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I like to consider myself a fairly open-minded person.  But some people and some situations are just so ridiculous that they deserve to be called out unequivocally and immediately.  So let’s not waste any time in giving this week’s Unbelievable Ignoramuses Prize to the Menifee Union School District in southern California.

What has the district done to deserve such notoriety?  Menifee Union decided, upon prompting by a complaining elementary school parent, to do a little book-banning.  To be more specific: they banned the dictionary for including “age-inappropriate” words. 

The answer to your question is “No.”  Really, I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.

I’m not a fan of book-banning in general (as you may have guessed from my post immediately preceding this one).  In fact, I’m one of those people who is more likely to pick up a book when it begins to be banned by people who fear their kids might actually acquire knowledge and be exposed to—gasp—ideas.  I wasn’t even interested in Harry Potter until I learned that people were banning the book; then I bought a copy as soon as I finished signing up for the now-defunct organization, Muggles for Harry Potter.  There are books I don’t like, books that are terrible, books that disgust me and I’d rather my kids not read now, but in general, the long list of things in the world that frighten me does not include books.

Here’s what happened in California: a student flipping through the dictionary (Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, to be specific) stumbled across the term “oral sex,” which is defined as “oral stimulation of the genitals.”  The student’s parent then freaked and administrators removed the smutty lexicons from fourth and fifth-grade classrooms so that their children would be protected from the dangers lurking therein.

Threshold question: Shouldn’t the hysterical parent in this story have been elated by the mere fact that his or her kid had his or her nose buried in the dictionary?  (Sorry about all the pronouns; I don’t know any genders here and I don’t want to make any assumptions.)  Personally, this sounds to me like an occasion for celebration.  But I digress.

The district deservedly took a beating in the press for its decision.  They subsequently issued a press release reversing their decision.  I won’t presume to paraphrase; here is an excerpt in their own words:

The Review Committee has met and has determined that an alternate dictionary, in addition to the Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (10th Edition), will be available in the fourth and fifth grade classrooms at Oak Meadows. Parents will be given the option to determine whether or not they wish their child to have access to the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary (10th Edition). 

So Menifee Union fourth and fifth-graders may now look up words in the dictionary, unless their parents exercise their option to opt out. 

Let’s be serious for a brief second: folks, the world is out there.  Your kids are going to find out about it.  If you make a point of hiding the most basic knowledge from them out of fear of the consequences of exposure—and it’s tough thinking of something more basic than a dictionary—then guess what?  Your children will be ignorant and utterly unprepared for the world that they face.  I censor my young children’s media access with the best of them, but I do my kids no favors if I deny them access to knowledge and the means to learn on their own, even if what they learn sometimes makes me uncomfortable. 

One more thing: I’m not a betting person generally, but I’d be willing to wager that the most sought-after book in the Menifee Union fourth and fifth-grade classes for the rest of this week and into next will be: Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary.  So maybe we should congratulate the school district for its wisdom after all. 

In case you want to buy your own copy of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, here’s a link to it on Amazon.  (As it happens, this is the very dictionary I own.  I’m thinking of leaving it on the kitchen counter tomorrow morning for my son to peruse over breakfast.)

“Don’t force it,” the little voice in my brain whispers.  “Don’t push.  You made a suggestion and it was rejected.  Just shut up and walk away.”

We each have a little voice in our heads that warns us to do what is smart instead of the thing we long to do.  Lately, my little voice has been working overtime, popping up constantly to warn me not to push eight-year-old “Jack” to read books.

Jack was an early reader.  He began reading in earnest before he was five-and-a-half and has read several grades above his chronological age ever since.  He spent his first few months as a reader whipping through picture books and dinosaur encyclopedias.  Then he took on series like The Magic Tree House, Geronimo Stilton, The Secrets of Droon and more.  He read every book in each series he tackled.  He loved reading.

And then he stopped.

Since the beginning of last summer, it’s been easier to pull Jack’s wiggly teeth than it has been to get him to read a book.  He’d rather play soccer, run in circles, build with his Legos or play on the computer.  He’d prefer to tell silly jokes or watch football on TV.  Really, he’d rather do almost anything.

I know what you’re saying.  “He’s an eight-year-old boy.  What do you expect?”

Well, if I’m being honest (Good God, I just quoted Simon Cowell): what I expect is a kid who wants to read.

The concept of not liking to read simply doesn’t compute in our house.  My husband and I are both voracious readers (or at least we were before we had kids).  Our house is lined with bookcases that are in turn crammed with paperback and hardcover volumes, books for adults, books for older kids, books for young children.  Books for boys, books for girls.  Fiction, non-fiction, adventure, fantasy, academic, popular—you name it and if it fits between the covers of a book, you can probably find an example of it in our house.  We keep well over a thousand books at home—not counting what we borrow from libraries.  Heck, I’m even writing a book.  Books are one of our greatest passions. 

So how can I be mother to a child who doesn’t want to read? 

Ordinarily, I am very conscious of not trying to force my own affinities on my kids.  But books are different.  A child who learns to love reading is a child who can find dreams beyond the limits of human accomplishment.  He learns the magic of ideas, the possibility of diverse experiences, the ability to master through his own industry tasks he can’t yet manage.  There is no limit to what he can learn.  I want my kids not just to be readers, but to appreciate the limitlessness of reading as I do.

But how do I make that happen when my kid wants almost nothing to do with books?

In a New York Times Magazine article a few days ago, prolific author James Patterson described to Jonathan Mahler his efforts to drive his own, similarly inclined son (now eleven) to embrace books:

Patterson told me that Jack, who had been working on his laptop for most of the meal, only recently started to like reading. It required a deliberate effort on Patterson’s part. Beginning a few summers ago, Patterson told Jack he didn’t have to do any chores; he just had to read for an hour or so every day. The first summer Jack resisted. The second summer he didn’t complain. Last summer, he no longer needed any prodding. Patterson ticked off some of the books Jack had recently read and enjoyed — “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “A Wrinkle in Time” and “Huckleberry Finn” — with obvious pride.

Patterson has taken on the cause of turning kids into readers with great enthusiasm.  He’s even got a website dedicated to this purpose: ReadKiddoRead.  It’s an easy-to-navigate tool to help parents and kids find books that will appeal to specific ages, genders and interests.  I fell in love with the site as soon as I found it.

Unfortunately, my own Jack was not so enthused.  I showed him Patterson’s website and required him to look at some of the choices as I crossed my synapses (we’re way beyond crossing fingers here) in hopes that he would find at least one book he wanted to read.  But his reaction was exactly the same as it had been in almost all of my previous attempts to offer reading material (even ones I’d engineered through his friends, his friends’ parents and teachers): “No, thank you.  Can I go back to playing now, Mommy?”

That little voice in my head threatened to glue my tongue to the roof of my mouth in order to keep me from screaming, “You damn well aren’t going to play anymore until you find a book to read and like it!”

I know that trying too hard to get Jack to read will only backfire.  I am not giving up this quest, but I know I have to maintain a degree of subtlety in my sales pitches.  Maybe I’ll take the approach Patterson did with his own son.  Maybe I’ll figure out something else.  It may take a long time, but I’m determined to find a way, sooner or later, to turn Jack into someone who likes to read. 

But it may be that my efforts are paying off in tiny ways here and there after all.  A few days ago, I walked past my living room where Jack was waiting for his father to finish putting his sister down for a nap.  As I breezed by the doorway, I observed my son, leaning over the arm of the couch, reading a children’s book about Rosa Parks I’d deliberately left lying on the coffee table in honor of Martin Luther King Day.

I may be able to make a reader of him yet—especially if I don’t tell him that’s what I’m doing.

Is anybody else out there parent to a cranky eight-year-old boy?  You know what I mean: full of joy and enthusiasm at being parent to such a sweet, engaging child, you eagerly walk to the bus stop to greet your charming offspring the moment he comes off the bus.  But what emerges from the school bus isn’t the kid you were looking for.  Someone else stomps up the driveway and drags his feet through muddy slush piles.  This sour child immediately begins an interrogation-and-complaint session.

“Do you have a chocolate chip cookie for me?  Why not?  Are you ever gonna have a chocolate chip cookie for me?  School was fine.  I already told you, I like recess best.  No, I didn’t play with M___ today.  Why do you always ask me that?  I don’t wanna do my homework.  Everything hurts ‘Emmie’s’ feelings.  She always says bad stuff to me.  I don’t wanna read a book.  Why don’t I ever get to do anything fun?”  And so on.  (Note: for full effect, you must imagine each of these sentences uttered in the octave of a mosquito that whines up and down the octave scale as it searches for the perfect, fingernail-scraping-down-a-blackboard pitch.)

Until recently, my first response to these periodic episodes was to adopt a stern, teacher-mommy voice as I reminded him of previous conversations.  “Tone, ‘Jack.’”  “That is not an appropriate way to speak to your mother.”  “Haven’t we talked a million times about the whining?  That’s enough.”  But often, these admonitions only earned me pouting and tears in addition to the whining.

Then, a few weeks ago, following a particularly unpleasant episode wherein a bitter Jack listed all of the ways I had allegedly treated him unfairly that day (like ordering him to stop playing on the computer because it was time for him to set the table), the four of us sat down to dinner.  Jack began shoveling food into his mouth in that particularly graceful manner common to eight-year-old boys—the manner that makes you glad you sit next to him at the table, not across from him, so you don’t actually have to watch.  Fifteen minutes later, I noticed something interesting: Jack was cheerful, laughing and silly again.  He was that kid whose company I actually enjoy.

So I began an experiment: every time Jack the Grouch made an unexplained appearance, I shoved food at him.  And every single time, it worked.  Mr. Hyde transformed into Dr. Jekyll, and all it took was a giant bowl of cereal.

I don’t know why I was so slow to realize that my son’s crabbiness is often a result of hunger.  I’m the same way: if I’m hungry and I don’t deal with it immediately, I get bitchy.  My sister displays this reaction as well.  A college friend has long been known to have a dark side known as “Metabolism Man”; he’s a great guy unless he’s hungry.  Then either you find the man some food or remove yourself to a separate room until the problem is addressed.  This physiological reaction is not new to me.

So why did it take me so long to figure out this connection with respect to Jack?  I’m not sure—it could just be that I’m slow on certain things—but I think the difference here is that when we adults are hungry, we recognize that and understand that we need to do something about it.  To my mind, if my kid is hungry, he’s going to tell me he needs to eat.  But that assumption appears to be incorrect.  Jack’s mind is occupied with critical matters like dinosaur traits, soccer games, truly idiotic eight-year-old boy jokes and the quest to discover new palindromes.  (Seriously.)  Basic needs sometimes don’t fit into that puerile mix, and I honestly believe that the kid doesn’t realize he’s hungry.

And that’s where his mother comes in.  If he doesn’t recognize the rumbling in his stomach, then I’ve got to teach him that when he feels like the world has suddenly turned against him, the first thing he needs to do is eat.  I also need to teach him that even when he’s hungry, he has to rein in the whining, the complaining and the accusations, but the truth of the matter is that there isn’t any point to even having those conversations with him until he gets some food in his stomach—often a sizeable quantity of food—and transforms back into a rational child.

So if you are visited sometimes by an inexplicably surly version of the child you love and you’ve been scratching your head trying to figure out where he comes from, especially in that shaky, mid-to-late-afternoon period, consider giving him a snack.  An apple or some cheese and crackers might just give you your child back. 

What about you?  Might you have a Metabolism Boy or Girl on your hands?

No matter how long I live, I will never understand either the buzz some people get from wrecking someone else’s work or the pleasure some information technology folks derive from withholding their specialized knowledge from those of us who can’t claim much in the way of skills in this area.  It took me six-and-a-half miserable hours yesterday to reclaim this site from the combined clutches of both categories of individuals, and on behalf of my ignored children and my growing to-do list, I do not forgive any of them.  Not that they care.

But enough about that.  You don’t come here to read about computer woes, and frankly, whoever hacked this site has already received more attention than they deserve.

All that time lost yesterday combined with the fact that I’m hosting a political event in my house this evening leaves me short on preparation time.  So I will simply share with you today an anecdote passed to me by another mom that shows in the clearest possible terms how, sometimes, no one can reveal us better than our kids.

Eight-year-old “Jack” attends religious school at our synagogue every Sunday morning.  The morning begins with T’fillah (prayer) in groups that combine multiple grade levels.  Part of the ritual is to pray for the sick, and in both weekly Shabbat services and in the kids’ Sunday morning T’fillah, the prayer leader will ask members of the congregation to mention anyone in particular who needs healing. 

Apparently Jack had no trouble thinking of someone close to him who could use a little divine healing power.  “My house,” offered Jack, to the delight of the entire assembly.  “It needs to be cleaned for a party.” 

Oh, Jack.  I know him, and this was not a case of Jack as class clown; he was serious.  He’s lived with me for eight years now, so there’s no point in arguing that Mommy’s housekeeping skills require divine assistance before our home can be deemed suitable to receive members of the public. 

Will Jack’s prayer be answered?  Well, the hacker didn’t help, so I’ve got to go now; I’ve got people coming over this evening.  I bet things will work out just fine in the end, though.  What better assistance could I wish for in an endeavor than my own child’s prayer?  (Okay, he could actually help me clean, but I’m living in the real world here . . .)

These can be tough moments in parenting.

As we think of the dead, wounded and homeless in Haiti, search for ways to help and give thanks for our own good fortunes, many of us who are parents of young children will face the additional challenge of questions about Tuesday’s devastating earthquake.

This challenge can arise whenever there is a natural or manmade disaster.  Even if you try to keep your kids from watching the TV or listening to the radio, even if you bury the newspaper at the bottom of the recycling bin, kids may hear about disasters at school, friends’ houses or any one of the numerous places a kid goes in the course of his week.  This is the world in which they are growing up, and sooner or later, they’re going to learn about it.

Kids react to these things differently.  One four-year-old little boy may see a few glimpses of the news before it is switched off and wake up in the middle of the night with nightmares about a building crashing down on top of him.  A nine-year-old girl may wonder what it would be like to be a nine-year-old girl in the affected area.  Little kids may focus on the immediate and the personal: Can this happen here, to me?  Older children may form more complex reactions and want to know about the causes of earthquakes, how many people died and do we know anyone with friends or family in Haiti?

Parents’ reactions need to be tailored not just to their own preferences regarding how much news their kids should be exposed to, but to their children’s ages and personalities, too.  At the bottom of this post,  I’ve listed just a few of the many resources available online where you can look for information about kids’ reactions to disasters and trauma and how you might talk to your kids about the earthquake in Haiti.  If your child’s behavior changes and it seems serious, you can always contact a counselor or your pediatrician.

I’ve learned in my house that my two kids need different approaches to events like this.  “Jack” first approached me with tough questions about life when he was four years old: What happened on 9/11?  How did the bad men kill those people?  How exactly does a baby get made?  What is the nature of infinity?  (I’m paraphrasing that last one, but he did force me to pursue that concept for about six months.)

With Jack, I take an honest, one-or-two-drops-at-a-time approach to disasters.  Now that he’s eight, I allow him to watch small portions of news coverage on these stories in my or his father’s presence.  He’s been able to read for years, so it makes more sense to me to guide him through some of the darker aspects of life in small pieces than to try to hide everything from him.  There are still topics I haven’t introduced because I don’t think he’s old enough, but when he comes to me with a question, I answer it honestly.

And that last bit is the key with Jack.  In my opinion, tough, rational questions from a child deserve honest answers.  He sometimes gets a dose of my values with those answers, sometimes he gets just facts, but I tell him the truth.  I usually limit what I tell him to the scope of his question, maybe a tiny bit more, then sit back and wait to see if there are follow ups.  If he wants to know more about something than I am equipped to give him, we explore the question together in a book or online.  And if I think he’s getting scared, I offer reassurances and we stop.  But Jack rarely gets scared.

Four-and-a-half year old “Emmie” requires an entirely different approach.  This is a child who can be frightened if the cat she’s known all her life walks too close to her, if the music of a ballet or cartoon hits deep octaves or even if Dora the Explorer is having a bad day.  I haven’t even brought her inside a movie theater yet because I think the vastness, blackness and loudness of the place would cause her to wet her pants.  Emmie also gets honest answers from me, but I tell her the bare minimum, try not to let her see anything scary on television and distract her as quickly as possible if she notices something.  Emmie’s sense of the divides between reality and fantasy, the possible and the impossible is much less developed than Jack’s was at the same age.  With Emmie, it’s all about avoidance.  She’s just not ready for the world yet.

And that’s perhaps the most important lesson to take away on helping our kids understand and cope with disasters like the earthquake in Haiti.  Utilize the resources below and many others, but don’t forget to know and watch your kid, because each child is different.  And don’t be afraid to ask for help if you see something in him or her you don’t understand.  After all, we adults often have a tough time understanding the world around us; it’s a no-brainer that sometimes we might need a little help making sense out of it for our kids.

A few resources that may be helpful (Please note that while some of these resources are intended primarily for children directly affected by disaster, some children may experience trauma by virtue of exposure to images, etc., and the behavioral descriptions and techniques described here may be useful in those types of cases, too.)

• Discussing the Haiti Disaster with Your Children (Momlogic)
• Mental Health America Fact Sheet: Helping Children Handle Disaster-related Anxiety
• Tips for Talking to Children After a Disaster (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services)
• Haiti Tragedy (Washington Post)

Also, if you are looking for ways to help those affected by the earthquake in Haiti, you can visit my post from yesterday and click on one of the many organizations listed who are accepting donations.

The scene is apocalyptic.  An entire capital city appears to have been flattened.  Schools, hospitals, the federal parliament, the federal penitentiary and almost everything else have collapsed.  The numbers of dead and wounded, to the extent they are known, are almost beyond comprehension.

You can find news about Tuesday’s 7.0 earthquake in Haiti just about anywhere.  Below are links to some places you can go to help. 

Please do what you can.  Some relief organization’s facilities were completely destroyed and they need assistance even to re-establish their operations so that they can help the injured and homeless.

• American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee
• American Jewish World Service Haiti Earthquake Relief Fund
• American Red Cross International Response Fund
• Baptist Haiti Mission
• CARE
• Catholic Relief Services
• Direct Relief
• Doctors Without Borders
• International Medical Corps
• Mercy Corps
• Operation USA
• Oxfam America
• Partners in Health Haiti Earthquake Fund
• Save the Children
• Stillerstrong (Ben Stiller’s organization, temporarily diverting funds to Haitian earthquake relief)
• UNICEF Haiti Earthquake Relief Fund
• U.N. World Food Programme
• Yele Haiti (organization established by musician and Haiti native Wyclef Jean)

 (Thanks to The Huffington Post for providing most of these links.  Please note that Uncharted Parent is only providing links to these organizations and is not making any representations about them or the use of funds donated to them.)

I tell stories on my kids here all the time.  It’s only fair that when I make a fool of myself, I share that with you, too.  So grab a cup of coffee or that 3:00 p.m. Snickers bar and settle in.

The setup: on days when my four-and-a-half year old daughter goes to preschool for the whole day, I like to start writing as soon as I can reach my computer and not stop until about forty-five minutes before the school bus drops off my eight-year-old son.  Then I shower and begin the kid portion of my day.  (Side note: reality rarely grants me this long stretch of uninterrupted writing time, but I do the best I can.)

On one such day during the first week after the holiday break, “Jack” had an afterschool activity scheduled.  We sent him to school with the requisite bus note giving him permission to remain at school at dismissal, and I rejoiced over my extra forty-five minutes of work time.

I came to a stopping point in my manuscript earlier than scheduled and went upstairs to shower.  As I toweled off my hair afterwards, dressed only in underwear, socks and a thin turtleneck meant to be worn under a warm sweater, I heard a low, rumbling noise outside.  I looked at my clock and realized that it was the sound of Jack’s bus on its daily afternoon run.  I continued my post-shower rituals without concern.

Then I realized that the bus wasn’t going anywhere.

My house is a classic New England cape, which means that we have no windows looking out from the upper floor to the front yard because the slope of the roof is too steep.  So I crept part-way down the stairs, still half-dressed, until I could peer out a window while remaining hidden from anyone who might be looking in.

The bus sat idling in front of my house, door open, partially obscured child in puffy parka waiting at the top of the bus steps.

“Shit!”  The bus won’t release an elementary school-age child unless a responsible adult is visibly waiting, a policy I generally appreciate but which was not helpful in this particular circumstance.  I dashed up the stairs, grabbed my jeans and practically vaulted into them, fastening them closed as I ran back down the stairs and cursed whatever breakdown in communication had placed Jack on the bus instead of keeping him at school.  But when I reached the bottom of the stairs, I looked out the window again to see the bus close its doors and pull away from my house—without dropping off my son. 

More cursing ensued.  I paused for three-quarters of a second to consider what to do, then made the logical choice: I would chase the bus. 

(Maybe you should have stayed home and called the school, you say?  Maybe you shouldn’t have freaked considering that you grant temporary custody of your child to the school district every day and they haven’t lost him yet?  Yeah, well, maybe so.  But I went a different way.)

I snatched up my purse, my BlackBerry and my keys, jammed my feet into the beat-up clogs I keep by the door and jumped into the car without bothering to lock up the house.  I backed the car into the street and found myself stuck behind a garbage truck that was driving too fast to pass safely but for some reason not stopping to pick up anyone’s trash.  It finally did stop as I grumbled, “Get the f*@! out of my way,” but by then a minivan out for a leisurely drive took over the spot between me and the school bus.  We reached the corner of my street, and I couldn’t see if the bus had a right or a left signal on.  Left would mean that the bus was probably heading back to school with my son inside, and I had no desire to follow it all the way there in my disheveled state.

But the bus turned right and stopped to let off a group of children.  The minivan in front of me slowly, leisurely, turned left, and I turned right and pulled up behind the school bus.  All I had to do was hit my blinkers, jump out of the car and run to the front of the bus before the driver pulled away and all would be rectified.

I pulled on the handle to release the door, and that’s when I remembered: the driver’s side door of my car is broken.  The only way to open it is to roll down the window all the way, reach outside the car and pull up the door handle from the outside.  More cursing.  I rolled the window down and pulled on the outer handle, but the door refused to open.  Uglier cursing.  I looked at the door and discovered that in my haste, I must have depressed the door lock with my elbow, because the lock was now in the down position and this explained why even with the window open, I could not open the door.

I was appalled that I might go through all of this only to have the driver pull away before I could reach her.  I finally worked my way free of my car and ran toward the front of the bus.

Here’s your picture: I am wearing jeans, clogs, and a thin, under-layer of a turtleneck.  That’s it.  My hair is soaking wet, I have no makeup on, and we’re in New Hampshire at the warmest part of a January day; it’s a balmy twenty-five degrees outside.  Five or six children who’ve just come off the school bus stop and stare at me like I’m an insane person.  (These kids very possibly sported the same facial expression you’re wearing right now.)

I reached the front of the bus and met the driver’s gaze.  She, too, looked at me like I was nuts. 

“Do you have my son in there?” I panted.

She stared at me.

“You stopped in front of my house and sat at the bottom of my driveway like you were waiting for me to come out.  My son was supposed to stay after school, but you were waiting at my house.  Is he on the bus?”

“Oh, no,” she said slowly, realization dawning on her face.  “Oh, sorry.  I just stopped in front of your house because I had to talk to the kids.”

Later, many appropriate responses occurred to me.  But at that moment, I just ran my hand through my hardening, icy hair and slunk back to the car.  Had I a tail, I would have tucked it between my legs. 

The kids who had gotten off the bus continued to gawk at me as I withdrew to my defective car and drove away.

I recounted this story to my husband and kids at the dinner table.  My husband nearly spit his dinner onto his plate when I reached the punch line.  My kids were highly amused, too, and my son has asked me each day after school since, “So, Mommy, do you have another funny story for us?”

No, son, I try not to behave like a moron every day.  I like to space these things out.  And after all, this is a small town; people’s reputations get around.  I think carrying around the moniker of “Crazy Lady Who Chased the School Bus” will suffice for a while.

Here’s your chance to tell the readers of Babble.com that if they’re not reading Uncharted Parent yet, they should be!  Go to Babble’s “Add a Favorite Mommy Blogger” page and scroll down until you find Uncharted Parent.  (It’s already listed.)  Then click on the thumbs-up to the right.  It doesn’t get much easier than that. 

The more votes this blog gets, the more people will come take a peek and maybe even stick around to see what comes next.  So feel free to tell your friends.

Thanks for your support!

WARNING: The exaggerations in this blog post may be dangerous to your health.  Or they may make you paranoid.  (Or you can just relax and laugh at them.)

( ZNJTQNFN96MJ  Please ignore this babble; somebody with some authority said I had to put it here.  It’s just annoying blogger nonsense.  You’ll get to the good stuff in the next line, I promise.) 

Now then . . . As parents, the physical safety of our offspring is our highest priority.  Sure, we want them to do well in school and grow into goodhearted, well-mannered adults who lead fulfilling and productive lives.  We want them to make zillions of dollars (so they can support us in our retirement), rescue wayward turtles and abandoned puppies while helping old ladies across the street and be President of the United States (the first one to keep every one of her promises).  We want a lot.

But before all of that, we want our kids to be safe.

We support their heads when they are seconds old and it continues from there.  We slice grapes into quarters, pad table corners and the teeth of small animals and gate the tops and bottoms of stairwells (and sometimes the odd, visiting relative).  We break a sweat opening our prescription bottles that have been capped to prevent access by small fingers, we teach “stranger danger,” 9-1-1 and “stop, drop and roll.”  We cram their heads into bicycle helmets, cover their soccer-playing legs with shin guards and issue orders like “no playing on the stairs” and “it is not okay to drop-kick your baby sister.”  We buckle them into car seats and steer them toward seat belts while keeping them away from liquid cleaning products, Grandpa’s pill box and that weird guy who lives two doors down.  Then we move onto the big stuff: drugs, drinking, sex.  What’s okay, what’s not, how to avoid the bad stuff and you can always call me if you find yourself in a bad situation.  It doesn’t end until they’re thirty or forty years old and they beg you, please, please, please, stop calling my boss when I have a cold to see if I’m eating the homemade chicken soup you sent me for lunch.

I’m no different from the rest of you.  I’m all about safety.  (Cue my husband, who will now laugh, roll his eyes and confirm that I know every bad thing that has ever happened to any child anywhere, and I’ve printed out an article about it and made him read it.  You heard about the little boy in China who stuck a chopstick in his brain, right?  I don’t make this stuff up.)  I try to look out for my kids every minute I’m with them, and many of the minutes I’m not.

So what I want to know is this: Why does my eight-year-old son already look like a juvenile version of Scarface?  “Jack’s” got blond hair, blue eyes, an adorable gap-toothed grin, a small indentation under one eye and a woozy, W-shaped set of lines under the other.  And while the gap in his smile will disappear one day, the scars under his eyes may not.

You can’t protect your kids against everything.  I couldn’t protect Jack from his own, idiotic behavior a year-and-a-half ago when, unbeknownst to me, he decided to choose a pencil over all of the myriad toys in the playroom and toss it repeatedly into the air until he finally caught it with his face.  (Lots of blood with that one.)  And as much as I yell at my own miniature versions of Fred and Ethel to treat each other with respect, I couldn’t protect Jack last summer when his little sister apparently tried to scratch his eye out.  (She missed, but not by much.)  He still bears the scars from both incidents, and I’m beginning to suspect he always will.

I really do try to keep my kids safe.  But there are some physical injuries I just can’t prevent. 

(Reality check: Jack really does bear the aforementioned scars, and I do wonder if they will ever go away.  But in truth, they’re very minor—probably a lot less significant than the emotional scar he’ll develop when he learns later in life that his mother told everyone she knows and a bunch of people she doesn’t know about his scars on her blog.)

Five minutes before I sat down to write a blog post yesterday, four-and-a-half year old “Emmie” and I stood on the pool deck of our local YMCA, waiting for her swim class to begin.  A dozen or so senior citizens finished their aquatic exercise class and climbed out of the pool, and Emmie and I moved aside to allow one of the men in the class to retrieve his towel and flip-flops.

After claiming his belongings, the man stepped in front of us and stopped.  He turned to me.  “Where’s she from?” he asked.

I hesitated, wanting to answer with the name of the town in which we live, or at least insert a common courtesy into the conversation—perhaps some form of greeting, like “Hello.”  But despite my intuition that I knew where this was going, I decided instead to try a more positive approach and view the question as an opportunity for education. 

“Korea,” I said with a manufactured smile.  I noticed that I had begun to twirl Emmie’s ponytail in an unconscious move to draw her to me.  Don’t mess with her, my physical contact proclaimed.  I resisted another urge to counter-inquire where the man was from or why he didn’t ask the same question of the mothers of any of the white kids on the pool deck.

He nodded, and then actually thought for a moment before he spoke these next words: “The Koreans are hard workers.” 

Oh, for the love of God.

“They always try to outdo the Japanese,” he added.

Yes, that’s why I got her, I thought.  Her middle name is “Hyundai” and as soon as she can read and do arithmetic, I’m going to set her to work designing super-efficient automobiles. Plus she can do lots of chores around the house.

I could almost feel my daughter waiting to hear how I would respond to this man, though I’m sure she couldn’t fully understand what he said.  I lifted my head and grew my smile.  “They’re individuals just like everybody else,” I said to him. 

He stared at me for a few seconds, his mouth open in surprise.  Then he huffed—or was it chortled?—and walked away.  Which was just fine with me.

Folks, positive stereotyping is still stereotyping.  Asian kids—whether parented by Asian, Caucasian or any other race parents—often find themselves confronted by expectations that they will be exceptionally smart, hard workers who excel in music and math and will be docile and obedient to their parents.  But the truth, of course, is that many Asian kids don’t exhibit these characteristics, because they are not all the same.  Imagine the unnecessary pressure felt by a young child whose violin lessons are going poorly because, contrary to expectations, he has little ability in music, or because she just isn’t interested and won’t apply herself to the learning the instrument.  Kids in this situation face not just disappointment from the adults they respect, but carry the burden of allegedly letting down their entire race as well.

This problem is a common one.  Yesterday’s encounter wasn’t my first since adopting an Asian child.  Over a year earlier, in the same YMCA, I mentioned to a fellow mom whose teenagers were dancers that Emmie had expressed an interest in taking ballet classes. 

The mom mentioned a few dance studios in the area that in her opinion offered superior training.  Then she nodded in Emmie’s direction.  “She’ll probably be good.  Asians are generally very good dancers.  I’m not being racist when I say that; it’s just true.”

If you feel the need to clarify your remarks with the statement that you’re not being racist, then guess what?  At the very least, you need to take a careful look at those remarks.

All kids face enough pressures just growing up in America today without saddling them with an  ill-informed list of achievements they are “supposed” to accomplish solely because of their race. 

I hope, of course, that Emmie will turn out to be a smart, hard-working child (and later, adult) who excels at everything she tries.  But the truth is that she’s going to do well in some areas of her life and poorly in others.  She’ll have successes and failures, good traits and bad, just like the rest of us.  For the most part, I don’t yet know what any of those things will be.  And neither does anyone else.

Yes, Emmie is Korean.  But more importantly, she is a kid.  Any assumptions you make about her should begin and end there until you take the time to get to know her as a person.