Mothers

WITH ATTITUDE

AUGUST 21, 2000

Are "today's parents" trying too hard or not hard enough? That's the question that keeps parenting books filling up, and flying off of, bookstore shelves. From the virtual shelves of Amazon.com, here are two new tomes that exhort us to do more, do less, do different. I haven't read them--heck, I'm still just halfway through Stanley Greenspan's "The Challenging Child," which I bought months ago, and I have a stack of such scintillating titles as "Assessment of Communication and Language," "Teaching Children With Autism," and "Reaching Out to Children With FAS/FAE" waiting for me when I'm done. No mere garden-variety parenting problems for me! But if you're not rushing out to buy these titles, then you must be a bad parent. Or so their publishers would have you believe...

Taking the "try harder!" tack is "How to Behave So Your Children Will, Too!" by the aptly named Sal Severe. Does your child throw wild, humiliating tantrums in public places? Maybe it's not his behavior you should be worrying about. Severe's take is that it's your behavior that causes junior to act up--your inconsistency, your ineffective disciplinary techniques, your willingness to give in to get a little peace. As Amazon's review explains: "Solidly putting the responsibility for a child's behavior on the parents, "How to Behave" addresses a wide range of issues, such as how children learn to push their parents' buttons, why children misbehave, and how to motivate kids to behave using simple rules and consequences. Push aside all the nitty-gritty advice, however, and several themes emerge. Over and over, Severe emphasizes that raising a child requires total parental consistency, that it takes awhile to get results from new parenting techniques, and that overall, parenting is a very tough job." Well, thanks. It's nice of someone to say so. Especially someone bent on making it tougher still.

But does it really have to be so tough? From the "don't try so hard!" school of thought comes "Hyper-Parenting: Are You Hurting Your Child by Trying Too Hard?" by Alvin A. Rosenfeld and Nicole Wise. What the two are specifically targeting is the overabundance of activities parents run their kids (and themselves) through in an effort to provide a rich, varied, and full childhood experience. Bad parents! Says Amazon: "If you've just sat down after a day that included taking your very intelligent child to a Kumon math tutoring session, shuttling another to soccer practice and piano lessons, supervising the homework of both to make sure it's perfect, and making a midnight trip to the grocery store to pick up the organic grapes for tomorrow's nutritionally balanced lunches, then "Hyper-Parenting" is for you.... This parenting style can be loosely defined as one that attempts to control everything in a child's environment with the aim of achieving a perfect outcome. It's not realistic or healthy, say the authors. Chapter by chapter, examining everything from parents' reliance on "expert" opinions to the huge impact of media messages on parent behavior, Rosenfeld and Wise make a compelling argument for their premise. They encourage parents to turn the lens inward and ask themselves what messages they are sending--not with their words, but with their behavior." Personally, I think that teaching children how to juggle a full schedule of activities is probably about as valuable a skill as anything, and teaching them that the best way to handle their lives is by reading a book (particularly one that then tells you not to listen to experts) is somewhat less productive. But then again, I've carefully perfected a hypo-parenting style by which I park the kids in front of the TV for endless hours of Nickelodeon so that I have plenty of time to sleep, answer e-mail, and read parenting books.

Hey, it works for me.

AUGUST 23, 2000

The big health news this summer, here in the New York metropolitan area, is mosquitos. And not just any mosquitos: mosquitos who are carrying the West Nile virus, that staple of nightly newscasts and inspirer of public panic. The virus is transported from infected crows to humans by those little needle-nose nuisances, and can cause encephalitis. Or not. Though seven people died after being infected last year and 62 more were sickened, most of those bitten will just experience a bad case of the blahs (and just how would I distinguish these from my normal everyday blahs?). It's a serious health hazard for the elderly, the weak, and the immune-system-impaired. For everybody else, the itching is probably worse.

Yet of course, since there's no news like scary news, all we hear and read is DEADLY VIRUS and PUBLIC HEALTH RISK and MUST SPRAY POISON! That poison would be malathion, which is something of a public health risk all by itself. Still, we can't be having no virus-carrying mosquitos flying around, so some counties are choosing airborne chemicals as a lesser evil. At the very least, residents are being advised to take major precautions: No standing water in your yard! No going outside without your own personal chemicals liberally applied! No going outside with any skin exposed, even if it's chemical-coated! No going outside in the evening at all!

Now, personally, I'm more afraid of a Lyme-disease-filled deer tick than a West Nile-virus-bearing mosquito, though I'll be happy to steer clear of both. And that's where I'm finding some small compensation in this whole thing. I've never much liked the outdoors. I've entered it grudgingly. When my children insist on playing outside, I stall them as long as I can. Can't let them go out by themselves, of course--between their developmental delays and judgment problems and the predatory strangers one hears about on nightly newcasts when there's no mosquito news, I watch those kiddos like a hawk. But I can whine and complain and delay and cut their outings short for arbitrary reasons. And I do.

Previously, this has made me a bad mom who for her own selfish reasons will not allow her children to frolic in the great and health-filled outdoors. Now, though, I'm a good and alert mom who is keeping her children safe from danger. Really, if you subtract the hours of the day you're advised not to let children outside because they could get sunburned, and then subtract the hours of the day you're advised not to let children outside because of mosquitos, there's only about five minutes in the early morning and five minutes in the late afternoon that are safe. By the time you slather on the sunscreen and bug repellant, that five minutes is gone. Can't put out a little backyard swimming pool, because mosquitos will lay eggs in it. Can't go hiking, because there are deer ticks out there. Can't leave toys in the yard, because the insecticide sprays will collect on them. Can't go outside when it's hot, because the clothes you have to wear to block out the sun and the bugs will give you heat stroke. Why not just stay inside, in the air-conditioned house?

And if that makes you just feel blah--well, see? You've already been infected!

AUGUST 25, 2000

AUGUST 28, 2000

There's a new movement afoot in America, Land of Many Movements. It's the anti-period movement. And no, they're not trying to ban that little particle of punctuation at the end of every sentence. Instead, this group of doctors and promoters of women's health are seeking to end menstruation as we know it. Have the Kotex people heard about this?

The argument, as laid out in the book "Is Menstruation Obsolete?" by Brazilian gynecologist Elsimar Coutinho, is that if women would just take their birth-control hormones all the way through the month instead of taking a placebo for seven out of 28 days, they could do away with all that mess and bother without doing themselves any harm. Proponents envision a world with no bloating, no cramps, no PMS, no painful complications--and, presumably, no peppy cheerleaders on TV commercials talking about their tampons. We can all certainly get behind that.

To those who say that suppressing this wondrous monthly event isn't natural, the anti-period patrol responds that it isn't natural for women to be bleeding so bleeding much in the first place. In the past, women started menstruating later, had more babies, and stopped sooner. Died sooner, too, but that's beside the point. In ancient Persia, a woman might have had 100 periods in her lifetime. In modern America, it might be 480. Think of the pain and suffering. Think of the inconvenience. Think of the money spent on super-jumbo packages of Always pantiliners. Oh, the humanity.

So if you could cut your menstrual rate down to that of an ancient Persian, without having to have additional babies or die young, why wouldn't you? Well, for one thing, because the jury's still out as to whether taking more estrogen than you really need is always a good thing. As with virtually everything in life, that which takes away risk in one area often adds to it in another, and though taking the pill and avoiding periods may cut one's chances of getting ovarian cancer, the extra estrogen may increase the likelihood of breast cancer. Then, too, let's think about that PMS for a minute. Is there not some value in having an excuse to be cranky once a month, as opposed to the rest of the month when we're cranky for no good reason at all?

Personally, I'm waiting for the counter-campaign that the sanitary-product industry must necessarily be plotting even as we speak. Expect much New Age-y talk about the glorious ebb and flow of life and the wholesomeness of nature and all of its ways. Let's hope they leave the peppy cheerleaders out of it.

AUGUST 30, 2000