What underparenting looks like when you leave a 20 year-old home alone for the weekend...
What underparenting looks like when you leave a 20 year-old home alone for the weekend...
Recently, I had one of those mothering brainstorms that my children have become accustomed to, and to which they generally accede with grace under the not-unreasonable-assumption that my enthusiasm for the idea will peter our more quickly if they just go along with me. Here's the idea: five nights a week, right after dinner and before the homework blitz, we each pick something to read out loud.
But because they don't like me to get off too easily, Middle usually announces that he has picked The Cruel Mother. We laugh and then everybody readily, if somewhat randomly, reads something outloud. The idea is that you don't practice, don't pick a poem in advance, don't even read the poem before you read it. Just open the book, stand up and read out loud.
We are now a few weeks in and I gotta tell you, this is a keeper. Our living room coffee table now sports a few poetry books. This is a particularly good one for the task:
Essential Pleasures: A New Anthology of Poems to Read Aloud
But, hey, don't take my word for it, take Verlyn's...
Come to think of it, tonight I am going to read that instead of a poem. Will report back.
I read this interview today in the NYTimes. I highly recommend it for parents for its applicability to parenting and for kids who will someday soon venture into the job market.
Take-home for parents:
Be patient.
Be calm.
Be thankful.
Be a problem-solver, not a problem-creator.
Value emotional intelligence.
Take-home for kids looking for a job:
All of the above and...
Have a strong set of values.
Have a great work ethic.
Know how to write really well.
Expect to be asked in an interview to talk about the last few books you have read.
Develop your emotional IQ.
Be a team player.
Focus on your job.
Know how to write really well (he mentions it more than once too!)
Great idea for when things get heated around the house....
"If you are in a really hard debate and somebody veers off the subject and goes after you in a way that isn’t fair, you get to ring the bell. It’s a violation of the rules of the road. So you ring the bell if something wasn’t a fair shot, and we all laugh."
Here's the Permalink if you want to pass it on to your kids, friend, or, um, parents?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/business/26corner.html
Let’s start with the bright side, shall we?
It’s the New Yorker.
And it’s the only thing on the floor.
It is even possible that the object of my son’s attention was the article and not the cartoon. What?!!? I didn’t say it was “likely.”
And even if it was the cartoon, it’s still a step up from reading the same Calvin & Hobbes for the three hundred and twenty-sixth time. Am I right?
Now for the, uh, less bright, side.
It is, yes, on the floor.
I picked it up and threw it away.
I do hope he wasn’t in the middle of that article.
About Day 4:
cce wrote:
I just love this story. First, because it is makes me laugh every time I read it and second, because it's actually very important. To wit: how do you figure out what your child is ready to take on in the way of responsibilities? And if we always give them the benefit of the "Aw, they're just kids" argument, when exactly are they going to show up and act like the adults we want them to eventually be?
We all want to be Goldilocks and get it just right, but if I had it all to do over again, I think I would err on the side of expecting too much of my children rather than expecting too little. Maybe I say this because the grass is always greener on the other side and in my case the other side would have been expecting my children to chew with their mouths closed, clean up after themselves and be considerate well before, well, now.
I think, particularly with my Oldest, my anxiety about mothering the first time around - coupled with a personal history of having felt shoved out of the nest at a very early age - led me to be too tentative in this regard . I was always waiting for him to make the move, take the chance, say “Yes!” (We were also kinda traumatized by an ill-fated foray into AYSO soccer in Kindergarten. We forced him to finish the season even though he LOATHED it. Big. Mistake. Deserves its own post, that one.)
Anyway, I rationalized my own reluctance to push him with a pretty solid argument. I told myself that I wanted his developmental steps to come from him, to be internally motivated and not an effort to please me or anyone else. I still believe this and if I had to pick a baseline to work from, I’d take this over its opposite. I have seen waaaay too many parents who push their children hard, not in the service of the child, but because the parent is narcissistically gratified by having a child who behaves a certain way at the table, gets a certain grade in a class, scores a certain number of goals in soccer. Bleh.
But the problem with my approach, and what I didn’t see until I had spent an embarrassingly long time being a parent, is that a huge part of the job is simply believing in your child - in his capabilities, her possibilities, his fundamental all-rightness, her capacity for growth - both in the present moment and in the far-off imagined day of adulthood. I now think that if at every step of the way we believe in our children’s inherent capabilities, they will show us what they are capable of.
Obviously, if you ask too much of a child, you are setting her up for failure. But asking too little is just the flip side of that same mistake. The real parenting challenge is believing in their capabilities just a shade more than they do. When you do that, sometimes they surprise you, and even better, sometimes they surprise themselves.
Also in regards to Day 4, magpie wondered:
It’s definitely not a standoff - thus far they are not paying enough attention to make it a standoff. And when you are as removed from the process as I have been, there is very little personal charge to the whole endeavor. I am being patient in this experiment (that in itself is an experiment, but that’s another story), because I don’t actually want them to pick up their sh*t in a communal room because they are paying attention to me, but because it is the right thing to do.
Thoughts, gentle readers?
Laura and (un)relaxeddad chimed in on yesterday's discussion with some interesting thoughts:
Laura wrote:
Yes, in the most fundamental way the parents have all the power. And it's not just a function of having the advantages of age, money and experience. The real power is the emotional power that comes with the parental territory. Our kids have no choice but to need us desperately and love us passionately. And it is my children's vulnerability to my power that makes me want to choose my battles wisely and with care. Whenever I feel really powerful, I try to remember that a battle between a parent and a child is never a fair fight.
A long time ago, when Youngest was in Second grade, he filled out a little questionnaire for a Mother's Day present devised by his (blessed) teacher. It said, "there are a million reasons why I love you. Here are five..."
The first thing he wrote, in his so-careful second grade hand was, "You know what is OK and what is not OK."
This power, the power to know what is OK and what is not OK, this is the place I like to parent from. In this instance, I am absolutely sure that it is not OK for the boys to carelessly litter a communal floor with their personal detritus. Working from that knowledge, and if I inject a little patience into the process (not my forte, in case you hadn't noticed), I think the lesson will find itself learned.
(un)relaxeddad was wondering about the utter lack of communication around the whole issue:
I'm pretty sure they have moved past the elf stage, but they may well not have noticed ANYTHING. Being the only woman in a house full of testosterone has made me quite aware that things that I value can have zero meaning to the men in my life. Reminds me of the time we all got in the car to go snowboarding. When we were all piled in and ready to go, I turned around to the boys in the back seat and said brightly, "We have five hours! What are we going to talk about?"
Dead silence. One beat. Two beats. Then Oldest broke the news to me gently.
"Mom," he said, "this is a road trip. We don't talk."
Back to the dilemma at hand. We are now on Day 4 and the morning photo, taken just after they leave for school, revealed this:
The good news is that someone is still reading The Week, which is a significant step up. The bad news is self-evident, right?
Since I'm underparenting this dilemma, I confined my reactions to a)one silent, internal "WTF?!!?" and b)picked up the magazine and tossed it in the recycling. Note to self: only put out-of-date reading material in the boys' bathroom.
When we last left off, the view from the boys' toilet had improved markedly. No clothes on the floor and the new magazines I had so generously placed for them on the stool remained there. The stool had been pulled in front of the toilet but hey, this is serious progress.
At that point, my pal Mizmell chimed in with the following suggestion:
I'm not so sure about this since I am quite confident I was just as big a slob as my children are now when I was their age.
Then Meno brought up an interesting point:
This referred to the fact that I had said the "You can have X thing that you want after your pick your shit up off the floor" argument wouldn't really work in our case since my kids didn't really have to ask me for things anymore.
It is absolutely true that the car is ours and we could insist he not go anywhere until the clothes/books/dirty socks/ you-don't-want-to-know-and-neither-do-I are picked up. But I'm reluctant to take this approach for a couple of reasons that I think are worth considering.
First, going to the "that car doesn't belong to you" and "driving is a privilege, not a right" place is the parenting equivalent of Defcon 2 (what does Defcon stand for anyway?). And while I care about this issue, I don't care enough to get the missiles out and pointed in the direction of the boys' bathroom. You can file this choice under a)picking my battles wisely or b)being too burned out after 20 years of parenting to care that much. Second, and perhaps more profound, I want to see what happens if I underparent this dilemma, and that means doing as little as possible. Getting into fights about the socks vs the car is a lot of work. Seriously. There's the shouting and the door slamming and, my personal favorite, the "I HATE you"s to contend with.
So, what what was the view from the john the next morning? This...
and in case you were wondering about which one made the floor..
So much for rowing's future.
I picked up the offending copy of rowing news and hid it...where DID I hide it? In its place, I left a week old copy of the Week. This worked for me on multiple levels. I wanted to see what would happen if I upped the reading material level within arms length of the john and I don't want old magazines cluttering up the living room.
That evening, I happened to make another visit to the boys bathroom. And what to my wondering eyes did appear?
Check it out. Oh yeah...
Oh happy day. Someone is reading about Rahm Emanuel! And it's not on the floor.
I'd weep with happiness, but I have been at this game a long time and will hold my tears to see what tomorrow morning will bring...
One last note: since the conversation over breakfast in which I laid out the "I'll pick up what you leave but you'll have to pay to get it back" plan, not a single word has been exchanged on this topic. There have been no questions about what happened to their stuff, or how the new magazines got there, or what is the future of rowing, anyway. Perhaps more important, I have not wasted a single bit of effort nagging, browbeating, yelling or otherwise, uh, conversing about the topic.
All I've done is blog about it.
As you may recall, I have a dilemma on my hands. But before I get to the state of the boys' bathroom floor, I thought I'd include some of my favorite readers into the conversation.
Alesia wrote:
And Rahul chimed in with:
They both bring up what must surely be the first question any parent interested in underparenting should ask. To wit: is any action necessary?
I think Alesia's approach might work really well with younger kids. With my giants, who don't actually have to ask for very much anymore (Middle just gets in the car and drives himself somewhere when he wants to go), not so much. The problem is that a) I would have to wait around until they need something from me and b) all that time I would be, shall we say, pissed.
I have actually taken Rahul's approach with their rooms (for the most part). As such, it is not uncommon for their doorways to be partially or fully blocked by piles of dirty clothes, wet towels, discarded homework and all manner of detritus. But the bathroom is used regularly by everyone who comes to the house. It is communal space and thus, I think, needs to be treated with more respect than the trash cans they call their rooms.
After giving some props to Calvin & Hobbes (don't get me wrong, I love C&H and agree there are some sophisticated concepts in it, but he has been reading it for TWO YEARS. It's not Heidegger, for God's sake!), Laura wrote:
This brings up something that is essential to this idea of underparenting. Less is more, but it is not necessarily nothing. See above in regards to the communal space. Also, given how much time these boys spend surrounded by electronic noise (they can do homework while simultaneously texting, IMing, video chatting, and relentlessly reshuffling their iPods), the bathroom may be the only place they actually read and do just one other thing. As such, the reading material in there may actually snag more of their attention than anything else in their lives.
So, here's what I did. I told them at breakfast that anything left on the floor would be confiscated and the owner would have to pay an as yet undetermined fine. After they left for school, I picked up both books, the shorts and the boxers and hid them. And just so they wouldn't go through withdrawal, I put two copies of Rowing News on the bathroom shelf.
When they came home from school, neither asked where the books were or the clothes. And when I went in the bathroom the next morning, this was the view...
Hey! I think this is progress. The reading material is actually off the floor! Someone had pulled the stool over to more easily read the smaller magazine type, there are no clothes on the floor. Could it possibly be that easy?
Uh, no.
More tomorrow...
I feel like I am peering into a dark cave or a wild canyon.
"Is anybody there...there...there...?"
What can I say? I've been busy.
But something happened that has just kept pestering me, like a determined three-year-old, to blog.
Here's what happened.
I walked into my boys' bathroom the other morning and, well, sat down. This is the view from the, well, you know:
Two books, two pairs of shorts and one pair of boxers. On. The. Floor. More on the floor later, but for now, let's just focus on the reading material, shall we?
Before you get all "Aww, Calvin and Hobbes, my all time favorite" on me, may I remind you that the reader of this tome is about to turn fifteen?
The about-to-turn-eighteen-year-old is made of sturdier stuff:
That volume, partially obscured by boxers, is called Supercars. Yes, Supercars.
I guarantee you these two books have been moving from the bathroom shelf to the bathroom floor for at least 18 months. So, I found had two parenting dilemmas on my hands.
One, how to get them to stop leaving stuff on the floor of what is actually a communal bathroom? And two, how to get them to read something that they haven't already memorized?
And how to do this and maintain my commitment to underparenting? That is, to parent in such a way that I do as little as possible, but no less than necessary.
Because I have learned a thing or two in my 20 years of mothering, I decided to focus on the floor problem and hope that would somehow magically take care of the reading material problem. When they emerged for breakfast I informed them that there was a new sheriff in town, one who would no longer tolerate things being left on the floor of communal spaces. Said sheriff would henceforth confiscate anything left on the floor and the owner would have to pay an as yet undetermined fine for its return. This seemed to me a most elegant mothering approach. All I was signing up for in the way of action was to pick up the detritus on the floor and hide it somewhere good.
The boys nodded their heads blearily over their Grape Nuts. They have seen me like this before.
But did they pick a single item off the floor when they left for school? They did not.
I'll continue the story in my next post, but in the meantime, I'd love hear your ideas as to how else I might have approached this dilemma, given my commitment to underparenting?
If, that is, there are any of you left out there.
You know how the Dow fell of a cliff this afternoon? In case you missed it, it went something like this:
Shocking, right?
Now for the bad news. I think this graph perfectly represents what we, as a country, are doing in the last weeks of the Presidential election. The level of vitriol is so high, the distrust and suspicion of each side for the other so intense, the accusations so wild, the fear and the fury so palpable, that I keep thinking that somewhere in a cave in Pakistan, with his laptop on his knees, Osama Bin Laden is laughing his ass off.
PEOPLE, we have all got to take it down a notch.
So in the service of bringing all of us out of our angry corners, I offer the following thought experiment:
Imagine the candidates for President and Vice-President that you believe should not be allowed in the Oval Office, much less given the best seats in the house.
Now find something in those two candidates that you can genuinely appreciate.
I know. It's hard. It kinda brings you up short, doesn't it?.
I'll go first: I genuinely appreciate John McCain's service to his country, the fact that he didn't take an early release from prison when it was offered, and that he has been a steadfast opponent of the use of torture by US personnel. I appreciate Sarah Palin's ability to talk to voters without condescension and the way she make many of them feel deeply understood.
OK, your turn.
Leave your appreciation in the comments or feel free to go off and be appreciative on your own blog. Let me know if you do so I can keep track of all the good vibes we create.
Come on, do your part to wipe that smile off Bin Laden's face.
