My piece on Maurice Sendak in the Chicago Tribune:

Claiming Maurice Sendak

By Miven Trageser
May 11, 2012

Maurice Sendak belonged to me. He wasn’t yours. I read him more, I loved him better. You could like him, but he was mine.

When you are little you own your favorites. Favorite color, favorite number, favorite animal, favorite toy and book, these are things adults ask you and you have an answer, and it matters. It is one of the few channels you have to express “who you are.” And so you howl when you get the wrong color plate as it carries all the weight of identity. [Read more]

Technology needs to be a group project: “Trying to work these decisions out separately in each family is not practical in a social medium. If we step up now, we have the opportunity to develop our own culture for online life, one that is grounded in our own, local values.”

My Op Ed in the L.A. Times about working together to form digital community as parents and citizens: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-trageser-kids-and-computers-20120314,0,467805.story

1. I knew this subliminally when I went searching for unsalted mini rice cakes in a sleep-deprived haze: LATimes–Giving Babies Salty Foods May Create Lifelong Preference

2. You try to make them into independent, resilient, strong people and then you have to live with independent, resilient, strong people! NPR: Teens Talking Back –Nuisance or Path to a Bright Future?

3. Pico Iyer on the Joy of Quiet. Needs no words to discuss.

4. I love this.  Any bit of real sleep is like rebooting the computer. We all could use a daily nap, no?

Toddler Naps Aid Emotional Control | Psych Central News

Here are links to clips of mine published in the media.

This is an editorial about safety, danger and precautions that I wrote after a particularly awful murder of a child:

http://articles.nydailynews.com/2011-07-17/news/

EXCERPT: “We should stop considering children as objects to protect and think of them more as verbs, in motion – which they are all the time, if you think about it. I would like us to create a different kind of safety than through protection: safety through competence. In this view, children would be safe playing outside because of their experience and the presence of many of them out there.

When asked why they restrict their child’s freedom in light of a few rare horrors, most parents say, “I just could never live with myself if something happened.” But what does that mean? I think it means, here is a situation so painful that I cannot even let my mind go near it. Unfortunately, that attitude closes the door on a dialogue that could be invigorating to all of us and our communities. Instead we add precautions (fences, leashes, rules and ever more advanced tracking technologies) to discharge our feeling of helplessness.”

Here is one in Salon.com about the hysteria about car seats:

http://life.salon.com/2001/08/01/booster_seats/

EXCERPT: “How many car seats do I have to buy to raise my child safely and obey the law in this country? Too many.”

I am having a great time listening to RadioLab podcasts lately. Here is one with Alison Gopnik, psychology professor and baby expert, talking about games. She talks about the difference in toddlers’ play and the rule-obsessed play of second grade, and somehow we get from there to the World Championship of Chess. Just listen.

http://www.radiolab.org/2011/aug/23/rules-set-you-free/

Here’s another amazing one, called Talking to Machines. It might just put therapists out of business. But stay tuned for the segment on Furbys.

http://www.radiolab.org/2011/may/31/

And this one on language: http://www.radiolab.org/2010/aug/09/words-that-change-the-world/

I don’t think I agree with their conclusions on baby cognition, but it was fascinating to follow how they explore it.

Risk and how we think about it has always been one of my passions. I want to empower people to think about it differently. It’s very important that we be able to discuss our different choices in an open, respectful way. I hope to offer tools and facilitate dialogue about this on Tuesday.

I believe that we tend to idealize a state of safety that we imagine to be absolute when there is no such thing, there are only greater and lesser degrees of risk. While it’s natural to want as much safety as possible for our children, there are more other risks we face when we protect children too much, something I call “slow risks.” These are things like passivity, obesity, fragility and overdependence on electronics. The human animal evolved to react to prehistoric threats to our survival. We don’t live in a world like that any more, so how can we adapt to the modern world and empower children to handle the world they will inherit?

The Benefits of Risk: Why Giving Kids More Freedom Helps Them Grow– offered through

Head Start Body Start : National Center for Physical Development and Outdoor Play

photo by jonRawlinson from Flickr

Every group has a unique culture: Your group of friends, your neighborhood, your parent-and-me group or your pre-school. You have shared expectations and unspoken agreements about kids’ behavior on the playground, sharing, interruptions, thank yous, and more. You also have agreements about what is safe for your kids. How far can the kids roam in the park before you follow or call them back, etc. How close can a toddler get to the newborn? How rough can the rough-housing get? These are decisions that are usually set by cumulative behavior, not conscious discussion. They grow out of just doing it that way over time, which happens from individuals reading each other’s cues and conforming to some extent.

Since anxiety is more contagious than calm, group levels of tolerance for risk get set at the level of whoever has the least risk tolerance. In other words, if someone says, “I would never let Max do that!” it tends to silence the parent who may have tried letting Joseph “do that”: go to the restroom alone, sit in the car alone for a minute, or walk to the neighbor’s house.

Add on our desire to get it right as parents and the tendency for self-judgment, and you see how hard it is to open these things up to talk about. To make matters worse, most of us are parenting in a void, not living in an extended family, village, tribe or other utopia, where the aunts and grandmas show us how it’s done and set up the norms, or at least give us norms to rebel against.

When I come and talk to groups, I help open up these dialogues in a way that is safe and even fun. There are many absurdities in the choices we make about safety, and if you can laugh at yourself, you’re in great shape. If you wonder if you are being too protective, or too cavalier on any issue of safety and independence, I will enjoy exploring it with you. Becoming explicit about what we are afraid of, and talking about it together helps us put it in perspective and make good choices about what precautions we’re taking, and the trade-offs we face. This helps us learn more and support each other more as parents, all of which will improve our world.

Risk Tolerance is Social

A Twitter friend (yes there is such a thing), Lisa Sunbury, of RegardingBaby.com, directed me to Lion’s Whiskers and it’s dedicated to brave parenting. She knew I would love it. Read:

“The more a child learns to take up his/her space in the world with respect and practical knowledge about his/her environment, the more confidently he/she can roam this earth…”

The rest of the quote pertains to a specific experience, but I think it’s 100% right for all aspects of a child’s existence. I highly recommend checking Lions’sWhiskers out. It’s not every day I find an ally: people committed to integrating such things as moral integrity, spiritual meaning, courage, literature and leadership–and on the topic of parenting. I love this broad mission statement. I’m aspiring to write one as comprehensive to represent the heart and purpose of this blog, because I think my purpose needs to become clearer. Here goes:

In redesigning my sites I’m going to focus the blog on the concept of Magical Safety and the Helplessness of Parenting. My core idea is that the utter helplessness of parenting (being bonded to this tiny creature with the imperative to protect and nurture him/her in a chaotic world you can’t control) activates natural protective instincts, that have gone awry in out modern world. We respond not with rational assessments of the dangers and trade-offs, but with magical thinking about safety, as if we could really protect our children from all harm.

The resulting magical stance (and the bubble-wrapping of childhood) is actually an avoidance of the truth of our situation–we cannot control our world much at all. Risk is an inevitable aspect of being alive. Change is the only constant. We can be more fully alive and vibrant and joyful if we embrace this truth instead of running from it.

See and feel the difference between these two images, and you’ll get a sense of what I’m wanting for all of us:

Baby on a Leash

Aspiring Climber, or Celebrating Risk in Living

When we say we want to be safe, on the conscious level we are saying we do not want anything to hurt us, we do not want to feel pain, injury or loss.  We are deeply driven by the simple fact of not wanting to die.

This leads to hunkering down, freezing, and armoring oneself. You can be very safe in this way, but are you alive enough for your taste?

So what could possibly be wrong with wanting to be safe, not be harmed, not die? Nothing except magical thinking. Look at it this way: keeping something safe is usually associated with locking it away, keeping it in a safe. This works for precious heirlooms but does not work for people. Inanimate objects actually are safer when they are locked away, sequestered, or armored. They can be safe, safer, or safest in an objectively quantifiable way.

But not when it comes to human beings. I prefer to think of people less as nouns, and more as verb forms who need safety while they move, especially for children. We need safety in the form of skills, competencies and experience. Magical thinking hinges on seeing ourselves or our children as more object-like, as things that we can protect. It also assumes that safety=protection.

What if there were a sense of safety that accounted for our being in motion, being alive not static? What do we need to conjure in order to imagine this goal which I will name resilient safety?

-Safe streets, sidewalks, greenery, safety to move. Safety to breathe. Neighborhoods with a feeling of community. Safe enough to play outside, not being protected/safe by being kept in an alarmed house.

-Safety through action, competence, and empowerment. Not protected by a walled compound, but safe through competence, having learned to participate in the world at an appropriate level, like walking home from a friend’s house or learning to take public transit.

-Safety through grounded action in one’s body, protecting one’s boundaries from incursion, protecting one’s self from disrespect, abuse or neglect. Having a grounded awareness in one’s body of what touch is and is not OK. Not protected from ever encountering a drunk person on the street, for example, but safe through knowing how to bypass one.

The magical thinking component here tells us that we actually can escape harm and death if only we take all the right precautions. Next post, more on the magical thinking and wish fulfillment behind this.

My Middle Way

Where else could I turn with the contradiction of liking both Tiger Mom’s approach (assume competence, have high expectations, it’s not all about how you feel) and loving the movie about relentless pressure, The Race to Nowhere (we are racing, testing and driving ourselves to nowhere).  In my opinion, too many discussions about children and parenting run aground because we make decisions from how we feel and we teach our children to do the same. We assume feelings are the most important things. I believe this happens because we are culturally narcissistic and overly individualistic. Without broader social underpinnings, shared values that we hold higher than self-actualization, what can we believe in but the Self and its fullest expression?

I find Dr. Wendy Mogel unusual and inspirational in her ability to break us out of the narcissism. I especially appreciate her efforts to bring principles of courage and bravery to parenting, which she does using spiritual principles from Judaism. Here is a quote from her a New York Times profile about this aspect of her work:

[And so Dr. Mogel] started using Jewish teachings. ‘It wasn’t that the Jewish texts had a brand new idea that psychology had never come up with,’ Mogel says. ‘But they came at it from a different angle.’ Like the concept of the yetser hara, the bad impulse within us that is a source of passion and an impetus to creativity, and the yetser tov, the good and proper impulse. ‘They’re very different from the id and the ego and the superego. Psychology textbooks don’t typically say that your child’s worst trait is also the seed of his best traits.’

Her work is accessible to all faiths, and her tone is warm yet not indulgent. She helps us get where we all agree we want to go:  raising children to be competent, successful adults.