Helicopter parenting

Back in the days when Kate was a toddler, and Leo not even thought off, and we lived in London, I marveled over the amount of organized activities some SAHM's would schedule for their children. There was singing, music group, toddler tumble, baby swim, story telling and pottery class in abundance. Every day, another thing they needed to get to in time, and that always seemed to clash with nap times and feeding routines.

I would bump in to a mother friend on my way to the play ground and she would be busy maneuvering her stroller on to the bus, rushing to get from playgroup to baby ballet, "I don't have time to chat right now, let's meet for coffee next week." We'd never make it to coffee.

As I was studying for my MA and Kate was at nursery 2 full days a week, the days we had at home together, I simply didn't have the energy to have to be somewhere at a certain time. I needed to take the day as it came. We would hang out with friends in the play ground for hours, go for long walks and find pine cones in the park, weather permitting, or just have a four hour long play date which consisted of Kate and her friends turning the apartment up side down while me and the other mothers would drink endless pots of tea, read gossip magazines and talk about how sleep deprived we were. And I admit, we would scoff at the poor mother's who had signed up to a life with screaming kids on the public transport, constantly going somewhere, never ever standing still long enough to take a deep breath.

Then I moved to California. Kate started Pre-K. And if I thought mother's over-subscribed their kids in London, I was in for a huge reality check. Suddenly, baby swim and toddler music seemed like free play compared to Mandarin lessons, yoga classes, Violin and Arithmetic for pre school Einsteins which were all norm rather than exception. And that's not counting the weekend activities which were all out doors, and sports based. Soccer practice twice a week, and two games on Saturday. And then off for some light mountain hiking. By the way, this is 4-year old's we're talking about.

I have always felt that we are doing our children a disservice by over-scheduling organized activities. Along with activities comes and enormous amount of pressure to perform and become better (well, best) of your peers. The activities are not for fun - they are competitive and strenuous and will leave children feeling that if they are not the best, they are simple not good enough. But apart from physically exhausting our kids and turning them in to self conscious wrecks , we are also taking away the ability to figure out who they are, and what the world is all about. And most of all: we are not letting them be bored.
All kids needs to be bored. They need to learn to become creative with play and time. They need to develop their imagination. And they don't need a mother who drives them from swimming to hockey in five minutes flat, they need a mother who sits next to them on a sofa and talks about dragons, and dolphins and why the earth might be flat after all.

According to a new book by American therapist David Code, To Raise Happy Kids, Put Your Marriage First, this problem is now recognized as "helicopter parenting", which "creates anxious, exhausted parents and demanding, entitled children." He has a simple formula for happier kids: take the focus away from your children and move it on to your marriage instead. Because another side-effect of helicopter parenting are less time to spend with our spouse leads to empty and unhappy marriages. This could be one reason why divorce rates in the US are sky rocketing right now.

So cut down on the activities! Start to actually spend time with your little one's. Listen to what they have to say. Get down on their level and see how they experience the world, and still have time over to give your husband a hug.

If this is bad - we should all be doing it -and be proud.

When I was a child, not once can I remember listening (yes, small girl, big ears, and not afraid to use them) to my mother and her friends talk about motherhood or children like something that needed to be talked about, or was interesting to talk about for that matter. They never sat around the kitchen table and debated whether they had enough time for their kids and if this was something they stressed about. They never defined themselves as mother's, it was something they happened to be, not something that they were consumed by.
If they ever talked about us, the kids pretending to play under the table while they drank coffee and smoked Blend Ultra, it was usually because one of us had behaved badly and had needed to be punished, or because one of us had had a stomach bug that made us vomit all over the living room carpet, as something that had disrupted the rest of their day by annoyingly stopping a halt to everything else they had to do.
Most of all they talked about work, or Dallas, or the new Jackie Collins novel. It made them sound interesting. It was a world I was yet to be invited to, something that was a mystery to me, something I was dying to be a part of. To be a grown woman, and sit around a table and talk to your friends about things that only they understood.

(I can only imagine what those small ears would hear, and what impact they would have on me had it been today, and the conversation around the table would have been about my child, my child, my child, my child, taking care of my child, finding the best organic and locally grown broccoli, and my child, and my child's Gymboree class, and swim class, and music class, and me child my child my child. I would probably have grown a pretty large head to go with those big ears, I tell you.)

Most importantly, no one considered them bad mother's. In fact, they were all (maybe except for one, but that was only because she served bolognese sauce without meat to save money, so that was done out of necessity, not evilness, strictly, I guess it doesn't count) very good mother's. They were loving, affectionate, funny, devoted and no-nonsense. Most of them worked full-time, while the kids spent their days in state-funded day care (you gotta love Scandinavia, even in the early 70's). When they didn't work they cooked basic meals while we watched the one hour of TV that was suitable for kids (and often more hours that was not so suitable), they made sure we were dressed and had our gym kit together and they left us with our grand parents at weekend's to get a break. They had fun parties where they all got merry and would dance around with us standing on their feet and had us fall asleep on a pile of coats in the hall-way. They would sleep in when they were tired, ask us to make them coffee when they woke up, and if they had any energy at all they would take us swimming, or for a walk in the park, but if it didn't happen, no one would think they had failed us.

It seems to me that there is something fundamentally wrong in how we define and perceive ourselves as mother's today - and how we judge all the other mother's around us by comparing them to ourselves. You are not a sufficient mother unless you get down on the floor at all times and actively play with your child for every awake moment of it's day. You have to sign up for activities, and play-dates, and do the home-work assignments, and still have time to show your kids how to relax (because they can't figure that out for themselves). As a mother, your life should be your children - and nothing else. You should not be happy unless your child's needs (which we have ourselves created by obsessing) are completely taken care of down to the very last detail.

And this is still not enough. Only yesterday, Kate moaned because there are so many movies coming out over the holiday's and when I had told her that we simply can't go and watch them all in the theatre, that we have to wait for them to come out On Demand (as if there were ever the luxury of determining your viewing schedule when I grew up - watch your fifteen minutes of Tjeckoslovakian puppet-show right now, or miss it forever).
- It's just not fair, she scowled. Everyone else can go with their mommy and daddy. They have time!

I felt huge pangs of guilt for about ten seconds, until I managed to shake it off.
- They probably can't, I said. And even if they could, I don't care. Different families have different rules.
It felt good saying it (not so good that it stopped me from lying awake later that night, agonizing over how horrible I'd been, though). It felt like I was finally putting my foot down. Making a stand. Separating me from the group and going it on my own. Taking charge of my life, all that sort of stuff.

It seems that in today's hyper-obsessed society (or should I say obsessive) we are not happy until we have completely, totally, one hundred percent thrown ourselves in to playing our roles as mother's that we are quite happy obliterating ourselves, and the people we were before we had children, to the point that what's is left are empty shells, mere cut-outs of what used to be a fully functioning human being. God forbid, we should have time to do anything else - let alone take a break and read a book, or do something that we'd take pleasure in doing for us, for me, not for my child. Only bad mother's take time out for themselves. Only very, very bad mothers.

Which is what I have been doing over the last day or so.
I couldn't put down memoir Bad Mother, written by Bay Area (Berkeley more precisely which makes her observations even more interesting at times) author and mother Ayelet Waldman , until I had finished the last page. This book is funny, clever, thought provoking and sometimes very, very close to the heart (when you read about how she nearly - unknowingly - sacrificed her son's life for breast-feeding, I had lock myself in my bedroom and reach for the tissues).
Waldman has been in the spot light before. To a lot of people she is most famous for a column she wrote about loving her husband more than her children, which led her to a sit on Oprah's sofa where she had to endure much harsh and personal criticism by the audience.
When I read Waldman's book I struggle to find anything even remotely offensive or inappropriate in her stories. They are all very nice and polite reflections on a society gone bonkers over Motherhood. Her book is open, truthful and very honest without being provocative for the sake of shocking. Waldman comes across as someone I would like to have a conversation with. Someone who has found an ideal balance between home, work and herself and who should be praised for that, rather than chastised.
She can come and drink coffee by my kitchen table any day - it would be an honor!

Bad Mother - A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and occasional Moments of Grace by Ayelet Waldman is published by Doubleday.

For more information, go to www.ayeletwaldman.com

Baby Einstein - not the solution to all your problems...

I have always been an outspoken critic of the Baby Einstein DVD's. I have never seen the point of them. Or rather: put on the DVD and let the little tot's enjoy them, but don't think for a second that they will help them become early speakers - and definitely not the next generation of Einsteins.
Ever since my first encounter with the DVD's, which was about 7 years ago, I have had a hate-relationship to these annoying so-called learning-stimulants because of that very reason: they want you to think that you are providing a learning-tool for your child that you are not capable of giving them yourself. After years of believeng that TV was bad for kids, and that they needed active play-time instead, suddenly, the creators of Baby Einstein wanted you think that you are a bad mother if you didn't let your child watch TV every day.

When Baby Einstein was released, there was an influx of otherwise TV-aversed mothers who suddenly thought that TV might not only be OK but necessary for their kids development of essential verbal skills. In fact, they felt that if they didn't put them in front of Baby Einstein, their kids would miss out on vital skills. Would they not qualify to the pre-school of their choice if they didn't welcome Baby Einstein in to their home? Would their kids fall behind in high school? Because children who watched Baby Einstein, the creator would have you believe, where not only much more advanced in their vocabulary, they where more likely to have adopted multi-lingual skills that they might never be able to adopt if they were to start a few years later.

I never for a second believed in this philosophy. To me it was blatantly obvious that the little child in front of the TV who, passive and silent, watched a spinning top while listening to classical music and a monotonous voice reciting the name of the color blue in five different languages did not learn a single thing about languages, never mind develop their speech.
Although not a huge fan of TV for under 2's, at some point of the day (usually around 5pm, when my kids where tired and dinner needed attention), I would turn on the TV. Tellytubbies, In the Nightgarden or Fimbles (OK, so I am British, so you have to bear with my choice of BBC productions here) did a lot more to engage my kids than Baby Einstein would ever do. Not only did my kids respond to what they watched and heard on the screen by interactively wave, dance, say 'hello' and 'goodbye' etc, after a little while they became bored and distracted and started to play with their toys again. If I wanted my children to talk, I would have to interact with them myself to get the conversation going.
The kids I knew who watched Baby Einstein, on the other hand, sat placidly and stared at the screen for longer periods of time, without a sound coming out of their mouths. There was no interaction, and no stimulation. OK, so my oppinon isn't exactly scientifically researched, it's a mere subjective train of thoughts, but recently I have read two articles that confirmed my believes that only interaction from grown-up's - not DVD's - will help stimulate your child's speech.



Research on Baby Einstein and evidence that the DVD's won't work as speech-stimulants, can be found in the book NurtureShock - New thinking about children, written by PO Bronson and Ahsley Sherman (Twelve, 2009). In the chapter 'Why Hannah talks and Alyssa doesn't' the authors present a wide range of research on speech and also dispels the common myth that if we subject our children to language, regardless of the medium, they will absorb it and eventually use it actively. They argue that instead of feeding our kids with constant chatter, we need to "notice what's coming from the baby, and respond accordingly - coming from his mouth, his eyes, and his fingers." In other words, to raise verbal children, the parents, should keep quiet, and instead listen and respond to our children.

And in an article recently published in the New York Times stated that Walt Disney Company acknowledge the fact that the fact that then DVD's are not educational and will therefor offer refunds to any parent returning a Baby Einstein DVD.

So, don't be afraid to use the TV as an electronic baby-sitter when you need to. But do it in honest. Don't try to dress it up with the argument that your kids will learn something from it. To really get them going, get down on the floor and start to interact. Quietly enter your child's world and start to listen to what they have to say instead.

Playgroup

When is it OK to hit someone over the head with wet wipes when that person talks absolute rubbish and you know you are going to have to face that person for two hours every week until you kids are old enough to decide for themselves what playgroups to go to?

My local playgroup often turns into a battle field where the more experienced mothers (older and/or more than one child) fight it out when the new mothers (first baby, everything is new and confusing) ask an innocent question about introducing solids or how to fight sleep deprivation.
There will be at least two or more mother honchos, opinionated, strong-willed, have read every baby book known to man who will give not so much advice but more a long list of what is right (their way) and what is not (other mother's ways).

They will not listen to anyone else, they will interrupt you if you talk, and they will not think twice about telling you that you are wrong should your advice be different from theirs. These alpha-mothers have made it their life to know everything about raising children and they consider themselves experts in the area. They get very emotionally attached and take it personally when someone isn't following the same sleeping or feeding schedule as they do, they will report you to child services if you don't breast-feed for as long as they consider proper, and they will pretend to be your best friend just so that they can enter your home and get a good look at the surroundings in which you raise your children, just to dissect it and criticize it.

These are the mothers fighting it out at playgroup every week. That is their life, and they are devoted to it.

Everywhere in this country, Damien is born, and born, and born again

What mother does not think that they are doing their child the biggest favor in the world by stop working and staying at home, spending their undevoted time to them? 7, or maybe even 8 out of 10, I guarantee you. Guess what?
You are most likely making them a huge disservice, catering to their every need, teaching them that you will wait on the 24 hours a day, not giving them a chance to ever, ever learn through trying by making mistakes, by hurting yourself every now and then.
It's not malicious, but a lot of times, we create a false sense of security by building up a very distorted reality that our little angels will mistake for true.

We drive them in the car everywhere. We have every snack you can possibly imagine packed, ready to be served within seconds of the slightest hint of a dissatisfied sound. We talk to them in fake baby-voices. We are always there to stop and solve any conflict that might ever happen in the playground before they even take place. We teach them that they will never have to be bored, and God forbid, they will never have to make up games of their own, because we will always, always be there, putting everything else we were doing away to yet again read that wretched Thomas the Tank engine book instead of saying, 'Not right now, mommy is busy.' We show them that they will never have to eat anything that might possibly look or smell a little different because we have all the time in the world to make them the dinner that they will eat. They will never experience pain because they'll never have a chance to graze their knees, or bump their head on the kitchen table.

By doing this, and more, we will create little monsters, and they are our future.

Alpha mothers are the curse on our society

Don't you just sometimes want to ram your Mclaren stroller in to the group of alpa-mothers hogging the swings at the playground, or at least 'accidentally' knock over their triple wet no-milk no-coffee hot-cold americano or something.
This breed of zombie-like women staring at their children, not letting them go for even a second, their vacant smiles glued to their faces as they keep a steady stream of nasal yapping coming out of their mouth:
- Good job, buddy. Good girl - let's grab the bucket, good job, now let's use our shovel to put some sand in the bucket, that's it, good job, buddy, no let's turn the bucket up side down, good job-
I mean, come on, if they don't get bored by the sound of their own voices, please spare a thought for the rest of us.
And in between the nasal yapping of fake enthusiasm is the conversation with the other alpha mothers, the high-pitched, too fast for the human ear to catch, stream of competitive note-swapping on pre-schools, play-groups, toddler science, music fun, which sun-block works and how much of an age gap is appropriate between kid two and kid three?

These alpha mothers reassure me that being a mother is the best thing that has ever happened to them and yet they are sucking every last drop of want out of my own body. Being a mother and ending up like that?

Baby talk is cheap

I had dinner with a few girlfriends the other night, some of which I haven't seen for a long time. There was a lot of catching up to do, what's been going on in our lives, how high our hopes are for Obama, are going skiing this year, and so on. And, for a few around the table, inevitably, the baby-talk.

Fact: I am not big on the baby-talk.
I like relaying a clever comment that my daughter made after school, or stating the fact that I will be brain-dead during our conversation because I didn't get any sleep - again, but apart form that, let's keep it real.
There is one obvious reason why this is, and here goes: Talking about your your own children is OK. Talking about other people's children is B_O_R_I_N_G. And if you talk about your own, the polite thing to do is to reciprocate too, and that's where I draw the line.
I mean, come on, we all think that our own little spawns are God's gift to the rest of the world. We think they will grow up a Super Model with a PhD in quantum physics and be a professional, classically trained piano player, that is how it is - but no one else can see what you can see, and if you go on about it too much, everyone is going to think that you are incredibly self-centered - because you are!

It is also not interesting to talk about strollers, play-groups, organic crackers and the latest sing-a-long craze. We are grown-ups and we are intelligent. Why oh, why do we need to let ourselves down like this?
The contra-argument would be that if you are a proud mother (and there is no reason why you shouldn't be), you want to share the joys of your life with the rest of the world. Sure. I can see that. But let's be realistic here. If you are not particularly in to dogs, you wouldn't be that keen on listening to a dog-owner and how she has just potty-trained her Alsatian. If you couldn't see the point of soccer, you'd hate to have to go through every single minute of the Spurs-Arsenal game (yeah, we all know that Spurs lost, yeah). So why on earth do we just take for granted that our children is by default a suitable subject for a conversation?

My time is simply to valuable to be wasting it on things I have no interest in. There was a time when I was young, free-spirited and had all the time in the world to sit around and talk nonsense for hours on end without getting any wiser (and guess what, that was in my life before children!), but these days, I want to spend my time doing things that matter, and, to be brutally honest, other people's children don't matter that much to me.
Also, listening to a group of women squel for hours over nap-times, baby-spoons, zippy-cups and organic snacks gives me migrane since it's so mind-numbingly hard to even try to look even a little excited about it.

And here's the thing: women struggle to claim and define their space in this fast-changing society and they often feel that they get pushed out, brushed to one side, walked all over, as soon as they have babies. Suddenly, their place is not where the fun and action happen anymore, their place is the home, whether they chose it or not. At least, that's what society would like women to think. You had the babies, so now you should have everything you ever asked for, right?

Well, if women want to be taken seriously even after they decided to enter the scary world of no-return, we have to cut down on the baby-talk, literally. If you start acting like you went in to hospital to have a baby, but came out like you had a lobotomy you're going to get written off as a reliable human being pretty sharpish.

Sure, before I get my head kicked in with someones diaper-bag I'd like to point out that I do talk, and I take a deep interest in talking about the children of my close friends, should they feel the need to let of some steam or otherwise. This is not about me being a terrible friend, cold- hearted and emotionally fucked. What I don't buy into is that if you are a mother you should, by default, have to OD on baby and let it take over your life. My children are important to me, but I accept that talking about them might not be that interesting to everyone else, and all other baby-related stuff, like Gymborée classes, organic cheese-sticks and the necessities of two nap-times a day, well, that really shouldn't be interesting to anyone.