ILX Parenting 5: I'm a big kid now

we have some parent-acquaintances who have tried to raise their 5yo daughter without literally EVER saying the word "no" to her. I'm sure there's other reasons for her issues (parents divorced when she was 3, the dad is a 6-foot tall version of Wallace Shawn who peppers his conversation with words like "alack and alas") but I can't help but think its contributed to some of her, er, more difficult behavioral traits. Kids need boundaries set for them! imho.

I start to feel bad about it when I'm saying no rather than either engaging/playing with them or giving them suggestions of things to do. Often my kids have a hard time figuring out something to do that isn't mostly bugging the shit out of each other. But, if I just take a few minutes and get them started on something (even just shove a book in their hands and say "read this"), they are pretty good at sticking with whatever it is.

I feel I am saying it 1000 times a day. In our last place she had a playroom and nothing there was no and it's where we spent most of the day. It was pretty luxurious, big, safe. She is into climbing right now. I try to change it up a bit: not for August, stop, please don't...then there is the general screaming and wailing when I try to dress her.

I'm a fan of "pick your battles" with no. The ones I try to be consistent about are safety issues (e.g. no touching the stove/burners), outright screaming, throwing food on the floor, throwing things generally. I also think of no in the beginning as a kind of groundwork-laying -- they may not immediately get it or respond to it but eventually the message sets in.

Yeah, I do reserve the no's for safety and our last duplex had zero furniture aside from stools for a bar. Furnished homes that are not childproof.... the next place is childproof and sparsely furnished.

http://www.salon.com/2013/11/11/other_parents_suck/

How timely.

Evie is HARDCORE into ballet right now. A dance studio opened in the same building as her day care and had a special deal for kids from her day care so we signed her up. Turns out no one else signed up so she was basically getting private lessons for a few weeks. We just had her bumped up to the next level so she'll actually be with other girls. And since it's literally next door in the building, they just come pick her up from day care and take her back. They have to wear "ballet clothes" so we went to Target and bought a cheap leotard, tights, and ballet slippers and she never wants to take them off. She got mad bc we wouldn't let her wear them to school today. The "ballet" she actually does seems to be a combination of ballet positions, yoga poses, and somersaults, it's pretty cute.

It's weird thinking about how strident I was about gender neutrality and fighting gender norms before she was born and how girly she is now - she only likes pink, she likes princesses and fairies, etc. Her day care is pretty old-school about what girls like and what boys like so that's where a lot of it comes from (plus the other kids). Sometimes I'm a little sad about it but also I feel like I have to let her be her own person. And if she says something is just for girls or just for boys I will still contradict her, so hopefully that's sinking in. And we were playing pirate ghosts yesterday.

She's been unusually gassy lately and playing ghosts involves being under a blanket with her so it was a genuinely frightening game of pirate ghosts.

Tell her gassy is not girly.

It's the fart game. You'll play one day, son.

Took personal leave from work today. Wife gets a frantic call from her friend, whose baby-sitter was unable to watch her 7 month old. I'm pretty unhappy about the situation, but I know the friend is going through some hard times, financially and everything and is basically just juggling the baby among whomever she can.

However, there's a weird thing where the father is coming by at noon to pick the baby up for a doctor's appointment, then bringing him back in an hour so he can go back to work. So it's a weird, complicated situation, but whatever. We all gotta stick up for each other in these economic times.

Dad stops by, gets the kid, brings him back. By the way, this wasn't just a 7 month well-visit or anything. Oh, we didn't tell you that he had complications from his circumcision and he had to go have his penis re-sliced while you were taking a lunch break? Well, the doctor put some medicine on to numb it. Gotta get back to work! See ya!

Kid cried for an hour and a half. Eventually, we got so pissed off that we called the dad back out of work. Sorry guy, this really wasn't part of the bargain.

damn that is ridiculous!

Her day care is pretty old-school about what girls like and what boys like so that's where a lot of it comes from (plus the other kids).

its interesting how/when gender roles get asserted in child development. which is not to say there is not a degree of fluidity, but around the age of 4-5 kids have essentially "picked" a gender, and will start to express opinions in gender-differentiated terms (ie "I am a girl, ergo I do not ____"). However, what constitutes being a girl/being a boy is highly environmentally dependent and contextual.

xp

they circumcised him at 7 months?!?

his penis was fighting back!

anyhoo, re: the gender stuff, yeah, my 4-year-old is deeply into very girl things at the moment -- pink, princesses, ballerinas etc. but her best friend is a boy, she just finished a very fun soccer season... i don't know, i guess i hope it balances out a bit.

tylerw basically has it right. He was circumcized at birth, but it reattached or something. : ( Totally bummer for the kid, but parents! If your kid is even having minor, outpatient surgery....

years ago i used to work in an out of school club, with kids aged 4 to 11. we had a box of "dressing up" clothes - really just cast-off stuff that i can't remember where it came from. some of the boys went thru a phase of putting on these oversized bridesmaid dresses and sliding on their knees up and down the hall in them.

i got some delighted looks from fathers who came to pick up their sons only to find them swishing around the place in tatty gowns.

this being SF my daughter's already dealt with transgendered classmates and families with two mommies (but not two dads! I dunno why that is) so she's been exposed to a pretty wide spectrum but yeah its hard to tell what's going on in her head as far as gender sometimes. she loves totally girly shit - princesses, fairies, for the longest time refused to even draw a picture of a boy/man (because she only draws GIRLS) - but on the other hand she is pretty rough and tumble and loves comics/superheroes (the latter being totally my fault) so she's plenty interested in traditional "boy" stuff too. There's a range, every child is a snowflake etc.

i don't think it's ever/will ever be possible to separate out what kids are picking up gender role-wise from their environment, despite what ev psych peeps want to claim.

nv I love that image of little boys in giant bridesmaid dresses, lol

i think the point i was after was this was a kind of genderless play based on the utility of the things and maybe a bit of a sense that they knew they were being daft but the big gendery elephant only appeared in the room when Dad knocked on the door

There is almost too much going on these days. Happened over night, 18 months..BOOM!

i used to think gender likes and dislikes were put on by parents/society but jesus christ try to keep a 2 year old boy away from a train set. impossible. Henry loves anything that GOES which i now tend to think is an inherent boy thing because trains etc were never deliberately introduced to him. they say girls innately need one on one contact while boys are about moving and things that move. nurturer vs hunter/gatherer? I don't know. theres still a good percent of neanderthal in all of us and im not willing to dismiss evolution just yet.

tbf i should also note that henry will often disappear into his sister's room only for us to later find him in his own room dressed in the pink faux-satin splendor that is beeps' sleeping beauty costume whilst awkwardly balancing a bridal veil on his head that inevitably falls off every minute or so because he dons this regal attire for the express purpose of smashing the living shit out of a couple of hot wheels cars possibly manned by a pair of highly accident prone, imaginary race car drivers, stunt men or the dukes of hazzard if there were two general lees.

lol yeah this is confusing

i'm not saying there's no evolutionary stuff in there either, i think it's obviously a mix of imperatives, but we don't have any kids raised totally outside of any society to use as a control group. who knows what cues those inscrutable little brains are picking up when we don't notice?

if she says something is just for girls or just for boys I will still contradict her

These are some of my proudest moments tbh, because it's not coming from here (at least not expressly) so there's some kind of higher-level information-processing going on. Would be far more concerned if he got much further not noticing who wore shirts and who wore dresses, or that boys/girls wasn't a handy & useful way to understand the world.

Also iirc life up to about sixteen becomes to a greater or lesser extent about fitting in with one's peers. I'm kind of troubled by to what extent any parent should be trying to restrict that. Not sure how much of a parental role there is on that front beyond instilling basic right & wrong, and otherwise trying to make sure he/she has the confidence to do their own thing when instinct tells them to. Selecting what the peer group is, in broad terms, seems like about as far as you can go.

partial, blurry proof <3

http://img856.imageshack.us/img856/1733/ys6r.jpg

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=parents-peers-children

not saying she's absolutely correct but she's interesting, persuasive and i dig her work

xp sweeeeet

Henry's eyes look like how mine feel right now

wish i had a dummy come to think of it

ditto

oh i love him<3

xps That's really interesting nv - in fact I'm pretty sure I've come across her before (not to the extent of reading her work) and have somehow incorporated those basic ideas. In which case the crucial thing seems to be to ensure a high-achieving peer group.

Idk though, we're getting round to looking at education and if we used all our resources we could probably guarantee such a group. But we certainly couldn't afford skiing trips or ponies or whatever else those cats get up to, so it'd be condemning them to something of a school life/home life dichotomy. Then again that's pretty normal, no? I certainly had one to some extent thanks to a catholic education system, would material disadvantage necessarily be a worse basis for it? Also both of us had mundane school lives that routinely produced achieving kids anyway, and it seems a good thing to know all sorts. Otoh I'm pretty sure the really high-achievers I know didn't go by that route.

Does it even matter? Are all these good intentions just a way to bring out the inner terrible person?

i think in terms of "good enough" peer groups and parents - there's evidence that below a certain level you can be pretty damaged by both, but in most normal circumstances they won't drastically affect your life outcomes compared to other factors - wealth, educational opportunity etc

obviously i'm a comedy Maoist so non-state education was never gonna be an option for my children. having said that, i live in a city with some badly struggling schools and was lucky enough to get my children into two very good ones. i don't know what lengths i'd've gone to if i was faced with sending them to one of the really troubled ones. it's that "good enough" line again.

since i don't have a ton of faith in the UK's education system i'd say "will my kids be given encouragement and support to achieve the best they can?" but also look at the socialization aspects of school - some places obviously confer social advantages down the line but do you want your kids to have those kinds of social advantages at the expense of learning to get along with their peers? personally i don't - i don't think our school system is meant to produce really high-achievers but i think high achievement is relative and self-directed for the most part. on the other hand i tend to think of myself as an autodidact beyond a certain point even tho i think i had v decent primary and secondary education in the state system

rambling. shit is complex. tend to err on the side of "being a good person is better than running with the elitists" but shit is complex.

I suppose I believe in integrated universal education as much I believe in anything, probably, but that world doesn't exist and in any event my belief would go out the window in the face of personal disadvantage. But then if I'm not trying to nudge every indicator to my (kids') advantage, what am I for? Plus it's not easy to know what the right nudges are, there are plenty of competing priorities in terms of nice house, quality time, self-education, etc.

As for social advantage vs getting along with everyone, idk if that isn't a false dichotomy. I spend a fair bit of my work life being intimidated by public school qualities, but I don't feel I'm getting some kind of edge among the lower orders in return. The principle's nice, but is it worth anything?

Plus there's the effect on happiness, which I couldn't even begin to guess at. Actually I suppose the nearest I get is that life should be some sort of achievable challenge, in which case starting-point maybe doesn't matter.

like i say, my thoughts are far from coherent and rational here - my aversions are some of my deepest-rooted prejudices, buried way beneath pure rationality. and i have a really complicated relationship to class and other social entanglements that i ought to pick apart elsewhere if i was gonna discuss it.

i think you're onto something with the balance of the different investments you make in your children tho. my understanding is that the quality of education is certainly not determined by a state vs private dichotomy. one of the few demonstrably beneficial things that private education tends to offer is smaller class sizes. the other stuff i know nothing about. i wouldn't place trust in any educational establishment to radically form the people my kids are going to grow into, and that affects my estimation of the value of a "good" school, i know.

when you mention achievable challenges i remember a recent piece of research suggesting that kids who are moderately successful within their year group tend to do better at transition than kids that are high fliers in a small pond when they move into a bigger one. so much guesswork, especially re: happiness, or fulfilment, or however we think about a life worth living.

Oof yeah, that last bit - took me years, repeatedly, to get used to not being special any more. And even then I suspect I go out of my way to create space or psychic situations where I am the big fish again. Can take quite unattractive forms, like pancynicism or moral superiority, but fortunately I eventually twigged that those were facets to avoid.

As for the rest we're probably not miles apart - buggered if I'm transmitting those prejudices onwards if I can help it. Not least because they'll be old-fashioned pretty soon, if they aren't already. Though there's a kind of outward confidence you acquire on tap from a paid education I'm sure - not that life everywhere isn't full of blowhards, but with it it can become nigh-impossible to tell the difference between cleverness and stupidity.

My kid reports that the fifth graders on his bus are teasing him for wearing jeans: "they're so last year." What's in? Shorts.

kids are idiots tbf

i mean i like shorts but kids are such pissy little fashion sheeples, their opinions mostly suck

Yeah. He says that a lot of them just stand there shivering.

lol that's ridiculous

Shorts?! My teenage cousin wore some long sleeved skiing shirt under his tees, in the Texas heat, because all the kids in his grade were into cold weather fashions.

lol

it's funny when you get to be an adult and it's like "WTF, how did I sweat this stuff so much back then?"

I think that a lot!!!

Because I sweated the hell out of everything. I hope I don't pass that tendency to this kid.

I never did, so I think we're cool.

yr babby is gonna be chill & rad

most of my dad advice to my kids is "this doesn't matter"