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About “normal” parenting

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Interesting what Véronique says about how your 24 hours belong to you. I admit I’m still at the “criticizing others for their obvious failings” stage, but I take her point. I don’t know how I would cope with several children wanting to do several activities in several places. Probably not very well.

I’ve been thinking about “normal” parenting a lot lately. I’m reading a surprisingly interesting biography of Prince Charles (don’t ask) that was published before his marriage to Diana (ditto) and his family had a lot of trouble giving him as much of a “normal” upbringing as they could (one of Her Majesty’s least noticed virtues is that she has always been ahead of her time, and so has her first-born son; he got heavily into organic farming and sustainable development well before these things became popular). His situation was anything but normal and yet his parents struggled to give him a taste of the kind of life normal Britons lead. He always had to deal with journalists and photographers anywhere he went, and he spent his school years with a full-time detective in tow, but he did manage to go to school – the first Prince of Wales to do so.

How do you know whether what you’re doing is right? Is following your gut enough? I don’t know. It’s a lot easier to criticize other people…

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Tanya adds: Agreed. I was a great parent, and I knew it all, until I had one of my own. I used to see badly behaved children everywhere I went. I hardly see any so terrible anymore.

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Véronique asks: Who said: “At the onset of my career (I think it was a child psychologist), I had no kids and 12 principles. Now, I have 12 kids and no principles.” ?

Free range parenting

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An interesting article in yesterday’s Globe & Mail about “free range parenting”, read it here. I meant to blog about it yesterday but was too busy driving my children to their Mandarin and Eastern art appreciation classes. Just kidding!

Seriously, Tuesday is one of two days out of seven where our children don’t need to be driven somewhere. This will change radically as soccer season starts: three of our children have soccer practice on Tuesday in three different locations. We are working overtime on teleportation and ubiquity. Hopefully, the device will be ready for next week. Yeah…

In light of this unfortunate (read “untenable”) situation, the article made me wonder if I was not just a little guilty of hyper-parenting. But there is more to hyper-parenting and supermomdom than meets the eye. This year has made me eat back every nasty, eye-rolling, head shaking comment I’ve ever uttered against Parents-who-do-this-to-their-kids when my three daughters got heavily involved in dance and gymnastics. As it turns out, some kids do it to themselves. And why shouldn’t they? If you are “blessed” (or should I say “cursed”?) with children who have particular physical or creative abilities, you can’t count on schools to get it out of their systems. Art, languages, sports have all been cut from the Ontario curriculum. And there is no way street soccer can replace the level of physical activity that my pint-sized gymnast needs to be happy (she trains 7.5 hours a week at age 6, don’t shoot until you’ve met her). What is a parent to do when Little Sunshine wants to do more gym, or more dance, or more drama? Fill the form, write the cheques and drive the car, that’s what you do.

But heavy involvement in activities doesn’t have to mean rushed meals, non-existent family time and homework woes. A little organization – and some willful blindness – goes a long way in ensuring that things are done around the house. I make suppers during the weekend, I jog during gym class – which gets me healthy AND walks the dog in one convenient package – I shop for groceries during dance class, I make arrangements for carpooling. But more importantly, there is no tv, computer or video games during weekdays, meaning that the children still get plenty of down time to toss a soccer ball, goof around and relax. Hey, they even have been known to do their homework out of sheer boredom! As for me, I could definitely use some non-graduate-studies-induced boredom. But this too shall pass, I’ll sleep when I’m dead, yadda, yadda. Really, my kids will be in their mid-twenties when I’m in my mid-forties and I know I’ll miss these crazy years.

There is 24 hours in a day for everybody, even super-moms. What you do with them is up to you.

What fits in Mother Russia?

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Russia has the highest abortion rate in the world. Now the Duma is attempting to ban abortion advertising in an effort to reduce the number. I see this as a reminder that abortion being legal doesn’t correlate with happy, healthy populations. Women in Russia do not have more freedom and rights, men and women in Russia are not healthier (in fact, globally, Russia is the only country to not experience an improvement in life expectancy between 1950 and today–improvements in life expectancy are generally an indicator of better health and welfare.) I’m not saying abortion is the only factor to consider–that would be silly. But it is one factor and since we are strangely told that abortion equals enhanced rights and improved health in particular for women, we ought to examine Russia closely.

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Brigitte wonders: Does anybody really believe that a ban on abortion advertising will help? I have trouble imagining any pregnant woman suddenly deciding to abort her child because she saw an ad on television on in a magazine. I’ve lived in Quebec for 30 years (last time I looked: 42 abortions per 100 live births), yet I can’t really recall any abortion advertising jingle or slogan or any kind of abortion ad whatever. But I can still imitate Sucrets’ famous “Solange, es-tu réveillée?” from an ad that probably hasn’t aired since 1978. I’m afraid there as here, the problem is a culture that doesn’t put much value on the unborn, not abortion advertising.

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Rebecca adds: 42 abortions per 100 live births? Wow. I’ve never heard it framed that way before, but that’s a very attention-getting way to put it.

 

Re: abortion and advertising: I agree, I find it unlikely that a given woman with an unplanned pregnancy will be spurred to abort, when she otherwise wouldn’t, by an ad. I do believe, though, that a culture in which abortion is portrayed as so mainstream and acceptable as to be advertised like a new soft drink (hey, we don’t allow cigarettes to be advertised anymore because of their harmful effects) would encourage people to perceive abortion, even unconsciously, as a perfectly valid option that means less caution is needed with birth control and choosing sexual partners.

 

The link between unmarried births and welfare rates (they’re positively corelated with respect to increases in most U.S. states) is a similar sort of background, culture-setting issue. Your typical 17-year-old doesn’t sit down with a scratch pad and calculate whether it’s financially viable to have a baby with no job and no husband on the horizon based on current benefit rates, but is nonetheless influenced by the degree to which society assents to supporting the children of teen mothers.

 

In the case of Russia, even if the only motivation is demographic concern, a ban on abortion advertising would have the effect of delegitimizing it to some small extent. Free speech is always an issue in advertising restrictions, but Russia’s history of problems with freedom of expression is such that pro-abortion ads are the least of its troubles on that score.

Does no one smoke cigarettes anymore?

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Who: Me. Jogging

Where: On the paths in the shadow of Parliament Hill

When: Many days the past couple of weeks

What: People smoking pot

Why: Apparently, the government, having launched an overzealous anti-smoking campaign failed to note that smoking up also constitutes smoking. Someone should make that stuff illegal! (Wait a second…)
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Véronique adds: On the other hand, it might explain a lot…

They’re all sea monkeys

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Having recently encountered some serious money ($50), my son Kurt headed to the toy store for his bi-yearly Lego fix. He came home beyond excited announcing that for the first time since learning about the buying power of money he did not buy Lego! Instead, he bought Sea Monkeys. Yes, Sea Monkeys. Complete with a plastic tank, crystallized eggs and fertilizer. Learning that Sea Monkeys were indeed a kind of shrimp, Liesl and I got busy contemplating how we could eventually eat them (would they be better BBQ’d or sauced?) when Kurt, oblivious to our culinary musings, announced that Sea Monkeys could reproduce in captivity. He added, lifting his eyes from the owner’s manual: “For those who don’t want to reproduce, the kit includes a special mating powder!” That was too good to pass. I replied: “Hey, be careful not to sneeze in it near your classmates!” Once he picked himself off the floor laughing, Kurt blurted: “It will be like the day “Quinn” was approaching all the girls in class telling them: “there’s a nice couch in the teachers’ lounge!!!”

Argh. Blah. Speechless…

Where do kids get their pick-up lines these days?

Happy belated Birth-Mother’s Day

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The special day… celebrates women who chose to carry their baby full-term, but who made the difficult decision to have the child adopted.

Adoption (of the non-celebrity kind) is not discussed nearly enough in the media. A rare read of a birth-mother’s story here.

It really is a life-altering experience. There is so much loss involved,” says Johnson who, when she was 15, gave birth to a baby boy…

“If I had to go back again, I would still do it and I would choose the same family. Seeing Max and how happy he is . . . I could never take that away from him,” she says.

Happy belated Mother’s Day

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Human rights tribunals are obscuring the real themes behind Mark Steyn’s writing: His book America Alone is actually about demographic change.

 

A report released last week is calling birth rates in Europe “critical.”

Europe is now an elderly continent.” Almost one in every five pregnancies ends in abortion. The marriage rate fell by 24 per cent between 1980 and 2006. Two out of three households have no children, and nearly 28 per cent of households contain only one person.

Happy belated Mother’s Day…

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Tanya adds: I had a baby-boomer who lives solo suggest something intriguing this weekend. She thinks young, struggling, single moms should move in with lonely, single, middle-aged women who live in over-sized houses. It’s a novel concept. There’s a need within both parties. Many older, single-dwelling women feel as though society has told them their usefulness has expired. Heaven knows they still have so much left to offer!

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Véronique adds: Well, on a happier note, demographics are doing just fine around my house where I was literally swamped by arts and crafts on Sunday morning. A special mention goes to daughter Brigitta who not only gave me several crafts made of a variety of weeds (mostly grass and dandelions since there is no trees in my urban sprawl neighborhood) but choreographed a ballet number and wrote a poem. One of her verses went a little like this:

 

“Mommy, you make me happy like a dolphin skipping over the waves”

 

You know, you just go about your daily life wondering if you are doing an acceptable job or if you are scarring your children for life. Then  you get this and it makes it all okay.

 

Marriage and motherhood

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Further evidence of a “life” outside this blog? 

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Tanya adds: I’m happy to report from personal experience that there is still a negative stigma attached to unmarried couples having children. Though no one dare ask a single mother what her ‘problem’ is, unmarried couples (especially with children) unabashedly have that question thrust at them.

When I’m asked, I graciously heed the floor to my very own live-in boyfriend and father of my daughter. He loves it!

 

The pill kills

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American Life League is organizing Protest the Pill Day ’08: The Pill Kills Babies. They are clearly referring to its abortifacient capabilities.

The pill also has a long list of admitted health risks to women (heart conditions, circulatory illness, and eye disease, to name a few). Then there’s the kooky idea that it contributes to breast and cervical cancer. I’ve also recently come across an unverified statistic that a teenage girl who uses the pill (or other hormonal contraception) is five times more likely to contract an STD than one who does not.

My humble suggestion is that they sensibilize everyone to the fact that the pill kills women, too, lest we overlook all the spoken (but mostly unspoken) side effects.

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