Cookbooked

Little Man is too little to cook on his own. But the NY Times today has a good article about the ascendency of cookbooks aimed at kids.

But that is changing, as parents who have a keen interest in cooking encourage their young children to spend time in the kitchen and new titles take a more sophisticated approach to children’s food. Although no one tracks overall sales of cookbooks aimed at children, some retailers say that sales have shot up.

But Gillian Engberg isn’t too critical of overly ambitious books, because they represent a return to the kitchen. “We are seeing more of these because people are growing more knowledgeable about food,” she said. “Cooking together represents a pause, a chance for families to come together.”

This feels about right to me. As Little Man gets bigger and more mobile and more independent, there are fewer and fewer things I do exclusively. I find cooking for the baby extremely gratifying (as seen by the crazy amounts of time and food I prepare) and I think cooking with him, teaching him and (one day I hope) his sister the joy of food is an important way to spend time together, particularly in a world where I want to emphasize less TV.

YAY ERA!

Science Daily has a bit about a University of Iowa study that shows that "Whether a young man's mother earned a college degree and whether she worked outside the home while he was growing up seems to have an effect years later when he considers his ideal wife, according to a study by University of Iowa sociologist Christine Whelan."

High-achieving men -- those who earn salaries in the top 10 percent for their age and/or have a graduate degree -- are highly likely to marry a woman whose education level mirrors their mom's.

Nearly 80 percent of the high-achieving men whose mothers had college degrees married women with college degrees, and 19 percent of them married women with graduate degrees. Of men whose moms had graduate degrees, 62 percent tied the knot with graduate degree holders, and 27 percent said "I do" to women with college degrees.

Sixty-eight percent of high-achieving men agreed with the statement, "Smart women make better mothers."

"Successful men in their 20s and 30s today are the sons of a pioneering generation of high-achieving career women. Their mothers serve as role models for how a woman can be nurturing and successful at the same time," said Whelan, a visiting assistant professor of sociology in the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. "One man I interviewed put it like this: 'If your mother is a success, you don't have any ideas of success and family that exclude a woman from working.' This Mother's Day, I think we should thank those moms for leading the way toward gender equality for a younger generation."

....Sixty-two percent of high-achieving single men disagreed with the statement "Women who are stay-at-home parents are better mothers than women who work outside the home." Almost three-quarters of the high-achieving men disagreed with the statement, "It is usually better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family."

One of the nicest parts of me stumbling across this article today is that it's sort diametrically opposite some of the stuff rumbling around in my head that was a result of the piece in NPR about early motherhood's biological superiority and the trend towards more stay at home moms.

It makes sense that if we had happy childhoods, we'd look to replicate those. I am reassured that smart men want smart women, even though I don't think this study really says that.

I'm also curious about methodology. It sounds very upper middle class to me. And I guess I'm using upper middle class to also serve as a code for white.

I say this because I remember reading an article a couple years ago about the difficulty African American women may begin to have in finding mates because of increased college attendance rates among African American women, but flatlining and decreasing rates among African American men. There were a set of assumptions in that article that grated, but it was thought provoking enough to share with my students.

How do these two stories connect? And with the NPR piece?

Control

The New York Times has an excellent article about online web tools for teachers to communicate with parents. Though my Little Man and my Boo aren't old enough for school, let alone not turning in homework and failing grades, I am interested in the whole phenomenon for two reasons. One: I'm a teacher. Two: Parenting seems to be all about control.

A profusion of online programs that can track a student’s daily progress, including class attendance, missed assignments and grades on homework, quizzes and tests, is changing the nature of communication between parents and children, families and teachers. With names like Edline, ParentConnect, Pinnacle Internet Viewer and PowerSchool, the software is used by thousands of schools, kindergarten through 12th grade. PowerSchool alone is used by 10,100 schools in 49 states.


In rural, urban and suburban districts, they have become a new fact of life for thousands of families. At best, the programs can be the Internet’s bright light into the bottomless backpack, an antidote for freshman forgetfulness, an early warning system and a lie detector.

....

Depending on the software, parents can check pending assignments; incomplete assignments; whether a child has been late to class; discipline notices; and grades on homework, quizzes and tests as soon as they are posted. They can also receive e-mail alerts on their cellphones.

With some programs, not only is a student’s grade recalculated with every quiz, but parents can monitor the daily fluctuations of their child’s class ranking. The availability of so much up-to-the-minute information about a naturally evasive teenager can be intoxicating: one Kansas parent compared watching PowerSchool to tracking the stock market.

As a teacher, I have heard tales of a spate of over-intervention of parents. I don't see it too often in my own job. I have seen instances of it at the grad school level, where students will have their parents try to intervene with the professor to get a grade change (SERIOUSLY?!! You are an adult. You get to vote. Grow up!)

But the thing that is terrible about such programs is that it disempowers the kids and takes the responsibility for their success off of them. Sure, I want Johnny to turn in his work. I want Johnny's mom to help. What I don't want is Johnny's Mom to walk his work to my classroom at 7:20 AM because Johnny himself can't be organized enough not to lose it or to forget it.

Also, knowing a kid's grade minute-by-minute seems to lead you to a non-macro understanding of how well a kid is actually doing. It's a snapshot, in the same way that standardized tests are snapshots, of how a kid is doing at a given point in time. If they are spiraling downward, then yeah, intervene. But seriously? There are worse things than failing a class in 3th grade AND sometimes that failure is a good wake up for a kid.

I do understand the other hand though. The desire to control every aspect of what a kid does in order to make the outcome work out to the kid's maximum potential. And I catch myself doing it as a mom.

With Little Man crawling all over, I feel like this is the end of an chapter in his life. From this point on, it's a continual slow acquiescence of control by the parent. And it should be.

What I want most for my children is that they be self-reliant, competent, loving, and confident beings. Independence is a necessary component of that, but it means I can't fix it all and make it go right, not that I ever could.

I'm sure by the time my two are in school, I'll be foaming at the mouth for more information, more interaction, more control. But I hope to remember that independence is necessary too.

Think Outside the TV box, Part II

Great article at Babble about TV or No TV for infants. There are the usual AAP recommendations. I think this piece about interactivity is right on.

"But the infant brain is unique in that it is not fully developed — it is particularly malleable, plastic, under the age of two. Early infant brains develop in response to stimuli from the environment. If their environment is a screen, their development will be different than it will be if a human can interact with them. If in the future you can talk to your screen and it can talk back, maybe what I'm saying will not apply. But we're not there. Babies need interaction with live, in-person human beings. There is more and more research that says exactly that."

Little Man and Boo are both learning from every person they come in contact with. We coo, we make faces, we giggle and laugh and kiss them. We model responses to their behavior. We use words and change what we are doing based on what they do. And it's not just mom and mom doing this. But when strangers say, "What a beautiful baby!" Little Man knows EXACTLY how to be coy and to dip his chin and make the stranger smile.

In fact, we are blessed with beautiful babies who prompt a ton of interaction. Sure, I'm biased. But I have noticed how often people stop to talk to Little Man and how often the nurses play with Boo versus other babies we encounter. All of that interaction helps them socialize and learn. TVs can't do that.

Finally, the concluding paragraph of the essay is right on:

I've come to the conclusion that television is neither enriching nor evil. It's reasonable to view as suspect the claim that a video can turn a kid into an "Einstein." But it's also reasonable to let your kid watch a little Sesame Street without flagellating yourself to death with a peer-reviewed journal article. Just let go of the guilt — either by letting go of the quest for parenting perfection, or by letting go of the remote.

And I've done this to a certain extent. While the TV might be on when we are with Little Man, he rarely is "watching" TV. Sometimes he's lying across my lap drinking milk while I am checking out the weather or catching up on Project Runway. Or sometimes hockey is on and Katie is watching, while I am sitting on the floor making dino noises at my son who is chewing his dino book and looking at me.

We haven't yet started plonking him down in front of the TV while we do something else. Instead, we plonk him down in his exersaucer or on the floor with a plastic basket of toys.

I've accepted my lack of parenting perfection AND I've also really stopped to analyze how much TV he actually watches and realized we have let go of the remote. He encounters some, but it's like contact TV, not primary encounter TV.

What's in a Name?

The New York Times has a great article on names. "A Boy Named Sue, and a Theory of Names".

Studies showed that children with odd names got worse grades and were less popular than other classmates in elementary school. In college they were more likely to flunk out or become “psychoneurotic.” Prospective bosses spurned their résumés. They were overrepresented among emotionally disturbed children and psychiatric patients.

Today, though, the case for Mr. Cash’s theory looks much stronger, and I say this even after learning about Emma Royd and Post Office in a new book, “Bad Baby Names,” by Michael Sherrod and Matthew Rayback.

By scouring census records from 1790 to 1930, Mr. Sherrod and Mr. Rayback discovered Garage Empty, Hysteria Johnson, King Arthur, Infinity Hubbard, Please Cope, Major Slaughter, Helen Troy, several Satans and a host of colleagues to the famed Ima Hogg (including Ima Pigg, Ima Muskrat, Ima Nut and Ima Hooker).

The authors also interviewed adults today who had survived names like Candy Stohr, Cash Guy, Mary Christmas, River Jordan and Rasp Berry. All of them, even Happy Day, seemed untraumatized.


But even if a bad name doesn’t doom a child, why would any parent christen an infant Ogre? Mr. Sherrod found several of them, along with children named Ghoul, Gorgon, Medusa, Hades, Lucifer and every deadly sin except Gluttony (his favorite was Wrath Gordon).

You can sort of understand parents’ affection for the sound of Chimera Griffin, but Monster Moor and Goblin Fester? Or Cheese Ceaser and Leper Priest? What provokes current celebrities to name their children Sage Moonblood Stallone and Speck Wildhorse Mellencamp?

“Today it’s all about individuality,” Mr. Sherrod said. “In the past, there was more of a sense of humor, probably because fathers had more say in the names.” He said the waning influence of fathers might explain why there are no longer so many names like Nice Deal, Butcher Baker, Lotta Beers and Good Bye, although some dads still try.


“Researchers have studied men with cross-gender names like Leslie,” Dr. Evans explained. “They haven’t found anything negative — no psychological or social problems — or any correlations with either masculinity or effeminacy. But they have found one major positive factor: a better sense of self-control. It’s not that you fight more, but that you learn how to let stuff roll off your back.”

Before I got pregnant, I had strong opinions about names. Working in schools, I did NOT want a name that a child would be ashamed to have on the playground. I wanted a name that seemed like a name -- not just trendy Madisons or even less trendy odd names. When I was pregnant I flirted with name Henry which I love, but then I realized, I wanted a non-nicked name.

As a result, I have children with extremely common names. In fact, if I look at the Social Security database, I have a daughter with the 17th most common name and a son with the 15th most common name. When I first learned that, I got upset.

How boring! How common! But the I realized the intention behind my name choices and I realized that of course they would be common.

I love their names and can't imagine them with any other name.

This does not bode well

Little Man's digestive system went wonky as a result of antibios. I was reading around the internet and came across this NYT article about picky eaters.

Little Man isn't picky. And prior to the antibiotics, he had a little gut of steel. But I WAS a picky eater. So the article freaked me out. To wit:

But for parents who worry that their children will never eat anything but chocolate milk, Gummi vitamins and the occasional grape, a new study offers some relief. Researchers examined the eating habits of 5,390 pairs of twins between 8 and 11 years old and found children’s aversions to trying new foods are mostly inherited.

The message to parents: It’s not your cooking, it’s your genes.

The study, led by Dr. Lucy Cooke of the department of epidemiology and public health at University College London, was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in August. Dr. Cooke and others in the field believe it is the first to use a standard scale to investigate the contribution of genetics and environment to childhood neophobia.

According to the report, 78 percent is genetic and the other 22 percent environmental.

“People have really dismissed this as an idea because they have been looking at the social associations between parents and their children,” Dr. Cooke said. “I came from a position of not wanting to blame parents.”

Nutritionists, pediatricians and academic researchers have recently shifted focus to children who eat too much instead of those who eat too little. But cases of obesity are less frequent than bouts of pickiness.

Hugh Garvey, an editor at Bon Appétit magazine, knows the heartbreak firsthand. He shares his experience on gastrokid.com, a blog he created with a British pal that details the gastronomic life of families. His daughter, 6, is an omnivore’s dream child. But his son, 3, will eat only brown food.
...

Most children eat a wide variety of foods until they are around 2, when they suddenly stop. The phase can last until the child is 4 or 5. It’s an evolutionary response, researchers believe. Toddlers’ taste buds shut down at about the time they start walking, giving them more control over what they eat. “If we just went running out of the cave as little cave babies and stuck anything in our mouths, that would have been potentially very dangerous,” Dr. Cooke said.

A natural skepticism of new foods is a healthy part of a child’s development, said Ellyn Satter, a child nutrition expert whose books, including “Child of Mine: Feeding With Love and Good Sense” (Bull Publishing, 2000), have developed a cult following among parents of picky eaters.

Each child has a unique set of likes and dislikes that Ms. Satter believes are genetically determined. The only way children discover what they are is by putting food in their mouths and taking it out over and over again, she said.

...
People who study children prone to flinging themselves on the floor at the mere mention of broccoli agree that calm, repeated exposure to new foods every day for between five days to two weeks is an effective way to overcome a child’s fears.

Oh damn. I'm screwed. I still really like to eat the same foods over and over. In fact, when I go to a restaurant and don't order the same thing, I feel a huge sense of overwhelming loss. Like I missed an opportunity to eat something I love, like I wasted a meal.

I'd love for Little Man to love broccoli (ugh). Hell, I hope Boo gets around to eating anything (getting tube fed babies to learn to tolerate taste is a struggle).

Please let my family avoid the food wars.

On a Toddler's Terms

In today's NYT, there was an article on how toddlers are little tiny neanderthals and Harvey Karp, the Happiest Baby on the Block, says to get down and communicate with the tantrum prone on their terms.

But Dr. Karp’s method of toddler communication is not for the self-conscious. It involves bringing yourself, both mentally and physically, down to a child’s level when he or she is upset. The goal is not to give in to a child’s demands, but to communicate in a child’s own language of “toddler-ese.”

This means using short phrases with lots of repetition, and reflecting the child’s emotions in your tone and facial expressions. And, most awkward, it means repeating the very words the child is using, over and over again.

For instance, a toddler throwing a tantrum over a cookie might wail, “I want it. I want it. I want cookie now.”

Often, a parent will adopt a soothing tone saying, “No, honey, you have to wait until after dinner for a cookie.”

Such a response will, almost certainly, make matters worse. “It’s loving, logical and reasonable,” notes Dr. Karp. “And it’s infuriating to a toddler. Now they have to say it over harder and louder to get you to understand.”

Dr. Karp adopts a soothing, childlike voice to demonstrate how to respond to the toddler’s cookie demands.

“You want. You want. You want cookie. You say, ‘Cookie, now. Cookie now.’ ”

I'm trying to imagine what this looks like in practice. But it makes sense. This is sort of the "active listening" of cognitive coaching taken to an extreme. Would it really work, or will it just infuriate a little tantrum machine?

Gifted? God No.

On monday, when I walked into the school's main office, a teacher had posted this column from Newsweek about giftedness and kids. She makes a couple of points about how giftedness is statistically improbable; that is to say that most parents who want their kids to be gifted should know that it's unlikely that the kid really IS gifted. She also mentions that status of giftedness and how parents try to get their kids labelled as such to give them a leg up into a private school or to get them into a special program to make up for the crap that can be public education.

She also mentions the weird industry that seems to arise around turning our kids into gifted-bots: Baby Einstein videos and "smart" baby food (not to be confused with Smartfood which is delish and hella fattening but won't raise your SAT/GRE/MCAT/LSAT scores.

This part:

I'm starting to think being smart is overrated. We all know adults who are supersmart but somehow never learned the basic playground rules about how to play with others. And while it would be nice if my child turns out to be gifted, it would be even better if she turned out to be kind, confident and happy.

is where I am. I doubt that Little Man or Boo will ever be thought of us gifted. With Boo, she has to overcome a lot just to get to breathing on her. That doesn't make her less loved and treasured. We have a joke in our family, whenever Little Man tumbles forward from seated for faceplant on the floor or whenever we bop his head as we carry him from room to room: "There goes a few more points off his SAT score."

I don't have advanced child-geniuses. But I do have a daughter who loves anyone who will hold her and a son who will smile and flirt like mad. I have mostly happy acting babies, which is a miracle to me. I'd prefer the happy, sweet, kind kid.

Brain, Child

My first issue of Brain, Child came in the mail today. I opened the cover, read much of it, laughing and sighing all the way through. Then I came to this article, On Line, Off Kilter. I agreed with some, disagreed with other bits, especially as it pertains not to the mommynet, but the internet communities of which I have been an active part pre-parent.

But, this part really struck me:

I realized that we were all in danger of becoming parenting fundamentalists.

Over and over again, in various online parenting groups and in real-life encounters with parents of young children, I saw the hallmarks of fundamentalist communities: a desire to return to one’s roots and to get back to the “natural” way of doing things; a mistrust of science, government, mainstream society; a sense of feeling persecuted; intolerance of differing viewpoints; fear of outside influences.

I'm not sure I know anyone who is at risk of being a parenting fundamentalist. But I do think that the term is apt for a certain mindset. In the article, she uses it to describe the anti-vaccination, homeschooling, wood-only toys set. But I think what it does speak to is a larger ease at judgment over parenting.

I'm not sure why, but parenting lends itself to judgment. Maybe because the stakes seem so high, if you mess up, you are sure to live with those repercussions endlessly. And I think in a post-freudian world, we do believe that. But if having a preemie teaches you anything, it's that children are resilient little creatures.

Would I prefer being a "natural" parent? Maybe. I'm not sure. I will say the bells and whistles on some toys engage my Little Man and help him develop in ways that blocks of wood won't. But by the same token, wooden blocks have less toxins than plastic and push him to develop other skills and creativities.

I guess, then, as ever, as a parent what I'd like to search for is balance.

Not related to that little navel gaze, if you haven't seen Brain, Child, it has some lovely writing and some thought provoking stances. There's an article about special needs children and the myth of "special mothers" that rings a note of truth from where I sit. You should definitely check it out.

Swaddling

I was a big fan of swaddling, when Little Man and Boo were smaller. The nurses swaddled the little ones in the NICU and Boo, in particular, was all about feeling contained and safe. I'm not sure when the benefits of swaddling wear off, but Little Man, with his limbs longing to explore, might benefit from some boundaries set. So I started to reconsider swaddling at night for him.

Then I read this NYT article on poor swaddling leading to hip dysplasia. Oops. Now I don't wanna. Though Little Man, with his cloth diapered butt, doesn't need the precautionary extra diaper to get his hips in alignment.

Speaking of hip dysplasia, the OT and PT that Boo has is worried that she might have it. One leg was much less developed than the other up until two weeks ago when we really began working with her on it. Now it's bulking up and matches the other leg, but she'll still have some x-rays (I'm sure) and an ortho consult. So many hurdles to overcome.