Kid Amnesiac

Spring has sprung here in Louisville. A week or so ago, I had hosta tips and unfurled fern fronds in my front yard, and I knew my shade garden was about to wake up and take on its summer form. Then we got sleet on Wednesday, I watched and worried as the tree workers’ hands grew stiff from the cold, and it seemed as though true spring—the spring that lets you leave the house without a coat—would never arrive.

And then suddenly, over the course of a single day, it did. I awoke Friday to unfurled ferns, new leaves on late-leafing trees, temperatures in the eighties, and blue sunny skies. It’s been warm enough to wear shorts, warm enough to sleep under nothing but a sheet, and sunny enough to require sunscreen and a hat.

All of which is new to Simon. Or, I should say, all of which Simon thinks is new to him. Friday morning, as I dressed him in shorts and a tee, he looked down, realized that his pants legs did not reach his shoes, and cried. Literally. He yanked at his shorts legs, willing them to be longer, and plaintively explained that “pants broken.”

That first warm night, as we put him down to bed, he realized that we had not put him in his sleep sack, and he was upset about that change in routine, too. We compromised by putting him down under the Aunt Marcia blanket, in hopes that he’d be comforted by its familiarity but manage to kick it off during the night.

And, of course, when you combine shorts and running, the inevitable result is a skinned knee. Or, in Simon’s case, two skinned knees. And when you combine Simon and sunscreen, you get a lot of slapping away of hands, ducking, squirming, and fussing.

None of which is to say that we are ready for more winter! We’re not. The tragedy of the broken pants lasted only one day, the sleep sack is no longer being mourned, the knees will heal, and we’ll work on getting the sunscreen and sunglasses down soon. I might even manage to buy Simon a few more pairs of summer PJs, as I was embarrassed to have been caught this week with only one pair, purchased by Evie at a yard sale last summer.

For all of the undesirable change in routine, Simon is discovering that warm weather means we can get out of the house fast, and we can do it often. After three weeks of somewhat tolerable weather and one week of glorious weather, Simon now can tell us about the dog park, the creek park, the river park, and the park with the big tunnel. (That would be the former dog hill, Big Rock, Waterfront Park, and Hogan’s Fountain to you fellow Louisvillians.) We also go to Willow Park, and once his fixation with standing under a tagged bridge fades, we’ll resume our trips to Tyler Park.

Warm weather also means playing ball outside, getting in his sand-box, running in and out of his play house, and running around the block at Bubbie’s. It means pretty flowers (his words, by the way), new white socks to wear with his sneakers (“pretty white socks” he told me), and lots of dogs and babies to meet.

Soon he will learn about summer things, things like playing in the pool, eating ice cream, and going to “camp.”  I might even fix up my old bike and put a carrier on the back. Turns out, having a little boy in the house has made me absolutely mad for spring, and the question, “What do you want to do today?” once asked by Matt or I of each other in boredom, now is issued as an invitation to pleasure.

Oh boy. I’ve been hitting the books again, this time Positive Discipline, and the experience is forcing me to give a serious re-think to much of my day-to-day parenting. Most of the books I’ve read to date have given me solid advice about a range of practical matters (What to Expect the Toddler Years), have given advice I could take or leave with no strong feelings (The Sears books), have enlightened and reassured me (Touchpoints) about childhood behavior, or have elaborated and given voice to inclinations I already had (The Blessing of the Skinned Knee).

This one, though, is making me question some of my ideas and approaches, and I wasn’t expecting that at all when I got it. I was looking for a book that would detail Simon’s developing cognitive abilities, describe developmentally appropriate behavior, and offer ideas about how to correct or at least respond to undesirable behavior. My goal, in perfect harmony with the book’s title, is to employ as much positive discipline—as opposed to punishment—as possible.

When I first began reading the book, it was easy to feel smug. The book set up something of  straw parent-a person so ill informed about parenting and children’s nature that he would spank a two-year-old for saying he did something “yesterday” when he really did it a week ago under the logic that lying must be punished. “Idiot!” I cried from my armchair. “A two-year-old doesn’t understand ‘yesterday’ versus ‘last week’.”  I’m not afraid to get judgmental, and in gentler language, the authors backed me up.

A chapter later, though, my comeuppance arrived when the book stated that it is disrespectful of a child Simon’s age to carry him instead of having him walk. Before you suggest that is the dumbest thing you ever heard, let me explain that I’ve yanked the line out of context. The larger point, and a timely one, is that children Simon’s age are working hard to develop autonomy. Or, more to the point, children Simon’s age need to be working hard at becoming more autonomous as part of their psychological and physical development.

Therefore, it is imperative that parents start helping their children learn to do things for themselves when they are toddlers. A child not much older than Simon, they elaborate, can learn to pour his own bowl of cereal if you adapt your kitchen for him. He can put on his pajamas if you show him how. And in learning to do these things, that child builds a sense of capability and confidence that carries into adulthood.

What’s more, parents should also be mindful to encourage their child (“Look Simon, you’ve climbed twn steps. One more to go! Hold tight to that banister—you can do it!”) as opposed to offering empty praise (“Great job, Simon!”). You don’t want to create a praise junkie who always looks outside for validation.

After reading those three short paragraphs, paraphrased here, I shed my smug skin. The advice about encouragement versus praise gave me food for thought. It should be simple enough to adjust (some) of my language to be more context specific. And anyway, I’m not giving up my “great jobs!” entirely whatever they suggest.

But that first bit hit home. Whenever I see a parent push their child in way I have not as yet, I always wonder what the rush is? “Children are little for so long,” I think to myself, “why not relish it as long as you can?” I love taking care of Simon, and that means I also genuinely enjoy dressing him, carrying him, cutting his sandwiches into tiny squares, getting things for him, and generally attending to him; the only thing I don’t enjoy is putting him in his car seat. It has never once occurred to me that I do too much for him and should hold back.

Before now that is. But I can see the author’s point, and I have no desire to raise a child who is helpless and entitled. Nor do I want to disrespect Simon by infantilizing him. Some of my indulgence, no doubt, stems from genuine ignorance on my part that Simon is (or should be) capable of doing some of these things for himself. But if I dig a bit deeper, another cause is my own reluctance to let go of things I enjoy so much.

I don’t think I’ve done any damage to this point. “Most” kids Simon’s age can no doubt do things for themselves that Simon cannot. But most kids also walk before they are twenty months old. Simon’s gross motor skills are vastly improved from a year ago, but they are still developing slowly, and he is not physically adventurous. Still, I will be mindful that if I am not careful, my own reluctance to part with the remnants of his babyhood could impinge upon Simon’s development. I don’t’ want to smother his budding independence.

As happens so often in these matters, Simon himself is helping me adjust my approach. He’s resisting being carried unless exhausted, he is running farther and farther away from us at parks before looking back for us, he wants to help around the house, and he increasingly plays without direction. He’s working hard, in other words, to become his own person. My job, as I understand it, is to help him-or at least to get out of his way and let him help himself. It’s a paradigm shift for sure, but so far each stage of Simon’s development has brought us increased pleasure. So I’m hoping that if I focus on the activities Simon and I can share once he’s more independent, I’ll find the letting go a little easier.

The Dignified Master Whitworth

Matt and I are generally opposed to toddlers running around in diapers. Yet somehow, a few days ago, we needed to take a breather between wrestling Simon into a new diaper and wrestling him into his pants. During that time, he decided to try on my gardening hat, which got hilariously close to fitting him (I’m a seven and a quarter, just like the Lyle Lovett song), and also helped himself to a brownie from the kitchen counter.

The resulting image says little about our parenting skills, but it’s just too funny to keep hidden away.

Well, here’s another post bound to fail to capture the moment. I’m going to give it a try anyway.

It was around 8:30 or so last night, and Matt, Simon, and I were all on the bed. Simon should have been tucked into bed by this point, but we tend to run late on Thursdays because we have dinner and spend the early evening at Jim and Evie’s.

At any rate, we were quite literally wrestling Simon into his pajamas (a favorite game of his we have not figured out how to redirect), when he let out a colossal…um…as my Bubbie would say, “you should forgive me a thousand times, [barely audible voice] gas.”

Which is to say, he farted. I am not delicate the way my Bubbie was, and Matt and I are both in for it later because we laugh about and in response to Simon’s farts. We make poop jokes, too, so he’s ready for middle school! Anyway, this one had a certain character that led us to believe we should double-check to make sure Simon didn’t require a final diaper change.

We discussed this possibility openly, checked him, and then moved on to the more appropriate topic of bedtime stories, when Simon began to sing. At first we thought he was talking in a sing-song voice, but after a bit we realized he was replicating the tune “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” perfectly. Only he changed-up the lyrics:

Poop-poop, poop-poop, poop-poop, poop

Poop poop poop poop poop poop,  poop….

He may have ended with a thrown in “poo-poo McGroo,” but I couldn’t say for sure because Matt and I were both clutching our sides and wiping away tears by this point. Silly and rude as it may be, it’s moments like this that infuse the entire house with laughter and happiness.

For anyone who has chosen to not have children, you may perhaps already know that the statistics back up your choice. For the fact is that when given questionnaires about life-long happiness, childless couples consistently report greater measures of happiness than ones with children. The one caveat here is that the couples need to have chosen to be childless; those who want children but are unable to have them feel differently than those who actively make a choice.

You could easily speculate why this is. Childless couples have more time to spend on each other, have more time to pursue joint or individual hobbies, are able to travel more, enjoy flexibility regarding their schedules, and have fewer financial constraints than couples with children. They also have one less (fewer?) subject for marital arguments and at least one less (fewer?) person to argue with.

Several recent studies have taken on this question, attempting to adjust for things like state of unions before children came along and whether the pregnancies in various families were agreed upon and planned. It’s only logical that couples who agreed about having children and carefully planned them would report greater happiness than those who did not agree and/or who did not plan them.

So far, the best the researchers have shown is that these best-case scenarios only even the playing field between couples with children and those without them.

These studies beg two questions:

• 1. Why does everyone say their kids are their greatest joy if they are not?
• 2. Who do so many of us have children if they cause such unhappiness?

And again, it’s easy to speculate. We remember moments of transcendent joy and forget the daily niggling irritations. We are wired to reproduce and delude ourselves about how much we enjoy it. Those that want children are more likely to pass on this personality trait than those who do not. We are pressured into having children by societal expectations.  We are pressured to say we like being parents by the same. And, of course, many of us don’t plan our children, and some of us are honest about being miserable after they arrive.

Recently, this topic hit Lisa Belkin’s Motherlode blog in the NYT, and as when she blogged about talking to your children about death, I clicked into the comments field to see what the village was saying. This time, unlike with the post about death, the responses were not overly reassuring:

• One half reported not feeling happier per se as parents, but feeling like their lives were richer for the experience. Many of these said that happiness is over-rated, and that fulfillment is the more important quality.
• One quarter admitted to being less happy as parents, a significant percentage of which claimed that parenthood had led them to divorce or to the brink thereof.
• One quarter of posters, mostly parentless, claimed that children are miserable, life-force-sucking creatures, and that any of us who claim otherwise are deluding ourselves.

My internal responses fell out more or less like this, following the order established above:

• Hm. Yes, fulfillment is good and my life is also richer, but are you dodging the question?
• I pity you and your kids. Seriously-no judging here, just genuine sympathy for a difficult, no-win situation for all parties.
• I’m glad you can’t pass on your obnoxious genes, you smug little ass.

What I did not see much of, and what my experience has been to date, is those reporting a genuine uptick in happiness. I don’t just feel richer or more fulfilled for having Simon, I also feel measurably happier. And not in some deluded, “I am miserable all day but have transcendent moments of joy once a month” way, but in a totally unmistakable “I miss very little of my pre-child days, I smile more now, I laugh more now, I feel happier engaging the word and those around me” way.

One way I absolutely know this to be true and not delusion is that a good friend of mine visited recently and told me as much. She was catching me up on a mutual friend who had inquired about me when she offered that I seemed very happy in my post-baby stage—and unusually calm (for me, I should qualify), too. This is someone who has seen a fair share of  Jessica freak-outs over the years; there’s no fooling her about my internal state.

She’s right. I’ve had my parenting-related anxieties, and I’ve laid them out here for all to see. But when I compare them to my pre-child feelings, the shift is monumental. I haven’t been this happy since my junior year of college, my first year or so in San Francisco, or my early childhood. Perhaps that will change as Simon grows up and gives me more cause for worry. I expect it will. But for now, I’d like to ask the wanker who chalks up all self-reported parental happiness to cognitive dissonance who is he or she to say whether someone else is happy?

There are lots of things that make others happy that I am unfamiliar with or do not enjoy myself: Things like Nascar races, marathon running, stamp-collecting, playing card games, and eating donuts come immediately to mind. I take no known pleasure in any of that. But I would never be so arrogant as to say that those who DO enjoy a long run or a good donut are deluded.

I know when I’m happy and when I’m not, and right now I’m very happy. What I don’t know is how long this happy (pun intended) circumstance will last.