Category: Parenting

What can you say?

Posted on by Suki

There are times when you realize that nothing you can say is exactly right. In the last couple of days I’ve read a number of pieces about “how to respond to tragedy,” but I find them all lacking. Really, it seems to me, there is nothing right to say to parents who have lost a child to random murder. Just simply nothing that can encompass all you might want to say yet avoid everything that might cause more pain, might seem to trivialize it, or might imply that can know what they’re feeling.

We live in an unusual time in human history when we are ill-acquainted with childhood death. I know two parents who lost young children to disease, but even that is rare in comparison with the past. Before the age of cancer treatment, I would probably have known a few more. Before the age of antibiotics, I would have known many. And before the age of plentiful nutrition, relatively clean and comfortable housing, and freedom from daily violence, every single adult I knew would have had childhood death in their immediate experience.

Our modern culture has no equipment to deal with this phenomenon that is largely unique to modern culture: random acts of violence aimed at groups of children. We digest the more common news of gang killings, innocent deaths during wartime, and parents lashing out at their own kids because there’s a sense of both normality and otherness: gang violence, innocent victims of war, and personal abuse have been part of Western human societies long enough that we collectively understand them even though we don’t accept them. At the same time, though, victims of all three of these types of violence are easily dismissed as “not our kids”—we may feel sympathy, but most of us don’t know anyone it’s happened to personally, so it’s OK.

But these random, “in the wrong place at the wrong time” acts of violence are not padded by cultural understanding. Why that day? Why that school? Why those children? — It could have been any place, any day, any kids who happened to be in the perpetrator’s path.

I am glad that events like this spark collective soul-searching, because I think that our culture is very happy to trip blithely along as if we are doing just fine, when we’re not. We have way too many deaths from violence in this country. We have way too many untreated mentally ill people in this country.

But for me personally, I still end up wondering, what can I say? What would be the right way to respond? And I come up blank. Nothing I think of contains the enormity of this, the sadness, and the answers to the questions we naturally want to ask.

Favorite boy, favorite girl

Posted on by Suki

My daughter has started to refer to her brother as “Favorite Boy.” You might think that this is not an epithet, but you would be wrong. She is skilled at turning any fine word into an insult, when her brother is the one she’s referring to.

In this particular case, after years of not pulling the “you love him more than me” line on me, suddenly she has started to say that I favor my son over her. She’ll take any excuse: If I ask her to stop hitting her brother, he is “Favorite Boy.” If I tell her to pick up her shoes in the middle of the floor, it’s because he is “Favorite Boy.” Heck, I bet if I asked her to hit her brother, she’d find a way to turn it into favoritism.

En garde!
Watch out for little sister!

I remember feeling this way. I remember telling my friend—perhaps I was the same age she is now—that my father hated me. I remember this as being very matter of fact. He hates me, and I have proof. I remember that we would sit on our beds and discuss these weighty matters: who had a loving parent, which of us had the more evil sibling, what we’d do if we ever found a way to get away from our miserable families.

Of course, the ironic thing is that eventually, pretty much every one of us got away from our families. And did our families say “good riddance” and erase our existence? Hardly. Things went on pretty much as before, except that we weren’t around each other nearly as much and so all the little things that drove us crazy about each other faded into the background.

Though I bet my little brother still hasn’t forgiven me for slamming his finger in the door.

Or did I do that to him? I can’t quite remember.

I’ve been thinking a lot about developmental milestones lately. The early ones are really obvious: When your toddler notices that your body is actually separate from his. When your preschooler finds out that other children have feelings. When your 6-year-old discovers universal laws of morality and applies them to everyone (especially her brother).

Perhaps this “who is Mommy’s favorite” thing is developmental. Perhaps she has some biological need—now that she’s figured out that she’s not a part of me, that her brother has feelings, and that everyone in the Whole World has wronged her—to find the pecking order in our family. Perhaps it’s because her brother is a teen and she is just entering adolescence. Were they princes, she would just now be realizing that her brother is destined to be king while she will probably end up a jester.

If they had other siblings, these ordinal musings would come and go. Today she might see her older brother as the favorite; another day it might be her younger sister.

But our family—like more and more modern families—is organized as sets of two. One father, one mother. One brother, one sister. Daily their genes battle to find dominance, and only find one other person to exert dominance over. The cave-person instinct to suspect the older brother is never put aside to thwart the ambitions of a younger sibling. At our house, there is apparently one throne, and two possible occupants.

Her brother the teen, of course, shrugs this off. His genes have him going off in another direction, thinking that instead of taking the throne, perhaps he’ll travel to uncharted lands.

We recently purchased a bunch of foam swords, and they have been getting lots of healthy use. I’m sure that someday the kids will return to the nest for a Thanksgiving dinner or perhaps to drag one of their parents off to an old folks home, and they’ll laugh about this.

“Do you remember how jealous of you I was?”

“You? Jealous of me? No way: Mom loved you more.”

“No, way, Favorite Boy! You were always her favorite.”

First born!

Perpetual baby!

Inheritor of the throne!

The one who got to have all the fun.

OK, maybe they won’t laugh, but I will. Wheel me out, kids. I’m off to play some gin rummy and seduce those nurses into thinking I’m the best. The chosen one. The one who inherited my parents’ love and admiration.

Attachment and Success

Posted on by Suki

I was reading about attachment research in Paul Tough’s How Children Succeed and remembered a conversation I had not long ago with another adult. I had mentioned something about how so many of my homeschooling friends were attachment parents (read this if you don’t know what that is), and this person responded, “Aren’t their kids all clingy and shy? Wouldn’t they benefit from being away from their parents more?”

I answered what I had seen: They look pretty much like normal kids to me. In my small sample of humanity, the attachment kids are no more “attached” than other kids when it comes to public behavior. Some of them are quite clingy. But I’ve known plenty of “non-attachment” kids who are clingy. Some of them are very independent, just like many “non-attachment” kids. They are who they are, who they would have been in any case, being brought up in a loving family.

My own family is a perfect case in point: I like to joke that when I gave birth to my first child, the doctor made a big mistake. She gave my husband the scissors and asked him to cut the umbilical cord. Really, she should have left it to a professional! My first child is just now, at 13, permanently separating that umbilical cord. Between the ages of 1 and 4, he pretty much spent all his time attached to an adult’s elbow, literally. His grandma liked to say that she was a perfect adult to hang out with him, since the skin on her elbow was so loose! When I delivered him to his preschool room, I would detach him from my elbow and his teacher, the wonderful Cari, would offer hers in exchange. Throughout his childhood, he felt a deep need to be near, to touch, to be comforted.

Then there’s his sister. I don’t put a lot of stock in birth stories, but that girl shot out so fast the midwife had to draw on her quarterback skills. This is a girl who ran into the library parking lot the first day she could walk, and hardly noticed my absence the first time I left her at preschool.

My two kids came out on the two opposite ends of the spectrum, and I simply responded to their needs. Amusingly, at 9 years old, the girl who shot out of me at birth is now on the clingy side, refusing to go on errands in the grocery store (one of her past favorite pastimes), declining to carpool with other families, and requiring cuddles and hugs throughout the day. Her brother is now a confident young man who has no problem doing things on his own.

I think the research on attachment is very interesting, and I think parents who adopt the ideas of attachment parenting are doing what feels right to them. But I also notice that they are largely responding to their kids’ needs as all good parents do. I hadn’t read about attachment parenting when I noticed that my fussy first baby liked to be carried all the time—I just responded to his need. And attachment parents are just as happy as any others, I’ve noticed, to let their little ones run off hand-in-hand with a “big kid” who wants to take care of them.

I wonder what it is about parenting that makes us sure that people who are doing it differently than we are will most definitely screw up. Perhaps it’s that we’re all aware that this is the most important job we’ll ever do, and the consequences of a screw-up are so immense. But I think it’s safe to say that as long as we’re loving parents who respond to our kids’ needs, we’re doing the best we can. And perhaps instead of seeing the choices that other families make as an attack on our own choices, we can just be sure that they, too, are loving parents doing the best that they can.

Birthing a book

Posted on by Suki

People compare writing a book to having a baby, and in many ways its the same. You pour a huge amount of yourself into a book, whether it’s an autobiography or an academic treatise on a rare insect from Guatemala.

But for me, the process of publishing my book, From School to Homeschool, has been in some ways uncomfortably unlike birth.

Suki and book
Me with my little newborn baby!

When you have a baby – those of you who are parents will remember – your body is flooded with happy hormones and despite the fact that your body may hurt and you’re getting very little sleep, you feel elated. You know that your baby is the most beautiful, wonderful baby ever birthed. And people stop you on the street to tell  you how beautiful and wonderful your baby is.

Between the heady days of writing a book and sending it out into the world, however, you lose any hormonal help you may have gotten. The editing process drags on and then you have to start marketing something you can’t even hold in your hands yet. You start to think:

“Is my baby really that beautiful, or did I somehow mislead my publisher?”

“Oh, I really should have given my baby brown eyes instead of blue!”

“Did I forget to give my baby a pleasant smile?”

“Why would anybody like a baby of mine, anyway?”

“How could I have thought that I’d be a good mommy to this baby?” (OK, I think I did think that one once or twice over the last 13 years of parenting, as well!)

The first thing that happened as the paper copies rolled off the press was contacting reviewers. My publisher’s publicity person rightly pointed out to me that they get a better response rate when the writer approaches reviewers she knows or has some sort of relationship with, so I started sending out e-mails. I suspect they were more professionally worded than this, but I remember these e-mails going something like this, “Please like my baby, please don’t treat her badly, please notice her friendly smile and not the big wart on her nose!”

Last week, I awoke with a start in the middle of the night. I realized with great certainty that I had forgotten to mention the website of one of the wonderful movers and shakers of the homeschooling world who agreed to review my book!

What is going to happen when she reads the book and sees that her wonderful website and her wonderful books aren’t mentioned? I thought, my heart pounding. I mentally composed an apologetic e-mail — “I can’t believe we got through the entire editing process without my realizing that I’d forgotten your website!” — and somehow got myself back to sleep.

Days later I remembered that midnight terror, and went to check my electronic copy of the book. There the website was, with appropriately encouraging words about the author’s contributions to the craft of homeschooling.

OK, so my baby is slightly less imperfect than I thought.

Of course, there will be people who don’t like my book, and I’m prepared for that. And there are people who for whatever reason don’t like me, and thus won’t like my book. I suppose I’m a little less prepared for that because I know that I’m way too concerned with whether people like me than I should be. And of course I’m completely prepared for the fact that my book isn’t for everyone: When people whose children are grown or gone, or people who never had any in the first place and are not into gifted education, say that they’re going to buy my book, I’m happy to say, “Only if you want to.” (I personally have a “thing” for owning books by people I know, but what started as one shelf of people that I know has overflown to books stashed all over the house, so perhaps that’s a “thing” I need to give up!)

So yes, publishing a book is like birthing a baby. I am terribly fond of my little orange-and-blue progeny and it was such a thrill to see her (why is she a she? I can’t answer that) after all those months of imagining what she’d look like.

But it’s also a period of growth for me, and growth, as any rapidly stretching teen can tell you, is not always comfortable.

Here’s to books, babies, and personal growth. None of the three is always a welcome force at any given time of a given day, but all are necessary for the continuation of intelligent life in our little corner of the universe.

News from the convention, Day 3

Posted on by Suki

Following are my notes on the National Association for the Gifted Convention, day 3. Click here to read day 1 and day 2.

I can’t believe it! I’m typing this on the airplane home and I may in fact be caught up when we touch down. Now, whether I have time to put any links into this text this evening is still unanswered. But you know how to use Google as well as I do.

This morning, I got right on it by turning up with a crowd of other people at 8 a.m. to hear Jim Delisle speak about teaching writing to middle schoolers. It was a very school-focused talk, and I am sure that if I were to do any of these exercises with homeschoolers I’d change them considerably, but his ideas are great and it’s clear why he is considered at the top of his field. I don’t have the title of his book handy at the moment, but I would highly recommend it to teachers – in fact, I did recommend it by e-mail to one of my son’s teachers. He used a variety of methods to get kids to get in touch with what they really care about, and he is able to help them do the seeingly impossible, such as a beautiful essay by a girl who had been failing English. For once, she was not required to write in full sentences, and her little bits of thought held together beautifully.

I hardly took notes during the panel discussion of gifted kids and sensitivity (again, I didn’t write down the panelists’ names, so I only know that Linda Silverman was one of them). The first question that came up is do we know for sure that gifted kids are in fact more sensitive than other kids? Silverman joked that perhaps her 35 years in the field should be dismissed because she hadn’t submitted peer-reviewed papers to the journals, so we could just consider what she said a 35 year long anecdote. Then she went on to detail the huge amount of data amassed by her Gifted Development Center in Colorado and others and said that from what she’s seen, sensitivity appears to be a prerequisite for gifted learners. Those kids who can’t stand the hum of fluorescent lights aren’t just coincidentally the fastest learners in the classroom. She and the others on the panel all had different ways of coming at the problem, but they all agreed that a hyper-aware brain is part of what makes a brain the sort that excels on IQ tests. Two of the panelists spoke movingly of their experiences as therapists working with families. One spoke bravely of his own struggles with being a highly sensitive person and how it has informed his opinion on how such children should be dealt with in schools.

The final keynote was by Jonathan Mooney, who is apparently well-known though he was new to me. He spoke of neurodiversity, which is a relatively new argument that we should think of the diversity of human minds like we think of plant and animal diversity: something to be nurtured and treasured. For a man who has never lived in the South, the woman next to me said, he sure does sound like a black preacher. In fact, we noticed that the cadences of his sentences were exactly like President Obama’s, which were explicitly modeled on black preachers’ speech. But he was a very engaging speaker, and his message was both in lockstep with what many at the conference were saying – gifted kids are different and need to be accepted and nurture – and also critical on the focus on traditional “academic” learning as what makes an educated person. Like Temple Grandin, he admitted that he is never going to be the well-rounded generalist that our schools attempt to produce. But in his case, there was no diagnosis to go on (though clearly these days he’d be diagnosed ADHD if he were in school). He was made to feel stupid and lazy throughout his school years, and the only thing that saved him, he said, was the unwavering faith that his mother had in him. When he was failing in school, she’d tell him that he was worthwhile and smart. Finally, after failing his way into high school, he somehow turned everything around and got into Brown University (not sure how that happened except that Brown is notoriously creative about taking unusual students such as the earliest gifted homeschoolers when no one else in the Ivies would).

All in all, this conference was a fabulous place to learn and connect with others if you are in education and care about your sensitive, asynchronous, neuro-nontypical, “gifted” learners. Nowhere at this conference did I hear dismissive statements about other kids, just a concern that while advocating for any other group of children is seen as noble and fair, advocating for gifted children, in all their rainbow of flavors, is seen as elitist and unnecessary. It is such a relief to everyone there not to have to apologize for their passion for reaching the thinkers in our society, trying to find the ones who are hiding, trying to heal the ones who have been broken, trying to inspire the ones who have been bored into compliance. The message of the conference was not “these kids are more important,” but rather, “all kids are important, so why are we trying either to make these kids into something they’re not or forcing them always to be on the outside in education?”

Thanks to everyone who gave their time to present at the conference and were willing to talk to someone who nodded vigorously when one presenter spoke of “imposter syndrome.” If you spend too much time feeling like you don’t belong, you can end up believing that you will never find a place in this world.

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