Tag: parenting

Take your children to hear live music!

Posted on by Suki

I’m reading a fantasy novel in which the main character is a musician. When he is entrapped by a malevolent fairy, he tames her through his music.

I’m pretty certain that the story wouldn’t quite be the same if our hero had pulled an iPhone out of his pocket and said, “Hey, listen to this sick new track by Bruno Mars!”

There’s something special about live music

All hail the Great Morgani! (Photo courtesy of the Santa Cruz Sentinel.)

No matter who the musician is, whether a down-and-out traveler trying to make a buck on a sidewalk or the New York Philharmonic, musicians are in it to communicate. Recordings have many wonderful qualities, but they lack that person-to-person connection you find in live music.

What happens when you hear live music? It’s a one-to-one conversation between the musician and each listener. Though the musician may not be looking at each member of the audience, each member of the audience is within the sphere of communication that the musician has set up, whether that’s the distance an acoustic guitar can be heard on a busy street, or the surround sound of a stadium performance.

This one-to-one transmission is special, and is fundamentally different than listening to recorded music. Perhaps the continuing popularity of live recordings testifies to a bit of the live feeling being transmitted. Despite the fact that we can make “perfect” recordings in studios, live music feels more real.

All live music is valuable

Sometimes it seems that parents feel they need to choose “important” music to bring their children to. But I would argue that unless your child is enthralled with opera, a guy playing a squeezebox on the corner will make a deeper connection with your child than the greatest opera singer.

Concerts that require our children to go against their natures won’t connect with their nature. Being confined to a seat, being forced to look quietly in one direction, being too far away to make a personal connection—it’s no wonder that many kids balk at being taken to concerts.

I recommend finding a cafe that features local musicians. Go to a busy downtown on a nice day. Some of the musicians that children appreciate most in my community are an accordion player who dresses in wild costumes and a large marimba group that sets up on street corners and plays at festivals.

Music is communication

If you can find a situation where your child can actually interact with the musician, even better. My kids loved putting money in buskers’ cases. And we loved the orchestra “petting zoo” that our local symphony puts on each year.

Our local symphony hosts an orchestral “petting zoo.” (Photo courtesy of the Santa Cruz Sentinel.)

Music together

If you can’t get out to hear live music today, another thing you can do listen together—not in earbuds!—or sing together. Make music, share music, and live longer and happier lives.

On the other side of the free range

Posted on by Suki

The last time I wrote about helicopter parenting was 2009. At that point, my kids were 10 and 6, a prime age when our culture is telling us to fear “stranger danger” and other harm that could come to our kids if we allow them the simple freedoms kids used to have.

Click on this handy chart from the CDC to find out the risks to your child’s life. Please notice that “stranger danger” doesn’t make the grade, as far as the CDC is concerned, of things you should worry about.

And I thought it was bad in those good ol’ days.

The New York Times reports that mothers (though, perhaps predictably, not fathers) are being charged with crimes and referred to Child Protective Services for leaving their children in perfectly safe situations that others deem “unsafe.”

Remember:

All research on childhood independence shows that hovering over children and never allowing them time to be alone is bad for them.

All research on childhood safety shows that “stranger danger” is so far down the list of risks for children (and so unpredictable) that acting to prevent it doesn’t actually prevent it.

Our free-range days

My kids are now 19 and almost 16. I allowed them a “free range childhood.” Amongst the “horrible” things I allowed:

  • walking to friends’ houses alone on our street
  • walking in the state park near our home alone
  • playing with friends on the street or in the park
  • riding the bus alone or in pairs
  • going into stores alone
  • waiting for me in the public library

My children loved to go on walks on our street. Shockingly, I allowed them to do it….though I did wish they would wear shoes!

Amongst the horrible things that have happened to them:

  • figuring out how to negotiate with typical adults
  • figuring out what to do when they missed a bus
  • learning to interact with other children naturally
  • learning how to manage money
  • and yes, making sure to keep their bodies and emotions safe from predatory humans

I realize that something truly horrible could have happened to them. But something truly horrible is so unusual and so random, it just as likely could have happened when they were with me.

The guilt monster

But I will admit, as the moms in the Times article explain, that guilt was a constant presence in my subconscious and conscious mind when they were out. I remember one time standing at the kitchen sink watching my younger child go out our front gate, having declared that they were going for a walk. I imagined the headlines: “Local parenting writer’s child abducted while walking alone.”

Bad Mommy!

For those of you with younger children now, the only advice is to keep these basic facts in mind. And if anyone questions you, please feel free to quote me:

  1. Choose your partner well, and the danger of physical violence against your child by an adult will be negligible
  2. Instead of worrying about stranger danger, get your baby vaccinated for diseases which they are more likely to die of
  3. Feed your child healthy food, including dairy without hormones, vegetables without excessive pesticides, and meat without unnecessary antibiotics
  4. Buy a safe car, and drive safely, and don’t look at your phone while driving
  5. Teach them safety skills, then…
  6. Set them free.

I can’t tell you how to avoid the guilt. That is a battle each one of us has to wage on her own.

Parenting in the age of fear porn

Posted on by Suki

Faced with clickbait articles about all the harm we can do to our children, it’s hard to know how to make decisions. Parents are facing very real distress at the onslaught of competing voices. I am not immune, of course, but I have made a choice.

I advocate rational decision-making based on using the information we have, then moving forward with our lives without regret.

Here’s why:

Rational decision-making is a process of watching accumulating data and making the best choices given the data we have.

There’s a great temptation to parents to try to figure out what to do based on our fears of the future. Will we regret making this choice?

But there’s no reason to regret your past choices if they were made based on the best data you had at the time. Rational decision-making allows you to let your future self off the hook.

Fear journalism is not there to inform us or help us in our decision-making.

Fear-based articles are not there to inform us. They are there to titillate us. People get off on reading scary stories about what other people “did to” their kids.

I remember what it was like when states started enacting seatbelt laws: I kept running into stories about how “my kid/mother/friend” was “thrown clear” in an accident and “would have died” if s/he’d been in a seatbelt.

Of course, the data on seatbelts is absolutely, unequivocally clear: they save lives. For every person who might have been “saved” by not being in a seatbelt, millions really are saved.

Make the right choice for now and don’t regret it later if more data proves that choice wrong.

It’s very common for parents now to agonize over choices they have to make for their children. Many of these choices are medical, and involve a new vaccine, therapy, or treatment. The best way forward in all of these cases is to check out the reasons for the treatment, what the current understanding is, and go forward with the treatment if there is no clear reason not to. In the future, accumulated data might suggest that the risk of that particular treatment outweighs the benefits in certain cases. Or maybe a commonly accepted treatment will be replaced by something better. But that won’t change the rightness or wrongness of an individual choice at this time.

The right choice is to do what current understanding says is the best choice, and not regret it later.

Decisions made based on fears of what might happen aren’t rational and don’t have good outcomes in general.

Just because sometimes they turn out to be “right” doesn’t make them rational. Most of the time decisions made out of fear have worse outcomes than rational decisions. But there’s very little money in publishing stories about bad things that didn’t happen: “My Kid Didn’t End Up in a Wheelchair Because of Polio” isn’t very enticing clickbait.

People seek out titillation.

We are living in an age of fear porn.

Parents are the most vulnerable victims of fear-based journalism. We are making choices for other humans that could change their entire lives.

One area where fear-based journalism has had a great effect is vaccines. We read and hear these fear stories daily. “My child got a vaccine and this horrible thing happened.”

But the data on vaccines is abundant and the scientific community continues to agree: The overall effect of vaccines on our population is a clear positive. If you like to get your journalism with a dose of humor and foul language, check out this piece by John Oliver. If you like a point-by-point refutation, this is a good one from Australia. If you want links to the data, start at the CDC.

With vaccines, the only rational decision to make is to go with the data we have on hand and move forward. Fear of what might happen leads us to make irrational decisions. Understanding the data lets us make the right choice for now and move on.

How we live and parent is our choice.

You don’t have to go with the crowd and live a life based on clickbait-generated fear. You get to make the decision about how to live your life.

The rational way to get through this life of too many competing voices is to make the best decision based on the information we have on hand and move on. But this is hard to do when we are facing the onslaught of fear journalism.

Reject fear porn.

Avoid clickbait, let your future self off the hook, and stick with the science.

Also, listen to Neil deGrasse Tyson.

More on this topic:

Book review: Raising Human Beings

Posted on by Suki

Raising Human Beings: Creating a Collaborative Partnership with your Child
Dr. Ross Greene
Scribner, 2016

There are times when I fervently wish that all human beings were raised to understand the value of empathy, cooperation, and collaboration. This is one of those times.

I’ve been meaning to write a review of Raising Human Beings: Creating a Collaborative Partnership with your Child by Dr. Ross Greene ever since it came out. Uncharacteristically, I bought this book in hardcover. Perhaps that’s because when my younger child was 10, I believe that I joined with a zeitgeist of parents around the country who willed Raising Human Beings into reality. Collectively, we had read Greene’s The Explosive Child because we had a child of that description, then realized that it was also the perfect manual for raising any human being, explosive or otherwise.

Dr. Greene apparently heard our collective cry for a book aimed at all parents outlining his approach, which so improved the lives of families trying to raise difficult children. He heard us, and Raising Human Beings was born.

Greene starts from a place of simple logic: All children want to do well if they can. As much as we want to impute devious motives to our misbehaving children, they are misbehaving not because they want to

Drive

   Us

     Out

        Of

            Our

                  Minds,
but because they simply need something. Sometimes they have no idea what they need. Sometimes they think they need something completely different than what they really need. But they have a need nonetheless.

Greene’s approach is to teach parents to work with their little human beings starting not from an assumption of misbehavior, but from a place of empathy and compassion. Our little human beings are works in progress. They need our guidance to learn how to work within this complicated, confusing world. As parents, it’s our job to raise our children, not to beat them down or lord over them.

All of us want to raise the best human beings we can, but many of us fall back on the flawed reasoning that informed previous generations of parents. Dr. Greene calls this Plan A, and he understands why you use it. It’s quick, dirty, and seems (sometimes) effective. It feels good to say “because I said so.” Getting angry can be cathartic.

But Plan A isn’t what our kids need in this world. We live in a Plan B world. In this world, you’ll do best if you know how to figure out what other people need, understand your own needs, and learn to collaborate so everyone gets their needs met as well as possible.

Plan B is complicated, slow, and frustrating. I would venture to predict that most parents actually give up on it somewhere before actual full realization of the approach (I certainly did). But I feel very confident that all families will benefit from however much of this approach you can implement in your particular family situation.

I can’t recommend this book highly enough. If you have a particularly tough nut to crack, get The Explosive Child instead or in addition. It will improve your lives, and you will send out into the world healthy human beings who understand the value of empathy, cooperation, and collaboration.

And we could all use a few more of those around.

Are we doing better? A mom, a daughter, and a small press.

Posted on by Suki

I went to a reading the other night at Bookshop Santa Cruz. It was the most fabulously successful reading I’ve seen there, literally standing room only. But it wasn’t Jonathan Franzen or Suzanne Collins that pulled them in.

It was a mom, a daughter, and a little independent press.

The mom is Dena Taylor, famous in Santa Cruz for her many-year run with the great gathering of women writers, In Celebration of the Muse. (I read at The Muse once. I got to wear my fabulous red dress, a color which I admit that redheads should not wear, but I felt pretty darn fabulous and I got a laugh out of the friendly audience of local women and some of their men, so it was great!)

The daughter is Becky Taylor, also somewhat famous in Santa Cruz for being amongst the first mainstreamed disabled people in our public schools.

The press is Many Names Press, which has been run for years by my friend Kate Hitt. Kate selects poetry and prose by mostly local writers who write from the heart and with a unique (and usually not very marketable) point of view.

Kate introducing Becky and Dena at the reading. I had to crop this photo pretty seriously because of the sea of grey and balding heads that were in the foreground! What a crowd! (And a few were neither grey nor balding!)
Kate introducing Becky and Dena at the reading. I had to crop this photo pretty seriously because of the sea of grey and balding heads that were in the foreground! What a crowd! (And a few were neither grey nor balding!)

Kate has been telling me for months that she’s been so excited about working with Dena and Becky on their memoir, Tell Me the Number Before Infinity. The book is written in alternating chapters by Dena and Becky about their experiences. The first experiences are Dena’s, finding out that her daughter had suffered brain damage at birth and would be disabled, then realizing as her daughter grew that her “differently abled” daughter’s abilities included a very advanced aptitude for math. Then we start to hear from Becky as she learns to navigate a world that assumes that a woman who uses crutches and speaks slowly and with a stutter must be stupid, deaf, or a combination of both.

Dena and Becky’s story was familiar to me. I have written before about the term “twice-exceptional” and the difficulties of raising a child who has both unusual disabilities and unusual gifts. Becky’s differences were at the extreme ends. At a time when Americans were unused to disabled people expecting to be allowed into the mainstream, Becky was unique—and often unwanted. And although our public schools in the 70’s were sadly probably better equipped to handle a brilliant child, she faced the stigmatism and misunderstandings that many gifted children face.

Listening to them talk about their experiences made me wonder: Have we improved at all? Are we doing better at accepting twice-exceptionality?

I think to a certain degree, things have improved. Certainly, the general public is much more likely to have interacted with a disabled person now than 30 years ago. Most people are at least aware that physical disabilities don’t necessarily correlate with intellectual disabilities.

On the other hand, schools are probably doing a worse job at integrating brilliant children of any flavor. Our focus on tests and standardization comes at a price: creative, unusual thinkers are devalued. They are bored at the repetition and emphasis on rote knowledge. And teachers often note that such intellectual brilliance doesn’t always correlate with high test scores, so these kids are often dismissed as unteachable.

I am glad, in any case, that Dena and Becky wrote their book, and that at their first reading they—and Kate’s press—were received so warmly. I hope that this book adds yet another little bit of strength in the resistance to the corporatization, standardization, and dumbing down of our education and our literature.

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