Category: Parenting

I am a longtime cat owner. My family always had cats, starting with Kitty Boo, acquired as my oldest sister’s cat when she was small. We also had dogs, but they don’t figure into this much.

We had a big property, and back then, people generally didn’t get their cats neutered. So we had kittens. Lots of kittens. And in our family of five kids, we all got to have our own cat at some point. Our own cat came when we were in need of a confidant and ally.

I needed exactly that when I was in kindergarten and saw the box of kittens one of my classmates had brought and put in the

courtyard of our elementary school. I ran home at lunch and pleaded. I really, really needed that funny-looking little kitten. My

mom said yes, so I left the school proudly carrying the kitten in my arms that afternoon. Cat carrier? Who needs one?

I hadn’t come up with a name yet when a boy came up next to me and asked her name. I said I didn’t know yet. He said, “Call her Princess.”

Never was a less suitable name chosen for a cat. Through various iterations, we ended up calling her Ton and she became my confidant and ally.

When my son was born we had two cats, the siblings I’d adopted right after I graduated from college. The male soon died, and we had only one cat, which was not a reasonable situation for me. So we got a pair of kittens. When my daughter was born, then, we had three cats, but soon the female of my original pair died, and we were left with two, which seemed just right.

But one day it hit me that my mother had passed on a piece of wisdom to me. My son, now six and the big brother of the Queen of the Terrible Twos, really needed a confidant and ally. Our fluffy sisters were rather aloof, on better terms with the squirrels than him. So we got him a little orange kitten named Mauen, and the kitten became his confidant and ally.

Now, as a longtime cat owner, I know some cat-owning wisdom. One piece of cat-owning wisdom is that if you’re going to get two cats at once, they should probably be siblings. Another thing I know is that it’s possible to introduce a third cat into a household with not too much trouble.

It’s the fourth cat that causes problems.

Now somehow, we always managed multiple cats in my childhood home without too many fights. Only one or two of the cats would be “indoor cats” for a good part of the time — most of them just hung about the property. And it was pretty chaotic anyway, with a dog or two, five kids, a tank of unfortunate fish, and a bird that was about to die.

We like our house a bit more orderly, or at least we pretend we do, so when our daughter started asking for her own special pet, we kept putting her off. Then we started to weigh options. No fourth cat, I said. Too dangerous. We considered everything else. We’re not dog people. Rats are bad for kids with asthma. She wanted something warm-blooded. Had to be easy to take care of.

And here we are, where I always said I’d never go: Four cats in one house.

The new kitten, Sawasdee (which means hello in Thai, and thus he’s “Hello Kitty”, get it?) is adorable. He’s half Siamese and a real charmer. He follows his girl around like a puppy, comes when she calls, plays like a maniac, purrs so loud you can’t sleep.

Our adult cats have had the whole variety of reactions. Nisene the surrogate mommy loves him just like she loved kitten Mauen. She lets him play with her long, fluffy tail. Maxine the aloof is pretending he simply doesn’t exist. Kitten? What kitten?

And then there’s Mauen. I thought he’d like having a friend, another boy in the house. Or rather, I hoped. But I bet you know what’s coming: I was right about the fourth cat. Mauen is very definitely not happy.

We’re working on it, but haven’t come up with any bright ideas: Kitty tranquilizers? Meow therapy? How do you make a big orange love muffin love a little Siamese dynamo?

It occurs to me that we’ve got parallel cats to kids: the big orange love muffin is paired with the boy who needed a friend because his sister was driving him crazy. And the wild sister? She’s found her match in a funny little Siamese boy she’s taken to calling Ton.

What goes around comes around!

When my kids were in preschool, we went through a routine that I bet is still going on in preschools across our nation.

It’s the dreaded check-in.

When I’d drop them off in the morning, their teacher would greet me with a smile and, “Just checking in to see how things are going this morning?”

I had kids four years apart, so I had a long time to answer this question before I started to question its validity.

At first, I’d be honest, and perhaps offer a warning: “It’s been a terribly difficult morning. I couldn’t get her to eat breakfast!”

Or a reassurance: “Things went so smoothly this morning. We all have smiles on our faces and full bellies!”

And when I picked them up, the check-ins were supposed to foretell my future.

“It’s been a hard day for little Mini-Me,” I might hear with dread.

Or, “What a great day this has been. What a great week, really!”

The thing is, after this happens with the first child for a few years, you start to think perhaps you’re the only one who notices a problem. But upon “checking-in” with the second and noticing the same pattern, you start to form a theory:

The check-in is totally bogus. Yep, you heard it here. If you have a little one just starting preschool, consider this a warning. Your teacher will love the check-in. She will hang on your every prophecy in the morning. She will send you off with odes to joy or threnodies of despair.

But it will mean nothing.

Here’s the truth: Your kid can be a screaming maniac one morning. She can insist that the only thing she will eat is slow-cook Annie’s Mac ‘n’ Cheese, don’t even START with the suggestion of the microwave variety. Then when you finally cave in, all she will want is a bagel. Except you don’t have bagels. And by the time she’s worn you down and you’re about to suggest getting bagels on the way to school, you’ll see that it’s past time to get her to preschool, and you have a doctor’s appointment (or, even more important, a pedicure) scheduled for 15 minutes after drop-off time at the prechool. Why did you do that?

Your daughter senses your frustration. She realizes she has real leverage. You, her mother, have dared to schedule something important to you when she wants Annie’s Mac ‘n’ Cheese, slow cook variety, now, here, before preschool? Your daughter resorts to physical violence. She’s hitting and kicking all the way to the car. You pray your neighbors are driving their kids to school so they don’t call CPS on you. You are not touching your daughter but she’s screaming “Ow! Ow! You’re hurting me! I hate you! When you go to sleep tonight, I am going to kill you with my hairbrush!”

You’d laugh, but you’re crying now. You’re driving to preschool, trying to keep the tears from getting you into an accident. Your daughter calms. You wonder what’s happening back there — it’s so quiet.

You get her out of the car. You’re shaking now, though you’ve stopped crying. You’re sure the mascara you actually took time to put on today because of your appointment — because you were doing things for yourself, darn it — is now raccooned under your eyes. You look at the ground, not meeting other parents’ eyes. They are laughing with each other as they leave the school, relaxed and happy.

You walk into the room.

“Just checkin’ in to see how things went this morning!” says a chirpy voice.

Where is that hairbrush your daughter was threatening you with? You have a better use for it.

Because you know, when you go to pick up your daughter later, she will have had a “super-duper day!” She will have sat still for circle time, and she will have shared her paints with little Rosco even though all the other kids don’t like him because he’s autistic and says things like, “Actually, dragons don’t exist, and if they did, they wouldn’t be able to fly due to their excessive weight.” Your daughter was a great helper and a great friend. She was so kind and gentle with the class’s pet rat, who was acting sick.

Just checkin’, indeed.

Then there’s the day from hell at preschool. Remember that evaluation your teacher gave you at the first parent meeting? Your son is doing fine, but we do have some questions about his… whatever. It doesn’t matter what it is. Perhaps he has a small roadrage problem out on the playground. Perhaps he likes to get into the teacher’s cabinet and squeeze Elmer’s into the scissors box.

No matter what his problem, there will be a day when, “Just checkin’ in!” will be a humiliating experience. My kid? He did that? Oh, I’m so sorry.

“It’s OK,” she’ll comfort you. “I’m just checkin’ in so you know what to expect.”

But when you get home, oh, such a surprise! That’s the day that little Rosco sits on the darn potty and puts his poopie in, plop, plop.

That’s the day he climbs to the top of the play structure at the playground and doesn’t start screaming for you to come save him.

That’s the day he sits next to you on the couch, looks up at you with his adoring eyes, and says, “Mommy, I loves you mostly of anyone.”

Just checkin’, that’s right.

Let’s admit it: preschool-age children are ciphers. One day we give them a cookie and they turn into wild maniacs and we decide No More Sugar.

Then one day they’re wild maniacs and Grandma, having conveniently forgotten about the No More Sugar rule, gives them a huge piece of cake and they quiet right down and ask to read a book.

We think we can figure them out, but really, we can’t. By the time we figure out that we can’t figure them out, they’ve changed again and they have all new behaviors for us to figure out until we realize we can’t figure them out.

I hereby move that we abolish the “check-in.” From here on forward, I would like to change the check-in to some sort of non-denominational blessing: “Oh, ye Parenthead, may whatever deity or force which you believe in bless you with an afternoon not resembling the hellish morning your child gave me.” Or, “Oh, ye Parenthead, please ask whatever deity or force which you believe to bless my morning with your child in the manner you believe would be most beneficial to all of us.”

Now, wouldn’t that be so much better for you?

…Just checkin’!

I’m spending the weekend with my tribe: a ragtag band of people who call themselves homeschoolers. We each have different reasons for choosing this path, and our kids are as different as kids can be. Some of us homeschool because we want our kids to go to college. Others homeschool to keep our kids away from school, period. But the thing we have in common is a passion for kids and learning.

But that doesn’t mean we always agree.

I started out this morning going to a talk that I had to walk out of. The speaker is well-regarded and I’m sure she was going to say lots of things I’d agree with. But she gave herself away in the first ten minutes. She told me that she knew what my kids need and want.

Good way to get me to stand up and walk out.

Some of us have unusual kids. Even saying that is against what a lot of homeschoolers believe, which is that all kids are unusual. Well, yes, but if you could make a chart of all the kids in the world right now, behaviorally speaking, you’re going to see most kids falling into some wide center, and then the outliers. Those in the center have more in common with each other than the outliers have with anyone else. That’s my kids.

This speaker showed a picture of someone wearing a baby in a Baby Bjorn. The baby was old enough to hold his head up. He looked perfectly content, his eyes on the camera.

“Never, never do this!” the speaker said.

And I was transported back.

My first child was unusual. I didn’t know how unusual my kids would be as they developed, but I noticed right away that my son was an unusual baby. He didn’t sleep. Or rather, he did, but in little catnaps throughout the day and night. He didn’t go through a short period of stranger fear at the appointed time — he only wanted to be with me or his father, and his father only if I wasn’t there. He was interested in everything. Right away, his eyes met ours and focused on us. He watched things happen.

His first two words were his own: “Datz” meant something like “I want that.” “Dis” meant something like “Wow, this is cool!” Around the time when he was using these two words with great frequency, my husband and I took our annual spiritual pilgrimage… to Santa Cruz’s Open Studios. And here’s the memory that came up when the speaker told me I had done some horrible, irreparable harm to my son.

We got out of the car at the 17th Avenue Studios, a group of artists populating decaying industrial buildings sprinkled amongst acreage of auto body repair shops and machine shops. I strapped my son into the Baby Bjorn, facing out.

Why did I do that? Well, I knew my son. He wasn’t in that “I need to cuddle with you and be protected by you” mood. He was primed to look at and marvel at this world he was discovering.

We started to look at art. His conversation was sprinkled with occasional “dis”es and “datz”s. I moved into the studio of an artist whose work didn’t particularly grab me. I was turning to leave when my son, facing outward, came face-to-face with a painting that just blew his mind.

“Dis! Dis! Dis!” he cried. He pointed. He kicked his feet in a happy dance. He noticed that the painting was enormous! He was thrilled to see little bits of newspaper incorporated into the surface. He used his full vocabulary to tell me what he was thinking: This painting is exciting! There’s Mommy’s newspaper, ripped into little bits and glued! I love looking at Mommy’s newspaper! Look at that red paint! I love red paint! This painting is so big that I have to crane my neck to see the top! Look how far away the top of this painting is!

“Datz! Datz!”

I want to take it home with me! Please, Mommy? Please can I go into that painting and be in that world? Please will you spend $3000 dollars on something you don’t even particularly like?

I did not make the wrong choice. I did not violate any rule of human love and nurturing. I knew my son, and I gave him a gift. Not a $3000 painting, but the gift of his first experience by being blown away by a work of art. I have never forgotten this experience and never will. I loved my funny little boy who kept me up all night so, so much right then.

All parenting books have the potential to help you think about your parenting and improve it. But no parenting book can tell you how to parent your child. Even if your child would fall into that wide center of dots close together, your child is, as the homeschoolers will tell you, unusual.

I hate prescriptive parenting because it makes all of us feel like failures. We can’t please everyone. So instead, let’s figure out how to be the best parent we can be of the children we get. And let’s not vilify a parenting tool and blame it for bad parenting. It’s a tool, and that day, I used it well.

I just read an interview with educator Alfie Kohn that I highly recommend. In one short interview, he clearly and logically explains the fundamental problems with the approach to public education taken not only by the Republican administration responsible for No Child Left Behind, but also continued by Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan. If you care about your children’s schools but haven’t really paid much attention to what’s happening, this interview lays it all out very clearly.

Yearly standardized testing is a waste of our money and a stress on our children. As Kohn explains, “any test that’s standardized — one-size-fits-all, created and imposed by distant authorities — is inauthentic and is likely to measure what matters least.”

Yearly standardized testing actually has the opposite of the intended effect: “The more you reward people for doing something (or threaten them for not doing it), the less interest they tend to have in whatever they were made to do.”

Merit pay (as New York City found in a recent study) has no merit: “So how should we reward teachers? We shouldn’t. They’re not pets. Rather, teachers should be paid well, freed from misguided mandates, treated with respect, and provided with the support they need to help their students become increasingly proficient and enthusiastic learners.”

But shouldn’t we trust the experts who have risen to the top of their field? As Kohn points out, they aren’t experts from the world of education. The people making decisions for our kids are motivated by corporate profits, not serious study of learning and genuine interest  in having a well-educated population: “Arne Duncan knows nothing about the nuances of assessment and he’s surrounded by Gates Foundation people and others who are at the heart of the corporate “reform” movement that has actively supported the ultra-high-stakes use of lousy tests.”

What can we do?

Well, I’m guessing that you, like me, aren’t going to be in Washington tomorrow for the big Save Our Schools march. But you can do your part to make it clear that you want your child’s school to educate, not teach to the test. You can vote with your feet (and the tax dollars that follow you) by leaving a district school that focuses on testing over learning. You can write to your representatives to let them know that parents don’t see their kids becoming more educated as test scores rise — we see them more stressed out, less creative, more focused on narrow achievement instead of broad understanding and skills.

Here’s Kohn again, reminding you that education doesn’t have to be this way:

We are living through what future historians will surely describe as one of the darkest eras in American education — a time when teachers, as well as the very idea of democratic public education, came under attack; when carrots and sticks tied to results on terrible tests were sold to the public as bold “reform”; when politicians who understand nothing about learning relied uncritically on corporate models and metaphors to set education policy; when the goal of schooling was as misconceived as the methods, framed not in terms of what children need but in terms of “global competitiveness” — that is, how U.S. corporations can triumph over their counterparts in other countries.

There will come a time when people will look back at this era and ask, “How the hell could they have let this happen?” By participating in Saturday’s march, by speaking out in our communities, we’re saying that we need to act before we lose an entire generation to this insanity. The corporate-style school reformers don’t have research or logic on their side. All they have is the power to impose their ignorance with the force of law. To challenge their power, therefore, means we need to organize. We must make sure that the conversation about the how’s and why’s of education is driven by educators.

In short, we have to take back our schools.