One of them sings loudly. One doesn’t like to talk at all. One wants only water. One deliberately initiates a scuffle even though there’s plenty for everyone.
It’s a typical winter weekday morning: one on which between the hours of 6:30 and 8:30 a.m., I’ll feed four different meals to three different species in three different locations. In all, it’s 15 mouths to feed; or, put another way, 56 legs all making their way over to see what I’ve got to offer them for their morning repast.
Not all at once, of course. My 13-year-old eats first, fresh out of the shower and cheerful even though first light has yet to dawn. He takes one look at the thermometer, which hovers around the 10-degree mark, and begins to sing loudly: “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” a song he learned from watching the movie “Elf” twenty or thirty times last summer, when it was most definitely not cold outside. Today it is, though, and as I listen to him do his best cabaret act while buttering an English muffin, I wonder where the stereotype of sullen teenagers slow to waken on a winter morning comes from. I may be wishing he’d go back to bed, but he’s clearly ready to face the day.
As he assembles his backpack for school, I make a quick stop in the laundry room to toss a scoop of kibble into the dog’s empty dish. I notice her water bowl is empty too and would prefer not to think how long that has been the case for; it continues to be a mystery of domestic life that in four years, I have never once known anyone in my family except for me to fill the dog’s water bowl, and yet at least twice a year I go out of town for two days or more, leaving the rest of the family behind, and when I return the dog is always still alive. Somehow it gets done by someone else if I’m not around, but most definitely not when I am. Another truism of motherhood.
After feeding the dog, I head upstairs to wake my very drowsy 9-year-old, who does not like to be roused one bit. The only thing that cheers her up in the morning is a somewhat maddening game of her own invention in which she answers my question about what she’d like for breakfast by forming letters with her fingers and expecting me to guess what breakfast food the initials represent. On a good day she flashes me an easy one: “O” for oatmeal; “B” for bagel. Other days it’s not so easy, and I waste six or seven minutes trying to figure out that “L” stands for “lightly buttered toast” or “M” represents “medium-sized bowl of Special K.” She always seems disappointed when she has to provide verbal clues for me; I’m just glad to be one step closer to getting everyone fed and out the door.
A cacophony of mooing greets me an hour later as I drive down the lane to the barnyard, where 12 cows divided into three groups based on weaning, breeding, and general compatibility are waiting to be fed. The adult cows point their faces skyward and let loose with their loudest moos; the calves stand in front of the gate and then skittishly leap to the side as I reach out to pat them.
The cows eat in their usual inexplicable pattern: although I throw five hay bales down from the hay loft for one sub-herd of seven animals, all seven of them cluster around the same single bale, shouldering each other out of the way while four other bales sit nearby, unnoticed. Two more bales go over one fence to a group of three cows; and the last group of two gets just one bale to share.
And then I’m done: everyone whose breakfast I’m responsible for has eaten. I still need to go running and then write some articles, but it all seems easy and relaxed after everyone has been fed. The kids are off at school; the dog is waiting to go running with me; the cows are chewing away, as they’ll do for the next several hours before they make their way through all the bales.
I’ve often said the reason I like feeding the cows is that it’s so easy and yet so satisfying. It requires so little judgment or analysis, just strength. And yet the results are so tangible: I’m faced with a herd of content, well-fed animals whose noisy clamor has ended. I suppose that's true of the other creatures as well. The rest of my day might be more challenging: writing compelling text, offering intelligent conversation, solving various problems. True, it sometimes seems like feeding hungry beings is my primary role in life, but at the same time, feeding is easy. And for now, feeding is done.
Showing posts with label kids. Show all posts
Showing posts with label kids. Show all posts
Friday, January 20, 2012
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Kids & Kindles
Yesterday’s feature in the Boston Globe about little kids developing a penchant for state-of-the-art electronics such as iPads and iPhones caught my attention. The issue isn’t exactly relevant in our household – at 9 and 13, my kids are considerably older than the toddlers and preschoolers described in the story – and when the kids were that age, we didn’t have iPhones or iPads (and in fact still have just one iPhone in our household and no iPads).
Coincidentally, though, just the night before, I had for the first time purchased a book for Holly on my Kindle. And I didn't do that without a fair share of rumination as to whether it was appropriate for my nine-year-old to be reading on a Kindle.
But my guess is that many parents make the reluctant leap to letting their kids e-read the same way I did: Holly had just finished a book and wanted the next one in the series in order to complete the twenty minutes of nightly reading that her teacher requires. And while I acknowledge that this sounds demanding on Holly's part -- wanting one book and one book only -- I've become used to it from Tim. When he's in the middle of a series, no book except the next book in the series will do. Switching over to reading something else for the sake of convenience -- such as, there's a copy of it right over there on the bookshelf, whereas the book he wants is at the library or the bookstore and we won't be able to pick up a copy 'til tomorrow -- is an option not even worthy of consideration.
And in Holly's case, it wasn't only that she'd have to wait until the next day for me to go to the library: the book she wanted was a brand new release from a popular series, and getting a copy of this high-demand read would take a while.
So I let her order up a six-dollar copy on my Kindle, and thirty seconds later she was reading. I watched her and thought about what I had done. For myself, I'm absolutely a Kindle convert: I love the convenience of carrying as much reading material as I could possibly want -- novels, reference materials, magazines, newspapers, notes of my own -- all on one little piece of plastic that weighs less than a pound.
But the sight of kids using Kindles gives me pause. I've never agreed with adults who shy away from e-readers saying they can't imagine enjoying the experience of reading without the feel and smell of an actual book in their hands -- to me, reading is reading, and why should I have the inconvenience of newsprint on my fingers or the weight of a hardcover in my purse? -- but I'm a little unsure as to whether kids are absorbing the full experience of reading, when no book is in hand.
When a friend told me both her kids, ages 12 and 13 at the time, owned Kindles, I said to her, "I'm not sure my kids would know what they wanted to read if they didn't browse through the stacks at the library." But she told me her kids use the New York Times Book Review section on children's books for recommendations, or they order books by authors whose work they've enjoyed in the past, or they use the "Customers who bought this book also bought" tab on Amazon.com to get ideas about what to load onto their Kindles next.
Or they go to the library, browse through the stacks, and find something they want to read, just like my kids do. Then they order it on their Kindles.
It still seemed a little strange to me, and to some extent, that's the point made in the Globe story about toddlers and preschoolers using iPhones, iPads and similar devices. Surely Holly needs to be immersed in the sensory aspects of reading a book -- the slippery feel of the cover, the heft of the volume, the nubbly texture at the edge of thr pages -- before she's ready to skip that part and go electronic. And seeing her sit there poring over my Kindle screen didn't give me the same twinge of delight that seeing her immersed in a real book always gives me.
Still, it enabled her to read what she wanted to read at that very moment. Admittedly, that might make it more a lesson in instant gratification than literary appreciation. And when she finishes this book, I'll encourage her to find her next one the old-fashioned way, at a library or a bookstore. But for now, what matters to her is that she didn't have to wait even twelve hours to find out what happens next in her favorite series of the moment. And to me, that's a certain kind of passion that I’m more than happy to fuel, whether it finds its resolution on the page or on the screen.
Coincidentally, though, just the night before, I had for the first time purchased a book for Holly on my Kindle. And I didn't do that without a fair share of rumination as to whether it was appropriate for my nine-year-old to be reading on a Kindle.
But my guess is that many parents make the reluctant leap to letting their kids e-read the same way I did: Holly had just finished a book and wanted the next one in the series in order to complete the twenty minutes of nightly reading that her teacher requires. And while I acknowledge that this sounds demanding on Holly's part -- wanting one book and one book only -- I've become used to it from Tim. When he's in the middle of a series, no book except the next book in the series will do. Switching over to reading something else for the sake of convenience -- such as, there's a copy of it right over there on the bookshelf, whereas the book he wants is at the library or the bookstore and we won't be able to pick up a copy 'til tomorrow -- is an option not even worthy of consideration.
And in Holly's case, it wasn't only that she'd have to wait until the next day for me to go to the library: the book she wanted was a brand new release from a popular series, and getting a copy of this high-demand read would take a while.
So I let her order up a six-dollar copy on my Kindle, and thirty seconds later she was reading. I watched her and thought about what I had done. For myself, I'm absolutely a Kindle convert: I love the convenience of carrying as much reading material as I could possibly want -- novels, reference materials, magazines, newspapers, notes of my own -- all on one little piece of plastic that weighs less than a pound.
But the sight of kids using Kindles gives me pause. I've never agreed with adults who shy away from e-readers saying they can't imagine enjoying the experience of reading without the feel and smell of an actual book in their hands -- to me, reading is reading, and why should I have the inconvenience of newsprint on my fingers or the weight of a hardcover in my purse? -- but I'm a little unsure as to whether kids are absorbing the full experience of reading, when no book is in hand.
When a friend told me both her kids, ages 12 and 13 at the time, owned Kindles, I said to her, "I'm not sure my kids would know what they wanted to read if they didn't browse through the stacks at the library." But she told me her kids use the New York Times Book Review section on children's books for recommendations, or they order books by authors whose work they've enjoyed in the past, or they use the "Customers who bought this book also bought" tab on Amazon.com to get ideas about what to load onto their Kindles next.
Or they go to the library, browse through the stacks, and find something they want to read, just like my kids do. Then they order it on their Kindles.
It still seemed a little strange to me, and to some extent, that's the point made in the Globe story about toddlers and preschoolers using iPhones, iPads and similar devices. Surely Holly needs to be immersed in the sensory aspects of reading a book -- the slippery feel of the cover, the heft of the volume, the nubbly texture at the edge of thr pages -- before she's ready to skip that part and go electronic. And seeing her sit there poring over my Kindle screen didn't give me the same twinge of delight that seeing her immersed in a real book always gives me.
Still, it enabled her to read what she wanted to read at that very moment. Admittedly, that might make it more a lesson in instant gratification than literary appreciation. And when she finishes this book, I'll encourage her to find her next one the old-fashioned way, at a library or a bookstore. But for now, what matters to her is that she didn't have to wait even twelve hours to find out what happens next in her favorite series of the moment. And to me, that's a certain kind of passion that I’m more than happy to fuel, whether it finds its resolution on the page or on the screen.
Thursday, July 21, 2011
Sibling swim
The kids and I spent the afternoon yesterday at a nearby pond, and I was reminded anew of the lesson I seem to re-learn every summer: swimming is perhaps the one activity at which they always have fun together and they always get along well.
And maybe that’s why I have so much fun watching them. While I sit in a lawn chair on the beach, they plow through the water, indifferent to my curiosity about what they are doing. They race each other. They splash each other. They make up complicated games and obstacle courses. My book goes unread as I gaze over at them and contemplate how kids together in the water, at least for me, is a little like a sleeping infant or a fire in the fireplace: I just can’t take my eyes off the sight, even knowing I could be paying attention to something that would seem to be much more engaging.
Most of the time, my children get along fairly well. I always attribute this to the fact that being four years apart in age and different genders, they don’t find much to compete over. But by the same token, there often isn’t a lot they like to do together. Their interests and hobbies tend to be fairly divergent.
But all kids like playing in the water, and it is truly the one medium in which I can count on them to remain happy together no matter how long we stay. I know I could be catching up on the newspapers and magazines in my beach bag, but somehow I can’t pull my attention away from the fun they’re having.
Eventually, just as it’s getting close to time for us to leave, they ask me to join them in the water. But it turns out this isn’t because they want me to race or splash or try out their underwater obstacle course; they want to show me a synchronized singing act they’ve worked out, and they feel I need a close-up view of it. My sisters and I used to make up performances like this by the hour – we usually connected our water shows to an event such as my parents’ August anniversary, and to this day my sister will call me around that date and say “It’s almost Mom and Dad’s anniversary; have you choreographed the swim show yet?” Watching Tim and Holly raise their arms in synchronicity, then twirl and dunk, I contemplate the reach of genetic memory and laugh to myself; I’m guessing my mother and her sisters practiced a synchronized swim show or two in their day as well.
Yesterday was our first pond visit of the year. It shouldn’t still surprise me, after all these years, that my kids have such a good time together when I take them swimming. But somehow it still does. Water, sunlight and proximity make them treat each other far more affectionately than they do in the car, or in the house, or even in the yard. And bearing witness to the phenomenon remains one of summer’s greatest joys.
And maybe that’s why I have so much fun watching them. While I sit in a lawn chair on the beach, they plow through the water, indifferent to my curiosity about what they are doing. They race each other. They splash each other. They make up complicated games and obstacle courses. My book goes unread as I gaze over at them and contemplate how kids together in the water, at least for me, is a little like a sleeping infant or a fire in the fireplace: I just can’t take my eyes off the sight, even knowing I could be paying attention to something that would seem to be much more engaging.
Most of the time, my children get along fairly well. I always attribute this to the fact that being four years apart in age and different genders, they don’t find much to compete over. But by the same token, there often isn’t a lot they like to do together. Their interests and hobbies tend to be fairly divergent.
But all kids like playing in the water, and it is truly the one medium in which I can count on them to remain happy together no matter how long we stay. I know I could be catching up on the newspapers and magazines in my beach bag, but somehow I can’t pull my attention away from the fun they’re having.
Eventually, just as it’s getting close to time for us to leave, they ask me to join them in the water. But it turns out this isn’t because they want me to race or splash or try out their underwater obstacle course; they want to show me a synchronized singing act they’ve worked out, and they feel I need a close-up view of it. My sisters and I used to make up performances like this by the hour – we usually connected our water shows to an event such as my parents’ August anniversary, and to this day my sister will call me around that date and say “It’s almost Mom and Dad’s anniversary; have you choreographed the swim show yet?” Watching Tim and Holly raise their arms in synchronicity, then twirl and dunk, I contemplate the reach of genetic memory and laugh to myself; I’m guessing my mother and her sisters practiced a synchronized swim show or two in their day as well.
Yesterday was our first pond visit of the year. It shouldn’t still surprise me, after all these years, that my kids have such a good time together when I take them swimming. But somehow it still does. Water, sunlight and proximity make them treat each other far more affectionately than they do in the car, or in the house, or even in the yard. And bearing witness to the phenomenon remains one of summer’s greatest joys.
Monday, May 30, 2011
City stay
It was a plan three years in the making, though the actual scope of the plan certainly doesn’t merit taking that long to effect.
Three years ago, Rick and I agreed we’re really like to go into Boston for an overnight getaway: see a live theater performance, walk through the Back Bay neighborhood in which I lived during the years between college and marriage, absorb the ambience of city life that we expose ourselves to so little these days.
Boston is only 45 minutes from where we live, and leaving the house and kids behind for one night really isn’t that complicated an undertaking, so it shouldn’t have taken three years to pull this off. We’ve traveled for longer stints of time to far more distance places in those same three years.
But somehow the stars just never aligned: our schedule and our wishes and our budget never intersected at a point where this little trip seemed viable until this month.
And in the three years since we first imagined it, we’d made a critical change to the plan. Perhaps it has to do with my own growth process as a parent and perhaps it has to do with the difference between having kids age 5 and 9 versus having kids age 8 and 12, but at some point not long ago I decided I wanted Tim and Holly to come with us. “We need a family excursion more than we need an adult getaway right now,” I told Rick when we were finally ready to nail down a plan. “They haven’t had enough exposure to city life lately either. Let’s all do this together.”
So that’s what we did, and even though it was only 24 hours, it was a wonderful experience. We ate at Legal Sea Foods, visited the Museum of Fine Arts, saw a performance by Blue Man Group, swam in the hotel pool, and took a long walk through all our old haunts: past my Back Bay studio apartment, through Rick’s college neighborhood, into the Christian Science Center courtyard where we got engaged. “This is where I was conceived!” Tim exclaimed when Rick told him the stone bench amidst flowering gardens next to the famous fountain was the site of our engagement. “Not exactly!” I exclaimed, startled by his mistake. Conceived of, maybe, which is definitely different. But we let it go at that.
Tim thanked us for including him; Holly followed suit when she saw that we appreciated his words, even though I don’t think she had the same mature awareness that Tim did as far as understanding we could have just as easily gone by ourselves. And that was one thing I couldn’t help thinking was better about traveling with them now than when they were a lot younger: with little kids, you spend a lot of time trying to arrange family trips and hoping the kids appreciate it. At this point, we know they do. And they say so.
Perhaps it shouldn’t have taken us three years to execute on this plan, but I’d argue it was worth the wait. We all had a wonderful and memorable time. Simple enough to drive 45 minutes from home for a single overnight? Absolutely. But all the more appreciated for how long it took us to get there.
Three years ago, Rick and I agreed we’re really like to go into Boston for an overnight getaway: see a live theater performance, walk through the Back Bay neighborhood in which I lived during the years between college and marriage, absorb the ambience of city life that we expose ourselves to so little these days.
Boston is only 45 minutes from where we live, and leaving the house and kids behind for one night really isn’t that complicated an undertaking, so it shouldn’t have taken three years to pull this off. We’ve traveled for longer stints of time to far more distance places in those same three years.
But somehow the stars just never aligned: our schedule and our wishes and our budget never intersected at a point where this little trip seemed viable until this month.
And in the three years since we first imagined it, we’d made a critical change to the plan. Perhaps it has to do with my own growth process as a parent and perhaps it has to do with the difference between having kids age 5 and 9 versus having kids age 8 and 12, but at some point not long ago I decided I wanted Tim and Holly to come with us. “We need a family excursion more than we need an adult getaway right now,” I told Rick when we were finally ready to nail down a plan. “They haven’t had enough exposure to city life lately either. Let’s all do this together.”
So that’s what we did, and even though it was only 24 hours, it was a wonderful experience. We ate at Legal Sea Foods, visited the Museum of Fine Arts, saw a performance by Blue Man Group, swam in the hotel pool, and took a long walk through all our old haunts: past my Back Bay studio apartment, through Rick’s college neighborhood, into the Christian Science Center courtyard where we got engaged. “This is where I was conceived!” Tim exclaimed when Rick told him the stone bench amidst flowering gardens next to the famous fountain was the site of our engagement. “Not exactly!” I exclaimed, startled by his mistake. Conceived of, maybe, which is definitely different. But we let it go at that.
Tim thanked us for including him; Holly followed suit when she saw that we appreciated his words, even though I don’t think she had the same mature awareness that Tim did as far as understanding we could have just as easily gone by ourselves. And that was one thing I couldn’t help thinking was better about traveling with them now than when they were a lot younger: with little kids, you spend a lot of time trying to arrange family trips and hoping the kids appreciate it. At this point, we know they do. And they say so.
Perhaps it shouldn’t have taken us three years to execute on this plan, but I’d argue it was worth the wait. We all had a wonderful and memorable time. Simple enough to drive 45 minutes from home for a single overnight? Absolutely. But all the more appreciated for how long it took us to get there.
Monday, February 15, 2010
Kids & chores: Why they should and why I should
As I read this article by my Globe West colleague, Taryn Plumb, I noted with some relief that most of the children cited in the story about household chores are older than mine, or at least older than my younger child. The article reassured me that maybe there’s still time for my 7- and 11-year-old to get with the program.
I admit I’ve been negligent when it comes to expecting my children to do regular household chores. It’s much more my fault than theirs. For one thing, as odd as it may sound to admit, I don’t feel like I need a lot of help. This may be the whiplash effect of being a self-employed full-time-at-home mom after two years of 9-to-5 out-of-the-house corporate employment, but I really don’t find it difficult to get most of the household chores done myself. I’m just grateful to have the time at home to do them.
Furthermore, the kids’ schedules aren’t always particularly conducive to household chores. My first thought upon reading the opening about the kids helping with the laundry every day was to wonder how they possibly have time for this before school…and then I read that they go to a private school where catching a bus or even arriving in time for the first bell is not necessarily a requirement of their school day, as it is in our household.
And even though I know setting the table is an excellent match for the skills of a 7-year-old like my daughter, there are a lot of days when I find the half-hour before dinner to be one of the most peaceful parts of the day, as I spend it by myself in the kitchen cooking, setting up and listening to NPR. Sure, I could call the kids down to help, but they’re doing their homework or playing, and I’m relishing the early-evening solitude.
But I know that’s not entirely the point. As the article says, having children do chores isn’t just about getting help with the work; it’s also about contributing to the children’s character development. And intellectually, I agree with this; I just have trouble coming up with recurring jobs for the kids that I consider both ideologically and pragmatically appropriate for them.
For example, we have pets because the kids wanted pets and love having them around, so I think pet-related chores are a perfect match ideologically for the kids. But unfortunately, that’s where the pragmatic part comes in. Though it makes sense intellectually to have Holly clean her guinea pig’s cage, I don’t feel that she has the manual dexterity or the sanitation standards to do a good job. It takes coordination to ensure that all the dirty shavings from the cage slide into the trash bag rather than all over the floor, and I’m generally squeamish about a child who needs to be reminded to wash her hands before snacks and meals being up to her elbows, or even her knuckles, in guinea pig waste.
I also don’t like the level of dissent that chores tend to generate in our household. My two children seldom argue with each other, but when they do, it’s almost always because I’ve asked them to unload the dishwasher or clear the table. Both of them prefer to unload the upper rack of the dishwasher rather than the lower rack, but since it’s not a task that needs to be done daily, they can never remember whose turn it is to have first choice, so they argue about it. When my husband tells them to clear the dinner table, with each expected to take half the tabletop, they furtively try to slide items onto the other person’s half to “even it out.”
In the end, though, I think the winning reason to give my kids work is so that they don’t reach adulthood having never done any household tasks. When I ask my son to clear dishes or set the table, a part of me is aware that I’m paving the way for a future household in which he’s an adult. Since I’ve already picked out several girls in his fifth grade class whom I’d be happy to see him settle down with, it’s fairly easy to picture them cursing me, as his mom, for never have expected him to do any work around the house. It’s a sobering thought, and it almost always keeps me from caving in when he complains about being asked to pitch in.
I admit I’ve been negligent when it comes to expecting my children to do regular household chores. It’s much more my fault than theirs. For one thing, as odd as it may sound to admit, I don’t feel like I need a lot of help. This may be the whiplash effect of being a self-employed full-time-at-home mom after two years of 9-to-5 out-of-the-house corporate employment, but I really don’t find it difficult to get most of the household chores done myself. I’m just grateful to have the time at home to do them.
Furthermore, the kids’ schedules aren’t always particularly conducive to household chores. My first thought upon reading the opening about the kids helping with the laundry every day was to wonder how they possibly have time for this before school…and then I read that they go to a private school where catching a bus or even arriving in time for the first bell is not necessarily a requirement of their school day, as it is in our household.
And even though I know setting the table is an excellent match for the skills of a 7-year-old like my daughter, there are a lot of days when I find the half-hour before dinner to be one of the most peaceful parts of the day, as I spend it by myself in the kitchen cooking, setting up and listening to NPR. Sure, I could call the kids down to help, but they’re doing their homework or playing, and I’m relishing the early-evening solitude.
But I know that’s not entirely the point. As the article says, having children do chores isn’t just about getting help with the work; it’s also about contributing to the children’s character development. And intellectually, I agree with this; I just have trouble coming up with recurring jobs for the kids that I consider both ideologically and pragmatically appropriate for them.
For example, we have pets because the kids wanted pets and love having them around, so I think pet-related chores are a perfect match ideologically for the kids. But unfortunately, that’s where the pragmatic part comes in. Though it makes sense intellectually to have Holly clean her guinea pig’s cage, I don’t feel that she has the manual dexterity or the sanitation standards to do a good job. It takes coordination to ensure that all the dirty shavings from the cage slide into the trash bag rather than all over the floor, and I’m generally squeamish about a child who needs to be reminded to wash her hands before snacks and meals being up to her elbows, or even her knuckles, in guinea pig waste.
I also don’t like the level of dissent that chores tend to generate in our household. My two children seldom argue with each other, but when they do, it’s almost always because I’ve asked them to unload the dishwasher or clear the table. Both of them prefer to unload the upper rack of the dishwasher rather than the lower rack, but since it’s not a task that needs to be done daily, they can never remember whose turn it is to have first choice, so they argue about it. When my husband tells them to clear the dinner table, with each expected to take half the tabletop, they furtively try to slide items onto the other person’s half to “even it out.”
In the end, though, I think the winning reason to give my kids work is so that they don’t reach adulthood having never done any household tasks. When I ask my son to clear dishes or set the table, a part of me is aware that I’m paving the way for a future household in which he’s an adult. Since I’ve already picked out several girls in his fifth grade class whom I’d be happy to see him settle down with, it’s fairly easy to picture them cursing me, as his mom, for never have expected him to do any work around the house. It’s a sobering thought, and it almost always keeps me from caving in when he complains about being asked to pitch in.
Monday, December 14, 2009
Kids and technotainment: I deserve a B- (or maybe a C+)
Amy Suardi wrote earlier this month on her Frugal Mama blog about the viability of keeping small children from technology, and the post inspired a lot of interesting comments. Most supported Amy; one (who appears to be a friend of hers) wrote tongue-in-cheek about this: “As the proud owner of a Wii, I enjoy spending time with my kids using “gasp”, technology to bond and have fun with them. I would never feel that it can replace fresh air and sunshine, but it isn’t the devil, either.”
Now that my children are 11 and 7, I think we're far enough into parenting that I can begin assessing how well I succeeded at meeting the ideals I held early in my parenting days about keeping technology at bay. Overall, I think I'd give myself a B-, and that might be a little bit generous. A C+ might be more honest.
Neither of my children was a TV-watcher early on; at about the age of three we started allowing occasional DVDs. A year or two after that, Tim was introduced (I forget exactly how) to children's video games, and after that he acquired a GameBoy. More recently -- in the past year or two -- he developed an interest in specific TV shows like Survivor and American Idol. My daughter, like most younger siblings, experienced all of these things a bit earlier due to her older brother's influence.
Although I still admire the ideal of keeping kids away from screens altogether -- wrapping network programming, DVDs, video games and computer games into one all-encompassing category -- I have to admit I wasn't altogether successful at it. I did manage to avoid regular TV shows until my kids were in grade school, which was a small accomplishment that carried the added benefit of keeping them away from commercials, but Tim adored video games when he was young, and both now enjoy watching the aforementioned TV shows together.
So maybe I'm just rationalizing my own semi-failures, but all in all, I think their exposure as it developed was reasonable and not particularly harmful to them. While I'm no fan of video games, Tim has always played the sports kind and not the violent kind; and while I could surely live without American Idol, I don't find it particularly offensive. The show also gives my two children an interest in common, which being different genders and four years apart in age they haven't always easily found. And in fact, the very first reality show they followed was a teen version of Survivor called Endurance which airs on the Discovery Kids network. We found out about Endurance when I interviewed one of the cast members for a Boston Globe story, so in a way it carried a favorable connection between my writing career and TV. The fact that they eventually got to meet the subject of my story after watching him on TV for two months was particularly satisfying.
I wasn't happy at all about Tim's GameBoy fixation when he was 6, but unrelated to all the restrictions that I tried to place on his usage of it, in time he lost interest in it himself. The valuable lesson I learned from that was that sometimes with kids, their good judgment ultimately prevails even where your own attempts to mold their thinking fail. In retrospect, it definitely wasn't worth my expending so much energy trying to put restrictions on his GameBoy use when his interest in it burned out so fast.
Last December we bought the kids a Wii setup. As the commenter on Frugal Mama says, it's a cooperative activity they can enjoy together, with cousins or with friends. Like American Idol, it's one of the few interests they have in common. Moreover, they don't overdo it. They play it like a board game, taking it out every few weeks on a lazy weekend. They never try to stay up late playing Wii or get a game started when they should be doing homework.
I think the most important thing I've learned in regard to parenting and kids' technology is that it's not an either/or situation. When Tim was first born and I was full of new-parent ideals, I believed that letting a child watch DVDs or play video games meant he or she would never develop an interest in books; that giving them access to American Idol meant they'd never learn to play an instrument. But I was wrong. My kids do both. On a wide-open Saturday, Tim will play computer games part of the day and read at other times of day. With an extra half-hour in the morning before she has to leave for school, Holly might ask to watch the previous night's episode of Endurance or she might play school with imaginary students. They do technology and they have imagination. Even though she could have asked to watch a DVD, Holly spent hours earlier this fall dictating her first novel to me, a 11,000-word opus more comprehensive than anything I wrote at her age.
I do realize most of this is rationalizing. My teenage nieces are two of the most intelligent, well-rounded and capable girls I have ever known, and their lives were TV-free until they were about 10. It's hard to look at them and not argue that this is the right way to go. On the other hand, I see some parents work too hard to keep their kids away from technology. I think it's Judith Warner in Perfect Madness who writes about parents of young children who end up acting like TV sets themselves in their efforts to entertain their children, with a constant stream of story-telling, hypothetical problem-posing, fantasy, invention and other means toward the end of forcing their children's imaginations to stay active.
From the time Tim was eight months old until he was about two, I used to take him out in the jog stroller, and what was most notable for me about those forays was the silence. Before he was born, I was accustomed to running alone, and once he was old enough for the jog stroller, I was delighted to take him with me but had no desire to turn my time of solitude into a period of one-sided chatter. So he and I would cruise the streets of our neighborhood for 30 minutes or more in companionable silence. He never fussed and I never initiated conversation. He just looked around, absorbing the scenery and absorbing the quiet.
He's still someone who likes quiet. Along with video games, computer games and novels.
Now that my children are 11 and 7, I think we're far enough into parenting that I can begin assessing how well I succeeded at meeting the ideals I held early in my parenting days about keeping technology at bay. Overall, I think I'd give myself a B-, and that might be a little bit generous. A C+ might be more honest.
Neither of my children was a TV-watcher early on; at about the age of three we started allowing occasional DVDs. A year or two after that, Tim was introduced (I forget exactly how) to children's video games, and after that he acquired a GameBoy. More recently -- in the past year or two -- he developed an interest in specific TV shows like Survivor and American Idol. My daughter, like most younger siblings, experienced all of these things a bit earlier due to her older brother's influence.
Although I still admire the ideal of keeping kids away from screens altogether -- wrapping network programming, DVDs, video games and computer games into one all-encompassing category -- I have to admit I wasn't altogether successful at it. I did manage to avoid regular TV shows until my kids were in grade school, which was a small accomplishment that carried the added benefit of keeping them away from commercials, but Tim adored video games when he was young, and both now enjoy watching the aforementioned TV shows together.
So maybe I'm just rationalizing my own semi-failures, but all in all, I think their exposure as it developed was reasonable and not particularly harmful to them. While I'm no fan of video games, Tim has always played the sports kind and not the violent kind; and while I could surely live without American Idol, I don't find it particularly offensive. The show also gives my two children an interest in common, which being different genders and four years apart in age they haven't always easily found. And in fact, the very first reality show they followed was a teen version of Survivor called Endurance which airs on the Discovery Kids network. We found out about Endurance when I interviewed one of the cast members for a Boston Globe story, so in a way it carried a favorable connection between my writing career and TV. The fact that they eventually got to meet the subject of my story after watching him on TV for two months was particularly satisfying.
I wasn't happy at all about Tim's GameBoy fixation when he was 6, but unrelated to all the restrictions that I tried to place on his usage of it, in time he lost interest in it himself. The valuable lesson I learned from that was that sometimes with kids, their good judgment ultimately prevails even where your own attempts to mold their thinking fail. In retrospect, it definitely wasn't worth my expending so much energy trying to put restrictions on his GameBoy use when his interest in it burned out so fast.
Last December we bought the kids a Wii setup. As the commenter on Frugal Mama says, it's a cooperative activity they can enjoy together, with cousins or with friends. Like American Idol, it's one of the few interests they have in common. Moreover, they don't overdo it. They play it like a board game, taking it out every few weeks on a lazy weekend. They never try to stay up late playing Wii or get a game started when they should be doing homework.
I think the most important thing I've learned in regard to parenting and kids' technology is that it's not an either/or situation. When Tim was first born and I was full of new-parent ideals, I believed that letting a child watch DVDs or play video games meant he or she would never develop an interest in books; that giving them access to American Idol meant they'd never learn to play an instrument. But I was wrong. My kids do both. On a wide-open Saturday, Tim will play computer games part of the day and read at other times of day. With an extra half-hour in the morning before she has to leave for school, Holly might ask to watch the previous night's episode of Endurance or she might play school with imaginary students. They do technology and they have imagination. Even though she could have asked to watch a DVD, Holly spent hours earlier this fall dictating her first novel to me, a 11,000-word opus more comprehensive than anything I wrote at her age.
I do realize most of this is rationalizing. My teenage nieces are two of the most intelligent, well-rounded and capable girls I have ever known, and their lives were TV-free until they were about 10. It's hard to look at them and not argue that this is the right way to go. On the other hand, I see some parents work too hard to keep their kids away from technology. I think it's Judith Warner in Perfect Madness who writes about parents of young children who end up acting like TV sets themselves in their efforts to entertain their children, with a constant stream of story-telling, hypothetical problem-posing, fantasy, invention and other means toward the end of forcing their children's imaginations to stay active.
From the time Tim was eight months old until he was about two, I used to take him out in the jog stroller, and what was most notable for me about those forays was the silence. Before he was born, I was accustomed to running alone, and once he was old enough for the jog stroller, I was delighted to take him with me but had no desire to turn my time of solitude into a period of one-sided chatter. So he and I would cruise the streets of our neighborhood for 30 minutes or more in companionable silence. He never fussed and I never initiated conversation. He just looked around, absorbing the scenery and absorbing the quiet.
He's still someone who likes quiet. Along with video games, computer games and novels.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Giving thanks for...the kids' clutter (really!)
Having planned in the week leading up to Thanksgiving to count down the days in my blog by giving thanks for the various non-essential delights that grace my life, you’d think I’d be extra attuned this week to anything that might meet the criteria. The general idea is to go beyond what I call the massive things – the presence of family and friends; physical and mental health; food; shelter; freedom – and acknowledge the many other beloved everyday things that might not make it into a Thanksgiving toast.
But after I mentioned in another communication that due to an inexplicable failure of wireless connectivity in my home office I’ve been working today in my son’s room, at his little wooden desk, surrounded by his sports pennants and baseball cards, Twitter correspondent Jack Ferriter pointed out to me that there’s another item for my list of non-essential but wonderful things worthy of Thanksgiving week thanks: the clutter of toys and other paraphernalia that reflect my kids’ presence in the house.
Of course, when it comes time to pick up all their stuff, thankful is often the last thing I’m feeling (unless my inspiration for picking everything up off the floor is the imminent monthly arrival of the housecleaner, for which I always give thanks). But it’s true: our children’s beloved chotchkes remind us of their unique qualities, their hobbies, their passions, their idiosyncrasies. In Lionel Shriver’s mesmerizingly horrifying novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, one way Shriver conveys the character’s psychopathic tendencies is by describing the sterile tidiness of his childhood room, in which not a toy or game or stuffed animal or book mars the surface of the furniture or floor. This detail has stuck with me for years in its ability to imply a child’s chillingly un-childlike personality.
So when I view the clutter that follows my kids around like Pigpen’s dust cloud in Peanuts, I remind myself to feel grateful.
Along with the sports pennants on the wall and the baseball cards scattered across his desk, Tim’s most prized objects include his 10-year-old stuffed frog, Ba, and his newer but somewhat shabby gray elephant, Vicon. Both animals can usually be found draped across whatever chair or tabletop is nearest to Tim if he’s in the house; when he’s at school he leaves them on the mudroom bench so that he’ll see them as soon as he gets home. Tim also treasures the race numbers he collected at a series of road races he ran over the past two years as well as myriad baseball trophies and ribbons, and the coin collection his grandfather gave him, and a pile of baseball hats from every team he’s ever played on.
Holly’s clutter is a little less resonant with significance than Tim’s. Whereas Tim’s clutch of special belongings comprises things he’s had for a long time that are infused with special meaning to him, Holly just plain collects odds and ends, most of which she eventually uses in crafts projects (or plans to, anyway. Or so she says). Strewn across the rug in Holly’s room are beads of all sizes, straws, pipe cleaners, barrettes, recipe cards, paper clips, post-it notes. “Can I have that?!!” she pleads when I remove the disposable packaging from almost any grocery, whether it’s the cardboard carton that strawberries are packed in or the Styrofoam tray from a package of drumsticks. Kleenex boxes, cereal boxes, egg cartons: they all end up in Holly’s room. Last month I made pumpkin cupcakes for Halloween; now the unused cupcake papers are on her bookshelf. She loves to collect little odds and ends of all kinds. What isn’t to be used in a crafts project instead becomes a stand-in for a character in one of her imaginary play scenarios. One day she was engrossed in a game of imaginary school in the kitchen while I prepared dinner. I plucked a piece of dried macaroni that somehow hadn’t made it into the pot of boiling water with the others off the floor and threw it away. “Mom!” she gasped, horrified, “that’s the principal!”
So Jack Ferriter is right: their possessions, permanent and temporary, valuable and disposable, are all items to be thankful for, because these trinkets and chotchkes represent their personalities, for which I am always grateful. And if it sometimes seems that I spend a lot of time picking tiny beads out of the soles of my feet or dusting baseball trophies, I suppose it’s a small price to pay compared to the gratitude I feel for my unique and wonderful children.
But after I mentioned in another communication that due to an inexplicable failure of wireless connectivity in my home office I’ve been working today in my son’s room, at his little wooden desk, surrounded by his sports pennants and baseball cards, Twitter correspondent Jack Ferriter pointed out to me that there’s another item for my list of non-essential but wonderful things worthy of Thanksgiving week thanks: the clutter of toys and other paraphernalia that reflect my kids’ presence in the house.
Of course, when it comes time to pick up all their stuff, thankful is often the last thing I’m feeling (unless my inspiration for picking everything up off the floor is the imminent monthly arrival of the housecleaner, for which I always give thanks). But it’s true: our children’s beloved chotchkes remind us of their unique qualities, their hobbies, their passions, their idiosyncrasies. In Lionel Shriver’s mesmerizingly horrifying novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, one way Shriver conveys the character’s psychopathic tendencies is by describing the sterile tidiness of his childhood room, in which not a toy or game or stuffed animal or book mars the surface of the furniture or floor. This detail has stuck with me for years in its ability to imply a child’s chillingly un-childlike personality.
So when I view the clutter that follows my kids around like Pigpen’s dust cloud in Peanuts, I remind myself to feel grateful.
Along with the sports pennants on the wall and the baseball cards scattered across his desk, Tim’s most prized objects include his 10-year-old stuffed frog, Ba, and his newer but somewhat shabby gray elephant, Vicon. Both animals can usually be found draped across whatever chair or tabletop is nearest to Tim if he’s in the house; when he’s at school he leaves them on the mudroom bench so that he’ll see them as soon as he gets home. Tim also treasures the race numbers he collected at a series of road races he ran over the past two years as well as myriad baseball trophies and ribbons, and the coin collection his grandfather gave him, and a pile of baseball hats from every team he’s ever played on.
Holly’s clutter is a little less resonant with significance than Tim’s. Whereas Tim’s clutch of special belongings comprises things he’s had for a long time that are infused with special meaning to him, Holly just plain collects odds and ends, most of which she eventually uses in crafts projects (or plans to, anyway. Or so she says). Strewn across the rug in Holly’s room are beads of all sizes, straws, pipe cleaners, barrettes, recipe cards, paper clips, post-it notes. “Can I have that?!!” she pleads when I remove the disposable packaging from almost any grocery, whether it’s the cardboard carton that strawberries are packed in or the Styrofoam tray from a package of drumsticks. Kleenex boxes, cereal boxes, egg cartons: they all end up in Holly’s room. Last month I made pumpkin cupcakes for Halloween; now the unused cupcake papers are on her bookshelf. She loves to collect little odds and ends of all kinds. What isn’t to be used in a crafts project instead becomes a stand-in for a character in one of her imaginary play scenarios. One day she was engrossed in a game of imaginary school in the kitchen while I prepared dinner. I plucked a piece of dried macaroni that somehow hadn’t made it into the pot of boiling water with the others off the floor and threw it away. “Mom!” she gasped, horrified, “that’s the principal!”
So Jack Ferriter is right: their possessions, permanent and temporary, valuable and disposable, are all items to be thankful for, because these trinkets and chotchkes represent their personalities, for which I am always grateful. And if it sometimes seems that I spend a lot of time picking tiny beads out of the soles of my feet or dusting baseball trophies, I suppose it’s a small price to pay compared to the gratitude I feel for my unique and wonderful children.
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