Letting Kids Be Kids (Even When They're Parents)

I'm still on my soapbox about leaving Bristol Palin alone, and so all I've got to say on the announcement of her canceled engagement to Levi Johnston is that I'm glad if they're following their hearts, and I wish them both the best.

But all the angst-y right-wing commentary on the non-wedding of the season is fair game. Not to mention easy pickins! Here's what Lisa Schiffren of the National Review had to say (via Hugo Schwyzer):

I certainly don’t know if they should have gotten married. You’d have thought so . . . even if it didn’t last forever. Better odds for the kid. [My emphasis.] If the parents didn’t like it, well, they should have thought about that when they were drinking and fooling around. But, as we all know, shotgun marriages lead to plenty of unhappiness, some of the time. And very young marriages have a lousy track record. So parents of the expecting teens are not willing to push. And maybe they are sometimes right. Still, the default position of the girl, left on her own with the baby, now in serious and immediate need of further education and a set of remunerative skills with which to support herself and Tripp, which will be harder to acquire with her maternal responsibilities, isn’t much of a happy picture either.

For all of the high-minded discussion of marriage policy on these pages and elsewhere, to me it looks very late. That train left a while ago. Even Corner readers, who will discuss choosing life vs. abortion, with endless passion, do not get so worked up about marriage. Which is why all I have to say is, “poor girl.”

Hugo rightly points out the pity, condescension, and ethical bankruptcy in Schiffren's position. Amanda Marcotte argues that the pressure put on Bristol and Levi to redeem her pregnancy through coerced marriage reveals how ultimately, conservative anti-sex fury punishes men, too, by pushing them into unwanted and possibly loveless marriages.

Yes to all that. But I think the punishment goes deeper than the shotgun marriages that even Schriffren can't quite stomach. Schiffren unwittingly exposes this deeper dimension when she writes: "Better odds for the kid." I read that and thought: Which kid? Because Tripp is not the only child in this story! Bristol was 17 when she became pregnant!

In my book, that's still a kid. But in the anti-sex reactionary playbook, as soon as you have sex and get caught out - that is, if you turn up pregnant - you're disqualified from being a kid anymore. And since abortion isn't an option, you've got no choice but to plunge pell-mell into adulthood, whether you're 17 or 13.

I understand that a young parent will have to grow up faster than usual and meet the challenges of parenthood. Having had two babies, I know that babies impose their own limits and constraints, and unless you give your child up for adoption, your old freedom is toast. That doesn't mean young teen parents will instantly grow up, however. They are still kids - cognitively, emotionally, behaviorally - even if they rise to the challenge. This is why a pregnant child should always have the option to terminate, with or without parental permission; no one should be forced to grow up so fast. But if she does choose to carry the pregnancy to term, she deserves massive support to let her finish her education and maybe even have some fun once in a while. She deserves to enjoy whatever vestiges of childhood remain.

Imposing premature adulthood on pregnant girls and their partners as a punishment is just the flip side of seeing a baby as a righteous punishment for having sex. Both attitudes betray a profound contempt for children.

Lactophobia and "Discretion"

Stymied milk-slurping kittehs from I Can Has Cheezburger?

So the Denny's in Asheville, North Carolina, is just the latest in a long line of businesses where some twit took it upon himself to tell a nursing mama she couldn't feed her baby where everyone else was dining. Daisy at Daisy's Dead Air reports on the brouhaha - in which the restaurant manager threatened to call the cops! - and the resulting protest. North Carolina law guarantees the rights of mothers to breastfeed anywhere and anytime, but I guess lactophobia trumps the law.

Among all this absurdity, what jumped out at me is that the manager was going to call the police unless the mother covered herself.

In my experience, the demand for "discretion" while nursing may sound like a compromise, but in fact it's completely unreasonable.

My two little creatures partook of mama-milk until they were each about ten months old. As newborns, they wiggled a bit while nursing but mostly concentrated at the business at hand. It can't be easy to drink and breathe at the same time, but they practiced and practiced (oh, did they practice! about every hour and a half! for weeks on end!) until they'd mastered the task and grew large and fat. (Each of them gained about 5 1/2 pounds in their first six to seven weeks. Seriously.) Even as novices, they weren't exactly inert, but I could usually arrange a blanket around them and not feel too exposed.

And then one day, they discovered that mealtime was for socializing, not just for sustenance. They'd drink a little, and then blop! They'd pop off the nipple, look around, smile, drool, and flirt with everyone in the room. I'd be left with my breast waving at the world, chilly and exposed, until their Royal Babyness deigned to latch on again. If we were in a public place, I could be grateful if a jet of pressurized milk didn't spray any innocent bystanders.

Now, I'll admit I never went in for those "nursing" clothes that promise discretion. You know, those goofy, dowdy shirts with flaps and buttons that oh-so-discreetly announce "I'm lactating." That didn't matter, though, because once a baby pops off the boob, no flap in the world is gonna hide you.

There are blankets, you say? And the mama can artfully drape her nursing baby in flannel and fleece? My guys saw the mealtime blanket as a fun challenge. Grabbing and wadding up and throwing it probably did wonders to develop their motor and visual skills. But coverage? The net effect of a blanket was probably negative, because if you relied on it, you'd end up flashing even more skin once the kid wrestled it to the ground.

Besides: In order to fully cover your breast, you've got to swaddle your baby's entire head, too. Last I checked, infants need air as much as they need milk.

The standard feminist response to lactophobia is to say that men have issues with naked breasts that aren't displayed for their express pleasure. There's surely some truth to that. Prudery and prurience are often two sides of a single coin.

But the other thing about naked lactating breasts is that they bluntly remind us of our animal nature. Mammaries make it impossible to deny that we're mammals. There's no way to cover that up when you've got a baby at the breast, no matter how uncomfortable it may make some folks.

Update 12 noon, 2-27-09: Vanessa at Feministing alerts us to an example of how these two forms of lactophobia can intersect: Milwaukee hate-radio talk-radio host Mark Belling recently called breastfeeding mothers "sows" on his program, saying, "It's..it's what a pig does and it does it in public, right?" Just goes to show that misogyny and disgust at our animality make a happy, harmonious match.

Time Travel to the Island of Lost Toys

From the annals of classic 1970s ads, here's a reminder of what's gone lost in the world of play since my childhood.

I'm not arguing for a pink-and-blue-tinged nostalgia. I remember how clearly trucks were considered a boy toy. My little brother adored his Tonka trucks while I stuck to my stuffed animals. I was no gender outlaw in the sandbox. He got a doctor kit for Christmas; I got a nurse kit. All we really cared about was the bottle of candy pills. Still, the message hit its mark.

But by 1972, marketers couldn't just ignore the burgeoning social ferment. In the first of these ads, check out how many dads are involved with their kids - sons and daughters alike. Note the nod toward racial inclusivity. In all honesty, toy marketing is no more racist or sexist in those ads than it is today; maybe less so.

And man, were these ads prescient for 1972! Thirty-seven years later, we're surrounded by plastic crap that breaks on contact. We're deluged by gadgetry meant to entertain rather than engage. I love the line:

You see, we've learned that when a toy doesn't need a kid, in a very short time, the kid doesn't need the toy.

But enough seriousness. If you're old enough to remember 1972, by now you're recalling the classic Tonka elephant commercial and wondering where it went. It's here in this clip, too; ain't YouTube grand? Unlike platform shoes and Richard Nixon, the Tonka elephant hasn't gone terminally uncool. (Well, okay, so Nixon was never cool.) Enjoy!

"Reborn" Female?

I foolishly clicked on the "don't click ..." link at this post by Auguste at Pandagon ... and slid into a world of "reborn babies." In case you want to live a little crazy, too, here's where not to click.

If you're more prudent than I, maybe it's enough to know that reborn babies are ultrarealistic dolls weighted to flop like a newborn baby. They're sold on ebay, among other venues, for hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Some are sold to mothers who've suffered a stillbirth. It's easy to snark at these dolls, but it's not my place to judge any comfort a bereaved mother might find. However, most are marketed to women who'd like a baby but are too old to get pregnant or just don't want an infant that poops and burps and eventually talks back (according to this MSNBC feature).

About the reborn babies themselves I'm generally in agreement with Auguste. I, too, think they are uncanny. Freaky. Replicants among us. Then again, I'm spooked by clowns. Even as a little girl, I wouldn't play with baby dolls. I adored my stuffed animals. They were cuddly and didn't look like aliens.

But here's what surprised me when I explored the photo galleries at Reborn-Baby.com: Nearly all of the dolls were female. I saw just two boys out of roughly forty dolls! Not every dollmaker has such a skewed sex ratio, but girls seem to predominate across the board. For instance, at Destinys Reborn Babies (no, they don't believe in apostrophes), the ratio of girls to boys is about two to one.

Now, I'm not willing to argue that the purchasers of reborn babies constitute a representative cross-section of the population. But their behavior merges with what I've observed anecdotally: the historical preference for a boy may have shifted toward girl babies in the modern West.

This is a remarkable transformation. Just a century ago, the rural German women whose birth experiences I've researched hoped and prayed for boy babies. Never mind their own innate preferences. If they failed to bear sons and heirs, no matter how modest their situation, they were considered failures as women. The whole community knew they were deficient. Their husbands and in-laws treated them with contempt. Mothers-in-law were particularly harsh. Not surprisingly, those women desperately desired boys.

The roots of this preference go back to ancient times. It was sustained by the importance of brute strength in the pre-industrial age, especially on farms. But probably more decisive were rural inheritance practices that resulted in daughters carrying off part of the family property as a dowry when they married, whereas sons inherited directly and continued to provide for their parents in old age.

Here's one example from a midwife in rural Bavaria circa 1920 or 1930, who attended a farm wife who'd borne three girls in a row. When the expectant mother went the hospital (due to the threat of complications) the farmer told her not to bother phoning if the baby was another girl. Predictably enough, it was a girl. The farmer neither visited his wife in the hospital nor picked her up to bring her home. The midwife said that husbands normally didn't even bother to look at a baby girl for the first couple of months - and they blamed the midwife, too, for the baby being the wrong sex.

While I'm very glad for the shift in attitudes (not to mention the modern awareness that the father's X or Y determines sex), I'm not at all convinced that a general preference for girls would be a real improvement. For one thing, reversing sexism wouldn't end it. It would only flip the terms of the inequality. This is structurally the same as the question of whether matriarchy would be superior to patriarchy. As long as one group is lording it over another, it's not fair or just ... not that we're in any danger of living in a matriarchal society, mind you!

For another thing I suspect that all kinds of rigid assumptions about girls are wrapped around the growing preference for them. Girls are thought to be easier to manage. They're imagined to be more docile. How is this progress from the tired old stereotypes of female passivity?

Objectively speaking, there are lots more cute clothes for little girls. If you've ever taken a look at the Land's End girls section, you know what I mean. I totally get the pleasure mothers have in dressing their daughters; I've envied it, to be honest, while pawing through drab piles of camoflage T-shirts. But what does it mean that we start sending the message from birth forward that a girl's appearance matters more than a boy's? And how can we then hope girls will resist the pressure to crave "sexy" styles before they even dream of puberty?

Finally, mothers may hope for a "mini-me," much as fathers have long hoped for a Junior to carry on the family name and their personal legacy. Such hopes can only be dashed. The burden of a legacy is a heavy one for any baby, whether a boy-child or a girl-child.

I actually always pictured myself as the mother of a daughter, so I may well be part of this new wave. Instead, I got two boys. I'm just wise enough to realize that quite possibly I would've made more mistakes with a girl, projected too much of myself onto her, assumed she'd be too much like me.

My boys remind me continually of how much greater the human potential is than the old straitjacket of gender roles would suggest. They're capable of great empathy and gentleness. (Okay, every once in a while the Tiger wallops the Bear, but that's rare these days.) They're creative and funny. They're definitely boys, but they're not imprisoned by the role.

One thing my boys don't do? Play dolls. But like the little-girl version of me, they cuddle and love their stuffed animals. That seems just about right.

Is Blue's Clues Going Black?

Via image.fishpond, used under fair use provisions of copyright law for educational and critical purposes. Welcome message to Viacom spiders: We love Blue's Clues, so please consider this a free promo and don't make me take the pic down. :-)

I live very happily without MTV and VH1. I get most of my Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert online anyway. No one in my house is a big Spongebob fan. But losing Nick Jr. and Noggin? Blue's Clues and Dora the Explorer? That is a crisis.

The crisis is scheduled for midnight tonight. When the ball drops for the new year, my #%*&$ cable provider, Time Warner, will also drop all Viacom channels. A last-minute settlement is still possible but unlikely, since Viacom claims Time Warner is refusing to negotiate.

Why - instead of hearing this directly from Time Warner - did I get word of it instead from Skippy the Bush Kangaroo? (Thanks, Skippy and Jill!)

These are the fruits of media consolidation, folks. Time Warner and Viacom are mired in a spitting match to determine who's the more powerful player in their little oligopolous world. They don't give a damn about notifying their customers. Why, Time Warner isn't even reachable via their customer service number today! All I get is a recorded message claiming "technical difficulties."

These big media meanies don't even mind if they make my little Tiger cry. He loves Blue's Clues and Max and Ruby. He used to be passionate about Dora, though that has faded slightly. Gosh, the whole family likes the Wonder Pets. If Blue goes black, even for a few days, tears are sure to ensue.

Those tears might just be mine if I have to do without what a friend of mine calls "the bad parent machine." She means that in the most affectionate way possible, because she too relies on TV at strategic moments. Not constantly, not indiscriminately. In my house, the kids are allowed to watch TV mostly in the early mornings, and then mainly on weekend and vacation days.

Yes, I'm a slacker. I like to sleep in when I can. Blue lets me do that. So for the sake of us dedicated slacker parents, let's hope Viacom and Time Warner catch a clue.

Sadistic Coaching and Parenting

Before it goes stale along with my Christmas cookies, I just have to vent about this expose of Santa and his head reindeer, Donner, via Christy Hardin Smith at Firedoglake (caution: not suitable for kids):



It's about time! Even as a kid, I hated Donner's overbearing, unsympathetic attitude. Until now, though, I didn't notice how relentlessly Santa had his back.

Didn't you have a coach or gym teacher just like Donner, too? For me, the worst was Mr. Rosen in junior high. His favorite trick was to make his classes run "gut drills." I think they're called by different names in different parts of the country, but the upshot was that - starting at one end of the basketball court - you had to sprint to the first freethrow line, touch it, pivot and sprint back to the starting line, then do the same with the center line, the other freethrow line, and the out-of-bounds line at the court's far end.

If you didn't finish the gut drill in 30 seconds, you had to run another. Then another. And another. You were done if you made it in under 30, or when Mr. Rosen could see you were about ready to puke. Woe to you if his basketball team had lost the night before.

I almost never finished in less than 30 seconds. All through those long North Dakotan basketball winters, I'd make myself sick with nauseated worry on days when I had gym. Since P.E. was always late in the afternoon, I lost entire days of my life to that dread.

Mr. Rosen was a sadist. I suspect my sons' gym teacher has a similar, though much milder, streak. As a parent recently said on an email list I lurk on: "P.E. is institutionalized bullying." I'm think it's changed somewhat since 1975, but I don't see it as wholly transformed.

The truly appalling thing about the Donner character, though, isn't that he's a coach. It's that his parenting reflects the same sadistic approach. Even more sadly, I don't think he's wholly fictionalized.

This fall, watching the Tiger's kindergarten soccer team, I overheard a dad yell at his child: "Come on, pull yourself together out there!" He then stalked away in disgust. Dude! These are five year olds!! Ironically (but irrelevantly) this man's daughter was actually paying attention to the ball. My Tiger, meanwhile, was running in the wrong direction and chatting with a little girl who'd befriended him.

Sometimes I think my boys need to be a little tougher - not because they're boys but because they can both be cloyingly thin-skinned. They tend to cry over every little bump. They tattle on each other at each opportunity. I'll readily admit that my understanding and frustration spring from the same source: I was just like them as a kid.

But you know, the world is full of Donners, and my sons will encounter plenty of them. They're leading P.E. classes. They're on the playground. They're clawing their way up the corporate ladder. (Who hasn't had a Donner as a boss?)

What my kids need from their mama is not a Donnerette. They need love and understanding. They need sympathetic encouragement to distinguish the minor scrapes of life from the big bruises. They do need me to discourage the tattling, too - but that'd be another post for another day.

The Tragedy of the Elves

Today I have a horrible elf hangover. No, I didn't fall too deep into the egg nog last night. I was up until the wee hours doing the work of the elves.

As always, this wasn't how I'd planned it.

A few weeks back, the Bear mentioned that the one toy that caught his imagination in the Christmas catalogs was a puppet theater. I whispered to his dad that we could maybe build our own; the one in the catalog looked small and flimsy. By "we," I of course meant "he." The Bear didn't bring it up again - until a few days ago, with hope gleaming in his eyes. By then, his dad was under the weather and nothing was going to be built of wood and hardware.

But I started to fret that the Bear might be disappointed to not get the one and only toy he'd requested. So yesterday, I got the brilliant idea (and by "brilliant," I of course mean "harebrained") that I could sew a puppet theater. These Martha Stewart-ish fits strike me only about once a year. They always end in me feeling grateful that home ec was a required course during my long-ago North Dakotan girlhood - and foolish at not having learned my lesson during my last fit of craftiness.

4 p.m.: I'm in Wal-Mart, scouring the fabric department for supplies. (Please don't chide me for patronizing the evil empire; it's the only source for fabric within 40 miles.) Finally I find the only bolt of velvet in stock. Technically it's velveteen, but it'll do. It's lush and black. As for trimmings, I settle on sequined braid, ribbon, and tassels, all in a festive gold.

9:30 p.m.: I sneak the sewing machine out of the upstairs closet and past the kids as their dad gets them ready for bed. I discover that the prongs on the plug are badly warped. I unwarp them just enough to render them pluggable. Mercifully, the machine runs smoothly; I hadn't used it since I'd driven all the way to Zanesville for repairs after I'd broken the entire needle unit while sewing a Halloween costume. It dawns on me how stupid it is to engage in Christmas brinksmanship.

9:35 p.m.: The Bear appears downstairs. I bark at him - rather unmerrily - to get back to bed. I thank my stars that it wasn't the Tiger, who still believes.

11 p.m.: My husband slinks out to his woodshop in the garage, after all, to sand down a dowel to support the bottom of the stage's opening.

12 midnight: We cross the Christmas dateline without any kids appearing again. Ribbon loops grace the top edge of the curtain, an arched opening has taken shape, and I'm about to hem the edges. I realize that the edges are really long - six foot along the floor and nearly five feet vertically. This theater is big enough to accommodate three or four puppeteers.

1 a.m.: Everything is finished except the trim. I reconsider my original plan of using the hot glue gun to attach it. What if it makes the curtain too stiff? What if it melts the sequins? If I wreck the theater, I've got no Plan B. How about if I sew the sequins on with the machine? No, no, no - that's how I broke the damn thing last time. (My machine is no match for the glue on sequined fabric and trims.) I google variations on "attaching sequins" and come up remarkably empty. Oh Martha, Martha, why hast thou forsaken me?

1:15 a.m.: I sigh and start sewing on the sequined braid by hand. It is two yards in length. I learn that black is a truly fiendish color in dim artificial light when your eyes are tired and you've refused to get bifocals despite advancing presbyopia. I take off my glasses and bring the fabric within a few inches of my face.

2:30 a.m.: I go through another round of dithering about how to attach the tassel trim. This time, I use the machine. The metallic gold thread breaks again and again.

3:00 a.m.: I hang the theater on the suspension rod. I can't believe it's finally done. I can't believe it actually worked and - as the Tiger loves to say - "it looks awesome." I'm so tickled, I have to take a picture.


I lay out a trail of animal puppets to lead the kids from the stairs to the theater. Santa's work is done, and not once did I use the seam ripper.

3:30 a.m.: I crawl into bed.

4:00 a.m.: The Bear crawls out of his bed.

6:15 a.m.: The Bear wakes me up to inform me that the motor for one of his toys just overheated.

I promised you a tragedy, so I'll tell you right now that nothing burned down from this incident. But as I groggily assured the Bear we'd figure it out later, I realized that yet again, the kids proved it's impossible to witness their pleasure when they discover Santa's goodies. Unless, of course, you stay up all night. Hey, I nearly did pull an all-nighter, and I still missed that mythical magical moment.

That's the tragedy of the elves, isn't it? Every year, they do Santa's bidding. And then, every year, Santa gets the credit and the elves - unless they're uncommonly early risers - miss the show.

I'm reminded of a story my mom still tells of how my dad once built a kid-sized tool bench for my brother. Santa got the glory. I'd always vowed that I wouldn't do the same; that I would refuse to let Santa be a free rider.

Except for this: The Bear is in on the secret. A few years ago, he dissected all the logical flaws in Santa's cover story. And so after I finally dragged my bones out of bed later this morning, he and I exchanged a few knowing, smiling glances. He knows. I know he knows. That's good enough. That, plus the excited gleam in his eye as he said, "I really love the puppet theater, Mama."

Helicopter Parenting Goes off to College

Indulgent mama kitteh from I Can Has Cheezburger?

There's humoring one's children. There's hovering. And then there's outright helicoptering.

So this morning, I get an email from the mother of a student who's enrolled in one of my classes winter quarter. She wants to know the names of the books for the course so she can buy them for him. The email concludes by saying I should "feel free" to contact her via email or phone.

Now, I realize that the money for my students' textbooks normally flows from their parents. That is, if they're lucky enough to have parents who are both solvent and supportive. But geez, there's a world of difference between paying for your kid's books and actually buying them for him.

This is not the first time I've had a mother contact me about book purchases. (And yes, so far it's always been mothers, not fathers.) When I spoke with the bookstore manager this morning, he said there's been a real uptick in mothers buying their kids' books.

What's more, some of the parents pay with their credit card but have the kid actually go to the bookstore. However, according to the manager, they don't trust the kid enough to give him or her the card or the number. The cashier then has to speak to the parents on the phone - usually with lines of other customers snaking out the door - to complete the sale.

Yes, I'm totally judging. As the store manager said: "Who dresses these kids in the morning?"

Of course, it's not just the parents coddling the kids. We professors coddle the parents. After speaking with the bookstore manager this morning, I fired off an email to mother with a list of the books and information on where to buy them. So yes, I'm an enabler.

Then again, with all the budgetary pressures my university faces, we can't afford to piss off parents. So coddle we must.

The Thing with Feathers

I know that we're all still supposed to be jubilant over the election. This is supposedly our honeymoon, these days between Obama's victory and his inauguration, before he's had a chance to start disappointing us in earnest. But elation hasn't been my mood; not at all. Maybe I'm just too tired from the endless campaign, but I've felt cautious, depleted, reflective, even a little melancholy. The November days are short and bleak, and the thing with feathers threatens to fly south for the winter.

Photo by Flickr user tanakawho, used under a Creative Commons license. No birds were harmed in its making.

And so I find myself mulling over this business of "hope" and what it's good for - what the "thing with feathers" might animate, beyond the sloganeering.

For one thing, I think hope is an effective antidote to fear. As such, it's crucial to real democracy. Of all the laws and policies born of fear during the past eight years - the Patriot Act, the Abu Ghraib interrogations, the Guantanamo Bay internments, the rampant wiretapping - I can't think of one that was wise (and many were plain unconstitutional). Fear turns off people's critical faculties and turns citizens into subjects.

Uncritical hope can be exploited by demagogues, too, but not so easily. Hope is not self-sustaining: Reality has a way of intruding on hope while tending to reinforce people's fears. Historically, dictatorships have rested far more on fear than on hope, and idealistic revolutions-gone-bad have always shifted from hope toward fear before spawning such atrocities as Stalinism or the Terror. Hope can move people to take to the streets, but fear is a far more potent motivator if you're out for blood.

But even in times of threat and crisis - especially then - hope can lead us back to our core values. Hope can guide us toward a foreign policy aimed at strength through alliances rather than intimidation and militarism. Hope can inspire an economic rescue plan aimed at restructuring our economy - moving our automotive industry away from gas guzzlers and our energy infrastructure toward renewables - instead of just panicking and giving AIG and Citibank whatever they want.

Hope itself is a renewable energy source. We're going to need that in the months and years ahead.

Hope is also a gift to our children. It's an example of how to live, a precondition for making the world better for them, a source of joy. It can help them cope with their nascent awareness of injustice and violence; it can nurture their empathy and protect them against cynicism. It's part of the very air I want them to imbibe. I just loved how Tim Wise captured this in a recent essay on Alternet:

[M]aybe it's just that being a father, I have to temper my contempt for this system and its managers with hope. After all, as a dad (for me at least), it's hard to look at my children every day and think, "Gee, it sucks that the world is so screwed up, and will probably end in a few years from resource exploitation...Oh well, I sure hope my daughters have a great day at school!"

Fatherhood hasn't made me any less radical in my analysis or desire to see change. In fact, if anything, it has made me more so. I am as angry now as I've ever been about injustice, because I can see how it affects these children I helped to create, and for whom I am now responsible. But anger and cynicism do not make good dance partners. Anger without hope, without a certain faith in the capacity of we the people to change our world is a sickness unto death.

(Read the whole essay, "Enough of 'Barbiturate' Left Cynicism," here.)

Paired with a sense of responsibility, hope is also a lot of work. (Maybe that, too, is why I feel so darn tired?) That's where Emily Dickinson got it wrong. She wrote:

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chilliest land
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

I actually think hope demands our all. It's voracious. It will swallow us whole. And so technically, I guess, it won't "ask a crumb of me" since it doesn't settle for crumbs.

Hope is much like bell hooks' notion of love as she describes it in her essay, "Romance: Sweet Love." Unlike romance (which she equates with infatuation and putting up a false front), love requires a choice, hooks writes. Love demands that we commit to it over and over and over again, every day, for as long as we want it to endure. I think hope is like that too; anything easier isn't hope, it's mere romance and self-delusion.

In other words, hope is a whole lot like a longstanding marriage. It's not always easy to sustain. It requires a body-and-soul commitment. It demands our energy.

But like love and marriage, hope can give energy, too. And when that alchemy of hope occurs, that's when the thing with feathers takes wing. That's when its chirps meld into full-fledged song. That's when it keeps us warm.

Photo of a lovely befeathered kitty named Lynksys by Flickr user SuziJane, used under a Creative Commons license.

A Bearish Birthday, and Nine Years of Parenthood

The Bear turned nine today. We celebrated by going to a concert where his choir performed. (Audio is here for anyone who's curious; if you're plugged into a real speaker you can actually hear some decent music behind the audience's rustling and coughing.)

Afterward, we got together with some dear friends and ate this cake:


Apart from the obvious model, the cake was patterned after some cookies at a post-election party that got devoured before the Bear had a chance to try them. This was my attempt to make amends for that little disappointment. (It was also a design that didn't require any cutting, and since I'm still semi-debilitated, I wanted to keep things simple.)

Contrary to appearances, I'm totally not trying to indoctrinate my kids. I do think that being a parent means you get to try to pass on your values. Very, very high in my firmament of values - ranking just behind kindness and empathy - is critical, independent thinking.

So I've told the Bear he may well vote contrary to me someday. (Secretly I tend to think he probably won't; if I teach him to ask tough questions, he's virtually immunized against voting for the next G.W. Bush.) Way back during the primaries, I asked him why he thought Obama would be a good president. Ending the war in Iraq topped his list. Education was way up there, too.

The Tiger, for his part, just likes to jump up and down and say "Obama winnded! Obama winnded!" He still has a ways to go with both his political consciousness and his past-tense verbs.

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Earlier today, I mentioned to the Tiger's father that we've now been parents for nine years. His response? "Ha ha ha ha ha!" That captured my incredulity, too.

I laugh at all the moments of absurdity. Just yesterday, the Tiger turned up with ball-point ink crisscrossing his face, resembling a psycho Spiderman. He steadfastly denied applying any ink to himself.

I marvel at how the time could go so slowly and so swiftly all at once. Those near-sleepless nights and endless tantrums seemed to expand into eternity. And yet, looking back, I wonder what happened to the mini-Bear who'd throw his beloved stuffed animal, Mama Bear, out of his crib, and then bellow with fury that she was no longer snuggled up against him. Wasn't that just a few weeks ago?

I still wonder why I thought I was qualified for this job. No one really is, are they? It's all on-the-job learning, and if you screw up, there's a whole world hanging in the balance. Hmmm ... it's not so unlike the presidency, in miniature, when you think about it.

The Bear has extremely keen hearing unless he's being asked to clean his room. Predictably, he overheard my comment about nine years of parenthood. His response: "What does that have to do with anything?"

What, indeed, my darling little Bear? Nothing, of course, from the center of a world in which I've always been his mama, in which I'm as taken for granted as oxygen and his still-beloved Mama Bear.

And yet everything - more than he can possibly know unless he too someday becomes a parent.

The Most Unexpected Pleasures of Parenting

I should have posted this over the weekend, when this was fresh and the Tiger was in a brilliant mood - not today, when he was testily ignoring anything that any adult said to him. But maybe today's the perfect time to remind myself that I don't just love him, I actually enjoy his company when he's not so cranky.

Upon becoming a parent, you expect certain pleasures. You know you'll melt when your child says he loves you, not suspecting it'll be his favorite topic-changer whenever he's about to get in trouble. You look forward to that first "Mama," even if it comes weeks or months after he cooks up a name for Grey Kitty (aka "Mau"). You realize you'll get teary at the first day of kindergarten and school plays and really any milestone, no matter how trivial.

What you could never anticipate is this. The Tiger recorded his first song this weekend, written and performed by his silly self, at the callow age of five. I think it could be a big hit among the three-year-old set.

Here are the lyrics:

I love chickety poop
chickety poop chickety poop
I love chickety poop
all day long.

If you figure out what "chickety poop" is, let me know.

Good Thing the Tiger Has a Hard Noggin

Political blogging will resume tomorrow, I hope, but this evening I'm pretty wrung out. Tonight at the Bear's soccer practice, while the younger siblings were playing on the sidelines, a six-year-old threw a rock at the Tiger and hit him in the head. Hard. I wasn't there, but I heard all about it from the rest of the family.

The Tiger proved once again that scalp injuries bleed like crazy. He'll be okay, but he arrived home looking like a refugee from one of those scary movies I haven't watched since my high school days.

It was a deep cut and hurt like hell, but worse, the incident wasn't an accident. It was deliberate and unprovoked. The child's father didn't say a word to my husband. Not cool.

It's hard to know how to handle this; the family is new to this team. I'm not one to hold grudges, but I don't think it's unreasonable to expect an apology from the parents, or at least a word of concern. (The dad did insist his son apologize.) I'd also like some reassurance that in the future, they'll keep an eye on both of their children, especially if their younger son has a history of aggression.


Here's what the Tiger's noggin looked like up 'til a few hours ago, before it got bloodied and then shaved like a big bullseye around the wound. (Out of privacy concerns, I don't normally post pictures of my kids, but this one doesn't reveal his identity.)

Update 9/20/08: The mom of the other little boy sent us an apologetic email earlier today. That made me feel a lot better. Kids stand so much better a chance of getting it if their parents do, too. Although I really don't know these parents, I sort of suspect they may have a division of labor where the wife is charge of dealing with social situations, including the touchy ones.

Parenting in the Shadows of Atrocity

Pictures from a few hours ago:

We're in the mountains. The sky is preternaturally blue. Maybe I'm in Colorado.

An airplane approaches, too low. It breaks into two pieces. There's no fire, smoke, or explosion. The fuselage just snaps in two, breaking right behind the wings. It goes down instantly, silently.

In the dream, everyone knows it's September 12. Oddly, I'm the only one who immediately realizes that this isn't just a technical malfunction.

I wake up. Sometimes, commemoration doesn't involve flag pins or pious moments of silence. Sometimes, it's neurotic and lonely and feels as real as the rubble of history.

********

We haven't yet told our kids about the 9/11 attacks. Each year, we keep the news off the TV and radio so that the Bear won't pick up on the story. I realize he needs to hear about it from us before he hears about it from other kids; I know that time is running out on our policy of avoidance. He was not quite two in 2001. It was easy to shield him, then, and he was too young to ask why my eyes were so red-rimmed.

Now, as he approaches his ninth birthday, he's a very sensitive kid - so much so that he asks me to turn off NPR if a report about the Iraq War comes on. He understands that war is not a game, that it's about death and destruction. I've never discouraged him from gun-play because it's never really come up; he's scared of guns, plain and simple.

He's familiar with the word "terrorist." He knows about the shoe bomber. We fly regularly and he hates taking off his shoes for security. I explained that a bad guy tried to sneak a bomb onto a plane in his shoes, and that it won't happen now because the TSA is watching for it. I believe this is true. Something else will happen, but it won't be a shoe bomb.

It's much easier to provide reassurances about those attacks that never happened.

How do I explain falling buildings? How do I make sense of the kind of zealotry that guides a plane into a skyscraper? How do I assure him that we can still get on a plane without fear?

I'm not looking for advice. Legions of child psychologists dished out tips on managing our children's fears after 9/11. None of it struck me as very helpful. These are questions without an answer, and I know it.

Maybe I'm overprotective. I think it's more complicated than that.

********

I'm a historian. I don't understand how people can be "history buffs." History is not a hobby. History is a chronicle of atrocity, disaster, and horror. Every once in a while the archives give you a glimpse of love or heroism or honor. Mostly, it's war, plague, oppression, and one child in five dying as an infant.

I am as thin-skinned as my Bear. I cried the first time I saw Night and Fog - not discreet, dignified tears, but big gulping sobs. My doctoral adviser was sitting right next to me. I was afraid she'd conclude that if I lost it while watching a documentary on the Holocaust, I wasn't tough enough to study German history professionally. Instead, she kindly told me: There would be something wrong with you if this left you untouched. Once I'd calmed down, I realized she was right.

It's possible to be that thin-skinned and still stare down history without blinking. I want that for my children. I don't want them to become impervious.

Given that my kids are half German, they'll have to live with the legacy of the Holocaust. From me, their American mother, they inherit the legacy of slavery and the persecution of American Indians. We've talked about this things in age-appropriate ways. The Bear knows about slavery, Martin Luther King, and Huckleberry Finn. He knows Germany had a very bad ruler who was mean to the Jews and started a huge war when his Oma was a little girl. There's time enough for the harsh details when he's old enough put them into context: A great-grandfather who made his peace with the Nazis. A great-grandmother who was killed in an air raid while his Oma was buried alive. The deportations and the death camps.

Is it ever possible, really, to put such stories into context? Or do we just learn to hold ourselves at an ostensibly safe distance?

********

I also don't want my children to be ruled by fear, which is surely what will happen if they're exposed young to all the world's dangers. We have become a nation of cowards that specializes in saber-rattling. We are "governed" by chickenhawks who think invading Iraq worked out so well, we might as well take on Iran and Russia next. I don't want to raise my sons with the sort of false bravado that becomes a defense against otherwise unmanageable fears.

The same people who peddle fear promise to deliver us from it. Vote for them, and they'll snuff out the evildoers all around the globe. Give them power, and we'll be freed of the stuff of our nightmares.

I don't want that freedom, bought with the blood of innocents. I want a leader who will say yes, there is evil in the world, and I can't make all your bad dreams go away. I want to hear that even when the world bristles with real threats, we can be brave without being belligerent.

I want to be told that it's our job to be the grown-ups.

The Neediness of Special Needs Kids

Blue Gal has come right out and said, "Sarah Palin is a bad mother." Her main point is that a child with special needs can't just dispense with hands-on parental care:

As the mother of a special needs kid, I can tell you that at the time of his diagnosis I would have cut off my own limb before taking ANY job that took me away from his care.

I was lucky at that time that I did not need to work. I feel horrible for parents who must work outside the home to pay for the care of a special needs child.

But Christ, she's got a Down's Syndrome baby. She has no idea if the baby has any Mental Retardation issues at this point. Special needs babies are ALL CONSUMING and SHOULD BE. It's like the only issue she had was making political points from not aborting. And then it's right back to work? Not even the standard six weeks maternity leave? Are you kidding me? To hell with her.

(Read the rest here.)

Now, whether you consider this relevant to Palin's fitness for office is your call. I'm disinclined to disqualify a candidate on this basis. Plenty of solid public servants have been crappy parents and spouses.

Palin herself seems to differ. Her speech Wednesday night put her family members front and center. In fact, that's the only positive I remember (along with her invocation of McCain's POWness) in her stew of snark and sarcasm. But since she considers motherhood one of her qualifications to be VP - perhaps the main qualification - I'm not going to tell you not to judge her on that.

Instead, I'd like to back away from electoral politics for a moment and discuss the nitty gritty of parenting a child with special needs. In the past few days, I've heard it repeated over and over that Palin's child will automatically get the best possible care due to her privileged status, and thus it doesn't matter if she and her husband delegate Trig's care to others. This is a pernicious lie.

I have a little experience with a developmental delay - and I mean a true delay, not a permanent disability. My younger son, the Tiger, had a significant speech delay. He's doing great now. Between the ages of two and three, we went to speech therapy for an hour each week. For part of that time, we also had weekly home visits from an Early Intervention specialist.

I suppose a nanny could have kept the Tiger company at all those appointments. But would a nanny have stepped in when a young speech therapist used techniques that were obviously doomed? For instance, she tried to elicit words by withholding toys from the Tiger. This was a huge success - in pissing him off. I knew how stubborn I was. I knew she was only setting everyone up for failure. So I gently but firmly insisted she try to harness his natural goofiness and sense of humor instead. This not only kept the weekly sessions from becoming a nightmare of tears and refusal, it also worked way better.

The Early Intervention specialists had better instincts. However, if I hadn't pressed for an evaluation sooner rather than later, the bureaucratic wheels turn so slowly in this county that he would have turned three - and aged out of eligibility - before services even began. I think this is a reflection of the lack of funding for such services, locally; social workers are stretched thin, and this becomes a form of de facto rationing.

Maybe a nanny would have been just as assertive. More likely, though, she would not have known my child in the same depth as I did. She would not have felt as deep an investment. She might have felt that negotiating with the professionals and insisting on a partnership with them was above her pay grade.

What I also learned is yes, you need the professionals, but you also need the whole family to be on board with teaching speech at home. I scoured the Web for helpful advice and we all became better communicators. Instead of speaking in full paragraphs with tons of subordinate clauses like I do here at Kittywampus - hey, it worked fine with my first kid! - I learned we needed to start with individual words and work our way up, matching the Tiger at the level he was at. This led to scintillating exchanges where he would say "car" and I would go "red car" and words like "scintillating" were banned altogether. But it paid off big time. Today, you'd notice some quirks in the Tiger's usage (and that would be worth a whole 'nother post) but you'd never call him disabled.

So my experience was really with "developmental delay lite," and yet it was tremendously helpful that I was only working part time. I'm not arguing that one parent must therefore stay at home, only that if both parents' jobs are all-consuming, a special needs child will pay the price. I'm also not assuming that the mother has to take the lead. The crucial thing is that both parents are connected and tuned in to their child's unique needs and strengths, and that at least one of them has adequate time and energy to devote to that child's extra needs for nurturance. (For a perspective on how much harder this quest is when a child has Down syndrome, see this post by Mother Who Thinks in Salon's comment section.)

No one except the parents will know that child's temperament, personality, and needs inside and out. No one else will love that child as deeply. No one else will be as fierce an advocate. That is what you can't outsource, no matter how wealthy you are.

And now I'm off to see the Tiger play the Gingerbread Man in his kindergarten play. (He's one of several G-Men.) I'm already teary-eyed at the thought of it.

Update 9/5/08: Since I dashed off to school before I had a chance to re-read this post, I realize I should come back to the Palins. I want to emphasize that I don't think mothers have a unique responsibility to their kids apart from the gestating and breastfeeding. Todd Palin could absolutely step up and be his baby son's number one advocate - as long as that doesn't contradict the religious-wingnut ideology of male headship of the family. So far, I've mostly seen Trig in Bristol's arms, and his long-term welfare is seriously not her job.

Since I bumbled that one, here's a photo that shows why I was in such a hurry to get to the play. This was the Tiger's costume. Please note the green face on the Gingerbread Man; the Tiger is not into realism. The kid attached to it was equally funny.

Parenting between the Cliffs of Risk and the Rocks of Pragmatism

Cliffs and rocks at Big Sur, California, photo by Flickr user Ed Yourdon, used under a Creative Commons license.

Yesterday in comments on my feminist homeschooling post and at her own blog, Marcy of Marcy's Musings suggested that my arguments against long-term withdrawal from the paid labor market were driven by a politics of fear. She pushed me to keep thinking about this, since they way I mix my feminism with my parenting is definitely not driven by fear. It’s a balance between risk-taking and pragmatism, which recognizes that "choice" is illusory unless you've got a clear picture of the trade-offs.

Honestly, a lot of people (feminists or not) might say I take a few too many risks. Too many years in grad school? Check. In an "impractical" field? Check. Married a foreigner whose training is in philosophy? Check. Rode home the other night on my bike after midnight - alone - through the big city of Berlin? Check. In other areas, though, I'm boringly risk-averse: I won't talk on a cell phone while driving, and I'm very careful with my kids' safety.

We all take risks - some smart, some stupid - and the trick is to figure out which risks are worthwhile. Marcy recognizes, for instance, that her decision to stay home with her kids through their school years entails a financial risk. She doesn't deny it, though she reduces it mostly to the risk of divorce, while I see the issue as broader: a spouse can also die or become disabled while kids are still young. My husband narrowly escaped death twice, and he went through a prolonged period of disability.

My story is far from unique. The Sungold family tree indicates why it's important for women not to become too dependent financially over the long term. One grandma was divorced from an alcoholic husband in her early twenties. (Circa 1912! Imagine the scandal!) She raised her two daughters alone until she met my grandpa nearly two decades later and then gave birth to my dad. One of my dad's half-sisters was divorced while her daughter was still tiny. His other half-sister was widowed in her early fifties. My maternal grandma was widowed while still in her early forties, with four children to support, the youngest (my mom) only six years old. Both my mom and her sister were divorced while they still had young children at home. Their two brothers remained married to the same women into old age.

So, in those two generations, only two of eight women enjoyed a husband's support throughout their childrearing years. (And those two were farm wives who worked from dawn to dusk and beyond.) It's not that the women in my family are unusually flaky, either; those who divorced did so only under considerable duress. While none of the women in my family chose single motherhood, they still had to find ways to cope, financially and emotionally. For instance, both my grandmas were teachers, and that's how they held their families together.

My family tree suggests why it's neither pro- nor anti-feminist to say that women run greater risks the longer they're completely financially dependent on a mate. The risks are simply a pragmatic reality.

Now, Marcy interprets my argument as saying

women shouldn't have the freedom to do what we find fulfillment in, if it means we might be dependent on the men in our lives, because if those men should fail, we will be in serious trouble. We should follow the current cultural pattern and go to work so we will have a "safety net" in case our husbands should walk out on us.
(Read the rest here.)

No, what I'm saying is something different. I'm suggesting that we need to balance a quest for fulfillment with awareness of the risks of long-term dependence, which grow over time. Only if we're realistically aware of the risks can we make informed and conscious choices.

I'm not at all arguing that mothers should take six weeks' maternity leave and then plunge back into work full-time. I'm not inveighing against stay-at-home parenting. My own choices have tilted in that direction since my first baby was born. I chose to take the financial risk of parenting first - and working for pay only secondarily - during my kids' preschool years. I believe kids need intense attention while they're very young. As infants, my boys got that almost entirely from their dad and me. Starting from around their second birthday, they went to daycare half-days with six other kids and a wonderful caretaker; they loved it, and I could work part time. Only now, with both kids in school, am I returning to work full time. I'm lucky I'll still be able to pick up the kids after school, since I can grade and prep classes at home. My work responsibilities have allowed me to spend lots of time with my kids, and to enjoy the sort of self-fulfillment that Marcy describes. I was lucky that my husband supported (and quite literally subsidized) this arrangement. Other people make other choices, and that's okay too, as long as their choices are conscious and well informed.

Indeed, failure to recognize the importance of active, involved parenting - and its rewards for children, mothers, and fathers - poses very significant risks of its own. The truth is, most jobs are a hell of a lot less interesting than mine, and it's very common for parenting to be far more fulfilling than paid work. That goes for most of men's jobs, too, although lots of fathers still find their fulfillment through the breadwinner role - sometimes too narrowly, at the expense of closer relationships with their children.

Where I differ from Marcy is mainly in the length of time we're spending outside of the paid labor force. The risk here is that re-entry into the labor force becomes increasingly difficult, the longer you've been out. For women, this has historically translated into a substantial risk of poverty in old age or upon their marriage ending. (One of my aunts is in precisely this position now, at age 76.) If the kids are still at home, they're hurt by poverty, too.

In other words, I'm arguing that we need to consider the long-term perspective in our decisions. For me, it made sense to roll back my career to spend lots of time with my little ones. That was a risk and a trade-off. It struck me as worthwhile - and it was. But I see how its costs continue to rise over time. The choice to homeschool, if it means two decades or more outside of the labor force, carries risks and sacrifices that would be too costly in my life. Above all, my children would depend on me completely if my mate's health failed again.

Other folks are free to take that risk, and for some parents whose circumstances are different than mine, it may make sense. However, it would be misleading to portray these significant risks as minimal or to argue that homeschooling may be a more feminist choice than relying on the public schools. The only feminist choice, I'd say, is one that's thoroughly informed.

Finally, I really haven't addressed the elephant in the room: socioeconomic class. It should be clear, though, that the capacity for real choice depends on a certain level of prosperity. In many families, both parents must work in order to avoid eviction and keep the utilities on. That's when choice - even to take a brief maternity leave - can become an unattainable luxury. And that's why poverty has to be a central issue for feminists. That would be a whole 'nother post.

Feminist Homeschooling: Why I Don't

Student kitteh from I Can Has Cheezburger?

As I mentioned yesterday, the Feminist Underground is running a cool series on feminist parenting. The latest post is a spirited argument by Rachel Allen in favor of feminist homeschooling, which was originally published in its entirety by California NOW. The core of her argument is that schools are basically racist, sexist, homophobic engines of conformity that magnify the most pernicious aspects of the mass media. Homeschooling offers her a way to counteract those forces while maintaining a work-at-home career as a feminist activist.

In principle, I think homeschooling can be made compatible with any worldview. In my little town, as in most of America by now, the homeschool community is composed partly of fundamentalist or conservative Christians, partly of lefty/alternative/neo-hippie families. I also know people with non-ideological reasons for homeschooling: they have gifted or speech-delayed kids who are served poorly with by their local school, or they faced a bullying problem that couldn't be resolved.

In practice, however, I think feminist homeschooling is a thorny issue, if only because it requires one parent to be mostly at home. Rachel Allen is lucky in that she works from home. I know another political activist in my neighborhood who strikes a similar balance. Most of us don't have that much flexibility.

As a university professor I have more flexibility than most workers, but I couldn't homeschool unless I had a nanny to carry much of the burden. I still have to show up for my classes and meetings. This year, I've got a rising third grader and kindergartner. With both kids in public school, I'm looking forward to going full time (and having my own health insurance!) after nearly a decade of part-time work.

For work reasons alone, then, I wouldn't homeschool unless I felt there was no other tenable solution. Of course, I realize that I'm lucky to have work that's personally rewarding and reasonably remunerative.

And this points to the crux of the problem of reconciling feminism with homeschooling: While the kids may be getting an anti-sexist, anti-racist, anti-homophobic education, the stay-at-home parent is still usually a mother. If she works from home for pay, she rarely earns enough to survive financially if her marriage or partnership were to end. So homeschooling as a solution that's feminist for the children is much harder to defend on feminist terms for the parent.

I don't think that staying home to parent is inherently anti-feminist. I did it myself when my kids were little, and it's important, honorable work. It's just that the longer you stay out of the labor market, the more precarious your financial position will be - and if that situation persists for a couple of decades, the stay-at-home parent is likely to be very vulnerable, financially. Sure, there are ways to mitigate this by working part-time or from home, or by taking turns being the at-home parent. But the fact remains that as Ann Crittenden has shown so persuasively, staying at home has very steep, long-term costs.

I'm the last person to measure worth and happiness solely in financial terms (otherwise I wouldn't have spent all that time in grad school). However, I see lots of female students hoping to be stay-at-home parents without much awareness of the attendant risk of poverty, and I suspect many mothers decide to stay home with the assumption that divorce or widowhood won't strike them personally.

The calculation changes, of course, if you live somewhere with poor schools. We're lucky in that our local elementary school is quite good. The teachers are smart, dedicated, and fairly progressive. Though I live in predominantly white Appalachia, the student body is multiethnic and multinational, partly because the school serves the university's graduate student population, partly because binational families like mine gravitate toward its diversity.

Diversity is of course no safeguard against racism, sexism, or homophobia. I know of at least one incident where a racist joke was told at recess. Lunchtime conversation too often revolves around gender stereotypes. The teachers can't police all of this, and so it's up to us parents to talk to our kids after school and discuss why those things aren't okay.

Homeschooling would shield my kids from hateful and stereotypical comments. On the flip side, though, they wouldn't learn how to respond to racism and sexism, which my rising third grader already does pretty effectively. The school environment is also much more diverse than our local homeschooling community in terms of race, nationality, social class, and parents' educational level.

I fully agree with Rachel Allen that there's pressure to conform even in most progressive schools. One of our jobs as parents, I think, is to help kids learn to distinguish between mindless conformity and the necessity to get along and work well with others. So far, we're all doing okay, but I'm well aware that striking this balance won't get easier over time.

Temperamentally, homeschooling would be a tough fit for my kids. My older son, the Bear, wouldn't want homeschooling; we've talked about it, and we both know it would turn into a contest of wills, me nagging, him resisting. He also needs more stimulation than any one parent could provide, and he gets that primarily from the other kids at school, plus frequent playdates and oodles of informal teaching after school. The Bear's curiosity never sleeps. (For that matter, the Bear would literally prefer never to sleep, and he's been that way since the day he was born.) Even with all the activities that homeschooling families pursue together, we'd still come up short.

I can imagine certain circumstances where homeschooling might be the least-bad choice for us: if one of my boys was getting severely bullied and was unable to learn; if he was so terminally bored that his grades were suffering (their dad dropped out of school, actually, for that reason); or if we moved somewhere that had lousy schools. But for now, I'm grateful that my kids are in good hands at their school. We've been lucky to have good, close relationships with their teachers. I'm eager to finally put more energy into my own work (feminist and otherwise) after nearly a decade of dialing back those commitments.

Not least, the kids get along better when they're not together 24/7, and for that reason alone, we're counting down to August 26. (I am that LOLcat!)

I'd love to hear what others think about feminism and homeschooling. I'd bet there are as many perspectives on this as there are parents.

Young, Pregnant, Desperate? Pick Your Judge Carefully

Photo by Flickr user mindgutter, used under a Creative Commons license.

Parental notification laws for young women and girls seeking abortions are a crappy idea. Most states have them by now, but that still doesn't make them smart.

As a mother, I know that if I want my kids to come to me with serious problems someday, I have to build a foundation of trust. If either of my boys ever got a girl pregnant, they'd need to know that they could come to me for advice and counsel. They'd need to feel enough love and respect that they could trust me to support them. And so my job of establishing that trust starts now, while they're still little kids.

Because you can't legislate love, trust, and respect. You've gotta earn it.

Realistically, though, some families are just dysfunctional. Sometimes a pregnancy is a result of incest. Sometimes a girl fears being thrown out of the house, or beaten, or belittled. In those cases, parental notification laws don't repair anything; they just make a pregnant girl's life much more difficult. And if we're stuck with those laws, then judicial overrides are indispensable.

In Ohio, pregnant teenagers under 18 do have the option of taking their case to a judge - but as yesterday's Columbus Dispatch reports, it matters crucially which judge hears your case:

The bypass hearing is "not something a lot of people know about, I admit," Judge Dana Suzanne Preisse said.

"The average age is 16 or 17, and some are weeks from their 18th birthday. They have to prove to the court they are emotionally mature and intelligent enough to make this decision on their own."

After 18, parental consent is not needed for an abortion.

Judge Kim Browne said she spends 20 minutes with each teen and her attorney.

"I don't think I'm playing God at all," said Browne, who has never denied a request. "That is their choice. That's the decision they are going to have to live with. ...

Judges don't ask for the teens' names or schools, or who the father is. Sometimes, a clean driving record and good grades are enough to convince a judge of "sufficient maturity," the key phrase in the Ohio Revised Code. ...

Some former judges, including Carole Squire and the late George W. Twyford, usually denied the requests on moral grounds, court officials said.

"I don't think it's appropriate for a family court judge to flagrantly disregard the parents' authority," Squire, a Domestic Relations judge from 2000 to 2006, said last week.

"I don't believe (judges) are applying the law correctly. Good grades in school is not dispositive of being sufficiently mature."

As her conservative stance became known, fewer bypass hearings came her way, she said. ...

Preisse has denied only one request, she said.

"I feel I'm elected by the people to follow the statute," even if it goes against her own moral standards.

(Source: Columbus Dispatch)

I don't know where "playing God" enters into this. Why is that even part of the discussion? Why does a judge - even a liberal judge - feel compelled to defend herself against this potential charge? This is a human decision, affecting human lives.

Why does a judge feel she needs to make clear that she herself is more moral than the girls over whose fate she presides? Even though she has only turned down one case, why does she presume that her personal anti-abortion stance is more moral than the decisions these girls have made?

It's also misleading to couch this decision in terms of parental authority. If no action is taken, these girls will become parents themselves! How can a judge deem a girl too immature to make the abortion decision - but then lock her into a parental role, which will demand far more maturity from her?

And how does a scared sixteen-year-old figure out in advance which judge will give her a fair hearing, and which one will dismiss her case out of hand?

Lots of questions, no good answers - all spawned by legislation that's basically misguided from the get-go.

A Sniffly Penalty for Parenting "Right"

Photo by Flickr user James Jordan, used under a Creative Commons license.

So you had a baby. You breastfed for a year (well, ten months, because he was losing interest and you were ready to get your body back). And you waited until he's six months to introduce solid food (well, five months, because he was watching your spoon move with such lust!). And you did all of this "right" - well, by the book, anyway - because your baby's dad has wretched allergies and you wanted to spare him the same fate.

And now? It turns out you did it all wrong:

Delayed introduction of cow's milk and other food products is associated with a higher rather than lower risk for atopic manifestations in the first 2 years of life, epidemiologists in the Netherlands report in the July issue of Pediatrics.

They note that one of the most widely recommended allergy prevention strategies is delaying the introduction of milk and solid foods into the infant's diet. However, there is little scientific evidence to support this advice.

To investigate, Dr. Bianca E. P. Snijders, at Maastricht University, and her colleagues analyzed data from a prospective birth cohort of 2558 infants. Mothers completed questionnaires at 34 weeks of gestation and at 3, 7, 12, and 24 months postpartum regarding food exposures, allergy manifestations, and confounders. Blood samples were collected from the infants at 2 years of age for determination of sensitization.

After adjustment for duration of breastfeeding, sex, exposure to tobacco smoke, maternal characteristics, and family history of allergy, delay in the introduction of cow's milk products beyond 9 months significantly increased the risk of eczema (adjusted odds ratio 2.29).

(Source: Reuters Health via Medscape, free registration required; article also available at revolutionhealth.com without registration; the study is published in Pediatrics 2008;122:e115-e122.)

Translating back from science-ese: Wait too long to diversify your kid's diet and you could more than double his or her chances of living with allergies.

Of course breastfeeding is still a good thing. But women have been made to feel guilty for introducing solid foods "too soon" and for not "exclusively" breastfeeding for "long enough." All of those are spongy terms that seem to shift with the winds of changing medical fashion.

That baby of mine - the one who watched my spoon like a tennis match - was the Bear. He's had the sniffles this week. I've wondered if he might be showing some mild allergies, since he didn't otherwise seem sick. I still don't know. But at least now I'll stop wondering if his sniffles has any relation to those carrots that he wore so cutely all over his face as a plump and happy five-month-old. Of course, he wanted them earlier. Maybe he was right?

It's funny how I wrote nearly a hundred pages in my dissertation on what a crock "expert" advice can be - and yet I'm one of the biggest suckers for it.

Gambling, Explained

On my trip home yesterday, we connected through Las Vegas, an airport I'd never visited. The terminal featured a prime view of the sphinx-and-pyramid casino (whichever one that is) and a bunch of 25-cent slot machines.

Of course, the kids wanted to play the slots, and so I had to try to explain the concept of gambling to them. The best analogy I could cook up was those crane games - those big glass cases where you use a joystick to maneuver a claw and pick up a stuffed toy, only to see it drop out of your grasp, again and again. You know, the games that small children periodically get stuck inside.

Crane game photo by Flickr user Paul Pellerito, used under a Creative Commons license.

I was going to demonstrate the equal futility of playing the slots, but the machines wouldn't take my quarters! You can see how long it's been since I gambled; I didn't realize that the minimum amount of cash a quarter machine would accept is actually - a dollar. There I was, with $6.25 in quarters, a very big stake by my standards, and nowhere to burn them.

In other words, I needed a machine more like this one, and none was to be found.

Photo by Flickr user cobalt123, used under a Creative Commons license.

Then the attendant chased us away because at ages 5 and 8, the boys really don't pass for old enough to "loiter" around the machines, as the warning signs so charmingly put it.

Still, it was an easy, uneventful trip: We had an extra seat for each kid, they both slept on the long flight, and our plane arrived a half hour early, which I thought violated some unwritten law these days. And now it's great to be home.

The Melody of Language

I've been interested in language acquisition ever since my first baby started to talk. In keeping with the theme of this blog, one of his very first words was "mau," referring to Grey Kitty. In fact, "mau" predated "mama." I didn't care bit. I thought watching him learn language was one of the coolest parts of parenthood.

That changed with my second son. I was just as excited about him learning to talk - but it didn't happen for a very long time. Worry displaced joy. At age two, when most kids are combining three words into crude sentences, the Tiger had just a handful of words. He didn't even say "no." Now, three years later, he's mostly caught up, following a little speech therapy, a lot of terrific help from a support group online, and the simple passage of time. And believe me - he has learned to say no!

So I was fascinated when Dave Munger at Cognitive Daily (Science Blogs) reported recently that music apparently helps in language learning. A research team headed by Daniele Schön had students learn a set of six nonsense words; it took them 20 minutes to learn where one word ended and the next began. Schön's team then mapped each of the six words onto a unique pitch. They found that the musical association dramatically increased learning. (Their abstract is here; since the full text of their article is not accessible on the Web, the following graphs are courtesy of Dave Munger's post.) The graphs show the test subjects' accuracy after seven minutes of hearing the nonsense words paired with a unique musical note:

Munger observes:

The dotted line in each graph represents the average score for all listeners, and each square is the average score for an individual listener. As you can see, in the speech-only experiment, listeners did no better than chance. But in the second experiment, nearly everyone did better than chance, and the average score was 64 percent correct -- significantly better than chance performance. Simply associating each syllable with a musical note improved performance.

But in real songs, syllables aren't always matched with the same notes. Sometimes different syllables get the same note, and sometimes the same syllable is sung with a different note. In a third experiment, Schön's team allowed the notes to vary with each syllable. Again, listeners could identify words at a rate better than chance (though they weren't as good as in the second experiment).

Schön and her colleagues don't go so far as to argue that music is a requirement for learning language, but they do make the case that the extra information provided in music can facilitate language learning. They also suggest that other information, like gestures, might be equally helpful for learning a language.

But there is additional evidence suggesting that music plays an important role in language. Similar areas of the brain are activated when listening to or playing music and speaking or processing language. Language and music are both associated with emotions. And of course, we know that children -- especially small children -- really like music. This study offers another bit of evidence that the link between language and music may be a fundamental one.

The cool thing about this, from my totally anecdotal persepctive, is that I saw exactly this in the Tiger's language development. (I should be embarrassed that every time I cite something from Science Blogs, I end up sullying it with non-scientific thinking. I guess I'm not embarrassed enough to desist.)

The first time I heard my Tiger utter multiple words, he was singing "Ring around the Rosie." He'd hum the first part, then repeat the last line over and over:

Ash-ah! Ash-ah! Da da dow!!

Granted, that's the sort of phrase that only a parent can appreciate - especially when it's on endless repeat. But the cool thing is that the tune helped him put the syllables together when he couldn't otherwise get beyond single-syllable utterances. He was maybe two-and-a-half at the time. Equally great, I was able to understand him, thanks to the melody. (He has a great natural ear for music, and that was apparent long before he was talking.)

All fired up, I took this information to our speech therapists. Oddly, frustratingly, they didn't know what to do with it. Now, it seems to me that Schön's research suggests fruitful new approaches. Though I'm no longer in the trenches with late-talking, and I'm not a scientific expert by any means, I am a tuned-in mother who learned a lot about how to encourage language. And I'm guessing that late talkers could really benefit from the therapist using more music - not just prerecorded songs, but melodies sung aloud to help kids acquire new vocabulary.

The photo shows my piano; that's me making noise at it.