As the Juan Williams scandal made clear, even the most staunch liberals sometimes have bad thoughts. And, despite all my best intentions, sometimes I fall into pre or anti-feminist traps:
Sometimes, I wish my daughter would care more about her appearance.
Sometimes, I wish my son were more of a jock, or even vaguely interested in sports.
Sometimes, I want my daughter to have a crush on a boy, or Johnny Depp.
Sometimes, I wish I were a stay at home mom.
Sometimes, I want to tell my son that he is being a "pussy," or to "man up."
Sometimes, I hope my kids will be popular.
Sometimes, I wish my daughter would wear a dress.
Sometimes, I want to purge all my son's less masculine toys.
Sometimes, I want my daughter to like anime and superheroes less and read Little Women or Heidi.
Most of the time, I love them exactly as they are and hope the world loves them as much as they deserve.
Friday, August 5, 2011
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
Hello Princess
The Disney Princess phenomenon has been well-bashed, by Peggy Orenstein among others. Thankfully, I never had a Princess-loving daughter. She had a small moment. One time, when she was about five, she was invited to a birthday party at which girls had to dress up in princess costumes and have make-up put on them. Worse, they then had to humiliate the birthday girl's dad, who had to sit in a chair and have the girls all dress him up in princess garb, for reasons unclear to me then or now. I was appalled. We had been listening to Free to Be You and Me in the long car ride to the party. This was a key record for me when I was a kid -- my fourth grade teacher, Ms. Sullivan, a hippie with Ali McGraw hair, would play it every day and we'd run around the classroom and dance. I got the DVD years later and both my kids liked it a lot. So, after listening to "Parents Are People" and "William's Doll," and other songs aimed at breaking down gender stereotypes, there we were at a princess party, with my daughter, wearing eye make up and a gown and glitter on her face. She loved it. But she never got full-blown princess fever and she never went for dolls. And over time she became super cynical about both dolls and princesses. She and I shared a feminist disgust at the after-school Princess class organized at her K-8 school, which consisted of little girls and the grown teacher wearing tiaras and gowns, with parents PAYING for this. So, when we went on a Disney cruise recently, it was she, more than me, who was appalled. Because every time, and I mean every time, she entered a dining room, or a theater, or when she re-entered the boat after an excursion, or when she arrived at a hotel, or got on or off a shuttle bus, someone who worked on the cruise would greet her, saying "Welcome home, Princess." (When I was her age, my family went to London and my pixie haircut and brown velvet pantsuit led the entire staff of the hotel to greet me as The Little Master, so perhaps hotels are geared to humiliate ten year olds). For me, it was the "home" that galled -- as if Disney were some ur-home for all of us, our collective womb (and maybe it is). But she really hated being called Princess. It was both the offense of being assumed to want to be a princess, and the constant need to define kids by gender that irked her. And what about the boys? The Disney folks had no idea what to call them. Prince doesn't have the cache of Princess. Pirates seem to be now the gender equivalent but you can't really hail boys with "Welcome home, Pirate (murderer, rapist, thief)." Maybe they could just call them Mickey and Minnie? Or maybe they could just say "hello."
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Free Range Tragedy
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/14/nyregion/arrest-made-in-brooklyn-killing-of-leiby-kletzky.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=todayspaper
In 2008, journalist Lenore Skenazy created a major controversy when she let her son Izzie find his way home from Bloomingdale's with a subway map, and cash, but no phone. Called "America's worst mom," she became an advocate of "free range kids" in her blog and book of that name. I read Skenazy's book for an academic project I am doing on the idea of neglect -- what I am calling a fantasy of neglect -- in literature and film about and for children. Reading it, I have become aware of my own helicopter parent tendencies -- my inability to give my kids the freedoms I had when I was their age. Like most people my age, I remember leaving my house on a summer morning and telling my mother I'd be home at dinner. In between, I might go to organized activities at the park (gimp, plaster of Paris, kickball), hang out in the woods, wander the neighborhood, go to a friend's house, or walk to the store. I never had a problem beyond the usual kid stuff of being hassled by other kids, yelled at by neighbors . My kids, by contrast, have never walked down the street by themselves. They still don't ride bikes alone and, when they bike with us, we use tandems because biking across highways and in city traffic is too risky for little bicyclists. Reading "Free Range Kids," I have wanted and tried to give my kids little freedoms -- on our recent trip, we let the kids wander the cruise ship alone, and get lost, using in-ship phones to contact us when they got worried. I stopped walking them into school and try to give them more responsibility in the house.
Today, when I read about the murder of Leiby Kltezky (see link above), my heart sank. Here were parents doing exactly what I wanted to do -- letting their kid have some small independence by walking part of the way home from day camp. They showed him the route, rehearsed it with him, and still he got confused. Stopping to ask for help, one would hope that most of the time the person asked would not turn out to be a psycho, but in this case, he chose the wrong person, or was chosen by him. I shudder to think of whatever happened between their initial contact and the discovery of his dismembered body two days later. I feel terrible for the parents. They were not irresponsible but trying to let the boy grow, and feel some freedom. Now, though, they will carry the terrible weight of their decision and now those of us who might want to give our kids freedom, which is also a way of giving ourselves freedom, will feel unable and will hover more closely than ever.
In 2008, journalist Lenore Skenazy created a major controversy when she let her son Izzie find his way home from Bloomingdale's with a subway map, and cash, but no phone. Called "America's worst mom," she became an advocate of "free range kids" in her blog and book of that name. I read Skenazy's book for an academic project I am doing on the idea of neglect -- what I am calling a fantasy of neglect -- in literature and film about and for children. Reading it, I have become aware of my own helicopter parent tendencies -- my inability to give my kids the freedoms I had when I was their age. Like most people my age, I remember leaving my house on a summer morning and telling my mother I'd be home at dinner. In between, I might go to organized activities at the park (gimp, plaster of Paris, kickball), hang out in the woods, wander the neighborhood, go to a friend's house, or walk to the store. I never had a problem beyond the usual kid stuff of being hassled by other kids, yelled at by neighbors . My kids, by contrast, have never walked down the street by themselves. They still don't ride bikes alone and, when they bike with us, we use tandems because biking across highways and in city traffic is too risky for little bicyclists. Reading "Free Range Kids," I have wanted and tried to give my kids little freedoms -- on our recent trip, we let the kids wander the cruise ship alone, and get lost, using in-ship phones to contact us when they got worried. I stopped walking them into school and try to give them more responsibility in the house.
Today, when I read about the murder of Leiby Kltezky (see link above), my heart sank. Here were parents doing exactly what I wanted to do -- letting their kid have some small independence by walking part of the way home from day camp. They showed him the route, rehearsed it with him, and still he got confused. Stopping to ask for help, one would hope that most of the time the person asked would not turn out to be a psycho, but in this case, he chose the wrong person, or was chosen by him. I shudder to think of whatever happened between their initial contact and the discovery of his dismembered body two days later. I feel terrible for the parents. They were not irresponsible but trying to let the boy grow, and feel some freedom. Now, though, they will carry the terrible weight of their decision and now those of us who might want to give our kids freedom, which is also a way of giving ourselves freedom, will feel unable and will hover more closely than ever.
Saturday, July 9, 2011
Sister Wives
Some time ago, I mentioned my fantasy about having a sister wife, like on Big Love. I just got back from a family vacation and got as near to the sister-wife method as I am likely and, I have to say, it works. My father-in-law took us and his two daughters' families on a Disney Cruise, then the parents and kids -- sans grandparents -- went to Disney World. The grandparents were not in a position to help. My father-in-law has been having some health issues and needed a fair bit of care from his wife, children and in-laws. But that still left 6 adults to take care of 7 kids. Much of the time we all hung out -- so all parents were pretty much consumed by childcare -- helping kids order meals, finding potties, making sure they didn't go crazy when the service at the restaurant was so slow, or after they'd eaten (for reasons I can't fathom, Disney would usually have the kids eat their meals before ours arrived, so they would not be hungry but they were very bored). At times we could drop the kids at the kid center (Camp something or other, filled with workers from Great Britain -- nobody working on the cruise was American -- maybe because they worked 84 hours a week for no overtime!). And one glorious afternoon, we let the kids roam the boat by themselves, a rare taste of independence for city kids who never get to walk down their own block by themselves. Mostly, though, it was shared sister-wife style parenting with brother-in-law-wives as well. I was more than happy to take the three 8-year olds for a walk around the boat and to the arcade so my sisters-and brothers-in-law could have an hour of grown up time. And I was very happy when my brother-in-law played with my kids in the pool and let me read for a while. I was happy to take their kids on teacups while they took mine on Space Mountain. Trading off meant that nobody felt the burden too much. We all got to know our nieces and nephews better and felt like we had an actual vacation.
Sadly, both my siblings and my husbands are scattered all over -- San Francisco, LA, Massachusetts, and Arlington, VA, with us in Chicago. We do not have the family support system that some people still have. Our only local family -- the generous grandparents above -- spend most of the year in Florida and then come here for three months in summer. They have babysat once in ten years. They warmed to it just as my father-in-law fell ill, so who knows if that will ever happen again.
My sister has some of this. A single mom by choice, she moved to the town where my parents live when her daughter was born. My mother became the nanny for the first two years and she and my dad still drive their granddaughter to play rehearsals, attend school events, take her to church, and have the odd family dinner together. When they drive my sister crazy, I try to remind her how lucky she is. And how she and my niece have probably done more to keep them going in the last ten years than anything else.
Sadly, my fantasy that it would be this shared "takes a village" sister-wife community all the time if only we all lived nearby is probably false. My sister-in-laws live only a few miles from each other but said they never see each other. One is a stay at home mom with three kids, the other runs a dog-walking and boarding company. Somehow, they can't grab a coffee, visit each other, or swap childcare duties. Unlike my mother, who is retired and whose children are grown, they are too busy to find ways to make themselves less busy. They can't extract themselves from what they are doing to find a way to share the burden.
So, how can we do it? How do we access the village that it takes to raise our children? And where on Craig's list is the section for sister-wives?
Sadly, both my siblings and my husbands are scattered all over -- San Francisco, LA, Massachusetts, and Arlington, VA, with us in Chicago. We do not have the family support system that some people still have. Our only local family -- the generous grandparents above -- spend most of the year in Florida and then come here for three months in summer. They have babysat once in ten years. They warmed to it just as my father-in-law fell ill, so who knows if that will ever happen again.
My sister has some of this. A single mom by choice, she moved to the town where my parents live when her daughter was born. My mother became the nanny for the first two years and she and my dad still drive their granddaughter to play rehearsals, attend school events, take her to church, and have the odd family dinner together. When they drive my sister crazy, I try to remind her how lucky she is. And how she and my niece have probably done more to keep them going in the last ten years than anything else.
Sadly, my fantasy that it would be this shared "takes a village" sister-wife community all the time if only we all lived nearby is probably false. My sister-in-laws live only a few miles from each other but said they never see each other. One is a stay at home mom with three kids, the other runs a dog-walking and boarding company. Somehow, they can't grab a coffee, visit each other, or swap childcare duties. Unlike my mother, who is retired and whose children are grown, they are too busy to find ways to make themselves less busy. They can't extract themselves from what they are doing to find a way to share the burden.
So, how can we do it? How do we access the village that it takes to raise our children? And where on Craig's list is the section for sister-wives?
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
The Sitter
It is summer, so my kids are not in school. Some years we have done camp, but this year, for a variety of reasons -- our travel schedule, the kids lack of interest -- we got a sitter to cover as many days as possible so that I could work (write a few articles, prep classes, proofread and index a manuscript). We hired a teacher from the kids' school so we already knew her and trusted her. It is so great having a sitter! She comes at 8 and leaves at 4PM. She takes the kids to the pool or a beach, the park, the zoo, bowling, and/or plays with them here in the house. She gives them lunch, and makes sure they clean up whatever toys they get out. They like her, she likes them, and we are all happy.
Part of me feels guilty, of course. It is weird to pay someone to take care of your kids when you are in the house, as I often am. And I regret a little that they are having fun with her instead of me. I think occasionally that I should be taking them to the beach more. But I also know that I am not always fun. Since I am not paid to take care of them, and have other stuff to do in the house besides take care of them -- like laundry, cooking, grocery shopping, cleaning, etc., as well as my own academic work -- I know that I would not spend 8 hours being a nice mom, but would drag them on an errand or fill the days with "hang on"s and "just a sec"s. So I try to make the time we do have pleasant -- knowing that I have been able to get most of my work out of the way so I can be a nice mom when they are with me. On weekends, in the afternoon, and at night, we do lots of fun things and usually with my husband, too.
But mostly I feel jealous that I can't have a sitter all the time. Or at least for the crucial gaps in our childcare schedule -- Someone to take care of the kids on sick days, so my husband and I don't have to take a day off work. Someone to cover school vacations. Someone for Monday holidays and the "teacher conference" days. I don't want one all the time. I like dropping the kids at school and picking them up. I think it is important that I, or my husband, is with them when they do homework. I like meeting their friends when they have playdates. But I'd love to have access when I need a sitter. Without family nearby, and living in a city, where we do not have neighbors we can count on, or even know that well, we are somewhat isolated and self-reliant when it comes to childcare. We don't have the money to have a full-time sitter or to keep one on retention. So, we usually patch things together -- a sitter or camp usually covers us for about 3/4 of the summer. And that still costs a lot! We take a lot of days off to cover the rest of summer, when inevitably our sitter becomes unavailable, or camps end (they still operate on some assumption that parents will be in the Hamptons for August!). I start teaching weeks before they go back to school. It is all the scheduling issues -- the days off from school, sick days, vacations -- that make our life as parents difficult and that make it especially difficult to have two working parents. Every summer, I find myself thinking that maybe next summer I will somehow be able to be a full-time mom, just for the summer. This means no writing, no work beyond the most basic prep for teaching. It means giving up a lot of what I do and who I am. But, until they get old enough to be independent in the summer -- unimaginable now -- it will pull on me and urge me away from work.
Part of me feels guilty, of course. It is weird to pay someone to take care of your kids when you are in the house, as I often am. And I regret a little that they are having fun with her instead of me. I think occasionally that I should be taking them to the beach more. But I also know that I am not always fun. Since I am not paid to take care of them, and have other stuff to do in the house besides take care of them -- like laundry, cooking, grocery shopping, cleaning, etc., as well as my own academic work -- I know that I would not spend 8 hours being a nice mom, but would drag them on an errand or fill the days with "hang on"s and "just a sec"s. So I try to make the time we do have pleasant -- knowing that I have been able to get most of my work out of the way so I can be a nice mom when they are with me. On weekends, in the afternoon, and at night, we do lots of fun things and usually with my husband, too.
But mostly I feel jealous that I can't have a sitter all the time. Or at least for the crucial gaps in our childcare schedule -- Someone to take care of the kids on sick days, so my husband and I don't have to take a day off work. Someone to cover school vacations. Someone for Monday holidays and the "teacher conference" days. I don't want one all the time. I like dropping the kids at school and picking them up. I think it is important that I, or my husband, is with them when they do homework. I like meeting their friends when they have playdates. But I'd love to have access when I need a sitter. Without family nearby, and living in a city, where we do not have neighbors we can count on, or even know that well, we are somewhat isolated and self-reliant when it comes to childcare. We don't have the money to have a full-time sitter or to keep one on retention. So, we usually patch things together -- a sitter or camp usually covers us for about 3/4 of the summer. And that still costs a lot! We take a lot of days off to cover the rest of summer, when inevitably our sitter becomes unavailable, or camps end (they still operate on some assumption that parents will be in the Hamptons for August!). I start teaching weeks before they go back to school. It is all the scheduling issues -- the days off from school, sick days, vacations -- that make our life as parents difficult and that make it especially difficult to have two working parents. Every summer, I find myself thinking that maybe next summer I will somehow be able to be a full-time mom, just for the summer. This means no writing, no work beyond the most basic prep for teaching. It means giving up a lot of what I do and who I am. But, until they get old enough to be independent in the summer -- unimaginable now -- it will pull on me and urge me away from work.
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Shame
How much shame is okay? Seemingly, one of the by-products of post-feminism is a loss of bodily shame. On the one hand, this signals a positive body acceptance, a move away from the beauty and body ideals that can be so terribly constricting for women -- leading to such diseases as anorexia and bulimia, as well as self-loathing. This is "Dove campaign" feminism -- love me and my curves and my flaws. It is also the backbone of the Fat Pride movement. But pride in fat is tricky, a step or a few steps beyond acceptance of imperfection. Fat Pride signals a more defiant stance -- women and men "claiming their fat" as the song "The Ladies Who Lunch" puts it. But Fat Pride seems dangerous -- do we want to have pride in diabetes, pride in heart disease, pride in the myriad health problems caused by obesity? Should we be angry when an airplane tries to charge us for two seats or embarrassed that we require two seats? Isn't a little bit of shame a good thing?
I ponder this not simply as summer starts and I am seeing way to much flesh paraded shamelessly around my neighborhood (male, female, young, old -- too many bellies, too many giant legs, giant arms, too much cleavage); but as I am raising two kids, and wondering whether to instill shame or not. In part, it is an issue related to weight. My mother used to touch her fingers to my stomach when it got pudgy and let me know if I was looking fat, to encourage me to lose a few pounds. It was demeaning but effective. But was it a good idea? I never had an eating disorder -- I didn't have what I took to be the resolve (I took laxatives once, had to get off a public bus to find a bathroom in a Chinese restaurant and vowed never to go that route again). (I know thinking of it as resolve is sick, but like many girls I was a little envious of anorectics until I understood the depths of it better and knew a few friends who suffered from it -- then I recognized that it was a terrible illness, not willpower). I never had an especially good body image. Now, I look at pictures of myself as a kid and I see a healthy relatively lean kid but then I was convinced that I was pudgy. So, did I have too much shame?
What do we tell our kids? When my son got chunky a few years ago, we worked to teach him better portion control and better habits. We didn't shame him or call him fat but we did tell him that he was gaining too fast and needed to take better care. It helped him learn and he now thinks about what he eats a bit more, but still enjoys food. If we didn't teach him, but "accepted" his fat, would we have been doing him a favor or leading him into a lifetime of bad health?
With my son and my daughter, I have discussed food and body in terms of health and fitness, not appearance. I have made clear to both kids that they should be healthy, that they should not worry about the ideals in magazines, that plastic surgery for appearance is unnecessary, that they are normal, wonderful kids. That's relatively easy.
But what about other kinds of bodily shame? As puberty looms, I think about sexual shame. How much should I worry about my daughter's changing body? What can she wear and what can't she? I feel a prudishness growing in me, a desire to cover her, hide her, protect her from the gaze. But that seems a wrongheaded shame. My shame, not hers, as she has none, not yet at least. Part of me wants to keep her shameless, proud, open, and free. Still, I want to teach her to protect her body, to know it privately and share it wisely, not to show it heedlessly. Is this too focussed on the body? Too alienated from it? Or just realistic?
I ponder this not simply as summer starts and I am seeing way to much flesh paraded shamelessly around my neighborhood (male, female, young, old -- too many bellies, too many giant legs, giant arms, too much cleavage); but as I am raising two kids, and wondering whether to instill shame or not. In part, it is an issue related to weight. My mother used to touch her fingers to my stomach when it got pudgy and let me know if I was looking fat, to encourage me to lose a few pounds. It was demeaning but effective. But was it a good idea? I never had an eating disorder -- I didn't have what I took to be the resolve (I took laxatives once, had to get off a public bus to find a bathroom in a Chinese restaurant and vowed never to go that route again). (I know thinking of it as resolve is sick, but like many girls I was a little envious of anorectics until I understood the depths of it better and knew a few friends who suffered from it -- then I recognized that it was a terrible illness, not willpower). I never had an especially good body image. Now, I look at pictures of myself as a kid and I see a healthy relatively lean kid but then I was convinced that I was pudgy. So, did I have too much shame?
What do we tell our kids? When my son got chunky a few years ago, we worked to teach him better portion control and better habits. We didn't shame him or call him fat but we did tell him that he was gaining too fast and needed to take better care. It helped him learn and he now thinks about what he eats a bit more, but still enjoys food. If we didn't teach him, but "accepted" his fat, would we have been doing him a favor or leading him into a lifetime of bad health?
With my son and my daughter, I have discussed food and body in terms of health and fitness, not appearance. I have made clear to both kids that they should be healthy, that they should not worry about the ideals in magazines, that plastic surgery for appearance is unnecessary, that they are normal, wonderful kids. That's relatively easy.
But what about other kinds of bodily shame? As puberty looms, I think about sexual shame. How much should I worry about my daughter's changing body? What can she wear and what can't she? I feel a prudishness growing in me, a desire to cover her, hide her, protect her from the gaze. But that seems a wrongheaded shame. My shame, not hers, as she has none, not yet at least. Part of me wants to keep her shameless, proud, open, and free. Still, I want to teach her to protect her body, to know it privately and share it wisely, not to show it heedlessly. Is this too focussed on the body? Too alienated from it? Or just realistic?
Gender bending toddlers
http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/10/navigating-gender-in-pre-k/?scp=1&sq=gender%20toddler&st=cse
This article from the Sunday NY Times deals with gender bending kids and their parents. Unlike some of the parents I've discussed in previous posts (see Child X and the discussion of Harry vs. Haley on Oprah below) who decide to change their kids gender according to which behaviors they adopt, these parents are trying to let their kids be whatever they choose -- meaning girls who wear "boy" clothes, boys who play with dolls or paint their toes. It seems potentially like these parents could really break down some barriers and create new ways of understanding gender, and disentangling behavior and biology. Still, the article gets at some of the difficulties -- how the parents sometimes feel they have to apportion their open-mindedness according to societal rules (nail polish at home but not at school) or when they choose to ignore those rules, and how parents can potentially differ on these issues (in one case, a dad is more forgiving than the mom, and in another the dad is grappling more than the mom).
This article from the Sunday NY Times deals with gender bending kids and their parents. Unlike some of the parents I've discussed in previous posts (see Child X and the discussion of Harry vs. Haley on Oprah below) who decide to change their kids gender according to which behaviors they adopt, these parents are trying to let their kids be whatever they choose -- meaning girls who wear "boy" clothes, boys who play with dolls or paint their toes. It seems potentially like these parents could really break down some barriers and create new ways of understanding gender, and disentangling behavior and biology. Still, the article gets at some of the difficulties -- how the parents sometimes feel they have to apportion their open-mindedness according to societal rules (nail polish at home but not at school) or when they choose to ignore those rules, and how parents can potentially differ on these issues (in one case, a dad is more forgiving than the mom, and in another the dad is grappling more than the mom).
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