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I grew up in a household in which the normal mode of verbal interaction
started at banshee and escalated to supersonic, so I was interested in
the New York Times piece “Shouting is the New Spanking” that KJ wrote about last week.
The article says that yelling at children is becoming as socially
unacceptable as whacking them. I agree that regular shouting is
ineffective and counterproductive. Just think of your reaction when
you’re in public and you see a parent screaming at a kid. Even if you
don’t know what the offense was that set off mom or dad, you recoil at
seeing an adult so out-of-control. And the yelling just leaves an
aftermath of gloom and resentment over the whole family ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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More on the permutations of parenthood: I wonder what to make of this 2005 Census table about "self-care" among children of various ages, up to 15. It seems like some indicator, however rough, of the supervisory ethos in families (though I can't figure out how much variation is encompassed by self-care-regular long stretches, shorter interludes, or what). If I'm reading it correctly, it seems to confirm Liza's hunch that there may not be a class schism between hovering-haves and hands-off-have-nots. In fact, if anything, it suggests the trend may not tend the way we think. It looks as though the more education and the higher the income a mother has, the more likely it is her 11- 14-year-old kids spend some time fending for themselves. This isn't what I would have expected. And obviously, it doesn't tell us anything about the situations of kids older than 15, among whom birth rates are creeping up (while staying steady among 11- 14-year-olds). There, too, class differences can surprise you. As Margaret Talbot's great New Yorker article "Red Sex, Blue Sex" suggests, less-educated parents who run a tight ship don't necessarily inculcate sexual self-control in kids, just as more affluent liberal parents big on youthful autonomy can produce some pretty strait-laced teenagers.
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Reading about dangerous strollers this morning on the New York Times op-ed page, I thought about a hilariously dismaying chapter in Mary McCarthy's The Group. It's 1935 or thereabouts, and conscientious Priss Crockett takes her toddler, Stephen, to Central Park, where she bumps into a fellow Vassar alum, Norine Schmittlapp, whose is sitting on a bench with her baby. The women proceed to regale each other with polar opposite and equally crazy theories of child-rearing. Example: Norine gives her 3-month-old a pacifier; Priss is horrified. She tells Norine that the pacifier is unsanitary and can change the shape of a baby's mouth. Norine tells her a child sucks "because he's been deprived of oral gratification." Priss is unpersuaded. "For a child to find heaven in a dummy breast was the worst thing she could think of—worse than self-abuse. She felt there ought to be a law against the manufacture of such devices."
And now we learn, via a preliminary study in Britain, about the latest suspect device: the forward-facing stroller. According to the researchers, mothers (yes, it's ever mothers) talk less to babies who ride facing away from the person who is pushing them. This is not a good thing because babies' vocabulary build mostly from listening and laughing with their caregivers. (Quiet time, overrated.) This makes sense to me, to a point. I always felt a bit separated from my kids when they rode forward. The researchers appropriately include a short caveat about the significance of all of this: They say that babies spend a couple of hours a day in strollers, not all their waking hours. (Even that sounds high to me.) Still, the upshot is a general frowning upon the forward-facing stroller. Which, of course, most American and apparently British households with babies have. Suddenly, a seemingly innocent piece of baby equipment seems treacherous. It's blocking babies from learning to talk! The researchers don't call for a law banning the strollers. They've updated to the idea of an award, for an affordable collapsible stroller that faces both ways. Sounds great. But in the meantime, can we hold off on the mommy guilt for the strollers we already have?
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