18 posts tagged “parenting”

When my son was born, the nurses who were working on the umbilical cord and cleanup called one of the doctors over.  "Look at this cord blood," one of them said.  The doctor said, "This baby must have had excellent in utero nutrition."  The other nurse said, "Well, look at his skin, too.  You can see he was already well cared for."

I tried, you know, all throughout my pregnancy.  I tried my best to make sure that the baby had every nutrient that he needed, every day.  I started eating foods in strange combinations to make sure I was getting enough vitamins and minerals in my diet, and it's paid off.  Not only was he born full-term at a healthy weight, he hasn't had any of the problems that plague so many children.  No ear infections, no weird skin afflictions, nothing like that.  He's a bundle of robust good health.  We're very proud of that.

But I'm not just writing this to brag.  I'm writing this because I find the way we talk about these things (or don't) and the way we treat our children in general in this country to be appalling. 

As research into what happens in utero goes on, we're finding out more about how much nutrition in the womb matters.  I think most of us are already aware that a deficiency in folic acid early in pregnancy is linked to neural tube defects, especially spina bifida.  But, when it is recommended by the government that all women who are of childbearing age take a folic acid supplement, it is taken by some people to mean that the government is trying to say that women should always be planning to be pregnant, because maybe that's what women are for.  I find this baffling.  Unplanned pregnancies are most of the pregnancies in this country, and as far as I can tell, most of those unplanned pregnancies are not aborted.  So, a small thing that you could do to prevent lifelong spinal cord dysfunction isn't worth it because of what it says about you, the woman.  Here, as in so many other cases, women's ability to take umbrage and see themselves as victims of a government machine trying to squash their rights and personhood takes precedence over the health and welfare of any unplanned children.  That seems fair, so compassionate. 

Please note that while the FDA does mandate folic-acid enrichment of some cereal products, it does not mandate that any women, pregnant or otherwise, take folic acid supplements.  It just recommends it.  Apparently a recommendation to reduce the odds of spina bifida occurring in children by as much as 70% is fucking oppressive, but probably not as oppressive as spina bifida itself.

And god forbid that you should express sympathy for the goal of getting all pregnant women to pay more attention to their nutrition while they're pregnant.  Apparently it is more important that a woman be able to eat whatever she wants than that the baby be given some chance at good health.  Yes, I believe the majority of mothers do take as much care as they can with this, but it's obvious that too many mothers do not.  One of the reasons we have such a high infant mortality rate is because we have such high rates of preterm births here, and that is sometimes related to in utero care (not always, of course.  It is also related to other factors, but use of alcohol and tobacco during pregnancy are big factors--occasionally, some women smoke during pregnancy because they want smaller babies believing that will make labor easier, which it doesn't.  All it does is set the baby up for lifelong health problems.)

And god forbid you should ever mention the small-but-growing body of research that suggests a link between IVF and some cancers, autism, and other birth defects and complications--not to mention the fact that most such babies are born at low birthweights and often prematurely, putting them already at risk for various health and developmental problems.  Instead, keep following the red herrings and refuse to get your kid vaccinated. 

But what do we care about babies, right?  What we care about is women's rights, and every time the two even remotely, questionably come into conflict, we feel we must choose the woman's right to smoke and drink and not take folic acid during pregnancy.  We get ourselves into that position because of the abortion debate.  It is felt that ceding any concern to the developing fetus is admitting that this thing is a developing person, that what we do to it now can have potentially devastating lifelong consequences for the person it will be.  And admitting that, it is felt, gives up important ground to the pro-life crowd.  Maybe it does, but maybe on this one, the pro-life crowd is right.  I believe that abortion should be safe and legal (and, yes, rare, because I believe that in every case, contraception is preferable) but I am not willing to take away all consideration for the fetus.  And we shouldn't have to.  I believe there is a middle ground where a reasonable case can be made that a potential, developing person is worthy of moral consideration but that there are times when the rights of the woman are more important.  This is an ethical position, please note, not a recommendation for a legal position.

This all disturbs me quite enough, that we care, apparently, so little for giving our children the best chance at a healthy life that we would rather protect abortion rights at any cost than advocate, say, public-health campaigns that would help to educate women about in utero nutrition and its consequences.  But it doesn't really end once the baby is born.  Riddle me this:  If caring about a fetus is not the same as caring about an actual person, then why do our attitudes about fetuses so often carry over even after they're born?

We abuse our children.  We neglect them.  We kill them.  We abandon them, in dumpsters and at hospitals through Safe Haven Laws.  We don't take a lot of time out of our busy lives for them.  We don't take special care to keep fathers, mothers, and children all living in the same household.

In Nebraska, as I'm sure many of you have heard, the Safe Haven Law does not currently have an age expiration.  In the few months since the law passed, some 35 children have been dumped at hospitals, abandoned by their parents.  Most of those children are not infants and are old enough to know they have been abandoned.  Some were in their teens already.  Several of them were driven from out of state by their parents.  One woman drove her son up from Georgia to dump him, then said, "Don't judge me.  I love my son."  Apparently she loved him so much that she could find the wherewithal and money to drive to Nebraska from Georgia to abandon him but not enough to actually take care of him.  Tonight, Campbell Brown asked what's going on that we have so many parents willing to abandon their kids to the state, whether there aren't enough state resources or not enough accesssibility to help parents who feel they can't care for their kids.  I don't think there are enough state resources in the world to prevent this kind of thing.  If parents are bad parents, irresponsible, uncaring, they will still be no matter how much money or aid you provide them.  Good parents take care of their kids even through poverty and hard times.  Any good and loving parent would know the damage they do to their kids by abandoning them.

We do not as a society, though, encourage parents to be responsible and stay with their children and care for them.  We certainly don't encourage men to do so and have gone so far as to tell fathers that they are neither needed nor, in many cases, wanted.  Their money is wanted and required, yes, but not their actual presence.  We don't care, frankly, if putting kids in daycare hurts them in the long run; we don't even want to talk about it because of what it might say about women working. 

And so we get stories like these, girls who have unprotected and sometimes promiscuous sex from young ages (and presumably boys, too, but this survey was focused on girls).  I think it's cute how Dr. Schroeder concludes from these results that what these girls need is sex education.  It's startlingly clear from what the girls said about their sex lives that they know a lot about sex, including how pregnancy happens, what STDs are and how to prevent them.  That isn't the problem.  They're so afraid of losing the "friendship" of boys that they do whatever the boys want.  The problem is they don't know what a relationship with a man that is based on respect rather than sexual demands looks like.  The problem is they don't know what it feels like to be loved by a man--their fathers--for something other than sex.  So, to avoid having these boys think they're uncool or get mad at them, they take the risk of unprotected sex.  That isn't a lack of sex education.  That's a lack of fundamental self-esteem, a self-esteem that your school can't actually give you or teach you because it has to come from your home life, from these basic relationships that are supposed to teach you that you are loved even if you don't want to have sex.  The fact that it isn't--in girls who have not been abused--tells us something pretty fucking awful about our country and how it treats its children.

Add it all up.  We've decided fetuses are not worthy of moral consideration.  We abandon infants, through Safe Haven laws and also illegally in dumpsters and plastic bags.  We abuse and neglect a substantial portion that we don't actually abandon.  Another substantial proportion, we tell them that one or the other of their parents--usually their fathers--are essentially worthless in the cause of raising children.  We expect them to evolve to our desires rather than tailoring our desires to the ways children have been raised for millennia of human history.  We think it's perfectly acceptable to feed our kids any old kind of junk food because we don't "have time" to cook nutritious food--nevermind about the consequences.  We sexualize girls from young ages without ensuring them the benefit of a positive relationship with a man.  While contraception of various kinds is widely available, even when you're poor (Planned Parenthood, for example, has a sliding fee scale--I know from experience) and young, and adoption is also a widely available option, we still have this culture of no blame, no shame for mothers parents who abandon their children or who fail to care for them (to be fair to fathers, I doubt most fathers of abandoned infants even know that they're fathers).  We don't want to talk about anything that would benefit kids but potentially stigmatize or disallow anything any woman wants.  If something does come out, it tends to get buried quickly or shouted at by so-called feminists who support "reproductive choice" for women (but not for men, because this is about equality).  Since we don't want to talk about sex with our kids or take care of our kids, we demand that the government offer programs to do it for us (sex ed in school, self-esteem exercises in school, etc.).  

We, as a society, incentivize irresponsibility, self-centeredness, and to some extent, bad parenting (although we don't only incentivize irresponsibility in parenting and family issues--the bailout so far has been a good example of this, and, gee, look how well AIG is behaving now!).  We don't like to punish people for mistakes that any of us could make, but at the same time, we have to do better at raising kids.  We have to do better by our kids.  We should feel shame at the state of our nation's childrearing. 

I don't frankly know whether it's better or worse in other countries, and I don't care.  If it were found that British parents were even worse than us (and, again, I have no idea--sorry, UK), that wouldn't make our behavior OK.  I don't know what it's going to take anymore--I don't even know how to correct some of the shit we've done.  But we have to because the people who are least deserving of suffering are suffering, even when they don't always know they are.  We are failing to protect the people who most need protection.  And that's wrong.  

When my son was born, the nurses who were working on the umbilical cord and cleanup called one of the doctors over.  "Look at this cord blood," one of them said.  The doctor said, "This baby must have had excellent in utero nutrition."  The other nurse said, "Well, look at his skin, too.  You can see he was already well cared for."

I tried, you know, all throughout my pregnancy.  I tried my best to make sure that the baby had every nutrient that he needed, every day.  I started eating foods in strange combinations to make sure I was getting enough vitamins and minerals in my diet, and it's paid off.  Not only was he born full-term at a healthy weight, he hasn't had any of the problems that plague so many children.  No ear infections, no weird skin afflictions, nothing like that.  He's a bundle of robust good health.  We're very proud of that.

But I'm not just writing this to brag.  I'm writing this because I find the way we talk about these things (or don't) and the way we treat our children in general in this country to be appalling. 

As research into what happens in utero goes on, we're finding out more about how much nutrition in the womb matters.  I think most of us are already aware that a deficiency in folic acid early in pregnancy is linked to neural tube defects, especially spina bifida.  But, when it is recommended by the government that all women who are of childbearing age take a folic acid supplement, it is taken by some people to mean that the government is trying to say that women should always be planning to be pregnant, because maybe that's what women are for.  I find this baffling.  Unplanned pregnancies are most of the pregnancies in this country, and as far as I can tell, most of those unplanned pregnancies are not aborted.  So, a small thing that you could do to prevent lifelong spinal cord dysfunction isn't worth it because of what it says about you, the woman.  Here, as in so many other cases, women's ability to take umbrage and see themselves as victims of a government machine trying to squash their rights and personhood takes precedence over the health and welfare of any unplanned children.  That seems fair, so compassionate. 

Please note that while the FDA does mandate folic-acid enrichment of some cereal products, it does not mandate that any women, pregnant or otherwise, take folic acid supplements.  It just recommends it.  Apparently a recommendation to reduce the odds of spina bifida occurring in children by as much as 70% is fucking oppressive, but probably not as oppressive as spina bifida itself.

And god forbid that you should express sympathy for the goal of getting all pregnant women to pay more attention to their nutrition while they're pregnant.  Apparently it is more important that a woman be able to eat whatever she wants than that the baby be given some chance at good health.  Yes, I believe the majority of mothers do take as much care as they can with this, but it's obvious that too many mothers do not.  One of the reasons we have such a high infant mortality rate is because we have such high rates of preterm births here, and that is sometimes related to in utero care (not always, of course.  It is also related to other factors, but use of alcohol and tobacco during pregnancy are big factors--occasionally, some women smoke during pregnancy because they want smaller babies believing that will make labor easier, which it doesn't.  All it does is set the baby up for lifelong health problems.)

And god forbid you should ever mention the small-but-growing body of research that suggests a link between IVF and some cancers, autism, and other birth defects and complications--not to mention the fact that most such babies are born at low birthweights and often prematurely, putting them already at risk for various health and developmental problems.  Instead, keep following the red herrings and refuse to get your kid vaccinated. 

But what do we care about babies, right?  What we care about is women's rights, and every time the two even remotely, questionably come into conflict, we feel we must choose the woman's right to smoke and drink and not take folic acid during pregnancy.  We get ourselves into that position because of the abortion debate.  It is felt that ceding any concern to the developing fetus is admitting that this thing is a developing person, that what we do to it now can have potentially devastating lifelong consequences for the person it will be.  And admitting that, it is felt, gives up important ground to the pro-life crowd.  Maybe it does, but maybe on this one, the pro-life crowd is right.  I believe that abortion should be safe and legal (and, yes, rare, because I believe that in every case, contraception is preferable) but I am not willing to take away all consideration for the fetus.  And we shouldn't have to.  I believe there is a middle ground where a reasonable case can be made that a potential, developing person is worthy of moral consideration but that there are times when the rights of the woman are more important.  This is an ethical position, please note, not a recommendation for a legal position.

This all disturbs me quite enough, that we care, apparently, so little for giving our children the best chance at a healthy life that we would rather protect abortion rights at any cost than advocate, say, public-health campaigns that would help to educate women about in utero nutrition and its consequences.  But it doesn't really end once the baby is born.  Riddle me this:  If caring about a fetus is not the same as caring about an actual person, then why do our attitudes about fetuses so often carry over even after they're born?

We abuse our children.  We neglect them.  We kill them.  We abandon them, in dumpsters and at hospitals through Safe Haven Laws.  We don't take a lot of time out of our busy lives for them.  We don't take special care to keep fathers, mothers, and children all living in the same household.

In Nebraska, as I'm sure many of you have heard, the Safe Haven Law does not currently have an age expiration.  In the few months since the law passed, some 35 children have been dumped at hospitals, abandoned by their parents.  Most of those children are not infants and are old enough to know they have been abandoned.  Some were in their teens already.  Several of them were driven from out of state by their parents.  One woman drove her son up from Georgia to dump him, then said, "Don't judge me.  I love my son."  Apparently she loved him so much that she could find the wherewithal and money to drive to Nebraska from Georgia to abandon him but not enough to actually take care of him.  Tonight, Campbell Brown asked what's going on that we have so many parents willing to abandon their kids to the state, whether there aren't enough state resources or not enough accesssibility to help parents who feel they can't care for their kids.  I don't think there are enough state resources in the world to prevent this kind of thing.  If parents are bad parents, irresponsible, uncaring, they will still be no matter how much money or aid you provide them.  Good parents take care of their kids even through poverty and hard times.  Any good and loving parent would know the damage they do to their kids by abandoning them.

We do not as a society, though, encourage parents to be responsible and stay with their children and care for them.  We certainly don't encourage men to do so and have gone so far as to tell fathers that they are neither needed nor, in many cases, wanted.  Their money is wanted and required, yes, but not their actual presence.  We don't care, frankly, if putting kids in daycare hurts them in the long run; we don't even want to talk about it because of what it might say about women working. 

And so we get stories like these, girls who have unprotected and sometimes promiscuous sex from young ages (and presumably boys, too, but this survey was focused on girls).  I think it's cute how Dr. Schroeder concludes from these results that what these girls need is sex education.  It's startlingly clear from what the girls said about their sex lives that they know a lot about sex, including how pregnancy happens, what STDs are and how to prevent them.  That isn't the problem.  They're so afraid of losing the "friendship" of boys that they do whatever the boys want.  The problem is they don't know what a relationship with a man that is based on respect rather than sexual demands looks like.  The problem is they don't know what it feels like to be loved by a man--their fathers--for something other than sex.  So, to avoid having these boys think they're uncool or get mad at them, they take the risk of unprotected sex.  That isn't a lack of sex education.  That's a lack of fundamental self-esteem, a self-esteem that your school can't actually give you or teach you because it has to come from your home life, from these basic relationships that are supposed to teach you that you are loved even if you don't want to have sex.  The fact that it isn't--in girls who have not been abused--tells us something pretty fucking awful about our country and how it treats its children.

Add it all up.  We've decided fetuses are not worthy of moral consideration.  We abandon infants, through Safe Haven laws and also illegally in dumpsters and plastic bags.  We abuse and neglect a substantial portion that we don't actually abandon.  Another substantial proportion, we tell them that one or the other of their parents--usually their fathers--are essentially worthless in the cause of raising children.  We expect them to evolve to our desires rather than tailoring our desires to the ways children have been raised for millennia of human history.  We think it's perfectly acceptable to feed our kids any old kind of junk food because we don't "have time" to cook nutritious food--nevermind about the consequences.  We sexualize girls from young ages without ensuring them the benefit of a positive relationship with a man.  While contraception of various kinds is widely available, even when you're poor (Planned Parenthood, for example, has a sliding fee scale--I know from experience) and young, and adoption is also a widely available option, we still have this culture of no blame, no shame for mothers parents who abandon their children or who fail to care for them (to be fair to fathers, I doubt most fathers of abandoned infants even know that they're fathers).  We don't want to talk about anything that would benefit kids but potentially stigmatize or disallow anything any woman wants.  If something does come out, it tends to get buried quickly or shouted at by so-called feminists who support "reproductive choice" for women (but not for men, because this is about equality).  Since we don't want to talk about sex with our kids or take care of our kids, we demand that the government offer programs to do it for us (sex ed in school, self-esteem exercises in school, etc.).  

We, as a society, incentivize irresponsibility, self-centeredness, and to some extent, bad parenting (although we don't only incentivize irresponsibility in parenting and family issues--the bailout so far has been a good example of this, and, gee, look how well AIG is behaving now!).  We don't like to punish people for mistakes that any of us could make, but at the same time, we have to do better at raising kids.  We have to do better by our kids.  We should feel shame at the state of our nation's childrearing. 

I don't frankly know whether it's better or worse in other countries, and I don't care.  If it were found that British parents were even worse than us (and, again, I have no idea--sorry, UK), that wouldn't make our behavior OK.  I don't know what it's going to take anymore--I don't even know how to correct some of the shit we've done.  But we have to because the people who are least deserving of suffering are suffering, even when they don't always know they are.  We are failing to protect the people who most need protection.  And that's wrong.  

I meant to write about something else tonight, but instead I'm going to talk about my dad and my childhood.

See, my husband and I started talking about my dad and my childhood tonight while our son was playing, and in talking about it, I came to think that my childhood was somewhat unusual, mostly during the time I spent with my dad, although having a Republican archaeologist and a vegetarian/Democrat anthropologist raising you is probably also somewhat unusual, but they strived to offer me normalcy.  They may not have quite got there, though.

What brought this up is that my husband asked me, upon seeing some security guards, if that was a well-paid position.  I said I didn't know, and then I went on to mention that my dad was a security guard for some years.  He was a security guard, specifically, for a Game & Fish museum in Little Rock, Arkansas.  As you can well imagine, there were not a lot of break-ins or other problems--apparently, no one wanted the stuffed trouts on display.  My dad used to take me with him to work in the summers, because our time together was so short and he felt he had to make up for lost time.  So, when I was about 9 and 10 years old, I would spend all night locked in a darkened museum with my just my dad and another security guard and lots of those vending machine cheese-n-crackers.  There wasn't really anyplace to sleep, so I would go around and check out the displays and push all the buttons on the ones that would tell a story or whatever.  My husband can now see clearly why I have such trouble with insomnia.

My dad had two other jobs at various times that he would take me with him to do.  First, he was a salesman of agricultural oils and greases.  I had no idea, really, that so many types of greases existed, but apparently different farming implements require different lubricants.  Some of them are fuchsia, for some odd reason.  My father was an amazing salesman.  He was one of those guys who loved to talk to people, loved to schmooze, and could make anyone feel like a close personal friend within minutes.  He could make virtually anyone trust him.  He could make you feel that, by golly, if you say I need the fuchsia grease, then I must really need the fuchsia grease.  It was amazing to watch.  He took me with him a lot on this job, so I spent a lot of the summer traveling around northern Arkansas listening to my dad sing "Battle of New Orleans" and "Blowin in the Wind" and even "Tennessee Stud" talking to farmers and eating Frito pie.  We also spent a lot of that time holed up in honky-tonks, taverns, and VFW bars.  I don't know if in Arkansas they still let kids into bars, but they did then, and I would sit with a glass of cold tomato juice listening to all these seemingly old men talk about the weather and sports. 

Then, later, my dad became a milkman.  Yes, he drove a truck around and delivered milk and other dairy products to people's homes.  Again, my dad got to use his salesmanship to win new customers and encourage Miss Polly down the road that she really needed a quart of ice cream this week.  I couldn't actually drive around in the truck with him, but he would come get me after he finished the deliveries to help him do inventory and then we went back to the office to do his books.  I did his books for him while he drank coffee and schmoozed.  He pointed out to every person in the room every single day that his daughter, who was only 11, was doing his books for him because she was so smart, so smart that she could get them done faster than anyone else.  It was true that I usually got them done faster than anyone else, but that's probably because I did less coffee drinking and schmoozing.  It felt pretty good to hear my dad brag about me that way, and afterwards we'd often head out to either a Waffle House or another bar.

There was one summer when my dad bought a pool hall (a bar with a lot of pool tables) that was in this ancient building in Newport, Arkansas.  There was an old and probaby condemned hotel on the second floor, and that's where we lived.  He was married that summer to some bar chippie (I had no fondness for the woman), and she had her four kids with her, so we all lived in this 100-year-old hotel we were convinced was haunted.  That's the summer his drinking really got out of hand, and he failed to pay the electric bill or the water bill, and we kids had to take turns hauling water.  It wasn't a great summer.  He really made an effort to keep the drinking somewhat under control while I was there, but that summer he just couldn't, I guess. 

The thing is, I loved all those times with my dad.  I loved spending all night with stuffed deer.  I loved all the Frito pies and Johnny Cash songs.  I loved driving all over northern Arkansas schmoozing farmers.  I loved the VFW bars.  All of it.  My dad was a funny man, always with a joke and a wink, always with a silly song.  He would also get really quiet and scary sometimes, but that isn't the part I want to remember and so mostly I have decided not to.

Then I'd go home, back to New Mexico, and there would be much consternation.  My mom doesn't actually consider Frito pie to be a balanced meal nor Dr. Pepper an adequate substitute for water.  But, while my mother always provided me with a healthful diet, things weren't exactly normal.

My mom went back to college when she was 30, and I was 7.  To go to college and raise me, she took classes (pre-med at the time) full time and also worked full time on the graveyard shift (interestingly, she worked at White Sands Missile Range doing something with computers, and she was involved in some missile testing which I thought was tremendously cool at the time).  She didn't sleep.  She wasn't home much, either, given all that.  She would talk to me in her sleep or half sleep and often call me by the names of her coworkers instead of my own.  She would sometimes find a way to both study and spend time with me by reading to me out of her textbooks.  I would curl up next to her and listen to her read about zoology and microbiology and toxicology and gawk at the pictures of flagella and such.  Not exactly written for kids, those things.

Then my stepdad came along, and he is significantly younger than my mom (9 years to be exact) so he was just a pup, very much still interested in partying his way through college.  And he did.  We did.  Many of the parties were actually at our house, and I would hang around and make chit-chat with all these college students while pouring them beer out of a keg.  I wasn't allowed to stay up past my bedtime or drink any beer or anything terrible like that, and to me, looking back, the most remarkable thing about it is that all those college students would make time at a party to talk to a 9-year-old girl.  Sure, I was conversant in microbiology, but still.  They didn't just make time for it, they actually liked me.  I still see many of them, and they still feel like surrogate aunts and uncles to me.  They cared about me and talked to me like a person instead of segregating me with other children (though to be honest, there were no other children; all my parents' friends were much younger than my mom, and none of them had any kids yet). 

All of this is just to say that I think a lot of our ideas about what kids need and what a normal, good childhood is are overly narrow.  All kids have different personalities and needs, but the life I had suited me just fine, even though I'm pretty sure the authorities would not have liked it much.  That's also why I think our education system just has the wrong idea in forcing children to spend so much of their time sequestered with those their own age and level.  I learned so much more from my interactions with adults than I ever did in school.  Namely, I learned how to talk and act like an adult.  Eventually that translated to being an adult and having some idea of what that entailed.  I also learned a lot from my mom reading books that were way over my head to me, especially because I would ask questions about the pictures (mostly) and she would take the time to answer them, even though an 8-year-old is hardly expected to understand microscopic organisms.

For sure, this is informing the way we raise our son.  I read him books and explain concepts to him that are clearly way over his head--anything he asks about from how clouds make rain or why clouds are white to (with John's help!) why magma is hot.  We take him on trips whenever we can, even if it's just driving around to look at old farm equipment that likely needs lubrication.  I had heard that kids can be so inflexible, but ours isn't so he fits right in.  He's lived in three states so far (New Mexico, Alaska, and Idaho) and knows that he has connections to Japan.  I don't want him to ever know what it's like to have a parent who lets your water get shut off or to spend too much time sitting around a keg, but I want him to know what all is out there, to know how big and full the world is and all the things that can happen in it. 

The other day he was jumping on the couch and he shouted, "I love to live a crazy life!"  That's good, because that's more than likely what he'll get.  Our life right now, in this town, isn't especially crazy (although, like me, he has a mom who works at night and is often very tired--I don't work full time at night, though, thank god), but it won't stay that way forever. 

I see that you're sitting there having a nice chat together, the three of you, while your collected 10 or 12 children play here on the equipment.  I'm glad you're enjoying yourselves.  Sure is nice to have some time to relax with each other and totally ignore your children, right?

But I have to tell you, the way your kids are playing is unsafe.  The screaming and general bad manners of your children, even including their seeming incomprehension of the notion of "waiting one's turn," would perhaps be acceptable to the rest of us who have children playing here if only your children were not endangering all the other children.  As you can see--or, as you might see if you so much as glanced in the direction of the area where your children are playing--several of the children playing here are quite small, much smaller than your children, and your children persist in climbing over the smaller children, climbing up the slide despite the fact that people at the top of the slide cannot see anyone who is climbing up that curvy part, sitting on top of the slide exit and dangling their feet right in the face of anyone who comes down.  A couple of your own children have already been injured by others of your children and begun crying, or did you not hear that?  The only reason my son remains uninjured is because I have told him to avoid your children like the plague that they are.

But it isn't your children's fault, really.  It's your fault.  Turn your eyes away from your milkshakes and pay attention to what your kids are doing.  They need some basic understanding that when they break some of the safety rules they are putting other kids in harm's way.  Your kids are certainly old enough to be able to understand what it means to hurt someone else, but you are currently failing in your duties as a parent because you are not taking any action, or notice even, of what is clearly unsafe behavior.  Your children are shockingly ill-behaved, but it is you who appall me.

/things I wish I'd said to those ladies at the playground. 

What’s the biggest challenge parents currently face when raising their children?
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To me, this seems like an easy one.  I think the single biggest challenge parents currently face when raising their children is the overabundance of "experts" on the subject offering totally conflicting "advice" on everything from what sort of bib to use to how to get your little one into the best preppy preschool.  Ninety percent of this advice is total bunk and violates every instinct (for lack of a better word) that parents have.  It all, however, comes with absolutely dire warnings about the horrible--but horrible!--things that will befall your hapless tyke if you ignore their advice.  And most of it comes with a shopping list.

I bought it for a long time, I did.  I allowed myself to be pushed around, this way and that, by "experts."  I stupidly put myself through absolute hell, when I should have been enjoying my son's infancy (as much as possible--he was a reasonably easy infant, all things considered).  For example, it went against every gut feeling, every emotion, everything I knew about human history and evolution and parenting in other cultures to force my son to fall asleep by himself in his own bed practically from birth.  "Let him cry it out!" some said, and for a while I thought I had to.  But I hated it.  I hated it, and my son hated it, and for good reason.  Once I started giving the proverbial finger to the damned experts and listening to myself and to my son and using a considered gathering of history and cultural comparison, things were much better.  I didn't need all that stupid gear.  I didn't need to feel guilty that my son wouldn't breastfeed (there have always been kids who couldn't or wouldn't breastfeed, and there have always been a variety of solutions for that problem--instead of feeling guilty about it, I decided to feel thankful that at least modern formula was probably a whole lot better than some of the other bottle formulas I had read about, especially the watery white rice gruel of premodern Japan which malnourished babies in a flash--and anyway my son was and is extremely healthy, so be damned breastfeeding fascists!  I don't mean that there is anything wrong with breastfeeding, of course.  I mean that there is something wrong with the ideologues who want to make you feel like an unworthy being if you cannot or do not breastfeed).  I took what I knew about family sleeping situations in other cultures and applied them to a modern bedroom and came up with a sleeping arrangement that protected him from SIDS but also made us all happier and calmer. 

I decided to raise my son by the values I hold most dear, especially liberty.  You don't normally think of 3-year-olds and liberty, but they need it.  They need to not always be toted around in a car seat to wherever their parents want to go or want them to go.  They need to just run around for unscheduled and unstructured amounts of time, just following their whims, even if those whims do not involve any actual running (my son's whims always involve running...and skipping...and dancing...).  Given liberty, my son has amply demonstrated that 3-year-olds are ready for a lot more than we give them credit for.  Given his liberty, my son has discovered a love of arithmetic and entomology that we nurture as best we can.  We are surprised how well he already grasps basic arithmetic; we are surprised how well he grasps the basic principal of metamorphosis and even reproduction.  We are, moreover, surprised by the complexity of his emotional understanding of the world and of other people.  We were told by "experts" that 3-year-olds were not capable of the level of emotional understanding that he demonstrates.  It may be that our son is different inherently from other children his age, or it may be that other parents, by believing the experts rather than listening to their own children, are doing their kids a great disservice.  I don't know.  I do know that in our case we no longer have need of experts, except our pediatrician who reassures us every so often that our son has no health problems at all.

Similarly, parents in the US face the demon beast known as "kid food."  What the fuck is this, America?  Who came up with this shit?  I have no idea, but I categorically reject the idea that some food is unsuitable for consumption by children (allergies and the like excepted).  We have never accepted this notion, primarily because it is not commonly accepted in Japan.  There has never been "kid food" in our house, at least not since he outgrew baby food.  There is food, food that is good for all of us to eat.  There is also dog food, and I will admit that my son occasionally eats it.  However, the end result of not making a distinction between kid food and food food is that when I asked my son what he wanted for lunch the other day, he said, "Broccoli and tofu." We were in town, too, and he had all the restaurants in Idaho Falls as his available options.  This morning, he declared his affection for goat milk.  His diet is as varied as ours is, although he doesn't like his food quite as spicy as we do.  It isn't that he was born with some inherent palate that other kids don't have (well, it may have something to do with the wide variety of food he experienced in utero, or so they say).  It's that, again, we have decided that the "experts" who declare mac'n'cheese to be kids' territory are big stupidheads who are not the boss of us.

Seriously, I think the biggest problem parents face now is just having the self-confidence and self-reliance to listen to themselves, listen to their children, and figure parenting out for themselves.  In the end, though, you have to.  Those experts don't know you and don't know your child, so it's up to you to know.  You even have to be prepared to admit when you make a mistake and try to correct it and move on.  It's going to happen, no matter what parenting style you're following.  But this seems to me the essence of being an adult (along with the realization that, in fact, life requires you to make difficult choices and no, Virginia, you cannot have it all all of the time).  Of course, it also seems to me that we live in a society in which being an adult is considered a very bad thing.  Fuck it.  Just as I refuse to listen to childrearing experts, so will I refuse to listen to the proponents of endless youth.  I've even gone so far as to not be embarrassed by the little lines at the corners of my eyes, the ones I got from smiling and laughing for these 34 years.  It's shocking, I know.  I'm obviously maladjusted.

This is one of the saddest things I have ever read.  I cannot believe this is from a children's book:

The dinosaur children are offered simple, straightforward advice on what to do about the divorce. On custody decisions: "When parents can't agree, lawyers and judges decide. Try to be honest if they ask you questions; it will help them make better decisions." On selling the house: "If you move, you may have to say good-bye to friends and familiar places. But soon your new home will feel like the place you really belong." On the economic impact of divorce: "Living with one parent almost always means there will be less money. Be prepared to give up some things." On holidays: "Divorce may mean twice as much celebrating at holiday times, but you may feel pulled apart." On parents' new lovers: "You may sometimes feel jealous and want your parent to yourself. Be polite to your parents' new friends, even if you don't like them at first." On parents' remarriage: "Not everyone loves his or her stepparents, but showing them respect is important."

These cards and books point to an uncomfortable and generally unacknowledged fact: what contributes to a parent's happiness may detract from a child's happiness. All too often the adult quest for freedom, independence, and choice in family relationships conflicts with a child's developmental needs for stability, constancy, harmony, and permanence in family life. In short, family disruption creates a deep division between parents' interests and the interests of children.

One of the worst consequences of these divided interests is a withdrawal of parental investment in children's well-being. As the Stanford economist Victor Fuchs has pointed out, the main source of social investment in children is private. The investment comes from the children's parents. But parents in disrupted families have less time, attention, and money to devote to their children. The single most important source of disinvestment has been the widespread withdrawal of financial support and involvement by fathers. Maternal investment, too, has declined, as women try to raise families on their own and work outside the home. Moreover, both mothers and fathers commonly respond to family breakup by investing more heavily in themselves and in their own personal and romantic lives.

Sometimes the tables are completely turned. Children are called upon to invest in the emotional well-being of their parents. Indeed, this seems to be the larger message of many of the children's books on divorce and remarriage. Dinosaurs Divorce asks children to be sympathetic, understanding, respectful, and polite to confused, unhappy parents. The sacrifice comes from the children: "Be prepared to give up some things." In the world of divorcing dinosaurs, the children rather than the grown-ups are the exemplars of patience, restraint, and good sense.

Source article.

Unfortunately, the dinosaur advice is fairly accurate.  Children are expected to accommodate the whims and irresponsibilities of their parents.  It is assumed that they will bounce back, that children are so great at adapting, they'll be fine.  I've said before that it depends a lot on what we mean by "fine."  It is unfortunate that children are not evolving fast enough to keep pace with the growing inability of adults to act like adults or our changing set of mores.  But they aren't.  Human children still need parents who are fully committed to the well-being of their children, who put the needs of their children before their own ephemeral "happiness." 

Or, you know, a set of Hallmark cards that express dad's regret that he never actually sees them.  Whatever.  It's all good, right?

Actually, I recently read an interview with Tina Fey in which she was talking about being a working mom and how she basically gets home just in time to give her daughter a bath and put her to bed and then she works with the writers while her daughter sleeps.  She mentioned that her daughter was so sad that the writers' strike was over and begged her mom not to go back to work.  She says that broke her heart, but she went to work anyway.  My heart breaks for this kid that I don't even know.  Whatever other amazing accomplishments Tina Fey racks up in life, she has a daughter, a daughter who needs something from her mother that she isn't getting (time), a daughter who is going to grow up basically as a stranger to her mother, because you don't get to know a person by putting them to bed.  It's Tina Fey's choice, of course, but it's not her daughter's choice--in fact, it's the opposite for her daughter. 

Oh, but kids don't have rights anyway.  What was I thinking?  What matters is that Tina Fey is happy.  Her daughter will survive.

OOOOH, Emily Yoffe has brought the noise! 

Yeah, she made the outrageous claim that kids do better in a household with two married parents, preferably their natural ones (but, sure, adopted ones can stand in just fine and so can responsible and caring stepparents--that's my commentary, I guess, since I don't think she really addresses it, but given the fact that her article is so focused on the economic benefits of two-parent households, it would make sense).  I know, I know!  She's so utterly Victorian!  To even suggest that women might oughtn't (Too much time in Arkansas.  Just deal with the double modal.) conceive of children with someone who ain't going to be around come time to buy diapers!  It's so oppressive!

Or, I guess, that's what Broadsheet thinks.  But, meh.  They get a big meh and even a snort of contempt because they (where "they" equals Tracy Clark-Flory) present no actual evidence or data to counter anything Yoffe wrote.  Nothing.

The thing that bothered me most about Yoffe's piece wasn't the thesis of it or her focus on the economic indicators, because those are important.  But I thought she ignored one of the most brutal problems with kids born out of wedlock:  Not only are these kids almost certainly going to grow up poorer and with less parental involvement (duh), they are vastly more likely to be victims of child abuse.  Kids raised by two parents other than their own natural or adoptive parents are at increased risk of being abused, but that number increases higher for kids who have no father figure around at all, except maybe (and possibly worst of all) a string of boyfriends.

There are a lot of possible reasons for this, and you can peruse the Internet at your leisure to find hypotheses galore, although a lot of them have to do with economic stress and are thus related to the poverty argument, but there are other possibilities as well.  It is a fact that most fatal child abuse is perpetrated by the biological mother and most sexual abuse of children is perpetrated by a male who is not the biological father. 

There are a host of other worrisome statistics.  Kids who grow up without their fathers are more likely--in some cases, vastly more likely--to engage in all kinds of risky behavior, end up dropping out of school, end up on drugs, in prison, etc.  Most rapists grew up in fatherless households.

I have seen some research suggesting that two adoptive, committed parents of the same sex (yeah, I'm talking about the gays.  Yesterday I mentioned the Latins.  Today it's the gays.) are equally effective at preventing most of these bad outcomes (I'd say becoming a rapist is a bad outcome, wouldn't you?), leading some to suggest that perhaps it is the mere presence of two loving people who are absolutely committed to the child's best interests.  However, the research is somewhat limited due to a) that type of family being relatively rare and b) the fact that most of the gay couples who adopt/give birth are well educated and of above-average income, confounding comparison with most children born out of wedlock.  That being said, I will continue my support for gay adoptive parents--I don't know, but I have a gut feeling that the more loving and stable adoptive homes that exist for kids, the better off we all are.

It is of grave concern to me that feminism seems to care very little about what is good for kids (or men) because they are so focused on what is "good" for women.  Feminism will continue to ignore the data that kids do much better in a stable home with two parents because it suggests that women should, oh, at least consider how their choices are going to affect others.  And we can't have that.  Or at least Tracy Clark-Flory can't.  The commenters on that piece are a bit more reasonable about it.  No one--not even me or Emily Yoffe--is suggesting that women should marry men who are clearly unable to act responsibly toward both the mother and child and obviously not abusive men or men who have violent rages and make the house feel unsafe and constantly stressful.  Yoffe and I would venture to suggest, though, that perhaps women should GET ON THE FUCKING PILL before they allow themselves to get knocked up by these guys.  But, of course, we shouldn't get all judgey and preachy at women (and men, sure) who are totally fucking their kids over because it's, like, a woman's right to do what she pleases.

Every time some new report comes out that links some behavior in the mother with some outcome in the kid, every damn feminist website screams, "OH MY GOD, THEY ALWAYS BLAME THE MOM."  Well, sometimes, maybe it's the mom's fault, eh?  It's less about blaming the woman, I think, than about finding out what's best for kids, but the constant focus on the woman, the woman, always the woman, means that we can't find out what risk factors there might be for childhood obesity, for example.  Because if it's linked to working mothers, as it has been, the feminists will fucking shriek.  Similarly, there will be a shrill outcry if it is suggested that wymmins are animals and share any qualities with other female animals, including, of course, the dreaded maternal instinct.  We don't have instincts!  We went to college! 

I know, I know.  I'm hopelessly conservative and out of date.  But I warned you:  I care fuck-all about "progress" if progress means throwing kids under the bus.  I also famously hate the type of diseased individualism we have taken to celebrating in this country--hey, man, whatever you want to do as long as it makes you happy.  Feh.  As Kant said, doing your duty first makes you worthy of happiness and 'duty' implies the existence of some type of relationship.

Now, maybe I'm just engaging in pointless handwringing.  God knows, that's what Tracy Clark-Flory would say, right?  Maybe all of those differences between single-parent households and two-parent households can be explained simply by the poverty.  I don't really see how you can ferret out the differences between differences caused solely by poverty and those related to the presence of parents, because in so many cases it is precisely the loss of the one parent that causes the poverty.  So, is the loss of the parent causing the poverty, and then the poverty causes the other problems?  Or is the absence of the parent causing all of it, proximally?  And what are we to make of the fact that biological fathers who live with their children are, compared to single mothers and unrelated men, less likely to abuse their children?  And, by the way, comparisons to Scandi-fuckin-navia don't really hold up; there are so many cultural differences between the US and Sweden that it's way too hard to control for all the variables.  It is certainly possible that with their system that has come close, or so I hear, to eliminating child poverty in their countries also eliminate or nearly eliminate the social difficulties of single-parent households.  Anyway, eliminating child poverty is a worthy goal even if it doesn't, but it's too hard to say. 

Furthermore, comparisons with the animal world are not helpful here since there are no other animals that I can think of who require several years of care before they become independent of their parents.  Also, no other animal young are expected to learn language, to learn to be civilized and ethical, etc.  Human children take much more effort and care and time than any other animal young, so far as I know.  Correct me if I'm wrong--is there some rare bird in the Upper Orinoco that has young who now require 12 years of schooling before they are ready to the leave the nest?

I'm going to go ahead, since it's late and I'm tired, and go way out on a limb here.  I have, as some of you know, a special interest in sociopathy.  Of the sociopaths I have personally known, all of them came from fatherless homes (and some of them from motherless homes, too, i.e., they had been abandoned by both parents).  It makes a certain amount of sense since, while there is probably a biological component for the antisocial personality disorders, it is thought that they can be prevented in early childhood through certain parenting techniques--parenting techniques that are often more doable in a two-parent household.  I would suggest--and some others have, too--that single-parent households are more likely to push kids who already have the biological component to become sociopaths and that two-parent households have a higher likelihood of preventing it.  Incidentally, the rapists mentioned above are more likely to be psychopaths than sociopaths, though they both lie at various places on the antisocial spectrum.

I was just thinking about this the other day, how in this country we put children in their own beds as soon as we can get them to sleep there.  We have a host of experts telling us how to fight the baby's natural instinct to cry like hell when they are left to sleep by themselves; we have to send the message, of course, that in this life, kiddo, you're on your own.  I think attachment parenting gets some stuff wrong, too, but how can we expect kids to grow up feeling part of a deeply loving relationship, feeling that other people's feelings matter, feeling connected to other people when we ignore the kid's needs from infancy.  Not all the kid's needs, yeah, just the need to feel safe with his parents while he sleeps.  I figure that as human emotions and relationships have evolved, sleeping was probably a dangerous time.  A lot of predators are nocturnal, and a baby left alone in a crib all night would have been easy prey.  It seems at least plausible to me that we evolved to prefer sleeping with our loved ones (and this is still how it's done in many places) because it was safer.  (We had our kid sleep in his own bed in our room--our bed when he was very young was too damned fluffy to be safe for an infant--but we got up with him every time he cried.  He now sleeps in his own bed in his own room without any trouble, but if he wakes up in the middle of the night and needs us, we let him sleep with us.  To me it is more important that he know that we are always there with him and for him than to promote a very false independence.  He's 3, man, he is not independent, although he does go potty all by himself.  woot!)  It isn't just the sleeping thing.  I know parents who don't think twice about keeping their baby essentially confined all day long--in cribs, playpens, high chairs, car seats--forcing the baby to conform to the adult's schedule and needs and utterly ignoring the need the baby has to play, move, rest, eat when hungry, etc.  Not to mention that the kid is basically alone most of these times, experiencing the world without the touch, voice, smell of a loved one.  Working parents have come out and admitted in national magazines that they don't enjoy and cannot force themselves to enjoy playing with their kids, so they work instead and hire out the play, as if the kids won't get the message.  But to kids, "love" isn't a word or a feeling--it's an action.  They don't think you love them because you say it, because the word itself doesn't mean much to a 2-year-old.  They learn what it means by associating it with actions and with time spent (the currency of love is time).  A child whose parents are there, making that child their first (not only, but first) time and energy commitment, obviously enjoying the time spent and actively joining the child in their engagement with the world--that child knows it is loved and is lovable, and that child conversely learns to do love to others.  "Do love" is an odd construction, I know, but we adults have come to think of "love" as just a feeling, not an action.  I accepted that without thinking about it until I met T who doesn't like to say "I love you" but is always sure to act in such a way that he doesn't need to; he gives me the time and energy that are love.  We give that to each other, and we give that to our son. 

Love is an action.  The currency of love is time.  Do your duty by your spouse and kids.  Take responsibility--yeah, of course, fathers that goes for you, too, but fathers have less reproductive choice here, having no birth control pill and no say in the abortion question--for the life you create. 

I'm too tired to proofread this now, and tomorrow is my darling son's birthday, not to mention the community Easter egg hunt, and I have a ladybug-shaped cake to frost (coconut cake, and man, it is some fabulous cake--Martha Stewart's recipe, even!) and presents to wrap and gather and blah blah.  Ha.  It's 4:00 a.m.  Awesome.  So, if there are places I should have edited, grant me a modicum of latitude, I beg of you. 

Oh, finally, don't get all up in my face with cohabitation being as good as marriage.  In America, at least, cohabitations are much more likely to break up than marriages are.  In their first 5 years, 20% of marriages will break up, but 40% of cohabitations will; in the next 5 years, the numbers jump to 40% for marriages and 60% for cohabitations.  So, in terms of commitment and stability, they aren't equivalent to marriage. 

Right now, I am not up to the task of turning this into a coherent post.  There are just a variety of related things that have been rattling around in my confused, oxygen-starved brain for a few days, and I need to lay them out here. 

• I've read several articles, in print and online, lately that suggest that "guilt" is something unnecessary and that judging others for their decisions is always (or at least usually) wrong (nevermind the judgment inherent in that).  Guilt is a way that we recognize that we've done something wrong.  There exist people who feel guilty all the time over every single little thing, I know, and those people may need therapy.  But I don't think that is most of us.  If you're feeling guilty, it is possible that your conscience is attempting to communicate to you that you have done something wrong, harmed someone, violated the moral code.  As for being judgmental, why is it wrong to have standards that you expect yourself and others to live up to?  Since when did we decide that any choice is equally OK, as long as that choice does not involve spanking your children, an act which is clearly the worst thing any human could possibly do?  Charles Taylor gives a very good accounting of why all choices are not equally valid or good, at least not in a society that wants to maintain some sense of morality.  Unfortunately, it's not the kind of thing people will generally listen to.  Hmmm, I think there's an essay in this month's Harper's that also touches on this, how we are now meant to respect any idiotic belief, so long as it is sincerely held.  *Note to self:  Reread that essay and also Charles Taylor and make little Invader Zim-like hand gestures of frustration because you are the only person alive who still cares about this.  (I know, that last is an exaggeration.  I know.  I've had pneumonia, and I'm feeling bloody sorry for myself.)
• Stay-at-home dads are kind of awesome.  But what's even more awesome is when people, like Kimura and some hippie dude commenting on this essay, recognize that the supremacy of WORK is fucking bogus.  I've said before that one of my problems with most mainstream types of feminism is that it completely buys into the capitalist hegemony, the superiority of paid work and conspicuous success.  Some of us say fuck all of that, I am SOOOO not giving my life over to some asswipe who gets to decide what my time is worth, I am SOOOOO sick of all the time you people fucking waste in committee meetings that accomplish nothing.  I guess if you like doing all that, well, someone needs to keep the stock markets open, so go for it.  But don't sit around and tell me how much meaningless work I do in a day because I actually change my son's diapers by myself (or used to when he wore them) and wash dishes and such.  You do at least as much meaningless work in a day as I do.  A lot of the work of life is tedious and crappy, whether it's paid work or unpaid work.  Just because you get paid for your time (in units of currency that are gradually decreasing in value, too, you human slave) doesn't mean what you do is inherently more valuable in moral terms than what I do is.  Conclusion:  Fuck the corporate hegemony!  I could totally make a rap song out of this.
• On a related note, I am disturbed by something I have seen on several feminist sites lately--I'm calling them feminist, incidentally, because they call themselves that.  I have no idea if this represents any kind of majority of feminists or not--I hope not.  There is a set of work, mostly that work associated with the house and raising children, that many people find tedious, frustrating, and not important enough to do for themselves.  Their careers are more challenging, interesting, exciting, important, satisfying, etc.  And yet if you suggest, even a little, that middle class, American white women only have the "freedom" to choose the career over the housework because they step on the backs of the colored and the poor, those white women will cry out in rage at you.  The general thrust of their cries will run, "That work isn't inherently demeaning."  Ummmmm...am I the only one who thinks maybe someone is contradicting herself here?  If it's too tedious in comparison to your thrilling career, if you find it mind-numbing and stultifying, do you mean seriously to suggest that it's only that way to you and to no one else?  Do you mean to actually try and tell me that all those impoverished women, some of whom have left their own children and families in their home countries to come here and take care of yours, have done so because nothing thrills and satisfies them more than raising someone else's children?  Are you the most disingenuous bitch ever put on the face of the earth?  The point of noting that white American feminism steps all over the colored and the poor is not to say that white women should all, therefore, go back to being housewives.  The point is--well, there are several.  A)  As in Western Europe, families (including single-parent households, of course) should receive more support in general, including universal health care and all of that, so that all women and men have more choices and better options.  B)  The implication in the economics of these nanny and daycare situations that we currently have is that raising children is not valuable work.  We Americans, as a society, do not value it.  C)  Uh, well, personally, I think it's quite classist and a tad bit racist to say that work that is too tedious and demeaning for you to do is perfectly fine for the underclasses.  Because, um, they don't have the same high-powered mind that you have?  Or...I'm struggling here to find a way to make it better...because you have some kind of rich-white ADD and can't tolerate the mundane tasks of existence that the poor cannot escape, but because the poor are not subject to the rich-white syndrome, they don't get bored the way you do?  WTF?  Grrrrrrrrrrrr. 
• Pneumonia sucks. 
• I really, really hate it when people automatically assume that most people can't "afford" to choose to be stay-at-home parents.  For one thing, the expenses of holding a job if you have children often make the job next to worthless.  Daycare is expensive (and often, let's face it, shitty) and nannies even more so.  Commuting is increasingly expensive.  The extra meals out of the house, the more expensive wardrobe (yes, I am assuming that work clothing generally costs more than at-home clothing--however, unless you wear your work clothes all the time, even cheap work clothes cost more because they entail having a work wardrobe and an at-home wardrobe, in addition to the fancy clothes for dates or whatever--also, work clothing often seems to entail the extra irritating expense of dry cleaning)--all this crap adds up.  After taxes and all this crap, working can be expensive.  I actually can't afford to work outside the home; I can't afford not to work, either, so I work part-time at home, although I resolutely maintain my self-identification as a stay-at-home mom because that's how I mostly think of myself.  Anyway, for another thing, some of us have made the decision that there are any number of expenses we will just forego so that we can afford to stay home and raise our kids.  We don't have satellite TV, for example, which basically means we get only ABC.  Yay, ABC!  We don't have cell phones, iPods, or any other gadgets at all.  We keep our housing costs in check by living in a tiny, old house in the boondocks.  In other words, if staying home with your kids is the most important goal to you (and, it should go without saying, I am NOT talking about single-parent households where there is no choice), you find ways to cut back on what you spend so that you don't need as much income.  In our case, we never realized how much we would have to cut back when we made this decision, because we naively assumed that America's economy was just and sane, but we both agreed that children should be raised by their parents, not by (under)paid help.  And so we make do.  I know I bitch about our poverty mightily on this blog, but most of the time, it's alright.  I bitch here because this is my space to bitch.  In real life, we're OK--at least, thank God, we never ever fight about money.  We made our choices, we take our lumps.  Alls I'm sayin is there are a lot of other people who could easily "afford" to stay home if that was their priority.  That it is not says more about them than they apparently like to think it does.
• That being said, we cannot afford to have another one.  Sad.  That makes me sad.  The last time I was pregnant, I lived in an idyllic land where health care was affordable (pregnancy is oddly not covered by the Japanese national health insurance, but the prenatal visits were still affordable).  I also lived at that time in a land where the assumption is that families will live off of only one income, and most jobs seem to pay accordingly.  Here in America--and this is partially related to the success of '60s feminism and also related to our misguided economic policies more generally--we assume families will need two incomes, and jobs pay accordingly.  This system forces the choice either not to have kids or to come up with ways to manage kids and careers--except for those of us who say "fuck off" to capitalism and consumerism and instead stay home and garden with our kids.

So, I took my kid to the Barnes and Noble today, because in their kids' section, they have one of those big Thomas the Train sets, all set up for kids to play with.  My son loves it.  We don't want to buy him one because of the whole lead paint deal...paranoid, I know. 

When we got there, there were three or four other kids around the table, toddlers of various ages, playing.  My son is not a very pushy sort by nature--like a good Japanese, he'll (mostly) wait his turn and not shove or snatch or get whiny and crappy.  On the other hand, if you have 6 trains to yourself and there are other kids standing around without any, my son thinks you could probably share one of those trains without causing yourself too much stress.  After all, you'll still have 5 trains to his 1.

But, alas, these kids were not the sharing, patient types by nature.  They were the grabby, whiny, pushy types by nature.  Ideally, at least to my retro mind, this is where parents come in to tell their little savages the Mr. Rogers message.

As I looked around, I saw one dad sitting in a chair nearby snoozing.  Snoozing?  Dude, I could totally kidnap your kid right now if I wanted to and, like, ship him off to do child labor in India.  Wake the fuck up. 

Another mom was out of eyeshot, browsing a couple rows over.  I only knew she was there because, finally, when her kid let out an ear-piercing shriek because one of the other little primates had taken "his" train, she came over.  But, basically, she might as well have been snoozing as well for all the freakin guidance she was offering her son in ways to play nice.

Another parental figure was...I dunno, totally AWOL.  Never did figure out where she/he might be.  The miniature tyrant was being nominally watched over, I found out rather late in the game, by a tween-y sort of girl who was completely ignoring him in favor of gossiping with her tween-y friend.  The two of them sort of perked up and started paying attention to him after I stepped in to lecture him--after he had pushed my son a couple of times (without even saying "excuse me" or "sorry"--what is the world coming to?) and stolen every last train on the table from the other kids (one of whom let out the ear-piercing shriek, as noted above--my son did nothing except look at him confused, like, "Dude, chill.  This isn't how we play where I come from.  What's your problem?"

I'm a total beeyotch, and I'm pretty comfortable with that, so I said to the kid, "These trains are not your trains.  They are here for everyone to play with, and that means that you need to share them with other kids who want to play.  Shoving will not be tolerated here.  Also, if you do not intend to go around the circle track at roughly the same speed that the other kids are going around it, you need to step aside and let them pass.  Otherwise, you could play on the inside track there.  Are we clear?"

His sister (? the tween-y girl) suddenly realized I was lecturing her charge, and she became a little more interactive with him, at least in terms of monitoring his brattiness, and play afterwards went much more smoothly.

I was the only mom/parental or other authority figure who consistently monitored my son's behavior.  My son actually apologized to someone he bumped into.  When he had two trains and realized there was another girl who had none, he gave her one, with prompting from me, but without crying or whining at all.  This isn't some kind of miracle, and it's only partly due to his nature.  The other part comes from the fact that I'm sitting right there watching him, and he knows what I expect.  He knows quite well that if he gets too grabby and pushy, I will remove him from the store and his playtime will be over.  George Bush may have won the presidency that way, but it isn't tolerated in our house.

It might also have to do with the fact that, while I was sitting there, I actually interacted with my offspring.  He asked me questions and told me stories about his play and the train tracks, and I listened and responded appropriately, you know, like I cared.  The thing is that I interact with him because I care, but it has unexpected benefits, too.  He is way ahead of his age group in verbal skills; he is way ahead of them in problem solving, too.  He is on the cusp of being able to read.  He can identify all the major species of trout.  He uses the words of civility (e.g., "please" and "excuse me") consistently and appropriately.  He is incredibly self-confident (really, to the point of being fearless), and I think that has something to do with the fact that he is so good at playing by himself and with others, because he has so little neediness.  Also, he doesn't wail for hours when I leave, like some people's children we won't mention.

OK, sorry, the point wasn't to get all braggy about my kid and my parenting.  I know some of this comes from him, naturally, and I only get so much credit (and, yet, all the responsibility? that ain't fair!) for it. 

The point is that the Thomas the Train playset here in Barnes and Noble is NOT A FUCKING BABYSITTER, AND NEITHER AM I.  If your kid is there playing with it, you really need to paying some attention to your kid and his/her behavior.  Because, see?  THIS IS A PUBLIC PLACE.  And even though our children are very young and therefore still quite primitive, NOW IS THE TIME TO START TEACHING THEM CIVILITY before our entire fucking nation ends up...oh, wait a second.  Nevermind.

Sorry to have shouted. 

"Honey, just because your mom's a freak, it doesn't mean you have to be."

--said this afternoon, at frustration that he is developing some of my worst habits.