Archives: Childhood

Some Thoughts On The Parenting Report from a Young Parent

12.08.2011 4:34 AM

Tonight I am sitting in Columbia Hospital’s Emergency Room reading the State of Our Unions. Amidst the family medical emergency that brought me here, I’m surprised to find myself smiling. I’m smiling because despite what all my friends, and my parents, and my in-laws, and my extended family have been telling me for years about my life choices, the brilliantly done, nation wide research, (and thoughtful commentary I might add) says that I should be just fine.

Between the charts and statistics and numbers it was as if a hope I had always held was given a voice for the first time. I gleefully raced through the pages. “All along I have been right!,” I exclaimed to no one. Perhaps the most delicious satisfaction was the bit on martial happiness leveling out for childless and parenting couples. Many onlookers into my ‘parental emergencies’ as the report called them, have wondered why two attractive, educated, and vocationally successful couple in their young twenties would inflict themselves with the perpetual crisis’s of parenthood. (Are you allowed to publically refer to yourself as attractive? My daughter thinks I’m pretty when I wear things that twirl. I’m going to go with it.) I’ve always had this gut feeling that while my childless married friends were reading in central park, and going to concerts in Brooklyn, and out to dinners alone, that our beautifully chaotic family adventure would land us not far from them given a few years. That my days filled mostly with wiping things would be what Elizabeth Marquardt so wonderfully described as “a dip in marital happiness” that is simply “more sudden for parents…whereas nonparents experience a more gradual decline in marital quality.” Our serial hobbying friends might argue that our choices to parent young haven’t turned out so well, because to be honest, a lot of days are hard. A lot of days I don’t feel so happy. It’s true that happiness is a truthful indicator of a life well lived— but an important distinction must be made between a deep undercurrent of happiness and a daily, more circumstantially based happiness.

A year or so ago New York Magazine published an article: All Joy and No Fun Why Parents Hate Parenting. It was a national embarrassment. Parenting, they announced, decreased your level of happiness but increased your joy. Um, duh. Similar headlines could have read: recent study shows that watching movies on your sofa is more enjoyable than jogging. Or, experts show that going to a party college is more fun than an Ivy League school. Yea, in a sense. But there are different types of happiness. There is the happiness of eating a really amazing burger with a milkshake. And there is the happiness of being healthy, energized, and slender because you choose every day to eat nutritionally. If you take a snap shot look at two people respectively and ask who is happier and more satisfied, it’s an obvious answer. But is it? For years I’ve come up on the short side of what always felt like an unfair comparison. I’ve never been the person who went with the hamburger.

It’s no surprise to me that the study outlined how one of the most significant predictor of martial happiness is a college education. Perhaps part of this is because college is one of the first major endeavors a young person is expected to complete. I know when my employers have taken a cursory glance at my degree all they really cared about was the fact that I finished. I had what it took to finish the degree. That says something about you as a person, how strong your will is, how capable your follow-through is, to what extent you are capable of being motivated by things other than the human appetites.

People who have what it takes to delay gratification and to sow in anticipation of reaping, are people who have found deeper undercurrents of happiness that are rooted in the human experience of loving relationships and the discovery of their fullest identity and purpose. It’s no surprise that the report found a strong valuing of having meaning and significance among parents. Now, I’m a very ambitious person. I wasn’t one of those ‘I just want to be a mom when I grow up’ kind of girls. I am pure determination. I had my sights set on Harvard grad school when I first got pregnant. I am an author. I bring research projects to the beach. And yet, as I sat next to my two year old during the new Muppet movie I found myself quietly resonating with Kermit the Frog: “Maybe you don’t need the whole world to love you, you know? Maybe you just need one person.” It was humbling to admit that if something were to happen to me, it would not be my academic colleagues or readers who would miss or honor me. It would be my children. I am irreplaceable to my family in a way I could never be to anyone else in my life. Perhaps an even quieter, more vulnerable thought, was the realization that maybe I was starting to be ok with that.

 


Categories: Childhood, Motherhood
2 Comments (Comments are Closed)

‘Divorcing marriage from children’

12.07.2011 3:28 PM

A two part series by George Mason law professor Helen Alvaré, at Public Discourse:

The first part of this series summarized two centuries of Supreme Court opinions identifying the state’s interest in marriage with its interests in children, their formation for self-government, and the building of a decentralized society. Today, however, those who demand state recognition of same-sex marriage either ignore or minimize the relationship between marriage law and children’s welfare. In light of the Supreme Court decisions discussed here yesterday, this seems a foolish strategy, bound to fail.

Yet it is making some headway. To understand this, is it necessary to grasp how myriad family law developments over the last forty to fifty years have ignored or minimized children’s interests, thus paving the way for the arguments same-sex marriage proponents advance today. For example, as against the idea that marriage and child well-being go together, state laws approving no-fault divorce and normalizing cohabitation (by enforcing cohabitation agreements) do not take children’s presence in a household into consideration at all. Rather, they allow more and more children to be reared outside of households containing their married, biological parents. They also expose more children to instability in living arrangements, and to stepparents and new boyfriends, each of which is, on average, correlated with increased risks to children’s safety and to their emotional and educational achievement. more


Categories: Childhood, Children of Divorce, Marriage
21 Comments (Comments are Closed)

‘Parent-Child Relationships in Children’s Literature’

11.30.2011 10:36 AM

A paper by Maria Donata Panforti, professor of comparative law at University of Modena-Reggio Emilia, Italy, in the newly-launched International Journal of the Jurisprudence of the Family.

Papers are not available free online so I’ve excerpted an interesting bit of this paper, below.

See this link for full table of contents with many other interesting papers.

…According to the reading I suggest, then, Pinnochio is born in a single-parent family; moreover, that parent is a man (Gepetto, who is a joiner). He is conceived through an unusual and unnatural technique that makes us think of assisted reproduction (he is a piece of wood carved out by his father). He is reared by Gepetto, but from time to time, and indeed in some key moments of the plot, a female character intervenes, first called the Child with turquoise hair, later on also the Fairy. Read More


Categories: Childhood, Children of Divorce, Fatherhood, Reproductive Technologies
Comments (%) (Comments are Closed)

The Onion: ‘Nation’s 10-Year-Old Boys: ‘If You See Someone Raping Us, Please Call The Police”

11.30.2011 9:52 AM

UNIVERSITY PARK, PA—In the wake of the sex abuse scandal that rocked Penn State earlier this month, a coalition of 10-year-old boys from across the nation held a press conference Saturday outside Beaver Stadium, home of college football’s Nittany Lions, to remind Americans that if they see someone raping a prepubescent boy, they should contact the police immediately.

“Considering that the monstrous acts perpetrated by Jerry Sandusky went unreported for years, even after a fellow coach saw him raping a 10-year-old boy inside the facility behind me, we feel perhaps not everyone is totally clear on what to do if one witnesses such a thing,” said spokesperson Joshua Pearson, who was flanked by several of his fifth-grade colleagues. “Many of you will no doubt be relieved to know the proper course of action is really quite simple: Just contact the police. Call 911, go to your local precinct, stop an officer on the street—the bottom line is, if you see one of us getting raped, notify the police, and do so as quickly as possible.” Read More


Categories: Childhood
12 Comments (Comments are Closed)

How old do you think a child should be to ride a train alone?

11.23.2011 6:18 PM

“Amtrak Bans 12-Year-Old Unaccompanied Child Riders”


Categories: Childhood, Children of Divorce
3 Comments (Comments are Closed)

A Dragon Mom, Indeed

10.17.2011 9:54 AM

When I first began serving in hospice care as a chaplain, I was surprised to learn that we cared for babies and toddlers.  On the one hand, many diseases that once took the lives of infants and children are quite treatable and thus beatable, but still there are children who die.  Most of these children are born with genetic anomalies that effect the growth of the heart or with brain encephalitis.  Many of these infants can even develop normally for some time, but the shadow of death never leaves.

I have been stunned to learn that most of the conditions that cause death in children are incredibly cruel.  I learned of Tay-Sachs disease about a year ago.  We were preparing to admit a 3 year-old with the disease and none of us on the team had heard of the disease so we looked it up.

“Infants with Tay-Sachs disease appear to develop normally for the first few months of life. Then, as nerve cells become distended with fatty material, a relentless deterioration of mental and physical abilities occurs. The child becomes blind, deaf, and unable to swallow. Muscles begin to atrophy and paralysis sets in. Other neurological symptoms include dementia, seizures, and an increased startle reflex to noise.”

Without a feeding tube most children die before age 3.  Our team sat in stunned silence.  Just when you think that there couldn’t be a crueler way to die, one presents itself.

I do not have a child with a terminal illness, but I have witnessed parents that do, and they are amazing people.  When our first son was born, I sat in stunned silence realizing that there was now someone in this world whose death would devastate me in ways that my own never could.  My own existence seemed like folly to the weight of wanting this little person to survive and thrive.  There is a fierceness and grace and even normalcy to parents of a terminally child that renews my hope in the seasons of existence and that love is worth it, no matter the length of time given to love.

Yesterday, a powerful piece by Emily Rapp, a mother of a son living with Tay-Sachs, was in the NYTimes Opinion pages.  Her words touch the heart and she closes with these words to all parents:

“This is a love story, and like all great love stories, it is a story of loss. Parenting, I’ve come to understand, is about loving my child today. Now. In fact, for any parent, anywhere, that’s all there is.”

 

 


Categories: Aging, Disability, Death, Dying, Childbearing, Childhood
2 Comments (Comments are Closed)

Complex Family Forms from Children’s Perspective

09.28.2011 11:31 AM

In a newsletter out of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, researchers Maria Cancian, Daniel R. Meyer, and Steven T. Cook summarize a recent Demography article on a theme near and dear to my heart: “Stepparents and half-siblings: Family complexity from a child’s point of view.”

One interesting fact: They find that “60 percent of firstborn children of unmarried mothers have at least one half-sibling by age 10.” Also, “Children who have half-siblings on their mother’s side are also more likely to have half-siblings on their father’s side…” Complex, indeed.


Categories: Childhood
3 Comments (Comments are Closed)

Does Singing Violent Lyrics Make us More Violent?

09.23.2011 2:05 PM

I am a sucker for singing contest reality shows in general, but my hands-down favorite is “The Sing-Off.”  The show premiered its third season last Monday and features a capella groups from across the country who arrange and sing their own versions of popular songs.  They are then judged by the incomparable Ben Folds, Sara Bareilles, and Sean Stockman (shout out to the BTW class of ’93 and our senior song, the Boyz 2 Men hit “End of the Road,” which in hindsight is a really depressing senior song but great to sing en masse, tears flowing.)

I don’t listen to a great deal of pop music so the show introduces me to what people, and I assume mainly teenagers, are listening to.  The show started with the University of Rochester’s Yellowjackets singing the uplifting World Cup theme from K’Naan, “Wavin’ Flag.”  Great beat, great lyrics:

“When I get older I will be stronger

They’ll call me freedom, just like a wavin’ flag…”

Everybody’s on their feet, waving arms and flags to the beat.  Goosebumps.

Then came the all girls group, Delilah, singing Bruno Mars’ “Grenade.”  Now I love joyfully bopping around to Mars’ “Just the Way You Are,” as much as the next gal, but when you slow down and clearly enunciate the lyrics to “Grenade” your mind is filled with disturbing and violent imagery.

“To give me all your love is all I ever asked

‘Cause what you don’t understand

Is I’d catch a grenade for ya

I’d jump in front of a train for ya

You know I’d do anything for ya

See I would go through all this pain

Take a bullet straight through my brain

Yes I would die for ya, baby

But you won’t do the same…”

Do we really want our young people to believe that love means threatening to do violence to your body and brain until the person reciprocates your level of emotion?  And yes, I know drama sells.  In this day and age, Bruno Mars is not going to sell songs about calmly realizing that sometimes a person just doesn’t feel the same way about you as you do for them, and that you’ll be okay.  There’s a reason that Romeo and Juliet were not in their 30’s but were teenagers.  The likelihood that a teenager will look at a list of multiple choice answers of how to respond to heartbreak and loss and choose the most dramatic one is fairly high.  Thankfully, most of us reach our 20’s and our frontal lobe finishes developing and we realize that if answer C. ends in death, DON’T PICK C!!!

I was saddened to see the violent trend in song selection continue on the show with Urban Method, a group that features a rapper, choosing to perform Eminem and Rihanna’s “Love the Way You Lie.”  This song tells the story of a couple where the man beats the woman and she stays because she both likes likes it and likes pretending that when he says he won’t do it again he’s telling the truth.  The woman sings the chorus again and again:

“Just gonna stand there and watch me burn

Well that’s all right because I like the way it hurts

Just gonna stand there and watch me cry

Well that’s all right because I love the way you lie…”

The man’s part, which walks you through his possessive rage as well as the incidents of abuse and physical threats toward the “woman he loves,” at least acknowledges that what he is feeling and doing is wrong, evil, and something he wishes he didn’t do:

“…it’s awful I feel so ashamed

I snap, ‘Who’s that dude?’ I don’t even know his name

I laid hands on her, I never stoop so low again…”

She of course responds with the chorus telling him it’s all right, I like the way it hurts.

Now, I am not terribly naïve.  Are there many real, non-rapper/pop artist people involved in sick, sadistic relationships?  Sadly, I’m sure, yes.  Are there much sicker and perverse songs out there about those types of relationships?  I imagine so.  But those songs not being sung by young kids, a cappella, at 7pm CST on the “Sing-Off” where the judges responded, “Wow.  That was powerful.”  I wanted to yell, “No!! Sadistic and sick is not the same thing as powerful!”  And, bopping around the Sing-off stage talking about shooting ourselves in the brain for someone or tying the person we love to a bed and setting the house on fire in order to ensure that she never loves anyone else, is normalizing some pretty disturbing behavior.

With these violent lyrics filling our young people’s mouths like gravel, is there any hope they’ll ever sing “Wavin’ Flag?”

“When I get older, I will be stronger…”

No, they will not be stronger but instead weaker and enslaved to violent and sick images of human relationships that the market proclaims and sells as “powerful.”

Whew, and I get this worked up over an a cappella singing show!

 


Categories: Childhood, General
6 Comments (Comments are Closed)

Babies, Habits, and Aristotle

09.19.2011 11:13 AM

With a baby on the way (six weeks away, if he comes close to his due date!), I’ve been thinking some about how I want to live. I have a tendency to set goals and cast grand visions, but to put off the daily practice that will get me to those goals. One example: I’ve been wanting to get into the habit of exercising my whole pregnancy. And now that it’s almost over, I’m finally buying a yoga mat.

When I’m a parent, though, how will I be able to teach my son to save his money, for example, if I myself don’t have a budget? It seems that we learn the most from our parents by what they do, not by what they say. I don’t ever remember my mom lecturing me about spending money wisely, but I did watch her cut coupons out of the papers and compare prices in the sales ad while making her grocery list. And she passed her habit down to me. I don’t remember her telling me to be generous, but I do remember her taking meals to neighbors after they’d had babies or been sick. I don’t remember her lecturing me about living a life of faith, but I do remember seeing her take a moment in the afternoons while us kids were playing to sit in her pink lazy boy to read, pray, and journal.

This also struck me when I was reading through some of the posts in “The Virtual Thrift Club” at The Dollar Stretcher.com, In one thread called “Childhood Memories of Money” people recall how their parents dealt with tough financial times (like the Great Depression), and note how this has affected their own thrift habits. I know that’s why my mom is thrifty—because her Iowa farmer parents had to be.

Of course, I hear parents all the time talking about how they’re not perfect and that they make mistakes—and I know that there’s no sense in having a guilt complex over every missed opportunity or fault. But I do feel like becoming a parent is going to act as a kind of check on my behavior. It’ll make me do a double take before I reach for that package of Oreos at the grocery store. It’ll make me pray more. It’ll make me manage my time better. Perhaps I’m being naïve, though. Maybe some of you more experienced parents can fill me in if that’s the case? :)

The point, though, is that parents model a life for us, and we often learn our habits from them. And this matters, because as Aristotle noted, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit.”


Categories: Childbearing, Childhood, Motherhood
3 Comments (Comments are Closed)

Into the Woods…

09.09.2011 1:09 PM

In the past week, I’ve been reading Judith Wallerstein’s insightful and breathtaking work, The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: The 25 Year Landmark Study as well as Kevin Wilson’s fascinating new novel The Family Fang.  As I look back on the real and fictional terrain they cover, tracing the perspectives of children attempting to survive their families and live to adulthood, I see their point crystal-clear:

If you are a parent to a child, be an adult.

Wallerstein points out that the odds of your being and acting like an adult in service to the healthy development and maturation of your child are higher if you are married, but the true enemy of childhood is chaos.  Although intact families can be chaotic, divorce always brings structural and emotional chaos to a family system.

“Their lives begin with an intact family that one day vanishes…For children, divorce is a watershed that permanently alters their lives.  The world is newly perceived as far less reliable, more dangerous place because the closest relationships in their lives can no longer be expected to hold firm.  More than anything else, this new anxiety represents the end of childhood.” (31 and 60)

However, chaos can reign in intact families, in single family homes, in co-habiting homes…and chaos is always bad for kids.  Children need adults to be in charge and who put their development first.  I like her description of what being an adult on behalf of your child looks like:

“In a well-functioning family, mothers and fathers are in the background as children grow up.  Their role is to create a safe and supportive place for the children, whose job during elementary and junior high is to go to school, play, make friends, and simply grow up…Their parents should encourage, applaud, feed and clothe the players…the things that can make a difference in the child’s life always involve sacrifice and change on the part of one or both parents.” (57 and 257)

In other words, children should not necessarily see their parents, but they should not disappear.

In the Kevin Wilson’s Fang family, chaos reigns supreme. Camille and Caleb Fang, the parents, are explicit that their lives are devoted to creating chaos as art.  Carefully orchestrated and recorded moments of societal dissonance enmesh them to each other and to the world of artistic expression.  And then children come along.  Although Annie and Buster see themselves as children and individuals, their parents refer to them as Child A and Child B, or simply A and B, who are then dragged along and incorporated into the family act.  The parents see the children as equal players in their life work, but children see the world and their family much differently than adults do.  As Buster muses:

“How often had their parents sent them into the wilderness of a mall or public park or private party and asked them only to be prepared, to open themselves up to the infinite possibilities that their parents, god-like, would create?” (167)

Children are at the mercy of their parents, and chaos makes pretty unmerciful parents. Everyone in the family cannot be center stage in order for the children to mature into a healthy adulthood that is defined by meaningful relationships and meaningful work. Neither Fang child can figure out what to do nor who to be with, and when they do step out in faith they are terrified.  Buster speaks of his choice to try to be in a relationship:

“Actually, it seemed like a good idea, but I was terrified of it.  I feel like I’ve always done things that were profoundly bad ideas, and it’s always ended exactly as you’d expect.  That comes from Mom and Dad.” (233)

And then their parents disappear for real.  I won’t spoil the book for you, since you really must read it, but they spend the remainder of the book sorting through this dilemma:

“They (the siblings) would forever come to this impasse.  Buster wanted to believe that his parents still loved them, that they planned all of this as a way to save their children from falling apart and to make them strong. Annie, however, was certain that their parents had created something just for themselves, and that they did not care what pain they caused in service to this idea.” (169)

In childhood and young adulthood, they have no adults to help them negotiate this mine-field of relative meaning.

I first fell in love with Kevin Wilson’s writing with his collection of short stories, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth. I have been fascinated by how in both his stories and this novel, parents suddenly disappear, often exploding in fiery flames.  At first glance, one would think that incorporating the idea of spontaneous combustion would be a narrative stretch, but I wonder if Wilson is not a child of divorce.  In one short story, a young man’s parents spontaneously combust on a train and he is left to raise his younger brother.  He supports them financially by working in a Scrabble tile sorting factory, where each day he stands knee deep in lettered tiles searching to create words from the sea of letters around him.  His family has disappeared, he is deeply lonely, and he lives in a world full of meaning that is opaque and confusing to him.  And the tiles just keep falling.

As Wallerstein writes of chaotic family systems:

“there is far less opportunity to escape from the madness that surrounds them because there are no true adults to give them a helping hand.” (150)

Both Wallerstein and Wilson follow young people traversing the wilderness of growing up.  I think of Little Red Riding Hood who is sent into the wilderness to tend to the needs of the previous generation, her grandmother, and along the way is led astray.  Her mother, no father is mentioned, tries to provide a roadmap, but in a time of distress she is not backstage ready to help and encourage and support.  Little Red is swallowed up by the wilderness and with the countless different endings to the story you can choose, she is left to create meaning for herself.

As Little Red sings in Sondheim’s Into the Woods at the close of her journey into and out of the woods:

“And I know things now, many valuable things,

That I hadn’t thought to explore,

Do not put your faith in a cape and hood,

They will not protect you the way that they should,

And take extra care with strangers,

Even flowers have their dangers,

And though scary is exciting,

Nice is different than good.”

The world is wild, so if you are raising a child, be an adult.


Categories: Aging, Disability, Death, Dying, Childhood, General, Motherhood
3 Comments (Comments are Closed)

What’s in a Name?

08.25.2011 12:49 PM

I have always loved turning.  In ballet, I always considered turning to be my thing, especially after I learned that much of my success in completing a turn lay not in my head or arms but in my feet.  A small adjustment in my feet placement and a genuine commitment to being properly grounded could make all the difference in completing a series of turns without throwing up in dizziness.

Returning to the dance studio, I have found one of my greatest challenges to lie in feeling grounded.  For example, our teacher reminded our class doing a pirouette combination last Monday, “Do not let your foot leave the floor, until it has left the floor.”  This is very hard.  Most of us do not think about when our foot connects to the floor or leaves the floor.  Just try it the next time you walk.  You will most likely have to slow down and think through how your heel, arch, ball, and toes work.  When I think about how my foot is grounded I am thankful that most of the time staying connected happens by default.  I don’t want to have to work to stay connected.

For the last few weeks I have been immersed in obituaries and computer databases, searching for the contact information for bereaved children and stepchildren of deceased Baby Boomers.  My mind is a jumble of addresses, phone numbers and e-mail addresses.  Although quite tedious at times, I’ve grown to feel a great deal of affection for the names themselves and the ways that our names connects us to parents, siblings, spouses and children.

Some observations:

You can always be tracked by your birth name.  I’ve found that men are easiest to find since their names do not typically shift with the covenant of marriage.  I’ve learned to search for women with their birth name, even if the obituary lists their married name and name of spouse.  The birth name always comes up and married names come up under “alternate” names along with common misspellings of your birth name.

Your biological siblings will always be connected to you.  By sharing a mother and father and a last name, you will rarely shake your brother or sister.  Despite distance and time, those biological siblings are like shadow selves, a virtual communion of saints who companion you.

Computer databases struggle to connect you to anyone NOT related to you by blood.  If you have been married for a while, the spouse will tend to be in your list of relatives, but if you are female and your last name has changed, the computer will hedge on how permanent that new name will be.  The married name is often found in the “alternate” or “also listed under” category.

Despite how much you may love your stepparent, stepson/stepdaughter, mom’s boyfriend’s child, traditional tracking systems will rarely connect you.  If you are not related by blood, you are unmoored, floating in a universe of your own.  These folks tend to have many names listed in the “possible roommates/associates” column.  I most often find stepchildren and stepparents listed as roommates or associates.  In other words, these family members are on equal footing with your college roommate.   And the system isn’t confident about connecting you, it’s always just “possible.”

Old age runs in families.  Not rocket science, but as I trace families, some are decimated with death and disease and some have countless members who are 100+.  For example, the Rosenburgers have 3 family members who are over 100.  If you are a Rosenburger, good for you, and if not, I would highly recommend marrying one on the chance that your children could have a long life.

Contrary to current rumor, AOL e-mail addresses are not dead.  However, they are only alive and well for people in their late 30’s and early 40’s.  People in this age range tend to have simple, straight-forward AOL addresses that consist of their name and aol.com.  No numbers, no cute phrases.  It is painfully obvious that everyone in this group picked up AOL CD’s in the mid- to late- 90’s and signed up for dial-up e-mail.  They were able to get their name as their e-mail address because, frankly, no one had e-mail yet. (Note to AOL: market to folks in their late 30’s and early 40’s.  They are either too lazy to get a new e-mail provider, nostalgic about keeping their first e-mail address, or deeply devoted to AOL.  Either way, there’s your market. Figure out how to make us happy.)

As a rule, people in their twenties should not be trusted to choose their own e-mail monikers.  Bad taste abounds.  Some sort of default name and numbering system should be instituted in order to save these young people from future embarrassment.  A guiding principle could be that you should not put anything in your e-mail address you would not want chiseled on your tombstone.  The word “pimp” is never cute nor appropriate, unless you are a famous rapper.  “Sweet” and “Bigz” and “MMMMBeer” should never be allowed.  When choosing, imagine your funeral: “We gather together today to remember SweetLousianaSpacePimp…” Just wrong.

And finally, in this day and age, there are many around us who we must consciously choose to stay connected.  Many families are not by default connected, a default that is a privilege.  Many children from in-tact families have built-in universes that hopefully buffer that young person from the harsh realities of life, create a financial, emotional, and spiritual safety net that enables confident risk-taking and personal development, and, at the end of the day, helps people find you.  People know where you are, your life has weight and permanence.

Last week I attended the open house at my childrens’ elementary school.  The hallway walls were covered with art work and I slowed to admire the drawings, many of which were pictures of families.  Many 8X10 pages were filled completely with parents, kids, animals, sunshine, and names.  Pictures where parents are bigger than the world and children are sheltered by parents and there is boisterous, raucous life spilling out everywhere.  But there were also many quiet pictures.  One such picture made me pause.  A lovely picture colored entirely in light red, not one smudge of white showed through the waxy red crayon.  In the middle of the page were two small figures, about the size of pennies, labeled “Me and my Mom.”  Even now, this picture demands my still attention and I hear my heart beat echo in my throat.  This child is connected, to a parent, to a loving school, to a lively neighborhood, but this child must work.  Work to stay connected in a big, red, world that seeks to diminish at every turn.

The world keeps on spinning and, whether by default or through hard work, being grounded can mean the difference between confident success and fearful dizziness.


Categories: Aging, Disability, Death, Dying, Childhood, Children of Divorce, Marriage
2 Comments (Comments are Closed)

The Daughters of the Second Wave

07.25.2011 12:26 PM

Erica Jong’s daughter, Molly, below.

Alice Walker’s daughter, Rebecca:

…Ironically, my mother regards herself as a hugely maternal woman. Believing
that women are suppressed, she has campaigned for their rights around the world and set up organisations to aid women abandoned in Africa  -  offering herself up as a mother figure.

But, while she has taken care of daughters all over the world and is hugely revered for her public work and service, my childhood tells a very different  story. I came very low down in her priorities  -  after work, political integrity, self-fulfilment, friendships, spiritual life, fame and travel…

 


Categories: Childhood, Motherhood
4 Comments (Comments are Closed)

‘Immigrant Children’

04.14.2011 5:37 PM

The Future of Children series, published by Brookings and Princeton, just released its newest issue on immigrant children.

The well-being of immigrant children is especially important to the nation because they are the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population

More here.


Categories: Childhood
Comments (%) (Comments are Closed)

Lead Author of Child Trends Brief Responds

04.12.2011 1:26 PM

Kristin Moore, lead author of the new Child Trends brief I blogged about below, responded to observations by me and other commenters on the post, here. I have reposted her comment here. My thanks to her for responding.

From the lead author of the Child Trends brief: I’m glad for the opportunity to respond to some of the issues raised in these comments. For this study, I was interested in exploring an important hypothesis that hasn’t been previously examined because the necessary data have not been available — the breadth and consistency of the association between couple relationship quality and child outcomes. Some people have said that the association reflects a middle class phenomenon that does not extend to other groups, so I wanted to test that assumption, which I think is a very important question.

The association between family structure and child outcomes is well-established and has been documented repeatedly, e.g., in the Future of Children special edition on the subject and many articles in the Journal of Marriage and Family and in Demography, so that wasn’t the focus of this new research. I think that the hypothesis that was tested is very important and (while caveats exist and are noted in the brief) the analysis represents a contribution to what is known about couple relationship quality and child outcomes.

-Kristin A. Moore
Senior Scholar, Child Trends


Categories: Childhood, Marriage
Comments are Closed

What Does Child Trends Have Against Marriage?

04.08.2011 3:09 PM

Today Child Trends, the respected non-partisan research organization devoted to improving outcomes for children, released a research brief titled “Parental Relationship Quality and Child Outcomes Across Subgroups.” Based on the responses of 64,000 participants involved in the 2007 National Survey of Children’s Health, the brief by Kristin Moore, Andrea Kinghorn, and Tawana Bandy claims that “parents’ relationship quality is very consistently and positively associated with a range of child and family outcomes…” and that the “association holds across varied subgroups” including across income, gender, age of children, immigration status, and “married and cohabiting couples.”

The latter got my attention.

They go on to say, “almost without exception, the lowest levels of positive child outcomes are found among children in families where the parents report that their relationship is ‘not too happy.’ In contrast, the best child outcomes are found almost without exception among children whose parents report that their relationship is ‘completely happy.’” They repeat that this “pattern holds across various subgroups” including “family type.”

But let’s take a look at the data on which they base these conclusions. Turn with me to Table 1 and examine the column called “family type.”

When the parents’ relationship was reported as “completely happy,” here are the percentages of parents who report that their child has behavior problems, by type of family:

Married parents (biological or adoptive): 4

Married step: 9

Cohabiting (bio or adoptive): 6

Cohabiting step: 11

In other words, in this very large sample of 64,000 children, among those who had a parent reporting that the relationship of the adults in the home was “completely happy,” the children in stepfamilies were over twice as likely to be reported as having behavior problems compared to children living with their own married parents. The children in a cohabiting step arrangement (translation: in most cases, mom living with her boyfriend) were almost three times as likely to have these problems.

These not-insignificant differences are readily apparent in other categories reported in that table, including having socially competent behavior and high levels of school engagement. In nearly all cases the children of married bio or adoptive parents do the best, even among those who have a parent who reports very high levels of adult relationship quality in the home.

Moreover, the brief avoids noting that adults’ relationship quality is dependent on them actually being a couple. Those stepfamilies and especially those cohabiting parents are far more likely to break up than the married bio or adoptive parents.  Other studies that follow kids over time reveal increased negative outcomes for those who experience multiple family transitions, such as the break up of their stepfamily or their parents’ cohabiting union.

Child Trends, why do this? Why isolate relationship quality without noting the intimate connection between relationship quality and marital status? (The latter conferring stability, and thus the likelihood of higher quality in a moment in time and over time.) Why say that kids do fine in any kind of family structure so long as the adults in the home get along when your own data reveals a far more complex and troubling portrait?

Why?


Categories: Childhood, Marriage
21 Comments (Comments are Closed)

Thirteen Year Old Fashion

03.22.2011 11:36 AM

Mini-prostitutes? A WSJ opinion piece muses why.


Categories: Childhood, Dating, Mating, Hooking Up
Comments (%) (Comments are Closed)

Beware of Tigers and Tiaras

03.02.2011 12:31 AM

Last week I reflected upon the journey and conclusions posited by Amy Chua in her recent book on “Tiger Moms.” Most of her book is spent tracing in great detail the arduous routines she commandeers for her two daughters as they train on the piano and violin. Both display natural talent for their instruments as well as great stamina for practicing as their mother forces them to play each day for hours on end. Each time they achieve some level of success, one even plays at Carnegie Hall, she organizes extravangant, costly parties to celebrate and she writes of the great pride she feels in their accomplishments. She claims that her relationship to her daughters’ successes is healthy and within well-defined boundaries:

“Here’s a question I often get: “But Amy, let me ask you this. Who are you doing all this pushing for–your daughters”–and here always the cocked head, the knowing tone–”or yourself?” I find this a very Western question to ask (because in Chinese thinking the child is the extension of the self)…My answer, I’m pretty sure, is that everything I do is unequivocally 100% for my daughters. My main evidence is that so much of what I do with Sophia and Lulu is miserable, exhausting, and not remotely fun for me. It’s not easy to make your kids work when they don’t want to, to put in grueling hours when your youth is slipping away, to convince your kids they can do something when they (and maybe even you) are fearful they can’t…” (125)

As I pondered this quote, the term “stage mom” kept creeping its way into my thoughts. In this day and age, that term most likely triggers a negative image in our minds: controlling, pushy parents who live vicariously through their children who eventually turn 18, sue their parents, and never speak to them again. Maculay Culkin, Lindsay Lohan…Even worse, as Tracy Stephenson Shaffer brilliantly portrays in a recent stage production, the stage parent’s relentless pursuit of fame at all costs can suck the very life of their child and transform them into a modern day zombie. Brittany Spears anyone?

Amy Chua advises that you should not push your child to excel in any arena where they cannot win a medal. I wondered then why she did not push her daughters into beauty pageants? More than mere medals, pageants offer trophies and sashes and money, oh my! In Cinderella Ate My Daughter, journalist Peggy Orenstein dedicates an entire chapter, “Sparkle Sweetie,” to the world of pageants. She follows a family that was featured on TLC’s Toddlers and Tiaras, which she explains has been a big success and that “the more evil and clueless the “momsters” it covers, the better.” (75) Each parent assures her that they are not living vicariously through their daughters, that pageant experience will help them grow in confidence and poise, and that if their daughter didn’t want to be competing, there’s no way they could make her. But Orenstein relentlessly tries to look at our princess culture, the social networking activities of tweens, the relentless use of the color pink in marketing directed to females, as well as beauty pageants from the perspective of the child and she wonders:

“Where does desire end and coercion begin? When does “get to” become “have to”? I’m not sure parents who are that deeply invested in their children’s success are able to tell. And if love, however subtly, seems conditional on performance–whether on the playing field, the classroom, or onstage–how can a child truly say no?” (79)

So, I haven’t had time to check out Toddlers and Tiaras, (though the TLC web-site is sufficiently creepy for me!), but when I was at the library last weekend I thought I’d see what books they have out there for potential “stage moms.” I picked up Raising a Star by highly successful child agent Nancy Carson, and was shocked to find a straight-forward, very practical guide that offers great parenting advice for anyone who struggles to self-differentiate from your child (yep, that would be all of us!). Overall, the necessary attributes she looks for in a working child actor and supportive parent seem incredibly far-fetched and unrealistic, such as “evaluate your child’s talent realistically” (really? How many parents perceive their children, let alone their talent, realistically?) and “the child should handle rejection well.” (yes, yes, adults handle rejection so well, so we should definitely expect that attribute of our children!) However, she sprinkles in some gems for parents, such as:

“People can get pretty bored of listening to you brag…As a parent, you can help your child stay well adjusted by not thinking and talking about show business constantly.” (43)

“Adults should have more control over their actions than children.” (44)

Or from Martin Charnin, the director of Annie,

“What you have to remember is that you will always be your child’s parent. On the other hand, a child’s professional experiences are transient. These experiences do make impressions. But when the show ends, the child will move on to another professional experience. Throughout all this you are still his mother or father.” (195)

And so I circle back and conclude that whether who call yourself a Tiger Mom, a stage mom, Mommie Dearest, or a mom who is stying up to late too write a blog post, good parenting and most likely, being a good human, boils down to the never-ending tasks of role definition, of consciously choosing to act like an adult, especially when you are responsible for those who have less power than you, such as your child, and of submitting your soul to the disciplined goal of healthy self-differentiation.

During each of my pregnancies I have savored the words of Tikva Frymer-Kensky’s Motherprayer. She culls the riches of ancient texts (Sumerian, Hebrew, Aramaic, and so on) to offer prayers and rituals for a pregnant woman’s journey to birth. No matter how many times I have read her epilogue, her words cause me pause and I must stop to catch my breath.

“At birth, the mother and child become two, and the long, ongoing process of individuation and separation begins.” (230)

And she concludes with a beautiful poem honoring the holy and unique place every life holds in our universe:

“In my womb You formed the child, in my womb, I nourished it.

You formed and numbered the baby’s limbs, I contained and protected them.  You who could see the child in my depths, I who felt the kicks and turns, together we counted the months. Together we planned the future. Flesh of my Flesh, form of Your form.

Another human being on the earth, a home for God in this, our world.” (230-231)

Devoting my life to finding ways for my children to learn to live as a home for God in this, our world, is something I can do fiercely and passionately. Watch out, Tiger Moms.


Categories: Childhood, Motherhood
4 Comments (Comments are Closed)

Getting Comfortable in Your Own Parenting Skin: Lessons from a Tiger Mom and the Creator of Facebook

02.21.2011 4:14 PM

This past weekend I read Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother and watched The Social Network.  Spoiler alert to anyone who hasn’t read or watched these works. 

I was fascinated by how much they had in common.  How, when faced with the deep, even primal need to be accepted, to fit into a group perceived as utterly desirable, really smart people will cope by being extremely driven, by accomplishing feats that most of us can barely comprehend, and by struggling mightily when facing the reality that complete control over any given situation or person is ultimately elusive.

In the end, no matter how driven we are, how loud we bark, how much money we make, what level of success we attain, we cannot control other humans.  Decent human beings will not enslave their friends or their children or their spouses.  Ah, but the desire to control is a sweet temptress.

Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and CEO of Facebook, just wants friends and to be accepted into elite groups.  But all the code and servers and money in the world can’t force a person to accept your request of friendship.  At the close of the movie, after a long day of interrogation, he hears wise counsel from a member of his legal team, basically saying, “You’re in the right, but you must settle because you cannot control what a jury thinks of you.  And no jury likes someone who turns on their friends.”  I kept waiting for the funk hit, “Why Can’t We be Friends?” to start playing in the background.

For Amy Chua, her desire to fit into her own narrow definitions of Chinese culture and Western culture through the success of her daughters nearly derails her family. On the one hand, I respect that she believes in the resilience of her children and that she is hyper critical of the western definition of the “helicopter” parent who gives a medal to everyone and tries to protect their children from failure.  She writes:

“I came to see that Chinese parents have two things over their western counterparts: higher dreams for their children and higher regard for their children in the sense of knowing how much they can take.” (16)

Although she doesn’t come out and directly admit it, she does dance around the truth that she too is a helicopter parent, just a more driven and cruel version (spending hours each day with her two daughters practicing piano or violin).  I did some digging on helicopter parenting and I love that in Scandinavia it is called “curling parenting” since the parents attempt to sweep all obstacles from the path of their children. The July 7, 2010 article in the NYTimes on the “Unhappy Helicopter Parent”could have used Chua as a prime example of parents who have no life or friends outside of their family because they have no free time.  Lisa Belkin writes:

“Many of the helicopter mothers I’ve spoken to have told me, often with pride in their voices, that their daughters are their best friends. At first, I wondered why these women — some of them in their late 40s or 50s — wouldn’t prefer to spend their free time with people their own age. But as I looked more closely at the way they are tackling parenthood, I understood: they have no free time.”

Chua mentions at the end of the book that much of what she wrote about her husband’s responses and interactions with her and their daughters was cut because that content is a whole other book.  A far more interesting book in my mind since her internal monologue isn’t that nuanced, but a dialogue between two highly intelligent people trying to reconcile very different philosophies of parenting; now there’s a book I would enjoy reading and from which I would learn!

Towards the close of her book, her perspective on her “tiger mom” parenting style changes and she attributes that change to the rebellious behavior of her younger daughter.  However, as someone who deals with seriously ill and dying people all the time, I couldn’t help notice that coincidentally her beloved younger sister contracts a very deadly strain of leukemia around the same time and she spends much of part 3 of the book butting up against the vulnerability and potential mortality of this sister.  She even concludes her book with these words:

“I often wonder what the lesson of her illness is.  Given that life is so short and so fragile, surely each of us should be trying to get the most out of every breath, every fleeting moment.  But what does it mean to live life to the fullest?  We all have to die.  But which was does that cut?” (188)

From the cradle to the grave, the desire to fit in and be “normal” dogs us at every step.  Some of us have to invent Facebook to pretend we are “normal.” Some of us dub ourselves “tiger moms” and run our homes like a boot camp to pretend we are “normal.”  And all of us may just need a basic introduction to our humanity:

“Amy, Mark, this is your skin.  Skin, this is Amy, Mark.  Be at home with each other.”


Categories: Aging, Disability, Death, Dying, Childhood, Marriage, Motherhood
4 Comments (Comments are Closed)

Siblinghood

02.16.2011 11:48 AM

What’s that all about, growing up together, bound together like the fingers of a hand and then losing touch like boats set adrift? No one warned me. As children we were a fortress. I came home from school and there he was with his Lego and cars. I thumped him. He bit me. We watched TV, huddled together. He rifled through my things. I passed my ear infections onto him. He wore my trousers and jumpers. We were each other’s alibi, against our parents. Occasionally we betrayed each other. We hated each other. I made fun of his spelling. Then we would club together to buy a purse on mother’s day or a tie on father’s day. We were in the same boat. How could I have believed it would go on forever? How could I have let the moorings break away?

–Agnes Desarthe, Chez Moi (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 205-6.


Categories: Childhood
5 Comments (Comments are Closed)

The Hague Convention on International Child Abduction

02.11.2011 12:07 PM

A couple years of ago, a neighbor and friend of mine in a north shore Chicago suburb was planning a delicious week alone. Her husband, a science professor, was taking their two children for a week to Mexico on a work trip. But almost as soon as the husband and children departed for the airport my friend’s cell phone started to light up. The ticket agents at O’hare would not let her family board the flight until my friend, the mother, appeared in person to say she consented to their trip. In a last minute flurry she rushed to O’hare with identification, showing up at the ticket counter much to her children’s bewilderment, as they had already said their goodbyes to her, and affirmed her consent to their trip. They barely made it onto the flight.

At the time, I thought this was all a bit ridiculous. Since when does a mother have to appear with ID and give consent to her husband taking their children on a trip? This week I learned more. As our world has shrunk – international travel is cheaper, people pour across borders, and more couples from different nations marry or form liasons that produce children – the problem of international child abduction, typically by a child’s parent, has grown. This week fellow FamilyScholars blogger Alana S. and I were guests on a panel at John Marshall Law School in Atlanta. The session after our panel was on the Hague Convention on international child abduction that has been in effect since 1980. Panelists included Karen Brown Williams and Randall Kessler, both experienced attorneys in Atlanta who have dealt with a number of these cases (and Williams herself is author of a forthcoming paper on the topic to be published by the John Marshall Law Review).

I learned that the convention establishes a timely return of a child to their residence and sets up protocols to help attorneys and parents in different nations – with different cultures and legal systems – to locate the child and obtain a speedy hearing. I also learned that a number of nations are not yet signatories to the convention, including India and Japan, the latter of which is the only industrialized nation in the world that has not signed it. (The pressure is on Japan; see for example this Japan Times article published yesterday: ”Ambassadors push Japan to join Hague treaty on child abduction“.)

Williams said that she has never seen a case in which a parent disappears abroad with a child (typically to the parent’s native country) in which the parent has not been formulating the plan for quite some time. Once the parent in the US realizes what has happened they are already behind the curve. She also advised attorneys handling divorce cases in which one or both parents have citizenship or history in another nation – especially nations that are not signatories to the convention – to be aware that such a development could happen and to “keep their antennae up.” In such cases she brings up the question early and advises that a third party hold the children’s passports for a certain period of time. Sometimes she is that person. Kessler’s advice from experience with a number of these cases included suggesting that attorneys and parents who find themselves dealing with this check out the State Department’s informative help page on the topic. He and Williams told stories of how heartbreaking these cases can be and the panic they confront in parents who first realize their child has been taken to another country and may not be coming back anytime soon.

Now and then such cases appear in the news – such as the Sean Goldman case fought between Brazil and the US – but the panel really brought home to me how any family law attorney in any corner of America can now find him or herself on the front lines of an international disappeared child case, and how international systems are trying – sometimes succeeding, and sometimes failing – to hold families together even as marriages fall apart.


Categories: Childhood, Children of Divorce
Comments are Closed

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »