Half Changed World

It’s been a while since I’ve posted about D and his limited diet.  I still worry that he’s going to develop scurvy or something, but I’ve pretty much come to peace with Ellyn Satter’s division of labor — we decide what food to put in front of him; he decides what he’s going to eat of it.  For Thanksgiving, he had a miniscule taste of the cheese biscuits and pumpkin muffins.  He’s decided that plain spaghetti is acceptable, so I guess we’re making progress.  He’s active, he’s happy, he’s at a higher percentile on the growth curve than I was at his age, so we’re trying not to worry.

As I commented to Phantom Scribbler this week, dealing with kids’ food issues is incredibly frustrating, in part because everyone has really good advice.  Except that, like us, she’s tried almost everything you can think of, and it hasn’t made a difference.  (And Baby Blue isn’t gaining weight, so she’s under a lot more pressure than we are.)

One of the standard pieces of advice that people give is that kids will be more willing to eat different things if they’re involved in cooking them.  That hasn’t worked so well for us.  D loves to cook dinner, but only because it lets him control the menu — so we all wind up eating peanut butter on ritz crackers, with sprinkles.  So tonight, I told him that if he wants to cook dinner, it has to involve a protein and a vegetable, as well as a starch. 

He promptly pulled out Pretend Soup, which a friend gave him quite a while ago and he ignored, and started perusing the recipes.  We didn’t have the ingredients for most of the recipes, but we did have carrots, and he said that he wanted "carrot pennies."  So we sliced up a few carrots — and miracle of miracles — he ate some. 

Last week, MC Milker (from the Not Quite Crunchy Parent) commented that one of the advantages of wooden play kitchens is that they’re sturdy enough to last through several kids, and can be sold on eBay when you’re done with them.

I certainly know people who use the high potential resale value as a justification (excuse?) for buying high end baby and kid stuff, from Bugaboo strollers to Hanna Andersson clothing.  But I wonder how many of them actually wind up reselling things?  The most cost-effective thing to do is probably to both buy things used and resell them.

I’ve sold some baby stuff, but I’ve given away far more.  For t-shirts and the like, I just can’t be bothered to carefully wash, photograph, advertise, respond to questions, and then either schlepp to the post office or make arrangements to meet the buyers.  I’m  curious about the people who do find this worthwhile.  Some people are clearly doing this on a semi-professional basis, buying things at end of season sales specifically in order to sell them online the next year.  But others are just listing a few items, as their kids outgrow them.  It’s a high tech yard sale.

I try to give things to friends or family, but if they’re not interested, or if I’m just desperate to get something out of the house, it goes to Value Village.  We just gave our jog stroller to a friend who is expecting her first baby.  Yes, we probably could have gotten some money for it, but the money isn’t make-or-break for us, so we decided to just give it to her.  Things have to be pretty beat up before I just put them in the trash.

We buy the vast majority of the boys’ clothes on ebay.  I refuse to spend $8 on a t-shirt.  Some day maybe they’ll figure it out and protest, but as long as we can get away with it, we will.  I focus on the large lots, since otherwise the shipping makes it less of a bargain.  When I’m paying $2 each for pants, I don’t sweat it if one or two pieces don’t fit.  I know it’s more expensive than the thrift store, but I’m willing to pay a few dollars for the convenience.

I happened to be looking at my eBay profile today, and discovered that I’ve been a member since June 1999.  That surprises me — I wouldn’t have guessed that I’d been on it so long.  I’ve got a feedback level of 71, but I’ve probably bought closer to a hundred things (not everyone gives feedback).  Of all the things that I’ve bought on eBay, I’ve only really been disappointed once (by a used computer where the battery wouldn’t hold a charge).  At this point, I’m surprised when I run into people who have never bought anything on eBay.

I’m feeling low energy, so turning to the cute kid story category for an easy post:

• When I got in this evening, the boys were running around with blankets over their heads and crashing into things and saying "who turned out the lights?"  D. thought it was absolutely hysterical when we found in the Ranger Rick he brought home from school a picture of a squirrel with its head in a peanut butter jar.  The caption, of course, was "who turned out the lights?"
• I went up to my bedroom to change into jeans.  I was hoping to maybe sneak in 2 minutes of checking my messages, but N followed me upstairs, saying "I keep you company, mommy."  When I had the nerve to shut the bathroom door on him, he protested "I need to keep you company."  I told him "I want my privacy."  "Are you using the potty, mommy?"
• When N finished eating, he was playing around with what happened to his plate when he put it on top of the tines of the fork and pushed down on the handle.  "No catapults at the table," I told him. "Oh, wight, I fowgot, no cataputs at the table.  At dinner," he responded.
• For my birthday, D gave me Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and we’ve been reading it out loud.  It’s a near-perfect read-aloud book — short chapters, each of which end on a cliffhanger.
• In D’s folder, we received notice of an "honors ceremony" tomorrow morning.  It’s possible that this notice was sent home on Friday, since D was out sick then, but we didn’t get it until today.  For K-2, it’s from 8.30 to 9.15, which is right when N needs to be dropped off at preschool.  I can go into work an hour late, so I’ll show the flag, but I’m still a bit irritated.

Stepping away from the politics for a little while, I thought I’d do some reviews. 

• First, Curious George, the movie.  (Disclosure: I was sent a free review copy.  While I don’t necessarily praise the things that I get sent, I do feel guilty if I don’t get around to posting about them.  Should I?  Is it unethical to accept the offers if I don’t review the item?)  This is a cute, inoffensive kids movie.  Unlike most G-rated movies these days, there are no hidden pop references that are designed to go over the kids heads.  The plot is not directly based on any of the Curious George Books, although they inspire various scenes (George painting the walls, George hanging from a balloon).   The writers figured out how to avoid the most cringe-worthy elements of the book (e.g. that the man in the yellow hat kidnaps George) and also answer such pressing questions as what he’s doing in that stupid yellow suit in the first place.  My kids loved it.
• Street Fight.  I netflixed this, and asked T. if he wanted to see it.  What’s it about, he wanted to know.  It’s a documentary about a mayoral race, I said (the 2002 Newark mayoral race between Sharpe James and Cory Booker).  Not interested, he said.  But 15 minutes later, he was watching it just as intently as I was.  It has the hypnotic qualities of a car crash — you can’t believe that James’ goons didn’t realize how bad they were going to look on video.
• I’m an Amazon Associate on this blog (last quarter I earned $2.42), so they occasionally send me emails pitching products I might want to feature.  Most of the toys they’re promoting for this holiday season made me yawn, but both T and I are sorely tempted by the new Lego Mindstorms robots.  We’re resisting the temptation, because we know our boys are really too young for them, but boy do they look impressive.
• I’ll admit that I’m also quite tempted by the Nintendo Wii.  If that controller is as cool as it’s being described, I suspect we’ll be getting one, although maybe not this holiday season.  The idea is that the controller is motion sensitive, so instead of pushing a combination of buttons, you can use it as a tennis racket or steering wheel or whatever the game requires.
• In browsing through the toys r us catalog, I had to laugh at the Lifestyle Dream Kitchen, which is described as "realistic and upscale."  A quick comparison with the regular play kitchen reveals that what makes this "upscale" is the fake stainless steel on the stove and the refrigerator.  But this has to be an aspirational pitch, because my guess is that the mommies and daddies who have stainless steel appliances in their ktichen wouldn’t buy their little darlings anything with so much plastic — they’d go for something like this wooden version.

What’s on your wish list?

We had N’s birthday party today.  For D, we had gotten away with having only family parties until last year, but since that put the idea of a "party" into N’s head, he would have been disappointed without one.  We had the sort of small-scale at-home party that everyone I knew had when I was growing up, and that is becoming less and less common in these parts.  Hullaballo, Pass the Parcel, pizza, cake, playdoh.  We invited the two other boys from his preschool class, of whom only one could come, and a family friend.  It was lovely.

And, even with such a small scale party, I’m exhausted.  I feel like I spent most of the weekend cleaning.  I don’t know the parents of N’s preschool classmates well, and was not willing to let their first impression be our usual level of benign chaos. (And even after the cleaning, I still worry that they think we’re slobs.)  At least three times today, D got overwhelmed by his frustration that N was getting all sorts of cool presents and he wasn’t and burst into tears.  It’s hard; I understand.

The NY Times had an article this week (written by a friend of mine, as it happens) on how young children learn from television.  In particular, the article discusses a study that found that the more that children interacted with the television characters — Blue’s Clues is cited as particularly well-designed — the more they learned.

On vacation last week, I heard N shouting as he tried to open the heavy sliding door on our rental house.  It took me a minute to figure out that he was saying "Abre!" just like on Dora the Explorer.  He also loves to make a gate across the entry to our kitchen with his body, and make us do knock knock jokes before he’ll open.  So, yes, I’m sure he’s learning from television.  But I still cringe when we go to the bookstore and he shouts with his enthusiasm about finding books with Dora and Boots.  Why don’t you paint a scarlet "TV" on me while you’re at it, kid?

In spite of the bad rap that TV gets, I’m not convinced it’s bad for small children as long as it doesn’t replace reading.  A report came across my desk today about mother-toddler bookreading in low-income families which confirmed that reading to kids promotes language development.  As the abstract of the study says, "Path analyses show reciprocal and snowballing relations between maternal bookreading and children’s vocabulary."

One minor finding of the study is that moms are more likely to read to their first-born children than to later ones.  That should not come as a surprise to anyone who has more than one child.  I’m sure that younger children are also exposed to more television, and in particular, more non-educational television (e.g. D sure wasn’t watching KimPossible when he was 2).  I wonder if there’s a way to use that fact to improve research on the effects of TV on child development — most current research is flawed because it can’t distinguish between the effects of TV on children and the effects of having parents who allow or don’t allow lots of TV watching.

I’m not worried about N in any case.  We’ve been reading a lot of In the Night Kitchen lately, and he’s been walking around reciting long passages from it.  He particularly likes "I’m not the milk, and the milk’s not me.  I’m Mickey!"  Except that sometimes he says it as "I’m not the milk, and the milk’s not me.  I’m N—!"   or "I’m not the milk, and the milk’s not me.  I’m D—!"  and then he sneaks a peek over at D to wait for his reaction. 

Today’s book is The Price of Privilege, by Madeline Levine.  Levine is a psychologist in Marin county, California, and she writes about how she’s seeing more and more affluent teenagers who are depressed, anxious, anorexic, using drugs, cutting themselves, or otherwise acting in self-destructive manners.  She argues that this isn’t in spite of their privileged backgrounds, but because of them. 

In particular, Levine suggests that affluent communities are characterized by:

• intense pressure to perform, in both grades and extra-curriculars
• materialistic values
• very busy parents who don’t have time for their kids (whether or not they work outside the home).
• isolation and lack of social supports.

She claims that the result is kids who don’t have a real "sense of self."  They know what is expected of them — and depending on their personality, may either conform or do precisely the opposite — but don’t know who they are and what they really value in life.  Or, as the subtitle says, "How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids."

Levine argues that parents need to both take a step back from their kids’ lives — let them make more decisions on their own, and learn to deal with the consequences — and be more connected with them as persons and let them know they love them for themselves, not just their accomplishments.  This rang true to me.  I know that my husband is still dealing with the message that he got from his parents as a teenager that they believed that if he was left to make his own decisions, he’d ruin his life. 

The book also helped me articulate some of my irritation with the Post magazine article on "toxic parents" from a couple of weeks ago.  The article seemed to suggest that the only parenting alternatives were to a) let your kids do whatever they wanted, including buying alcohol for them and letting them have unsupervised parties, and b) to track their whereabouts every minute.  I’m pretty sure that the right choice is c) set clear expectations, provide freedom within reasonable limits, and let there be consequences if the kid screws up.  (Levine admits that in spite of her best efforts, some of her son’s friends snuck alcohol into a party at her house, and she got busted by the police.)

That said, I’m not convinced that the people who read this book will be the ones who need to, or if they do, that they’ll recognize themselves.  I suspect it’s more likely to be read by people who enjoy tssking at other people’s bad parenting, and feeling virtuous by comparison.  (And who wouldn’t feel virtuous compared to the dad who wanted Levine to fix his kid’s drug problem, but wouldn’t give up using himself?)

Go over to Julia’s and read her post today.  She asks Ayun Halliday what the appeal of New York is: "… what makes it worth your while to carry six bags of groceries up three flights of stairs to an apartment that is smaller than my garage… WITH A BABY ON YOUR BACK? "  And Ayun responds with a paen to the wonders of the Coney Island Mermaid Parade.  It’s just wonderful.

As I’ve written before, if not as eloquently as Ayun, an urban childhood has its own charms.  If real estate had been slightly cheaper in the District nine years ago, we might have stayed on the other side of the Potomac.  But as it is, I live somewhere between true city and true suburbs, with a minivan and a Costco membership, but without a driveway.  My kids chase fireflies on summer evenings, and also have conversations with the mildly schizophrenic man who details cars on our block.  These days, I’m more likely to envy friends with big backyards than those who go to interesting shows, but I’m ok with that.

Today’s New York Times’ magazine has a long story about a family in the foster care system.  Marie has five children, the first of whom she had at age 13, and has a history of drug use, incarceration, and involvement with abusive men.  She’s completed a course of substance abuse treatment, is testing clean, and has jumped through the hoops the child welfare agency has asked her to.  But the agency is moving to terminate her parental rights, because they don’t think she has the emotional stability and personal resources to cope with the many needs of her troubled kids.

I’m not going to presume to second guess the agency based on a magazine article.  The one thing that’s clear is that this case falls in the awful grey range, where there aren’t clearcut right choices.  One of the things that was hardest for me to accept in my CASA training is that once families are in the child welfare system — particularly once they’ve messed up enough to have a child removed from the home — in many ways they’re held to a higher standard than families in general.  Things that would never get CPS involved in the first place are enough to prevent reunification.  But you can’t keep kids in limbo indefinitely while you wait for their parents to get their acts together.

The article raises the fact that poor kids are disproprortionately likely to be removed from their homes by CPS, that the same types of problems are much more likely to result in termination of parental rights when the parents don’t have other resources to draw on.  It needs to be read together with another article from the same magazine, After the Bell Curve, which discusses the evidence that being raised in poverty stunts kids’ intellectual development, so that they don’t achieve their maximum potential. 

The article about Marie quotes a DFS official as saying "Some people just should not be parents."  I’m sure that’s true.  But the article raises the possibility that Marie isn’t one of them, that she loves her children and with enough support could be a good parent to them.  But that support isn’t there, not from the child welfare agency, not from anyone in Marie’s life, and not from society at large.

I had an interesting conversation with an acquaintance the other day.  She was talking about how she had prepped her daughter for the first day of camp, explaining that her daughter doesn’t cope well with loud, chaotic settings, and is also quite short.  So, they’ve been going over strategies, such as bringing a quiet toy to play with, and telling the other kids how old she is when they meet.  I commented that my son, D, is also short for his age, but that I don’t think he’s noticed.

It’s hard for me to know whether it would be helpful to try to give D some social skills advice before he starts kindergarten  — try to learn the other kids’ names, don’t sit there waving your hand every single time the teacher asks a question.  As a parent, there’s a desire to protect your child from obvious traps.  And yet, it’s not clear that such warnings would be helpful.  D’s much more of an extrovert than I ever was, and makes friends easily with kids on the playground.  He’s convinced that everyone he meets wants to be his friend, and his belief often makes it true.

There’s also the complicating factor that, based on the school’s demographics, D is likely to be either the only white kid in his class, or one of just a couple.  And he may well be the only Jewish kid in the school.  So, he’s going to stick out.  I can’t help but worry that it’s going to make any social sins he commits much more obvious.

Any thoughts, stories, suggestions?