Parenting a Toddler

If you've done it, this is worth your 1:44. If not, well, you still might think it's cute.

"And What's Your Daughter's Name?"

We were at a local restaurant where my wife is a regular. I occasionally join her for lunch there. But today, our daughter Emma (now four) came along. One of the waitresses greeted my wife, exchanged pleasantries, then looked at Emma and asked, "What's your beautiful daughter's name?"

Emma replied, "I don't have a daughter yet."

What a Long, Strange Tri....

How does that family come up with these names?

Trying to Pull Rank

A "Rodney Dangerfield" parenting moment while kidding around with my (almost four-year-old) daughter....

Emma: Why do you want me to do that?

Me: Because I'm the boss of you.

Emma: You're not the boss.

Me: Okay, then who's the boss of you?

Emma: Mommy's the boss.

Sexist, Yes. But Against Whom?

A few years back I was involved with a board that addressed family law issues. One lawyer on the board, an older man, would object to any proposal that suggested the treatment of men and women as equally capable parents. His beliefs boiled down to the idea that men were naturally disposed to working outside the home and bringing home an income, and women were naturally disposed to raise children. He never objected to working mothers or daycare, but instead objected to the idea of treating men as equally interested or equally capable parents. Based upon his preconceptions, upbringing, and the role he had taken for himself as a parent, he simply knew better. Yes, he would debate people on the issue, but no, there was no room for movement in his beliefs - he would only argue to try to convince challengers that they were wrong. After a while, people stopped engaging him and we got back to getting through the agenda in a timely manner.

As with ever other human endeavor, parenting skills, interest in parenting, and aptitude for parenting fall on a continuum. Some people (men and women) are very interested in becoming parents, while others are not. Some have a great deal of interest in raising their children, and others have little. And despite their best efforts, some who are interested in raising their children lack the aptitude to do so. I'm not going to try to argue whether men and women fall on the same continuum, or if there are gender differences resulting from societal pressures and biology, first because I'm not aware of any good research into the area, and second because it's not relevant to this analysis. (If any reader coming across this knows of research, please share it as a comment.)

Some have suggested that it is "sexist" to ask of Sarah Palin, "How can you take a high pressure, all-consuming job while you are raising five children." To the extent that the same question would not be asked of a man (and let's be honest - it generally will not), there is sexism at play. But it's not only sexism against women. When a man takes a high pressure, high hours job, the assumption is that somebody else will take over the primary parenting role. That could be a spouse or a nanny. Nobody defends the man by stating, "Maybe he's a superdad who can work 60-80 hours per week yet still make the kids' lunches, attend all of their plays and sports meets, make cookies for the bake sale...." It's just assumed that he does not.

If that's your assumption about a man who works a consuming job, it's not necessarily sexist. If you've ever worked that much, or have observed somebody who does, you know that the assumption is usually correct. That parent is often out of the house before the kids are up in the morning, back home after they've gone to bed, or both. There are only so many hours in the day, and if you spend ten or twelve of them at work (plus commute time) you're not spending them at home. The sexism comes in if you don't ask the question of a man, but ask it of a woman.

One thing that has been overlooked in this "who's taking care of the kids" nonsense is that there have been a lot of women in high-powered jobs, both in the public and private sector, who have kids at home. In recent memory the whispers have not involved "How does she have time to take care of the kids and work that job," but have instead been, "Did she pay Social Security taxes for her nanny?" It's misleading to argue that there's a judgment of women in this type of situation when it is known how they take care of their kids. Sure, there are some people who view it as anything from a dereliction of your proper gender role to entirely inexcusable (unless you're Sarah Palin) for a mother to work outside of the home, but beyond that fringe reliance on a nanny is broadly accepted.

It seems apparent that for now the McCain campaign is giddy about being able to accuse anybody who asks anything about Palin of "sexism", so they're not going to tell us how the Palins divide their parenting responsibilities. They appear to love having people jump to Palin's defense with the assumption that she's a supermom, and don't want to lay out facts that might contradict the myth. But unless your assumption is that a working dad with a high pressure job is an equivalent "superdad", that assumption is also predicated upon sexist assumptions.

When a working parent, man or woman, who has tried to balance work and career, wonders, "How could she possibly do it," there's not necessarily any sexism in their wonder. People with one or two kids and forty hour per week jobs struggle with these issues. And sorry, replying "Who are you to ask," or "Why don't you assume she's a supermom", doesn't clear things up. You know what? If in fact Palin somehow manages a highly involved parent with all of her kids despite her obligations as governor, she should be writing a book of parenting tips. It could be a bestseller. And if she's relying upon her husband or a third party to pick up the slack, she would do us a favor by saying so and ending all the speculation - including the buzz the National Enquirer is trying to generate by depicting her teenage children as all-but-feral. There's nothing wrong with being human.

Are Kids Smarter Than Their Parents?

The Washington Post lectures parents that yogurt, although a potentially healthy snack for kids, can be loaded up with fat and sugar. I suspect kids know this, if from nothing else then from the marketing and packaging. When my three-and-a-half year old, who had never tried the stuff before, first saw "Danimals drinkable yogurt" on the shelf at a grocery store, her reaction was, "I want the candy milk."

Kids and Television

Today in the Post, an author describes her concerns about young children and television. After introducing the idea that it is possible to let your kids watch TV or DvD's while avoiding commercials, she states,

You probably think that these parents are doing the right thing - avoiding commercial advertising while selecting programs expressly made for children. For years, that's what I thought, too.

The avoidance of commercials is a good thing. To say "it's not the end of the story," is fine, but consistent with the rest of the editorial it should be remembered that small children have trouble distinguishing when programming ends and when a commercial begins - that's the intent of advertisers - and also that for all the talk about programming designed for specific age groups, commercials involve some very sophisticated psychological techniques directed at children within the target market, often far more sophisticated than those used by producers of "age appropriate" programming.

But a flurry of new research says we have more to learn. The problem: We're assuming that our children can make sense of what they watch, no matter how old they are. We're forgetting that huge cognitive leaps occur between the ages of 1 and 7.

Who's this "we"? Is it the "royal we"?

Researchers, it turns out, doubt that a 1-year-old can even make sense of the sequence of information on the screen, let alone pick up the wholesome messages in "Sesame Street." There's almost no evidence that children under 5 are picking up on the moral lessons in "VeggieTales," not to mention the supposedly character-building themes of many Disney movies. And the children's shows on PBS may be more educational, but that doesn't mean that they're always getting through to young children.

This extends to pretty much everything. Babies understand very little of what we say to them, yet still we talk to them. Babies and young children may very much enjoy having a story read to them, but that doesn't mean that they understand the story, let alone their "character-buiding themes" or "moral lessons". Should we also refrain from reading to children until we are sure they will be able to fully understand not just the story line, but also any moral the author intends them to draw? Should we hold off until they can also grasp all of the allegory within a story? How far do we take this? No Teletubbies or SpongeBob until the child is old enough to independently assess dubious claims that certain lead characters are gay?

You may ask, "Where's the real harm if our kids don't 'get' the shows they watch?" If adults are there to provide context, point out new things and shake their hips to the Wiggles, the worries are few. But for most families, TV becomes a babysitter. Would you knowingly hire a babysitter who, no matter how smart, mistakenly leads children astray?

So the story here is, if you're not going to pay attention to the messages your kids are receiving, even if you're pretty sure they're safe and wholesome, make sure those messages come from something other than television? What other sources of messages are acceptable, and why are they superior to television? Or is it that you should let your small children play, unsupervised, or sit quietly in an unstimulating environment, so as to save them from the potential perils of seeing a T.V. show they cannot fully understand?

I've heard lots of parental stories about late nights spent comforting children who were frightened by something they saw in a supposedly innocuous children's show, even if - or maybe because - they didn't understand what it was about.

Are we to believe that this phenomenon is unique to television? Personally, I remember finding the story of Abraham and Isaac rather disconcerting. Is this a quantity thing, based upon the assumption that kids watch lots of TV and don't get any comparable exposure to age-inappropriate material from any other source?

Video is a part of our children's lives, and I'm thankful for it. But as they grow up in a multimedia whirlwind, they'll need us to manage not only how much time they spend with TV and video but also what they watch. That means that parents, TV producers and educators alike are going to have to be aware of what our children will actually be absorbing when the screen lights up.

And that's not such a bad approach to take. But again, why limit it to television?