Category: Parenting

Charting the puzzles and peeves of kid-herding — from Huggies to homework, Pilates to pinatas.

Rated PG for Parental Gaffe

Published on July 23, 2009

It starts like this. You’re chatting with your kid when a familiar phrase pops into your head. A line of dialogue from a favorite movie of your youth. “Eat my shorts” from The Breakfast Club, perhaps, or “Son, you got a panty on your head” from Raising Arizona. Maybe you’re calling the family to the dinner table, Junior is unresponsive and you find yourself blurting, “Bueller? … Bueller? … Bueller? …”

Then you realize, with a cold blast of horror, that your child has no idea what you’re talking about. No frame of reference through which to recognize your superior cinematic literacy.

How can this be? (And this is where the faulty thinking begins.) No offspring of yours is going to go through life without studying the classics, without paying proper deference to the heroes of your adolescence, the big-screen giants whose vast wisdom and extraordinary wit shaped your psyche: Mel Brooks. Eddie Murphy. Long Duk Dong.

So you rent a movie, tell your kid, “You’re gonna LOVE this” and plop down on the couch for a family movie night. Which is exactly when the cursing begins. And the full-frontal nudity. And the powder-snorting, pole-dancing, cop-killing and flagrant cracking of jokes so racist they actually make your jaw clench.

People, what the (rated R for language) were you thinking?

Kids and Marijuana

Published on July 16, 2009

It’s not easy keeping kids off ganja these days. The world, it seems, has gone to pot. President Obama admits to having “inhaled frequently” in his youth. Hollywood Dudes-of-the-Hour Seth Rogen and James Franco shared a joint (or an authentic-looking prop) onstage at the MTV Movie Awards last summer. Regular moms can get hash prescriptions for anxiety and pick up a dimebag from a clinic on their way to yoga.

Even when photos surfaced this year of Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps taking a bong hit, the nation sort of shrugged with disinterest. Most of his endorsement deals failed to flinch. Last week, Subway launched a new TV commercial featuring Phelps (does he always look that stoned?) and the Sly Stone anthem “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin).” Can’t you just see Subway’s board meeting after the bong photo broke? “Fellas! We sell snack food! Tell me again why this is bad news?”

If a guy can suck skunkweed recreationally and still win 14 gold medals, what’s to dissuade teens from taking their first curious puff? In my experience, there’s only one way to keep your kids from becoming potheads.

You’ve got to become one yourself. That’s right. Light up for the sake of sobriety. Inhale in the name of clean living. Take a hit for the temperance team.

The Nip/Tuck Talk

Published on July 9, 2009

Have you had this conversation at home? “Mom, the other kids are picking on me at school. They say I’m fat.”

“Oh, sweetheart. Kids can be cruel. The important thing to remember is that we love you. And we’re saving up for your lipo.”

No? Good.

Cosmetic surgery is certainly hot — as hot as ever. More than 12 million procedures were performed last year, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. And while teens accounted for more than 200,000 of those (oy, a column for another time), most parents still believe a good “beauty’s on the inside” talk trumps an adolescent collagen injection any day.

What’s good for the gosling, though, may not always fly for the goose. Having ridden the ole “love thyself” buggy about as far as it’ll go, lots of grown-ups opt for a nip or a tuck these days — then find themselves at a loss for how to explain it to their kids. How do you preach self-acceptance and practice self-alteration simultaneously?

Off-Leash Kids

Published on June 25, 2009

Weekday morning, early summer, my kids are playing outside. Not in the backyard. Not in our enclosed, danger-proof, visible-from-every-window backyard.

They’re cavorting out front. Where there are driveways, blind corners, and a teenaged neighbor with a Pontiac and a lead foot. Where there may be oleander. Or vicious dogs. Or a gun-toting, candy-dangling, meth-addled pedophile.

Maybe not. But from where I sit at this computer, I can’t see my kids. And though it makes me sound deranged, I admit this simple scenario puts me on edge. It fans a smoldering lump of fear deep in my gut. As they explore the world beyond our porch, their voices grow fainter, and the voice in my head grows louder: “Lady, you ain’t doing your job.”

Am I insane? Yes. Also no.

Journalist Lenore Skenazy says such parental paranoia is the common and natural result of sensationalistic media reports on ghastly kidnappings, gruesome murders, and freak accidents — all of which make society seem far more dangerous than it actually is. Her book Free-Range Kids argues that Americans have become so unnecessarily fearful for our children’s safety (kneepads for crawling babies? helmets for wobbly toddlers?) that we suck all the joy out of both parenthood and childhood.

Fathering Females

Published on June 18, 2009

When I was born, the doctor misspoke. “It’s a bo… ,” he told my parents, “a girl!” I work hard to avoid pondering what it is the guy thought he saw. My dad was surprised to feel a twinge of disappointment. “It only lasted a split second,” he assures me. “And I probably wouldn’t have felt it at all except for Dr. Slip.”

I don’t begrudge him his momentary grudge. As the mother of boys, I know that being a yin and begetting a yang can make a parent uneasy. My boys like to beat on things, jump off stuff, and generally behave in confounding ways. And when I shepherd my three-year-old to the bathroom at 2 a.m., I’m ill-skilled to help him aim. Or shake. You might as well ask me to repair a blown head gasket.

Thus do I feel a certain kinship to the fathers of daughters. Girls are complicated, and raising them is tricky — especially when your model for “father” is the fella who taught you to throw a long bomb and “take it like a man.”

I know a guy who cursed when he found out his wife was pregnant with a girl. “I remember distinctly yelling ‘#@$%!’ in the muffled cone of silence my car offered,” he said. “At the time, it was just one more thing that I felt was not going my way. I would come to the realization years later that it’s your child’s personality you fall in love with, and it’s irrelevant what that personality is attached to.”

End-of-the-Year-Gifts for Teachers

Published on May 28, 2009

Okay, class, time for a math quiz.

Take your child’s attitude. Multiply it by 24 students. Subtract 11 weeks of summer vacation, but add $5.3 billion in education budget cuts.

That’s what our kids’ teachers cope with daily, from the second their coffee kicks in to the moment the blessed bell rings at 3 o’clock. And we parents are grateful, of course we are. As the school year ends, though, it’s hard to know how to express that gratitude. Or, frankly, how to wrap it.

Some families bake cookies to show thanks. Others give potted plants, scented candles, or handmade greeting cards. I’ve heard of parents bestowing teachers with cashmere robes, Tiffany necklaces, and even $300 cash.

“Are we supposed to be supplementing their income because they are ridiculously underpaid?” asked a mother I know, whose confusion echoes my own. “Or is it purely a token of appreciation, in which case, should it come from the child or the parent?”

So I did what I’d be too ashamed to do without the defensible guise of “column research.” I asked teachers what they really want. And some of their answers surprised me.

Motherhood

Published on May 21, 2009

They say crisis brings people closer. Certainly it was true during the Jesusita Fire when, if you weren’t evacuated yourself, you were welcoming displaced friends into your home.

I think motherhood — especially new motherhood — is a kind of crisis in itself. For all their wee littleness, newborns bring colossal emotional upheaval and physical duress. Their arrival demands mandatory evacuation from our comfort zones.

And women bond over it. Un-inclined to discuss their chapped nipples and husbands’ quenchless libidos with the friendly check-out guy at Vons, they’ll squawk their guts out to any stranger with a diaper bag.

Or a movie camera.

At 6 p.m. on Wednesday, May 27th, UCSB’s MultiCultural Center Theater will screen a new documentary on the pleasures and pains of parenthood. Birthright: Mothering Across Difference will be followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker, my friend Celine Parreñas Shimizu, who teaches in the Feminist Studies department. The event is free.

The film is a patchwork of interviews with 50 area moms: gay and straight, rich and poor, married and single, working and stay-at-home, white and Latina and Asian and black. Despite differences, they share anxieties, hopes, and points of pride.

Pool Spawn

Published on May 14, 2009

Pregnancy is a slog. For me, there was 4 p.m. nausea and 2 a.m. charlie horses. There were sore breasts, fat feet, and a humiliating resemblance to the Fantasia hippos when I slipped, foolishly, into sexy lingerie.

“Poor you,” my compassionate husband often said. “You’re going through so much.”

Each time, I told him the same thing: “It’s okay. You’re doing the swim lessons.”

Different people dread different points on the parenthood continuum. Some fear labor and delivery. Others cower from potty-training. Others cringe at the notion that someone will eventually hand their graceless offspring a driver’s license.

My personal Misery Milestone is the one that has me leaping from a soup-like public pool with a slippery toddler and plodding through cold puddles on slick cement in search of a restroom where I must wrestle with said toddler’s rubbery swimsuit and stand dripping and shivering while he uses the toilet, then looks up at me with chlorine-reddened eyes and chatters, “R-r-ready to g-go b-back in?”

Any mom who’s been baptized in the church of swim lessons, who’s donned her least revealing tankini and descended hesitantly into the wet world of “kickers” and “splashies” and other words one would never say in a board room, knows that swim lessons don’t improve as your child ages. They just shift.

My Son's Peaceful Defiance

Published on April 30, 2009

Parents can be so smug. We think we have life’s puzzles solved, and that our kids are callow dimwits desperate for our guidance. Admit it: We think of them as dense, doughy biscuits requiring the heat of our unparalleled wisdom to rise to their fluffy full potential.

Lately, though, I’ve been wondering if we’re wrong. If, in fact, our car seat-bound offspring are the ones who have the answers and we grown-ups are too culturally programmed, too set-in-our-ways, to see it.

The notion strikes when I ask my three-year-old to put on his shoes. Or clean up his toys. Or turn off his video, come upstairs and take a bath. That’s when he looks at me with utter impunity and says, “I won’t.”

There’s no willfulness in his voice. No shame. No guilt. “I won’t.”

He’s simply stating a fact, letting me know we’re going to have a problem here if I insist on pursuing this ridiculous mandate.

There’s a look of — is that peace? — that crosses his peanut butter-smeared face when he says it, and I’ll admit the whole situation stymies me. My linear adult thought process goes like this: How do I get the child clean if he won’t get in the tub? How “clean” does a person really need to be? What will his preschool teachers whisper when they notice the same dirt smudge that was on his knee yesterday…and the day before?

Sin City

Published on April 16, 2009

It looked so much nicer in my head. The way I pictured it, we were going to spend a few days of bond-bolstering family togetherness at a Las Vegas resort that would cater to our every fickle whim. By day we would lounge poolside; by night we’d venture out to ooh and ahh over the city’s convenient cultural lessons: the Venetian’s canals, Luxor’s Sphinx, Caesar’s Trevi Fountain.

In my imagination — over-enterprising as it may be — we were going to find freedom in the clean light of the warm desert sun.

Instead, we got drenched in debauchery.

On reflection, yes. It was witless to seek a virtuous vacay in Sin City, the nation’s unapologetic adult playground. In the 1990s, Vegas’s tourism office made a marketing push to lure families there. But the campaign went bust and the tourism office did an about-face, adopting the decidedly grown-up (notice I didn’t say “mature”) motto, “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.”