parenting

New research estimates that one in eight U.S. children will experience maltreatment

kkrisberg — Fri, 06 Jun 2014 13:15:28 +0000

New research estimates that one in eight U.S. children will experience maltreatment

Researcher Christopher Wildeman has spent his whole career describing and quantifying the more unpleasant parts of people’s lives and his latest study on the surprising prevalence of childhood maltreatment is no exception. Still, there is a bit of a silver lining, he told me.

“This is the sort of issue that both the right and left shouldn’t have a hard time supporting,” said Wildeman, an assistant professor of sociology at Yale University. “It’s the sort of thing that once we become more aware of it, designing interventions that could diminish maltreatment rates is something anyone can get behind.”

According to Wildeman and his study colleagues, one in eight U.S. children will experience confirmed maltreatment by the time they turn 18 years old. The term “child maltreatment” includes neglect as well as physical, sexual or emotional abuse. The finding, which is greater than other maltreatment estimates, was published earlier this week in JAMA Pediatrics. To calculate the one-in-eight finding, researchers examined eight years of official data on confirmed maltreatment cases from the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System.

Specifically, researchers wanted to get at the cumulative effect of confirmed maltreatment cases, so they took the same approach that the Census uses to calculate life expectancy at birth. That method essentially asks this question: Starting at birth, if a person is exposed to the latest age-specific mortality rates, how old can we expect that person to be when she or he dies? Similarly, Wildeman and colleagues asked what would happen if a hypothetical child is exposed to age-specific, confirmed initial maltreatment rates from 2004 through 2011. Based on that data, what proportion of children could ever expect to experience maltreatment? The answer is one in eight — a prevalence that’s nearly 14 times higher than the confirmed annual child maltreatment caseload.

Wildeman noted that about three-quarters of the data used in the study concerned cases of neglect. He also emphasized that for child protective officials to confirm a case of neglect, the neglect is highly chronic or very severe, such as a 7-year-old left alone to care for younger siblings or a child showing up at school malnourished.

“(This finding) alerts the American public to the fact that child maltreatment is a pressing social problem on the same scale as a whole host of other childhood experiences that we pay so much attention to,” Wildeman told me. “In my mind, it seems like an obvious underestimate…but let’s just say that even if this is the absolute floor — that one in eight children experience maltreatment — it’s just tragic how few resources we give to preventing maltreatment. It’s kind of amazing that we basically ignore this topic.”

Typically, there are two types of child maltreatment estimates. The first are annual estimates of confirmed cases from Child Protective Services. According that data, only 0.9 percent of children experienced confirmed maltreatment in 2011. The second examines maltreatment based on self-reported data, which in some cases has found that more than 40 percent of children can expect to experience maltreatment. Wildeman and colleagues — Natalia Emanuel, John Leventhal, Emily Putnam-Hornstein, Jane Waldfogel and Hedwig Lee — put themselves in the middle of those two methods to calculate the cumulative risk of maltreatment using confirmed case data.

“Even though few children experience maltreatment in any given year that doesn’t mean that few children will ever experience it,” Wildeman said. “Our broader motivation for doing this study is that things that happen to small proportions of kids are easier to ignore. They’re horrible and tragic and they pull at the heartstrings, but they don’t seem to matter much at a broader level. (With our findings), it becomes harder to say that.”

In addition to the one-in-eight finding, the study uncovered some startling disparities as well. For black children, the cumulative prevalence of maltreatment is one in five and for American Indian children, it’s one in seven. Overall, nearly 21 percent of black children are estimated to experience maltreatment, followed by 14.5 percent of American Indian children, 13 percent of Hispanic children, 10.7 percent of white children and 3.8 percent of Asian/Pacific Islander children. Girls are more likely to experience maltreatment than boys. Wildeman said he was shocked by the high prevalence among black children — “that’s the finding that kept driving us to go back to check and recheck our data and analysis.”

“The fundamental causes of disparities we see are about life circumstances that make parents feel overwhelmed,” he said. “This is fundamentally a structural issue; it’s not about individual parenting.”

Wildeman told me that if one in eight children are experiencing maltreatment so severely and consistently that it’s being confirmed by child protection officials, it suggests that many more parents than we'd like to believe are feeling completely overwhelmed and don’t have the resources to properly cope. He said he hopes advocates use the study’s findings to call for supportive policies and programs, whether it be reimbursement for nurse home-visiting programs, paid sick leave policies or something as seemingly simple as a safe neighborhood playground.

From a public health perspective, childhood maltreatment is linked to profound health effects throughout the lifespan. As Wildeman and his colleagues noted in their study, such maltreatment is associated with higher rates of mortality, obesity, HIV infection, mental health problems, suicide and a higher likelihood of engaging in criminal behavior. The cost of childhood maltreatment in the U.S. is estimated at $124 billion each year, with per-person costs akin to diseases such as diabetes or stroke.

Indeed, because such maltreatment is linked to so many health problems later in life, preventing adverse childhood experiences is often described as the ultimate primary prevention tactic. For example, public health officials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have called on communities to rally around the primary prevention of child abuse and neglect in their “Essentials for Childhood Framework,” which argues that creating community environments that support safe, stable and nurturing relationships between children and caregivers could be key in preventing childhood maltreatment and raising healthy adults.

“We need to support proactive public policies to try to make parenting less overwhelming for people,” Wildeman said. “Diminishing childhood maltreatment rates is something we need to take very seriously.”

To request a full copy of the study, visit JAMA Pediatrics.

Kim Krisberg is a freelance public health writer living in Austin, Texas, and has been writing about public health for more than a decade.

kkrisberg Fri, 06/06/2014 - 09:15

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government

Public Health - General

Research

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adverse childhood experience

I've heard too many stories recently of people being arrested for "neglect" because they let a kid walk or bicycle to school, play outside alone, or sit in a car in a safe neighborhood for five minutes to believe that all putative neglect as defined in America is chronic and severe enough to have lifelong health consequences.

RIP Maurice Sendak

sastyk — Tue, 08 May 2012 08:38:11 +0000

RIP Maurice Sendak

Speaking as someone with kids who pretty much are Alligators All Around and Wild Things most of the time, I'm going to miss him. Thanks, Maurice, for the books that fed my childhood and now the childhood of all the kids I love!

sastyk Tue, 05/08/2012 - 04:38

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I honestly wish i had never watched this video about these sickly, anthropocentric, Indian-bashing, rakish, pushy, cross-dressing alligators. Did you see Maurice Sendak with Stephen Colbert? Unbelievably funny and awesome.

Rest in Peace, Maurice Sendak...

I'm not wild about the Indians image, but it is just one of 26, and expecting older material to be to fully modern standards doesn't usually work. The rest of it is awesomely funny to me, at least. But then I've got six little boys in my house.

Sharon

Anything after the old cartoon Go, Go, Gophers is an improvement (though I loved those "two little Indians, left all alone." :-)

"The Sign on Rosie's Door" was my daughter's favourite. And Kenny's Window (An only goat is a lonely goat). Twenty five years later she messages me to say "Maurice Sendak and Russel Hoban both gone in the last six months. Makes me cry."

Tiger Mothers, Depression Moms and Reasonable Expectations

sastyk — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 08:33:03 +0000

Tiger Mothers, Depression Moms and Reasonable Expectations

I didn't expect to like _Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother_ - in fact, I expected to hate it. Instead, I found it funny, charming and moving - and give Amy Chua a lot of credit for having the ovaries to expose herself. I didn't just like the book, I loved it.

If that seems strange, give me a minute to explain before you assume I'm secretly Mommy Dearest ;-). I should note that I am not a Tiger parent, although Chua and I perhaps have more in common than you might think. You see, like Chua, I don't necessarily think that that assumptions of western parenting are always right. Like Chua, I think more can be expected of children than most American parents expect. And like Chua, I think the psychological assumptions that underlie Western parenting are not unassailable. My husband jokes that we are slacker tiger parents - too lazy to invest the kind of effort that Chua does in her kids, but in broad agreement that high expectations of children are good for them. Even if they aren't the same kind of expectations.

Now if you have only read the media coverage of this book, you probably think it is primarily a memoir of a borderline (or perhaps over the border) abusive mother, and don't grasp why I would like it. I would encourage you to read the actual book, not the extracts.

That said, I don't think that highly of much of her behavior. Indeed, I certainly don't think I'd enjoy being Chua's kid. The media coverage has focused on her rages and over-the-top behavior, and well, there's no good excuse for those - they are awful. The only problem is that they don't seem so strange to me - most of the parents I know are guilty of rages and bad behavior to their kids, if not so consistently as Chua. Moreover, they don't seem to be central to the point - they are Chua's excesses, rather than the actual necesary behavior of Tiger parents.

Chua normalizes this, seeing it as part of a model of parenting, whereas Western parents deny, deny. deny. But nothing seems to change the fact that our kids can really piss us off - this is merely a deep secret in our culture. Chua claims children of tiger parents (and she was one) hear what is really intended in the anger - not "you are bad" but "you can do better, you are capable of more." I'm not sure that this is always true, nor that I would want to try it - I think by personality I just don't have Chua's investment or passion, much less the anger. But that doesn't mean I've never blown it with my kids - despite not having a philosophical underpinning to do so with ;-).

Consider what Chua says about pressuring her oldest daughter to practice:

"According to Sophia, here are three things I actually said to her at the piano as I supervised her practicing:

1. Oh my God, you're just getting worse and worse.
2. I'm going to count to three and then I want musicality
3. If the next time's not PERFECT, I'm going to TAKE ALL YOUR STUFFED ANIMALS AND BURN THEM!

In retrospect, these coaching suggestions seem a bit extreme. On the other hand, they were highly effective." (Chua, 28)

Now this is all outrageous, and I should be outraged, I guess, except I've done awful things to my kids too. I wish I hadn't, of course, but I've blown my stack enough times to make this not sound so unusual. And I don't think it *is* that unusual - when I read the bit about stuffed animals, all I could think of was Annie LaMott's wonderful essay in _Plan B_ about parent rage:

I need to put n a quick disclaimer so that when I say what I'm about to say, you will know that the truest thing in the world is that I love my son more than life itself. I would rather be with him, talk to him and watch him grow than do anything else on earth. Okay?

So: I worked up one morning not long ago and lay in bed trying to remember whether, the night before, I had actually threatened to have his pets put to sleep, or whether I had only insinuated that I would no longer intercede to keep them alive when, because of his neglect, they begin starving to death.

The thing that is both crazy and true is that both things are right - your kids and your spouse if you have one, who you love more than life itself, can make you crazy-angry faster than almost anyone on earth. The only people better at it might be one's own parents ;-).

I know a few people who never raise their voices at their kids, are unfailingly kind and never really lose it with their children. I do not, however, get the sense they are an overwhelming majority - one of the best parents I know once said "everyone says you are such a great Mom and you walk along thinking 'if only they knew.'" Nearly every parent I've ever met has the same feeling.

My own mother recently told me a story I find funny and totally understandable now, but would have been horrified by when I was a kid. When she was a social worker, doing removals of children from abusive homes during my and my sister Rachael's teen years, she was assigned a family in which the mother, coming home after a long day of work, had hauled off and hit her teenager who had trashed the house and left a sink full of dirty dishes for her. My mother told her supervisor not to give her this case - that she had at times been so angry at her own daughters for doing precisely the same thing that she didn't feel that she was capable of judging this mother fairly - that she understood that urge (if not the action - my mother is incredibly opposed to physical violence of any kind) to beat the crap out children who were so disrespectful and uncaring of their parent's hard work.

And oh, do I grasp that now that I'm a parent. I have said pretty terrible things to my kids too - I once screamed out a window, where my boys were fighting (physically) over who got to drink out of a glass of water first that if they did not stop fighting I would never, ever let them drink anything, including water, again. They burst out laughing and after a minute, so did I - but the fury that led me to say such a ridiculous thing was real. And I wasn't necessarily wrong to try and make them feel lousy about such stupid behavior. Even though I was capable of just as stupid behavior when I was young - maybe more because I can remember it.

This does not make Chua's actions ok - I'm not saying that her rages were appropriate, or for that matter that mine were. What I am saying is that rage is part of parenting for many of us regardless - Chua's narrative makes it more acceptable, which might or might not be bad, and it makes it more natural, which also might or might not be bad. Our own psychological narratives make it less acceptable, but also make it secret, and erase it from the larger story.

I have little strong opinion on which is better - what I think is that her rages aren't the center of the Tiger parenting story, but an expression of the kind of Tiger parent she is (I'm guessing there are tiger parents who do it differently) and of angry parents and parenting. Her anger isn't something I admire, but I do identify enough with it not to see it at the center of everything.

The book could have been written by a mild mannered, or quietly manipulative or silent-treatment rendering or dispassionate, cold Tiger parent, or a sweet, loving but incredibly tough one too - but it wouldn't have gotten the same kind of attention that Chua with her showy parent rages get. It is fun to be outraged by her - and allows us to forget that most of us behave just as outrageously at times, we are just more comfortable with it as our secret shame rather than in our faces.

At the real center, however, is this - what Chua eloquently writes about the losses caused by living in modern America - what she calls generational decline in which values of hard work, thrift and commitment to creating something multi-generational worth having start with the first immigrant generation, and are lost in the priveleged generations that follow. She writes about the decline between her parents and her children:

Well, not on my watch. From the moment Sophia was born and I looked into her cute and knowing face, I was determined not to let it happen to her, not to raise a soft, entitled child - not to let my family fail.

That's one of the reasons I insisted Sophia and Lulu do classical music. I knew that I couldn't artificially make them feel like poor immigrant kids. There was no getting around the fact that we lived in a large old house, owned two decent cars, and stayed in nice hotels when we vacationed. But I could make sure that Sophia and Lulu were deeper and more cultivated than my parents and I were. ...To make sure that Sophia and Lulu weren't pampered and decadent like the Romans when their empire fell, I also insisted that they do physical labor." (Chua, 22-23)

It is probably pretty obvious that I think the Chua is in some measure shooting at the wrong targets. Her goals are intellectual achievement, and resistance to what she sees as Western intellectual decline (to be fair, Chua is actually much gentler to Western parenting choices than I would have anticipated) is couched in both terms of discipline, but also of achieving *to the standards of Western Industrial culture* - I don't share those goals. I don't share her goals of making my children the best - or the advocacy of competition uber alles. I think she's wrong and too quick to conveniently shift her ground away from the economic culture of thrift and hard work that created her parents and herself.

Actually, I think she gives economics short shrift in the book - why does she think being professors, doctors and musicians is so much better than being a really good woodworker or farmer or welder? Ultimately, where she sees high achievement is also where the money is, and Chua doesn't really acknowledge this - she doesn't acknowledge that the things she takes as a given - the pricey house, the private programs for kids, the nice cars, the travel - aren't themselves a goal that reinforces her overarching objectives, and in fact, they fully undermine it. She does recognize this in some measure, but doesn't explore why her goals are so focused on financially achieving professions, and why she sees discipline wholly in these terms - here, she has allowed Western culture to takes sway.

At the same time, her fundamental recognition that we have lost something in our expectations of children, and that softer parenting hasn't brought greater happiness, harmony or cultural benefit is right. I think she's picked the wrong way to reduce generational decline - she'd do better to sell the lavish house (not just large, but pricey) and the nice cars and cut her family's income - that the artificial disciplines she's choosing aren't as good as the structural ones of less money and more need. But I think she's got her finger on something that is right - that we aren't necessarily serving our children by our way of life.

At the same time I was reading _Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother_ I re-read Mildern Armstrong Kalish's wonderful memoir of the Great Depression _Little Heathens_. In it Kalish recounts the structure of her childhood on an Iowa farm in the difficult years of the Depression, and particularly the workload and expectations of children. In one section she talks about hog butchering, remembering the job given to the "Little kids" - ie, the kids under 10, too young to do heavy work - cleaning the head of the hog for headcheese, She recalls a group of children around the dismembered head of a pig, washing it thoroughly, even brushing its teeth to make sure no dirt contaminated the later project, and asks rhetorically whether it is possible to imagine 5-10 year old children taking on this job now.

Whether you mourn the child with the skill set for pig-head cleaning or not, it is manifestly the case that historically much more discipline was expected of children than now. An 8 year old in 19th century America would be expected to wield the hatchet competently and keep the woodbox full. Kalish writes:

I never earned any money for my work until I was in sixth grade and teh lady who ran the dry goods department of the Farmer's Store hired me to clean her big house for her. Grace was the widowed mother of three girls...For seventy-five cents an hour I did the washing and ironing, vacuumed and cleaned the floors, bathroom and refrigerator. The was a job that carried some prestige....The summer after I graduated from seventh grade I became the live-in caretaker and companion of an elderly, arthritic, cranky, devout, retired Methodist missionary....Here in addition to helping her with dressing, bathing and toileting, I did all of the washing, the marketing, the cooking, the baking and the cleaning. The discipline of my early years in building fires in teh kitchen stove, planning and cooking meals, cleaning house, washing and ironing were paying off. I knew how to run a household...Though I had no leisure time of speak of, I was finally acquiring what I craved most: the approval of the adult community and a modicum of independence...My sense of my own self worth soared right along with my finances." (Kalish, 277-278)

Kalish spends much of her time describing the hard work and discipline that shaped her childhood, and that provided her with satisfaction. Kalish's memories dovetailed with Chua's narrative about Chinese parents suggest that "western parenting" assumptions may not be all that western - they are *modern,* rather. There's more in common in Kalish's childhood, which assumes a high degree of resilience and has little interest in inner well being than you'd think:

"...I've noticed that Western Parents are extremely anxious about their children's self-esteem. They worry about how their children will feel if they fail at something, and they constantly try to reassure tehir children about how good they are not withstanding a mediocre performance on a test or at a recital. IN other words, Western parents are concerned about their children's psyches. Chinese parents aren't. They assume strength, not fragility, and as a result, they behave very differently."

This assumption of strength was true in America in Kalish's childhood - and presumably has been normative for most of human history. Now let's not pretend that this has no costs - the low achiever, the failing, the child that could not or would not conform met high costs. Chua talks briefly of the challenges for her parents of a youngest daughter with Down syndrome, and the way that westernization benefitted her sister - her parents emerged from a culture that offered little for the disabled and were told iniitally to insitutionalize her. At the same time, Chua's other reference to her sister suggests that Tiger parenting can be compassionately and affectionately used to drive maximum achievement despite disabilty - and presumably some of the conformist pressures of rural Depression culture are not necessarily essential elements of high achievement.

Chua gets her finger on something really important - that an assumption that children are strong and resilient can be as truthful as an assumptiont that they are vulnerable - and that the assumptions we use about the nature of childhood shape a lot of things. Chua points out that despite the tendency of Chinese parents to criticize, while western parents validate, there is no evidence that western children and parents get along better because of the way they act, or that they love each other more. Nor is there any evidence they are happier with lower expectations.

Some people might see my family as tigerish, living a life where kids are expected to do chores, and have physical responsibilities, to live up to a certain discipline (that imposed by the farm, and by our homeschooling). In fact, we're slacker than that - my family only looks unusually tough because the rest of the world is so different - yeah, my kids feed rabbits, goats and chickens every day, while most American kids might have to fill a dog bowl, but they don't do anything like the kind of work that most children through history have done.

Some of that is good, of course - time for education, time for other pleasures. Indeed, what seems most missing from Chua's stories are two things that farm families have. First, their father - Jed, her husband, is absent from the story. She says that it was somewhat natural they would use Chinese parenting because "like many mothers, I did most of the parenting." Even though both are law professors and work, this is all Chua ever says about the fact that her husband seems to be largely absent from the story except as a dispenser of treats like pancakes and Yankees games, and occasionally offering a weak "you are too hard on them." While Kalish's father is explicitly absent due to criminal activity and divorce, farm and work life in rural America often involved much less separation of parents and children than we are accustomed to.

The second thing missing from the story is playtime for her children. Chua explicitly rejects some kinds of play - despite the media play her not letting her daughter go to sleepovers got, Chua's real reason was that the only one her daughter attended was rife with factionalism, exclusion and meanness, as well as sexual discussions she didn't think her daughter was ready for - a very ordinary reason to exclude them. But Kalish and her brothers and sister do play - they work hard, but time is allotted for them to play baseball, make up games, enjoy nature. Chua's family never seems to have fun.

Which just brings me to where I felt I was most like Chua - ultimately, what Chua is creating to reduce generational losses is artificial, the form of the thing, without the substance. She wants the discipline poverty and ambition and hard work impose without actually living a life that requires physical labor, thrift or discipline except to please your Mom.

In a way you can make the same case for me - I'm reproducing a farm childhood for my kids - but it is facsimile, a chosen way of life that is not motivated by necessity. We could sell out, move to the 'burbs and play soccer. Moreover, just as Chua is working constantly against a culture that does not validate her choices, so am I - and the culture often wins. She knows it and I do, which is why the story of her younger daughter's rebellion and "victory" is part of her framing narrative, and why the media thinks the story of her losing is so much more interesting than what Chua actually has succeeded at. Even Chua sees it as more interesting - Lulu's rebellion becomes the center point of the book.

A friend of mine wisely observed that this book must be tough for Chua's kids to handle and that she could have waited a few years, and published it then. I think she's right, and for more than one reason - declaring defeat or victory in a child's adolescence seems to me a bad idea anyway. My parents looked like utter failures at instilling their values in us during our teen years - one of us got in serious trouble, another slacked off and smoked dope and ran after boys, still a third rejected everything our parents wanted from us and took off on her own path (and smoked some dope and ran after boys too ;-)). All three of us looked like Tiger Mom despair.

Now, all in our 30s, my parents are starting to be able to rest on their laurels. They might have wanted to kill me at 13, but the thrift and discipline that seemed like they failed so miserably are back. All of us are happily married, self-supporting, achievers in our own ways. Chua might do better - or worse - than she thinks.

Living in a culture that doesn't value hard work and discipline much, that doesn't see kids as strong or their contributions as worthy of excellence, one that diminishes their competence and pretends we shouldn't ever be really mad at them when they fail, Chua and I are both working on related projects with different goals. I don't see high academic achievement in the traditional sense as having the economic value that people have invested it with - indeed, the high student debt and reduced subsidies available make the trade offs harder. At the same time, I think the day is coming when hard work and self-discipline, however achieved, may be critical to security - when we simply may have to expect more of ourselves and our kids than we are accustomed to.

Balancing this with having a childhood is important - but not, I think, impossible - hard working kids on farms and in cities have had childhoods. Chua may have gone to far, but so has our culture - finding the intellectual space between those two things to begin to think about what a right childhood might be, what good expectations might be is challenging. I'm grateful that Chua is working out one end of that spectrum of thought, even if I don't share all her goals. The reality is that I suspect that a world facing the kinds of challenges we are facing is going to require a different kind of parenting - not Chua's model precisely, but something not totally unrelated to it.

Sharon

sastyk Thu, 08/04/2011 - 04:33

Tags

Show me a Chinese "tiger mother" and I'll show you the girl she aborted.

Chua's parenting style and all of her values are garbage. It is a moral crime that she bred while good people are infertile.

I also think that the disturbing cult around this book would never have been so nourished by the media if it had been "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Husband," in which a man went into detail about how Western life made most wives self-indulgent and lazy and what you've really got to do is constantly berate, threaten, and emotionally abuse them to get them in line. Ditto for your mother's story, if it had been written by a man whose certain propensities made him more likely to "understand and be unable to judge" another man who had beaten his wife half to death.

>the overies

what is the overy?

consider using a sperl chucker

First world child-rearing culture is overrun by intellectually indolence: the result of parents prioritizing their own mental comfort over anything else. You are advocating more of the same, only you recommendation is that sticks are less effort than carrots. Good luck with that.

Show me someone who doesn't identify at all with being really angry at your kid and I'll show you someone who has never been a parent. My mother didn't condone what she did, she just wasn't the social worker to handle it. I don't like how Chua managed her kids particularly, but I don't think that has that much to do with the basic values - I think it has to do with how angry parents can get at their kids.

Your analogy doesn't work - adult women are not children. Children do need a kind of guidance and direction that adults don't. I don't think you do have to berate them to expect a lot from them or require a lot from them. I understand that some people can only see the anger - I just think the anger exists in other parenting models as well, but isn't as clearly or honestly acknowledged.

Sharon

Sharon,
I too have read "Little Heathens" and am raising children on a farm and homeschooling them. I too have gotten angry when they have not stayed on task and accomplished things well within their abilities. I like the idea of changing assumptions. It is a discussion I have had with my husband. He tends to be softer than I am - I think that the expectations are reasonable and he doesn't always agree. he is now in some ways paying for that - for some reason especially this year.
I have been thinking about going to one of the alternative high schools here and talking with those kids. I would tell them they are way ahead of their peers because they are already able to think outside the box. They didn't conform or fit the "norm" we are going to need those young adults to see other ways to define success.
Thanks for posting this.
Kate

I found that Chua's "anger" at her children was either manufactured or grossly exaggerated in order to get the results she desired - and throughout the book seemed tantamount to child abuse - effective child abuse no doubt (her daughters both appear to be prodigiosly talented in the areas she decided they should excel in) - my favourite piece was when the younger daughter was perfectly willing to freeze herself to death in defiance of her mothers ridiculousness.

Another rather telling point was Chau's mother admonishing her for treating both children the same way - apparently she lucked out with her over the top approach with her first daughter, and probably severely messed up her relationship with her younger daughter by attempting to utilize the exact same approach - Chau's mother understood that different approaches worked for different kids - Chau clearly didn't make this connection and as such turned her younger child's life into an exercise in misery (which shows that assumptions of strength, or weakness, are bloody stupid, and that one should tailor ones approach to the individual child - some kids likely need their self esteem maintained, some can deal with criticism and indeed may thrive on it, no one size fits all model is going to work in every case)

Sharon,

Interesting view. I mind an Amish acquaintance that echoed what I read in _The Amish in Their Own Words_, that they believe a farm is the right place to raise children, precisely because the amount of work available to each is easy to increase to meet their needs. The Amish, many of them, live a disciplined and respectful life, and their love and care of the welfare of the Earth is part of their faith.

I find that expectations can very well be conveyed without demonstration or even words. _Tools for Teaching_ (Fred Jones) points out that the teacher has an invisible zone of influence. Any child within a couple of feet acts and reacts as if the teacher were Right There. At five feet, the impact is a bit lessened -- ten feet away and you get attention drifting away. One approach is to roam the classroom, so that no student is left outside and impact zone for more than a minute or three (the time the effects linger increase with passage of the school year, and consistency of discipline).

Working at Wal-Mart, I find that many kids acting out will stop, if I but pause and look at them. No stern expression, just a waiting to see if they will behave. Many rise to the occasion. Often the parents never notice their little darling has interacted with another adult, let alone changed their behavior. Even infants will give attention, and toddlers on the verge of crying out will pause with a look, a low low phrase of humming, and an extra moment of attention, sometimes from across the aisle or floor. I cherish these wordless communications.

When I substitute taught at the local schools, I found the classroom discipline parts of _Tools for Teaching_ to be extraordinarily effective. (I had a very long learning curve.) I found that just reading a section, without intent it would show up, helping me and helping the class, the next day. Working cows, strangely, even got simpler and more understandable. Most of it was about consistent discipline and expectations, and the non-verbal feedback of where you spend your attention.

I find it telling that your children, when you shouted in anger, understood the message to be "stop that bickering", and not "you don't deserve to live". That part of a pattern of acting out anger and rage, when it becomes a practice, conveys the underlying meaning rather than the surface attack. The problem is that it is very wearying, and teaches that you don't mean the words you say, sometimes. That makes other communication problematic, as the child is free to disregard any words said.

Blessed be!

Show me someone who doesn't identify at all with being really angry at your kid and I'll show you someone who has never been a parent...Your analogy doesn't work - adult women are not children. Children do need a kind of guidance and direction that adults don't.

According to whose culture? Chua's whole argument is that Chinese traditional ways are better than those of the West. Do you know how many of the world's traditional ways emphasize keeping women subservient, and complaining over how the West is doing it wrong? Cultural relativism isn't a slippery slope--it's a bottomless abyss.

And yes, of course as a parent I know what it's like to *feel* anger at my kids; this is why, as you've discussed here before, "Go the F to Sleep" is so hilarious and cathartic. It works perfectly as a joke because everybody understands it. Chua isn't joking.

Anger, jealousy, hunger, fear, and lust are all very basic and normal human emotions that can surface in any relationship, no matter how long or how close. We don't criminalize emotions, and most people, if you gave them a try, would probably understand them being there. But when those emotions come out as harmful *actions* is when society shuns those who have committed them.

And that's why Chua's wholly unearned pride in her pseudoparenting is so disgusting. She thinks she's working hard, but she's actually one of the laziest mothers I've ever heard of. Parents who routinely, year-upon-year cannot or do not control their anger at their children are failures.

Two thoughts: THANK YOU for admitting to getting angry at your children. I think all of us need to accept that every child occasionally gets yelled at and most of us aren't scarred for life by it. Turning ourselves in our minds into "Abusers" because we occasionally yell is just wrong. And by the way, why does it only apply to moms? Most of us give dads the latitude to yell, but moms must be 100% loving and nurturing all the time. I call bullspit on that!

That said, I try to yell less than my mom did, and to yell less damaging things. Hearing your mother scream "I wish you were never born" is qualitatively different than hearing her yell "if you don't clean your room this instant I'm going to make you sleep in the doghouse!" In my family we have a talent for yelling things which are so dramatically ridiculous that they just can't be taken seriously - Once my mom yelled at me "I'm going to tear your arm off and stuff it up your nose!" That was cathartic for her, I'm sure, but I wasn't afraid it was actually going to happen.

The other thing is in regards to our expectations for children working. My husband comes from a poor background in Mexico, and he worked like an adult from the age of 9 or so. Now I'm not suggesting THAT is healthy, but having lived there, I know for a fact that there is no biological reason that an 8 year old can't do medium-hard physical work for an hour or so a day. We have reached a point in this culture where we think making our children take out the garbage is child abuse.

Kids NEED to learn to do age appropriate work, and they will need to be encouraged and occasionally pressured to do so. Hopefully, most of us can learn the knack of helping kids enjoy sweeping the floors or weeding the garden, but when your kid isn't enjoying it and has to do it anyway... well, that's an important lesson and a lifelong skill, the ability to buckle down and do a hard boring job.

For the most part, children LOVE to help their parents, at least until they reach the teenage years. It's often WE who stop our children from helping, because it's easier to just do it ourselves than it is to teach the kid how to do it too.

By the way, when our friend came over to help us butcher the goats, his eight year old son helped out in a hands-on way, sharpening the knives and carrying dishes of blood and viscera. His father was pointing out the anatomy and the boy was learning and interested. Almost all the American parents I know would send their children away to shield them from the slaughter - we anticipate damage so often that we are actually doing our children a disservice.

"I know a few people who never raise their voices at their kids, are unfailingly kind and never really lose it with their children."

Oh, those parents can be abusive too, in a cool, controlling, manipulative kind of way. I've seen very close, in my own family, parents who lose it and parents who never lose it, and both can be either good or bad news for kids.

What's more important from a child's or teenager's point of view is this: are the parents fair? Are they coherent? Are they able, after screaming at their kid or threatening to kill pets, to say, "OK, I'm sorry I went to far there, because I was very angry (or frightened) by what you did. Next time we'll both have to do better"? Do the parents who hold their children to high standard and expect them to do chores or excel at school *also* give them kudos when they do well?

In other words, do they make their kids feel valued when they hold them to high standards, or do they just make them feel like pawns in their parents' own ego game of social competition?

TTT, I don't think the book says what you think it does - I don't see any "cult" around this book other than the self-satisfied "oh, I'm better than that" dismissal of the book. The book's central premise is that she was wrong in her behavior as a parent, if not in the expectations, and that her kid had to show it to her. That's why the subtitle includes the part about how the book was "supposed to be a story of how Chinese parents are better at raising kids than Western ones.

But instead it's about a bitter clash of cultures, a fleeting taste of glory, and how I was humbled by a thirteen-year old."

She says in the end of the book, though, that she wrote it after Lulu rejected the violin - that is, she's telling the story after it already failed. All of her claims are touched by that irony, and all of her descriptions of her over-the-top behavior are leading up to the part where it all falls apart and she had to admit she did screw up. That's why I think it is both brave of her, and also, I think she's right not to wholly abandon the principles that she's been shooting at, even though she wasn't very good at enacting it, even though she was angry.

I find it weird that so many people ignore the larger point of the book - even though it is in the text and on the cover. She's not glorifying her rages, although she is asking us to view them through a slightly different lens than the one we are trained to view them through - and that's not, I think unfair. She lacked perspective - and she acknowledges that. But I think so many of her readers want her to abase herself and say that everything she was shooting at was wrong. It wasn't - she did some stupid and lousy things, some really bad parenting - but she also wasn't wrong about the larger problem of values and expectations.

I see it as a little like when artists are rotten people - they write beautiful books or paint beautiful paintings that say something really true. And then you find out they are jerks with feet of clay - or worse. But it doesn't make the work of art less true, and it isn't the case that no one else has feet of clay.

Sharon

...that assumptions of strength, or weakness, are bloody stupid, and that one should tailor ones approach to the individual child

Thanks, Ewan, for cutting through the bull and saying what needed to be said. QFT.

@TTT - The gender oppression thing a bit of a bait and switch argument, isn't it? Chua's argument about how western parenting is flawed and aspects of Chinese parenting works better = she supports keeping women subservient. How is that even relevant? That's like saying all American capitalists must love apple pie because America values capitalism and apple pie, thus capitalists are bad because apple pie is unhealthy. I mean, really, if Chua's supporting the idea women have to be as subservient and oppressed as she is (as a Yale law professor), then I'm totally there.

And look, as someone who was a teenager only a few years back, I can say with only mild old person bias, that I was yelled at quite a bit in my childhood for stuff like grades, and I really don't think it was damaging. It certainly wasn't fun at the time, but I think I turned out okay and we're still very close. It did motivate me to work hard, and my parents, like Chua, always emphasized that they were upset at me because they knew I could do better (the constant refrain being, "if we didn't think you were capable of this, would /we/ be spending so much effort?") And yeah, seeing my college acceptances and the scores on my AP report added way more to my self esteem and happiness than a thousand "good try" comments on my crappy papers.

You can argue that Chua takes it too far - I think she herself suggests that - but that doesn't mean she doesn't have some good points, especially about assuming strength and not weakness. I don't see why the idea of taking into consideration the ideas from other cultures (or even just different ideas) is so offensive to some people. You can bet lots of people in China are looking to see what Americans do. (One of my TA's studies China, and she said after the economic meltdown, a newspaper headline about it translated roughly to "the teacher stumbles.") Ideas aren't religion, just because you think part of it is reasonable doesn't mean you have to accept everything it's ever been associated with. We can always plug our ears and chant that we're awesome and the best in every way, (maybe that's how we're raised, heh) but I doubt everyone else is doing the same, and I guess we'll see what turns out in the long run.

Aimee: "For the most part, children LOVE to help their parents, at least until they reach the teenage years".

I'd go farther; the #1 thing children want to do is please their parents; and actually helping them, contributing to the family, is one of the things that makes them happiest. And; even teenagers! Not sure this is a universal, but I mocked my kids when they started to act like "teenagers", as learned on the bus and the rare TV exposure. "Ew!! Don't tell me you're going to turn into a TEENAGER! You really don't have to, you know." Sure, they'd always grump, mostly playfully; but the underlying pride of contribution and achievement was always there, too.

As soon as your child learns they CANNOT please you- you've lost.

One of my favorite essays on parenting is Ron Howard's film "Parenthood". Lots of truths in it, and I get to fantasize about Mary Steenburgen... :-)

Re: Tiger moms. They push/drive their children, yes? I greatly prefer to open doors and paths, and lead. Though occasionally a good nudge may be the only way to get movement. Anger? Pretending parents don't get angry is a lie- and the kids know it. Far better to be open about it. Patching up and forgiving is natural too- nobody can forgive you like your own children.

You may be right, Ewan, although it does seem easier for Grandparents to step back and show perspective - perspective they didn't necessarily have as parents, and to pass jusgement on parenting.

I don't see her rages as artificial or manipulative - I think that's part of who she is, and it would be way too much work to manipulate. At the same time, I think it is interesting that the cover sentence points out that this book is "supposed to be" about how Chinese parenting is better than Western parenting, even though the events - and her failure - happened before she began composing it.

In that context, then, "supposed to" becomes "what the readers want to see" not "I set out to write this book" - she didn't. The book is about her failure from moment one - Lulu from her first entry is admired for her rebelliousness and intelligence and resistance - in fact, Chua keeps pointing out that she's like her (a telling point - there's a reason for the famous parent curse "I hope you have one just like you." ;-)).

I guess I see the book as much more self-conscious than other people seem to - yes, what she did didn't work - and she's proud, as most parents are, that it didn't work because what Lulu has is both enraging and wonderful. The whole point of the story is that it didn't work on Lulu - that you can't really be a full Tiger parent in a culture that allows for other choices.

Sharon

Moreover, they don't seem to be central to the point - they are Chua's excesses, rather than the actual necesary behavior of Tiger parents.

No no no. You miss the point entirely. Chua is behaving exactly as a Tiger mother (or Asian mother, for that matter; the issue isn't Chinese-centric) would behave. You, Sharon, talk about times when parents are driven to anger or frustration. That is NOT what Chua is about.

Asia values age. The older you are, the more respect you garner, regardless of whether you're an incompetent prat or not. Therefore, the younger you are, the less respect you deserve and are accorded. Therefore, as a parent, you are free to treat your children like complete shit, knowing all your contemporaries and authority figures are in complete agreement.

I had a Tiger Mother. I am living in Asia right now. I know of what I speak. And it is despicable.

PS The alternative to Chua's "parenting" is not permissiveness. It's not a dichotomy, people, it's a continuum. There are degrees; it's just finding the right one and giving your children the respect they deserve as human beings.

The trouble with humans is that speech and motor skills and reasoning come in way before prefrontal cortex development. So sometimes emotional development is not remotely in synch with what might assume as 'age appropriate development'.
Kids can do physical labor and intellectual labor far beyond what we typically challenge them with in this day and age. What they can't always do is emotional labor we think should go along with those skills-regulating their own emotions or helping us regulate ours. It's not the tasks that are too much- it's demanding that they stay on task the way an adult can. It's important to remember that they used to send 8 year olds out to fill the woodbox *when they were frustrated and need to burn off some steam* (it's a very productive sort of therapeutic distraction, chopping wood), not just when they needed wood.
In a way, I wonder if "high expectations" tends to exacerbate the problem... when our kids get so amazingly competent at X, Y and Z, we forget they can't necessarily do A, B and C to keep themselves calm and happy whilst doing X, Y and Z. For an adult, taking a break, a deep breath, getting a snack when your blood sugar is low, or recognizing when you are just frazzled beyond all else and Need a Nap, should all be second-nature. It's hard to realize how much self-knowledge all that depends on.

Full disclaimer- I only have a toddler. I may be talking out my ass when it comes to older kids.

You may be right, Ewan, although it does seem easier for Grandparents to step back and show perspective - perspective they didn't necessarily have as parents, and to pass jusgement on parenting.

I don't have the book around anymore, or have a particularly great memory - but didn't Chau mention that her siblings weren't all raised as she was - I got the feeling that her mother tailored the parenting to the kids (to an extent at least) - although I may be utterly mistaken here.

I don't see her rages as artificial or manipulative

I do - it's particularly illustrated with her rage when child no.2 shows rebellion for the first time - nobody remotely sane would get so enraged with a child that they would put them outside in freeze your fingers off weather - she consistently goes to defcon 1 fully conscious that in doing so she's forcing the issue with her kids. Now I'm not claiming there is no anger, only that she is expressing it through a loudspeaker rather than simply expressing what comes naturally - this appears to be a great deal of what being a Tiger mother entails - turn up the anger to 11, hit the mute button when your kid does something good.

Or at least that's what I got out of it.

A guy I work with has a pretty good perspective on parenting - he figures that if you don't feel like you're making it up as you go along then you're probably doing something wrong - 10 months in (so clearly I speak from impeccable authority...) and this is an approach I can buy... if only because it validates my parenting skills as being right on track. (confirmation bias? I can't help it if everything I do or think just happens to be right)

I do have experience of someone who responded just exactly that crazily (not the same reaction, but the same scale in a different way) to outright rebellion - so I guess it doesn't seem as strange to me. My father was like that - defiance just pushed his buttons (he was not a screamer in that sense, though - it played out in other ways) so I guess I see it as bad, but not forced.

I did get the impression that her parents learned that lesson when they had their youngest, disabled daughter - although from a few things they say, it sounds like she got a slightly lightened tiger parenting too.

As for authority - you know, you never do get to declare victory on this one - we're all talking out our butts in some measure ;-).

Greenpa, Eric and I love _Parenthood_ - we watched it once when each child was born.

Chua has issues to say the very least. If you take a gander at her book World on Fire: Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability, Chua discusses the murder of her aunt in the Philippines. The ethnic Chinese dominate the Filipino economy. According to Chua, this dominance spawned the hatred that led her aunt's driver to murder her.

However, if you actually read what Chua writes, you quickly realize that Chua's aunt was an irony-less, abusive, petty kleptocrat whose cruelty brought her demise.

At eight-years-old, Chua staid with her aunt her âsplendid hacienda-style houseâ when, one night, she decided to grab something to drink. Groggy, Chua ended up in the male servant's quarters, a room Chua says was packed with at least six men who slept on mats on a dirt floor that reeked of âsweat and urineâ. Confronting her aunt the next day, Chua's aunt informed her, in front of her Filipino staff, that Filipinos were âlazy and unintelligent and didn't really want to do much else.â While her staff maintained her aunt's childless household that the aunt did not have to work to sustain or create, she proceeded to launch into the libertarian saw about how if they (the staff) disliked their jobs they were free to leave. As Chua recalls, her aunt said this about her household staff as if they were not present.

Another endearing trait of Chua's aunt is her habit of stealing ketchup packages from McDonald's whenever they ate there. While the ketchup packets are provided free of charge, they are provided free for the food you purchase there. Chua's aunt stuffed her Gucci purses with them with apparent disregard for either their cost to the company or the desire of other patrons for condiments. This thievery and ignoring the wishes, desires, and rights of others does not bode well for the decent treatment or accurate payment of her household staff.

Naturally, it was racial hatred, not her aunt's unconscionable behavior that brought her aunt's death. And I am sure being raised, at least in part, by scum like that had no impact on Chua's parenting decisions.

Certainly children are capable of doing more than we in the United states typically ask of them. But Chua's big problem seems to me to have been her forcing development in narrow areas of her children's lives while failing to nurture other areas.

In 1931, when my mother turned 13, she left her farm home where her parents were having seious difficulty in providing for her, moved to a nearby city where she shared a room in a boarding house, and went to work in a cigar factory. She had two dresses. Each day she wore one and washed the other. There was no one to wake her up or to insist that she go to work on time or that she keep herself clean and neat.

After nearly a decade of experience in self-sufficiency, when the war came she trained at the Federal ship yard as a welder and worked there even after marrying until I was born as the war was ending.

But she missed out on her education.

Children, like adults, have just so many hours a day. Some of those hours need to be spent learning, some working (and maybe learning at the same time), and some playing and socializing. Children also need to have gradually increasing control over their own time and behavior in order to mature. I think that to a large degree parenting is about preparing our children eventually to say no to us in a healthy way.

I'm not so sure that getting one just like you is the worst that can happen. I was (and am) a happy-go-lucky kind of person, I keep pretty much to myself and have been mostly responsible with the opportunities that I've received. My teenage son, on the other hand, has such a negative outlook (possibly due to divorce and his mother's prior abuse [she blamed him for trapping her in parenthood]) that we have never been able to see eye to eye on anything. He's smart, but consistently berates his own intelligence. He's capable, but often undercuts his success by not applying himself.

As I've grown older, I've come to the conclusion that I don't know how to help him - so I've told him that everyone finds their place in the world and he will need to find his. I try to show him ways to see things differently so that he can learn from his experiences. I look back on my own life and realize that I didn't grow up until I left my parents' house - and I know that he won't grow up until he makes that journey. For me, that was a stint in the military. For him, I don't know what it will be...

Lastly, my youngest daughter is as much like me as a girl could be. I want to encourage her to do the things that I did as a kid - and find that I'm not allowed to because such behavior is "neglectful". I want her to play hard, wear our her clothes, scrape her knees and elbows and get the shit scared out of her when tries something that fails.

Because I know that experience is a much better teacher than I ever will be. The best that I can hope for is showing my kids how to use someone else's experiences to guide their own development.

Eric, I have one pretty much like me (Simon), and I admit, he's not the one I struggle with most. When my mother so cursed me (saying, as she said it, that her mother had done the same to her and she'd sworn she'd never say it ;-)), my comment was that as long as I didn't have one like my sister Rachael, I'd be fine ;-). Still, it can be hard to see your faults in a child - sounds like you are less faulty than me ;-).

Sharon

I'm so glad you liked this book, Sharon! I loved it too; disagreed with a lot of it, felt good about my own parenting by comparison, and laughed a LOT, of course.

Overall, I think I ended up just admiring her willingness to put all this stuff - both positive and negative - out there. She's a very confidant, smart writer and I wish her all the best dealing with her kids as they get older...

Note to Parents - No Sleeping!

sastyk — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 06:54:15 +0000

Note to Parents - No Sleeping!

There's an article about a couple of recent cases charging people (read: mothers) with neglect if they (gasp!) dare to go to sleep around their children.

A couple of weeks ago in Delaware, a woman put her 3-year-old down for a nap and then took a nap herself. The 3-year-old got up and somehow escaped the house. After the girl was found, police charged her mother with child endangerment.

In New York, a woman's 3-year-old son got up in the middle of the night and wandered around. The woman woke up at some point and called the police. A man who had spotted the child had already called police. After the child was found, the police arrested her. Her parenting will now be monitored indefinitely.

I find this interesting because it is in many ways the natural outgrowth of a culture that allows less and less time to parents for actual parenting - parents are needed in the formal economy as much as possible, and in the US we provide little economic or cultural support to enable them to be with their kids - but higher and higher expectations of parents. This strikes me as the perfect metaphor for how our culture demands we parent - we cannot sleep, but we can't be slowed by sleep deprivation either. It is literally a vicious circle.

Because I have an autistic child who wanders, I'm particularly sensitive to this issue. The reality is that even though we try, it is impossible to watch any child every single second of the day. We have fences, gates, latches - every child in my household knows that if Eli goes missing we drop everything and go find him. Friends and family also participate in keeping an eye on him - and he still slips off sometimes, because, after all, we have other things we must do too, and he doesn't have anything to do but think about ways to go get to the creek or to scavenge cookies. We have always managed to keep him safe, but we've had some scary near-misses, particularly when we discovered for the first time that my son could do something we hadn't expected - the first time he pushed out a screen and went through a window, the first time he climbed the 8 foot board fence we use to keep him safe to get the to creek.

This trend is troubling for several reasons. The first is that if parents have to fear prosecution, they may delay calling in police and other help when a child goes missing - and no one wants to see what could have been a trivial disappearance turn into something more serious by waiting too long. The second is that at the same time we demand higher and higher standards of perfection from parents, we make other parts of this riskier. Around the time Eli was born, an exhausted father in the state I was living in at the time put his infant son's carseat on the roof of his car while he opened the door, forgot it was there, and drove off on the highway. The child survived, fortunately, but deep in my son's colic, it was precisely the kind of accident I could imagine myself causing. I have memories from Eli's infancy of getting into a shower and getting out again, with no memory of whether I had washed my hair, no sense of how long I'd been in the shower. I remember arriving by car at visiting family with no recollection of the trip - and yet I hadn't been asleep.

Moreover, asking parents to do the impossible - not to sleep, to watch perfectly, to never make any mistakes in the care of their children sets them up for failure and seriously damages families. It makes childrearing into a marathon of stress and misery for parents who simply can't meet those standards.

Having Eli has required Eric and I to have conversations I hoped I'd never have - about what happens if we can't protect him. Eleven years of watching, constantly checking, constantly obsessing about where Eli is and whether he is safe has made us recognize that we simply aren't perfect and are going to fail sometimes. We have done everything we possibly can to keep him safe, and it has worked - but we could lose the lottery one day - we could fail to protect him, because we're human and imperfect. We also have had to balance his needs for safety with his right to a childhood in ways that most parents get to abandon once their children leave toddlerhood. We could have one of us stay with him always - but he has a need for space and independence. We could prevent him from ever going more than a few steps away from Mom and Dad - or we could accept a marginally higher risk, and let him back out in the yard with the 8 foot fence he *can* climb, trusting that our lessons about not climbing and our frequent observations will protect him.

Ultimately we make these same judgements with our own children. Last month, all three of my younger sons earned pocket knives. Each of them desperately wanted one, and we hesitated before giving 5 year old Asher a knife (to be fair, he is only permitted to use his under adult supervision - 7 year old Isaiah and 9 year old Simon can use theirs unsupervised as long as we never see any evidence of misuse). But Asher is responsible, and he does do an astonishing number of responsible things for a kid his age. We both felt instinctively that he was ready, and the children's pride in being trusted was worth a lot. So far, Asher is the only one who hasn't managed to cut himself ;-).

Safer or stronger? How do you choose? It isn't a great set of choices. I can't say it is made better by the knowledge I could be arrested and lose custody of my other children for the judgements I've made, either.

Sometimes a wandering child is a sign of a serious problem - kids left alone for days by parents off doing something else, parents so drunk or drugged that they aren't aware of their kids. I can understand why this raises red flags, and worries. At the same time, it is one of those fairly universal experiences - and bringing down CPS is a frightening thing both in perception and reality.

In older, less energy intensive societies, people love their children just as deeply. They cannot, however, helicopter parent them in the same ways when there is constant domestic work to be done and no money for a supply of professional caregivers. As free-range parenting advocates have pointed out, there are gains as well as potential losses in this model, where children have more freedom - and, let's be blunt, more risk - but have also the chance to develop independence and autonomy.

I don't claim these are easy choices - they are hard for me and my family, they are hard for most parents. What I don't grasp his how blaming any parent for daring to sleep makes children any safer. Instead, it sets up parents to do the impossible - and refuses to acknowledge that it is impossible.

Sharon

sastyk Wed, 07/13/2011 - 02:54

Tags

Poor women -- imagine what they would have done if they had locked the toddlers in their beds?

I think the fear culture of parenting is also dangerous in the long term to the kids. I talk to parents all the time who are terrified to even let their kids play in their own yards in safe, suburban neighborhoods. They've seen too many stories on our 24/7 over-hyped media about the rare incidents when a child is hurt by a stranger. People talk about implanting microchips with GPS trackers and other indignities.

So the kids stay indoors, confined, sitting on a sofa watching TV or playing a video game. A lifetime of habitual sitting and inactivity is very, very dangerous -- much more so than a skinned knee or some bruises from falling off a bike. Life is not safe. A hurt or, heaven forbid, dead child is a horrible thing for a parent, but kids don't learn to be safe by being oversheltered. Sometimes you have to give them the metaphorical pocketknife.

I did not sleep for the first 8 months of my sons life. 45 minutes here, 2 hours there...but mostly deep, continuous sleep deprivation. Since he is only 10 months now, that state is fresh in my memory, but I think only people who have been there really understand how completely debilitating it is.

In that state, driving with the baby on car, baby shaking, driving into a telephone pole - they all become things that (though no one wants to admit it) are only a hairs breadth away for any parent, no matter how devoted that parent might be.

This is a terrible trend - I'm shaking my head in disbelief and sympathy for the parents. We are criminalizing terrible accidents.

My husband is a very active sleepwalker. I've caught him trying to leave the house on more than one occasion, and over the 10 years that we've been together I've learned to help him stay in bed and to wake at the slightest rustle to keep him out of harm's way.

Add a baby into the mix, and I never sleep. I actually hung bells on our bedroom door to wake me so I could prevent my husband from leaving after I didn't wake up when we sleepwalked downstairs in the early stages of my son's infancy. We cosleep too (cosleeping safely with a sleepwalker is another can of worms...) and my son is now 16 months old. And he's still up a few times a night. And one of my biggest fears is that he'll be a sleepwalker like his dad and I'll really never sleep again. I live in a state of deep sleep deprivation, and I could easily be one of these mothers, but fortunately my son can't open doors... yet... at least as far as I know.

It's scary. But like you said, we have to sleep! I just keep my faith in those bells on the bedroom door!

Strangely, I feel compelled to play devil's advocate here. I have no desire to defend an agency that would infringe on parents just for taking a nap, but to be honest, I don't really know if that's what happened here.

Two points: first, the article linked above cites two cases where parents were charged with criminal neglect after their child wandered away while sleeping. The article did *not* specify that this is *why* they were charged, though, just that event A (child wandering) immediately preceded event B (criminal charges). What was in the charge itself? Perhaps the child disappearance got CPS involved, and they then discovered other evidence of criminal negligence. Certainly when we reported a missing child from our own house (a neighbor's son who got scared in the middle of the night and went back to his own home without telling us) the CPS agent came with the police officers as part of standard protocol. What if, while there, she discovered other reasons for charging criminal negligence (e.g., maybe we were obviously drunk or high)? How would that have been reported in the media? Makes a better story to imply that it's a government agency ridiculously overstepping its bounds than to tell the straight story. Of course, I have no idea if this is the case in the two linked above, but no one else here probably knows either (unless one happens to be personally familiar with the case). I'm hardly going to credit Yahoo blog news with fair and accurate reporting and take the story at face value.

Second point: let's say that the two cases *were* reported completely accurately, and there are two incidents of completely ridiculous CPS agency decisions. Two. TWO. In the entire nation, and in the thousands of daily reports to CPS, there are two examples of this. That's hardly a national trend. The only reason it's even a blip on anyone's radar is because we do have 24/7-always-on news reporting, whose main job is to scare us as much as possible. Either they're trying to terrify us into being overprotective (as the first commenter points out), or they're trying to scare the bejezus out of us about Big Brother coming to steal your children. Like I said above, CPS came to our house during a very similar incident, observed what happened, concluded it was an unfortunate accident, and nothing has ever come from it since. If the two CPS agencies in the story did really charge two different sets of parents with criminal negligence just for napping and losing track of their children, then I truly sympathize with the parents and hope they're able to battle back the stupidity. But this just does not mean that there are now CPS agents hiding around the next corner, waiting for you to look away from your child before snatching them. This is not a trend. In fact, it fits my brother-in-law's favorite saying perfectly: "Two data points does not a trend make."

Good grief! In the early 1980s my 3-year old niece managed to wiggle out of her ground-floor bedroom window, go over a fence, down a 50-foot embankment and go "see Santa" in a shopping mall a couple of miles away. After midnight!

The cops saw her heading towards the Christmas display and nabbed her. She had been taught her full name and her phone number so they had no trouble bringing her back to the house about 4AM.

Their only comment: "She must be a handful, ma'am, so it's a good thing she knows her phone number."

Robyn, both points are correct (although I would add "two in the entirely nation in a fairly short period of time)", although I should have also added that I did find quite a few other examples of similar cases doing some legal searches - I was lazy, though and didn't quote them.

You are correct, of course, and I've removed the word "trend" - at the same time, I do think it may well be indicative, because it is part of a larger cultural reality that we hold parents to truly impossible standards, while simulataneously making it harder and harder to meet them by placing more and more demands on them.

I would also observe that even if it turns out that there is a marginal additional issue in the household (neither household could have had any family circumstances so acute that they merited removal of the children, since they didn't remove them), I think there's good reason to ask whether you want to have the perception that calling the cops because your kid has gone missing opens you up to a full-scale investigation. That's not to say that a child found wandering alone shouldn't draw CPS attention - at teh same time, there's a fine line here to be drawn. My concern is that parents will delay calling because they are afraid of losing their kids for something fairly normal.

Look, I'm working with CPS as a foster parent, and the idea of any investigation doesn't immediately frighten me - but at the same time I also do think that we both know that it isn't just the media that makes CPS a dangerous tool sometimes, particularly for families that aren't like we are, white, educated and middle-classish looking (even if not in fact ;-)). Sure, the media likes to scare people. It is also the case that working at CPS requires making fundamental judgement calls that sometimes are pretty disturbing and outside of people's experience.

Sharon

Sharon, likewise, I agree with your points. But I worry (perhaps like you) that we've got a faulty perception of the danger of calling the police/CPS, built largely out of media hype rather than out of genuine danger. You're probably right that people read things like the blog article on Yahoo that you cite, and then are more afraid of calling the police. But given the comparative rarity of such an event as the one described above (even if there were 10 such cases, that's still pretty durned rare), the relative danger of not calling the police is much higher than the danger from CPS from calling the police. Humans have a famously faulty ability to gauge relative dangers (hence why we're so scared of anonymous kidnappers, but still drive cars). And articles like the Yahoo one are really just trying to capitalize on that faultiness, rather than to convey any actual information or news.

If there really are 10 or so similar cases, or even just these two cases, then those probably should hit the media spotlight. But I think it should be cashed out more as in "These absurd cases should be stopped", with the situations being conveyed as what they are--outliers. And they could also be used to highlight the problems you point out of holding parents to absurd standards, while simultaneously undermining our ability to conform to those standards. If there are growing systemic problems with CPS, it could still bring those to light and hopefully stop them in their tracks. Those whole, worthwhile, discussions could be had without raising alarm bells that cause parents to fear calling the police. (Well, maybe. Again, typical human reasoning skills = very bad.)

Sharon,

There seems to be an institutional bias going on here. I understand that in Denver, leaving a child under 12 unattended for 10 minutes or longer constitutes abandonment, legally.

There seems to be a presumption of two or more adults to mind a family's children. You cannot have that with single parent families, or low income families.

Your first reaction might be a bit mild for me. I see a lot of moral arrogance and relational and economic bigotry at work, and perhaps religious or racial bigotry.

The bigotry should have been the point of the stories, and not the portrayal of parent as criminally inept.

First off - Brad, I believe you are misinformed about Denver. I live here and recently looked up the laws, as my next door neighbors routinely leave their 6 and 9 year old home by themselves and it drives me nuts. Once the parents didn't come back for some time and the 9 year old got worried and called the police. The police just came and sat outside the house until their mother got back. *sigh.

As to this post - I feel so sad about it that it makes me want to cry. As a mother of soon to be three (I'm due any minute, I swear), all I want to do is nap. I do think these media stories are just meant to sensationalize and scare parents though. But it's heartbreaking and terrifying. Last week I called my husband sobbing because I just wanted to sleep and the boys (4 and 2) wouldn't nap. And today, as soon as I was done reading blogs, I planned to nap. This stuff makes you afraid to sleep, and without sleep I am a HORRIBLE parent. It is safer for my children to have a rested mother. I have to trust my sons to follow our previously discussed rules as well as the locks on my doors.

Wasn't there an issue in GA with an agency removing children from a house that the electric had been turned off? Citing sub-standard living conditions? It's not the one or two events that concern me, it's the trend!

I'm curious if it's possible to ascertain what percentage of calls about missing children result in a full CPS investigation of the relevant household. I'd guess it's very high. There are plenty of people who already don't call the police right away if they have any kind of issue, including child-related, because of the biases and abuses of control that they would risk. Many of my friends & acquaintances live in fear of CPS involvement in their lives. These incidents described above are extreme, but unfortunately not surprising.

Wow, reading all this amazes me. I'm so glad I have no children.

And growing up, at age 8 I had a key to the house. Both parents worked full time so there might not be someone there to let me in when I got home from school.

And I had 2 to 3 hours of having the house to myself. And you know what, that was great for a kid. I'd do my homework, watch some TV and play with the dog.

http://www.sparkweekly.com/article/20110621/NEWS01/106210351/-1/TERMS - the 3 yr-old chose to walk around for hours on a hot day and was suffering from heat exhaustion.

http://www.wgrz.com/news/article/125660/13/Lockport-Woman-Charged-With-… - this 3 yr-old left in the middle of the night.

As a 3 yr-old many years ago in Long Beach CA, I woke up with the sun, grabbed my mom's purse (she didn't leave the house without it - why should I?) and proceeded to head over to my friends' house. On my way there, some nice police officers asked me where I was going and, when I didn't give them a satisfactory answer, they had me get in the car and go to the police station. They called my mom (her phone number was on her driver's license), told her where I was and she picked me up around 7:30 AM.

I find it incredibly difficult to punish my kids for attempting to do things that I did as a kid; in fact, when their mother's aren't watching, I encourage them to push the boundaries as long as they let me know where they are and they let me know what they've experienced and learned.

Eric

This is indeed a thorny issue, and it doesn't feel right to come down entirely on one side or the other. Certainly many children suffer from a kind of chronic, mild neglect - they are on their own too much, left to their own devices, ignored, let run wild and made to care for themselves too much too early. Parents like this would probably benefit form an intervention WAY SHORT of removal from the home. More like, help finding resources, maybe a parenting class or two. Lots of parents love their children dearly yet care for them sub-optimally due to exhaustion and/or knowledge deficit. The immediate demonizing of anyone who suffers a tragedy due to a minute's inattention (the child who drowns in the bathtub, the child who is run over in the driveway, who runs into the street, who - God forbid - disappears at the mall) is counterproductive and cruel, but it is a human defense mechanism. It's a way of distancing ourselves from having to admit it could happen to us.

On the other hand, millions of children suffer from the opposite problem - chronic anxiety and fear due to their parents severe overprotection. There are children who aren't allowed to go swimming in the lake, roller skate, ride a horse, go to a new friend's house until the parents have passed a criminal background check... etc etc. When children are raised in the shadow of their parent's constant anxiety, it can be crippling. These kids may grow up having internalized the fear that the whole world is just too scary to be navigated. That's certainly no favor you're doing your kids, now it is?

Kids NEED to learn that a skinned knee isn't the end of the world. That most grownups are perfectly nice people who can be trusted to help you find your mom if you are lost, not monsters who will nab you and lock you in a closet for the rest of your life. They need to learn competence by failing at something, by getting hurt, even.

I guess I've picked a side. I don't mean to trivialize the horribleness of accidents - just because I used to sit on the roof and climb sixty foot trees at age seven doesn't mean I should let my kids do the same. Mainly I think people should take the time to learn what real dangers are (riding bikes without helmets, backyard swimming pools, poisons in the home) and what are not realistic fears (stranger abduction, death by red dye no. 2, airplane travel) and make reasonable choices.

When I was 5 years old (in 1962, if you must know), my mom walked me to kindergarten the first day. I noticed lots of things, especially how big the older kids were and how no one else's mom was walking them to school. On the way home, I carefully observed the route so I could walk it by myself. On the way to school the next day, I carefully observed the route again, and announced to my mother that I would walk home by myself. She may have been a bit skeptical - but she also had a 3 and 1 year old at home that she likely figured needed her more than I did at that point. Plus the route was all in suburbia, no real busy streets, and there were crossing guards on most of the streets I had to cross. So she let me walk home, and observing that I got home safely at the time expected, let me walk back and forth by myself every day from them on. My mom tells this story to this day.

On the other hand, my sister needed a week or two of walking back and forth accompanied to feel comfortable doing it by herself. And my brother, who was still under 5 when he started kindergarten, never did walk it by himself; my sister and/or myself always walked it with him.

Kids' capabilities vary widely. I think part of what I worry about with CPS involvement is that it's done by rules of what kids are supposed to do when, and how people are supposed to parent. There's probably not any other way to do it than that. Yet kids are so very different in what they can do, and parents so very different in how they parent, that it's very difficult to determine when to act, or at least should be. Or what requires a parenting class or even removal of a kid from a too-dangerous home, and what is just a different way of parenting than the norm. I don't have any answers - except that this is one instance where a real community of people who know and help each other might be in a better position to observe and respond to problems early. But given where we are now, a good CPS (with help from all of us to get and stay good, to avoid over-reactions that are harmful) seems to be needed.

I'm not convinced that either case is true. No substantiating details are given; none at all. No references to a newspaper which carried the stores - nothing at all. No names of people involved, no names of towns.

Pat

Car seat installed by a sleep-deprived parent into a car driven by a sleep-deprived parent.

I have read everyoone's comment's and I am glad that this topic is finally getting discussed. I am a pretty, upper middle class, college educated with an MBA, mother of three. We live in an upscale neighborhood that was built in a middle class town. I had a neighbor across the street who was jealous of me and addmititingly wanted to be me, call our CFS on us. CFS in our state was taking a lot of slack because of missing things that were going on and children were being found dead in foster homes. They came out to our house and I know from the other case worker who testified in court for me, that I was charged with child abuse and neglect before they ever entered our home. Figure that one out. I was not allowed to be alone with my children, the women who called CFS offered to babysit them for a fee to help me out. Her husband a cop, hit one of my sons and their son bit my son as well while in her care and CFS could care less. I was the unfit parent for some unknown reason. After six months they were gone, but not the charge. It took four years to go to trial (they expect most people to not have the money or know how to persue it). Both intake case workers had quit by then (not wanting to purger themselves in court). The one case worker as I said testified on my behalf. We found out they never opened up a case. They had no record of the visits with the regular case worker (she did not exsist). They basically spent four years trying to tear our lives apart believing what our psyco neighbor told them. They even tryed to split my husband and I up by playing one against the other. These agencies are not about perserving families. They could care less about you; and even less about your children. My children were ages 1 1/2, 5, & 7 at the time. The five year old is still not right from it and my seven year old is very protective of her brothers. They came into MY HOME and took my childrens sense of comfort and safety. The only thing they could write in their report that night was how large and beautiful my house was and how nice I had it decorated and how each child had their own room with awesome furniture and lots of toys, etc.. Give me a break! What does that have to do with how well we parent our children? There are no checks and balances when in comes to CFS. They are their own agency and can do what they want, they do not applologize when they have the wrong house or they are trying to fabricate a case. They ruin people's lives. They simply have a four year degree and they get to determine whether you get to keep your children or not, or if you are a fit parent or not. Most of them do not even have children themselves, once they do they quit, their conscience kicks in. Anyway, I won in court, the Judge tore the agency apart litterly telling the supervisor to STFU (he had the tape recorder shut off first so it was off the record); I knew then that I could let it all go and move on with my life.

Given my experience with the Baltimore police here, I'd never call them about anything that in *any way* involved me. They are as unpredictable and untrained as Tasmanian Devils. From my experience with them during a divorce, I'd say that CPS are often equally unable to distinguish a serious situation from a trivial one.

Lyn, didn't they teach you to proofread in college when your work would only be read by your instructor? How much more so when it will be read by thousands?

Lyn, to be honest, when someone posts something as long, rambling, and difficult to read as your comment, it does not result in readers thinking, "Why yes, that poor woman was victimized for no reason." It makes us think, "Well, if CPS showed up and she was this incoherent and hysterical, it's probably a good thing they investigated further."

I didn't think Lyn's explication was incoherent, rambling, or hysterical. If CPS showed up at YOUR door for no reason and took your kids, how calm would you be? I'm a little surprised at Jim and Heather's immediate put-downs...is there a particular reason for that?

This seemed to fit in this coversation -- The NYTimes ran an article today on hyper-safety concerns of children being counter-productive:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/19/science/19tierney.html

@Harriet - I suspect it's because Lyn bragged non-stop about her lifestyle and peered down her "pretty" nose at those who "simply" have a 4 year degree or were supposedly envious of her perfect life. It isn't just poor, ugly, uneducated people who mistreat their children, and CPS shouldn't treat her any differently than them. Whether her rant was accurate or not, she certainly doesn't make a sympathetic character.

I appologize that my story was rather unclear. I shared my story (painting a picture of myself and my lifestyle) only to let people know that this can happen to anyone, anywhere. The media tends to show extreme cases that often occur in lower income parts of town. They never show the cases that occur in the better sections of town. Income and education does not make a better parent. I feel love and attention are more important than your child having the latest video game. I am a Mother of three of the most precious gifts that I will ever recieve.

My Husband and I were very angry the night CFS came to our house. Until you've experienced such a thing you can't say how someone should react. How would you feel if a caseworker took your 4 and 6 year old (at the time) upstairs to their rooms to question them? We were not allowed to contact our Attorney or to go with them. The Police Officer's that were there told us, "unfortunately they can do what they want."

I don't want anyone's sympathy. I did nothing wrong. I fought and cleared my name. I was able to forgive the neighbor who called CFS on me because I understood she was suffering from some personal problems. I wanted to move on with my life and I did. Hearing about the two women being arrested for falling asleep while their 3 year olds were sleeping brought it all back.

Everyone should go to their states CFS site and read the definition of "Abused or Neglected Child", and what it means to be charged with "Child Abuse and Neglect"; you would be amazed at what you see. Also follow some of the links for past cases (you might have to go through Google for these).

I always thought these forums were to get people to speak about the things that are wrong in the world (share information) so we can move foward. Instead it feels as if the adults can't stop themselves from criticizing each other. No one is perfect and no one's life is perfect, but maybe if we work together instead of against one another we'd get better results.

I think that is any parents worst fear (losing their child). However, I find it utterly ridiculous that this particular woman who took a nap while her child was taking a nap was charged with child endangerment. I mean, not every parent can be there 24/7 to watch a child and it is not like this woman was abusing her child. I just think that this woman was punished enough by the thought of losing her child and it is adding insult to injury to charge her with child endangerment.

http://scholarshipsforwomenonline.com/grants-for-mothers

I could only image how horrible it would be to lose a child. If CPS showed up to take anyone's child away its only normal to react the way she did. I don't think this women deserves more punishment than what she's already going through

http://www.scholarshipsformomsadvice.com/scholarships-for-moms-apply-fr…

Chore Time

sastyk — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 10:17:38 +0000

Chore Time

Note: I wrote this piece in 2009, when my boys were younger. By now they chop food for dinner, Isaiah can indeed use the hatchet and Simon and Isaiah have their own flocks of birds, and the sale of any eggs they raise. The general principles are still the same. We still don't give allowances per se, but allow the children to do extra labor to earn money, over and above the chores they do simply because they live here. I found myself thinking about this book in the context of the discussion around the "Tiger Mother" book that advocates all of children's attention be focused on purely academic achievement. Perhaps because I have a disabled child whose primary achievements will never be academic, and because my husband and I were academic achievers in some ways that still managed to get along doing other stuff, I'm skeptical - as you can see.I

'm a mean Mom. By this I mean that I make my kids do chores. Don't get me wrong, they don't labor all day in sweat shops while I eat bon bons. But when my husband and I say, put the house in order, guess who is expected to help out? Besides cleaning up their own room, all my kids have other responsibilities.

Each of the children is responsible in part for helping to tend the menagerie - Asher feeds the cats and collects the eggs, Isaiah feeds the bunnies and brings them dandelions, and fills their water bottles. Eli feeds the dog and helps brush her, while Simon makes sure the goats have hay, water, minerals and baking soda at all times. Everyone helps get ready for the Sabbath, everyone helps haul wood and weed the garden, as well as do the big harvesting jobs.

Eli collects laundry and puts it in the baskets and loads the washer, Isaiah makes the kids' beds and sets the table (and is awfully proprietary about everything once it is done - I think he may have gotten the tidiness gene that skipped his parents), Asher puts away towels and cloth napkins and helps hang the laundry, Simon wipes down the bathroom and gets the beverages. Once per week, each boy picks the meal, and helps cook it.

As they get older, they can do more - I'm sort of astonished by how much they alread do. Last week, Isaiah made a pan of cornbread all by himself, with only adult help with the hot pads, the oven controls and with reading the recipe. He just hit the 5 1/2 mark - I thought that was pretty good. Simon has already mastered chocolate chip cookies and making tomato sauce. We allow Simon and Eli to take turns with the hatchet, chopping kindling, with heavy supervision, and Isaiah has declared that he will start using the hatchet this year. These are words to strike fear into any mother's heart - but also to fill it with a certain pride and delight.

By the standards of the past, my children get off awfully lightly. At 7, Simon is only allowed to use the hatchet with help - by the time he was seven a hundred years ago, my son would have been expected to keep the woodbox filled. I have no daughters, but had I, a 7 year old girl would have been able to tend the fire and produce a simple meal, as well as sew a fairly neat seam. Simon's seams are graceless (we don't do gendered division of labor here), and I won't trust him with an axe or a fire - and for the latter two, I think that's probably wise. And yet we never cease to remind ourselves that balancing keeping them safe and letting them be competent is a balancing act - too much on either side, and you tip.

I must admit that my children are both more willing and better workers than I was - although I think most of my memories come from adolescence, and I may find that my children's willingness dries up somewhat then. I still remember the outrage I felt at my two step-mothers, both of whom rightly felt that since I made use of the household, I should do some of the work. "What do you mean I not only have to do *all* the dishes but wipe down the stove and counters too?" I remember that thought all too well. I take comfort in the fact that I probably wasn't any more spoiled and callow than any other 13 year old, but still... I do not want my children to ever believe that toilets magically make themselves clean, that dinners simply appear, or that any part of life comes without honest effort. I was appalled to learn that my cousin, a teacher in a wealthy school district had been recently told that her students shouldn't waste time cleaning up after themselves, because after all, they'd have "people" to do that for them when they grew up. Ugh!

That said, however, I understand why many well-intentioned parents just do everything themselves - quite honestly, a lot of times, it is much more annoying to train your child, as they say, up in the way he should go, than to just do it yourself. Add to that that we live in a culture that teaches us that education exists so that you don't have to clean your own toilets or cook your own meals, and the culture that teaches competency to kids is in some danger of being lost - just as it is most needed.

One of the least-favorite things I've ever heard come out of my own mouth is: "I know you want to help me cook, but I just have to do this fast and you can't help." That this is sometimes the reality is not much consolation. But I have found that the time I invest in doing it with them, or even occasionally sneaking around fixing what they do is mostly worth it - I can see in my older kids the seeds of competence. That corn bread was really good. So were the cookies.

My kids still find helping appealing for the most part - they particularly love to be engaged in a collective process. For example, they love harvesting herbs and food - picking is a kid-appealing job. The younger ones will happily dig deep planting holes, and the older ones enjoy showing how much wood they can carry at once. In fact, every one of my sons enjoys proving his strength as much as I did at the same age. It takes some practice in schooling your face to watch a three year old first carry, then drag, then roll a log that is too big for him, and some practice to stop yourself from asking if he wants help, when he's already said he doesn't.

Up to now, we've not paid allowance - they children have tzedakah (charity) money to give away, but other than the occasional windfall from family, they don't have their own money. But we've decided to add on earning chores, which can be paid for in either cash or in popsicle sticks (the home currency) to be redeemed at yard sales, or in our "home store." These will be larger jobs that, hopefully, actually save Mom and Dad work, or contribute to our well being, like weeding a whole garden bed (or more if you are bigger), tidying your room, herding the goats into the back field to graze, entertaining a brother who needs supervision or stacking a certain amount of wood.

Besides the competence, I want my children to have a full sense of what it means to be a participant in any human relationship - whether a nuclear family or a larger community. And a whole lot of that is work. I want them to have a sense of the whole range of work - the annoying jobs that no one likes that have to be done, and are better done cheerfully and with grace, the jobs that become pleasures as you do them, the work that can be integrated with play, the work that takes all your attention, the work that earns them money, the work that does not. I want them to balance remunerative and subsistence labor, because most of us need to find such a balance.

There is an ongoing debate among parents about whether chores should be done for pay, or because you are a member of the household. My thinking is that it is no bad thing to work for pay from early on - but that I also don't want my kids to expect to be paid for every contribution. So one of the things I do when we are doing the chores is try and point out (as often as I can without being boring or pedantic) how useful these skills are or will be to them, or how these skills potentially invest them in the farm as a whole. So, for example, I point out that the wood they split for kindling keeps them warm, but also that our neighbor, a young man in his late teens, makes a fairly good income over the years selling firewood that he cuts after school on his father's land. I point out that when they are older, they too could cut wood, and that the work might keep them warm, and help their family stay warm, or might make them some money. The same is true of baking, mending, milking or cleaning - these are jobs that can be either subsistence labor or a source of income. My middle children are already starting to build a source of income in their own poultry flock, subsidized by parents.

My favorite of Joel Salatin's many excellent books is his _Family Friendly Farming_ book, where he makes the point that if we want to keep our children down on the farm, we must help them find ways to envision themselves as having a viable future there - that means everything from teaching them the work itself to helping them start businesses of their own to treating them as apprentices and junior partners in the shared family agricultural project. I suspect this is good advice for most families, not just farming ones. Fostering as much competence and independence in children as possible, is, I think a tool for making viable and connected futures, not just on the farm, but in the home.

The idea that children's proper work was making good grades, and achieving at sports, and that parents should handle household labor is an artifact of a period of long economic growth, but also an artifact of times when families were not expected to stay together, when the right and proper order of things was that children should grow up, move out, go to college and then start their own place somewhere else. But that model is not fully viable in the face of our collective reality, and I think teaching our children to be competent at home carries with it, not an insistence on proximity, but preparation for it to move back to our lives.

Right now, due to our economic crisis, millions of high school and college graduates and students have no summer job or post school work available, have returned home, after living their whole lives in places where "work" was something you did outside of home. Making space in the home to share the subsistence work we're all going to need is part of preparing for the future. For the millions of unemployed who see themselves as not contributing anything, we must revalue subsistence labor. That begins at the very beginning - at how we teach our kids about the value of their share of the household work.

I realize that it is a long step from Isaiah's pan of cornbread, or Eli's starting the washer to them producing their own crops, managing their own household (or a portion of mine), raising their own livestock or starting up their own businesses. And I realize that by the time they are men, things will be different and it is possible (I don't think likely, but possible) that we will have shifted back into another mode. But it is a step, I think - that is, the things are linked contiguously - they are getting a sense of what work is, and how work will be the way they spend their lives. I hope they will learn to enjoy working, to get through the parts of every job that are drudgery, to delight in the parts that are engaging, and to enjoy working together with others.

I sometimes run into people who advise against making children do particular kinds of work because their parents made them do it, and they hated it. They had to weed the garden or carry wood, scrub the toilet or do the shopping, and the injustice of that shaped forever their relationship to that work. I admit, I sort of identify - my sister and I had to share the dishwashing chores, and I still rather dislike doing dishes, more than 20 years later. On the other hand, I have yet to find a way to compel magical elves to do the dishes for me, and so I do them.

When people tell me that their mother made them weed the garden and thus, for 30 years, they never touched dirt, it makes me think that the problem was not the cruelty of their parents but the lack of ubiquity of gardens, that is, that had their most-hated job been something they had no choice but to suck up and do, they'd have gotten over their repression much faster and been the better for it.

That said, I'm fully expecting my children to write a tell-all book someday about me. My prayer is that the very worst thing that will be said about me (unlikely, but a girl can hope, right?) is that she made her sons pull weeds, wash clothes, cook dinner and get down and dirty, keeping house with their parents.

Sharon

sastyk Tue, 02/01/2011 - 05:17

Tags

Do they really "chop food for dinner"?

What a great contrast to the Tiger Mother's extremely narrow worldview!

I like that you distinguish between chores your sons do because they're part of the household and chores they do to earn money (or its equivalent). While growing up, my siblings and I rotated through a series of chore assignments that corresponded to different allowance payments: setting the table, washing dinner dishes, cooking three dinners a week, doing laundry for our family of five, and cleaning the bathrooms. We did the nightly ones pretty regularly, but the bathrooms often went uncleaned for far too long, and I think part of the problem was that we were perfectly willing to accept the penalty of a reduced allowance for chores left undone. (By my early teens, I earned enough from babysitting that a couple of bucks off my allowance each week didn't hurt much.)

It probably didn't make too much of a difference in the long run - my siblings and I manage to keep ourselves in meals and clean laundry, and when we all get together everyone pitches in on the cooking and cleanup. Your system sounds better, though.

Yes, Simon and Isaiah just cut up a bunch of potatoes for dinner tonight - they have kid friendly knives and had to learn proper techinque, but of course. No fingers lost yet ;-). They like it - Isaiah even asked for his own knife and cutting board for Chanukah.

Sharon

I remember when I was really young - early elementary school - I pretty much begged for the job of edging around the flowerbed and house. This was done with a pair of grass shears. Somehow the job lost its charm over the years ;-). But I do remember feeling a sense of accomplishment and pride when I did the job, at least until I got old enough to find it an annoyance.

You'd hardly find a baby-boomer who didn't have chores to do growing up. It was standard parenting practice of the time. What and how much was done varied, but not that something was done. How else do we learn what needs to be done and how to do it so we can do it when we have a household of our own (at least, those of us who won't have "people" to do it for us)? I think doing household work helps to develop the self-discipline needed to accomplish pretty much anything we want to do. Also, as you point out, it offers a concrete example of a task completed and done well. This is the real way to develop self-confidence: do something and have a product to show for it.

Re paying or not: I'm partial to the position of giving children a small allowance that doesn't depend on their doing of regular chores, then paying them for bigger jobs over and above their usual responsibilities. The point of an allowance, I think, is to help children learn about money and how to manage it. To that end, a small amount paid regularly will suffice. Paying for larger jobs brings in the ideas of earning extra money for particular financial goals a child has and also starts to prepare the child for life as an adult who will need to do work in the larger world.

And what's funny is how everything is so customizable to your exact situation. I have a cousin (he's probably 11 now -- holy cow!), who when a kid, was SO OBSESSED with the money he had, that any punishment he received was a fine. "If you don't get your room clean, it'll cost you a quarter."

I really like the Salatin quote -- there's been so much effort on moving out, moving on, moving away from the farm and family, that I had idly wondered how people USED to stay, and how they would again.

But I equally hate doing the dishes -- for exactly the same reason. But because I hated it so much, I'd make it take forever, and so I was the most thorough of my household to do the dishes. I found all of my mom's moldy coffee cups squirreled away in her room, etc. :-P

I'm afraid we have pretty much failed with both our teenagers.

The 17 year old can and does sew, for herself, for me and for others.

I had to tell my 19 year old, within the past month that while he had never been led to believe in Father Christmas I now had to break it to him that there aren't any Little Faries either. The Litle Fairies who fill the washing machine, or empty it. Who do the washing up or take the bird food out of the back of the car and put it in the feed bins. Who do the washing up. Who clean the floor. Who close the curtains at night when the birds go to bed. Who make the dinner.

I'm now asking him to look around him and see if there is any Little Fairy work that needs done. He hates it, but there is usually something that needs to be done if he were only to observe!

My mother began teaching me to bake bread at age 7, and by the time I was 9, I was responsible for keeping the family in bread. This was sometimes annoying, when I was told I had to put in 20 minutes to get the bread started before going out to play with a friend. But I vividly remember the sense of pride and accomplishment it gave me. And I still have -- and use -- the pottery bread bowl my parents gave me that year as a gift -- Christmas or birthday, can't recall, but I remember how I had longed for my own bread bowl, and how thrilling it was to receive it. And yet, my younger brothers never learned to bake bread, never were made responsible for feeding the animals (another of my chores; feeding the dogs and cats, and bottle-raising the lambs and calves), doing the laundry and ironing, various other household chores . ... this, from a mother who was fiercely feminist on her own account. 30 years later I'm still rather bemused by this.
Doing dishes ... I recall bemoaning how BORRRING the dishes were, as a teenager, and how I longed for excitement. One of my aunts told me, "if you can't be happy washing the dishes, you will never be happy doing anything." One could quibble a bit, ; }, but the basic idea has stuck with me.

I completely agree with you about letting kids experience the value of work of all different kinds, and how important it is to have them fully participate in the household. On the other hand, I'm one of those people scarred for life by doing hated chores, to the extent that I have significant problems keeping my house as clean as I would like because of the psychological barriers I built around these tasks. So I'm taking this fairly seriously.

But I think there's a lot that can be changed about the "how" of assigning chores, without letting kids grow up oblivious. For me, the most important thing is to not pass on my hatred and fear of chores. So I'm taking responsibility and working on my issues, and also making sure that I use at the very least neutral language about chores next to my daughter. I'm also a big believer in tailoring the chores to the kid - my daughter loves washing (the dishes, the floor, the toilet, anything), she loves preparing food, and she shows a lot of interest in sewing and knitting. On the other hand, she's really not interested in organising things, putting them in place and tidying up. So I chose to go with her strengths, and also to have her help me tidy up as a means to an end she wants, like finding a toy or washing the floor. I don't think it's a problem to share the workload according to personal inclinations, but I do want her to become competent in all the basic household chores.

Of course, she'll only be three years old next month, so we're just beginning to experiment. It's good to read about what you do as an experienced mom, and I really love how you balance paid and unpaid work for the kids!

Believe It Or Not, this is Not an Onion Photo-Shopping Project...

sastyk — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 12:19:32 +0000

Believe It Or Not, this is Not an Onion Photo-Shopping Project...

Hat tip to Rod Dreher for pointing out what he deems the most depressing toy ever - yes, your little one can have his or her own cubicle! Has your two year old been falling down on the hard, tedious job of being a child - here's a way of ensuring that she's ready for a life of dismal monotony!

Now you can make home more like the office, enhance the number of hours of screen time (children between 2 and 5 years old only get a measly 32.5 hours of screen time per day on average, gotta get those numbers up!) and bring Dilbert to life for your child.

It is every parent's dream!

Sharon

sastyk Fri, 04/16/2010 - 08:19

Tags

Checked the date, not April 1...

...Holy crap!

Hmmm.... but a similar little tykes cooking set, or laundry or toy vacuum cleaner doesn't send a "don't have a career, stay at home and live a fulfilled life as a housewife" message?

I mean. Really. I have worked in a cubicle and in an office, and my jobs on the computer have been exciting, creative and financially and emotionally rewarding.

It's not at all depressing imagining my daughter playing that she has my job. In fact, it's a dream job of many children, though it takes place at a desk in front of a computer.

But nobody dreams of being a professional vacuum cleaner operator, or a laundress.

Funny - Eiley's first response when she saw this picture, "CMOST!" - which is the Children's Museum here in Troy, NY. They totally have 3 of these consoles set up as you come towards the "Make a Shadow" wall. Kids love 'em.

But at home. Pretty creepy.

It is indeed horrifying. But clicking through to Rod Dreher, I didn't find any mention of it on the main page. Maybe you could link to the actual posting.
Not sure what you see in Mr. Dreher. To me he seems as dippy as David Brooks.

As far as I can tell, it isn't meant for at home. It is meant for institutional use (museums, daycares, preschools.) It also isn't meant to suck children into a horrible life in a cubicle. For one thing, not all jobs with cubicles involve dismal monotony.

http://www.littletikes.com/toys/young-explorer.aspx

32.5 hours/day - you mean hours/week or min/day?

I'm just wishing I could find 32.5 hours in a day to do ANYTHING! What do these kids know that I don't?

My oldest son got so sick of turning compost, weeding the garden, bringing firewood up from the river in a wheelbarrow, tending rabbits, mending leaks in irrigation pipe, etc., etc., that he moved to the city & got a job in a cubicle. To be fair, though, he enjoyed being home for a week in March, and doing chores around the place. I think that a week was enough for him, until next time..

After years of getting burned and cut while working in kitchens, or getting hit by cars as a bike messenger, sometimes there is something to be said for the mindless tedium of cubicle work.

They've got a couple of those at our library. They seemed to be getting a lot of use during our last visit. It was hard to keep my little guy away from them, but I think that was because he was so interested in the older kids (when I sat him over by it later he wasn't so interested). It struck me as rather neat, actually. I'm inclined to think that the whole view of "computer = work" is an obsolete generationally biased view anyway.

what I want to know is -- who has a house big enough for one of those anyway???

Yes, strange and creepy. But we also have given our children, as toys .... toy axes, toy ovens, toy guns, toy babies, toy saws ... In fact, it's kind of a human universal ... kids get toy X where X is related to the adult work.

Of course, you should see the FAO schwarz version of this toy! It's a penthouse executive suite with a big wide glass desk with nothing on it but a 2000 pen set and an intercom. Administrative assistant upgrade kit available.

Nothing new! I wish I had pictures of my grade school. We were on the A.C.E. system:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Christian_Education
At the time, roughly 30 years ago, students in this program were confined to cubicles in an attempt to squelch the inconvenient childhood out of us so that we would be more productive in our unrewarded, pointless efforts.

(happy ending!) Fortunately, a consequential uncle unwittingly gave this astronomy-curious child a copy of the book, "Cosmos". Carl Sagan became my savior in that fundamentalist cubicle farm.

The two "wings" on this toy cubicle remind me of blinders you put on a horse. The layout of an office cube is usually to have the worker's back to the door to easily expose the computer's screen and maximize productivity. The height of cubicles is such that someone's head will stick out when they stand up. Cubicles are intended to take away your privacy and discourage the desire to congregate.

I checked, and an administrative assistant upgrade kit is an urban myth.

Beanie_Baby

Oh yeah, please notice the angle of the little boy's left wrist where the inflammation of carpal tunnel would set in with overuse.

Dad, let's go to the park and play ball.

Please Dad.

The Baby Beanster

Playing in the backyard seems more appropriate - fresh air, sun, imagination.....

viv in nz

"Cubicles are intended to take away your privacy and discourage the desire to congregate."

There is a time and place for interaction with others. There can often be a lot of cacophony in the office which is not good for concentration. Not everyone can have their own enclosed office. Cubicles are more space-efficient.

You know, if you don't want to work in the office, don't. But I'm not going to claim everybody feels like Dilbert, Office Space, or the guy in Brazil.

Too often we extrapolate our feelings onto others when in fact people are different. It's kind of the "moral majority" phenomenon. We must not make such assumptions.

I was perfectly happy to work in an office as a programmer at the height of the dot com boom. Not quote as much now, having done it for 13 years straight and having kind of been obsoleted by the economy, but I can think of far more unpleasant work environments for me than sitting at a computer.

Different strokes for different folks.

TW, Sharon, don't you make your livelihood staring at a computer monitor, blogging and writing books? Is that okay because you work from home?

That is not even close to being as sad as this toy janitorial cleaning trolley...

http://www.toysrus.com/product/index.jsp?productId=3184394

I mean, computers can be fun. But a mop for a moppet is still a mop.

When PhysioWife was a little girl, she loved to pretend to do paperwork. She would have loved that fucking toy!!!

I don't really think criticizing the idea of "buy your kid a freakin' expensive faux cubicle so they can get more screen time" is in itself an indictment of every job involving a cubicle. The average American child between two and five gets 32+ hours a week (not a day) in front of a screen - is there anything good or healthy about that? I'm not anti-tv/computer - we own both and sometimes let the kids use them, but 32 hours?!?!?

No reason your kid can't play office at home with an etch-a-sketch or paper and stapler - without wing blinders to prevent him from accidentally having eye contact with a person. The point isn't "all jobs involving cubicles are dilbert jobs" but "we're teaching our kids to stare blankly at screens all day."

I don't see this as fundamentally like giving them toy adult tools of other kinds - this isn't a play office, it is a computer. As far as I know, there's no pediatrician on the planet out there saying "yes, give your kids more screen time to help prepare them for adulthood."

Sharon

And Ed, no it isn't ok because I do it at home, it is ok because I'm 37 years old, not four, and my brain is probably about as fully developed as it probably ever will be (pity that ;-)). And even then, I don't think life in the cubicle or in front of my computer at home in my bedroom is the healthiest model in the whole world - I can feel the consequences of sitting in my body, from the repetetive strain to the stiffness of inadequate motion, which is why I'm trying to do it a lot less. And again, I'm 37, not four. I don't really see why this is so complicated.

The thing about most of the toys we use to train kids in adult ways is that they also involve imaginative play, using your body, and pretend. Playing a computer game on a screen that is predesigned and managed for you is not the same thing. Even if they grow up to love their cubicles, that's not what they are supposed to be doing with either brain or body when they are four.

I guess I'm kind of mystified that this needs explaining.

Sharon

"In this age of technology we think it is essential that children learn about computers as early as possible. This technology can enhance critical and cognitive thinking skills, problem-solving abilities and analytical thinking. Having child-appropriate computers and software in your facility shows parents that you understand the important role technology plays in providing an enriched learning environment for their child's growth. It's a hallmark way to set you apart from other childcare facilities."

From the description of the toy Nadine linked to. It is true, it is for daycare centers - ooh, so much better! Because this is the classy kind of time your kid spends staring at the screen. And look, the company provides a lot of total bullshit about the importance of having technology in your facility.

Because, of course, we know that no people who didn't have computers as babies ever become fluent in them, right? And we certainly know that pediatricians and developmental experts overwhelmingly believe your two year old will have better critical thinking skills if they get some cube time.

Oy.

I'm pretty sure that kids will pick up on computers without a creepy, expensive toy. From my own experience, the kids know enough by age 10 to be teaching their parents how to use the computer.

When I was a little girl, I loved to play "office," which involved sitting on a chair in the living room and filling out rows of numbers, which symbolized whatever I wanted, on graph paper, accounting paper, and other types of paper my dad brought home for me to use. I would make pretend phone calls to people and write important memos. A special treat was when my mom let me borrow her tape recorder and microphone, and I pretended to dictate, then interviewed my visiting grandparents. This was all so GOOD because it combined imitation, imagination, and invention. I just don't see today's toys doing much of that... for the most part, as you point out, they teach button-pushing, direction-following, and screen-watching. What are we doing to our kids?!

Sharon - I disagree to an extent with the idea that exposure to computers early won't increase fluency with them - I work in an environment full of ludicrously intelligent people, most of whom are 10-30 years older than me, I can run circles around any of them when it comes to using computers - I (and they) put this down to the fact that I was exposed to computers as a kid (still have awesome memories of almost, but not quite, programming a home made space invaders game with my dad - which IMO beats the hell out of playing catch, if only because playing catch would have involved a long walk to the local park and the very real threat of stepping in poop) whereas for the most part none of them were (either because computers weren't yet readily available, or because they grew up in areas of the world where they probably still aren't)

Although I'd agree that this is maybe a tad silly for a 2 year old (what's wrong with an xbox!) I'd much prefer to have kids doing something interactive and thought provoking with a computer (my brother learned to play chess age ~4 on a beat up old 286 PC - yay battle chess (apparently even a 4 year old can be motivated by the desire to see little animated characters brutally murder each other)- and not just the rules, he could give adults a run for their money) rather than being plonked in front of a TV to watch drivel - so long as they also get to do like, other, real world stuff, too. (perhaps we should give recycled real computers to kids, rather than these nonsensical parodies... even the text to speech function of older versions of windows would have held me fascinated for hours as a kid "hur hur the computer said poop!" - plus recyling is good! (and when they get older you can give them other recycled parts and let them figure out how to build it... thanks dad!)

Sharon, your opening lines said "the most depressing toy ever - yes, your little one can have his or her own cubicle! Has your two year old been falling down on the hard, tedious job of being a child - here's a way of ensuring that she's ready for a life of dismal monotony!" Forgive us if we started off with the wrong impression that your were somehow making "an indictment of every job involving a cubicle." Your point about screen time was kind of hidden among all the Dilbert jokes.

I agree with you about kids not needing more screen time, but all the "office life sucks" comments make me feel really defensive - after all, I have and like an office job and it's hard hearing my life described as "dismal monotony."

A huge hunk of plastic designed to instill pretend play of sitting under ultra-violet lighting, staring at a computer screen, and pushing paper. Sad.

Is this all we want for our children?

I just pushed some paper from under a florescent light and on this computer at a lawyer under another florescent light at another computer that saved a small company and a family from bankruptcy.

I'll walk home and take the dog for a long walk.

I'll make a local strawberry cobbler.

I'll toss some morel mushrooms in black butter and shallots as a base for the Gruyere, shaved ham and baguettes I picked up over lunch and make Provence sandwiches to go with Saturday farmer's market asparagus and a nice burgundy.

I'll visit the gang at my local watering hole for a scotch or a brandy after dinner to discuss the news of the day with humans and avoid the vast wasteland of television (including the self congratulatory baby boomer crap-fest that is on the American Experience's very unspecial Earth Day episode).

I will return to my bride and pig/dog just as the laugh tracks are winding down on the sit-coms, do some dishes, read a chapter in the Ambrose Bierce biography and have a cuddle while she talks herself to sleep pouring out the horrors of a family law practice.

I'll be up in the middle of the night to circle the block while the dog has a pee, contemplate the fate of Bierce, miss my friend who died in the Murrow bombing and sleep.

Tomorrow I will make coffee and sit under my florescent lights banging out a revocable trust for a man whose English is so broken other lawyers lacked the patience to talk to him and knowing I wouldn't trade my "life of dismal monotony" for anything.

If The Bride is gestating then it will not be long before I pass on the big quarter sawn oak office chair where my father wrote his Phd dissertation, where I studied for the bar exam and where my kids can fulfill my grandfather's from bellhop to industrialist admonition.

"Anybody can figure out which is the business end of a shovel. It takes a special kind of nerve to bend your will around a pen for eight hours a day and make it do what you want."

Emily, I guess I think that observing that certain kinds of play are dismal for children doesn't mean "all office jobs are dismal." I think structuring screen time and sitting still for very young children is manifestly different than adults doing it work - there are kinds of adult work we simply don't model in play, because they are adult, and the whole phenomenon of the cubicle - sit still for a long time, stare at the screen, don't make eye contact or interact with anyone else - is the exact opposite of what people believe is appropriate for children. Sorry if this offends people, but again, I don't think the idea that it is a depressing invention says anything about the utility of any particular job.

Ewan, I think if kids were programming and taking apart computers, that might be worth doing, but I don't think very young children should be staring at screens, even if moving the mouse makes the do something. I don't think a child could do much on that front with this.

But moreover, I think you have to deal with what we know about kids - the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends 0 hours of screen time for kids under two, and minimal screen time, less than 10 hours per week for kids 2-5 - and we have so wildly exceeded this, with very predictable physical health consequences that you'd really need to make a compelling case that most kids, chess skills included, would be better off with more.

Sharon

and the whole phenomenon of the cubicle - sit still for a long time, stare at the screen, don't make eye contact or interact with anyone else - is the exact opposite of what people believe is appropriate for children.

This is at best only what occurs in the worst cubicle based jobs, not to say that it doesn't occur, but I'm sure that one could equally make the claim for any sphere of employment that a percentage of the jobs are monotonous soul killers.

I started my present job in a cubicle, now moved to a rather spiffy window office, but will be back in a cubicle again in a few months (there is no heirarchical assignment of windows it appears, which was nice while it lasted) - if I spent any great length of time not making eye contact, interacting, or indeed sitting still for a great length of time (depending how one quantifies a great length of time I guess) then I'd likely be looking for another job, quite possibly one of the soul sucking cubicle jobs that are being painted as the norm here. However I honestly think my job is completely awesome, cubicle and all, and apparently others do too.

Do I advocate for more time for kids in front of a monitor? Not at all. I was merely pointing out that done right it isn't necessarily a bad thing, although I had hoped that I had made the point that a) this particular manifestation of sitting in front of a screen doesnt appear to be a good thing (I bet it doesnt even have scienceblogs access) and b) 2 is probably a tad bit too young for any significant time in front of a monitor (although should a 2 year old show the desire to plonk down in front of a computer and simulate Daddy spending waaaay too long arguing on the internet I'd be more than happy to either grab a crappy old monitor and keyboard out of storage and let em have at it until they got bored - I'll get back to you in 2 years to let you know how this goes down!)

Friday Sprog Blogging: screen-time or scream-time.

jstemwedel — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 10:07:06 +0000

Friday Sprog Blogging: screen-time or scream-time.

Earlier this week, the younger Free-Ride offspring "made a bad decision" about time utilization at the after school program, electing to play outside and do a project before doing homework, meaning the homework was still unfinished when I arrived to fetch the sprogs.

The standard consequence for this is, apparently, one of the greatest horrors that can be visited upon a third grader: the loss of screen-time (which in the Free-Ride household covers television, computers, and hand-held game systems).

Through angry tears, the younger Free-Ride offspring responded to this travesty thusly:

Younger Free-Ride offspring: This is horrible! This will make three days in a row with no screen-time!

Dr. Free-Ride: Child, you'll survive. Generations of children grew up without screens at all, so you can make it through three days.

Younger Free-Ride offspring: But I want to watch TV.

Dr. Free-Ride: Mmm-hmm, and the hope is that this will help you remember to use your time wisely.

Younger Free-Ride offspring: No, I need to watch TV!

Dr. Free-Ride: Oh really?

Younger Free-Ride offspring: Watching TV is one of my hobbies! If I don't do it regularly, I'll get rusty!

Dr. Free-Ride: What?

Younger Free-Ride offspring: Without practice, I'll forget how to use the remote or change channels.

Dr. Free-Ride: The horror! You might end up watching a Congressional debate!

Younger Free-Ride offspring: Or South Park!

(By this point even the offended sprog was cracking a smile.)

Dr. Free-Ride: This all seems kind of ... improbable. I have this sense that television watching is the kind of activity people can fall right back into even if they haven't done it in a long time, no need for practice or stretches or anything like that.

Younger Free-Ride offspring: Really, there are lots of buttons on the remote. I could forget where the mute button is, or forget that I'm supposed to mute the commercials.

Dr. Free-Ride: Not in a matter of days. And not if you know what's good for you.

Younger Free-Ride offspring: If I knew that, my homework would probably be done already.

* * * * *

Being a science-minded child, the younger Free-Ride offspring is convinced that there must be some research out there that bears on whether you can "get rusty" at watching television, and would welcome pointers to papers that report the findings of such research.

Dr. Free-Ride is fairly confident that even if the evidence indicates that one can "get rusty" at watching television, she can make the case that the younger Free-Ride offspring's interest in not losing this knack is less important than other interests, like mastering the skills being taught in school, or avoiding stupid fights with parents about homework.

Dr. Free-Ride is less confident that the younger Free-Ride offspring will be persuaded by this argument.

jstemwedel Fri, 03/26/2010 - 06:07

Tags

well, there are a couple problems as i see this. first, hand exercises are important to maintain the general health of one's hands. it is possible that clicking the channel changer could provide this. on the other hand, there's the "surfer d00d" channel surfing problem where many repetitive motions, such as channel surfing, can damage one's hands so that sprog-the-younger cannot use the channel changer at all because s/he has to wear hand braces.

i have never had a television so i can say that the kid has a point: it does take practice to get really good at parking your ass in front of the b00b tube for hours or days at a stretch. i've never mastered the art, but i am always afraid this ability will somehow sneak up on me when i least expect it and transform me into an oversized potato, complete with hundreds of staring eyes trained on the flickering screen while sitting helplessly on the couch, wearing hand braces, unable to change channels or turn off the tv and escape.

This... is brilliant. :) I get SO tired of stupid fights with my EXTREMELY OCD Asperger kid that it just exhausts me. Sometimes I think parenting has given me PTSD, and other times I think I probably just need a nap. ;) Thus, it is great, so great to hear this story of sticking to your guns with humor and love. :)

I've gotta say, Younger Sprog is right. When you have ridiculous cable service 1 and you switch to ridiculous cable service 2, you forget how to change the channels. The "up and down" buttons just don't work (you have to go to "guide" or "menu" or who knows what). As someone who goes back and forth between Carebear's house with ridiculous cable service 2 to ridiculous cable service 1 at home, I do honestly forget sometimes. As does Carebear.

There is a yet more important consideration. I was recently at a party and somebody wanted to turn on the Olympics (on any of three ESPN channels- you'd think it'd be easy with so many targets). The hapless individual kept accidentally pushing the rapid-to-pay-per-view button that allows watching of "adult" shows for an exorbitant fee. Do you younger sprog to be visiting a friend, attempting to turn on NOVA scienceNow with Neil deGrasse Tyson, and instead only being able to find "Screwing the neighbors wife 3"?????

I like the blanket approach of screen time. Covers everything without any exceptions.

Not only do I love hearing about other parents who set limits and stick to them, I also am thrilled to hear that ours is not the only household the mutes all the commercials! My 10-year-old is already talking back to them and it is music to my ears. ;-)

I was very, very confused when I learned that not all people argue with the television. Muting the commercials is the saner choice.

Ha, that definitely sounds like the argument of a (smart) 3rd grader! I also like your concept of 'screen-time.

Dan Savage on Gay Adoption

grrlscientist — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 04:59:26 +0000

Dan Savage on Gay Adoption

tags: gay adoption, United States, equality, religion, children, religion, hypocrisy, Dan+Savage, streaming video

Unlike straight parents, gay parents cannot go out one night, get drunk and adopt. Unlike straight parents, gay parents have children because they are wanted and planned for. Certainly this was the situation for my (straight) so-called parents, who not only didn't plan for me and didn't want me, but they were horribly abusive and neglectful after I was born, and after they'd finished trying to destroy me, they gave me up to the state when I was a teen-ager. I would love to have had Dan Savage or someone like him as one of my parents instead of the violent, hateful wackaloons that I was born to. If anyone is "destroying the fabric of society," through their behavior, it's all those people who thoughtlessly pop out unwanted kids.

grrlscientist Sun, 02/07/2010 - 23:59

Tags

I've loved Dan Savage for years, ever since I discovered him in the Seattle Weekly when I first moved there. Now he's reached the level of people I respect highly, not just are entertained by (cough cough 'Santorum' cough cough), because of the causes he takes on and the way he pursues them.

A brilliant man, I'm sure a great parent, and oh how I wish there were loads more just like him. The world would be a better place with people like this in such strong numbers that they can no longer be ignored or marginalized.

Well, that's not totally true. If you live in a repressed world where gay people don't get to acknowledge they are gay, they can, since that's pretty much how my lesbian mother had me ;-). She married my Dad, had 3 more kids and 7 years of unhappiness and then left him for another woman, my beloved step-mom, who she's been with for 30 years. Not that I regret my conception, or anything, but it does seem that for Mom, it would have been easier to go the considered route, but not possible in the early 70s.

Sharon

*grin* You put life in perspective... Just when one things things are or were awful someone comes along with a better (a.k.a. worse) story! :)

I don't understand what the crux of this issue is.

If we came up with a word other than "marriage", and gave gay couples all exactly the same rights and privileges of heterosexual spouses, would that be acceptable to all parties?

So gay partnerships would be *precisely* the same in *every* way, except for the name.

@joshua

No, that wouldn't be acceptable to all parties, because the fact that it would be the same as marriage but STILL NOT marriage is what makes it unequal.

It still classifies gay people as second-class citizens ("You can have the same rights we have, but you have to call it something else because you're NOT like us.").

If it were a simple matter of semantics, of a silly name for the exact same rights, then why are straight people so worked up over it? If we're willing to "award" the rights of marriage to same-sex couples, why not just call it what it is: marriage? To say that gay people shouldn't be so worked up over a name is hypocritical when straight people seem to be just as (if not more) stuck on the terminology.

Natalie,

I don't know why straight people are worked over it. Just as I don't know why gay people would be worked up over my solution.

It is a matter of semantics. We use different words to describe different things.

Should we rename football to baseball? Or for that matter, should we just get rid of "homosexual" and "heterosexual", and just call everyone "sexuals"? After all, they are different names, and that fundamentally implies inequality, right?

-j

If we came up with a word other than "marriage", and gave gay couples all exactly the same rights and privileges of heterosexual spouses, would that be acceptable to all parties?

The same reasoning from Brown v. Board of Education applies. Separate institutions are inherently unequal.

joshua---

I see this solution as analogous to "separate but equal" facilities that were supposed to be provided for black people in the Jim Crow era.

I seem to recall that "separate but equal" emphatically did not ensure equal facilities or treatment and was eventually struck down for precisely that reason.

I am not convinced that your solution will be different. I suspect there are a lot of gay and lesbian people feel the same, and who want real marriage instead of a stopgap that might be a blind alley that will prevent equal treatment for another fifty years.

Weekend project: overhauling Snow White so that it is suitable for my daughter

sciencewoman — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 03:15:03 +0000

Weekend project: overhauling Snow White so that it is suitable for my daughter

Don't worry I'll be back to the course design series soon, but I spent yesterday focused on other things (paper revisions, grant proposals) and I haven't completed the necessary work to get the next post up. And it's Friday, so let's divert to ~~lighter~~ equally serious but different topics.

As the mother of a toddler daughter I've been struggling with the overt patriarchy of the classic Disneyfied fairy tales, in which a stereotypically beautiful damsel in distress is helpless until rescued by a prince. I'd been trying to avoid exposing my daughter to the princess stories (Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White) but now the princess-free spell has been broken by those around me, and Minnow is enchanted with Cinderella.
When she first asked me to tell her the story (having heard some version elsewhere), I managed to recast it as being about friendship and being nice to people. Later she discovered an old copy of a Disney Cinderella story book (emphasis on beauty and helplessness), so I am having a harder time telling the story in the way I want to tell it while she's simultaneously exposed to the Disney images.

Browsing the tubes has shown me that I'm far from the only person who's not in love with the Disney princessification of young girls. There's a cool series of photos from The Fallen Princess project , Brigindo's been doing some musing on other classic fairy tales, and even the Dad Labs have taken on "princess parenting." (Take note of that one, Fish, it's by guys for guys.)

All of which is leading up to, Minnow has asked me to tell her Snow White. I've been fending her off by saying that Mommy doesn't know that story, but I'm sure I'm going to have to confront it soon. Can anyone help me recast Snow White as anything but a patriarchical mess of women-on-women violence, domestic servitude, and helplessness?

Your help would be much appreciated.

sciencewoman Thu, 07/16/2009 - 23:15

Tags

Well, Neil Gaiman did an interesting rework titled Snow, Glass, Apples, but it's not exactly suitable for small children...

It's probably not yet suitable for your daughter to read right now, but Terry Pratchett's "Wee free men" is a great book, quite the opposite of the usual story, because it's the prince who's being a)complete use- or helpless and b)rescued by a nine-year-old (who doesn't like fairytales at all, because they're all not logical and the princesses are just beautiful but helpless and always in need of rescue) girl. With a frying pan. If you don't get around telling snowwhite in the usual way, maybe you could tell that story to show another kind of adventure. Or give it to her when she gets into reading, instead of the usual "girl books".

Very much second Terry Pratchett, but I agree, I don't think Minnow is old enough.

My thought is that you're a concerned parent with respect to these type of things and Minnow likely already understands what you want to really teach her: good values, non-submissivness of women, etc. And the stories, they're just stories. They don't have to become a big deal - especially if you say this is just a story, that there are many different types of stories.

This is coming from a female who knew all the Disney stories, played with Barbies, did ballet etc, and still came out with a phd in mechanical engineering, a healthy body image, and feminist tendencies.

Everything in moderation, even moderation.

There is a wonderful book by a Swedish writer/artist, Pija Lindenbaum, that I see is translated: Bridget and the Gray Wolves.
http://www.amazon.com/Bridget-Gray-Wolves-Pija-Lindenbaum/dp/9129653959…

Story: Bridget is left behind on a day care excursion and has to spend the night in the forest where the Gray Wolves lurks behind the trees. She finds out that she is not the only one that is afraid there, the wolves are not particularly brave... but are good play mates and night company.

She has made more books for children, some of these are translated: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=ntt_at_ep_srch/179-9267423-6159940?ie=UTF8&…

Both I and my daughters love the books about Bridget.

...and I forgot to say that I partly agree with Kate, with the exception that it is probably necessary to present a lot of alternatives to the Disney, Barbie, My Little Pony and other narrowing worlds.

This is why I mentioned the books above. :)

Perhaps instead of stumbling upon the dwarves' house and impulsively cleaning it because it is messy, she can start fixing the broken door that allowed her to get in uninvited, and fix the plumbing because the tub was broke and she needed to clean up after her escape. The dwarves can cook her a fancy meal as a thank-you.

Perhaps the stepmother is the SMARTEST in the land, and is jealous of Snow White's intelligence.

Mercedes Lackey. She's written several novels (The Serpent's Shadow is loosely based on Snow White) retelling various fairy tales. A bit much in the vocabulary department for a 2yo, but you might be able to work with it.

Robin McKinley wrote a wonderful retelling of Beauty and the Beast as Beauty. IIRC it was the first book I read to my kids, closely followed by her Newberry Award winning The Blue Sword.

Unfortunately, there's really not much you can do with Snow White unless you go all the way to Beach Blanket Babylon. About the only thing that can be said for the Disneyfied versions is that they're not as creepy as the original, where SW bears several children to Princey while still in a coma! (Ewwwww!) Two is also pretty early to be using stories as bad examples.

As an antidote may I suggest the excellent Paper Bag Princess?

There are some great books out there about princesses that are NOT the disney stuff. They worked to distract my daughter from the yucky disney books she encountered. I told both my kids from a VERY early age, "Mommy doesn't want to read that book/see that movie. That story makes it look like girls are not strong enough or smart enough to take care of themselves. I think that's silly and not nearly as much fun as (fill in the blank with the book you want to read/story you wish to tell)." We've used a similar approach with their exposure to toy commercials, fast food, etc.

Here's my list of strong princess books.
1. Princess Pigsty
2. The Paper Bag Princess
3. Cinderedna
4. Princess Smartypants
5. Princess Furball
6. The Barefoot book of princesses
7. The Princess Knight

For Snow White, maybe it could be a story of a girl who's strong enough to leave a bad situation, who makes an amazing group of friends who help her and eventually goes on to a loving, healthy, equitable relationship with the prince?

Instead of Disney movies, try Hayao Miyazaki's, like Spirited Away or Princess Mononoke, that feature animation with girls who drive the plot and way more imagination than anything Disney could come up with. When your daughter's a little older, Tamora Pierce's books are great for strong women. When I was 12, she rocked my world and they were the very books I had been searching for.

Though I wouldn't hold up the Fallen Princess series as a good example. They have some very serious problems of their own, particularly with Jasmine, which is discussed in detail here: http://www.racialicious.com/2009/06/19/fallen-princess-jasmine-raises-q…

When I was little, I was fond of Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz. There are a lot of other issues in the books, but at least Dorothy isn't helpless.

Second the Paperbag Princess, and second? third? the Wee free men.

Perhaps a preface that in 'once upon a time' land, girls are judged on their looks, instead of their value as people? That some stories focus a lot on looks, but we (mummy & daddy) try to see the whole person - not just what they look like but how they behave?

IIRC, the wicked witch is jealous of Snow White's beauty. Jealousy about things we cannot control, someone being mean to you and playing tricks can all happen - it doesn't require helpless victimhood.

I like the idea of SW making lots of friends who help her, while she helps them, until the prince comes along.

Perhaps also talk about the 'framework' of many stories: the hero/ine, the supporting role, the bad guy, the conflict, the scary bit, the resolution?

I have no idea if this is suitable for a toddler - just a thought!

Look forward to hearing what you try in response...

My suggestion is that you let your daughter be normal and allow her to read a harmless Disney story! I grew up hearing the normal stories and I didn't have any issues with thinking I needed to be "saved". Why not read her the stories and then as she grows older teach her to be an independent woman through your actions? I find these types of knee jerk reactions to innocent stories utterly ridiculous.

The ordinary princess by MM Kaye was one of my favorites (and mixed themes from a modern and traditional fairy tale). You could also go the Brothers Grimm route - in those they are cautionary tales about disobeying parents etc and 1) much more gory 2) much less happy ending-y.

Second the nomination of Ordinary Princess! And also the idea that the example you set her daily is far more important than occasional exposure to misogynistic stereotypes, particularly if you discuss alternate endings with her. Though not about princesses, Blueberries for Sal and Jan Brett's books feature great illustrations and strong female characters.

The cult of the princess is really hard to avoid. And it *is* worse than when we were kids because of the marketing. It's everywhere on everything. You can even buy a Cinderella basketball, for chrissakes, though I'm sure you would never want to use it for basketball, because that would involve bouncing Cinderella on her face.

We very strictly limited tv and dvds with our kids, and told them "modified" versions of all the stories. But they ended up watching all of that dreck at daycare and school!

I find these types of knee jerk reactions to innocent stories utterly ridiculous.
Humbug. I find this type of reaction to stories invigorating and entertaining!

I was mulling over this very issue a while back. I had planned to do a Snow White story using penguins, and I was struck by how little the title character actually does. My eventual solution (if you can call it that) was to ignore Snow White for the most part and concentrate on the stepmother. Thinking back on it, my version didn't really have a good moral either, other than perhaps "Don't try to kill your stepdaughter, especially not with an increasingly elaborate series of Rube Goldberg schemes, or you'll be sorry".

As others have mentioned it is probably impossible to completely shield Minnow from the Disney princesses. I also feel the exposure is far less benign than it was when most of us were growing up. I think reinventing the stories and offering her alternate stories is an excellent alternative. Perhaps "Fearless Girls, Wise Women & Beloved Sisters: Heroines in Folktales from Around the World" by Kathleen Ragan might be helpful.

i second the Barefoot Book of Princesses. i wish i had a daughter to read to... (my son is not even remotely interested in princesses).

actually, the Barefoot Books are very good - as are Usborne Books. vastly superior to the icky Scholastic Books that our daycare likes to encourage us to buy for fundraising.

I haven't read the specific Terry Pratchett book recommended upthread, but strong female characters appear in several other books of his. In particular, Equal Rites, about a girl who goes to school to learn how to use her wizard powers (bestowed on her at birth by a dying wizard who didn't realize she was female).

Also, Shakespeare. Old Will's plays feature quite a few strong women: Juliet, Portia, Lady MacBeth, etc.

And when she gets old enough to deal with murder mysteries, I recommend Agatha Christie's Miss Marple stories (but most definitely not Hercule Poirot; M. Poirot has a bad habit of taking logic much too far). Miss Marple always fingers the bad guy, even when the police can't figure it out, just by using her brain.

I don't have any good alternatives for princess-type stories, but I share your revulsion for the Disney versions. They promote the notion of the useless female, which I too find abhorrent, and not at all harmless.

We tried so hard to limit the princess influx at our house, but guess what Norah got for her birthday? (You know, you were there... Barbies! Dressed as princesses! With sparkles!) While I'm not a huge fan of the old-school princess movies, I've let her watch them, largely so she can keep up with what the other little girls are talking about. We've discussed them, and talked about what Snow White/Cinderella/etc. could have done to save herself faster, or fight back against the evil queen/dragon/etc. I agree with previous posters who have declared everything in moderation - you can't hide from it, so go ahead and let her see it... but you don't have to accept it as is. Question the sparkles. :)

In our house, we're on a big Enchanted kick - the princess not only saves the prince, but she fights off an evil queen who turns herself into a dragon AND escapes from her stereotypical storybook life. It's a little scarier at the end because it's live action, but Norah loves it.

I have a 2-year-old boy (yes, boy) who is also obsessed with Disney Princesses. He isn't particularly taken with the stories themselves (though we have read the short Disney version of Cinderella), he does love some princess figures I bought him - they dance together, and they push each other or fly in the air. Based on seeing this, I think you can introduce the Disney Princess characters with alternative personalities (in my son's play, Cinderella is kind of a bully and gets into fights with Jasmine).

Also, Disney publishes lots of books that include pictures of the princesses without the actual stories. We currently have "What is a princess?" out of the library, and it briefly talks about the "virtues" of the princesses - I think princesses are kind, smart (really!), caring, like to dress up, polite, and always live happily ever after. (I might be missing one there.) Perhaps you could let Minnow indulge in princesses without dealing with their stories.

(For my part, I find that the male characters in those stories are pretty flat. And they don't dress nearly well enough to attract my little boy's attention!)

I think you can not avoid completely these princess and their stories even if you want it (actually their Disney version which is more annoying for me not the story by itself). They are everywhere and your daughter will eventually get them from the surrounding even if you will hide them or alter them in home. We try to provide as much of other stories as well as a complementary measure to our 5 year old daughter. I think the key is not to avoid anything but to educate. If you will try to avoid it, your daughter will find more interest in it assuming that there something worth to know. And I am noticing that my 5 year old daughter is growing out of princess-mania slowly and enjoys many other books as well. I have complied a list of books which we like to read frequently, here it is
http://rainbow-science.blogspot.com/2009/07/reading-suggestions-for-4-5…

Dang -- I forgot Patricia Wrede's Enchanted Forest Chronicles. Not only is Cimorene a delightful princess who isn't about to put up with the roles assigned to her (just a small understatement!) but the whole series makes mockery of the standard fairy-tale tropes.

That a two-year-old can readily pick up on, and stands a good chance of immunizing her against the pervasive messages in a way that more explicit criticism won't.

Since Minnow is a toddler, I'd recommend "The Wolves In the Walls" by Neil Gaiman, which is very much in that age range-- Coraline's pretty good too. Pratchett and Wrede, and also Tamora Pierce's Tortall books (The Lioness and Wild Magic series, and others) are all wonderful, but are more in the young adult/grade school reading level range.

Try reading her Patricia Wrede's "Enchanted Forest Chronicles".

G-rated, and the starring princess is a competent young lady who "belongs" to a dragon and fends off the wanna-be rescuing knights.

Some of the Disneys are less abhorrent than others (though your tastes may vary, of course). Beauty and the Beast revolved around a strong, independent, intellectual young woman whose idea of romance was being given a giant library (I still swoon at that scene). Sure, the guy fights for her in the end, but as princessy stories go, it's not bad. So you could try getting both Snow White and B&B, and pushing the B&B a bit more heavily...?

Stories have a lot of power, but only as much as we give them. Perhaps you're giving these stories far too much power by trying to avoid/rewrite them. Minnow will eventually realize that the stories everyone else knows are not the ones her mommy told her. And she's going to wonder why and she's going to miss the cultural/social references to those stories. There is a reason those stories are the way they are. They are a part of history. They served a purpose in their time. We have learned from those stories and hopefully many of us have grown beyond those stories. Tell Minnow that. Expose her to all types of stories: the Disney ones and the alternative ones. Let her know what you think about them, all of them. Let her think about them. If she wants Snow White, read her Snow White (though maybe not the dozens of times a day if she asks for that) and while you're reading it, talk about it. I agree with Annie "Question the sparkles." Ask Minnow what she thinks, what she might do in the situations in the story. Get her involved as storyteller. You will not always be there to overhaul the stories for her, so teach her how to think critically so she can do it herself. Yes, I know she's 2.5, but even at that age she understands choices: Clean the dwarfs' house or take that nap and when the dwarfs get home suggest that they all work together to clean up.

Most of all, don't forget to tell her the most important and powerful stories of all, the ones that will carry far more weight than any princess story: yours and hers.

Ella Enchanted is a quasi-Cinderella story, and although it might take a while to read aloud you could always summarize.

Also, in a weird way it may be better to give her some exposure to the traditional fairy tales (I tend to think more traditional is better than the Disney versions, but they both have pros and cons). Then when she gets a bit older, she can read the enchanted forest chronicles (Patricia C. Wrede) and appreciate the subversive streak.
I found them via Chinaberry, which might contain other items to your taste.

I would second the paperbag princess. As a non-white individual, I had alot of issues with the colour of my skin because beautiful = white.

Thanks for the link to the DadLabs video - I hadn't heard of them and thought that was a good piece.

I'm a librarian, but a medical one, so this isn't my area of expertise, but I'm going to share your post with some folks to see if they have suggestions.

I'd also suggest Jack Zipes who either wrote or edited a volume of "feminist" fairy tales that were quite good. I don't have the title on me now (moving and everything is packed away) and some of the stories may be for older kids (or adults) but I do recommend it!

Young children will understand the story in the context of your own response to it. Just because some people pull out of the story just those elements that can be read as, "Women are helpless and dependent on men" doesn't mean that you have to. You can read the various traditional versions of the story, including the Disney version, without imposing on modern children morals about women being submissive (there are no willingly submissive women in this story) or being helpless (the women in this story are very active in getting what they want).

I read the traditional story of Snow White to my grandchildren and emphasize those elements that support my own values and view of women. There actually are people in the world who judge others by their looks and try to hurt people they are jealous of. And there are children who are homeless, and families where a child is not loved and cared for. It doesn't seem helpful to try to avoid those issues. In reading stories to the children, I always pause to make a quick remark like, "Oh, that was wrong, wasn't it?" or, "She shouldn't have done that" or "That was a good thing to do because . . . ." I always point out that the Prince falls in love with Snow White because he has heard the story of what a brave and kind person she is.

In this story, we have a powerful family member who wrongly focuses on looks and throws Snow White out because of her appearance. Even a young child can begin to understand that we should not put a lot of importance on appearance, whether it's because we think the person is beautiful or because we think the person is ugly. I point out to the grandchildren that when the "witch" appears, Snow White is polite and kind to her because she doesn't make the mistake of thinking that the woman's appearance justifies being rude or unpleasant to her.

The apple part is a lesson to little ones in not taking gifts from strangers, and the story emphasizes characters helping each other. Snow White is far from helpless. She survives abandonment and being lost in a forest. When she finds a dirty unpleasant house, she isn't serving the dwarves to clean it up; she's taking care of herself. She promptly and competently makes the place over to suit her own standards. But she isn't completely self-sufficient any more than real people are. Snow White, the huntsman, the dwarves, the animals, and even the Prince work together, everyone contributing to give them all a safe and happy life.

But Snow White is not perfect. Her "sleep" is the result of her own foolish choice to take the apple merely because it is beautiful: the stepmother isn't the only one to suffer for making the mistake of judging on appearances.

I 'm an academic librarian, but I used to work in a children's bookstore. There are many wonderful reinterpretations of fairy tales for kids, but my top recommendation for a toddler is The Paperbag Princess. I highly recommend it! http://www.robertmunsch.com/books.cfm?bookid=27. Enjoy!

Coming back to second robyn's suggestion of Hayao Miyazaki's movies. My Neighbor Totoro is probably the least scary for small children (much less scary than Snow White, which terrified me as a child), and Kiki's Delivery Service is a wonderful story of a girl discovering her strengths. (Kiki also borrows from Western fairy tales; it's not as deeply rooted in Japanese culture as Totoro and Spirited Away are.) And Miyazaki also has a strong environmental ethic in many of his movies. They're beautiful and thought-provoking to adults. (I haven't shown them to my kid, because until recently he's been freaked out by plot. That means he may move straight to movies with fart jokes.)

She's probably too young for this now, but when she's older, try the Inspector Gadget series. The little girl Penny is smart and independent and always ends up saving the day.

Lots of good suggestions here. One of my daughters is a princessy girl, now nearly 8. What I realize attracts her is the glamour--long floating gowns, pretty colours, sparkly jewels, the palace, the power, too. So we had conversations about princesses and using power well. I also have to confess that when she reached the whiny 4's, I said that princesses don't whine and asked her to speak firmly like a princess. It worked well, though had to be repeated often. To the books suggested, I'd add "Princess Stink Toes" which is more serious than its title suggests. I'm all for re-telling stories. Why not? The Disney versions have been bowdlerized from the original grim Grimm's and the Charles Perrault's (which came with morals appended to each story that we wouldn't necessarily agree with). I like the suggestion that Snow White fixed the house. But what I would emphasize in the story is that she found safe harbor. She's a toddler, so then around age 2? A very short rendition is in order for that age. It doesn't need to be more than a few sentences. Once upon a time there was a smart, beautiful kind girl named Snow White. The queen was jealous of her and mean, so Snow White ran away and found some nice little people to live with. (Here you can go on as long as you like about all their little furniture and the foods she ate with them. Kids that age like stories about size of things, big or little, and food. If you're daughter knows colours, you can also talk about the colour of everything.). After her stepmother died, Snow White was queen and she was a good queen and fair and kind. The End.

Wow! What a response. My new weekend project may be rereading this list of suggestions and checking a bunch of them out at the library and on Amazon. I've got no problem reading books "too old" for Minnow so that I can tell her simplified versions of the stories.

And, yes, The Paperbag princess is a favorite of mine. Minnow likes the dragon. Sometimes we tell dragon stories where the dragon gives kids rides and blows bubbles.

I know that I cannot shelter Minnow completely from the stereotypes and cruelty of our world, but I do want to make our home and our story time a place that mainly shows her what the world can be. A place where women aren't judged solely on the basis of skin color, beauty and fashion, where everyone helps with the clean up of messes around the house and in nature, and where people are valued for their ideas and kindness.

This morning, Minnow listened to a CD recording of Little Red Riding Hood twice with rapt attention. Then she changed the CD out to "Free to Be You and Me" and started to sing along. I couldn't have been prouder of my little girl, or of the way I am trying to raise her. Thanks for your help with that important project.

As a non-white individual, I had alot of issues with the colour of my skin because beautiful = white.

Back when I was taking German classes as an undergraduate, I read some of Grimm's fairy tales in the original German. The German version of Snow White uses "schönste", which means "most beautiful" without any overt statement about standards of beauty. This word was translated to English as "fairest", which explicitly refers to skin color. I wondered at the time what that said about English standards of beauty. (Sun tanning did not become popular until sometime in the 20th century.)

I appreciate where you're coming from, but I'd also say don't worry too much. I think it's more about the values being taught by the parents than anything a girl might absorb from a Disney story. I loved Disney as a kid (and even as an adult now) - for the animation style and the music and I ended up being a half tomboy and half-geek teenager and adult. IMHO, as long as you don't go around telling Minnow that she has to act like a princess/be pretty/dumb/etc, I think you don't need to worry much.

That said, when she gets older, Patricia Wrede's "Enchanted Forest Chronicles" is the way to go. Love those books. Wrede also has a few short stories from that world that you might be able to adapt into Minnow-level stories.

Marlo Thomas And Friends--I know most of all the stories and songs by heart.

I love Atalanta and how she wanted to see the world before settling down. And there's the one about the Tender Sweet Young Thing. And When I Grow Up (with Michael Jackson and Roberta Flack in the 70s) and so much more.

And admittedly, I do like a lot of Disney movies (Finding Nemo, The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast), but they also didn't dictate my sense of female roles and abilities. Furthermore, I have a hunch that if Minnow takes after mom, she's guaranteed to have a strong sense of who she is--independent of culture.

I'm also going to have to support the #2/3 responses and also recommend Pratchett for when she's older. In particular, anything with the witches or Susan Sto-Helit tends to have very good female characters, although anything else is bound to have a few as well. The only problem is that one probably won't get them completely until high school at least, possibly college, when I stumbled on them - but you can think ahead ;). Witches Abroad and The Hogfather are my two personal favorites.

The Disney films are at least better than the Disney story books which are usually appallingly written. I would stick with Grimm and the movies. Or retell the stories yourself however you like of course.

Also, I second the comment about not worrying too much. In the heads of small girls its all about wearing sparkles and being the center of attention. They don't develop the slightest intention of doing all (any of) the housework and listening to what men (including Dads) tell them from watching Disney, in my experience. And they even grow out of the sparkles phase if they don't get too much positive reinforcement.

Perhaps some simple changes in the plot would be helpful?

Make the Queen a wrinkling, vain old woman who paints her face to conceal her age who is jealous of Snow White's self-confidence despite having to wear glasses, so the Queen bans her from her favorite hobbies: soldering electronics and chemistry. Upset at this, Snow White runs away to the 7 Dwarves' (White-Hat) Hacker Collective. The Queen is furious that Snow White is flourishing and intelligent, so when a nice young male nerd falls for Snow White the Queen sets out and winds up poisoning his Red Bull. Snow White gets angry and DDOSes the Queen's personal website and vanity blog, then defeats her by throwing a bucket of water on her, washing away all of her makeup and then showing her that she's pretty anyway. With the Queen's confidence restored, the slumbering nerd reawakens and they go on to become the Chief Scientists of the Kingdom.

I might have to actually draw this one.

I wondered at the time what that said about English standards of beauty. (Sun tanning did not become popular until sometime in the 20th century.)

It wasn't necessarily about beauty. It was about money.

"Fair" was a desirable state because it meant that the girl/woman involved was never exposed to sunshine -- which meant that she never worked outdoors. Only the wealthy could avoid sun exposure, so "fair maidens" were those who had led sheltered lives.

Barf.

Note that the oft-inferred racism is anachronistic: darker skinned people didn't really show up in England in serious numbers until the "fair" standard was very well established. At the time, Mediterranean features were if anything considered attractive.

As for suntans, guess what? Same story. When "working" (especially for women) shifted indoors (office/factory) and the poor practically never saw the sun for weeks or months at a stretch, pallor ceased to be the mark of idle wealth. Instead, a nice "sunburn," especially in winter, became the mark of those who could afford to holiday on the Riviera.

The fact that this favored darker complexions such as those from India, at a time when there were significant numbers of Indian immigrants, is another counter to the "racist" interpretation.

Just plain old class system, it seems.

#38 Eric Lund,

"Back when I was taking German classes as an undergraduate, I read some of Grimm's fairy tales in the original German. The German version of Snow White uses "schÃ¶nste""

Did you get to the part where Snow White takes revenge on the evil (now rival) queen by forcing her stepmother's feet into white hot iron shoes in which she must dance to amuse Snow White until she dies in agony.

That's a wedding reception I want to attend.

Sheril @40: "Free to Be You and Me" was a staple of my 70s childhood - I think the "Tender Sweet Young Thing" bit was my favorite, mostly because I didn't see myself as either tender or sweet. Rosey Grier singing It's Alright to Cry and the puppet babies are also excellent. (And now I'll probably spend the rest of the afternoon on YouTube - such happy memories.)

I think the other book suggestions mentioned here are great-- Ella Enchanted and The Paper Bag Princess are probably the perfect answers to Snow White and Cinderella. I love Pratchett, particularly the Tiffany Aching books. I also love Karen Cushman's Catherine, Called Birdy, but it's also a YA book.

At 2, I think it's fine if she sees the Disney Princesses and reads fairy tales like Snow White as-is. She's going to be exposed to them at some point anyway, and I think rather than making it verboten, it's best to get it out in the open and just encourage her to read as much as possible, even if some of the stories are silly and don't always reflect your values.

As she grows up, you'll be talking together more and more about how silly some of these fairy tales are and how the presence or absence of a sparkly dress does not indicate any person's intrinsic qualities. Speaking for myself, I grew up during the Disney Renaissance. I was watching Ariel and Belle all the time, but mostly what I took away from it was not "Oh, gosh, I need a man to rescue me" but "good gravy, I want to do nothing but swim around with fish all day and have a huge library all to myself. That looks like a lot of fun." At the same time I was also watching Star Wars and being introduced to Princess Leia, and boy-howdy, does she ever kick butt. Now *there's* a princess role-model.

At any rate, the media we consume when we're young isn't the exclusive determining factor in what our values will be when we're grown.

If you make sure that she's exposed to a variety of different films, music, books, and people, and if you talk to each other about the ideas contained therein, I think she'll be just fine.

If you make sure that she's exposed to a variety of different films, music, books, and people, and if you talk to each other about the ideas contained therein, I think she'll be just fine.

Indeed -- quite a few of us managed to turn out OK, despite it all.

Why, even some of our kids aren't too awful, despite having parents like us. There's hope yet.

--
dcs, whose youngest had two passages today: 24 years and her MA.
Yes, I'm insufferably proud.

Argh. As a new parent (4 month old son) you've now given me yet another thing to worry about for when he gets a little older, i.e. how to contextualize fairy tales that promote abysmal morals (forget the sexist aspects of Cinderella, which are bad enough -- the central moral seems to be that if your life sucks, the best course of action is sit around and do nothing. Great message, there...)

Gee, thanks a lot. :p

"good gravy, I want to do nothing but swim around with fish all day and have a huge library all to myself. That looks like a lot of fun."
LOL oh my, that sounds familiar.

Another simple solution- my mom said that when she read me many stories she switched the gender of the protagonist to a female. Why on earth should PoohBear be a boy?? I think Cinders the prince being rescued by the brave princess sounds fine.
I can also assure you that I never found it excessively confusing to have "alternate versions" of stories instead of the culture defaults. Perhaps because there already are so many retellings of most of them.

The most interesting take on the Cinderella tale is Ever After with Drew Barrymore as the lead [Danielle de Barbarac]. The story is similar, but told as historical fiction, without the magic and silly animals. Wicked stepmother and stepsister [the other stepsister is OK]. Prince, ball, glass slipper, but a lot of other things happen that don't happen in the Disney version. And Danielle has a lot more strength in her character.

I just wanted to mention how much I enjoyed the daddy labs video, in particular the expert's mention that princess play is ok for boys too. I'm pretty sure seven year old would be mortified (I suspect he either doesn't remember or, more likely, wishes he doesn't remember) to be reminded of being one of his best buds fellow princesses, when he was three and she was four. I used to trade child care, taking care of four year old princess on a weekly basis. When they weren't playing with our massive collection of Thomas track and trains, they were usually playing princess - and she had a lot of princess and fairy costumes.

I'll have to second the Enchanted Forest series, as well as Terry Pratchett. I remember as a small child having at least one or tow books of Russian fairy tales, which seemed to be a bit less "save me" and a bit more "getting by on your wits and being nice to everyone".

Mercedes Lackey has a number of series about fairy tales, including the "500 kingdoms" where fairy tales are things that happen to you, and you realize how many of them are horrible. (She's also one of my favorite authors for strong women characters.)

Being a princess is all about being in charge and dressed well while you're at it. Put that way it's pretty darn close to some of the bloggers here (Isis). Who wouldn't want that?

Since it appears I'm not the only fan of the Enchanted Forest Chronicles [1] I'll point out that the SFBC omnibus editions are pretty easy to find at used book stores and are, like most SFBC editions, really cheap when used.

[1] Actually, $HERSELF and I agree that they would actually make a great TV series. Along with the Chicks in Chainmail, but they're not 2yo material.

As a new parent (4 month old son) you've now given me yet another thing to worry about for when he gets a little older, i.e. how to contextualize fairy tales that promote abysmal morals

It's not like the fairy tales are the worst examples he'll see. Think of all the glorification-of-senseless-violence that floods our culture.

Which means you might as well start off by exposing him to anti-heroic characters early on, ones who act in ways he'll easily identify as wrong, to establish the rule that the lead character of a story isn't necessarily a good role model [1]. Once you get that across, you can use dang near anything to get a worthwhile message across.

And then there are the utterly excellent stories. May I suggest The Forgotten Beasts of Eld? Strong woman, strong man, both acting outside of traditional gender roles to do good things and where the moral growth of the characters is central to the story.

[1] Interesting how many stories of that sort there are in the Jewish scriptures. I mean, look at the patriarchs. Liars (Abraham), wusses (Isaac), cheats (Jacob), bullies (Jacob's sons), murderers (Jacob's sons again), etc. Never mind that drunk, Noah.

I have a five and half year old daughter quite enchanted with the world of princesses out there but luckily she is also passionate about strong girls like Pippi Longstockings and Madita. I do read lots of princess and fairy stories (as they are hugely available in the book shops and libraries) but after finishing the story we discuss shortly how the princess could have been solved the problem without the prince. We had no one to discuss like this but we too outgrew the charms of princess lives with time so I have total faith that our daughters will surely be able to solve their problems themselves.

I understand not wanting to share values with which you don't agree, but has anyone studied the implications that come later in life when a child finds that their parent purposely warped stories?

My mother is a child psychologist, and she believed that it was always better to raise me with the truth (i.e., even if she did not agree with the morals in the story - as a strong woman herself, she always allowed me to watch/read the original version of the fairy tales) because she was more concerned with the implications of making up something else, and then what would happen if I saw the original movie or heard the original story with another person? Would I start a big argument that the other individual's parent was wrong and lying about the story, because it was different from what I heard? If I saw the movie, would I stop trusting my own mother with everything because she hid the true story from me?

My absolute two favorite movies growing up were Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty. And you know what? I'm getting a Ph.D. in science and I'm in a long-distance marriage. I never picked up the idea that I'm supposed to be a damsel in distress, wait for a man to rescue me, and rely on him for everything in life! (I also never wanted to be a princess growing up, either.)

I understand not wanting to share values with which you don't agree, but has anyone studied the implications that come later in life when a child finds that their parent purposely warped stories?

Folk tales evolve over time precisely in the way we're discussing: people adapt them as carriers of the lessons to be taught to children.

If you were to read the Kinder- und HausmÃ¤rchen complete with notes, you'd find that the Grimms were already observing that these tales had changed over time, in most cases from pagan to Christian (to name just one shift.) Other ethnographers have tracked the origins of folk tales back to the original Aryan migration and found common elements in India and Scandinavia.

In recent times, we have Disney. If you were to read the original version of Snow White to a child, she would be horrified (it's nasty!) So no matter which version you present to a child, someday she'll encounter a different one. You may as well make the first version one you pick to suit your agenda rather than defaulting to someone else's (such as the marketing of themed toys.)

I have bookmarked this post so I can mine the comments in the years to come!

SW, I mostly agree with the commenters that have said that how we lead as parents says more than what Disney stuff our kids watch. I watched Disney movies when I was a kid, too. At the same time, I find that while externally I may appear to be (and am) a strong feminist with a strong sense of herself, internally I find I have to war with myself to not want to be saved, to have my husband take care of me, to seek approval from male colleagues. Are Disney movies to blame? Certainly not entirely -- they are one symptom of the cultural conditioning we all receive as women to not trust our thinking, to take a backseat to others, to serve rather than be served, etc. So, in the same manner I am sure you already parent with Minnow, I will try to temper my daughter's exposure to these things, and do everything in my power to expose her to better messages, and lead by example that there are no limits for women, ever.

So totally, totally not for children:

Neil Gaiman's blood-chilling retelling of Snow White.

Here's one you probably won't come across otherwise: The Princess Who Kicked Butt. When Minnow is old enough to enjoy something very subversive, Angela Carter and Tanith Lee both did some very vivid reimaginings of fairy tales, and Ellen Datlow and Terry Windling put together several anthologies of more. Actually, there will be stories in the Datlow/Windling anthologies that are suitable for a younger age as well, but certainly not all.

whoa... just read that Neil Gaiman link and it's not for Grandmas either! I'll not be sleeping well tonight.

But... speaking of being a Grandma. I have four grandchildren, boys, age 4 and 2 1/2 and girls, age 2 1/2 and 1. Being the poorest Grandma of them all, I look for unusual, hopefully meaningful gifts and I generally look at books first.

What I don't find very often are good books about science. The 2 year olds are fascinated with bugs right now and go back and forth from wanting to pick them up and play with them to stomping them mercilessly, sometimes with the same bug.

I'd like to see more books about science for kids. After learning dog, cat, cow, and sheep why not learn spider, ant, and cricket? Are these books out there and I just haven't found them?

I like the movie Ever After as a Cinderella Story. I don't know what age it would suit.

Other good books for kids: "The Maid of the North" and "Tatterhood and Other Tales." Folk tales and fairy tales from around the world with strong female characters. You can read them to little kids, and 9-10 year-olds can read them on their own. I loved them when I was a little girl.

To Disgruntled Julie, I wouldn't worry a whole lot about the kids freaking out when they find out that their parents altered the stories. My parents always did that when I was little- told me that Prince Charming fell for the princess because she was clever and caring (they never mentioned whether she was beautiful or not). At some point I read the books for myself and saw the Disney movies, and I didn't have any big problems with the discrepancy.

Wow, I don't have time to read all of the comments right now, so perhaps someone already mentioned this... but there are Cinderella-type stories in nearly every culture and I found it fun to read some of these with my daughter. Here's at least one bibliography: http://www.uen.org/Lessonplan/preview.cgi?LPid=13676

I'm not saying they are all enlightening examples of girl power (patriarchy is global, after all!), but at least they get around the Disney version and provide some points of multicultural comparison!

If it's any consolation... I have an almost 8-year-old now and she is definitely over the "princess" thing and seems to have emerged from Disney overload relatively unscathed. Oh, and Disney's version of the Little Mermaid story is FAR WORSE than Snow White or Cinderella!

this reworking of cinderella is not for children either --- certainly not before they've started dating, at the very least --- but well worth reading nevertheless.

Ask Sciencewomen revisited: Not giving up this "silly scientist stuff" just because I'm going to have a baby.

sciencewoman — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 06:36:30 +0000

Ask Sciencewomen revisited: Not giving up this "silly scientist stuff" just because I'm going to have a baby.

In January 2008, a reader (Serious Scientist) sent me a query about dealing with inlaws who thought she should give up on her scientific career when her baby arrived. They wanted her to go to a baby shower across the country, without her husband, and she was dreading the trip and the questions and judgements that would certainly arrive during the party. I encourage you all to look back into the archives and read her original letter, and the wonderful advice everyone offered to Serious Scientist.

Serious's letter, even buried back in the archives, has generated a couple of recent comments. Most recently, Katherine commented:

Serious Scientist, I hope you return and let us know how things went :)

In light of that comment, I decided to dig out Serious's email and find out how her story turned out. Below the fold, I'll share her happy ending.

hi ScienceWoman -
Things, I am happy to say, are going GREAT!

In the end, re: the shower at my in-laws -- so it's sort of a long story. I was pretty sick when I mailed you before, but I continued to deteriorate and I got very, very sick that flu season, greatly aggravated by no doctor wanting to take on the risk of treating my illness because I was pregnant. In the end, after a week in the hospital(!), I was much better, and after a scare, the kid seemed to be fine at that point as well (and happily seems even now to be none the worse for wear). BUT all of that made it very very easy to say, look, now that we are both well, I am SO NOT traveling across the country. We suggested that we come visit much later, after the birth, for a "toddler shower." They thought about it, and then they very graciously suggested -- get this -- a Skype-based baby shower!! The whole family gathered at their end in front of a big screen, and we at ours, and had a party in both places. They sent some presents in advance, and the rest they opened for me in front of the camera and sent to us afterwards. They even called my mother (who lives in yet a 3rd time zone) so she could participate (by phone) too. So it worked out very well indeed.

Our son is now nearly 1 and walking(!). As of 2 days ago, he's signing too (they teach sign language in day care)! Although he's understood the signs (which are always coupled with verbal language) for a while, today he's actually able to ask for milk himself (though I confess it's still sometimes hard to tell "milk" from "hi", and we're still in the giddy phase of "I know what that sign, that word means" and so everything is "milk" -- "pick me up" is "milk" but with both hands -- but STILL, I'm so proud of him!). I'm a few weeks away from submitting a paper that will end up being longer than my PhD thesis was, and I have two more shorter papers not far behind it. I got a promotion at work. I'm still learning how to make the balance work out -- as you all know, it's a daily struggle, but somehow I'm doing it ! :) :) :)

Thank you for providing part of my support system!!!

cheers,
Serious

sciencewoman Wed, 07/01/2009 - 02:36

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Thanks for the update SS and SW :) I remember the original post and actually wondered before what happened. I have a few friends who have had skype-style showers before, though I've never been involved in one myself. Still, technology is great! Good luck with the upcoming submissions SS and happy to hear things turned out so well.

Thanks, ScienceWoman! This old friend of yours needed a little professional boost now that she's half-way through her pregnancy with twins. I'm reminded how lucky I am that both sides of my family are full of two-profession couples, and that there is no doubt in anyone's mind that I can have my kids and keep my career. So glad things are working out for Serious Scientist!

I think skype showers are the way of the future!

I remember her - I'm so glad things worked out! Thanks for following up.

Lol, I didn't realise the post was that old (I am terrible for that)! Glad to hear that everything went well for SS :)

Funny - I was just thinking of this the other day! I'm glad it all worked out. Thanks for the update!

That's wonderful news to hear, Serious Scientist! I'm so happy for you that everything seemed to work out so well (despite the early complications). I can only hope that my someday in-laws will be that ingenious to plan an online party if attendance in person is too difficult. It sounded adorable, and will make for a great story as the little one grows up.