parenting
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You are viewing stuff tagged with parenting.
In the style of Glennon Doyle…
Essie,
There’s a time in your life when you’ll be striving, reaching, seeking. Every new subject, every new interest, every new person will crackle with the possibility of sparking and bringing alive a part of you that you didn’t know existed. It’s the kind of ride you’ll know you’re on when you’re on it. It needs no label. And what’s more: by definition, you’ll enjoy it. It feeds the ego. For most, it occurs in late teens, early twenties. For some, it’s delayed by loss but ignites later in life, when there is time and space. For still others, tragically, it never happens.
I just instructed and showed Ess how to do something, and she immediately said “Whoa. Cool.”
First and last time, I think.
In a few hours, it’ll be three years since Ess was born. For the first two years, there was kind of a catching of the breath after each stage: after she began sleeping more reliably, after she stopped needing to be burped, after she could sit through a meal out at a restaurant. Beginning with this birthday, it is a less of a catching of the breath and more this sense of taking a memory (“hope I don’t fall down” whenever she climbed the stairs) or a mis-pronunciation (dooDAHNdaht for banana) and reverently setting it on the shelf, leaving it behind.
It’s easy to breeze through the times when Ess is happy, to let her play on her own when she’s content. There are always adult things to be done: cleaning, bill-paying, paperwork, planning, reading pieces on politics, philosophy, coding… and I have noticed I tend to conflate the important tasks with the urgent tasks. I can usually complete the urgent ones while Ess plays, but with that momentum I find I am sailing into important things and then… not very important things.
When Mykala was just three months pregnant with Ess, one of the challenges I anticipated was a sick kid at home. How difficult it must be to watch your little one run down by aches, a runny nose, a tight cough and tired lungs. It has been about two years since that thought, and through a combination of luck and hand sanitizer, our family has threaded the contagion needle through birthday parties, sick relatives, and an entire cold and flu season. Then there was last week. Ess was down, down, down. The primary prodrome was her tendency to sit on our laps for extended periods, paging through a book, resting her head on our encircling arms. Kid must be fighting something, we guessed.
Essie’s word for bug is “bugah” or I suppose “bug-ah” but those two sounds blend together so seamlessly, and she so rarely says it once, that you really get bugahbugahbugahbugah. So that’s anything small and colored dark. Most things requiring a pincer grip. “What’s that?” we ask. “Bugahbugah. BUGAHBUGAHBUGAH.” comes her reply.
A seven foot white pine Christmas tree, grown at the Kroeger’s family tree farm from which you pick it up, freshly cut for you, baled, and drilled plumb for a tree stand is $59, which I believe is an excellent deal. We went to get ours yesterday and marveled at the difference a year makes with Essie. Last year, Ess was in the Björn, reacting a tiny bit to things, and generally kind of just along for the ride. This year she is 16 months old and far more interactive: riding on my back in the Kelty, reaching out at trees she likes, drinking sips of apple juice in the warming house, beaming at people she sees. The long-needled trees like our white pine feel soft to the hand, and, as with anything she feels that is thick and soft, Ess says “maoww”, meaning that it feels just like her cat at home.
A startling, yet simple realization this morning: someday, somewhere, someone is going to be mean, or condescending, or hateful to our Ess. I don’t know, can’t know, can’t guard against when; and the circumstances around such a thing are impossible to anticipate, infinite in variety. And what’s more, apprehension and concern from me are neither beneficial nor constructive. So that will be tucked away. My job, then, is to love Ess into being, to (someday sooner than I want to admit) rest my hands on her shoulders and look her in the eye and tell her I’ll see her at home again, before she travels places I can not follow and takes risks from which I can not protect her.
Yesterday night, with an hour and a half still left until bed, little Ess was getting antsy in the Björn, acting like she was trying to escape. So, we took her up to the warm and cozy upstairs and just set her on our bed, with only one thing in front of her, her pacifier. Now, she has no particular affinity for sucking on any pacifier for longer than 10 seconds, employing a cute but slightly frustrating tongue thrust to pop it out of her mouth. But, she does like to hold it and understand it, with its purple flange and contrasting sides, one a soft silicone and the other a hard plastic.
Dear baby,
You’re the size of a small watermelon now. Where did the time go? It feels like we were just finding out about you, or moving, or painting your room, or assembling your crib, buying your mattress, picking out your diapers, installing your car seat. Get this: pretty soon I’ll be addressing these to you by your name instead of the generic “baby”. You used to be the size of a grain of basmati rice and now you’re huge!
I do weird things now, things I never consciously realized would be a part of my life. I clean trash cans. Sort mail. Go to the store to purchase toilet paper. Clean out the fridge. It’s fascinating that, though you have relatively little freedom as a young person, you have a very unique freedom from these adult responsibilities.
This morning, I was thinking about raising children. Admittedly, I know v̶e̶r̶y l̶i̶t̶t̶l̶e̶ nothing about it because I haven’t done it. I do think that when raising children, inspiring speeches carry almost no effect, while leading by consistent example is one of the most potent positive effects you can have on a child’s life.
When I’m a parent, I want to use old-fashioned words. If I want everyone to quit fighting, I’ll say “Kids, stop your quarreling!”
If I think we should all sit out on the porch after dinner: “Let’s retire to the colonnade.”
Someone’s hair is getting a little long: “Your tresses need to be shorn.”
Why Parents Hate Parenting — New York Magazine is a great summary of the research findings that having kids makes people less happy. However, it teases out exactly what that means. For example, it’s the moment-to-moment happiness that people lose out on when they have kids. They have less freedom to do what they did before. “Small cracks” in their relationship with their spouse (which is integral to happiness) become “huge gulfs” under the pressure of children. What’s more, the later people wait in life, the more autonomy and enjoyment they have experienced from working and socializing, and therefore the more they give up when they do have children. My favorite part, however, was the idea that it isn’t so simple as moment to moment happiness… there’s a larger factor, one of purpose, to consider:
The Secret to Raising Smart Kids in Scientific American:
Several years later I developed a broader theory of what separates the two general classes of learners—helpless versus mastery-oriented. I realized that these different types of students not only explain their failures differently, but they also hold different “theories” of intelligence. The helpless ones believe that intelligence is a fixed trait: you have only a certain amount, and that’s that. I call this a “fixed mind-set.” Mistakes crack their self-confidence because they attribute errors to a lack of ability, which they feel powerless to change. They avoid challenges because challenges make mistakes more likely and looking smart less so. Like Jonathan, such children shun effort in the belief that having to work hard means they are dumb.
The mastery-oriented children, on the other hand, think intelligence is malleable and can be developed through education and hard work. They want to learn above all else. After all, if you believe that you can expand your intellectual skills, you want to do just that. Because slipups stem from a lack of effort, not ability, they can be remedied by more effort. Challenges are energizing rather than intimidating; they offer opportunities to learn. Students with such a growth mind-set, we predicted, were destined for greater academic success and were quite likely to outperform their counterparts.
Praise is effective when specific - Good, new, peer-reviewed research revealing that praise can be very damaging to your children. Studies suggest that specific praise that is neither overused nor undeserved is the key to doing your part to mold children’s self-esteem into a healthy balance.
Welcome to the first post of 2006. So many things have happened to me in this year, that I’ll toss them out in random order, maybe they’ll be funny, and maybe you’ll get bored. Who knows. First, Nils is in Norway - he’s overseas along with many people I know (for example: Emily, Emily, others). He called the experience “once in a lifetime” complete with backpacking Europe later in his 7 month stay, and total immersal in Norwegian culture and general Norwegianess. This type of horizon and world-view-expanding activity strikes me as extremely desirable for the complete college experience. While I am unable to partake at this point in my existence and for the forseeable future, I plan at some point to do some real traveling. It would break my routine-building tendencies, show me things I’ve never seen before, and make me a more interesting life-experiency type father. “Let me tell you what the Cathedrals of France look like at sunset” is generally more interesting than “let me tell you about the Saint Paul skyline at sunset” but not necessarily as practical as “if you use the correct attachment on the wrench, removing the oil filter doesn’t have to be that difficult.”