The Good Baby And The Challenging Child

Last weekend I attended a conference. While I was allowed to bring a babysitter on-site to care for my nursing newborn, I wasn’t supposed to bring my baby into the conference itself. Or that was the rule until I cited New York’s Civil Rights Law that said I could breastfeed a baby in any public or private location. Period. I cited the law for a variety of reasons from the fact that I believe in my right to breastfeed and feed my baby without having to hide in some back room to that I want to have my cake and eat it too: attend my conference and nurse my newborn who needs to nurse roughly every 30-45 minutes (neither one of my children seem to be the kind of babies who nurse every two hours.).

But I also cited the law because I knew it could work - that I could have my baby nestled in her Ergo carrier as she nursed and napped while I learned all kinds of new things and talked to all kinds of people. I didn’t say that I carry her all over town not disturbing fellow subway passengers or New York Public Library patrons. I didn’t mention that I did the same with my son, even taking him to midnight Christmas Eve Mass where he slept the entire time and most people didn’t even realize he was there. I didn’t mention that in our society, we seem to have an idea about babies and it’s that mainly they cry a lot in movie theaters and on airplanes and in general, disturb the peace. I have taken my babies to movie theaters and on airplanes – a lot of them actually – and generally, my babies nurse and nap.

So I attended my conference with my daughter in her Ergo carrier where she nursed and napped and was her content little self. Sure enough, many people didn’t even realize she was there. And many people did. Many of these people came up and told me what a good baby I had. I know they meant it as a compliment, but it bothered me. I said thank you, because I knew they meant it as a compliment, but I said it with a sinking sick feeling in my stomach. They meant well, but they had labeled my daughter nonetheless.

When you attend a conference about anything, the people are there to discuss whatever the conference is about. It isn’t the time to launch a discussion about the labels we give children. Or maybe I should have. Maybe I should have pointed out, that my newborn daughter was just doing what babies do: nursing, napping, and dirtying her diaper. When she wakes up, she coos, smiles and laughs. When she’s had too much stimulation or noise or elderly ladies with too much perfume who stick their face next to hers, she cries and fusses. She’s a baby. She does the things that babies do and she communicates in the ways that babies communicate. It doesn’t make her good.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I don’t think she’s extraordinary. But I’m her mother. If she fit the description of a “bad” baby – which seems to be the baby who is not quiet or asleep – I’d still think she was extraordinary. I couldn’t help but feel for the babies who have reason to cry, who suffer from colic, allergies, or eczema or are just uncomfortable babies who express their discomfort. Would that make those babies bad or difficult? It seems ludicrous to label a baby bad, but I’ve met the people who have done it – who have called their three month old naughty because he wouldn’t go to sleep in his crib by himself and wanted to be nursed to sleep. But he wasn’t naughty. He was a baby. And his parents had expectations that he didn’t meet.

Which is often the case when we label children. It isn’t about the child; it’s about the parent’s unmet expectations. Children just express themselves in the only way they know to express themselves: they cry, yell, throw things, hit, kick, get silly, make faces, smile, laugh, and often do all of it in a matter of minutes. If we don’t like the way they are expressing themselves, then it’s our job to teach them age appropriate ways to do so, meet their needs and often times, get to the source of the behavior. But labeling – even positive labels like being a “good” baby – only creates a vicious cycle where no one wins.

 Not that we haven’t been guilty of it in my house. My husband one night when he wasn’t feeling well told my son, that he was making too much noise. Except my son wasn’t, I pointed out to my husband. My husband just wasn’t feeling well. I’ve caught myself too – battling my own hunger and fatigue at the end of the day, but telling my son he’s challenging and then having to apologize. Because he’s not challenging. He’s three and doing what three year olds do. And as his tired and hungry parent, I’m the one who’s challenged. I’m the one who in that moment feels unprepared and unable to handle a variety of moods and sudden shifts in behavior. 

I realized then that labels are projections, not descriptions, whether it’s calling a baby good, a preschooler challenging or a teenager difficult.  It’s irresponsible. It makes parents the victims of their child’s behavior, and it doesn’t teach the child to be responsible, just to blame the difficulty of the situation on the behavior of another human being. If we as parents can remember to take a step back and say, “Okay, I’m hungry, tired, low on patience (or whatever the case may be) and you clearly need something. Maybe we can have a do over or brainstorm other ways to handle this situation” then we’re honest and can avoid falling into the trap of playground name calling behavior, which is all labeling is after all.

What Steve Jobs Taught Me About Pre-School

When I taught my college English classes, I’d begin my semester with the ritual of the syllabus and handing out Steve Jobs 2005 Stanford University commencement address. Jobs’ address remains my favorite speech of all time, but I handed it out partially because Jobs was talking to students their age and in an age where much of education focuses on standardized testing or having students behave and memorize what is handed out, I wanted my students to think about finding what they loved and to think about what they loved. This wasn’t just for their sake, but for mine. Honestly, students who have found what they love and what they are interested in and then write papers about those topics write better and more interesting papers. They write the kind of papers I like to read because I learn things from them. I also handed out Jobs’s address because it’s the kind of thing I wish one of my professors had handed out to me when I was starting college. My students of course didn’t see it this way. They thought I was an idealistic sap.

This week, when Steve Jobs died, I went back and reread his Commencement address. It still moves me and makes me tear up. It makes me think about how much time I have spent listening to my fears rather than my heart and intuition and how some people spend their entire lives only listening to fears, unaware they have a heart and intuition.

Yet, something changed for me when I became a mother, maybe thanks to oxytocin and all those mothering hormones, but mostly, I realized with a clarity I couldn’t deny that I was my child’s role model, and I would demonstrate living a life I loved and was proud of for my son. And as a mother, I have relied on my instincts, even when I can’t find research to back me up (though every once in awhile the research catches up with me and I nod that satisfying I-knew-it nod).

This week I also signed my son up for playgroup. We opted out of traditional pre-schools because we live in New York and when we moved into our Brooklyn brownstone in February, we had already missed the deadline for fall pre-school programs. Throw in that out of all the pre-schools I researched, there was something I didn’t like about each of the programs. Throw in that each application required me to write various essays about my child or how my parenting lined up with their educational methodology or what have you plus the application fee and inevitable waiting list – and well, it all required far more work than either my husband or I had put in to get ourselves into college. I also think our college educations were cheaper.

Pre-schools are serious business in New York. The thinking goes that if you get your children into the right pre-school, the rest of their education and their brilliance will fall into place. Parents on the playground have worried conversations about which pre-school will prepare their child for kindergarten, reading and Harvard, as if failing to read by age 4 dooms their children to a life of minimum wage servitude. Parents can spend up to $38,000 on private Pre-K to ease their anxiety about such things. Whereas my husband and I shrug and figure, given how much we each read and write, it’s just a matter of time and our children will learn when they’re ready.

Our decision to not send our son to a traditional pre-school whether it be the YMCA or a Montessori or Waldorf type has raised the eyebrows of some family members and friends, as if we were denying our child key childhood experience, denying him the alphabet itself or guilty of negligent parenting, as if I haven’t spent years researching education or reading up on the crisis in the current education system that has trickled down into some of the country’s pre-schools. But rather than stress about son’s future SAT score and if it could be predicted by his pre-school attendance, we found like-minded parents whom we could do a pre-school home school coop kind of thing with because we do want our son to play with other kids, to make friends, and to learn the kind of social problem solving that happens in groups of people. Except our pre-school-home-school-coop-kind-of-thing won’t start until January. Playgroup, we thought, would fill in the gap, especially since in my mind pre-school should be about playing anyway. Except upon arrival, we discovered that while the playgroup advertised itself as up to age 3 ½, only kids under 14 months had come. My son looked out at the sea of babies and asked, “Mommy, where are all the kids?” My heart broke. I asked for my money back. As we left, the woman said, “You know the kids his age are in school, right?”

I spent the next day questioning myself, and our decision to forgo the traditional pre-school and education route. I google-ed things like, “what’s the point of pre-school anyway?” “home school pre-school” and what have you. I registered my son for art class at the Children’s Museum of the Arts. Then I shut my computer. I realized I parent my children the way I wished I had been parented. Maybe it was the same with education, and maybe I just had to think about how I wish I were educated and that would inform my decisions about my son’s educational future.

All things considering and even though I wasn’t the best student, I received a pretty strong education in the Portland Public School system, and as I bounced the question around with my husband and my other most trusted confidant, my sister, we realized we all at some point in our public school educations had experienced following our instincts, our guts, our curiosities, our hearts and not only getting in trouble for it, but also getting labeled.

My husband, sister and I also realized that we wished we had been taught to follow our instincts, and have our perspectives, ideas, and insights –even the childish ones – respected and taken seriously. We pondered what would it have been like to have someone as excited about our creativity and curiosity as we were, or interested in how we formed our thoughts and perspectives. We wondered what it would have been like to have been raised in an education system where the focus was on learning how we learn and how to think. In having taught college students and asked them their opinions, only to receive the deer-in-the-headlight stares, I also had reason to suspect that much of education is actually trying to educate the curiosity, the instinct, the heart and even the creativity out of students.

At my son’s art class, he played with clay, he made a mural with other kids, he listened to a story, he hid behind an easel during songs (then sang the songs the rest of the day), and at one point he stacked stools, while the other kids colored with markers. The teacher jokingly called him a troublemaker for stacking stools. Jokingly, but still. I refrained from saying that Maria Montessori would point out that he was not trouble making, he was stacking stools for whatever reason that was important to him, because I didn’t want the teacher to snap back with a suggestion to stick him in Montessori then (as if that wasn’t a long waiting list).

My son didn’t notice the label. Art class was fantastic despite the label, but I felt that I was right to question my son following the standard educational route where many educators are mainly interested in how well children behave.

Later that day, Steve Jobs died.

In rereading his 2005 Stanford Commencement address, it’s hard to pick a favorite part of that speech, but in light of spending the week obsessing about my son’s educational future, two parts stuck out:

1) “You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.”

2) “Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma —which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

I listened to my son in the bathtub bellow songs he learned in art class while hiding behind an easel. My son then asked to have his boat book in the bath. My husband explained it was paper and couldn't go in the bath. My son asked, “What happens to paper in the bath?” My husband and he then dumped a good portion of the recycling bin into the bath to find out what happens to paper in the bath.

I realized I didn’t have to worry about pre-school. My son is learning from living because that’s what kids do. Other people have different priorities for their children’s education whether it’s that they be high achievers in hopes it will grant them job security or that their children do well just so as parents they look good (we know these kinds of people, but they rarely admit such things) while others want their kids to just have good experiences of school and childhood.

I can understand these priorities for our children’s education, but I want my kid to take a page from Steve Jobs book and that means I too have to trust my heart and instincts and not live with the results of others’ thinking. I want my son to do great work simply because he loves what he’s doing (and not because it will earn him a good grade). I want him to know what it is that he loves. I want him to think for himself, and to trust his heart and values. And most of all, I want him to love learning and stay curious and to trust that curiosity. I don’t know exactly what his education will look like or where he’ll get it, and I don’t know the answers for reforming the education system or if there’s one system that will work for all children and learning types. But the life of Steve Jobs shows me that what I want to nurture and encourage are not my son’s abilities to behave, take tests, or learn by memorization, but his curiosity, his ability to ask questions (and tough questions), his natural love of learning – even if it takes nontraditional routes – his instincts, and his perspective that is his and his alone.

Me and Ira Glass

Someday, I will be friends with Ira Glass of WBEZ's This American Life. He will come to our house for Sunday brunch with his wife. He will bring his friends David Sedaris, Sarah Vowell, David Rakoff and for the first time in my life, I will keep my mouth shut because what can you say with those guests? You can't talk about the upcoming Christmas holiday because David Sedaris will lament the plight of Macy's elves. You can't talk about family because Sarah Vowell will talk about how when her dad gets mad, he goes and sets off one of his cannons. Meanwhile, David Rakoff will mutter about how his glass is half-empty and that his life is all the better for it. I simply can't compete with this level of conversation (even if my family is so nutty that yesterday when a friend asked after them, and I told him the latest events in my family (that so-and-so swore and hung up on so-and-so, someone else sought revenge by redoing their will and so-and-so is no longer speaking to so-and-so) he asked in all earnestness, "Is your family Greek?").

Still, I want Ira Glass and his friends to all be my friends simply because they are smart and funny people with introspective and enlightening things to say. I'd like them to send me copies of their books and invitations to their parties. In the meantime, I have this little tidbit from Ira on my fridge.

Ah, fall has started and just because we no longer start school as the weather turns crisp and chilly, we do relish the season of new projects and weekly deadlines.

Respect for Women from Father to Son

Sometimes Husband teases me about my feminist leanings - like when I say I'm taking Fyo to the Brooklyn Museum for the Mary Wollstonecraft exhibit as well as the Judy Chicago Dinner Party exhibit to begin his feminist education or like yesterday when we took a car and behind the driver's seat was a copy of "Ms. Taxi" magazine. Husband pointed to Ms. Taxi, and said, "I'm afraid you have an uphill battle."

It's true. It seems like society is on the backlash side of the feminist pendulum swing at the moment.

"You can still win," he added.
"I win with you and Fyo," I said.
"Yes," he said.

I do spend a lot of time of thinking about how to raise my son in a sexist society - my daughter too. I don't want my daughter playing with princess dolls, but I don't want my son playing with them either. I don't him to treat women like princesses, or put them on pedestals or think that women have to be pretty all the time or that their looks are more important than what they say and do. And he learns as much about how to treat women from his father as he does me, but it seems many men (and women) forget this small detail, which is why we need occasional reminders like this:

And respect for women takes many forms from how men treat women in conversation to what men do around the house and how they interact with their children. This morning, I walked into the kitchen to see Husband cooking with my son (and without even thinking about it that my son is learning from him cooking is a family activity). Glorious!