When a friend sent a link yesterday to a discussion about parenting yesterday, I sighed. It took me a long time to get around to reading it. Why? Partially because I’m sick of parenting books and blogs. What the nagging advice de jour? Should we be free-range parents or tiger parents? What looming disaster are they warning us about – poor grades, stress, depression, bullying, body piercing, drugs, bad SAT scores? Those books just stress me out.
I also dragged my feet about reading that article, because parenting HAS been tough for the past couple of weeks. I’m trying to create a place for my special needs kid in a school district that is set up for high achieving kids. It’s not easy work. In the past two weeks, I have set up a list serv for parents of autistic kids in the town, exchanged two dozen e-mails with teachers and administrators, and researched private school options.
Parenting the older dude hasn’t been much easier. In the past two weeks, we’ve dealt with a stomach virus, make up exams, a lost computer file, mid terms, snow days, and placement for honors classes. He’s exhausted, and we’re on a short fuse.
Isn’t raising kids was supposed to be fun? That’s the subject of that article and a new book. So, it is a timely topic. We’ve been batting around this subject a lot this winter.
It is not so important that parenting become fun. It is more important that being a kid is fun. With all the preparation and pressure for Jonah’s midterms, he spent hours and hours in front of his laptop for two weeks. He’s put in longer days than Steve. And he’s only 14. What happened to child labor laws? My 11-year old is under a lot of pressure to pretend that he’s normal. He has a small army of teachers and therapists molding him, while his brain is malleable. He’s made HUGE progress, but he’s tired out. Sometimes he needs to play his video games and talk to himself.
On Saturday, Jonah is going skiing for the day with Steve. That’s Jonah and Steve kind of fun. I’m not pressuring Ian to ski. He doesn’t want to go. Instead, I’ll take him to the mall to see a movie, which is Ian’s kind of fun.
Parenting books, even ones that tell us to have fun, are not fun. I don’t want anybody to tell me what I should be doing better. All parenting books create guilt, and I’m done with it.
Apt. 11d 
I was going to defend the concept of the book the discussion starts with (All Joy and No Fun — whose author I heard interviewed recently), but then I read the column and saw that Del’Antonio had changed the book into a prescription “Keep the joy take back the fun.” I agree with you that discussions that tell you how to do parenting better are not fun, even if they’re saying things like have fun, or let go of the guilt.
I didn’t think the book was like that — from the interview — more of a description of modern parenting and an answer to the sociological studies that, if true, would mean that no one would actually have children (and we know that most people do, and want to, so clearly, there is a paradox). But, I haven’t read the book.
On the other hand, I suspect that Del’Antonio would change anything into a prescription. I can’t believe that the message she took home from the book — which, in the author interview — was to quote one of the fathers “I am the standard” was to feel guilty about the fact that her children are starting to feel bad because they are “picking up” that it is not her joy in life to change sheets at 3 AM.
LikeLike
My 7th grader has, as of yesterday, three out of town trips scheduled through the end of the school year, without us, and for school/extracurricular related activities. It occurred to me this morning that she’s traveling for work, and that her job seems to involve a lot of travel. Scary, and, I’m not sure what it means for life in general.
LikeLike
That is a very interesting point.
LikeLike
Ya gotta do what ya gotta do. I like looking for hints for things, like activities or ideas, and I still love “How to talk so kids will listen and listen so kids will talk” but honestly the rest of it is just super annoying! Also I’m not always in the mood to be a perfect mother: I too need a break. You are a great mom: you are doing more than enough! And parenting is just a big challenge. I personally hate the “my kid eats like the [insert european nationality other than English or Irish] and is going to Princeton” type of books. I hated most interesting food until I actually got out of my parents house and started trying new things…enough already.
LikeLike
jen w said:
“I personally hate the “my kid eats like the [insert european nationality other than English or Irish] and is going to Princeton” type of books.”
Funny! Or Scottish or Poles or Ukrainians or Russians–there are LOTS of European nationalities with very questionable national cuisines).
LikeLike
“The Slavic word “salo” as applied to this type of food (it has other meanings as well) is often translated to English as “bacon” or “lard”. Unlike lard, salo is not rendered. Unlike bacon, salo is not necessarily bacon-cured. Salo has little or no meat (skeletal muscle), and low-meat high-fat bacon commonly is referred to as salo.”
The top right photo really sells it.
“When salo has been aged too long, or exposed to light, the fat may become oxidized on the surface and become yellowed and bitter-tasting. This can be used as a water-repellent treatment for leather boots or as a bait for mouse traps or simply turned into homemade soap.”
Yum!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salo_(food)
LikeLike
Here some things that have been fun lately:
1. Walking to church with my husband with Baby T in her stroller and the big kids on scooters (it’s a 25 minute walk one way).
2. Going shopping with my 6th grade daughter and buying her a funny Minecraft t-shirt.
3. Watching Potop (The Deluge, 1974) with my husband and the big kids (it’s a 5-hour long subtitled Polish movie about sin and redemption and fighting off invading Swedes).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Deluge_(film)
4. Watching the whole extended version LOTR over Christmas break with my husband and the big kids.
5. Taking my architecturally minded 3rd grader for a walking tour of one of our most interesting local neighborhoods.
LikeLike
Love walking the girl to school – 20 minutes each way. Well, 15 minutes if I’m coming back (on my own) – too much to look at and chat about when you are 8! We have THE best conversations while we are walking along.
The Deluge sounds great – big fan of foreign film (go to the Toronto Film Festival each September and gorge on 5 movies a day). Any recommendations would be appreciated!
For us, having dinner together as much as possible, making crepes with the girl on the weekend, Sunday family movie afternoon – it’s never anything really big, just time together.
Oh, and laughing at the stupid and silly family in-jokes that you develop over time.
LikeLike
You might have seen it, but I think probably my favorite movie of all time is Kieslowski’s “Blue.”
I also like “Entre les murs” (French teacher struggles with kids), To Live (Chinese family caught in insanity of the Cultural Revolution), Children of Paradise (Iranian), Leila (Iranian), Babette’s Feast (you’ve probably seen it), Goodbye Lenin (just an amazing comic treatment of what was good and what was terrible about life under communism), Mostly Martha (German), Shall We Dance? (Japanese), Downfall, Fear and Trembling (Japanese-speaking Belgian discovers she doesn’t really understand the Japanese–much much much better than Lost in Translation) and The Dinner Game (French).
There are some perhaps overly obvious ones in there. I was just cribbing those titles from a list I keep of movies to show. When we lived in residence in the dorms, we showed a Friday night movie every week, generally a foreign one. After we moved to Texas, we did a number of graduate movie nights, but post-baby we haven’t done it for a while.
LikeLike
O my, I remember walking my little girl to school. The days are long, but the years are short.
LikeLike
I looked through some old picttures yesterday and got all misty. Jonah pre-growth spurt. Waaaaaahhhhh.
LikeLike
I ordered this book on your recommendation, Laura, and inhaled it over the weekend on my Kindle. A lot of it wasn’t new to me, but it was really a revelation for me to realize that I am not the ONLY one for whom parenting has been mostly about being incredibly anxious — the stakes are so high! It’s so easy to screw the kid up! to screw up the enterprise called parenting!
It has been hard for me to enjoy being a parent because I’m really wrapped up in what she calls the ’emotional caretaking’ side of the parenting thing — the worrying that the kiddo won’t have any friends, won’t get invited to the birthday party, won’t get into college.
I do remember at one point saying to my husband that all three of my children had reached the age of 10 and they were all still alive, so by the standards of Little House on the Prairie I would already be considered a rousing success even if no one ever played soccer. The stakes have definitely gotten higher.
I think if I had a chance to do it over again, the main thing I might have done differently was to get a prescription for anti-anxiety medication.
I thought her argument — that men are less inclined to see parenting as being predominantly about understanding your child and their emotions and that we could learn from them — was an interesting one. I think I’m very much like many of the families she described in the book — where men and women might take turns making dinner, buying groceries, driving people places — but then women seem to have this other shift which is mostly having to do with worrying about the kids. If it was up to my husband, we’d have passed on the Stanley Kaplan SAT prep class, probably the music lessons, and possibly the swim team. In retrospect, he’s glad we did all those things, I think, but I definitely think I worry more.
LikeLike