Category: Psychology

Getting rid of…part 2

Posted on by Suki

Last week I wrote about cleaning out my closets, and I suggested that perhaps spring cleaning has moved to winter. Then I noticed that at least as far as my Facebook friends are concerned, spring cleaning is a thing of the past. What’s up here? Did the blue moon give us all cleaning out the nest instincts?

Last weekend we cleaned out our garage. Well, OK, we didn’t really clean it. Not wanting our cats to become coyote bait or bug us by banging on the screen door in the middle of the night, we lock them in the garage with a litter box, food, water, and a comfy blanket to sleep on.

They sleep on top of the cars, poop behind my husband’s motorcycle, and eat the moles they leave under the cars during the daytime. We try to make it into kitty spa, and they turn it into kitty skid row.

So OK, we didn’t clean the garage. I did scoop all accessible fossilized poop and stick it in the garbage, and we swept out the easiest to get dirt and leaves, but mostly what we did was organize and Get Rid Of.

What we got rid of: many, many cardboard boxes we were keeping for… uh…, a large bag of worn-out bath mats that we were keeping for… eh…, a bag of old clothing we were keeping to give to the Goodwill, a box of dishes we kept meaning to sell but ended up giving to our babysitter, a box of 8 place settings of a nice stainless silverware that had been discontinued and I couldn’t add to and kept meaning to sell but gave to our babysitter (starting to think you want to be our babysitter? Forget it — Vanessa is a saint for being able to keep up with Energy Girl for hours at a time).

What we didn’t get rid of: Hubby’s grandmother’s stand mixer, still works, still has lots of memories attached, lots of old sheets that we plan to use for, eh,… many boxes of books that I published years ago and can’t stand to throw away, two pieces of stained glass taken from a red-tagged building in New York City…

You get the idea. So I had the funny task today of calling a neighbor and asking if she would like, I mean, would be able to stand our putting lots of recycling into her bin. I went down the list of neighbors and decided not to call anyone with kids, the painting contractor, anyone who had a party lately… So luckily we have a single woman neighbor who said, Yeah, sure, bring me your garbage!

See, getting rid of even strengthens your bond with your neighbors.

We didn’t get rid of our skid row cats, but they found the process fascinating. Cats love any focused activity, though they personally choose not to do any work in their own lives. They’re great at watching and making rude comments, though.

“Hey, don’t get rid of that old rug! I like to pee on that!”

“What are you doing moving my favorite box that I sit in? Wait! Don’t crush it! How can I look cool sitting in a box that’s too small for me if you crush it?”

“Humans! They have absolutely no sense of what’s important.”

One of my Facebook friends asked if someone could come over and clean out her closets, but really, it’s no fun to clean out someone else’s old junk. How could you know what’s important? Frankly, the stuff we kept wasn’t all worth more than the stuff we gave away. I admitted to Vanessa today that the set of dishes was probably worth a fair amount of money. But ultimately, eBay just seemed like too much work and not at all as satisfying as passing on our old friend’s lovely pottery to someone I know who will love it.

Someday, perhaps, it will end up in her garage, and she can decide whether to keep or get rid of. And perhaps she’ll remember me, and our sorta clean garage, and our rude cats making comments.

“Ack. I wouldn’t even drink outta that bowl. Give it to the babysitter. She has a dog anyway.”

Mr. Know-it-all

Posted on by Suki

Before we had kids, my husband used to have a standard joke that he needed to get a business card that said “Mr. Know-it-all.” He has one of those encyclopedic brains, and he reads voraciously. So even though we don’t watch TV or listen to most popular music, if I say, “who is that person on the front of the Enquirer?” he’ll be able to answer. He knows the meaning to most any word we can find, though I have occasionally stumped him (and let me tell you, it’s thrilling when I do!).

Our son has inherited that particular characteristic from his father, but there is one big difference: His father was an only child, and he probably learned the various ways to offer corrections to people’s misinformation from other neighborhood kids and on the playground. You learn good and quick not to answer a kid’s boast with, “Well, actually, that’s not exactly true.” He learned that there are lots of situations in which correcting people is not polite, not socially acceptable, and a bad way to keep friends.

Our son, however, has a little sister. And like all little sisters, she says things that are fantasy, wish-fulfillment, or just plain not true. And unlike kids at school, his sister isn’t going anywhere. Perhaps he has largely figured out not to constantly correct his friends, but he sees no particular downside to correcting his sister… often.

I remember when I learned about autism. I was at college, and I read something about it, and how it manifests itself on a spectrum. I remember looking around myself and thinking, hm, I bet some of my friends are on that spectrum!

It’s fascinating how certain characteristics tend to bunch together. I went to Stanford, and so all my peers there had been very, very good students. But I am sure that for many of us, that came at a cost: learning social cues was more difficult. Kids who have books to love depend less on friends. And perhaps it’s a chicken and egg thing: kids who are predisposed toward using their brains more than their bodies are more likely to end up socially awkward. Or is it that kids who are socially awkward gravitate toward using their brains in a different way?

I knew people who’d gone to MIT, a place where the “nerdy” kids (mostly boys) were even more concentrated than at Stanford. And social skills were even less in evidence there.

Of course, you get those Tiger Woods characters: smart (he went to Stanford), personable (just look at that smile), and athletic. But they are clearly outliers when you look at the general trends among humans. Most of us are better in one realm of human existence than in others. And the more we apply ourselves in that direction, the less we have to give in other directions.

[*Tiger Woods actually came into my mind randomly, but I now remember that a friend suggested the other day that in order to get more hits on my Examiner stories, which pay by the click, I should write about Tiger Woods. Because I don’t watch TV, I am only vaguely aware of what’s been going on. But here it is, my almost gratuitous mention of Tiger Woods!]

So my husband and I have been experimenting with ways to get our son to stop critiquing every little statement his sister makes. So far, we haven’t come up with much. It’s gotten to the point that we can hear it coming, so we try to stop him and ask him to think about what he’s going to say. But he [honestly, I think] doesn’t think that what he’s saying is a criticism. It just hurts him to hear people saying things that aren’t true.

I know how he feels. I learned very early about not being a know-it-all at school. But I remember the feeling of sitting there listening to people saying things that were wrong and feeling this sort of discomfort verging on pain. I loved knowing things! Doesn’t everyone love knowing things? Don’t they want to know that they are wrong and fix it?

But I also know how my daughter feels. When she was little, I read that studies of kids find that first children are more likely to have imaginary friends — kids who have older siblings get teased out of that luxury. As soon as our daughter’s imagination started to blossom, I started to remind our son that he once had imaginary friends who lived in an imaginary world (an island near Japan, if you want to know), and we let him have that time.

Our son’s teacher said something to him recently that I think might be an appropriate metaphor. He said something like, “Don’t use your intelligence as a mallet.” You can’t — no matter how tempting it seems — bang knowledge into people’s heads. The most gracious people figure out other ways of doing it.

And if nothing else fails, at least you can look at yourself with humor. I’m thinking that perhaps I need to get my son Mr. Know-it-all cards. Then when his sister says something the is incorrect, he can hand her a card and offer her his services… when she’s ready to receive them!

Helicoptering, hovering, and hyperextending, but holistically

Posted on by Suki
From Time Magazine

Someone forwarded me the cover story from Time Magazine this week and asked for my opinion. In summary, it’s about what some are seeing as a trend in parenting, the trend already dubbed “helicopter parenting” and made famous by Lenore Skenazy, the author of “Free Range Kids.” Parents who parent too much, who hover and worry and overprotect to the point of smothering their kids.

I had two reactions. One is my usual reaction to any mass journalistic attempt to generalize: individuals just aren’t general. So yes, you can generalize a trend, but when you ask people whether it applies to anyone they know, they’re likely to say, well, not really.

On the other hand, yes, really. We all know the parents that she’s talking about. Here in Santa Cruz County, we have a sort of “two sides of the railroad tracks” split in the parent community, as far as I can see. The helicopter parents are generally on the other side from me. The ones who obsess about getting their child into the right preschool when the child’s in utero, who get their preschoolers tutors so they can be sure to get into the right private school, who hire clowns for their kids’ birthday parties and won’t let them go outside alone…

Oh, wait, I know people in that last category. So perhaps it’s not such a clear split, but you know what I said about generalizations above. I don’t personally know anyone who fits the description to a T, but yes, I do know people who pamper their kids past believability (from my 70’s Midwest childhood perspective), and I do know people who smother their kids, who expect ridiculous things from their kids. So it’s hard for me to say whether I think the article is so much on target or whether it takes what we’re worried about as parents right now and gives us something new to worry about.

However, there are some great passages. This one is one I could have written:

But too many parents, says Skenazy, have the math all wrong. Refusing to vaccinate your children, as millions now threaten to do in the case of the swine flu, is statistically reckless; on the other hand, there are no reports of a child ever being poisoned by a stranger handing out tainted Halloween candy, and the odds of being kidnapped and killed by a stranger are about 1 in 1.5 million. When parents confront you with “How can you let him go to the store alone?,” she suggests countering with “How can you let him visit your relatives?” (Some 80% of kids who are molested are victims of friends or relatives.) Or ride in the car with you? (More than 430,000 kids were injured in motor vehicles last year.) “I’m not saying that there is no danger in the world or that we shouldn’t be prepared,” she says. “But there is good and bad luck and fate and things beyond our ability to change. The way kids learn to be resourceful is by having to use their resources.” Besides, she says with a smile, “a 100%-safe world is not only impossible. It’s nowhere you’d want to be.”

OK, I admit: I have actually said to someone, “If you’re worried about your child being abducted by someone, you’d better take a good look at your spouse, first.” (Parents are by far the biggest perpetrators of this crime. Strangers are a distant last after other relatives and friends.) Our paranoia from being able to know about every bad thing that happens to every kid in this country (and many others) has led us to make ridiculous decisions. We would rather give kids drugs for ADHD than let them have ample unstructured, unmonitored play time outside.

I and many other parents I know are curing this problem by turning off the TV, flipping past the gory front-page stories, and remembering to enjoy our children’s childhoods. But that’s a conscious decision you have to make. And yes, like Skenazy, I’ve been the recipient of some flak, most of it non-verbal looks from people of grandparenting age. But we did have at least one friend express shock at our letting our son go out in the (gated, fenced) front yard (on our rural, dead-end street)… alone!

Here’s another quote from the article that spoke to me:

Shutting down your inner helicopter isn’t easy.

No kidding. But for me, it wasn’t the inner helicopter, because like Skenazy, I’m a pretty fact-based person. I was raised that way. I look at the odds. That’s why I’ve never gambled in Vegas, and I only bought a lottery ticket once, as a joke, with someone else’s money. (I won four dollars!!) That’s why I do get my kids vaccinated and why I do put them in carseats but I don’t say no when they want to walk down the street alone.

For me it’s the constant external pressure. Yeah, my eyes do go to those headlines, the one I said above that we shouldn’t read. And I, like everyone else, gawk at the “Amber Alert” sign over the highway. And even more than that, I do notice and care about what my fellow community members think of me and my parenting. The writer of the article tries to make it seem like it’s parents of my generation who are the worst, but I can say I’ve gotten more bad vibes from those of my parents’ generation. Dunno why. This isn’t science, just observation.

When I think of my parents’ job of raising me and my four siblings, in some ways it was very, very easy for them not to fall into these traps. For starters, there were five of us. I remember a time in my life when I continually attempted to run away from home. I’d come home absurdly late from having been out all day, hoping that my mother would run up to me and say, “Finally! I missed you so!” Well, she didn’t. She probably greeted me with, “There you are — set the table!”

My parents did indulge some of our whims, when they had the time and resources to do so. There was a time when my mom would take me out of school to drive me to another town to take harp lessons. She would write me excuse notes that would say “Susana was not in school today.” And finally the school counselor asked me to have my mother put a reason on the notes. My mother didn’t want to lie. I believe the notes from then on read something like, “Susana didn’t want to go to school today”!

But they were constrained in time and money, so I find my response to my son’s asking for an iPod Touch an echo back thirty-five years: “That’s nice, dear. Put it on your wishlist!”

I will close with a last quote from the article, itself a quote, which does sum up the major thing I think the kids today are really missing in most American family life. Brilliance, it is clear, does not arise during a session at Kumon. It comes from exploring your own mind, turning into odd, dark lanes you haven’t gone down before, letting your fingers put together the Legos in ways that are not printed on the package, and most of all, being left alone enough that you come to enjoy it.

If you embrace this rather humbling reality, it will be easier to follow the advice D.H. Lawrence offered back in 1918: “How to begin to educate a child. First rule: leave him alone. Second rule: leave him alone. Third rule: leave him alone. That is the whole beginning.”

Portrait of a happy girl

Posted on by Suki

Today I met with my publisher at SantaCruzParent.com. We talked about lots of things, especially social networks like Facebook and Twitter, which I had avoided, but I am now taking part in, reluctantly, sometimes enjoying them. (Want to receive my notifications on Facebook? See “fan me on facebook”: below, right side.)

Happy girl

And then Parmalee asked the $100 question: So what’s up with your daughter?

You can peruse my past posts to know why she was asking. I have been wondering what to write, and then a friend, a mom in her homeschool program, gave me the topic.

She took me aside at a fieldtrip and said, “I am amazed at how your daughter has matured.”

It was such a welcome thing to do.

Let’s face it: As parents, we spend a lot of time putting out fires. Sometimes, if you have a difficult kid, you have to remind yourself to kiss him on the cheek and say, “You’re wonderful,” or you have to remind yourself to grab her when she comes out of a dance class and say, “You are SO great!”

It’s so easy to focus on the negative, so hard to remember that the positive is What Works.

My daughter is the archetypal Difficult Child. We didn’t have a comfortable diagnosis to fall back on. We couldn’t say, “Boys will be boys!” She doesn’t fit cultural definitions of what a girl is. She has never fit cultural definitions of how a child develops. She is… herself.

Bad, mean, yuck, hit

I started homeschooling her when she was 5 because, frankly, she and kindergarten did not agree on what “fun” is. She was brilliant, funny, creative, energetic, and amazing. At school, she was frustrating, unable to endure group activities, destructive, angry, and completely unwilling to submit to authority.

But she was mine. She was what we got when we got a baby, and we had to love her no matter what.

And here she is today. I’m not going to say: She’s the daughter I always planned on having.

But I am going to say: She’s amazing, creative, energetic, funny, brilliant, and wholly and thoroughly herself. I can’t imagine her as anyone else.

In other words, she’s doing great!

Parents of difficult children out there are starting to pay attention now: What did you do? What’s the magic formula?

If you have a “normal” child (and I admit I don’t know what that is or if it exists), you know that development happens in fits and starts. You think that some new parenting change you made is doing nothing at all, and then one day you realize that the behavior that had been driving you crazy was… gone! Where? Why?

Sad

In my daughter’s case, I can pin it on three things, sorta. I won’t swear to this, but this is the formula that seems to be working.

First of all, we were patient. Everyone who worked with her and seemed to “get” her told us the same thing: this is all developmental. She will eventually grow out of it. She is a classic “asynchronous development” kid. You have the usual curve that “normal” kids develop along (more or less… some people would say that this curve is itself a fabrication), and then you have kids like my daughter. We knew she could read by the time she was three, but she didn’t really admit to it till she was about 4 and a half. It took till she was five, however, for her emotional development to make it out of the terrible twos. Everything was all mixed up, and no one could give us a formula to follow to get her past it except patience.

Second, I read various sources that gave me that idea that I had to “set my child up for success.” We spend a lot of time setting our children up for some level of failure: contests, grades, standardized tests. What if we structured their lives so that they saw how successful they could be? How would this change their perspective, and their behavior? I took her out of kindergarten, because despite the fact that I put her in the most loving, kind environment I could find, she was spending a lot of time drawing self-portraits with the word “BAD” scrawled underneath them. Teachers don’t have to say the word bad to make it so. A classroom was not a place that she could succeed at that time.

Third, this summer we made a pretty momentous dietary change. I read about a very small study that indicated a possible link between “hyperactive” behavior in some kids and low ferritin levels. Ferritin is one component of iron in our bodies. We get it exclusively from animal sources: beef, liver, bivalves (clams, mussels). I brought the study in to our MD, and he said, Hm, this is interesting, and agreed to do the test. He called me a few days later. “This is really interesting,” he said. Like most vegetarian kids, her iron came out low-normal in general. But when they separated out ferritin, she came out less than half of normal. This started a new eating program in our house. “Have some salami!” “Eat a burger!” “Don’t you just love this spaghetti sauce with clams in it?” It also started me down the supplements path, something I have resisted.

The result of this three-pronged approach is not magical. We don’t have the ADHD kid on Ritalin: one day a nightmare, the next day malleable and easy-going. This is not what we wanted, frankly. We love her spirit. We love her stick-to-it-iveness. We love her crazy creativity, which society tries to stifle but which will allow her to reach for greatness. But we were tired of the phone calls to come get her. Tired of her not being able to get along with other kids because they were freaked out about her behavior. And tired, just plain tired, of seeing the one-step-forward, two-steps-back momentum of our lives.

These days, I’d say we’re two-steps-forward, one-step-back… or perhaps sideways. Not everything goes according to plan. The day we realize that she’s stopped spitting at us to get our attention, we see that she’s drawn on the wall, something she hasn’t done for years.

Confident!

But like that mom friend said, there is something different. She’s come down a couple of notches. She’s seeing beyond the whirl of fabulous thoughts in her head. She announced last spring that she wanted to have A Friend. Now she has one, maybe two. She is going to her school program a day and a half a week without Mommy hanging over her. She and I are both getting the breathing room that we needed.

Where does it go from here? Most parents assume it will generally go forward. I’m assuming nothing. But I can surely say that we are all happier and more relaxed. We Have Our Days, as they say. But all families do. We don’t have those conversations anymore, the “how are we going to survive this?” conversations. Not now, at least.

It’s success, but not the sort of success you get when you go up and accept that Oscar or get a promotion to partner at your law firm. It’s a tenuous sort of success, where you wait with baited breath to see what comes next. You hope, you definitely hope, that what comes next is more movement forward, more success, more self-portraits of the happy girl in glasses, “BAD” a thing of the past.

Understanding how scientists make decisions about your child's health

Posted on by Suki

There’s been a theme running through conversations I’ve had lately. I and some of my more scientific friends have been noticing a general lack of understanding about how science works and what makes the scientific method worth considering.

First, a caveat. We all know that doctors have been wrong. So giving examples of when a medical approach turned out to be wrong doesn’t actually cancel out any of the information below. In fact, it confirms it. Science can handle mistakes — magic can’t.

So here’s the scientific method in a nutshell: Scientists noticed that if they could get a large sample of a phenomenon (let’s use human disease in this case), they could make general predictions for everyone based on that sample. So for example, all the knowledge we have about the basic vitamins in our diet came from observations like the ones we (hopefully) learned about in elementary school: Chinese sailors getting rickets, children getting vitamin D deficiency in wintertime. [Read more about the scientific method here.]

The scientific method says this: You make a hypothesis (a guess) based on your observations. You test that hypothesis in a double-blind test, where the people involved don’t know whether they’re getting the real treatment or a placebo (for example, a sugar pill instead of a medication). Then you look at the results. Did the people in the control group react in the same way as the people being given the real medicine? If so, the “real” medicine is a failure. If not, it’s a success. A good scientist is perfectly happy to prove that her guess was wrong.

So here’s a real-life example: American communities used to be devastated by polio. Children and adults died or were maimed for life. Then Jonas Salk developed a vaccine for polio. It was tested on a group of people, who were then compared to a group that didn’t get it. Amazingly different results: the vaccine worked. Soon practically everyone in this country was being vaccinated against polio, and now we live in a time when no one who now has small children remembers the devastating effects of polio on their community.

Until 1999, the polio vaccine was “live” and thus caused some polio symptoms in a small amount of children (many fewer than were affected before the vaccine). Since then, all polio vaccines are dead and there have been NO cases of vaccine-induced polio in children in the United States. (Polio, however, does still exist in the world, and the amount of unvaccinated children in our community makes it possible that it will return here.)

So how does this relate to the great interest people have had lately in alternative medicine? The thing you need to remember is that science does not negate community wisdom, but it can test community wisdom, which is very important.

So a good example is St. John’s Wort, an old remedy for depression. It has been tested and retested. The studies don’t all agree. So should we ignore them and assume they’re wrong? No — this is just a good example of the scientific method in action. Some studies have shown moderate benefits from St. John’s Wort, many have shown no benefit, and just a handful make it seem as effective as modern anti-depressants. So it’s clear that scientists need to keep working on this to be more definitive. But on a personal level, it means that you might want to try St. John’s Wort and see if it works for you. And if it doesn’t, there are other medications available.

Community wisdom was not able to test this age-old remedy. Science is in the process of doing so.

We have a number of medical doctors in our community who also work with “alternative” medicine — a better term is integrative medicine because it can be a good partner to Western medical techniques. I wrote an article about Lucy Hu of 7 Branches. She is a Western medical-trained doctor who works as an acupuncturist. Rachel Abrams is an MD who started a clinic that incorporates various types of medicine. These people understand that an integrated approach is better for everyone.

Finally, I wanted to address the question of group vs. individual decisions. The scientific method is what’s used by our public health officials to make decisions like the recent one to try to get all children vaccinated against this year’s H1N1. (Read H1N1 information here.) Their decisions are based on which alternative makes the most sense over a large population. Sometimes those decisions seem wrong on a personal level, but that doesn’t change the fact that the decision was made with the larger population in mind.

All the recent studies done lately to analyze whether early childhood vaccinations caused autism are pretty clearly negative. Over large groups of kids, there is no evidence that vaccines caused problems. But that does not actually refer to any one situation. It is completely consistent with that result that one child’s autism could, in fact, have been triggered by vaccines. What the research says is for the larger group: It’s still safer for your child’s longterm health to get vaccinations. Saying that no child should get vaccinations because one child was hurt by them is like saying that no child should walk to school because one child was hit by a car while walking to school. It makes no sense, and if you made all your decisions that way, you might end up living in a padded cell.

I read a really great piece in the New Yorker about fear of vaccines and its roots in a swine flu scare in the 70’s. Definitely worth reading (if it’s still available when you read this). The writer says that some parents have been having “swine flu parties” like some do for chicken pox (another disease that can be debilitating or fatal).

The facts are out there if you want to know them. If you don’t, then you’re making your choice and you will live with the consequences, as we always say to our kids! And it’s very possible that there won’t be any consequences. The scientific method tells us that.

No matter what you choose on an emotional and personal level, the scientific method will be there to test whether it’s a logical decision for large numbers of people.

Now available