Parenting Archives : Suki Wessling, writer

On raising a “tryer”

Posted on November 6, 2021November 8, 2021 by Suki

One of the major issues that parents struggle with is food. Why, living in a time and place of plenty, is food such a struggle?

Food choices often relate to family harmony, neurodiversity, gender, relationships with grandparents, health…

In other words, food is related to everything in a way that few other aspects of human lives are. That’s why I wrote the book Food for Humans: The history, science, and culture of what we eat. I wrote the text for my course at Athena’s, Yum! (I am currently seeking a publisher for the book but students who enroll get to read it in class.) The study of food is fascinating! It relates to culture, history, science, nutrition, ethics, and tradition.

I really love teaching this class because it’s one of the times I see “aha moments” just popping and sparking from my students. So often, even if they love to eat, they’ve never even thought about food. They have no idea what the difference is between fat and oil, why British people eat from forks but Thai people eat from spoons, or where potatoes are from. Many of my students have eating issues: allergies or sensitivities, aversions, unhealthy obsessive eating. As they learn more about food, they learn more about themselves.

But long before I started writing about food, I was a dedicated foodie pregnant with my first child…

Trying to be the Perfect Mom from a hospital bed

My first attempt at forestalling pickiness was when I had just given birth. I had read that sometimes American kids reject breast milk after the mom has had a particularly flavorful meal. My husband’s response? Get me Thai takeout while my milk was coming in! When our first child was a baby we’d grind up whatever we were eating and feed it to him—regardless of how spicy or unusual. [Read about how we came to this approach.]

Our older child had a few dislikes, but that was OK in our house. (We parents have a few of our own.) Mostly, he came to love good food, and being a freshman at UC was a torturous experience for him.

And then along comes that picky eater.

Like many neurodivergent children, our younger child’s eating habits were…rather unusual. That’s when we as a family had to get out the big guns. We were tryers! We went to every grocery or restaurant offering unusual cuisine that we could find.

Did it work? Well… yes and no. He definitely developed a wider palate than most picky eaters. Since most parents, faced with a picky eater, don’t try to get them to eat unusual things, they probably wouldn’t have introduced their kids to some of my kid’s favorites: squid, smoked fish, and pickles! He went from being a picky, mac’n’cheese sort to semi-adventurous—within limits.

All grown up

It wasn’t always easy, but now both of my young adults are adventurous, (usually) healthy eaters. We had lots of unexpected twists and turns along the way. Both kids had times when eating was difficult for one reason or another. And it turned out that we have found ourselves on a completely unexpected eating path because of food allergies that were un/misdiagnosed for years.

The most satisfying part of our food life now is that our kids love to cook wonderful food for us! When you spend so many years nurturing young bodies, it’s such a treat to get to sit down with a glass of wine and wait for a new, unexpected dish to be placed in front of you.

Keys to raising healthy, adventurous eaters:

I can’t tell you how to deal with your specific issues, but I think there are two ideas to keep in mind as you raise your children.

Encourage a healthy love of a wide variety of food by modeling. We parents sometimes have to confront our own issues first in this area. It’s important for us to model the eating we want to see in our kids. For example, if you don’t tend to eat raw veggies, try to start. If you won’t give up sugar, don’t ask your kid to.
Foster a family food culture of adventure and inquiry. Don’t make any assumptions about your “picky” kid because you never know what they’ll end up loving. (For a while, the only protein ours loved was squid!)
Seek and share information about food that connects with your child’s other interests. Got a budding scientist? Food science is fascinating. A geography buff? Find out what people eat in different countries. A social justice warrior? Food relates to everything!
Include your child in growing, buying, and cooking food. So many parents decide that it’s too much trouble have kids in the kitchen, but all the trouble pays off. Teach them the basics that you know, and ask them to join you in inquiry-based learning about foods that you haven’t cooked before.

Of course, children with eating issues will not necessarily turn into gourmets overnight, but wherever you’re starting from, you can make headway and raise a child who is more open to eating and enjoying food than they were at the start.

Food Fights

Trust the Transfer

Posted on October 6, 2021October 11, 2021 by Suki

“This was not my idea. I don’t want to be here.”

In my goal-setting course and in my book Homeschool with Confidence, I walk teens through the process of setting and achieving goals. And each semester, I ask the students to tell me whose idea it was for them to be there.

Since 2016, only one student has ever answered, “mine!”

Goal-setting sounds…bo-o-o-o-o-oring!

That’s the first hurdle I have to get over with teens, and I do it by keeping in mind the educational property of transfer. According to whoever wrote this web page for Yale, “‘Transfer’ is a cognitive practice whereby a learner’s mastery of knowledge or skills in one context enables them to apply that knowledge or skill in a different context.”

It’s an easy concept: a piano student practices scales and arpeggios not because they’re pretty music, but because playing them builds skills that they will apply when actually playing music.

But scales are… bo-o-o-o-o-oring! And many a piano student has quit in frustration when their teacher emphasizes scales too early.

So…start with enjoyment

I start by asking students what they like to do. Some of them respond with academic pursuits, some respond with so-called “extracurricular” activities, and many respond with…you guessed it…playing video games!

But no matter what their response, that’s where we start to build their goal-setting skills. Students are passionate about their passions! And yes, some students have passions that align well with their parents’ expectations. But many teens’ passions seem unimportant, or worse, a waste of time to their parents.

Build on passions

In my course, no pastime is a waste of time. If the only thing a kid can tell me really lights up their world is a videogame, well, that’s where we start. And I say this as someone who has played Minecraft once. (Short version: I started to walk, fell into a hole. Painstakingly climbed out of the hole, turned around, and fell back in. Went off to make dinner while my kids continued to play.)

It’s important not to judge any other person’s passion if you want to reach them, and in any case, the relative “value” of their passion is not important. I’ve had students whose initial goals were built on gaming, coding, photography, cleaning out a basement storage room, doing push-ups, and planning a D&D campaign. Their success at goal-setting had no relationship to any value that their parents or I ascribed to their goal—but their success was intrinsically tied to the value that they ascribed to their goal.

Focus on positive success

The human brain likes to succeed. Once we experience that feeling, we seek it out. If the only thing a kid ever succeeds at is getting attention for hitting another kid, that’s what they’ll seek out. If the only success a teen ever feels is hiding their gaming from their parents, that’s what they’ll seek out. Shaming our kids will always backfire, because shaming excites our brains and gives us a backwards sense of success by focusing attention on a negative attribute.

Sure, we don’t want our kid to be a bully or a 30-year-old living in their parents’ basement playing games all day. But the way we get the result we want is to set them up for success that feels just as good—or preferably better—than the negative attention that sends them in the wrong direction.

Step into their world

The way to get buy-in with goal-setting is to turn around and step into your teen’s world. What is important to them? What do they want to happen in the short-term? (Please don’t ask them what they want to be doing when they’re 30—they don’t even believe in 30 yet!)

Express your own enthusiasm and support of a goal, no matter how small. That kid who came into my class and made a goal of organizing a room in his basement initially did it to make a little space for himself. But how surprised was he when his dad came in and joined him in the effort? By the end of our 8-week course, they had created a new work space in their basement and were planning projects to do together.

Trust the transfer

This is the hard part: You have to trust that as your child matures, they will automatically do a transfer of skills. Goal-setting is a skill that can be practiced using any activity, no matter how small. Once they need it, they will have the skill to apply to more “important” pursuits.

The parent of the student who was designing D&D campaigns told me that the student was “totally disorganized and couldn’t plan anything.” Well… I beg to differ. Each week, the student would upload snapshots of all the work they’d done, and it was impressive. Sure, it was “just Dungeons & Dragons,” but they were developing pretty awesome organizational skills. At the time, they didn’t yet value academics in the same way, but once they did, they’d be ready.

The student who only wanted to code every day and all day is a great example. They realized that in order to get into the college they wanted, they’d have to focus on academics, and so they applied their problem-solving skills to academics without a hitch—but only once they valued college as a goal.

We’re all works in progress

We parents spend a lot of time telling kids what to do, but how much time do we spend telling kids little tidbits about who we are, what we want, and how hard it is to get through a day knowing we haven’t yet reached our own goals? I’m not advocating bo-o-o-o-o-oring your kids with unnecessary details, but just a little bit of, “Wow, I’m really excited I finished that project” or “I think I bit off more than I could chew—any advice?” can let kids know that you’re still a work in progress, too.

Our teens may look “all grown up,” but they are works in progress, and with support and encouragement, they will be able to reach their goals.

Resist irrationality: fight or flight in a time without lions

Posted on August 10, 2021August 10, 2021 by Suki

I’ve been thinking about a problem we humans have. I can express it in a formula:

Fight or flight response
+
Triggering media
+
Safest time ever to be a human
=
Extremely illogical behavior

Let’s pick that apart:

Fight or flight response

The fight or flight response is a very important function of our “lizard brain.” It’s what gets you to stop and fight when there’s a threat you can manage, or run like heck otherwise. It floods your body with adrenaline, gets your heart pounding, sends oxygen to your muscles, and leaves you totally exhausted and drained when it’s over.

We humans obviously needed this in the past. When faced with a hungry lion, we needed to be able to bypass our pre-frontal cortex “professor brain” and act quickly. But although fight or flight is very useful in situations of physical danger, it’s become maladaptive for modern times.

+ Triggering media

A lot of what modern media does is to tap into our lizard brains. Youtube cranks, 24-hour news, and social media all benefit when our hearts are pounding and we are full of emotion. They don’t do so great when we’re feeling calm and rational, because that’s the time when we’re more likely to want to hang with friends or take a nice walk.

The reason we like to be triggered by scary movies, news that makes us angry, or reading about the latest insults being traded by a comedian and a Fox News host is that it feels good. Our fight or flight response is set up to give us a huge payoff if we respond appropriately. Why? So that we feel up to doing it again if we need to.

So we like triggering media precisely because it makes us feel like we’ve been chased by a lion… and lived to tell the story.

+ Safest time ever to be a human being

This is a really hard one to get through to people. We are living in the safest time ever to be a human being. Don’t take my word for it. Read the numbers! Even with Covid, we’re still better off than we were (especially before the invention of antibiotics and vaccines).

And the things we’re actually scared of—sharks, strangers, earthquakes—are actually not that dangerous. Take a look:

Causes of Death in Comparison

= Extremely illogical behavior

There was a burglary on my block. As is often the case, the criminals were not the brightest of bulbs. They were caught because, um, they left the iPhone they stole from the house ON and it was pinging their location all the way to Nevada.

Oops.

But that doesn’t stop my neighbors from worrying that the endtimes are nigh, and shouldn’t we be recording the license plate of everyone who drives onto our street? Unfortunately, systems like that result in way more harm to innocent people than they do to criminals being thwarted.

When our children were little, we were the only family on our block that allowed our kids to play outside alone. We do not live in a war zone! (In fact, people in war zones often allow their kids to play outside. What choice do they have?)

Our country was much more dangerous in the 1970s, when my husband’s parents let him ride his bike over the George Washington Bridge into Manhattan and my parents didn’t ask to meet the parents of kids I visited. Yet parents now seem to believe that a child-snatching stranger is always hiding in the bushes.

We’re suffering from maladapted flight-or-flight, and we have to consciously resist

Yes, bad things happen. But bad things don’t stop happening when you shut yourself into a padded room. That’s how you make sure that a bad thing really will happen: You will be stuck in a padded room!

Yes, the human population is currently being ravaged by an awful disease. But the fact that someone was probably killed in a car accident near you in the last week doesn’t stop you from driving. The fact that multiple people near you died of heart disease doesn’t stop you from reaching for that éclair. Our media is terrifying us, and it feels good. The only way we can stop it from feeling so good is by resisting consciously.

Yes, the future of our beautiful planet is currently a bit bleak. But people who focus on bleakness, who revel in the human attraction to fatalistic, negative thinking, don’t get stuff done. And right now, we need people to Get Stuff Done. Global climate change is terrifying, and it’s making us freeze in place. We need to resist that urge and move forward.

Resist by being informed
Resist by being educated (and not by the University of Google, but by experts in their respective fields)
Resist by learning ways to calm yourself and practicing all day every day
Resist by being open and loving toward other human beings
Resist by not going immediately to fear-based decision-making

Resist.

Transgender support: healthcare, education, and community

Posted on June 21, 2021June 21, 2021 by Suki

Recently, Rep. Jimmy Panetta reached out to PFLAG to suggest a listening session about issues faced by transgender people, their families, and their communities. The meeting took place in the back yard of the Diversity Center with representatives from PFLAG Santa Cruz County and the TransFamilies of Santa Cruz County,. We were graced with the fun sounds of a live band at the regular Friday midtown street party in the parking lot next door.

The goal of the meeting was not necessarily to solve any problems, but at least to gain a sympathetic ear and educate a politician about transgender concerns. Concerns that were discussed at length included three broad areas: healthcare policy, educational outreach, and continuing issues with access to support.

Healthcare policy

Andrea Damon of the TransFamilies of Santa Cruz County cited a statistic from the Kaiser Family Foundation that in 2020: 67% of workers who got their health coverage through their private employer were in self-funded plans. What this means is that instead of contracting with a health insurance company to provide insurance to employees, the business creates its own healthcare group. These groups are not necessarily covered by federal or state law governing health insurance.

If you’re thinking ahead, you already know what comes next: many of these plans do not follow mandates written to regulate health insurance, including health coverage for transgender care mandated under the ACA. Often, business owners don’t realize there is an exclusion, and willingly add trans care when confronted. However, other owners can legally refuse to cover trans care through their self-funded plan.

Most workers have no idea that their “health insurance” isn’t legally required to cover transgender care, and it’s only when they are in crisis with a transgender child that they face barriers to getting appropriate, timely care for their children.

“TransFamilies has worked with several families over the last year who were faced with coverage being denied through their self-funded plans,” Damon says. Results have been mixed; some employers willingly added coverage, while in others, TransFamilies had to “apply pressure” to the board of directors, ultimately convincing two such employers to add coverage.

Rep. Panetta made an enthusiastic request to know more about when self-funded insurance isn’t required to follow insurance laws/requirements, since this is an area under federal jurisdiction.

Educational outreach

Santa Cruz County boasts a robust LGBTQ+ educational program supported by the Diversity Center. This program, Triangle Speakers, will send a trained panel of speakers into any school for any event for free. A similar speakers program in Monterey County is provided by Rainbow Speakers and Friends.

However, access to these programs is spotty, to say the least. Rachel Morales-Warne, a parent advocate whose children attend SLV schools, said that the Triangle Speakers hasn’t been invited to the district in at least the last ten years.

All of the advocates agreed that even when intentions are good, the lack of teeth in the FAIR Education Act (CA Senate Bill 48, 2011) means that it’s up to individual teachers, schools, and districts to decide how inclusive and supportive they will be.

“As an educator, 50 years now, I find it so frustrating that schools are not following what the law says, what we expected them to be doing,” said Lynn J. Walton, retired math teacher and PFLAG SCC Executive Board member. “There are no teeth in it. A lot of teachers have good intentions, but they don’t have the tools to go to the next step. We need to train our teachers so there’s harder conversations.”

Even in “liberal Santa Cruz County,” the treatment of LGBTQ+ students, including bullying, intimidation, misgendering/naming, and shaming, is common. The County Office of Education’s focus on equity in the coming school year, advocates say, is unlikely to make a substantive difference in the everyday experiences of queer kids in our schools if the training and support is not applied more consistently.

Access to support

Michelle Brandt and Andrea Damon (TransFamilies) offered the statistics that underpin everything that advocates do: Kids who grow up in families that support and affirm their gender have wildly better outcomes than kids who don’t.

“Having an affirming, accepting family is the number one indicator for a young person’s mental health, so that’s a big part of what we all do,” Andrea Damon explained. “PFLAG, TransFamiies, and the Diversity Center: for the kids—through the parents but for the kids.”

But support is applied unequally and sometimes it feels like parents have to keep refighting battles that had already been fought by a previous parent.

“You get tired and think, I can’t do this anymore,” Michelle Brandt says.

Rachel Morales-Warne responded more colorfully. “In our house, pardon my language, but I’m like, We’re fuckin’ still doing this?”

Neal Savage, also a PFLAG Santa Cruz board member, pointed out that the way to reach parents in the past doesn’t suit today’s parent population. “When you start expanding the population into Latinx and any kids who are in foster care, those families and those kids aren’t getting help. The number of families that can afford to go someplace on a Tuesday night for a meeting has gotten very small, given geography, money, two jobs. The PFLAG model from 30 years ago is in some ways a middle-class luxury.”

Morales-Warne agrees. “I talk to a cousin’s friend of a cousin because I have a child, because they can’t afford to go to these meetings or they don’t feel comfortable. It’s not necessarily a safe space to live in. I think some of the biggest obstacles are education and language. Not just language as in bilingual language, but the language around what it means to be nonbinary or trans or queer or gay or pan.”

Some takeaways

Rep. Panetta’s job is federal, which informs the areas where he is able to exert influence. Listening to the advocates at the meeting, he responded, “You see the continued need for the resources that are so necessary.” He shared his memories of a powerful meeting the week before about LGBTQ+ experiences moderated by our local State Senator John Laird and hosted by the Diversity Center.

It’s clear that transgender children and adults will benefit from a more focused, united push for understanding, inclusion, and legal protection.

Resources

Picking the scab off the nuclear family

Posted on February 18, 2021 by Suki

The nuclear, 2-parent family, the gold standard of American parenting, is a relatively new concept. In the past and present, America and communities around the world function well—perhaps better—with a more communal approach to raising children.

The pandemic, I’ve noticed, has been picking at the scab that holds the nuclear family together. Quarantined families, in many cases, have become truly nuclear. A few of my students report that they literally haven’t had a face-to-(masked)face conversation with another human since last March. Most of my students report that they are spending way more time with their families than they ever did.

Of course, in some cases this has been a wonderful gift that Covid has given families. Many of us were stressed out and overscheduled, and the last nine months gave us some breathing room. We rekindled interest in cooking or crafting. We had time to play board games with our kids. We finally got around to painting their bedrooms.

But let’s face it. The human organism was not designed for the nuclear family. We thrive in situations where small communities trust and support each other, shifting the responsibilities of raising children to multiple adults who each have skills to offer. In that situation, no parent needs to be the perfect parent for their children.

But here we are, so what do we do about it?

Some families are thriving, and to you I say, good job! Enjoy!

But other families are experiencing more stress than ever:

Spouses have seen their relationships deteriorate
Teens are angry and resentful, or depressed and withdrawn
Kids are missing daily infusions of joy they used to have when they and their families interacted with others

I’ve been talking with my teen students on how to deal with this, and here are the fixes we came up with.

Remember that you can’t control other people’s emotions

This is such a hard lesson! Depending on our personalities, we respond to our family members’ emotions (especially negative ones) by either blaming ourselves or blaming them, internalizing negative emotions or lashing out with them.

Remember that we can control our reactions

We want to blame our reactions on others, but really, how we react is our choice. But it is true that we have to practice reacting appropriately. Few of us are born ready-made with Zen-level patience!

We can do a few things to practice controlling our reactions:

When we react badly, go back and figure out what we should have done. Then tell the person we reacted to about it—aka, apologize.
Try to stop when we see ourselves following a pattern of reacting and blaming.
Practice the healthy responses when possible.

Parenting peels off scabs of its own

Parents generally find that parenting peels off the various scabs that they formed to deal with life. Some parents don’t want to question their own reactions, and it becomes especially hard for them once their teens assert themselves as individuals. My teen students see that all the time, and it’s confusing to them. As parents, we can help them by verbalizing what’s going on.

“Hey, I’m sorry I’ve been complaining so much. Being stuck in the house and going to Zoom meetings stresses me out!”

“When I was growing up, my family just kept out of each other’s way so we never had to face the fact that we didn’t get along. But now, we’re stuck together so let’s try to figure this out.”

Be empathetic about our teens’ situation

Teens are stuck in between. They hopefully experienced some independence before Covid hit, and now they are stuck with and completely dependent on their families. We parents need to acknowledge that and support our teens in seeking whatever independence they can find—and that’s usually going to be done through a screen.

Don’t give up on each other

I tell my teens whose families are struggling that it’s important not to give up on their relationship with their parents. If we assume that our family members are doing the best they can, we will feel better about our relationships with them. We all have to cut each other some slack right now.

Category: Parenting