Particle Roundup July 2015

One in an occasional series, a roundup of parenting articles (particles) that have caught my attention or been virtually shoved in front of my wandering eyeballs.

The Letter your Teenager Can't Write You
Weeks away from having a teenager, I was interested in this one.  It makes a strong argument for hanging in there when it feels like there's no point. 

I raised an addict - what could I have done differently?
Knowing some addicts of different ages, I have often wondered about whether a moment occurred that - if handled differently - could have changed a path.  This essay implores parents to be knowledgeable about the availability of drugs because even raising a kid well to the point that he or she looks happy and ready for life does not ensure against that child finding a source at just the wrong moment and throwing a ton away.

Screen Addiction is Taking a Toll on Children
In other bleak addiction news, screen addiction in China and elsewhere. Pretty happy my kids are at a no-electronic-devices old-school summer camp for two weeks.  Maybe there's one of those for me?

What if Everything You Knew about Disciplining Kids was Wrong?
Stats on suspension can be disturbing, especially among really small kids.  As a kid who got high marks in everything but penmanship and conduct and who knew his way around the elementary school principal's office because of the latter, this was an interesting read.

The Mixed-Up Brothers of Bogota
Not strictly about parenting, but the latest, most fascinating contribution to the nature vs. nurture question.  Two sets of identical twins in a Bogota hospital get crossed up.  Each family ends up with a non-biological son who happens also to have a twin out there.  All four twins meet in adulthood. 

For what it's worth, I read all of these articles using Pocket on my phone, here and there when I could.  Actually, for the letter from your teenager, I listened to it via Pocket's text-to-speech monotone robot.  That was an interesting medium for the raw emotion of that essay.

Mashup: Parent Comment Rage and Beautiful Winter Images

I take guilty pleasure in reading the comments on my school district's Facebook announcements of delays and closures.  We've now had several of both this winter.  Parents go absolutely nuts, complaining about the administration.  One really fun facet: the comments cut both ways, of course.  If the district delays or cancels school, that's inconvenient and sends a bad message.  If the district holds a full day or only delays without cancelling, that gets its own round of second-guessing.

To share the joy, I've copied selected comments verbatim from these Facebook announcements and surprinted them on beautiful winter scenes.  Enjoy!


On the day of a delay

This from a snowy Saturday when the high school basketball championship games were not cancelled.  Linda Lane is the superintendent.  Bus drivers love to comment; not sure if they're parents of children in the district or not.

On a very cold morning when we'd had delays but as of then no school closures at all this year





















On the day of a cancellation for cold (but not snow or ice)

When after-school activities were cancelled because the weather went south during the school day

Flickr Photo credits
1  blmiers2 - winter bird in the snow
2  Denis Colette - Route de l'Arc-en-ciel...!!!
3  SBA73 -  neu i vent a la mola
4  Let ideas compete - hot air in cold air
5  blmeiers2 - Frosty Footpath - Winter Snow

Particle Roundup February 2015

Call it the Jeffington Post.  It's your occasional parenting article (particle) roundup.  I see particles linked all the time on social media, and I read some of the ones that I see.  Here are some recent ones with my quick take on them.

What Ruth Bader Ginsburg Taught me About Being a Stay-at-home Dad.
While there's nothing actually ground-breaking here, it's well-written and an interesting slice of the at-home dad world.  The best nugget from the justice: "You can’t have it all all at once."

The Race to Nowhere in Youth Sports
This really targets parents who have bought into the hyper-competitive part of the youth sports spectrum.  It asks for changes from coaches and parents.  Unfortunately, it also lays out why change will be difficult to effect.  "The path is a race to nowhere, and it does not produce better athletes. It produces bitter athletes who get hurt, burnout, and quit sports altogether."

We're Ruining Our Kids with Minecraft; The Case for Unstructured Play
When I read this, I felt very validated about some of the choices we've made as parents: 
"If we want our kids to relearn how to play, we have to begin by exposing them to boredom."  We send our kids to camp in the summer, but we also structure their summer specifically to create boredom in hopes that they will overcome it of their own initiative.  Articles like this are fueled by scary statistics; this one features a finding that kids 8 to 18 spend 6.5 hours on screens per day.  That sounds outrageously high to me across the board.  I have no doubt that it's true of some kids, but where are they finding that kind of time?

This is more of a marriage essay (messay?) than a particle, but I saw someone link to it on Facebook.  The title "I Wasn't Treating My Husband Fairly, and it Wasn't Fair" should alert you to the kind of rocket surgeon we're reading here.  It's pretty annoying in the middle, so either read the whole thing or don't read it at all.  She finally gets around to a point that doesn't make me really resent her or her husband.

Behavioral Diabetes

At the risk of upsetting those who have to manage (or love someone who has to manage) actual diabetes, I've labeled a pattern exhibited by my eight-year-old behavioral diabetes.  Perhaps you know a behavioral diabetic, too.  All his life, when he's gotten hungry and his blood sugar has dipped, he's melted down.  There are worse afflictions.  Particularly in a very young child, I'd take hangry over tired meltdowns any day.   I can help reduce hanger by feeding him.  Tired and riled seems only to escalate until explosion. 

This pattern makes being home when Teddy gets home from school feel  really important.  Four to six o'clock is Ted's witching hour.  In his toddler/pre-school years, I felt I wouldn't make it through this dark valley some nights.  By trial and error, I learned that he couldn't identify low blood sugar as his problem.  He saw everything as terrible and hopeless, but he couldn't say "Please feed me."  More than that, as we started to see the pattern and would diagnose a behavioral diabetes attack, we moved from asking him if he was hungry to telling him he needed to eat something.  Unable to identify hunger as the problem, he would fight back, adding resentment of our prodding him to eat to his already-dark outlook.

[Editor's note:  I was drafting this post in my notebook while Teddy and I waited for his brother to finish an event.  I stopped during the above paragraph because Teddy said "I'm hungry".  It was 4:05 pm.  We went out to the corner convenience store for a dose of pretzel-cillin.]

I've tried and failed to capture on video the whiplash transformation in his personality that as little as one bite of food can effect.  He can move from moaning to singing in one-fifth of a banana.  It blows our minds.

As much as I'm proud of us as parents for figuring out the problem and helping Teddy manage his behavior at moments like these, I do worry that feeding him when he's upset essentially lays the groundwork for an eating disorder.  On a recent episode of Marc Maron's WTF podcast, Jeff Garlin, who's had his troubles with food, said in a slick and winning way - "You know, I'll either feel some feelings or have a sandwich."  Likewise, Weight Watchers' current ad campaign enjoins "If you're happy and you know it, eat a snack...If you're sad and you know it eat a snack...if you're human, eat your feelings, eat a snack."


While it seems like there is some chemical, blood-sugar magic to Teddy getting a snack when he really needs one, I want him to learn to take care of himself, not equate any bad feelings with hunger and attempt to eat them away.  It's a delicate balance.  How do I say "Eat this banana now, but don't eat an entire pizza at 2 am when you're 24, and an awesome young lady has just broken up with you."?  Actually, that doesn't sound half bad.  I'm going to try it tomorrow at twenty after four.

What I Can and Can't Tell my Kids About Drugs

One can get the idea in our culture that everyone does drugs. Characters in TV shows and movies do drugs all the time, and video cameras capture ordinary people doing outlandish things while they're high.  As a parenting issue, Baby Boomer parents have had to wrestle with the question of how to discourage their kids from using drugs while being honest about their own "experimentation".  No doubt many of my Gen X peers face the same issue.  Call this the "I learned it by watching you" problem. I wrestle with a slightly different problem.


When I was in elementary school, first lady Nancy Reagan opened up the children's front in the war on drugs with the Just Say No campaign.  We heard at school and on TV that if we were offered drugs to have the courage to Just Say No because the size 2 lady in the White House said so.

Because I came of age in this milieu, I was always waiting for the moment when someone would push drugs on me.  It never happened.  Having been primed to Say No, it haunts me now slightly as a parent to say that I have never done it.  I have never said no to drugs.  

I don't have to figure out how to tell my kids to Say No when I Said Yes.  I get to tell my kids that I've never done drugs.  It feels Pollyanna to admit that, but it's true.  

Part of me, though, feels like a better story to teach my kids would be the one where someone offered me a bong hit that I refused or that when the roach got passed to me in a circle, I just kept passing it.  In a way, I feel like it would be better to tell them that I had the courage to say what Mrs. R. wanted me to say.  

But the fact is, I've never knowingly hung out with drug users.  "Knowingly" is a key word in that sentence.  My naivete tends to get revealed later.  Ten years after high school graduation, I found out that a pretty close classmate (lunch table close) dropped acid nearly every day.  Acid.  Every day.  I had no idea.  Attending Red Sox games as a kid, I always noted this strange smell in the right field bleachers at Fenway Park.  In college, a friend nudged me as we entered a dorm and said knowingly, "Smell that weed?"  I said, "That's not weed.  That's the right field bleachers at Fenway Park."  The Red Sox were bad in the '80s, and the fans had to get through somehow.  

My parents were protective, so I didn't attend a ton of high school parties.  Being a social outcast probably helped, too; I wasn't with the cool kids, who could presumably score drugs.  The kids in French Club and on my Bible quiz team didn't do drugs (again, as far as I knew).  My family were teetotalers.  Our church tradition required a commitment not to smoke or drink for membership.  The upshot was that no one ever offered to give or sell me drugs.  

I had personal reasons to be cautious if they had.  Two of my uncles spent prime years of their lives and my life estranged from the family in the throes of alcoholism.  Controlled substances flashed a danger sign.  I didn't start drinking alcohol until graduate school.  And at that, I took it up very slowly and cautiously with an informed moderation.

At this point, I can be deeply grateful about being sheltered.  I can be deeply grateful that I didn't have my after-school-special moment when I had to decide whether to yield to peer pressure.  Former drug user parents might envy my position, but still in a vacuum, I kind of envy theirs.  I can't tell my sons from direct experience about my regrets about using drugs.   What I really wish, though, is that I could tell them what it takes to marshal the courage to Say No.  When the guy with the joint is older and someone you admire.  When the girl with the little pill is really cute.  I never faced those situations.

The grass is always greener (pun noted but not rejected).  Nancy Reagan be damned; I can say a powerful thing to my kids:  

I have never used drugs.  Your mother has never used drugs.  It is possible to reach adulthood without doing drugs and then continue not doing drugs as an adult without ever Saying No.  Sticking with the nerd herd and the youth group meant I never needed to test my mettle against the temptation to fit in.  That worked out for me, and it can for you, boys.

Violence and Football and Violence

Tony Norman, columnist for One of America's Great Newspapers, offers an interesting take on the NFL's violence problem.  One paragraph in particular asks cogent questions about Adrian Peterson's parenting.

"Isn’t the use of switches, belts or straps against a child an admission that there isn’t enough of a relationship there to use moral persuasion? What is the point of beating a child to generate good behavior when it has never worked? Violence against a child is evidence of the failure of parenting."

The whole column is here: http://www.post-gazette.com/opinion/tony-norman/2014/09/16/Tony-Norman-NFL-level-violence-gets-its-start-at-home/stories/201409160049

I find I can't really get excited about football this year.

Nurtureshock Update

This article picks up on some of the research that struck me five years ago when reading Nurtureshock and has stayed with me since then.  The big addition here for me is when the author confesses about her own experience trying to implement the recommended praise regimen.

http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/

Isaac, Behave

(A parenting poem in some jest)

When we're in church and you can't sit nice
And the scripture's about child sacrifice,
I cannot cope.

You should pray when I go to punch your ticket
That the Lord provides a ram in the thicket.
 It's your only hope.

Before church, I tamed your wild hair.
We stand for hymns and kneel for prayer.
It's what we do.

Yes, you have to wear church sandals.
Yes, they're going to light the candles.
Now sit in the pew.

From HuffPo: 10 Common Mistakes Parents Today Make

A friend posted this on facebook, and I gave it a quick read.  It's a useful list that lends perspective to parenting in the current era.  It feels a little Fox Newsy to me, though.  By that, I mean that parents who make these mistakes are so blind to them that this article won't change their approach.  Parents who don't make these mistakes (or recognize them when they slip into them on rare occasions) will sit back smugly and think about all of the bad parenting they observe...done by other parents.  Of course, this blog is only frequented by savvy people, so if you read the list, get ready to get your smug on.

One note the author doesn't really hit upon: kids whose parents make these mistakes are miserable children.  They know they're not supposed to be in charge, and the weight of being in charge weighs on their smooth, little shoulders.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kari-kubiszyn-kampakis/10-common-mistakes-parents-today-make-me-included_b_4753451.html 

On Rob Lowe on Sending his Son to College

It happens this way:  A friend links to something on the web.  Then another friend and another.  Depending on how busy I am, by the third or fifth friend, I'll often click on the link.  After all, my friends are using their social media capital to tell me about this item, I might as well read it.

Last week, the item was Rob Lowe's essay about sending his son off to college.  Timed with the release of his book Love Life, the essay has been published by Slate.  It's not a super-long read, and I invite you to go read it before I share my take on it.

 

This is not a book review of Love Life, even though I used that label on this post.  I've only read the college essay they're pushing out in the publicity for the book.

•  Facts highlighted by the essay or surfaced in subsequent Rob Lowe research - some striking, some not
• Rob Lowe is ridiculously attractive and shared his genes with his son
• Rob Lowe is still married to the mother of his two children as the older one goes off to college.  Impressive for a celebrity, especially given the above fact.
• Love Life is Rob Lowe's third book! Look out, JK Rowling.
• Gut reactions to the essay
•  After being winningly honest about growing up as a child of divorce, Lowe demonstrates a need to be friends with his sons that feels not quite appropriate to the father-son relationship.  It feels a little dependent and clingy.  Maybe we all work to make up for what we saw as most glaringly missing or painful in our childhoods.  Having shuttled between his parents as a kid, it's apparently really important to Rob Lowe the Father to be very close and just one of the gang with his kids.  This is apparently backed up by an interview with Jimmy Kimmel in which he confesses to being an "inappropriate frat dad".
• A fact relevant to the above: Lowe didn't go to college.  At the age at which he would have, he left home not for a campus full of his peers but for a 3-month movie shoot with grown-up actors and crew in Tulsa.  This does put an interesting spin on his life event of sending his own son off to college.
• Being a celebrity does not inure one from being a proud papa.  He gushes so much about the incredibly competitive school his son went off to that I finally had to google what amazing institution this is.  Turns out it's Duke.  That means the president he quotes is my own beloved former professor Richard Brodhead; that was a cool upshot of my web stalking of Matthew Lowe.
• It's a touching essay and definitely better than if he were unmoved by his beloved eldest's departure for college. 

 
Watch this space for my own version of this essay in six years, three months and six days.

Getting meta: why do I blog?

From a September 2011 Atlantic article about V.S. Naipaul by Joseph O'Neill, a possible explanation for why I blog:
 

"A deep formal rationale for going to the enormous trouble of committing words to paper over time is to find respite from the intellectually and morally chaotic buffoon who goes through the world minute by minute, and bring into being that better, more coherent entity known as the author."


Yes, I'm very behind in reading my magazines.  I've just finished last September's Atlantic.  But isn't that a fascinating explanation for why people write?  And doesn't it explain why it can be disappointing to meet a favorite author in person?  We want them to be as superhuman as the artifacts they produce would suggest they are.

Sometimes I worry that my blog only covers the high, funny and interesting parts of my parenting life.  And even with those limitations, I think I end too many posts on an ambiguously positive note.  Perhaps I write in order to believe that much more strongly in my own competence as a parent?

At any rate, I want to go look up some of Joseph O'Neill's writing.