Showing posts with label parents and kids. Show all posts
Showing posts with label parents and kids. Show all posts

Sunday, November 11, 2012

Praising children's accomplishments

My Favourite Little Person recently turned 1!  I'm so proud of her!

Yes, even though it isn't actually an accomplishment, my immediate emotional response is to be proud of her. The same holds for any milestone.  She can crawl!  She can walk!  If you ask her "Where's the apple?" she'll point at the apple!  (Aside: that blows my mind - I didn't even know pre-verbal children could do that!)  I'm so proud of her!

When I'm actually in the same room as her,  my immediate emotional response to her doing anything new or new to me or successful or big-girlish is to gush.  "Wow!  Look at you!  You're walking!  **Applause**  Good girl!"  Even though  it's a perfectly normal milestone that everyone who is physically capable achieves.

There's a parenting philosophy that you shouldn't gush over kids' accomplishments when they're regular everyday accomplishments, you should save it for the truly impressive. And proponents of this philosophy seem to think that parents are gushing over kids' accomplishments in an attempt to boost the kids' self-esteem.

But based on my visceral and emotional inclination to gush about MFLP (who isn't even my own child!) I question whether it's possible for a loving parent to not gush over a small adorable child learning something new or achieving a milestone.  It seems like it would take a massive amount of restraint, and would build up an emotional wall for no good reason.

What if parents made a point of never humiliating their kids?

This post was inspired by this comic strip:








Her son is mortified by the idea of her speaking to his class, but she completely shrugs off his emotions.  Her husband might be enjoying the fact that their son is mortified, and she seems to be amused by this.

This is sort of a common cultural trope - kids are embarrassed by their parents, the parents see the kids' embarrassment as foolish and invalid, and the parents therefore take a certain delight in embarrassing their kids.  And, as a cultural trope, it's seen as all in good fun, at least by the parents.

But it seems to me that this is the kind of thing that could foster bullying attitudes.

A kid in a family like this will learn that feelings aren't worth respecting. If someone finds something humiliating, taking advantage of that fact to make them feel humiliated is normal, valid, and entertaining.  Surely no good can come of taking that attitude into the schoolyard with them!  The kid will also learn (as I did) that baseline human reality is that people want to embarrass you, and develop self-worth and defence mechanisms accordingly.

But suppose instead the parent said "I respect your feelings. If it would embarrass you, I won't do it."  And then the parent said to the teacher "It would embarrass Danny to have his mother come speak to the class, and I respect his feelings.  I'd be happy to come speak to your students in a year or two, once it would no longer bother him."

Then he would learn that respecting people's feelings is normal, and might carry that forward into the rest of the world.

Sunday, May 06, 2012

My child-self's problem with princesses

Some people think the presence of princess characters in children's media are problematic, thinking that they might lead kids to value being pretty and waiting around to be rescued by Prince Charming.  For me they were problematic for other reasons, but I couldn't articulate it until I read a blogger's experience interviewing Julie Andrews about princesses in children's media.

And so I asked Julie Andrews (JULIE ANDREWS!), and Emma, who happened to be there with her own young daughter, how we raise strong, confident independent girls in a culture that’s so saturated with princesses.
I asked really nicely, I promise.
And their answers were terrific.
Because they didn’t talk about tiaras. Or even princes. They talked about values.
-Princesses are involved in charitable causes
-Princesses are kind
-Princesses are patrons of the arts
-Princesses make their friends feel good about themselves.

This was problematic for me when I was a kid. When I was very young, I didn't perceive the key characteristics of the Disney princesses and other similar fictional characters to be that they were pretty or that they were rescued by their prince.  I perceived it to be that they were Very Very Good.  The general moral that I got from the stories is that girls who are Very Very Good - they were patient, they were cheerful, animals loved them, they were proactively helpful, they never lost their temper - got to live Happily Ever After.

And this made me feel bad about myself because I'm not Very Very Good.  I'm not terribly cheerful - usually the best I can do is copacetic. I try hard to be good, but sometimes I lose my temper.  I don't know how to make people feel good about themselves.  I'm not good at seeing ways to be proactively helpful.  I'm not bad and I'm not mean, but the best I can do is just quietly stay out of everyone's way and not hurt anything.  I'll never have what it takes to be Very Very Good.  So I'll never get to live Happily Ever After.

On top of that, it wasn't just the princesses who were Very Very Good. Most, if not all, of the female protagonists I encountered at a young age were Very Very Good.  Since I'm not Very Very Good, that made me feel insecure in my femininity.  As I've blogged about before, I take after my father, I'm not very feminine-looking and was even less so without the benefit of puberty and makeup, and before I grew my hair long I was constantly mistaken for a boy.  My parents discouraged me from wearing skirts and (in a way that's rather similar to today's parents hand-wringing about princesses) tried to encourage me towards less girly pastimes and media consumption.  This led me into this weird cycle of self-loathing where I thought my parents didn't want me to do girly stuff not just because I'm not pretty enough but because I'm not Very Very Good, and I also thought I was going to turn into a boy because I'm not pretty enough and because of other misunderstandings of how human anatomy works, and I though that my inability to be Very Very Good was a sign that I must really be a boy.  But I didn't want to be a boy, I want to be a girl!  (And for those of you just tuning in, I'm female-born and cisgendered.)

Unfortunately, I don't think this trend of Very Very Good protagonists is going to go away.  Adults want kids to be good, so it makes sense that they'd keep producing children's media where Very Very Good = Happily Ever After.

But children's media could help produce more children who are closer to Very Very Good by teaching kids how to be Very Very Good, perhaps by showing characters who are working on it.  How do you make your friends feel good about themselves?  How do you be patient and never lose your temper?  How do you be proactively helpful? The stories I read as a kid portrayed these characteristics as innate, but they're actually things people can learn and work on.

There's recent research (I'm pretty sure I read it in Malcolm Gladwell, but the specific source escapes me) that kids who think good grades are the result of hard work get better outcomes than kids who think good grades are the result of innate intelligence. I think something similar could happen if virtue were presented as the result of work rather than as innate, as something you have to think about rather than something that comes automatically.

Thursday, March 01, 2012

Does forcing children to give to charity really make them grow up to be charitable?

There's a parenting technique where people force their children to give to charity in an attempt to teach them the value of charity. For example, they might require the kid to put aside a certain portion of their allowance for charitable donations, or they might make a rule that the kid isn't allowed to get presents at their birthday party and instead the guests should make a contribution to a charity.

I wonder if this actually makes the kids grow up to be charitable?

Any attempts my parents made to force me into charitable behaviour just made me resentful. The one with the strongest emotional impact was one time when my parents decided we needed to donate a toy to a xmas toy drive. The toy drive collection was at the credit union, so they drove us and the toy there and then told me and my sister to put the toy in the collection box. All the credit union ladies watched us and went "Awwww!" I had no idea why they were doing this, but it made me feel objectified and humiliated (although I didn't know those words yet.) It also made me wary of any parent-instigated attempts at charitable donations, because I felt (although I couldn't articulate this yet) that my parents actually wanted me to do it so that they could be smug (although I didn't know the word yet) that their children are being charitable. This was also a strong contributing factor to my current practice of only donating anonymously.

I wonder how it worked out for other people. Did your parents try to force you to be charitable? Did it work? Did anything else they did end up actually making your charitable?

Saturday, March 19, 2011

What to do when your pre-teen daughter wants to remove her body hair

There was recently a letter in the Globe and Mail's Ask A Pediatrician column from a parent whose 8-year-old daughter wants to start shaving her legs. As a former hairy 8-year-old myself, I felt compelled to respond.

Short version for busy parents: Anyone who has body hair is old enough to remove said body hair. In my personal experience, a No!No! is the best hair removal method for beginners. For more information on how I arrived at this reasoning, keep reading.

My credentials

You're probably thinking "You don't have kids, what do you know?" What I know is what it's like to be a hairy little girl. I have more body hair than most women, and started puberty earlier than most people. I seem to remember more clearly than most people what I thought and felt as a child, and I can now articulate those feelings with adult vocabulary and nuance, and without feeling the need to hide or sugarcoat anything like a younger girl might out of awkwardness or shame. I also have 20 years' experience managing my body hair, and have tried literally every home hair removal method currently in existence.

When you should let your daughter start removing her body hair

Short answer: as soon as she has body hair that she'd like to remove.

Your first thought is probably "But she's too young!" But when it comes to taking care of our bodies, we have to work with what our bodies are actually doing, not what they theoretically should be doing. If your daughter started menstruating, you'd provide her with feminine hygiene products and make sure she knows where babies come from. If she began developing breasts, you'd provide her with the foundational garments she needs to maintain her comfort and modesty. If she started having strange vaginal discharge, you'd get her gynecological care.

In fact, her young age makes having prominent body hair even worse, because she and her peers aren't accustomed to this, and might not even know that it's normal. (One of the greatest humiliations of my life was being the only person, male or female, with hairy armpits at the Grade 5 pool party. Neither I nor any of my classmates knew at the time that hairy armpits were a normal part of puberty. It took until adulthood for my self-esteem to recover.) She's likely the hairiest person in her class, male or female. If her mother removes her body hair, and if her sisters are either young enough that they don't have prominent body hair or old enough that they remove their own body hair, then your daughter probably thinks she's the only person in the world who has this very visible, very humiliating problem. Her self-concept will be defined by it. And, because for her entire hairy life she has not been permitted to remove her body hair, she cannot help but to feel like she will have to spend the rest of her whole life experiencing this humiliation.

However, being able to remove your body hair gives you control over this. You aren't sentenced to be the ugliest person in the room any more. You are no longer defined by your hair. You once again have control and sovereignty over your body and can look as feminine as you feel. I am telling you from my firsthand experience as a hairy girl, it is outright empowering!

Because your daughter specifically asked you about shaving, we know that she is bothered by her body hair and that she knows you can provide her with a solution. If you do provide her with a solution, she will learn that if she goes to you with questions or concerns about her changing body, you will give her solutions that make her feel empowered. However, if you tell her that she's too young, she will feel even more ashamed of her body hair, as though she's being bad just by being hairy at too young an age. The shame compounds: she feels ashamed because she has ugly masculine hair, and she ashamed at having hair at an age you consider too young, and she feels ashamed at wanting to remove the hair when you think she's too young. Again, these bad feelings are even worse for especially young kids, because they still want to Be Good rather than rebelling against their parents. You can save her from this shame spiral and reward her for coming to you with her concerns about her changing body simply by providing her with the solution she came to you for, which what any good parent does when their kid comes to them with any problem.

While it is normal for a younger kid to go to their parents for permission to do something to or with their own body (and such permission is often also logistically necessary), we all know that it's really a question of sovereignty over one's own body. Denying her this sovereignty will introduce the idea that it's normal for authority figures to overrule her sovereignty over her own body. Do you want to take that risk? Then, as she gets older and starts thinking about it, she'll extrapolate that your rules are arbitrary and lack credibility, and will proceed to do whatever she wants without consulting you.

In summary, letting your kids remove their body hair as soon as they want to will increase their self esteem, empower them, assert their sovereignty over their own body, increase your credibility in their eyes, and teach them that coming to you with any concerns they might have about their changing bodies gets good results. Not allowing them to remove their body hair has the opposite effect.

At this point, you're still thinking "But what if she hurts herself with a razor or hot wax? And I don't want her to have to commit to a beauty routine for the rest of her life, not at such a young age!" That brings me to...

Why I recommend the No!No!

If you clicked on the link above, you're probably thinking that the No!No! looks expensive and infomercially. It is a bit pricier than parents normally spend on pre-teens (although you can often get deals on ebay) but it does do the job. Here's why I like it, and why I think it's especially suitable for particularly young users:

1. The No!No! is safe. It's impossible to injure yourself with it. The only harm can come from if you get loose skin caught in it, and the one time I did this (I ran it over my elbow with my arm straightened instead of bent, so the skin wasn't anywhere near taut) I got a red line on my skin that disappeared the next day. No blood, no pain, no scar, just a red line. It's contraindicated for genitals and breasts, but can be used on the rest of the body, including the face.

2. The No!No! is easy. It's just as fast as shaving, but without any of the mess. You don't even need to be in the bathroom to do it. (I do mine in my bedroom - no water required!) Even in cases where it doesn't get every single hair, you always finish with fewer hairs than you started with. It's never a frustrating waste of time.

3. The No!No! is painless. It doesn't pull the hairs out, it zaps them in place. You feel a slightly warm thing passing over your skin, and that's all.

4. The No!No! can be used on all types of hair. It works on stubble and on longer hairs. You don't have to wait for the hair to grow to a certain length like you do with many epilatory methods. You can do it every day or once a week. It doesn't work on full-length pubic hair (you need to trim it down first, and it is contraindicated for the genitals anyway, although it's okay for the outer bikini line), and I, personally, struggle to make it work for armpit stubble (have never tried it on virgin armpit hair), although I struggle with all epilatory methods on my armpits because the layout of my breasts makes it difficult to get the skin taut. People with smaller breasts who carry less towards the outside tend not to have this problem, although I don't have any testimonials specific to the No! No! It does work on my leg stubble, as well as on regrown waxed hair and virgin arm and face hair.

5. You can stop using the No!No! whenever you want without any unpleasant regrowth phase. This is the reason why I so strongly recommend it for younger users specifically. Hair removed with a No! No! doesn't grow back as stubble. It isn't prickly. It doesn't get all ingrowny. It simply grows back as a kinder, gentler version of your own hair. Not every single follicle regrows, some regrow more slowly, some regrow finer or paler. Virgin hair (i.e. hair that has never been removed before) regrows looking even more virgin. I have used it on my forearms and on my face (mustache, sideburns, chin whiskers), and I have gone up to a month in between treatments. Apart from the fact that each day I have marginally more hair there than the day before, it doesn't look at all like hair regrowth.

When I was a hairy preteen, I alternated between wanting to remove my ugly body hair, and resenting the fact that I had to keep removing my ugly body hair. But if I stopped, I'd get stubbly and itchy. The No! No! eliminates this dilemma. Your daughter can remove her hair every day in the summer and stop in the winter. She can remove her hair once and then decide it's not worth the trouble, and then revisit it a year later. She can remove her hair only for special occasions. She can experiment with removing hair from another area of her body without any drama.

In summary, the No!No! addresses every concern a parent might have about a pre-teen removing their body hair. It's possible you might have to supplement with a razor for armpits, tweezers for eyebrows, or clippers for longer (i.e. longer than an inch or two) hair, but I highly recommend the No!No! as the best starting point.

Saturday, March 05, 2011

When I was your age, I GOT to walk five miles to school!

In elementary school and in high school, I mostly walked to school. I rather liked it. I liked being able to choose what time to leave (go in early to join the pick-up soccer game, or watch another cartoon before I leave?) and which route to take (the direct route like good girls, or the back streets where we could feel transgressive by jaywalking, or through the townhouses' playground where we could feel transgressive because strictly speaking that playground was for residents only?). I liked being able to stop in at Becker's and buy candy, or pop into a friend's house, or, when I was in high school, go out of my way to Tim Horton's for a treat before heading home. In high school I liked how, when I was signed out for an orthodontist appointment, I could just kind of not go back to school for my last class of the day. I liked having private time to talk to my friends away from adults' ears, or to just walk by myself and think without parents barging in and asking me why I'm sitting there doing nothing.

However, sometimes I got a ride for various reasons, and various adults around me would give me crap about that. They'd tell me that THEY had to walk to school and I was spoiled for getting a ride. But what this sounds like when you're a kid is that I wasn't good enough to get a ride, I didn't deserve to get a ride, and I should have to walk as punishment for being such a bad and unworthy person. Of course, all this did was make me more determined to get a ride! They were talking about walking in a tone that made it sound like punishment and humiliation, and I didn't want punishment and humiliation! It was like the Tom Sawyer fence thing, but backwards.

When adults complain about Kids Today, they often use language that has that effect. They say Kids Today are Spoiled and Pampered. They say they need to Get Some Responsibility. They say parent should Make Them walk to school and get a job.

But why not say the parents should Let Them walk to school and get a job? Instead of talking about it like punishment and humiliation, why not talk about it as liberating? Because it is liberating, in an age-appropriate way. You get a bit more agency than usual. You get a bit more privacy than usual. You get to do something a bit more grownup than usual and prove to judgey adults that you can do it.

Please pay attention to the nuances here: I'm not suggesting taking things that are objectively unpleasant and just slapping positive names on them, like people who insist on calling a job loss an opportunity for personal growth. I'm not suggesting taking things that are objectively unpleasant and just telling kids they're lucky to do them, like people who tell kids they're lucky to have overprotective parents. I'm not trying to be like Calvin's father and tell you that drudgery and unpleasantness builds character. I'm just thinking about my younger self, coveting the freedom of the characters in her young adult novels, and then being treated like she's bad for not having those freedoms, or that those freedoms are humiliations.

Sunday, February 06, 2011

Analogy for childcare decisions

I've noticed an awful lot of people like to make sweeping declarative statements about which childcare choices are good or bad. But one thing I've noticed from watching my peers who become parents is that, in addition to the dictates of circumstance, so much depends on the personalities of the people involved. Some kids are ecstatic about going to daycare. Some (like me when I was little) would absolutely wither if forced to spend their days in a large group. Some parents find it fascinating to watch their kids every single moment of the day. Some find it outright dull, and do better once the kids are old enough to have an actual conversation.

So here's a series of analogies:

Is it a good idea to go to grad school?
Is it a good idea drink milk?
Is it a good idea to live with roommates?
Is it a good idea to retire at 65?

The answer to all of these questions is "It depends." It depends on your personality, and the personalities of the other parties involved. It depends on your financial and career situation. It depends on your state of health. It depends on your personal values. It depends on the current economic context.

The same goes for childcare decisions. And it really disturbs me that so many people who think their choice is right for everyone are going around having kids.

Thursday, December 09, 2010

Reindeer games, like monopoly

When I was in elementary school, we'd have xmas carol singalongs. Whenever we sang Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, we'd always sing the callbacks that weren't on the lyrics sheet.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (Reindeer!)
Had a very shiny nose (shiny nose!)
And if you ever saw it (saw it!)
You would even say it glows (like a lightbulb!)


And the teachers would always scold us for singing the callbacks and try to get us to sing it without them.

In retrospect, looking at it as an adult, I find myself wondering: Why on earth did they care if we were singing the callbacks? They weren't by any stretch of the imagination naughty, they just weren't on the lyrics sheet. WTF?

Sunday, September 19, 2010

What could an adult possibly get out of deliberately upsetting a child?

When I was a kid, various adults (especially from my father's branch of the family) would tease me or pretend to do stuff that would make life unpleasant for me ("accidentally" throw out a valued toy, drive away without me, etc.) or otherwise be rather mean to me. My mother would try to comfort me with the in-retrospect bizarre statement "Don't worry, he's just trying to upset you."

But why was he trying to upset me? Why would an adult deliberately try to upset a child? What would they get out of it? Why is it worth doing?

As a kid, I chalked it up to "grownups are weird". But I'm the same age now as my father was when I was born, and I can't fathom, even for the weirdest and most unpleasant of my peers, what reward or enjoyment or amusement they might get out of upsetting a kid that would make it worth the effort.

Sunday, August 22, 2010

Things They Should Invent: standardized, widely-known way for children to make clear that they're just being cheerful to be polite

(This actually stems from another blog post that I'm hoping to get up today (the one about the secret to unhappiness, if it's up by the time you're reading this). I started composing the other one first but this one just came barging in and wrote itself beginning to end.)

I dislike the word "sulking" and similar concepts. They trivialize a person's emotions by implying that they're feeling those emotions for the sole purpose of annoying other people. Think about your own life. When you feel a negative emotion, is it in any way about how other people will feel about it? Of course not! Your emotion is your emotion, and you're expressing it because it's what you're feeling.

(I always find it especially bizarre when parents say their child us "up sulking in their room." Remember when you were a kid and, for whatever reason, weren't interested in being downstairs where everyone else was, so you went up to your room? Think about what you were doing. Were you sitting there with arms crossed and a sour face grumbling about the goings-on downstairs? Of course not! You were reading your books, playing with your toys - living your life, basically, rather than doing stuff you didn't want to. It was the childhood equivalent of whatever you're doing at home today on this rainy Sunday.)

I've been reading Miss Conduct's book (which is very interesting - a lot of examination of people's motivations, which I find useful), and one thing she mentions several times is "People aren't [X] at you!" The guest at your dinner party who doesn't eat shrimp isn't not eating shrimp at you, he's just not eating shrimp - just like that other guy who doesn't have a shrimp on his plate at the moment. The girl in the bar who looks hot isn't looking hot at you, just like how you aren't being tall at her.

Similarly, a kid who's feeling a negative emotion isn't sulking at you. They're just feeling a negative emotion. The real issue is the parent would like the kid to hide the negative emotion and pretend to enjoy the situation, and the kid isn't doing that.

So at this point we have to ask ourselves: why do people hide negative emotions? Think about your own life. You hide negative emotions when you have something to gain by doing so. What do kids have to gain by hiding negative emotions?

Let me remind you of another phrase you probably heard in your childhood: "See? That wasn't so bad!" When you're a kid, if you get through a situation you dislike without expressing a huge amount of negative emotion, you parents get all smug and told-you-so about it. Then next time you don't want to do something, they completely dismiss your feelings "Oh, don't be silly, you'll like it." Or, if it's the same thing, "What's the matter? You LIKE X!" And not only do they dismiss your feelings to your face, they also convince themselves that you actually did like the thing, to the point that they truly believe that your word on what you do and do not enjoy cannot be taken at face value.

Therefore, there's absolutely no motivation for a kid to hide their feelings. If they do, their feelings won't be taken seriously next time and the parents will truly think that the kid likes the things they say they didn't like. Their only possibility for being taken seriously is to express their feelings as vociferously as possible. (And even that often doesn't work because parents think they have to instill that kids won't get their way by "whining".)

So what is needed is a way for kids to express to their parents (before the fact, after the fact, or both) that they don't really enjoy something but were just trying to make the best of the situation to be polite. The parent would need to communicate this to them explicitly, as well as talking to them about why and under what circumstances and to what end people might hide their negative emotions. And then - this is the important part - the parents need to praise them for being good, and believe and remember that the kid actually dislikes the thing in question. If the kid doesn't like going to church but was good and sat quietly through the whole mass last week and then does the same this week, the parent needs to be thinking "They were so good and polite and helpful to sit quietly through mass!" It is absolutely imperative that the parent not start thinking "Oh, I see little Johnny likes church now. I knew he'd come around!"

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

"Their parents must be so proud"

I've seen variations on this (clearly sarcastic) statement in many of the places where pictures/videos of G20 vandals are posted.

What I don't understand: why would you say that? What do their parents have to do with anything, and how did it occur to the speaker to mention them in the first place?

Are the people who make this statement implying that they shouldn't have been vandalizing specifically because it would embarrass their parents? If so, do the people who say this take their parents' reactions into account when making everyday choices? Because I don't know about you, but I don't give it a moment's thought - it's just completely irrelevant.

Or are they implying something else? If so, what?

I can't even begin to fathom why this would be anyone's reaction, but I've seen it an awful lot. Help me understand.

Saturday, April 24, 2010

Things They Should Study: do kids see parent-child relationships as typical of all relationships?

A recurring theme in my relationship with my parents and how that affected my social skills is that as a child I took how my parents treated with me as an example of how I should treat others. To use one of the milder examples, if I didn't say "please" when asking for something, my parents would say "What do you say?" Therefore, in the rest of life, if someone asked for something without saying "please", I'd say to them "What do you say?" Not so very good for general social interaction with peers or elders, but I truly thought that was What's Done. When I first read Miss Manners in my early 20s, I was quite genuinely surprised to learn that it's rude to correct other people's manners. It would never have occurred to me.

This has come up in conversation with other people who happen to be parents (haven't discussed it with my own parents) and they all seemed surprised that it wouldn't occur to me that parenting is an exceptional circumstance. But I can't imagine how it would have occurred to me. That was life as I knew it, that's how the world had been every day of my whole life.

It would be interesting to study a bunch of children and see how many of them see parent-child relationships as typical of all relationships, and how many of them see them as exceptional.

Monday, March 08, 2010

Analogy for today's Anthony Wolf column

Anthony Wolf writes a column about why it's not fair for a custodial parent to remarry against their kid's will.

I agree with his thesis, but I think it could be explained better, so I made an analogy:

Imagine your daughter is a few years older and has gone off to university. She lives in apartment-style student housing, sharing a two-bedroom suite with another girl. Partway through the year, the other girl decides to move her boyfriend into the suite. Your daughter objects, saying she hardly knows this guy and doesn't want to share her home with a guy she hardly knows. She doesn't want a third person on the shower schedule. She doesn't want a strange man she didn't even choose herself into what has so far been female-only space. She doesn't feel comfortable with him seeing her bras hanging up to dry or her used pads in the bathroom garbage can. She doesn't want to bump into him when she gets up to pee in the middle of the night, or lose the ability to sit in the living room in her jammies and watch movies.

But her roommate insists. "You don't get to control my life," she says, "Aren't I entitled to some happiness?" So she moves in the boyfriend. There's now a man your daughter didn't choose living in her home against her will. That's not fair to your daughter, now is it?

It's equally unfair for you to move in your man against her will. "But I love him!" Yes, and your daughter's roommate loves her man. That still doesn't make it fair to your daughter.

At this point, many parents will say "But I'm the adult, I'm supporting her, I'm paying for the house." Yes, and that makes it even more unfair, because your daughter can't move out of your home. She's completely trapped. Plus, because your man is an adult and your daughter is a minor, he technically has parental authority over her. So think back to the roommate situation, and imagine your daughter's roommate is also her landlord, and when the boyfriend moves in he'll become her landlord too, and she has signed a lease that they won't allow her to break. That's not fair at all, is it? If that were an actual landlord/tenant situation, she might actually be able to take them to court!

So if a member of the household objects to bringing a new member into the household (especially when the current household member is a 14-year-old girl in a female-only household, and the prospective new member is a strange man), do them the decency of waiting until they're in a position to leave if they choose. Four years isn't too long to wait.

(As an aside: Personally, I can't imagine four years being too long to wait to get married in a case like this where you have an extremely good reason to wait. You still have the person in your life, they're still there for you, you just can't share a household quite yet. You've found the love of your life! A four-year wait is small potatoes, especially when you can still see them and talk to them every day.

Time goes faster when you get older. While I'm technically old enough to be the mother of a 14-year-old, given social norms the lady in the column is probably somewhat older than me, so four years would seem like even less time to her. I seriously cannot put myself in that mental place of not being willing to wait.)

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Parenting FAIL

In the mall, there's a big gorgeous doggie (kind of weimaranerish) tied to a railing, presumably while his humans stepped into a store. A couple pushing a toddler in a stroller comes up, squees at the doggie, and stops to pet it. But they park the stroller off to the side, as though it's an unimportant shopping cart, and don't involve the kid in the doggie interaction at all!

Aren't you supposed to show interesting animals to your small child whenever the opportunity presents itself? Shouldn't you be saying to your kid "LOOK! It's a DOGGIE! Look at the DOGGIE!" and taking him out of the stroller to interact with the doggie under your careful supervision? Even if you don't want to have your kid pet the dog since the dog is taller than your kid and the dog's humans aren't around, shouldn't you turn the stroller so your kid can watch and learn from the doggie interaction rather than turning him towards the wall?

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Parental forgetfulness run amok

I've blogged before about the concept that I call parental forgetfulness, where the instant people reproduce they seem to lose the ability to identify with children or to recall first-person memories of how they thought and felt as children.

But this is the worst example I have ever seen.

Like every distressed woman, I did what came naturally. I called my friends. "You wear high heels and makeup," said one, a psychiatrist and mother. "You are clearly not opposed to feminine things."

"I went through that when I was a kid; I turned out okay," a Bay St. lawyer said.

"Just don't tell her it's bad," advised senior bureaucrat mom. "People always emphasize boy things as good and girl things as bad."

Partway through the frantic dialling, I realized I'd hired the wrong advisers. Who knows what their kids will grow up like? I needed to speak to their mothers. Their parenting decisions have paid off. They raised strong, independent, successful women, despite Disney's insipid infiltration.


The author knows exactly what these people turned out like, she's talking to them as adults, they're her friends. And they're giving her first-person memories of what their parents did and how that made them think and feel. Information straight from the source, from right inside the former child's head complete with the big picture of how they turned out as an adult and whatever drama they might have gone through in between. And the disregards all this and goes to their mothers, who can describe the empirically observable outcomes but can't tell what was going on inside the kid's head.

Sometimes I wonder which is cause and which is effect. Do people forget what it's like to be a child when they have children of their own? Or do people who remember what it's like to be a child choose not to have children of their own?

Saturday, October 24, 2009

"The older you get, the smarter your parents get": two possible perspectives

I've been very frustrated with my elders lately, because they aren't being smarter than me in the ways I need them to be. I'm not talking professional knowledge or knowledge specific to certain hobbies and interests, I'm talking life knowledge and skills that you absorb or figure out just by living life. How to remove a stain. How to invest your money. How to answer the "Tell me about a time when you had a conflict in your workplace" job interview question when you haven't actually had a conflict in your workplace. I keep finding my elders know no more than I do in these areas, and sometimes are two steps behind me. It's very frustrating, and also utterly baffling. I came into the world in 1980 knowing literally nothing. Since then, I've had to learn how to walk and talk and eat and read and socialize and balance my bank account. And during this time, I also developed a certain amount of expertise in stain removal and investing and job interviewing. But my elders, who had already figured out how to do all the walking/talking/bank account stuff long before 1980 and have been removing stains/investing/job interviewing since well before 1980, don't seem to know anything more than I do.

So my first theory is that they have some huge amount of extra knowledge in areas that I can't even see, can't even begin to imagine. So I was wishing that there was some way to tell how much of a person's knowledge you aren't seeing. In the Sims, if a person has five personality traits but you only know three of them, you can see that there are two other traits you don't know. I was thinking it would be so helpful if we could see something similar for people we're talking to in real life. I don't know if it's the same for everyone, but when I talk to someone I tend to get the impression that what I'm getting from them is representative of the whole person. It would be far easier to respect an elder who tells me "wash your clothes inside out" as though that were panacea, as though I haven't already been doing that for a decade, if I knew that I was only seeing 10% of what they have to offer, rather than thinking they had lived for decades and decades and the best they have to offer is that I should wash my clothes inside out.

In a fit of frustration, I tweeted that I've learned more from my elders about what not to do than about what to do. But that ultimately led to my second theory: our elders don't actually have decades of experience on us, because in living alongside them and observing them we're constantly absorbing the lessons they've learned from their decades of experience. I'm not even talking about stuff our elders try to deliberately teach us, I'm talking about lessons that they learn when we're kids - we learn right along with them.

For example, both of my grandmothers are still living in their own homes, but they need their kids to drive them places and help with stuff around the house. I look at that and think that's not what I want my golden years to be like (especially since I won't have kids), so I've already altered my life accordingly by choosing to live in a highrise in a high-density, walkable neighbourhood. My parents were constantly painting and fixing up their house, and I hated it. The smell, the mess, the instability...so because of that, I'm never going to buy a fixer-upper or go charging starry-eyed into a DIY redecorating project only to end up weeping on the floor of a half-ruined room. My parents also took us on a lot of trips, and I hated it. Close quarters, carsickness, lack of control over food and accommodations, and I simply don't get any pleasure out of sightseeing or being on a beach or whatever. So because of this, I'm never going to waste thousands of dollars and a year's worth of vacation time and ruin a relationship on some idealized "OMG, travelling = sexy!"

But I think part of the problem is that our elders think that we're in the same place they were when they were our age. I'm pretty sure at least one of my grandmothers thinks I don't realize that, in being childfree, I won't have any kids to take care of me when I'm old. I'm pretty sure she and her husband bought their house when they were in their 20s without giving any thought to what life will be like at 80 so she assumes I'm doing the same, whereas in real life I learned about the long-term unsuitability of car-dependent housing at the same time that she did.

Analogy: Our elders are like pure mathematical theorists coming up with new proofs and equations. We're the math students decades later casually using those proofs and equations in our applied math textbooks. I certainly could never come up with a way to calculate or prove derivatives, and I promptly forgot the long-form equation as soon as we started learning the product rule and the quotient rule. But I can still use derivatives in physics for velocity and acceleration, etc. Unfortunately, a lot of my physics work is being discounted because the senior academics think my theories on velocity and acceleration are worthless because when they were my age they didn't have a way to calculate derivatives.

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

When, why, and how did classroom learning start being unsuitable for boys?

I've heard it mentioned as a given quite a few times in quite a number of places (examples off the top of my head: this and this) that boys are ill-served by the traditional classroom model of school. Apparently they find it way harder than girls to sit down, sit still, listen, pay attention, read, write, buckle down and do their work, etc.

But there's a great big neon blinking question mark here that I haven't seen addressed or even mentioned anywhere: the traditional classroom model, complete with sitting, listening, paying attention, and diligently doing work, dates back to when school was for boys only. Off the top of my head and limiting myself only to Anglo-Saxon culture (because that's the only one I have pertinent information from off the top of my head), I know that the traditional classroom model was around in the UK in the middle ages, because the Catholic church used it (at Oxford and elsewhere) to train boys up to be priests.

So when did this model, which was originally conceived for a male-only context, become unsuitable for boys? Why and how did this happen? If someone could figure this out, maybe we could address it or undo it.

Friday, August 28, 2009

Wherein the catholic school boards solve a 40-year-old problem

Apparently some of the catholic school boards are eliminating the uniform kilt because students are wearing them too short.

I think this is hilarious, because my mother wore her uniform kilt too short when she was in high school, back in the 1960s. It's actually my mother who (inadvertently) taught me how to roll a kilt so your hemline is high but you can readily lower it when there are teachers around. I never went to a school that had uniforms, but I still know the technique.

If my mother had chosen to start her family in her early 20s, and then I had chosen to start a family in my early 20s, my mother could easily be the grandmother of one of the high school students who's now seeing kilts banned from their wardrobe because people are wearing them too short. Imagine that! "But my grandmother got to do it!"

Friday, July 24, 2009

Things They Should Study: is there a correlation between childhood stuffed animals and materialism?

When I was in Grade 5, our teacher played John Lennon's Imagine for us. I listened to the song, following along the lyrics sheet, briefly scandalized by the use of the word "hell" but agreeing wholeheartedly with the sentiment. Until we got to the line "Imagine no possessions." Then I was scared: this man obviously wanted to take Smurfy away!

Smurfy is, as you might have guessed, a toy smurf. He has been with me my whole life, and for a good chunk of my life was my best friend - for a few dark years, my only friend. When the world gets too scary, Smurfy is there. After a long day being tormented by my bullies, I'd go to my room, cuddle up with Smurfy, and all would be right with the world. I still have him, and to this day there is a certain shade of comfort that only he can bring.

I'm sure only the most cold-hearted curmudgeon would characterize my relationship with Smurfy as materialistic. And yet, he is, strictly speaking, an object, a material possession, that I am emotionally attached to. The rest of my possessions I like for their function, perhaps combined with their aesthetics. With the exception of a few difficult-to-fit-and-discontinued pieces of clothing, I could do without them or replace them without blinking an eye. But Smurfy I need, and another stuffed animal can't do the job nearly as well. The emotional attachment to an object is there, developed at a very early age.

I know John Lennon didn't really want to take my Smurfy away. I know most people wouldn't characterize a child clutching a stuffed animal as materialistic. I know that whether people characterize me as materialistic will vary according to how much they like me and what point they're trying to prove. And I'm not suggesting or even hinting that parents should deny their children stuffed animals so they don't become materialistic - I would never deny another child the comfort that Smurfy has brought me.

But I can't help but wonder, does this emotional attachment to an object early on lead to materialism later in life? Or, conversely, does it reduce materialism because ordinary consumer goods will never be your best friend like that one stuffed animal is?

Saturday, July 11, 2009

Things They Should Study: why are there monsters under the bed and how did they get there?

When I was little, my furniture turned into monsters at night. Sure, it sat very very still, but I knew it was a monster and I knew it was going to get me. The cabinet in the downstairs bathroom also turned into a monster if I blurred my eyes a certain way, and ALL the furniture in my baby sister's room (where my parents would sometimes send me as a punishment because there were no interesting toys in there, unlike my room) was turned into monsters at all times, even during the day. (No, I never questioned why the baby was kept in a room with monsters. I was too young to see a baby as something that needed protecting.) When I started elementary school there was no respite from the monsters. Some of the toilets had monsters in them, and this wisdom was carefully handed down over the years. I'll bet you anything that if you asked a current student at my former elementary school which toilet the toilet monster lives in, she'll say the last one on the right-hand side.

When you're a kid, there are monsters everywhere. Under the bed, in the closet, we know this. When you were reading me describe my childhood monsters, you probably weren't thinking I was a completely delusional loony. You probably know that they aren't there now because I'm a grown-up, but there were very much real when I was a child. Sure, they didn't actually get me and I never actually saw them move, but they were real.

But why do children have monsters? How did this come about? Is it cultural or evolutionary? Do all children in all cultures have monsters? If so, what evolutionary purpose does it serve? If not all cultures have monsters, which ones don't and why not? Why do we have them?

Life should be scarier now than it was when I was a child. I know, in more specific detail than I've ever wanted to, about things like torture, rape, and war crimes. If there's a phobia trigger, no one is going to rescue me. My grownups can't solve all my problems - in fact, we're getting frighteningly close to the point where they can't solve any problems that I can't already solve for myself. I'm well aware that my financial resources are finite and competence and hard work aren't enough to earn a living. The number of people in the world who actively want me to be safe is so small I could probably type up a list of names, and the number of people in the world who directly or indirectly want to do harm to me seems to be bigger every time I turn around.

But I don't have any monsters, and generally live in less fear that I did back when my dresser turned into a monster. So why did we have that omnipresent but nonspecific fear back when we were kids, and why do very real and specific fears seem to chase it away?