Category: Parenting

Nurturing your inner adult

Posted on by Suki

There are times when I’m sitting with other moms and we’re talking about one of the standard subjects: If there’s a mom with a baby, we’re talking about nursing or sleeping. If there’s a mom with a toddler, we’re talking about a house full of mayhem. Any kid-related topic that comes up gets us talking about that subject, even if we’re long past it in our child-rearing lives.

Those times are wonderful and create such a great bonding experience, especially between moms. But then, occasionally, it occurs to me that we could actually be talking about something else. The thing is, we may know very little about the other parents amongst us outside of their child-rearing lives. Do we know what she thought she’d be doing as an adult when she was a teen? Do we know the bawdiest story she has from her days working as a barrista? Do we know about her former passion for roller derby? Do we have any idea what she used to talk about before she had kids?

That’s why I’m a big advocate of moms getting out of their mom circle and into the wider world. Even if the subject matter still involves kids, being with other adults passionate about the same thing feeds our inner lives and makes us much better parents.

This weekend I went to a children’s writing conference in Big Sur. Now, this may not sound so far from hanging out with a group of moms, and in some ways, it wasn’t. Though the majority of participants were female, and the majority of those were moms (and grandmas), we spent very little time exchanging information about our kids. Number and gender were the most common pieces of information, and possibly an anecdote or two would follow. But for the most part, we talked about our own passion for stories.

Many of the participants were probably like me: I’ve always loved children’s stories, but it was only as a mom that I started getting interested in writing them. But a fair amount of the participants were not yet parents, or were parents whose interest in children’s writing pre-dated parenthood. In any case, it was a weekend of intense talking about something that only tangentially related to our mom-lives, and the combined creative energy was invigorating.

For a few days, I handed my mom life off to my dad (since my mom was off being a mom to one of my siblings) and then my husband. As soon as I stepped out the door alone, I had that liberating feeling of being responsible for my self only. It’s not that I dislike being responsible for my kids, but when I step out of that life I feel like I’m a professional jockey on a horse bareback or a ballerina who kicks off her toe shoes and goes for pure personal expression. Just like the rider and the ballerina, I’m going to come back to my real life. But striking out on my own for a few days reminds me who I am, separate from my kids.

No matter what your interest, I recommend that you make a commitment to get out and do it occasionally without your kids. When you come home, I promise that you’ll be that much better of a parent, and that much happier of a person.

All’s well that ends well so long as you can forget that part in the middle…

Posted on by Suki

Santa Cruzans have been developing a love-hate relationship with our beloved public library. First the budget troubles, which resulted in Friday closures and the threat of closed branches. Then the about-face and the branches staying open, but for weird hours and with apparently new, unfamiliar, and sometimes less than helpful staff at the desk. Then the long lines. Then the short lines at the annoying self check-out stations.

And then there was the new online catalog.

Talk about adding insult to injury. We’d all been sucking it up and saying, OK, so we don’t like change but the library is going to change. OK, so my favorite librarian has apparently been replaced with a blank-faced young man who admits he doesn’t really know how to use the computer system. OK, so now we have to listen to those darn self check-out machines chanting over and over, “Scan barcode!”

I tell my kids it’s rude to chant, then the library undoes it all with a simple labor-saving device.

But the new catalog just about broke the camel’s back. One day in frustration, a friend e-mailed on a local e-mail list that she knows one person who has decided to buy all her books. The shocking — shocking, I say — lengths to which we must go in order to get our books without hassle!

We are big fans of open source everything in this house, and I am sure that the new software will be just fine in the long run, but this was no easy transition. It was a thrill that I could actually log in (I was expecting worse), but finding my way around a site all done in 8-point font isn’t my favorite activity. (Yeah, I know how to increase the font. But I shouldn’t have to!) The stark, dense design is already wearing thin.

And then there were the fees. I started to see the buzz on e-mail lists within days. “I went to the library and found out I had $25 in fees! The librarian said she couldn’t do anything about it.”

Turns out that when the library sent out that e-mail saying that e-mail notifications of overdues and requests would proceed as before, they forgot one, little word. Really, should one word make all that much difference? The one word: EVENTUALLY. No, the e-mail notifications weren’t working (and still aren’t as far as I can see). Apparently, some people at the library thought that this message had gone out to everyone. It hadn’t. Other people at the library thought that all the librarians knew that they were supposed to waive all fees until it was fixed. They didn’t. In fact, the librarian I got (another strange face at my local branch) said, “I’m not really trained to do front desk. I don’t know how to use this computer.” Great.

I love our library, and I love to give donations. But generally I prefer that the donations be a) planned, and b) tax-deductible. Rather than wait for our usual librarian to help (he was busy dealing with a shaggy-haired woman laden with shopping bags who was yelling that she needed the police — apparently someone had stolen her glasses while she was alone in the locked bathroom), I decided to let it slide.

The librarians had enough to do without my $2.50 to contend with.

Things are getting smoother. We’re all getting used to the tiny font and confusing layout, though e-mail notifications aren’t working yet and the system still thinks that my home library is Central. We’re starting to like some aspects of the site, such as the one I tried out today: Bookbag. You can actually save a list of books that you’re planning to check out at some point in your account. This is something I’ve always wanted. Yes, if I decided to check out lots of books about bomb-making and if I joined a fringe radical political group and if we were caught planning to overthrow our local library staff and take over, bombing all the self check-out stations back to the particles they were made from, I might be in trouble.

But since I am willing, always, to give my poor, beleaguered, hardworking, underpaid, understanding, knowledgeable, enthusiastic library staff a break, I won’t join that group… yet. I like to stay on their good side, especially when I’m leaving my under-12 kid alone in the kids’ section (just for a minute!), asking them to recommend readable King Arthur books, and informing them, sheepishly, that a mad woman out front is yelling to the world that the librarians have stolen her glasses.

The importance of buddies

Posted on by Suki

My daughter’s public homeschool program has had a buddy system since we started there five years ago. Since it spans K through 8, there are lots of opportunities for older kids to pair up with younger kids.

I always thought the buddy system was nice—when it worked, my daughter was able to complete an activity that before she might not have been able to. But I didn’t realize just how important the buddy system could be until everything clicked.

Last year, my daughter was pretty much not able to deal with school at all. She tried out two different class days, and finally ended up not wanting to go at all. But the activities she did enjoy, I was surprised to see, were the ones she did with her Big Buddy.

Her buddy is a teenage girl she’s known since kindergarten, a graduate of her homeschool program who now volunteers there as a high schooler. I don’t remember them connecting much when her buddy was younger. But somehow, as her buddy grew from a shy girl into a self-assured teen, a chemistry grew between them.

Last summer, my daughter was so fed up with her inability to handle class days at school that she was insisting she wanted to go to our neighborhood public school full-time. (If that sounds like a weird way to solve a problem, well, welcome to my life!) It wasn’t until she found out that her buddy was going to volunteer at her school on her class day that she gave up on this idea. Suddenly, she wanted to go to school.

Lots of homeschoolers and other “fringe” educators have been talking lately about the importance of mentors, and how our culture has lost mentoring as our society has become more fragmented. Some blame this loss on parents giving up their obligation to educate their kids to the state. As public schooling became more prominent, they say, families stopped thinking that education was primarily their responsibility, and community members stopped feeling responsible for taking youngsters under their wings.

I am less willing to blame public education (which I support) than a variety of cultural trends: Culturally, we are losing a sense of what parenting is. We are less likely to talk to our neighbors. We are less likely to live in the same community we work in. We are fearful of strangers—and even our kids’ baseball coach—as potential abusers. We are the perfect product of tabloid newspapers and sensational TV.

Accepting the importance of mentoring requires us to question our cultural messages. Mentoring requires that we believe that the adults in our community have an obligation and a right to help us in raising our children. Mentoring requires us to allow that our child will go out into the world without our protective arms about them. Mentoring requires adults to express interest in other people’s kids, even though adults have been taught the lesson, over and over again, that if they do that, they’re likely to suffer from our suspicions about adults who actually like kids.

If you look at any successful person, it’s more likely than not that s/he had a mentor, an adult who shared interests and who supported the young person’s learning. Sometimes that person is a parent, but more often it’s someone they came across as they focused on their areas of interest. A mentor is a guide, a coach, and in a gentle way, a critic. Americans love stories that feature strong mentors, but somehow in our culture, we have lost a sense of how important mentoring is.

For my daughter, having someone at school who is there for her and who only wants to support her has been invaluable. The teachers in her program are wonderful, but it’s her buddy she looks up to the most. Her buddy is the reason she can make it through. As she develops her interests and grows, this is a valuable lesson for her and for us. Sometimes it’s not a teacher or a parent that’s needed to help a young person develop her skills.

Sometimes it’s just another person on the path ahead of her. And when that person is willing to look back and lend a hand, the most difficult path is easy to navigate.

Your mom said it first

Posted on by Suki

When I was a kid and any of one my siblings was moping around the house, my mother said what probably countless mothers generations back had been saying to their kids:

“Get out of the house.”

Not, Get out of the house and don’t come back, you morose teenager, but rather, Get out of the house and get your body moving, soak up some sunshine, and think about something other than your problems.

It’s an age-old motherly piece of advice, one that scientists are now confirming with each new study of lifestyle and moods.

This piece outlines four pieces of advice that will boost serotonin levels and set things right in mind and body. They are:

1. Don’t mope about the house!

Even on cloudy days, there is more light outside than inside. Our bodies evolved to need that light for all sorts of things. In this case, sunlight triggers serotonin production. As the writer mentions, sunlight also triggers skin cancer, so we have to balance and think about how we get the sunlight. Best to keep it off your nose and the top of your head (prime areas for skin cancer because of years of accumulated exposure), but let it in for at least a while every day. Kids especially need to be reminded to go outside these days. It’s so easy to spend the day jumping from car to building and back to car again.

2. Human touch is important

The writer points out that the studies have been specific to massage, but I’m guessing that human touch in general is part of a healthy psyche. One of the reasons why solitary confinement is such a cruel punishment is that those confined miss the touch of other humans. And it’s not just prisons. I was shocked when I heard about “no touch campuses” — schools where they’ve made a rule that no one can touch anyone else, ever. Sometimes the gentle touch of an adult is what a child needs to focus and settle her body.

3. Exercise does more than keep us slim, lower our blood pressure, and all those other wonderful things

Getting daily exercise also promotes well-regulated emotions. Study after study finds that kids labeled with disorders — ADHD, especially — show fewer symptoms if they get regular exercise, preferably outdoors. This, again, is something that our modern lifestyles leave by the wayside. When I was a kid, kids walked to school. And if they lived too far to walk, they had to walk to the bus stop. These days, I have to admit, even my family with our emphasis on healthy practices would drive our son to his bus stop, a mile away.

4. Don’t dwell on your problems

Simply thinking happy thoughts actually makes us happier. Yes, we do need to face our problems, but not all the time. As adults, we’ve learned that when we let ourselves get sucked into a sea of bad feelings, it feels almost impossible to drag ourselves out. We can help our kids by teaching them how to pull themselves out by focusing on the positive whenever possible.

Angels happen by

Posted on by Suki

I know that this is an experience common to many parents, though we parents of “quirky” kids experience it more often.

I was sitting and watching my daughter’s soccer game with dismay. This is a girl who has great skills in practice, who simply falls apart on the field. Or rather, she becomes hypnotized. That day, she had pulled up a handful of grass and was fingering it, watching it fall from her hands, as the ball and 7 charging girls whizzed by her. She didn’t even notice.

This is the same girl who can get in the 99th percentile on a math test, but can’t sit through a math class. It’s so frustrating to see unfulfilled potential. Even more frustrating to know that there’s no worn path I can follow to help her approach her potential.

As I sat watching the game, a man came by handing out flyers. It was Bill Trimpi, who runs Santa Cruz Soccer Camp, an amazing program we stumbled upon some years ago. Bill and I did a double-take and then I explained what I was doing there. My daughter was sitting out for the moment so he couldn’t see her playing, but I explained my misery.

“But Suki,” Bill said in his patient way, “You have to remember that it’s such an achievement that she’s out there at all.”

He’s right, of course. The first time I spoke to him, I was sure that she wasn’t going to be able to handle camp. She was six years old and all fired up to play soccer, but I didn’t think she’d be able to follow their schedule, get along with the other kids, and be willing to work on the skills they were teaching.

In time, she has learned to do all of those things. Last summer she did three weeks of camp, and though she had her up and down days, she really did it. She was there and she was present in mind and body.

Talking to Bill got me focused on the goal: To get her to come out of herself and at least try to take part in things that I know she very much wants to take part in. So after the game, I pointed out to her that she’d spent much of her time on the field studying grass rather than watching the ball. We talked about how it was disrespectful of her teammates to do that, and that if she wanted to be on a team, she needed to support the team. This all made sense to her. So I issued a challenge: I said it is not important how well she plays soccer, but it is important that she enjoy it and that she be there to support her team. She had been wanting to go back to the science store to buy a little robot she’d fallen in love with, so I told her that if she stayed present in her next game, she’d get to do that.

Now really, this wasn’t such a grand motivation—she would have gotten to do that anyway, and she wanted to use her own money. But by tying soccer to something she’d been obsessing about, I got her attention, which was what she needed. At the next game, she succeeded in staying present in the first half, but did lots of grass contemplation in the second half. To her dismay and anger, I said it wasn’t time to visit the science store. All I asked, I reminded her, was that when she was out on the field she stay present in the game and support her teammates.

At the next game, I made sure to remind her before the game and at halftime. And she was on. She had a specific goal and she knew how to get there. Now, she in no way got anywhere near her potential on the field. She still was largely passive and watched her teaammates play, sometimes jumping out of the way rather than going for the ball when it was coming towards her. But she did something important, and she knew it. When one of her teammates got a goal, I watched as the other girls piled on and hugged her. My daughter kept her distance, but then in a pause a few minutes later in the game, she gave her a high-five. She was present, and that was the prize.

Yes, she got her little robot. And it will amuse her for a while. But she also got the feeling of actually being in a game, which was much more important.

I’ve come to the conclusion that good parenting without others to support us is probably nearly impossible, at least for us mere mortal moms. And when our kids throw us special challenges, as they all do at some point, we need others even more. My daughter’s coach has been outstanding in welcoming her to the team; her teammates, who must find her baffling, have been kind; I hear other parents cheering her on. On top of that, there’s Bill to happen by and reset my expectations. All of this is part of how we support each other in the hardest, most important job we’ve got.

Now available