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Sound familiar?

Today I’ve got a links roundup for you. Some fascinating articles have come out in the parenting world this week, and a few of them dovetail nicely with what’s been going on in my own house. I actually used the advice in one the same day I read it. Below you’ll find useful tips, a recommendation, and–don’t say I didn’t warn you–an example of truly abysmal human behavior.

• “‘It’s Not Fair!’ How to Stop Victim Mentality and Thinking in Kids and Teens” – Hands up if you hear this one from your kid. Okay you, the one with your hands down: kudos. Everyone else: read this. From Empowering Parents comes an article that I literally needed yesterday, and it gave me the tools to help explain to my eleven-year-old son the difference between someone who is targeting him and someone who is merely a grumpy person. It also helped me first empathize with his feelings, then start to work through steps to help him consider his own solutions to his problems and see that he has options for responses, even though he can’t necessarily change other people’s behavior. Problems solved? No. But it was a good beginning.

• “How Could a Sweet Third-Grader Just Cheat on That School Exam?” – A Wall Street Journal article examines a question that often elicits horror, denial or both from many parents who find themselves confronted with the fact that their young kids have cheated in school. I know, because recently my own second-grader did something with her schoolwork she shouldn’t have, and I was appalled. But this article explains why it can be harder than we think for kids to understand where the lines between right and wrong are, and it offers tips for how to make those lines clearer.

• “Mira Ptacin: Is Baby a Luxury?” (more…)

(Recognize this perfect family? Guess what? It wasn’t real.)

Recently, it has come to my attention that some parents awaken each morning to the joy of perfect, sunny children who always do what they’re told or, if they do misbehave, respond quickly to loving, gentle correction. These parents never raise their voices, never have a drink at 5:00 unless their rosy-cheeked children are in the care of a trusted babysitter they’ve known for years, never leave the house with a toddler attached to one shin and mascara smudged under one eye. They embrace the joy in every stage, every day of parenthood, wishing only that the clock afforded them more hours with their precious little ones. Yes, they’d like more time for sleep and adult interests, but they never have days when they really think about the activities they miss and wish they could have them back. In short, they are the people who say about parenting, “It’s all good.”

I think these parents are lying, very possibly to themselves. And they’re giving complexes to parents, especially new parents, who feel otherwise.

Parenting is not “all good.” Yes, it’s wondrous, enlightening, life-giving and loving beyond anything I could have imagined before I became a parent. In parenting, all the things you’ve heard are true. You will find energy and strength you didn’t know you had. You will hold something tiny and feel more love for it than all of the love one universe can contain. You will laugh in amazement at your own wit come back at you from the lips of your child, marvel at her accomplishments that already reach beyond what you could achieve and never tire of speculating about her future.

But all of the other things you have heard about parenting are also true. (more…)

(Photo credit: kbowenwriter via Flickr.com)

First, an announcement: As we say here in New England, I am wicked excited to share with you the news that I’ve been awarded an Artists Entrepreneurial Grant by the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts. Part of what the grant will fund is a renovation of this blog, so if you see scaffolding going up in the coming weeks or months, that’s why. I’ll let you know if you need to wear a hardhat when you’re on site.

Second, a totally judgmental calling out and tip for parents in restaurants: If your children are a) standing at my table with one of their chins over my child’s head, as if to join my family; b) following patrons into the bathroom and harassing them; c) tripping the waitstaff in the aisles; d) chucking toys (or items from tables) over the ledge separating the brick oven area from the dining area; e) wandering into the entrance area and interfering with the ability of the hostess to greet customers such that waiters have to escort your child back to his table; and f) traveling from unoccupied table to unoccupied table throughout the restaurant, without regard to neighboring patrons, and running toy cars on said tables, playing games there, etc., while you do not once turn your head to check on your children nor reprimand them in any way, then you are not doing an adequate job of parenting your children during dinner.

Yes, as I said at the beginning, I understand I’m being judgmental here. But honestly, I couldn’t believe my eyes. When I see behavior in this vein, I try to remind myself, even if I’m annoyed, that perhaps I don’t know the whole story. Maybe there is a special need I don’t know about, or perhaps the parents have had a terrible week due to a situation I can’t even imagine and this is their one, much needed break. But I found it hard to invent excuses for this complete disregard of everyone else in the restaurant.

Okay, enough time on my high horse. Moving on…

Books. Two nights ago, when eleven-year-old “Jack” and I finished reading The Hobbit, I realized with dismay that I had no book lying in wait for the following evening. Jack is selective about what he’ll read, so I knew I had a bit of work in front of me to find something acceptable if we were going to start a new book right away. (My own recommendation is not sufficient to sell a book to Jack; in fact, it often has the opposite effect. How old is he again?)

I asked Jack what qualities he’d like in our next book.

“Adventure. Suspense.” (more…)

(Photo credit: Sean Dreilinger via Flickr.com)

Every now and then, I hear a story or read an article that makes me think, Damn, I’m turning my kids into slackers.

A parent I know tells me about her kids who make their own breakfasts, pack their own lunches and all but drive themselves to school. An article notes that ten-year-olds are perfectly capable of cleaning the bathroom. Someone else mentions that his kid shoveled the driveway after the latest snowstorm–actually removed the snow, as opposed to digging a fort out of it.

My children do not do these things.

To be clear, my kids do have responsibilities around the house. Actually, that’s what we tend to call them: “responsibilities around the house”–just like my husband and I have, only far fewer. But often, I wonder if they have enough of those responsibilities.

Let’s face it: from a parenting perspective, chores are tough. There’s the complaining, the whining, the arguing. There’s the undeniable fact that with young kids or even older kids learning to do something new, it can take more time to teach them to accomplish something than it takes for you to do it yourself. There’s the reality that today’s kids are busy, families are over-scheduled, and if you’re desperately searching that Google calendar looking for a place to pencil in some family time, do you really want to spend it trying to convince the kids to do chores?

But then there’s the flip side: it’s important to teach kids responsibility and the daily life skills that come from accomplishing chores. Plus, there’s a lot to do around the house, and shouldn’t the younger people who live there contribute?

So how do you make it happen?

I suspect there are as many thoughts about chores as there are parents, but here are few strategies to consider for getting school-aged kids to participate in chores. (more…)

(Image credit: lorenkerns via Flickr.com)

“Mommy, how old do you think I’ll have to be before I can get my ears pierced?” Seven-year-old Emmie’s voice mixed wistfulness with an early note of adolescent challenge–her specialty.

I was ready for this question. “If you’re ready to follow the instructions and take care of the piercings, you can do it now. I think you’re old enough.”

“Oh!”

I explained how she would have to take care of her ears–assuming the instructions haven’t changed in almost forty years–and asked her if she was prepared to take on the responsibility. She promised that she was.

Secretly, I was delighted, because I’ve believed for a long time that Emmie will love having pierced ears. She’ll find it great fun to pick out earrings, match them with her clothes, maybe even learn to make them. These activities are all very much in line with her personality and her interests. But the notion of letting someone punch holes in her earlobes was something she had feared, and I waited for her to decide on her own that she wanted to leap that hurdle. (I also preferred that she be old enough to take on the responsibility of caring for her earlobes herself.)

Now, to her surprise, I and her father said yes to her request. She excitedly began to think about life with pierced ears. (She thought out loud, of course. Emmie always thinks out loud, and at length.) I promised her that as soon as I found a window in our crowded schedule, I would take her to get the job done.

But when the window opened, she balked. It turned out the fear wasn’t behind her after all.

No problem, I told her. I explained honestly that yes, it might hurt a tiny bit, but not even as much as the allergy shots she gets each week that don’t bother her, and this procedure would be over in a second. But if she wasn’t ready, that was okay. I told her to let me know when she was.

A few weeks later, she approached me again. “I’m ready now,” she said.

So a week-and-a-half later, I found another open Sunday afternoon. Emmie became sullen and curled into a corner of the couch, until I said, “Is this about getting your ears pierced today?”

She nodded.

I closed my eyes for a few seconds, trying not to feel like a yo-yo at the end of a string. I may have actually counted to five inside my head. “Honey, it’s okay. You don’t have to get your ears pierced. It’s your body. We’ll go when and if you’re ready. Okay?”

She nodded again, smiling this time. She bounced off the couch and ran to another room to play.

The yo-yo feeling did not subside, but I knew it would be unreasonable to demand a more decisive thought process from my seven-year-old daughter. (Also: have I met me? Hello?) More importantly, as the grown-up in this scenario, I realized there was a key value at play here, one for me to note and begin to teach to Emmie so she would understand it well by the time she is an adult. (more…)

(Image credit: Toca Boca via Flickr.com)

Last week, I wrote about the adjustments in our house–and my attitude–toward the tween and his new technology after I realized that “Texting is the New Phone Call.”

“Jack” is now allowed to text seven days per week. It’s a big exception to our previous screen-time rules, but I believe it’s a good one.

Texts aren’t the only exceptions that have crept into those rules, however. The iPod Touch in a tween’s hands is like the tiny, hairline crack in the foundation of your basement that your handyman tells you might possibly one day let in a smidge of dampness, only to discover that by the end of the spring rains, you have three inches of standing water covering your basement floor.

The rules began with a bright enough line: no screen time during the week. The inevitable result of this declaration was that both children got off the school bus on Fridays, tossed their backpacks aside and dove for any and every device within their reaches–preferably all at once. Food, verbal interaction, even bathroom needs were secondary.

The kids hoarded their screen use into the weekends, and we began to impose limits then, too. Jack in particular had a tendency to turn into a grunting, Neanderthalish version of his usual self following too many hours in front of the small screen. After witnessing this phenomenon repeatedly and consistently over a long period of time, we explained what we had seen. He didn’t deny it, and mournfully agreed to comply with the limits.

Enter the iPod. (more…)

(Photo credit: jfiess via Flickr.com)

Here we are again. Back in the murky, increasingly complex world of kids and technology, where, unless you are an IT professional, it’s almost a given that your teen or tween offspring knows more about everyday tech than you do. They’re certainly more comfortable with it.

And yet, you–we–are the parents. We make the rules, we transmit the values. We must apply the rules in a manner consistent with our values. Be flexible, firm and fair.

Sounds good, doesn’t it? But as the kids get older, I’m finding that it’s not that easy.

A few months ago, eleven-year-old “Jack” got an iPod Touch, something he’d coveted for nearly a year. Jack received an affirmation of rules with his iPod, which was essentially an extension of “screen rules” that were already in place. The edict was simple: follow the rules–no screen time during the week except for homework and other approved exceptions, obey all email rules–and you keep your iPod privileges. Break the rules, and we revoke them.

That’s clear, right?

First, a primer: for those of you unfamiliar with an iPod Touch, it’s basically an iPhone without the phone capability. It operates on a wifi connection, you can load it up with apps, and so far as I can tell, it can do everything else that an iPhone can do. (Apparently, there are even workarounds that will allow you to use it as a phone, but what my kid doesn’t know won’t hurt him. In any event, that’s definitely on the “forbidden” list.)

Thus, an iPod Touch allows you to text, using your email account as the contact instead of a phone number. This was the first place I discovered that we had entered new tween territory.

Jack was the last among his group of friends to get a Touch, and the texts began almost immediately. At first, they seemed a novelty. But they persisted, and after the first week, I wondered what had happened to our “no screen time during the week” rule. I thought about bringing his weekday texts to an end, but something I couldn’t define held me back. So the texting continued.

As the chirping that heralded the arrival of new texts persisted, I puzzled over my reluctance to enforce my own rules. I examined some of the text exchanges, wondering what these kids could be talking about at the rate of more-texts-than-I-can-count in fifteen minutes. None of them were nefarious. They consisted of classic, fifth-grade boy chit-chat. Some of them didn’t even make any sense. (Seriously. Some of the messages consisted of letters that didn’t form actual words.)

And then one day, after exchanging texts with Jack when he was home alone, I realized why I was so reluctant to cut off the mid-week texts: texting is this generation’s phone call.

Texting is how these kids communicate. When we were kids and we reached a certain age, we picked up the phone. And, to our parents’ consternation, we never put it down. (more…)

(Image credit: grifiti via DeviantART.com)

Oh, yuck. Did you shudder when you read the title of this post? I did, and I wrote it. But that’s why we have to talk about it.

First, let me clarify: this post is not about my kid. As most readers know, my kids are eleven and seven. There are no fuzzy lines for me on this topic right now. If I caught one of my kids taking an alcoholic drink tomorrow, I don’t think the situation would pose much of a dilemma.

But. Someday, in some way, it will be about one of my kids. Because though I wish otherwise, I know that my kids are not perfect. They will not always do exactly as I say. As much as I want them always to be good, one (or maybe both) of them will break an important rule someday. And I will have to deal with it, and it will suck.

Second point of clarification: everybody is okay in the following scenario. Nothing major happened, which is why this is a mere parenting dilemma and not a tragedy or an easy, “You lose all of your privileges for a year” kind of situation.

So here’s the dilemma:

Recently, a friend’s teenage son attended a party at his friend’s house. He later told his parents that alcohol had been present at the party, and that he’d had some. Specifically, he said he’d “taken a sip.” He also reported that he’d hated it.

So, parent, what would you do? (more…)

(Photo credit: abbamouse via Flickr.com)

It’s dark o’clock in the morning, and seven-year-old “Emmie” skips into my bedroom.  “Happy Birthday,” she sings.

It’s not anyone’s birthday, nor has it been since September.  But Emmie’s been trilling this wish a lot lately, to all of us.  She thinks it’s cute, and I, in my pre-caffeinated state, turn to give her an automated smile in response.

What I see wakes me up faster than coffee ever could.  I feel like someone has slapped me in the eyes.  Because Emmie has created a new outfit–again–and this one stings.

Emmie, who has resisted almost all fashion advice since the age of two, has today paired an attractive sweater dress done in horizontal, inch-wide rainbow stripes, with legwarmers, which also bear horizontal rainbow stripes.  But the legwarmers’ stripes are busy, bright, narrow and continuous, and they run all the way up to the hem of her dress.  They shout COLOR and EXCITEMENT and ought to be matched with something, well, let’s say with a bit of calm, contrasting space in it.

But Emmie has coupled the legwarmers with the dress.  The result?  She looks like a zebra who first has had an unfortunate run-in with the materials used to paint the set of a Muppet movie, and then has been the victim of a splinching accident.  Ouch.

At this point, when I was growing up, I would have been sent back to my room to change.  And that response crosses my mind.  But I look at Emmie, who is admiring herself in the mirror, and instead of sending her back to her closet I say, “Are you sure that dress and those legwarmers go together?  Stripes don’t always go with stripes.”

“Yes!  I like them!”  I can hear the exclamation points in her response.

“Okay,” I reply.  When she skips back out of the room, I turn to my husband.  “Can I hang a sign around her neck that says, ‘My child picked out her own clothes today?’”

He laughs.  I’ve wanted that sign before.

So Emmie the Splinched Rainbow Zebra Child skips off to school, smiling and undoubtedly blinding teachers with her colorful, if questionable, fashion taste.  And here’s the big question stemming from the fact that I let her go to school looking like that: So what?

Now I know that for many people, this seems like a no-brainer.  But the “issue” of whether and at what age to let kids pick out their own clothes is actually a hotly debated one in many places.  And let’s look beyond this single question; let’s extrapolate and peer into your house, your social circles, the media. (more…)

Something extraordinary happened in my home state of New Hampshire last week: the election resulted in the nation’s first all-female congressional delegation, plus a female governor.  Not only that, but all five of those elected officials are mothers.

That shattering sound you hear is a glass ceiling being smashed to pieces the size of confetti.

But make no mistake: many women and families–and even men–are still hemmed in by walls.

Let’s be clear on one point right from the beginning: these five elected women hold individual positions, are individual people, represent differently composed constituencies and should not be expected to vote the same way or espouse the same position on any given issue as a result of their gender or any other characteristic.  They’re not even all members of the same political party.

But they do share the following characteristic: they know first-hand what’s it like to juggle career and family.  They know, via their individual stories and in a way our society as a whole has not yet recognized, that the era in which most moms stay at home full-time is over.

Fellow New Hampshire resident and New York Times Motherlode blogger KJ Dell’Antonia ran two pieces last week relating to this topic, one regarding New Hampshire’s new all-mother delegation itself, and another that centered around the desperate exit memo written by a law firm associate who could no longer maintain the crushing, dual life of lawyer and mother.  Dell’Antonia’s commentary made clear what so many women already understand from personal experience: this woman’s predicament is far from unique.

Readers here know I have long maintained that our policies need to catch up to the reality of how we live in twenty-first century America.  We need to recognize that children are both a societal need and a societal good, that someone needs to raise these children, and, ideally, that someone includes the parents.  We need to look for ways to blend career and family, jobs and parenting, and we need to stop professionally penalizing and shaming both moms and dads who want to be engaged in the raising of their kids. (more…)