SquareParents.com - Cool Stuff For Cool Parents

With Friends Like These

Written by The Square Parent Wednesday, 04 February 2009 00:00

It's much easier to pick out and examine someone else's foibles than it is to examine your own.  Nowhere is this more true than watching your friends and their kids.  Everyone does it to some degree or another, some more and others less.  And you wonder how your friends turned out to be parents like that.  This is a sentiment that can skew positively or negatively (often both), but it's always there.

Many if not most of your friends have kids too by this point.  And as you compare notes, you will also secretly keep notes about where you think they're making errors (however small), and what you think is truly admirable about them.  Looking at your friends with their kids should really give some perspective as to the broad and universal nature of the business of raising small humans, but more often it has the opposite effect.

People are different, they keep their houses in different states of chaos, feed their kids different food, send their kids to different schools, sign the kids up for different activities, and pass along different neuroses.  None of this is anything out of the ordinary.  

Being outside of your normal zone of familiarity and peering into someone else's can clarify as to why you do some of the things that you do, and they don't.  It's why you're friends in the first place, only now there's a thick additional layer of difference there.  As the family expands, so too do they, but in ways that you never really would have anticipated.  Sometimes you'll wonder how in the world that little Spawn of Satan came from these people you call friends.

The same is true when they're looking at you and how you've arranged this set of circumstances.  Keep this in mind, and be aware of it when conducting one of those secret critiques, so as not to be too full of yourself.  It's not as though if you have everything figured out; if you think you do, then it's a well-deserved misfortune.   

It's much easier to pick out and examine someone else's foibles than it is to examine your own. 

Do It For The Germs

Written by The Square Parent Thursday, 29 January 2009 00:00

Kids - at daycare, the playground, in the lair of the rodent, at the pediatric dentist's office, wherever - are Cadillacs for microbes.  Germs pimp the ride with the kids and travel in style on the best gravy train ever.  The common rhinovirus never met a kid it didn't like. 

Daycare is the Tahiti of the common cold virus: a room full of little kids running around, sharing lunch, tackling each other, dropping things on the floor or ground then putting those things into their mouths (ewwww), offering the finest of accommodations to these microbes, a veritable Carnival Cruise of incubation.  

(It's a wonder that that these working conditions for the daycare providers aren't covered by some OSHA regulation or another, these are class one biohazards that they must contend with on a daily basis.)

And to be sure, the microbes are extremely valuable. 

Just like language, writing, and socialization, kids have the genetic capacity for immunity which must be learned.  And the best way to learn is through practice and experience.  Hence, the more exposure to the common viruses at  a young age, the more robust the immune system later in life. 

Send the kid to daycare if only for the germs, and endure the ensuing colds happily.  In fact, cheer the viruses on, exhort them to bring their A game, taunt them, issue brazen challenges, throw a gauntlet or two.  What exposure to common viruses does is strenghtens little immune systems. 

The actual problem with all of this, it seems, is cleanliness.  You'd be hard-pressed to find a pediatrician who suggests feeding raw salmonella cultures to the kids, but there is such a thing as too clean.  To boot, the wiping or otherwise installing a barrier on of the shopping cart handles; the constant application of Purell; a bath each night; intentionally keeping the kid away from other sick kids; and so forth.

"Oh, no!  Little Nalbert will get sick if he touches the shopping cart handle!  Who knows what germs some stranger has left behind!?!?  Sweetums could catch an ebola strain... or bubonic plague... or scurvy!"

Jeez.

It should be seen as an excellent idea to expose your kid to other sick kids, yes, even if it means that your kid may get sick.  He or she may not.  But the more exposure, the less the chance that they'll get sick in the future, and when they do, they'll recover from it much more quickly. 

There is a universe of rhinovirus out there.  Get used to it, and embrace this universe.

OK, so the kid gets sick, and they're miserable for a couple of days, and in turn make for a big unhappy hassle.  But this is exactly what you've signed up for, and is a rite of parenthood.  Besides, it'll provide a sense of self-righteous moral superiority in the coming years that you may find to be extremely useful.

Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer.

Bedtime Stories

Written by The Square Parent Wednesday, 21 January 2009 00:00

Newsflash from the UK:  Many UK parents have given up reading Grimm's Fairy Tales because they're either distressing to the kids, not PC enough, or any one of a number of reasons that someone had enough time to ponder and object to.  The article cites the parents as determining that the stories don't carry "the right message," and that "caring parents feel that the bedtime stories could emotionally damage kids." 

How's this for emotionally damaging to kids: witnessing a parent afraid to read a bedtime story because of the content.    

From there, questions abound:

• Is it only uncaring parents that read the Grimm's Fairy Tales to their kids? 
• What exactly is the "right message" that should be delivered by books? 
• What will become of the children is they don't read bedtime stories that contain "the right message?"
• Does "the right message" necessarily involve rainbows and unicorns? 
• Would "the right messages" then be demeaning in any way to unicorns, which, as everyone knows, are now extinct (as if extinction wasn't demeaning enough)?   
• And the rainbow -  at the end of the rainbow there's not only typically a pot of gold, but also a leprechaun - and a drunk, cranky, often violent leprechaun at that.
• And so forth.  

This is too bad - for the parents.   

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm didn't actually write the stories, but rather collected them from folklore, and like most folklore they're incredibly rich, textured, nuanced, and tend to absolutely grab and then tenaciously hold one's imagination.  Set in worlds with familiar and ordinary objects and easily understood situations, they're reconfigured into a convoluted dream world, which is a dead giveaway of more or less standard mythology.

Mostly everyone reading this has heard of Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, et al., and "happily ever after" is so well ensconced in modern lexicon that people three generations from now will understand what this means. 

For generations, kids have been raised on these stories which, like all myths, represent the accumulated wisdom and experience of the ages, in allegorical form.  

Ah, yes... allegorical.... right.  Blank stare. 

So parents, and contemporary folk generally, appear to have lost the notions of allegory and symbolism and myth, instead choosing to read these stories through the lens of modern, or worse, post-modern literal sensibilities. 

Sure, there's bad stuff that happens, and often gruesomely bad stuff at that, which serves to reinforce how bad 'bad' can be.  But then there's usually (but not always) the "happily ever after" part that drives the whole dynamic. 

If theses stories are so horrible and contain the wrong messages, how have they survived the last several centuries largely intact?  

The easy and literal answer is that these stories come from another, darker age, and we're far too enlightened now to be concerned with such crude, violent, misogynistic, whatever, text.  Let all such dark notions be banished by the bright sunlight of a cloudless day with unicorns leaping over the occasional rainbow and so forth and so on.

Perhaps the real objection and reason for avoidance is that the stories are even darker for the parents than they are for the kids because of a common theme that occurs throughout these tales: that the actions of parents have consequences for the children. 

The difference between now and generations past is that now it's apparently OK to hide behind the kids from fears and anxieties, in this case under the pretense of the kids being disturbed by a story.   

If the story is deemed so disturbing, perhaps one should ask who is protecting who from what?

Read what Jake and Will took the time and effort to write down.  They're some of the best stories (children's or otherwise) available anywhere. 

And who doesn't like a good story?

Terrible Thirties

Written by The Square Parent Wednesday, 14 January 2009 00:00

There's a lot made of the so-called terrible twos.  The so-called terrible twos is actually a misnomer, and has probably stuck because of the nice alliterative device.  The truth is, they're much worse at three, and for a variety of reasons.  They've begun to lie, have their own ideas about how the world should work according to them, possess a shockingly literal form of reasoning that evolves at light speed on a daily basis, and are able to flawlessly imitate things and behaviors that they see.  Add a limitless imagination and nano attention span, and all the ingredients are there for some real difficulties.

Curiously, this isn't a whole lot different from the parents, who also often have their own ideas about how the world should work according to them, possess a shockingly literal form of reasoning, and are able to flawlessly imitate things and behaviors that they see.  Add a limited imagination and divided attention span, and all the ingredients are there for some real difficulties.

How are the parent's tantrums really that different from those of toddler, apart from the intensity?  They may appear to be over different things, but in reality, not really, they both operate along the same lines.  Frustrated because you cannot find something or are unable to perform this or that task?  Can't get what you want (and obviously deserve)?  Is there something that you don't want to do?  Is there something that someone else will not, or hasn't done for you (and obviously they should have)? 

As a species, we're compelled to perpetuate our genes, essentially to create at least one Mini-Me.  Taking into account the role that genetics often plays in one's personality and the really really good job kids do of learning behavior through observation, and you've literally become minor deity, having created another in your own image.  It's like what would happen if you met yourself in a dream, except there's a lot more detail, and you're constantly behind the learning curve, while Mini-Me is constantly ahead of the curve.  The result is a hundred little train wrecks each day.   

Toddler's issues are with Cheerios, TV remotes, wiffle balls, pens, sofa cushions, purple dinosaurs, DVD boxes, pieces of colored plastic, window sills, and snacks.  Adult's concerns are with the spilled Cheerios, what's on TV, sports teams, finding a pen to sign one check or another, putting the sofa cushions back, purple dinosaur-induced insanity, abusing DVD technology, buying one's own pieces of colored plastic, replacing the windows, and avoiding snacks. 

All in all, there's a lot of remarkable similarity there, which is a rich irony: maybe you're fighting with yourself. 

Binge and Purge

Written by The Square Parent Tuesday, 13 January 2009 00:00

The holiday excitement's over, and it's back to the usual grind, slipping gradually back into regular schedules and doing normal things and back to the same hassles.  In the weeks following the holidays, though, there are some added wrinkles, namely all of the new stuff that's accumulated as a result of the holidays.  There's just more stuff, and there always is. 

Now is the time to take drastic action.  Just do it.  Purge the old toys, and perhaps even some new ones.  This is not easy for a variety of reasons, including concern about over-reactions, nostalgia, and general guilt about taking stuff away, filling a landfill with non-degradable material, general wastefulness, or any one of an number of other reasons. 

And many of the reasons may well be very good ones.  But now is the time to be ruthless, and zealously so.  Go farther than you thought you could go, and then go even farther with a radical re-assesment of how toys and stuff generally is stored.  Having stuff scattered everywhere in every corner of the house should be unacceptable, and require some draconian action such as declaring and then consistently enforcing parts of the house, kid-stuff-free zones with no exceptions.

To begin with, there are plenty of charities, Goodwill the most obvious and high profile, who will take the old toys and clothes.  There is no shortage of kids who would love to have new toys, second hand or not; they won't know the difference, to them it's simply a toy.  You also get a tax deduction, and gain a little perspective when you see the piles and piles of stuff at the drop-off points.  Above all, do not under any circumstances procure any new stuff "while you're there."  The idea is to purge.  There was already so much stuff that you had to get rid of it, not make a trade for more.   

And what of the landfills?  Donated or not, the hard truth is that toys and random stuff will all end up in some landfill eventually.  If this thought is discouraging, think of it not as contributing to pollution, but rather contributing to several job creation packages, a) so current landfill and waste disposal employees remain gainfully employed and b) creating opportunities for future archaeologists, who will stay productive explaining the religious significance of broken tinker toys.

It's actually easy to purge toys.  If the kid is bebe age, then they will miss very little.  Simply take all of the stuff that was buried in whatever box and get rid of it.  Likely bebe hasn't even seen it in months, and will have long forgotten whatever item it is. 

Toddler stuff requires a bit more discretion, but the same principles apply.  If there's any guilt about doing it in secret, that one day the kid notices that something is missing and asks where it is with eyes of droop and expression of disappointment, then don't go that route, do it in the open.  Once 300 pieces of this and that are scattered around, there's no way that a toddler can keep track of all of it simultaneously. Besides, they'll be too busy playing with one thing or another to notice.  If toddler gets too huffy about what's disappearing, tell him or her not to be greedy, and that the toys are being shared with some other little boy or girl.

If kid has an excess of stuff that was pleaded for and then won too many times during too many trips to Target, then the issue is much larger than simply having too much stuff around the house. 

Purging stuff is a part of modern life.  The kid will have forgotten about what's gone more quickly than you think, and if there somehow is a toy vacuum, it will be filled soon enough.   The point is, although it's the kid's house too, the entire house is not their own personal romper room, and since grown-ups live their own lives there too, it shouldn't be.