The Parenting Mystique

Why America is Obsessed With Raising Kids

[theparentingmystique]

The Wrong Thing for the Right Reasons

We saw this coming, people, like me who have followed discussions and argued the case for childhood vaccination year after year. First there were clusters of whooping cough and the mumps, then a few out isolated outbreaks of measles in under-vaccinated communities. Now with outbreaks of Measles in 18 states, the debate about vaccines has gone mainstream – and it’s turning ugly.

This New Yorker cartoon doing the rounds sums it up. Itshows a sad looking child covered in angry red spots sitting on the edge of anexamination table with the caption: “If you connect the the measles it spellsout ‘my parents are idiots’.”

 It’s tempting —oh so tempting — to pile on, to condemn and punish parents who don’t vaccinate their children, especially if you’ve ever argued with True Believer who has dismissed you as a clueless dupe of Big Pharma. Kick their kids out of school! Prosecute them! Make vaccination law water-tight! The thought of the suffering and deaths that measles will cause is more than enough to whip many people into a rage all on its own even without attempts to make vaccination into a partly political issue.

Don’t do it.

Yes, kids who are unvaccinated for other than medical reasons need to be excluded from schools, and yes we should strengthen the measures we take to ensure compliance with vaccination requirements – but demonizing parents or disputing their right to raise their children as they see fit or prosecuting them is counter productive.

No parent sets out to hurt the community. Parents are just trying to do what’s best for their child. The problem is that in our risk adverse climate, doing what’s best means that no risk – no matter how small – is acceptable. Taking a risk – even if it’s practically a non-risk leaves a parent open to charges of negligence. We are damned if we do and damned if we don’t.

Even so, we should be clear that it is still only a very small percentage of people refuse to vaccinate altogether. These are the hard core: absolutely convinced and unlikely to change. Delaying vaccinations through an excess of caution is far more common — and far more dangerous.

Contrary to what many in the media are saying the most common reason well-meaning parents delay vaccinations, is no longer fear of autism but the mistaken idea that an infant’s immune system is not strong enough to cope with too many vaccines all at once, or that a too many might overwhelm them and cause a dangerous reaction[i].

We need to respond to their concerns and work to allay their fears. Dismissing them as stupid or using scare tactics is unlikely to work. Moreover, legal vaccination requirements have not been particularly effective in making sure parents vaccinate. Ultimately the only way to ensure that vaccination rates stay where they need to be is by convincing parents they should do it and do it on time.

Want to start a productive discussion with someone on the fence? Below are the most common concerns about he measles vaccine that have come up on the Park Slope Parents community over the years, answered in a straightforward way (no dueling studies - believe me, it’s not worth it- just explanations). 

What parents on the fence really need to know.

Babies are born able to cope with exposure to the tens of thousands of immune challenges (bacteria, etc.)they inevitably encounter everyday. Vaccines are present far less challenge to a child’s immune system than they encounter in the course of a mild cold.

What isn’t always predictable is whether any child’s immune system is developed enough to translate that exposure into lasting immunity. Vaccines are scheduled for maximum efficacy - i.e. when most babies are mature enough to develop the immunity from their exposure and when they will offer children the maximum protection.

Children cannot catch measles from the measles vaccine.

Children can sometimes develop mild a non-contagious measles-like rash, uncomfortable but short-lived. The worst thing that can happen in young children is that sometimes their bodies don’t develop a lasting immunity after their first exposure. This happens in about 5% of children. A second vaccination built into the recommended schedule helps to protect children who didn’t develop immunity the first time around. The fact that a minority of children don’t develop lasting immunity their first inoculation is another good reason for keeping vaccination rates high. The more children are vaccinated the less likely these children are to be exposed to the disease.

Children cannot ‘catch’ autism from the MMR. Over a decade of research supports this conclusion.

Why it’s important to vaccinate on time

We vaccinate for measles early because babies and young children are more likely to be overwhelmed by the illness (NOT the vaccine) than older children and adults.

There is no benefit in delaying vaccinations — and serious potential for harm. 

Delaying vaccines leaves young children unprotected when they are at their most vulnerable. Falling vaccination rates compound the problem by compromising herd immunity making it more likely for children who aren't yet immune to be exposed. Plus, parents who vaccinate on alternative schedules are more likely to forget to vaccinate on time because it requires arranging additional appointments with the doctor above and beyond regular check ups. 

[i] This is untrue. The most that can be said is a child with an underlying problem such as Guillain-Barre Syndrome, a disorder that occurs when the body’s immune system mistakenly attacks part of the nervous system by mistake. Though vaccines sometimes trigger attacks, people with this disorder and just as likely to suffer the same after exposure to a virus or other serious challenge to their body’s immune system. Some people suspect that the regressions associated with mitochondrial disease may be triggered by exposure to vaccines (it can be triggered by the flu) but more research is needed to support this.

[theparentingmystique]

Male Mothers

Happy Mother's Day! I happened to see this little piece, about sexist sentimental mother's day ads by Amanda Hess in Slate in which she goes through a sort of round up of Mother's Day ads and the various reactions to them. The discussion on Facebook, which to be fair was less a reaction to the article than a debate about whether there is something inherently sexist in ads for mother's day showing mothers doing stereo typical things like cooking for their children instead of coaching their soccer teams. 

What struck me was not so much the discussion is one particular contribution to it from a man who spoke as a "male mother". He did, incidentally think that the ads were sexist, presumably because they didn't show any male mothers. Which has got me to wondering if Motherhood, as a specific category reserved for women can survive.

And if we objected would we be deemed bigots on par with gun toting KKK members from the era of Jim Crow in the way that opponents of gay marriage have been painted for insisting upon a specific historical content to marriage. (for a thoughtful discussion of the specificity of the question of marriage as opposed to  see Robert Rauch Opposing Gay Marriage Doesn't Make You a Crypto Racist).

The question came up fleetingly in another form on the PSP Yahoo!Group a few years back. A  gay man complained that he was not welcome at "Mommy's group", since, in his estimation, he too was a mommy.  At the time, a few years before gay marriage was the topic it is today, it didn't spark much discussion but the consensus was that as much as mothers wanted to be supporting and welcoming to gay families - and they really did, there was something unique about motherhood. Motherhood is not just the experience of giving birth or the experience of being a parent. Motherhood is the specific experience of being a woman who is a mother, with all the deep expectations that implies. There are many, many things we can share as parents but the experience of being a man, even a man playing the same role that mothers do is qualitatively different.

The discussion resolved itself, I don't know which way,  but I think back on it sometimes and wonder about the question it raises. Is there anything special and unique about motherhood? 

I think there is. Not something biological, after all, a mother to an adopted child is no less a mother. It's not about some emotional division of labor in which mothers are nurturing - men can be just as nurturing. It's not about who knows who the pediatrician is or who does what in the household. Motherhood is really about the female experience of raising a child. But it also an institution that extends back forever. As Erma Bombeck said, it is "The Second Oldest Profession". it has checkered past, to be sure, especially when it was held to be the ONLY thing women could aspire to. And yet,  but I for one am very attached to it. Should the desire for equality in all things trump motherhood? What do you think? 

[theparentingmystique]

On Connecticut

There are some events so terrible, they strike at our hearts and chill our souls. So it is with the event in Connecticut today. We cried, all of us, every parent I know as if these were our children and for their parents who will not wake from this nightmare for a very long time. 

Why is this so devastating? Isn't any loss of life unspeakably tragic? Perhaps it's just the human impulse to protect children or knowing the terror of simple things at that age: shadows, noises, the nameless dark. What are those compared to this? We could not protect them and it makes us ache.

I have turned off CNN and MSNBC and especially Slate, which feigns no shame but has rushed to its conclusions with the moral certainty of true believers. "It's very simple, just ban guns." 

Surely we could hold off a few hours? Learn a little and perhaps accept that even if we had stricter gun laws and even if we made it easier to identify and care for unstable people it might make no difference. Such is the nature of tragedy. Such is the human condition.

Let us just be sad tonight and dim the Christmas lights for the eighteen children and hold our sons and daughters tight.  

NM

12.14.12

[theparentingmystique]

Mayim Bialik's Beyond the Sling

Here's my most recent review (in concert with my favorite neuroscientist, Stuart Derbyshire) of a parenting book. Thank you to the folks who suggested I should actually put the whole review here on the blog rather than simply linking to it. 

I have been spending some time looking at Attachment Parenting. I get the sense that the most feverish moment of AP occurred in the late '90's, though it's certainly still around in a big way today. 

Just out of curiosity, I picked up Katie Allison Granju's book on the subject. Granju is intelligent and usually manages to say something sensible on most topics. And yet, here in her book, Attachment Parenting: Instinctive care for your baby and young child she refers to strollers and car seats as "artificial baby containers". Could this sort of priggishness be partly to blame for the backlash against Attachment Parents?

I do think there is a backlash against these extreme styles of parenting, but as I say in the review, many of the underlying assumptions are already mainstream. I do not think Attachment Parents are persecuted in the way some believe they are. This is the problem with the way that personal preferences have been elevated to the status of lifestyles, and these have becomes the prism through which people relate to the rest of the world. Any difference of opinion about something like circumcision or co-sleeping takes on exaggerated importance and especially in the case of parents, divides them from other parents, other generations and people without children in an unhealthy way. The only people more isolated than extreme parents may be the militantly child-free. 

N

Using science to freak out parents

‘Attachment parenting’, America’s most extreme ‘parenting lifestyle’, has a PR problem. First there was that embarrassing business about some attachment parents refusing or delaying vaccinations and the measles, mumps and pertussis outbreaks that predictably followed. Then there was the recent Time magazine cover, featuring the enormous, breastfeeding three-year-old: not good. And finally there is the smouldering backlash among ordinary parents, aptly portrayed in the Xtranormal animation, ‘Why I can’t make mom friends’, about an all-too-believable encounter with an insufferable attachment parent at the playground.

Mayim Bialik to the rescue. Who is Mayim Bialik? Americans of a certain age will remember her from the sitcom Blossom (stiff dialogue, canned laughter) shown on NBC in the 1990s. Bialik played the title role of Blossom, a brainy daughter to an inept single father of three. All grown up with her child-star days behind her and a newly minted qualification as a neuroscientist under her belt (she also plays a neuroscientist in geek sitcom The Big Bang Theory), Bialik has now taken on a similar role to that of Blossom for her book, Beyond the Sling: A Real-life Guide to Raising Confident, Loving Children the Attachment Parenting Way.

The idea, Bialik explained in an interview earlier this year, was ‘to present the style of attachment parenting both to people who love it’ and to ‘show people who may not be interested in attachment parenting that the values behind some of the decisions people “like us” make… can also inform all kinds of parenting’. In other words, Bialik aims to bridge the gap between attachment parenting and the mainstream.

What are the values of attachment parenting? Bialik does a competent job of laying them out. Her strategy is first to explain the basic philosophy, to back it up with science, then to show what it means as a matter of practicality. And she does all this in a chatty, non-judgmental way, using examples from her own family life. She covers eight key practices:

Birth (natural, of course)

Breastfeeding

Be sensitive (ie, don’t ignore your baby)

Bonding through touch (‘babywearing’)

Bedding (everyone sleeps in the ‘family bed’)

Be there (consistent parenting by parent or ‘trained and sensitive substitute’)

Be gentle (no smacking allowed)

Balance (don’t become so fixated on your child’s needs that you forget your own)

She then attempts to explain the reasoning behind these practices by launching into a discussion of what babies need and what babies don’t need.

So how do we know what babies need? The knowledge we need is ‘whittled down and programmed into our genetic code over hundreds of thousands of years of trial and error’. Sadly, years of parenting advice from ‘authority figures with fancy degrees’ have smothered our natural instincts. The good news, according to Bialik, is that attachment parenting is really just the natural way that human beings raise children – evolution has even programmed it into our DNA. ‘Your DNA’, she tells us, ‘is struggling to be heard above the din of “popular” parenting advice’. Luckily Bialik is there, armed with her PhD, both to guide us through the practices of attachment parenting (in a totally relaxed, non-judgmental sort of way, of course) and to explain why it makes sense.

But on closer inspection, this approach makes no sense neurologically (for a detailed critique, see Stuart Derbyshire below) or in any other way. Bialik is right that parenting advice has undermined parents’ instincts and intuition, but she is wrong to say that these nuances of human perception are essentially neurological, ‘the result of the chemicals in your brain and body that tell you what to do and how to act’. It is not hormones and DNA that are the fundamental shapers of the human condition, but the rich interplay between nature, society and culture.

Just as human beings thrive in vastly different circumstances and environments, so, too, our instincts and intuitions may be vastly different depending on the circumstances. Bialik’s notion – that we have evolved an ideal way to bring up children and that attachment parenting most closely approximates this – is itself a ubiquitous cultural meme expressing disenchantment with modernity and a longing for authenticity.

More sophisticated than traditional biological determinism, which stressed good breeding, attachment parenting suggests that it is a particular set of evolved good practices in combination with biology that ultimately determines how children turn out. In this view, the job of a good parent is to manipulate a child’s environment to make it more natural and therefore make it more likely that the child will reach his full potential. 

Bialik is, in many ways, the ideal public face of attachment parenting. Her PhD in neuroscience specialising in ‘hormones of bonding, attachment and obsessive-compulsive disorder’ seems, at least at first glance, to make her more than just your typical B-list celebrity pontificating about parenting. She comes across as reasonable and down-to-earth, not strident – just the sort of friend a first-time parent would want.

But although she bends over backwards not to be prescriptive like ‘the authority figures with fancy degrees who terrorised the last generation of parents with their schedules and rules’, in many ways she is worse. No, Bialik is not saying that not practising attachment parenting will harm your baby. She’s merely exploiting parents’ desire to give children what they need, then allowing them to draw their own conclusions. She is at pains to tell us that attachment parenting is ‘not for everyone’ – just for parents who really care about their babies, presumably.

Is it enough to bring attachment parenting into the mainstream? Not exactly. This isn’t because Bialik doesn’t do a good job of making her case, but because in some ways attachment parenting already is mainstream. The underlying assumptions of attachment parenting, namely that human beings are the amalgamation of experience and DNA in a continuum permanently etched into our neurons, is common coin. It has become the starting point not just for discussions of childrearing but also of public policy. Attachment parenting merely takes the extra step of making these assumptions the organising principle for a lifestyle.

Though there’s no doubt as to Bialik’s sincerity, Beyond the Sling is not the antidote to the hectoring childrearing advice of the previous generation’s ‘authority figures with fancy degrees’. It’s just an insidious, more scientistic version of the same thing.

Nancy McDermott is a writer based in New York.

OVERESTIMATING PARENTAL DETERMINISM Stuart Derbyshire

Following the fall of the Ceausescu regime in Romania in 1989, hundreds of orphanages were discovered where children lived in appalling conditions. Isolated, starving, cold and medically uncared for, the children displayed evidence of considerable physical and mental problems. Many of the children lacked language and other cognitive skills and they engaged in repetitive, stereotyped behaviours such as rocking and biting themselves as well as more serious aggressive and disruptive outbursts. In Beyond the Sling, Bialik refers to the experience of these children as ‘accidental experiments’, providing, ‘concrete proof that children must have their needs responded to in order to flourish and reach their fullest potential’.

She goes on to argue that what the Romanian experience demonstrates is that children need a cognitively and emotionally rich environment in their first few years in order to develop into healthy adolescents and adults: ‘All of the psychological imprinting that goes on, all of the patterns they experience, the rhythms they move to, and the feelings they have even before they can speak, these are what makes your children the people they will be at 5, 10 and even at 15, 25 and 35.’

Bialik is certainly not the first commentator to draw sweeping and general conclusions from the plight of the Romanian orphans. Bruce Perry, for example, has also detailed the conditions in Romanian orphanages before stating that ‘recent inadvertent impacts of technology have spawned declines in extended families, family meals and spontaneous peer interactions’, which, he suggests, are ruining children everywhere (1). A raft of booklets and papers from the Harvard University Center on the Developing Child, including The Science of Early Childhood Development, make similar arguments. In the UK, there have been a slew of reports arguing for the importance of the first five years, using the dramatic examples from Romania as support. (See, for example, Early Intervention: Smart Investment, Massive Savings, which features the brain of an orphan next to the brain of a normally raised child on its front cover.)

However, comparing the plight of Romanian orphans with the everyday experience of a typical infant is truly pernicious and dishonest. Placing an infant into a barred cot without access to any kind of toys, books, television, radio, another human being or any kind of stimulation beyond the immediate bars of the crib and bedding for 23 hours or more per day is not comparable to the day of a typical infant in a typical family. Evidence of emotional and cognitive problems in children deprived of emotional and cognitive input for most of every day for most of their first five years might be expected. Several reports confirm that children raised in such conditions have global cognitive impairment; several have severe behavioural problems and observable abnormalities in brain function and connection (2,3). But it is simply incorrect to imply that if severe deprivation causes severe problems then more benign neglect will cause less severe problems or to suggest that an enriched environment will provide benefits.

Take the development of memory as one example. Very young infants (less than three months) have almost no representational memory. That is, if you show a young infant an interesting toy and then hide it, the infant will not show further interest in the toy by gazing or reaching towards it. This lack of behavioural interest after the toy vanishes implies that the toy is not stored in memory. Beyond about three months, however, the infant starts to show behavioural interest and, as he matures, the infant will sustain a behavioural interest for longer. This implies that the infant is able to hold a stored representation of the toy (a representational memory) and that representation can be gradually sustained for longer (the memory store improves).

Anne Diamond and Patricia Goldman-Rakic carried out repeat testing of representational memory in young infants to track the development of representational memory (4). What they found was that infants who received repeat testing could sustain a memory for about 1.5 seconds longer compared with infants who were not repeat tested. The gain for the repeat-tested, or ‘enriched’ infants, was small and was not sustained past the first year of life - the infants who were not repeat tested caught up. Diamond and Goldman-Rakic concluded that memory develops at approximately the same rate regardless of ‘enrichment’.

Language development provides another example. It is known that newborns can detect and discriminate the basic sounds (phonemes) found in all human languages. By 10 months, however, infants respond preferentially to the phonemes particular to their native language. The necessary verbal input to generate this preference is unknown but one to two hours per day is generally considered sufficient and there is no evidence that using flashcards at three months of age or any other kind of enrichment provides any advantage in language development (5).

The comparison of orphaned infants with typical developing infants is also pernicious in another way. While it is true that the Romanian infants suffered extreme social deprivation, they also suffered extreme physical deprivation in the form of malnutrition, hypothermia and lack of adequate medical care. The malnutrition alone is sufficient to retard normal brain development, resulting in a smaller brain such as illustrated on the front cover of Early Intervention: Smart Investment, Massive Savings. It is likely that even with adequate cognitive and emotional care, but without sufficient food, warmth and medical care, the Romanian orphans would still have expressed cognitive and emotional deficits. To put that another way, the ‘accidental experiments’ from Romania did not include enough conditions for us to be sure of what caused what to happen. It could be that the infants suffered cognitively and behaviourally because they suffered physically.

Finally, the focus on children raised in such extreme conditions is pernicious in a further way: it implies that problems of development can never be rectified in later life. Many children from the Romanian orphanages were adopted into Western families. At the time of adoption, 70 to 90 per cent of the children had impaired cognitive ability and other serious developmental delays. Several years after adoption, however, those figures dropped to between 14 per cent and 36 per cent and almost every adopted child showed evidence of catch-up. That is not to say that all problems were overcome - many of the adopted children continued to have severe problems - but the extreme negative view that neglect, even the severe neglect experienced by Romanian orphans, cannot be overcome is not justified.

And if severely deprived children can catch up there is no reason to believe that typically developing children cannot overcome any minor neglect they may face in their early years. In 2011, a report was published demonstrating that 40 hours of video game playing can restore visual acuity in adults who had infant amblyopia (‘lazy eye’) (6). This finding was particularly exciting because it overturned the long-held belief that the adult brain lacks the plasticity to restore normal sensory function if that function was disrupted in childhood. And if basic sensory processing can be improved, then there is every reason to expect that cognitive and emotional function, which is inherently more plastic and adaptive, can improve and change as well.

Contrary to Bialik’s assertion, the first five years do not dictate the sort of person you will be at 10, 15, 25, 35 or any other age. Variation in parental outlook and methods - whether anxious or carefree, reading a lot or reading very little, permissive or authoritarian, and so on - is not a useful guide for how a child will turn out (7). And anyone can make positive changes in their life by learning a new language, working abroad, volunteering, etc, and discover aptitudes and skills they never had before. Regardless of what happens in the first five years of life, there are always opportunities and possibilities for further development. In short, Bialik does not provide a scientific case for attachment parenting because there is no scientific case for attachment parenting or any other type of parenting. Bialik does not use science, she abuses it.

Stuart Derbyshire is a reader in psychology at the University of Birmingham. He is co-producing and speaking at a session for the Battle of Ideas festival called Trust in Science.

(1) Perry B. Childhood experience and the expression of genetic potential: What childhood neglect tells us about nature and nurture. Brain and Mind 2002; 3: 79-100.

(2) Behan ME, Helder E, Rothermel R, Solomon K, Chugani HT. Incidence of specific absolute neurocognitive impairment in globally intact children with histories of early severe deprivation.Child Neuropsychology 2008; 14: 453-469.

(3) Eluvathingal TJ, Chugani HT, Behan ME, Juhasz C, Muzik O, Maqbool M, Chugani DC, Makki M. Abnormal brain connectivity in children after early severe socioemotional deprivation: A diffusion tensor imaging study. Pediatrics 2006; 11: 2093-2100.

(4) Diamond A, Goldman-Rakic PS. Comparison of human infants and rhesus monkeys on Piaget’s A-not-B task: Evidence for dependence on dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Experimental Brain Research 1989; 74: 24-40.

(5) Kuhl PK. Is speech learning ‘gated’ by the social brain? Developmental Science 2007; 10: 110-120.

(6) Li et al. Video-Game Play Induces Plasticity in the Visual System of Adults with Amblyopia.PLoS Biology 2011; 9: e1001135.

(7) Harris JR. Where is the child’s environment? A group socialization theory of development.Psychological Review 1995; 102: 458-489

reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/site/article/12865/

[theparentingmystique]

The reaction to the behavior of kids who ridiculed their bus monitor is confused and unhelpful. 

[theparentingmystique]

Another article I'm pleased with because I was able to start looking at the roots of Attachment Parenting. It's so much a philosophy of its time. nb. This precedes the Etan Patz article but still reflects the period I am researching. 

[theparentingmystique]

Playing catch up with articles. This was very apt because I have been spending a lot of time looking at the 1970's and 1980's. I believe our current situation has its roots in that period. 

[theparentingmystique]

The ultimate irony: Kate Pickert implies that Dr. William Sears develops attachment parenting as a consequence of the way he was parented. 

[theparentingmystique]

Parents are for more reasonable than we give them credit for. But it seems that any thing can become a flash point in the culture war over kids and what we ‘owe’ them.

It all started at a Yankees game where the cameras homed in on a shot of a couple who caught a ball tossed into the stands by a player. A small boy next to them cries because he wants the ball. The couple celebrate having caught the ball with smiles and photographs while the tearful toddler’s parents struggled to console him 

The Michael Kay, the announcer for the Yankees complained bitterly about the audacity of the couple who kept the ball instead of giving it up to the crying child.  

The story was picked up by the Media and went semi viral.  Notice the vitriol directed both against the “entitled” couple and the “entitled” child. An interview released today shows that the boy’s disappointment was no big deal, that neither the parents, nor the people who caught the ball were the monsters they were made out to be. 

[theparentingmystique]

Nightmare Turned Tragedy

There is nothing, and I mean nothing worse than watching your child suffer with a serious illness -- except being falsely accused of having abused them. The story of the murder-suicide of Tiffany and David O'Shell after they were falsely accused of abusing their baby daughter is gut wrenching. It turned out she suffered from a rear genetic condition that caused her bones to break easily. 

This a really egregious example of how parents are deemed guilty until proven innocent. It should be a wake-up call for us to take a long hard look at the institutional consequences of rampant parental determinism an its human cost. 

N

[theparentingmystique]

It's Open Season on Parents

Parents should not be above criticism, but the hysterical reaction to two stories, one about the cancellation of a Colorado Springs Easter Egg Hunt and bogus story about Park Slope Parents wanting to ban Ice-cream trucks tells us more about our current climate of intolerance than the problems with parenting culture.

The New York Times ran a follow up piece to the original New York Post story, interviewing Dorothy Scanlan, the unfortunate mother whose comments were published by  the article's author, Michael Gartland, without her permission. 

Reading Ms Scanlan's comments in context, it's pretty clear that she is not advocating for a ban on ice cream trucks or anything of the sort. But she and other parents in the neighborhood been subjected to almost ritualized public condemnation.

"Dorothy Scanlan", wrote one commenter in the Post, "You are what is wrong with society. I wish cancer upon you.!!!!!!" Another writes "Bad parenting blames disruptions on others. JUST DISCIPLINE YOUR DEVIL SPAWN - SO THE REST OF THE WORLD DOESN'T HAVE TO."  One speculates "I bet the parents are young up tight Jews." The level of vitriol seems completely out of proportion.

I was party to the original discussion on Park Slope Parents and while there were a few people who wished the ice-cream vendors could be banned, (in fact they aren't allowed inside the playground) it seemed more like their frustration talking.

There are things that every parent would, in the dark night of their souls, ban if they could. For me it's those wretched children's books with attached plastic panels that make noises. It doesn't mean I am incapable of telling my children to stop incessantly pressing the buttons (and mine) or that I am too pathetic to say 'no' to buying the book in the first place. It's more that it's just one more thing to deal with on an already overflowing plate. 

The ice cream vendors add another dimension. Children instinctively understand that the stigma of having a child who is behaving horribly in public allows them to put their parents under tremendous pressure to give in. At a time when parental authority is considered suspect any attempt to enforce that authority whether it's with a raised voice or a smack on the butt will result in dirty looks and maybe even a visit from social services. Trying and failing to correct an errant child is even more humiliating. It's no wonder some parents want to avoid situations like these all together. 

It's hard to tell whether these latest attacks on parents are simply a product of our incredibly intolerant times or whether, given our tendency to reduce all societies ills deficiencies of parenting, I suspect the latter.

N

[theparentingmystique]

Vive La France!

My review of Bringing Up Bébé by Pamela Druckerman is the feature in this month's Spiked Review of Books. Though this book is meant to be fairly light and journalistic - or at least it's been sold that way, I actually think these cross cultural comparisons make a very valuable contribution to the debate about parenthood.

More reviews of the book have been published since I finished writing mine. I had a quick peruse this morning. It's amusing how worked up some of the reviewers have become, maybe even more so than in some of the reviews of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. The silliest is this Ayn Rand-like diatribe in Forbes entitled "Bringing Up Bébé? No Thanks, I'd Rather Raise a Billionaire by Erika Brown Ekiel, which depicts Druckeman and the French as socialists, devoid of ambition for their children and ultimately doomed to a bleak future sans entrepreneurism. Read it. It's a hoot.

It's really striking about almost all the American reviews of Druckerman's book is the obsession with "outcomes". Outcomes? These are the last refuge of the scoundrel. Focusing on outcomes perpetuates the idea that parenting leads inexorably to particular conclusions. In reality our adult lives probably have more to do with the immediate forces we encounter in the course of leading our lives. There are things we can't always control, like economic conditions and social dynamics and there are those we can, like how to respond to our circumstances, whether we passively accept them, seek individual solutions or band together with others to shape our collective destinies. When all that goes out the window, we're left to understand the world through the prism of some all important childhood as in trying to figure out which parenting technique led to China's emergence as an economic power or how Mexicans raised children who are somehow prone to emigrate to the United States. As absurd as that sounds, it's the logical trajectory of this sort of thinking.

Obviously we all care what kind of people our children ultimately become. We all want them to be relatively happy, successful and productive members of society. But to lay the sole responsibility for this on the shoulders of parents is unfair, not just because it asks far too much of parents, but because it stops us from taking a critical look at what really shapes our lives. More importantly, I think, it removes our children from the calculations. They are no longer the authors of their own fates but outcomes of what other people do.

So the next time you find yourself constructing the familiar calculation: parenting technique + experience = X, (as we all do), stop and consider whether this is really a realistic way to think about things. After all, X is not an outcome. X is our child.

N

[theparentingmystique]

NY Makes Kids Alone in Cars Illegal

Parents are imbeciles. Apparently. New York State has just passed a bill to make it illegal to leave kids under eight alone in a car for any length of time. You can read more about it here. The bill is supposed to stop us from leaving our children in cars where they could perish from hyperthermia.

It will do nothing of the sort. When my oldest son was very young, there was a horrifying story about a man who forget his ten month old son in the back of his car outside his office. The child died. It was a terrible, tragic story and one that I had, a tangential connection to. He and his wife were connected with an Internet forum I was also connected with. They had struggled with fertility issues, so their little son was really a sort of miracle. 

i remember looking at the website they'd put together for friends and family. There were tens of pictures of him, They were so happy and amazed in the way first time parents are - in the way I was at the time.  

The circumstances leading up to their son's death were even more heart-breaking. The boy was waking in the night and his father had been up with him for hours so that his wife could get some rest. He meant to drop the boy off at day care, but he was so out of it, he went on "auto pilot" and drove to work as usual completely oblivious to the sleeping baby in the back seat. By the time someone noticed the boy in the car, it was too late for paramedics to do anything. News reports described the anguished father weeping in the parking lot. 

The story tore at my heart and I felt nothing but sympathy for the man and his wife. That's why it came as such a shock to find so many people ready to condemn them. "What kind of a parent forgets they have a child in the car?" Answer: a bad parent, a stupid parent, a self-absorbed parent. 

I just couldn't fathom the callousness of the responses. So I went away to find out everything I could about babies being left in cars. This tragedy occurs 3-4 times a year. It's usually with a very young child who has fallen asleep in the car. The parents, who haven't been parents very long simply forget they're there. 

I do not know of any research to back this up, but I believe we are particularly vulnerable to routine. There are times I have driven to work in my car and found I have no memory of what the drive to get there was like. The motions are so ingrained that it's as if part of my brain shut off. Another example - trivial but still on the same point - is what happens when you switch the contents of a drawer in the kitchen to a new place. I did this about a year ago and still find myself looking for items in the old location. 

The point is, I know in my heart of hearts, this could have been me. Forgetting is forgetting. I do not think legislation would have made me remember. Reading about these tragedies it seems obvious is that we need to develop a sort of alarm that alerts parents that there's a baby in the car, much in the same way it tells us we've left keys. How hard could it be?  Some people I've raised this with speculate that on one would manufacture a device where the price for its failure would be so high. This seems perverse.

Now, I realize there is a case to be made about children in cars. Horrible things have happened when kids are left in cars - these things range from kids being taken in would be carjackings to - more commonly injuries caused when they managed to put the car in to gear so that it rolled over them or sent the car careering in to traffic. But these incidents are rare. More importantly, the vast majority of parents are perfectly capable of deciding whether it is safe to leave a child in the car reading a comic book or sleeping while they run into a shop to buy milk. They are also capable of taking the steps - lowering windows - removing keys, etc. to make it much less likely that kids can get into trouble. 

But rather than starting a conversation about how to leave kids in cars, New York State has chosen to outlaw it all together. We are not apparently reasonable people capable of learning (as if it weren't obvious) that leaving kids in the car on a hot day or with the motor running is not a good idea. And as for forgetting babies - as Lenore Skenazy pointed out on Free-range Kids, the whole point of forgetting is that you forgot - in other words it wasn't something you had control over. 

The memory of the couple who lost their baby all those years ago has stayed with me but I have another memory too. I remember how angry and hysterical the reaction was at first - much the same way that some people have reacted when anyone has dared to be critical of this bill.

But I'll never forget how the everything changed when a very wise mother I know admitted "I thought it was inconceivable that anyone could forget their baby in the car and  was outraged, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized I was reacting the way I was as a sort of defense mechanism. It was something that I could forget, that could happen to me. It could happen to anyone."  

Her honesty was like flipping a switch and suddenly the mood changed from outrage to sadness, which is what I think we were all feeling anyway. It was a horrible tragedy made worse because it was so close to home. Tragedies tug at our hearts precisely because they seem so random and because with one or two "if's" things might have been completely different.  

I think we could use a little more honesty and common sense in the way we discuss this law.

N

[theparentingmystique]

Evil Parents Spoil Easter Egg Hunt

It seems that an Easter Egg hunt in Colorado Springs has been cancelled because organizers can't cope with "helicopter parents".

Last year's hunt was held in a open field where there weren't very many places to actually hide the eggs.The organizers simply distributed them on the ground then roped off the area and lined up the kids up to begin the "hunt". It's then that things get a little murky. There was a staticy public address system and a bull horn. Parents weren't supposed to help their tots to gather up the eggs but they either didn't get the message or they simply ignored it, jumped the ropes and started grabbing eggs for their kids. It was all over in a few minutes. You can read more about the carnage here. The organizers decided they could not deal with the onslaught of helicopter egg hunters again and cancelled this years event.

As a veteran of many hunts and more importantly hunt disputes in my beloved Park Slope I have a view on this.  But first, let's please just cut the crap. This is not really about pushy parents so much as complete organizational incompetence. Easter egg hunts work best when they are small and the kids participating are close in age. Even then, some kids will run ahead and find the majority of the eggs and others will wander around shell shocked and be lucky to find one or two. This is the inevitable law of the hunt. The only consolation is that as kids get a little older and gain a little more experience, they join the ranks of the successful hunters, until they join a group with older kids, in which case, the cycle starts all over again.

Organizational Incompetence

No one who has ever hunted an egg should be surprised about what happened in Colorado Springs last year. Organizing - and I use this verb ironically - the event the way they did guaranteed a free-for-all. And then to add cynicism to organizational incompetence, the organizers had the gall to cancel this years hunt and to blame local parents. Let's think about this for a moment. They didn't simply decide not to organize the Easter Egg hunt, they actually issued a press release to let it be known that the problem was parents. 

This is a cheap shot, not just because it's a pathetic example of shifting the blame but because there really is a problem with parents and Easter egg hunts. It just wasn't the main problem with this particular hunt.

Every year there are thousands of successful Easter Egg hunts take place across the country, attended by children and parents who are pretty much the same as children and parents in Colorado Springs. And yet, somehow they manage to muddle though how ever imperfectly without canceling or alerting the media. The difference is... the organizers have actually organized them. They have kept the size manageable, they have at least made a pretense of hiding the eggs and they have found a way to deal with parents - sometimes even enlisting their help. 

The Real Problem with Parents and Easter Egg Hunts

Now, there is definitely a problem with Easter egg hunts and parents that bears looking at but it's slightly different. We parents are far too invested in them. We are now so gravely concerned about our children's potential disappointment that we lose sight of the whole point of the hunt - which is to have fun looking for eggs. Our instinct is to level the playing field so that every child finds approximately the same number of eggs lest one be devastated. 

In the postmortems of Easter Egg hunts I've been party to (yes, I've done postmortems on Easter egg hunts), the overarching theme is disappointment. Sometimes kids don't even find a single egg. Sad, particularly if you've contributed a dozen filled plastic eggs to the communal pot, but not exactly surprising. Three-year-olds don't find many eggs - even if there are dozens of them strewn around in plain sight. I speak from experience. Are they disappointed? It depends on the child. Is it permissible to point out a few eggs for them. Absolutely. Is it reasonable to expect all kids to get approximately the same number of eggs? No.

It seems we suffer from a collective and selective amnesia. We've either forgotten that we were once the kid with no eggs (or we simply don't remember because we were too young) or we've rediscovered an ancient psychic wounding from an Easter egg hunt, poured salt on it and convinced ourselves it was one of the defining moments of our life.   

Why are we so frightened of disappointment? Surely these little failures - yes, failures are part of life's rich tapestry. We project our own feeling on to these events and lasting tragedies of the sort dissected on therapist's couches. In reality it's probably more likely that our kids just experience a momentary disappointment in part of an a day that was generally good fun. Truly, let's give our kids some credit and trust in their resilience and capacity to be better at hunting Easter eggs next year. 

N

[theparentingmystique]

Thought Experiment: Parents: Teachers First?

There are a number of things we could question about parenting culture today but the most fundamental is the assumption that nature the parent-child relationship is primarily educative, that being a good parent means understanding that everything we do teaches our child something. Good parents are mindful of this "fact" and so adjust what they do  accordingly.  It's an idea that is actually most clearly illustrated and perhaps owes something of its in public policy.

It's pretty clear that for policy makers at least, the parent-child relationship is highly deterministic. The best example of this comes from Early childhood policy. The quality of parenting is thought to determine a child's chances of success or failure later in life. It is assumed, and backed by evidence of correlation, that the children of affluent educated parents turn out the same because of the way their parents related to them. Early childhood programs seek to replicate this experience.

It's not primarily a matter of academics, though many early childhood education programs do teach children things like reading, colors and numbers far in advance of their contemporaries. The greater emphasis is on inculcating so-called "soft skills". These are things like perseverance, the ability to delay gratification and the ability to get along with other people.

Early academic gains tend to fade out by third grade but the positive impact of Head Start, as analyzed by Nobel Prize winning academic, James Heckman, lasts a life time. Graduates of Head Start and its precursors do better than their contemporaries by almost any measure, from lifetime income to health.

It's with this in mind that the trend in policy circles, best exemplified by Obama's "cradle to career" education strategy, is to intervene even before children or born to shape the parent-child relationship.

How is the parent-child relationship to be shaped?  The main aim and end of these very early programs is to transform the parent-child relationship into one that is primarily educative. The means that parents must be made aware that any thing they do will have an educative affect on their child.

So, if a parent is negative about an unusual vegetable in the supermarket, their child learns not to try new foods. If a parent reads to their child daily that child will learn to love reading - and perhaps to have higher confidence and self esteem because their parent has chosen to spend time with them.

Early childhood programs like those advocated by foundations like An Ounce of Prevention actually take young parents on "field trips" to the local supermarket where they are encouraged to use the experience as a series of teachable moments. This means the parent takes the opportunity to give their child an orange to hold while cooing something like "This is an orange. The orange is ROUND. How does is feel? Is it SMOOTH? See how it is BUMMPY? 

There are all sorts of problems with this approach at the level of social policy seeming from the temping but highly dubious tendency to want to reduce complex social and cultural and economic phenomena to the level of the interactions between parents and their kids, i.e. is the problem poverty a matter of parenting or do long-term social and economic trends play the larger role in shaping a child's prospect and expectations. my main concern however is the impact on the parent-child relationship.

The assumption that the relationship between parents and kids should be primarily educative puts a terrible burden on parents. Let us suppose for a moment that the parent-child is a rich, dynamic reciprocal relationship that evolves over time. If this relationship is primality educative, it means we can take nothing for granted. The time we spend with our children becomes a series of interactions that are more or less effective from the point of view of educating them. 

It puts parents in the awkward position of evaluating their actions, before, during or after the fact. What parent hasn't experienced that self-doubt wondering "what am I teaching my child by: losing my temper, indulging in ice-cream two days in a row, allowing them to watch/not watch television, making them stick with or allowing them to quit ______?"

Not only does this hugely complicate the fairly banal decisions parents make in the course of a day and encourage self consciousness and self-doubt, It opens the door to evaluating every other parent's behavior in the same way. Parents often talk about feeling "judged" by others but what we often miss is the far that we are judging our own actions on the basis of assumptions we never question. 

On some level I think most parents believe that it is simply common sense that our relationship with our kids is educative. My argument is not that we do not learn things from our parents. We evidently do. It's more to question a) whether that therefore means our relationship is primarily educative b) whether this requires any self-consciousness on the part of parents and c) why we have elevated the parent-child relationship above all other relationships on our children's lives.

Imagine if we applied the same criteria to our romantic relationships. Suppose we ditched all this sentimental slop about reman it chemistry and friendship and the pleasure of sharing a life together and decided that the real purpose of our romantic relationships is mutual responsibility to education one another? Imagine we assume that primary influence on our thinking and behavior was our interactions with our partner? What if we subjected every action in the course of a day to the same lines of thinking we take in regard to our children? "What am I teaching my partner by sleeping late, or drinking too much wine, or following the New York Yankees?" Or, because a romantic relationship is mutual, what in God's name is my partner thinking eating two slices of pie? 

It seems fairly obvious that this sort of thinking would undermine our relationship if not destroy it. By reducing everything to a matter of cause and effect, we not only rob our relationships of their complexity and spontaneity we also diminsis our partner's potential for autonomy and their capacity to  express various aspects of their personality.

Even children, at their most dependent have the potential for autonomy, to consider a thing and to decide how to act on it. When these deterministic assumptions begin to dominate our thinking, we start to see our children differently. So our children are not "ready" to walk to school because we have not taught them how to do it, or their refusal to eat broccoli is not simply a personal preference but because we failed to teach them to appreciate vegetables. 

There's much more to say on this - I could probably write a book about how the way we view the parent-child relationship today confuses the relationship between children and teachers and parents and schools. In the meantime I hope this provokes some thought and discussion.

Nancy

[theparentingmystique]

Parents vs Society - Not An Easy Leap

I just returned from the Battle of Ideas Festival in London where I was invited to appear on a panel about Tiger Mothers, or more correctly the row about Tiger Mothers.

The Battle, which is in its 7th year, is truly on of the most inspiring events going. It not only attracts the best and the brightest speakers from around the world, but the audience is always incredibly smart, articulate and young.

I am no worshiper of youth but I can’t help but feel this is one place at least where there is a genuinely intergenerational striving to grapple with big ideas. The ideas matter, not in a usual academic sense, but because of the participants, from most accomplished speaker to the youngest participants (some in high school) sense their capacity to the change the world. This lends the whole event a unique sense of seriousness and excitement.

I can’t help but contrast it to the Occupy Movement, which seems content to flirt with the vague, lofty platitudes ascribed to it by the press while spending the rest of its time wallowing in the minutiae of organizing collective food preparation or managing the excesses of the drum circles. But I digress.

I shared the platform with Stephianie Calman, a broadcaster, author and founder of The Bad Mother’s Club, Decca Aitkenhead, a journalist for The Guardian and G2 and the wonderful Tim Gill, of the Web site Rethinking Childhood, author of No Fear: growing up in a risk-averse society and a man who has probably done more to promote playgrounds the importance of play over safety in playground design than any other man on the planet.

It was a good session only slightly marred by the fire alarm that went off during my speech and required us to vacate the building. Fortunately we were able to return in 5 minutes. The content of the speeches are being transcribed for Spiked so I won’t go into them here but I was really stuck by how hard it is to move this discussion forward.

What I mean by this is that it is very difficult, perhaps more than with any other subject, for people to make that subtle intellectual separation between their own experience and what is going on with parenting culture and childhood at the level of society. Of course it’s fine to bring personal experience to bear up to a point, but in this case, it tends to really reinforce the focus on the parent/child relationship.

This combined with a tendency to focus on the poor means that many of the really horrible institutionalized aspects of parental determinism are excused because “we all know” there are parents out there (read poor people) who really need these remedial lessons in relating to their children (how to read to them, feed them, discipline them, etc.).

I don’t think this is an accident. I’m amazed at the number of mainstream trends in parenting culture today which have their intellectual origins in discussions of what used to be known as “social issues”, poverty, child abuse, inequality. So for instance, researchers look at the language children hear in early childhood in a middle class home and use that as a model for how parents in a working class home should speak to their children.

It has the insidious effect of making middle class parents feel superficially superior, though it ultimately makes them self-conscious about how they speak to their kids. For poor parents it promotes the fantasy that simply by exposing their children to different language they can single-handedly overcome systemic factors like long term economic stagnation, poor schools, etc. And if they fail… well naturally they need help – with their parenting! 

I think it would be useful for parents to experiment with taking themselves out of the equation. Anytime we hear a policy discussion about parenting we should askif parents weren’t here, how would we do this? I think we’d find that there are a number of different areas where parents are being brought in to compensate for the decline of some other way of doing things, whether that’s the loss of sidewalks.  

[theparentingmystique]

Please take the time to check out my Friend Jen of Jenography's interview with Joan Wolf, author of the terrific book, Is Breast Best: Taking on the Breast Feeding experts and the New High Stakes of Motherhood. Jen has lots of other great things on her blog which I would share if only I could figure out how to make a damn blog roll.