Learning and playing

Yesterday NPR’s Morning Edition ran an intriguing spot on education and play, pointing out that the kind of play that children used to do—unsupervised, highly imaginative, and structured by children themselves—has been replaced by time spent in parent-supervised activities and prefab ones like watching tv and playing video games. This is bad, the program suggested—children aren’t learning the capacity to self-regulate, for one. It even cited researchers who claim that this shift is one cause for the rise in ADHD diagnosis.

This seems spot-on to me. But get a load of NPR’s example of a curriculum that supposedly does teach children to self-regulate: Tools of the Mind. Its activities are highly structured and highly supervised. For example, children have to fill out paperwork describing games they want to play or making plans for what they want to do at recess—eek! Seems to me this misses the point altogether—among the crucial ways children learn is by getting to create their own structures. Creating your own game and even fighting out what the rules are is intellectually demanding, not to mention empowering. And it seems to me that becoming a self-controlled person later on in life means getting tastes of taking control early on, which is to say freedom and self-control are intertwined. Sure, there’s a definite place for fitting into a structure that already exists—take learning music, for example. But it seems to me that what NPR was getting at was the importance of do-it-yourself creative play, and that’s what kids today have lost.

I think the impulse toward freeing kids for this kind of learning is behind a remark an acquaintance made to me about her philosophy of parenting: “I studiously avoid teaching my child anything.” I presume she intended a certain irony here, but I’m not sure if she’s fully aware of how contradictory her position is. She advised against the conscious teaching of manners my partner and I are doing with our daughter—asking her to say please when she demands something, for example. Her daughter is perfectly polite for her age, but I can’t help assuming that’s because the mother teaches more than she lets on. She strongly shapes her daughter’s environment, for example by cutting her hair in a decidedly androgynous style and dressing her in boyish clothes (to resist the tendency to lock children into gender roles). She argues that she sees a difference between that and trying to shape her daughter directly—what she apparently means by “teaching.” I presume that she is motivated by a value I share—the impulse to cultivate her daughter’s freedom. Problem is, the freedom to do many things comes only through learning skills that are difficult to acquire unless you’re offered them, or even pushed into them, early. Obvious example: music. You’re not free to play the oboe unless you’ve learned how to do it, so if you want your children to have that freedom later you may well have to push them now to do what they don’t always want to do (like practice). And the discipline and even memorization involved in learning to play an instrument pave the way for later creativity.

All this makes me realize how much I mis-stated what I believe about education in an earlier post. I do believe parents and teachers have to take major responsibility for teaching, even though I also think effective education means calling forth the impulse to learn, not trying to pour information into the child. Live and learn.

Minnesota to ban nasty chemicals from children's products

Way to go, Minnesota: the state legislature is on its way to becoming the first state in the nation to ban the nasty—and ubiquitous—chemicals bisphenol-A (BPA) and phthalates from children's products.

What's so scary about these chemicals? Industry and some scientists deny they're a serious threat. Problem is, the studies they point to have looked only for high-level exposures, and when they haven't found them presumed products are safe. But research suggests that chronic low-level exposure is the bigger danger—indeed, there may be no safe threshold for these chemicals—and BPA and phthalates are in everything. That new car smell? New carpet smell? Phthalates volatilizing in the air. BPA is in plastic water bottles and in the plastic lining of food cans.

What do these chemicals do to human bodies? Steel yourself for a major ick factor: Never mind the usual cancer risk, though they do that too. Both chemicals are estrogen-mimicking, so they do gross things to reproductive development. Like cause boys to have under-developed genitalia and girls to develop breasts prematurely. Yuck.

Discovering Muslim Hedonist

This is an example of why the internet is so fabulous--and so frustrating. I just discovered a fascinating blog, Muslim Hedonist. Check out her post on discussing female genital mutilation with her daughters--whoa. I was intrigued too by her discussion of escaping polygamy. Here's a voice from a population that too often is voiceless, or at least doesn't get heard in the mainstream media or the blogosphere. What's especially fascinating is that while Muslim Hedonist is clear about her opposition to FGM, she doesn't treat FGM as a problem isolated to Islam. Instead she connects FGM and her difficulty talking about FGM with her daughters to the lack of language for female sexuality common to Islamic and Western cultures. She is startled that her pre-teen daughter doesn't know what a clitoris is. Hence the title of the post, "The Body Part That Had No Name."

And the whole conversation with her daughters got started by an episode of "America's Next Top Model," which apparently included a "circumcised" model from Somalia. Clash of civilizations, my tuckus. (But jeez, I'm out of touch. Talking about FGM on America's Top Model?!)

What's frustrating is how little I have yet figured out about who she is and what her story is. It's that infernal blog informality and lack of an editor. Anyway, I'm looking forward to digging around some more on her site and piecing it together.

Down with the experts

The other day, I made the mistake of scanning through a bunch of local parent magazines at one go. Eek!

There was the article about oral hygiene that directed me to take my baby to the dentist by age one. Sure. The dentist would have gotten glimpses of the kid’s teeth when she inhaled for another scream. It then proceeded with this ever-so-helpful ‘graph: “And if you tell a dentist that your child won’t let you brush their teeth, then remember that dentists have heard all that before. Parents would be wise to help their children brush their teeth until they are 8 or 9 years old.” Give me a friggin’ break. My daughter’s tooth brushing is purely ceremonial, but the only alternative would be nightly anesthesia to knock her out cold. Perhaps the author will send over an anesthesiologist—or a zookeeper with a stun gun.

Then there was the article on cell phones for tweens. Fer chrissake, I don’t have a cell phone. Or the advertorial page displaying an ever-so-cute onesie emblazoned with “my space” and a picture of a crib, for a mere $20 (my child refused to sleep anywhere near anything with bars, and I think she was right) and a stroller blanket with tie-downs for $70 and up (I kinda want one of those). By the time I got to the article about the “play debate”—about whether children are or are not being pressured to learn too much too young (with sidebar on playing with your child to stimulate brain development), I was ready to stick my kid in front of the TV and pour myself a double slug of whiskey.

Calmed by the booze, I offer this expert advice: Parenting magazines, advice manuals, and all supposed parenting experts are bad for you. Stay away from them. I take that back. (Like most experts, I flip flop.) Just dip into them sparingly and with liberal doses of salt. And after the kids have gone to bed, read Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English’s classic For Her Own Good: 100 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women.

My best antidote to expertist guilt-mongering is the Bad Mommy Club. My fellow chair of this club called up the other night at about 8:00 to tell me that her daughter had just woken up from a nap, so it was going to be a late night. She was now plunked in front of the TV watching Dora the Explorer and eating cheese crackers. “You’re the coolest mom,” I said.

Among the things that qualify me for the Bad Mommy Club are not always buying organic, allowing my child to eat sweets upon occasion, never getting the hang of putting her in a sling, never having Ferberized her, never having taught her sign language, and allowing Veggie Booty to be the only vegetable she ate for a while. I was in trouble when the stuff was recalled.

What the Bad Mommy Club reminds me of is that half the things some school of thought thinks are de rigeur are verboten for another—that’s part of the joke I share with my co-chair. It reminds me not to sweat the small things and stick to what I actually think is important. It also reminds me not to judge others’ parenting choices—or try not to. I happen to think both my co-chair and I are really good mothers. There are plenty of differences between us—I’ve never exposed my child to TV, for one—and that’s okay. There are many ways of being a good mother. Don’t let anybody tell you different.

Docs gets defensive on home birth

Right on schedule, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has issued another pronouncement against home birth. It repeats the usual baseless charges that home birth isn’t safe (more on that below)—yawn. Same old racket the docs have been pushing for over a century. Can you blame a guild for defending its turf?

What’s more interesting is what’s new. For the first time, ACOG has altered its stance to accept as safe “accredited freestanding birthing centers.” This is a significant retreat, in the face of what I surmise must have been rising pressure from birth centers. I guess this means these entities are growing in influence and economic power. Midwives attending home births will have this kind of influence when hell freezes over, so the retreat doesn’t suggest it’s likely ACOG will surrender its last stand against home birth any time soon. Still, this retreat makes ACOG’s anti-home-birth stance even more threadbare, as freestanding birth centers offer nothing significant beyond what midwives practicing in the home can offer.

The other interesting new tidbit is this weirdly defensive and downright sneering line: "Childbirth decisions should not be dictated or influenced by what's fashionable, trendy, or the latest cause célèbre. "

“Fashionable”? “Trendy”? A “cause celebre”? Are we talking about home birth, practiced since the dawn of humanity but holding steady at about 1 percent of American births for many decades? People who choose home birth do so in the face of widespread hostility, because of deeply held beliefs, often religious ones. Go tell the Amish they’re being “trendy.” It seems hard to believe big bad ACOG has been scared by Ricki Lake’s new film, “The Business of Being Born.” The movie’s hot in my circles, but has yet to be released in theaters in most of America. A more plausible (and more fashionable) bogey is the favorable mention home birth got in Vogue a few months ago.

ACOG is also defensive about the soaring C-section rate, which it mentions home birth advocates cite as a justification for promoting home births. ACOG states vacuously that it’s “committed to reducing C-section rates," but “there is no scientific way to recommend an 'ideal' national cesarean rate as a target goal." Actually, after thorough review of the scientific literature, the World Health organization has set 15 percent as the upper limit of what C-section rates should be and under 12 percent as a better goal (the U.S.'s rate is currently over 30 percent). The European countries with the lowest infant and maternal mortality rates in the world have C-section rates under 10 percent. These seem like pretty obvious science-based goals.

Among ACOG’s reasons for claiming home birth is unsafe: “a seemingly normal labor and delivery can quickly become life-threatening for both the mother and baby.” In fact, fast-moving emergencies in childbirth are exceedingly rare, and in those cases when they do occur, you’re not much better off in a hospital. Few hospitals have surgeons and anesthesiologists on duty 24-7, and the typical time between the decision to do an emergency C-section and the first cut is thirty minutes—it takes time for on-call docs to arrive at the hospital and scrub up and for equipment to be readied. If you live within 30 minutes of a hospital, you’re just as well off at home—and perhaps better, since, if you have a midwife at home, you have one-on-one attention and the problem may be recognized faster.

Indeed, all well-designed studies have found that a midwife-attended home birth is as safe for low-risk births as hospital birth, and perhaps even safer. See Johnson et al in the British Medical Journal, Janssen et al in Birth, etc, etc. etc.

And get a load of ACOG’s snide and dishonest whack at midwives who attend home births: It refers to “lay or other midwives attending to home births.” “Other” must refer to the highly trained and licensed certified professional midwives who attend most planned home births—nothing lay about it.

Taming Toddlers

“A wailing baby is nothing compared with the defiant behavior and tantrums common among toddlers,” says the New York Times. That sure feels like the truth, at least now I’ve forgotten the agony of hearing a wailing baby (motherhood requires lots of amnesia). So I read with interest of Harvey Karp’s latest offering: taming toddlers. In his latest book, "The Happiest Toddler on the Block," he apparently calls them little “Neanderthals.” “…When they get upset, they go Jurassic on you,” he writes.

His recommendations? Instead of sweetly explaining to a wailing toddler that she can’t have a cookie until after dinner (over and over and over), you repeat back what the child has been saying in her own primitive terms: “You want. You want. You want cookie. You say, ‘Cookie, now. Cookie now.’ ” Supposedly this works. Toddlers calm down and then you can explain why no cookie now.

I’m skeptical of one-size-fits-all expertism, but, hey, this might be worth a try on my little Neanderthal. If I can do it without laughing.

I Heart Katha Pollitt

Katha Pollitt has come through for me again: Just when I’m feeling utterly alone in my convictions, she says just what I’d been feeling in funny, clear-headed terms. Thank you, Katha, for pouring cold water on the Juno love fest.

I’ve now seen the movie, and I can say it’s beautifully made, with, as everyone has been saying, terrific acting, especially by its star. But I came home from watching it queasy and distraught. The movie’s a morass of bad faith. It’s so well done that it anticipates and deflects every criticism. Find its creaking stereotypes of adoptive parents as rich, uptight yuppies, or of high-achieving women as rigid, anal-retentive icebergs, offensive? Sensitive acting by Jennifer Garner as the adoptive mother so humanizes her one-dimensional character that your criticism seems pedantic. Think there’s a certain sexism in that one-dimensionality? Turn the charming adoptive dad into a juvenile creep by the end, the adoptive mother and Juno into allies, and the adoptive mother finally into a single mom. (Sorry if I just gave too much away.) Think Juno’s parents shouldn’t be cooperating in the idea that their daughter is unworthy of her baby? Give the stepmother a funny, heroic scene in which she dresses down the ultrasound tech for sneering at her daughter. Think the central premise that a person can give up her baby and live happily ever after is a lie? The movie gives us one scene in which Juno cries wordlessly after giving birth. So, see, the movie gets it.

It was a weird sensation watching this movie while seven months pregnant, feeling my baby twitch in my belly through scenes in which characters touch Juno’s belly and feel her baby’s kicks. I watched this slight girl go through the arduous and transformative experience of birth just as I had for the first time not so long ago and will again in a few months. I know absolutely, in my belly, if I know anything at all, that no one could go through such an experience, give up her baby, and come away unscarred, perhaps fatally.

Precisely because I’m so near her in experience, I found Juno inscrutable. Why she did such a thing is a question the movie doesn’t answer (although I found the information given at the very beginning of the movie that her own mother had abandoned her plausible and important). It was not so much with her, as a fellow pregnant woman, but with her parents, as a fellow parent, that I identified. I felt enraged by them (yes, I know this is fiction). What kind of people allow their grandchild to be given away? What kind of people collaborate in letting their daughter suffer the loss of a child? The cycle begun with the mother who abandoned Juno continues through the generations.

In a letter to the Nation responding to Pollitt’s column on Juno, a reader who works in inner-city schools defended adoption as “a viable alternative to teen motherhood,” and bemoaned the tendency of the community not to agree. “When I suggested adoption to a guidance counselor, she replied, “We don’t do this in our community.” Good for them. That is, if as I presume, what she meant is that instead family and community step in to help parent teens’ babies, as is a common pattern in the African-American community and indeed around the world. America would do well to look to these communities for an adoption model that does not involve sundering family bonds or erasing birth mothers.

Juno’s ending implies that Juno and her boyfriend will live happily in love ever after. But here’s the true story as I imagine it unfolding: Someday the boy will say or suggest that Juno abandoned their baby and Juno will think the same of herself, and how can a love survive that?

At its heart, this movie, despite its strong, idiosyncratic female lead, all its nuanced acting, and its ostensible focus on teen pregnancy, is a conventional love story. The boy is what matters, not the baby. How Juno feels about the boy, not how she feels about herself, her parents, or her baby, is the only important thing. And that is the ultimate destructive lie at the heart of this film. It is the basic lie of sexism.

Boys better be boys

Latest Boys-Will-Be-Boys News--er, maybe not: Peggy Orenstein in the New York Times this weekend described research showing that while girls choose less gender-stereotyped play as they grow older, boys grow more stereotyped in their play. But here's the kicker:

Whether girlie or girlist, girls, because they’re allowed more latitude in their identities, can still be girls: Boys, on the other hand, must be boys —unless no one is watching. In another study of younger children, Cherney and London found that if ushered alone into a room and told they could play with anything, nearly half the boys chose “feminine” toys as often as “masculine” ones, provided they believed nobody, especially their fathers, would find out.

This confirms what I've tended to notice: Parents who say boys will be boys (usually happily, even smugly) seem to really be saying my boys better be boys. As Orenstein notes, "Learning to “create an amazing dance routine” (as suggested by [The Girls’ Book: How to Be the Best at Everything] is still far more Dangerous [as in The Dangerous Book for Boys] for boys than, as their own volume suggests, learning to juggle."

Orenstein finishes on an ominous note: "That made me question whether any more expansive vision of girlhood can survive without a similar overhaul of boyhood, which, apparently, is not in the offing." And being told to be the 'best at everything'--with its implicit suggestion that you'd better be the best at everything--is hardly empowering, if you ask me. It rings of all those surveys showing girls excelling at school, in degrees awarded, sports, looks, and charm (and yet still hitting the glass ceiling once out of school), and reminds me of how many talented, beautiful, driven women I knew in college who were anorexic. Sounds way more fun to be allowed to do what's Dangerous--except if you know you'd better do what's Dangerous and you better not do anything dangerous, like dancing.

Send the sluts away

The more things change…this comes my way (thanks, Feministing) from the enlightened state of Colorado:

A state lawmaker used a derogatory term Wednesday to describe unmarried teen parents as sexually promiscuous and complained that society condones premarital sex.
"In my parents' day and age, (unmarried teen parents) were sent away, they were shunned, they were called what they are," Republican Rep. Larry Liston said during a GOP legislative caucus meeting in Denver. "There was at least a sense of shame."
Liston continued: "There's no sense of shame today. Society condones it ... I think it's wrong. They're sluts…"

I think of all the girls who were indeed sent away a generation ago, shunned and disappeared, and I shiver at how easily those days could be repeated. It makes me want to grab hold of my daughter and tell her I’ll never send her away and that I’ll keep bad men like Liston far away from her.

Liston did follow “they’re sluts” by saying “And I don't mean just the women. I mean the men, too." Like that shows he’s not a misogynist. Hah—the boys were never sent away. Although come to think of that crazy fundamentalist Mormon group that still practices polygamy and whose practice of ousting many of its young men was covered in the New York Times, if you take misogyny far enough you start having to treat not only your girls as disposable but your boys too.

I think we all owe Liston a thank you. I do appreciate it when misogynist right-wingers show their fangs and clue us in to what's really at stake.

Lest readers from Colorado feel smeared, I will confess that a state legislator from my state once spoke in favor of a bill to make English the official state language by saying, “If it was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for us.” Right-o. Learn Aramaic, buddy, if you're going to live in this state.

Women Prime Victims of Subprime Mess

From the start of the mortgage crisis, I was skeptical of the main defense supporters of subprime lending offered—that it enabled people who otherwise couldn’t buy houses to do so. The stories in the press of actual people caught up in the crisis didn’t fit this picture; they nearly always were about people who already owned their homes and had gotten enticed into refinancing with subprime mortgages.

But along with most of the press, it didn’t occur to me that the subprime debacle might be a women’s story. Thanks finally to The New York Times for its coverage of the sorry truth:

Subprime mortgages, which are driving the foreclosure rate, have gone disproportionately to women. … Though women and men have roughly the same credit scores, the Consumer Federation of America found that women were 32 percent more likely to receive subprime loans than men. The disparity existed within every income and ethnic group. Blacks and Latinos are also more likely to get subprime loans than comparable white borrowers.

Get that? Contrary to the apologists, lenders weren’t offering higher rates in exchange for taking on more risk. They were doing what they could get away with, and they could get away with it because of the whole context of sexism and racism at work in our culture. The Consumers Union attributes some of the gender disparities to the greater income instability women face because of divorce or family medical emergencies (they didn’t mention the added time women spend out of the workforce to care for children or elders). Other experts suggest that mortgage brokers assume that women are less confident to negotiate or shop around, and so they figure they can get away with offering them higher rates (a self-fulfilling prophecy, of course). Pile that sexism on top of the likelihood that a low-income neighborhood is not served by prime lenders and you get a nasty picture of shady lenders preying on the vulnerable: women, people of color, and children. I guess that’s what “women and children first” always really meant.

Because if the subprime crisis is a crisis for women, then it is a crisis for children. A foreclosure counselor for a nonprofit in Baltimore told the Times that his typical client is single and female with two children.

Congress and the presidential candidates, what are you going to do about it? (While John Edwards called for a mandatory foreclosure moratorium, Hillary Clinton has called for only a voluntary moratorium, a freeze on rate increases on adjustable mortgages, but proposes $30 billion in aid to affected homeowners and communities. Barack Obama is not calling for a moratorium, and offering only tax credits to homeowners that would average about $500.)