped their own damned labels all over the place, leaving precious little with which to compose something heartfelt and honest that doesn't read like a speech from a Stepford Mom.

It's much, much easier to be funny. Or to try to be funny. Technically speaking, it is a tremendous challenge to find the language to be honest without being cliche.

There's no ooomph left in "miracle." "A love like no other" has become commonplace. The "mother bear and her cub" have gone into hibernation. "It's all worth it!" never had a lot of meaning to begin with, but what it has has been leached out by repetition until it is as pallid as casper's ghost (another cliche!).

So you (I) sit, trying to come up with the words to describe the most profound emotional experience of your (my) life, and all there is are tinny phrases, old recordings from the days of phonographs, probably recorded by male doctors with the mothers' voices dubbed in. There's nothing left. You want something as wide as the pacific but all there is are puddles on the sidewalk (which junior is busy stomping in, interupting your train of thought).

I can't help it; it brings me back, over and over again, to the idea that english is a man's language.

This isn't a new idea. I'm not claiming an original thought here. But back when I first was introduced to it, as an undergrad, I thought it was silly. There was nothing in my life to that point that I couldn't say well in english.

But then, to that point in my life, everything I had experienced could also be experienced by a man. With a few exceptions that I wasn't going around trying to fashion words around anyway.

Then I got pregnant, and I realized, sometime in the second trimester, that there are no words that do justice to the experience of feeling your baby move within you. "Kicking" doesn't even begin to describe it. It's not "kicking." Rubbing, nudging, rolling, scrubbing, and poking cover a bit of it, but even there, they refer to sensations on the skin. A baby's movements are internal, on muscle and organ, not on the skin; and there is no word. There is no word for an internal, physical sensation that is not disease.

Don't get me started on labour. I'd like to meet what wiseass decided "labour" was an appropriate word (putting widgets into gadgets is 'labour'; childbirth may be work but it bears no resemblance to any other work you will ever do), let alone "contraction." "Crowning." "After-pains." These are all men's words. They do not describe female experience from a female point of view.

Then I was plunged into the world of mothers and there were no words, no words at all, for even a tenth of what I experienced. The best I could do was to take words meant for another purpose and hammer at them until they were half-right. Whether the experience is good or bad, it didn't matter. The words of parenting are those devised by men to describe fatherhood, or to describe mothering from the male point of view. Or from the child's. But not the mother's.

I was torn between the language of torture and the language of joy, with neither being quite right, because it's both. Exquisite torture. Great pain and great joy, wrapped up in a single moment. It isn't one and then the other, it isn't even an ambivalent both, it is a single coherent cohesive experience that consists of despair and elation. And there are no words.

It would be easier by far to abandon the attempt and use the tools I've been given. Speak of mothering the way the parenting magazines and the popular books do, using the approved language of "joy" and "love" and "adaptation" and "baby blues." Not just easier in terms of "more socially approved," though it would be that too and I might have more friends, but technically easier. I would have tools, no matter how poor they are, to fashion some sort of written expression of my experience. But in the end, it wouldn't be my experience, but a reflection of what my experience was supposed to be, and I find I can't do that. Ultimately truth matters a whole lot more to me.

It would not be truthful to say I felt "joy." What I felt was bigger, deeper, more scared, more vulnerable, more consuming, more mind-altering than joy, by far. I find I pity women who say they felt "joy" because I wonder if, in fact, they missed the point; if maybe they didn't feel what I felt, or did, but then glossed it over with what they thought it was supposed to be. All I know is that "joy" would cheapen and demean my experience.

I have felt joy in motherhood, those moments of crystalline perfection when the universe sings and you feel more alive than you ever have before; but that is not, to me, the most profound or best feeling of motherhood. If it were, it would hardly be worth it, since I feel joy too on Christmas morning or in certain frames of mind in wild places. If all I were after was "joy," I'd move to a park.

It's the same, too, with the negative experiences. Describing it using the approved language and it ends up sounding like torture, which it is, but it's not only that. "Sleep deprivation" makes it sound like insomnia, which it's not, so one tries to explain by expanding on it: You're not just tired because you're not sleeping. You are sleeping, but in fits and starts and little bits here and there. You stop remembering your dreams. When you do sleep, especially in the beginning, you are terrified of not hearing the baby cry or missing something and waking up and finding the baby has died, so your sleep is never deep. Terror and vigilance underly it. Then you relax and the baby settles into a better sleeping pattern (or not) and you start sleeping a bit better too, until a growth spurt kicks in and the baby is waking up every two hours all night long again. You are so tired you almost trip over your own feet walking down the hall to the nursery; you are afraid of picking the baby up lest you drop them. You are afraid of sitting down to nurse lest you fall asleep in the glider and let them fall. YOu do it anyways because you have to; the baby needs to be picked up and fed. The crying is like fingernails on a blackboard and, after a while, it is so hard not to shout at this little, helpless target of your frustration. But you don't, or at least you try not to, because it isn't their fault after all, they don't know any better. It is much, much worse than sleep-deprivation.

Trust me, as a lifelong insomniac, I know my sleep deprivation. I have gotten by on 1-2 hours a night for months at a time. By the end of Frances's clib refusal stage (8 1/2 months) it was definitely worse than that.

But it isn't just that, either. There is (or was for me) co-existing with this mind-deadening exhaustion a sense of lightness, eagerness, gloating, of being needed. It wasn't torture. There is no reward for torture. But I remember thinking often, and perhaps it was only delirium, that part of what made it so rewarding was the way it stretched me out and wore me down--giving past what I thought I could give. Being the carer-for. Giving without expectation of return.

Again, since there are no words, I'm probably not making any sense.

What do I do? Make up the words? But what's the point if no one else will understand them? Use words that are half-right? But if they don't reflect the truth of my experience, if they end up in fact playing into the script I've been handed by a culture that does not have my best interests at heart, am I not putting handcuffs on my own wrists and pretending that it's freedom?

Language is so powerful. I wonder sometimes, if people spoke in sentences before there was punctuation. Why would they? The question of to what extent our experience shapes language and our language shapes our experience is an old one and again, I'm not claiming to be original. But motherhood has brought me up against it much harder than I've ever felt before. I can use the words I've been given and claim as mine an experience I did not have, by doing so supporting a status quo I hate.

So many times during the first few months of Frances's life, I would tell Erik during a discussion (fight), "You don't understand what it's like."

And the unspoken second half was, "Because I can't tell you."

Maybe you've read all of this and you think I'm insane or I care too much about words or I'm being overly precise or pedantic. But I hope that at least if you're a mother, you understand some small part of what I'm trying to say.

There are no words. Why aren't there any words? Where are they to come from?

Posted by Andrea at 10:01 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Eating Crow

The thing is, when Frances gets sick like this--the throwing-up-and-diahrrea kind--I feel awful awful awful about the whole daycare thing.

Coughs, colds, sneezes, sniffles, headaches and teething I can weather well. But anything that might potentially affect her size or growth and my throat seizes up and I start thinking--maybe she shouldn't be in daycare yet, maybe we should keep her out of places where she gets sick so easily, but what, how, what can I do? Am I doing the right thing? But what is my option?

She has a doctor's appointment this afternoon and I am dreading when she gets on the scale. She's always been slim but after this one I can feel her bird-like little ribs under the skin. Her cheeks aren't as plump. She's lost weight; I know it, and I'm already panicking at finding out how much. And she doesn't have any weight to lose. And she only got sick because she was in daycare, which is all my own stupid fault because I know I make a lousy SAHM and a great WOHM and because I refuse to live in an apartment or a condo and because I have diabetes and need good health insurance and because I really do suck as a SAHM.

We'll see what happens this afternoon. I am already getting stomach cramps.

Any and all mothers reading this, and those of you who are planning to become mothers, must read this:

People Unclear on the Concept

Getupgrrl really does write a fabulous blog. But this post in particular is a great one.

I admit, I was a godawful judgemental bitch my first few months as a mom. It seems this is a syndrome, firsttimemomitis or somesuch. You've read all the books and of course you know everything and You Shall Overcome! The sleep deprivation isn't that bad and who could let their baby cry? Evil! Horrible! Die!

It's a learning experience, one of many that motherhood has to offer, when you are forced to confront over and over that all your best plans for being the world's best mom are going to fail because you aren't strong enough or smart enough or good enough to be that perfect. It smarts. It smarts even more to admit it. Well, no, it doesn't. But it smarts. Of course no one is that strong or smart or good, because the standard for Good Mothers is set so impossibly high, no matter which kind of Good Mother you aspire to be, that failure is inevitable at some point--whether one admits to it or not.

Anyway, if anyone is reading this who I have offended or hurt during the firsttimemomitis godawful judgemental bitchmother stage, I am really truly sorry, and I take it all back.

And to anyone reading this who isn't a mom yet or is a new mom and thinks that they actually do have it all figured out and they know how to be the Perfect Mom and \\who the hell am I to tell them they can't do it\\, honestly, save yourself the pain of eating crow later and decide to be tolerant right from the very start. It makes it easier to deal with your own failings, too, and believe me--at some point, you will fail. At least under the Good Moms Bake Their Own Homemade Bread Every Day From Scratch and Never Let the Baby Cry and Never Yell at the Baby and Always Think Happy Glowing Thoughts about Motherhood school of being a Good Mom that is all you ever get from Parents or Parenting or Today's Parent or any of those self-righteous rags of mother blaming and hatred disguised as helpful advice.

I actually bought copies of each last week just to mock them. It wasn't hard. I was almost disappointed.

We need to give each other compliments more.

We need to say to other moms, even when they are doing things other than how we would do them, "You are doing such a great job."

We need to say it a lot, to counter all those voices telling us how we're failing our kids who will grow up to be drug addict delinquents with rage issues because we didn't stay home/lived in a co-op/homeschooled them/public schooled them/didn't immunize on schedule/didn't wear them in a sling/co-slept/neglected the organic garden out back in which we were to grow the perfect pesticide free fruits and vegetables with which to create feasts of purity and taste for our babies right from 6 months, because of course we breastfed exclusively for at least that long.

So.

On that note.

You are all doing a fabulous job! You are great moms! I mean it.

Posted by Andrea at 12:47 PM | Comments (0)

Next Up: Baby Teflon Spray

Just in case you didn't already have enough to worry about wrt child safety:

From today's Toronto Star:

**Child dies after being crushed by TV**

"A young North York girl has died after a 27-inch television fell onto her head yesterday around the dinner hour.

"...

"Police say it's important for people to make sure television sets are secured if mounted off the floor when children are in the area.

"...

"Safe Kids Canada, the national injury prevention program of The Hospital for Sick Children, report that more than 100 children visit hospital emergency departments every year in Canada because they have been hurt by toppling televisions.

"More of a concern to president Emile Therien is the increased use of water coolers in homes "because they are top heavy."

"In North America, there were three fatalities last year with water coolers toppling over on children, Therien said."

This is undoubtedly a tragedy, but....

Am I the only one who read this and immediately thought, how far are we supposed to go to childproof our lives? At which point is it unreasonable? So no more water coolers? TVs on the floor?

Isn't it easier just to wrap the kid in bubblewrap and leave everything else alone?

Now mind you, I am an Evil Mom, who has yet to tie up all the electrical cords, wrap the coffee table in styrofoam, or put in baby gates. (The last more because we are moving soon and I want to avoid putting holes in the wall.) We do not use a baby monitor. There is no part of the house that is actually blocked off, except by her own inability to climb stairs. The bookcases have not been secured to the wall.

She even has some stuffed toys that have button eyes.

And yes, it means I can't turn my back on her and I'm constantly saying NO and moving her away from things.

So maybe I'm not the world's biggest expert in this area, but....

Is this crazy? Televisions and water coolers? Are we not already panicked enough about back sleeping, blankets in the cribs, falling down the stairs, walkers, icy patches on sidewalks, car accidents, incorrect installation of seats, electrical sockets and cheerios? How did anyone ever manage to raise a child to adulthood before all of these experts began telling us how dangerous everything is?

Posted by Andrea at 2:17 PM | Comments (0)

So much for a restful Sunday

Bunny is sick.

A weird sick--no fever, in a great mood, not much coughing to speak of, no sneezing--but huge huge pukes, everything in her tummy minutes after she eats it, everywhere and all over everything. And tired (which I'm sure is the puking). And a touch of diarrhea. But that's it.

Erik thinks it's flu, but can it be flu if there's no fever? And she doesn't seem sore.

I hope it's just a bug.

Something tells me I'm not going to work tomorrow.

Aww shucks.

But I hate seeing her like this. She actually napped for four whole hours today, which if you knew her, you would know was insanely long.

So Frances has gone through five outfits--I've gone through three--and Erik has gone through one.

And now I'm tired, and it's 7 pm, and I'm going to bed!

Oh, but I bought that book--\\Perfect Madness.\\ I went to Chapters today and saw it and got it and am going to review it here, probably soon. Now that there's all this hubub over the articles and interviews I want to see what she actually says in the actual book.

Posted by Andrea at 2:22 PM | Comments (0)

I Take It Back

All my bragging was premature, it seems, because either this tooth has started to hurt now that it's mostly through, or there's another one coming through that really really hurts. Because she has not been able to sleep for hte last 3 days without a preemptive dose of tylenol and even with it, last night, she woke at midnight screaming as if someone had stolen into her room and was busy sawing off her legs. It took an hour--with tylenol--to comfort her enough to go back to sleep.

Poor kidlet.

And poor mom and dad, who got so worked up over it that they couldn't get back to sleep until after 2.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Today is Frances's dance-a-thon. I made sure Erik brought the camcorder. I'll see if I can find some way to share it.

And we found a house we like on the weekend. We put in an offer last night. We'll see how it goes. If we get it, I'll link to the mls--or maybe send the link to interested persons. Damn me, I keep telling myself not to get my hopes up--then five minutes later, "So when we move in, I'll have to repaint the master bedroom, and I think the front sitting room would look nice with a loveseat and a small bookcase, maybe a plant stand."

Posted by Andrea at 8:46 PM | Comments (0)