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Boiling Point.
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Tackle or talk
How men and women handle (and cause) stressful situations.
by Terri Mauro
"Fight-or-flight" vs. "tend-and-befriend."
That's the difference in the way men and women handle stress, according to a recent report by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles. "Studies have shown that females facing a predator, disaster or a particularly bad day at the office tend to respond by caring for their offspring and seeking contact and support from others, especially other females," says the Associated Press report on the report. While men tend to respond by punching someone or worldlessly watching televised sports.
This may explain why men don't ask for directions; they'd rather forge a previously unknown path to the destination or just go ahead and drive the wrong way for 100 miles or so. And why their wives spend that drive time stewing, leading the kids in road songs, and thinking about how they're going to tell their friends about this bonehead maneuver. Women are always thinking about how they're going to tell their friends things. That's what friends are for--to provide support and advice, sure, but also to be an audience to the incredible behavior to which we are subjected. At any given time on the all-mother e-mail support group I belong to, about 80% of posts are about stressful incidents and how to deal with them. About 75% of the incidents involve men. Hey, UCLA researchers, study that, why don'tcha.
My husband's pretty much a flight kinda guy. His way of dealing with stress is to pretend it's not there. If I just go about my business and put one foot in front of the other, he seems to think, that bothersome thing will just go away. That's all well and good if the problem does not involve me. But when the problem is, say, that I'm annoyed with him, his flight plan sends me ranting to my friends. And if the problem is that he's annoyed with me, his complete disinterest in confronting the situation drives me crazy. I finally asked him the other day to kindly let me know when he was done being angry, since it was somewhat hard to tell. I think he said okay, but then I never heard anymore about it. I don't think he's still angry; I think he just finally ran fast enough, then forgot. I never forget. And if I do, my friends remind me.
As for tending the kids in time of stress...well, gee, does yelling at them for minor infractions that I'd ordinarily ignore count? Usually, when I'm upset about something, I'm too busy befriending to tend. But when my husband and I disagree about a child-rearing situation, then I do tend to tend. Become Supermom, is what I do. All knowing, all caring, all powerful. If the kids know what's good for them, they go along. And Papa stomps into the bedroom to watch the ball game.
Leaving me free to call someone and complain.
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Toilet-training time
The power struggle parents can't win.
It's the toilet-training time of year. Or so it seems, from the number of e-mails from anxious moms turning up on the parenting e-mail lists I belong to. They're usually worried because snookums is 2 and showing no interest in the potty. And this makes me grouchy because my own personal snookums was 5 before he showed an interest in the potty. No one whose child is under 5 is allowed to obsess about this, in my book. It ain't exactly the end of the world.
Getting in a fight with your child over toileting is pointless anyway because the child holds all the cards, and anything else he feels like holding. You can scream, you can cry, you can threaten, you can cajole, but in this one area of life, your child has ultimate control. How empowering for the little one! Mama may be able to force food down her throat, but Mama can't force it down the other end. I did have an occupational therapist suggest at one point that I give my son suppositories to make him sit and deliver, but that seemed somewhat insane. On the other end of the laid back scale were plenty of people who assured me that he probably wouldn't go to college in diapers. Isn't that reassuring--you mean by the end of high school, he'll get with the program? Only 13 more years of diapers to go!
Most often, I suppose, toilet-training panic sets in when an artificial social deadline imposes: the preschool that won't change diapers. Thanks to special-ed preschool, that deadline took a long time to loom for my boy. The special-ed teacher wasn't thrilled about the diapers, but those nasty IDEA laws meant that developmentally delayed diaper wearers could not be turned away. This is what classroom aides are for, at any rate. But the time did come when I wanted my guy to be in an after-school program, and the after-school program, being private, could do whatever it pleased. Their no-five-year-olds-in-diapers policy necessitated a get-tough policy on our part.
What finally worked--better than yelling, better than reading Mister Rogers' "Going to the Potty" or the gender-specific "Once upon a Potty", better than begging him to do it for Mama, better than leaving him on the toilet for hours, better than bribes and better than threats--was the guerilla tactic of just taking away his pants. No diapers, no pants, no nothing but a bare bottom for as many days as it took. To guard against mess, I followed him around with a crib liner and a porta-potty and made him sit on one or the other at all times. We cleared the schedule for a week so he could just stay home and be butt naked, but it turned out not to be necessary: He started using the toilet on day 1, and never looked back. I'd like to think it was my parenting brilliance that did the trick, but I know deep down that he was just ready. Thank goodness, because I can't even imagine how much icky cleaning up I'd have had to do if he wasn't.
I'm glad it's over. If I adopt again, I'm sorely tempted to do it past the age of diapers, 'cause doing this once was enough. I sympathize with moms who still have it to do. Unless their kiddos are under 5. Then, I don't want to hear about it.
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When school shootings were just pretend
My teacher shot my classmate--or did he?
by Terri Mauro
All the school shootings these days (and doesn't there seem to be a new one in the news every day?) puts me in mind of an incident from my own school days. It was sophomore year in high school, English class, and a hotheaded student had picked a fight with the teacher right there in the middle of second period. The argument became heated. We all wished the kid would just shut up and sit down, but he didn't. Finally, he headed for the door--at which point the teacher whipped a gun out of his desk and shot him.
The student fell, lay still. Was he dead? What just happened? In fact, it was a little act put on to spur us into a writing assignment in which our ability to grasp details would be tested. The slain student got up, brushed himself off, and took his seat. So intent was the teacher on taking us all by surprise that he only tried this little scenario every other year, so that word of it among students would have faded by the time it happened again. We were surprised, alright. And a little thrilled. Certainly not traumatized.
But boy, you sure couldn't pull something like that today. The teacher would be fired faster than you could say "Columbine," and our class would have been crawling with therapists. Ditto the legendary incident in my junior high school in which a teacher and a student got into a fight that ended with the teacher hanging the kid by his ankles over a balcony. No one actually saw it, but everybody knew someone who had. But if it had happened today, everyone would know: The kid would have had an Uzi, and he would have taken out half the class.
Hard to mourn that schools are no longer safe for mild and mock violence. That English class murder was a little out-there even by 1975 standards. But so many of today's school shootings seem like they should have been just such a set-up--kid shoots teacher on the last day of school, then the teacher jumps up to warn the students not to play with guns. How dearly the students who've witnessed such violence must have wished it was all pretend. Sadly, it's not an act anymore. And nobody's getting back up.
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copyright © 2000 by Terri Mauro