07 Monday Sep 2015
Posted in From The Owlery, Life and Love
Tags
I need to tell you something, and it’s hard to admit.
As a disclaimer, I want you to know that I love being a parent IN GENERAL. I loved Owl’s babyhood, I enjoyed his toddlerhood, and until recently I never once regretted his growth and change into a bigger and ever-more-complex-and-complete person.
Note the “until recently” part.
I have not enjoyed age Four.
09 Friday Aug 2013
Posted in Life and Love
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PH got $100 in Chapters money from his workplace for being generally awesome, and I used part of my share to pick up a book I’ve been eyeing for a while:
Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids
It seemed apropos, since PH and I are starting to think about committing this insanity again. I liked the Freakonomics sort of look to it, since I really enjoyed NurtureShock, which is also full of wacky thought-provoking research.
It was interesting, if not as convincing.
Really, this book isn’t going to convince you to have more kids if you don’t want more kids. His only real argument in favour of kids is that if you enjoy the one or two you have, you’ll probably enjoy a third or fourth as well.
It’s mostly just full of stuff to convince you to commit to it if you’ve already been tossing around the idea by poo-poohing a lot of common reasons NOT to have more kids.
Objections that he lays to rest through careful logic:
Myth 1: Kids are too costly, time-wise and financially speaking.
He argues that kids are only time consuming because we make them that way. While the baby years are unavoidably filled with work, he says that people over invest their time and money in their kids these days, by spending thousands on organized sports and lessons rather than let them run off and play on their own.
According to his statistics, the average working mother still spends as much or more time actively parenting her children than the average home maker did back in the 50s.
As Hannah over at Hodgepodge and Strawberries once pointed out, scheduled activities really eat into your time – organized sports and the like are a parental time-suck that hardly existed a few decades ago.
When I was a child, things were different. For one thing, North America was covered by glaciers. For another thing, when it came to sports, we kids were pretty much on our own [….] We rode our bikes to the field, played the game, and rode our bikes home.
At dinner our parents might ask us how the game went, but they might not. It was no a big deal either way. We didn’t expect the grown ups to think it was all that important. We didn’t think it was all that important. It was Little League.
If an adult had appeared at the Wampus ball field and spend an entire game yelling at the players, everybody would have thought that person was a lunatic” – Dave Barry, I’ll Mature When I’m Dead
So Bryan Caplan says that parents spend so much time taking their kids back and forth to organized activities and trying to have “quality time” that they end up cheating themselves out of the joy of more children.
He isn’t telling parents not to sign their kids up for anything, but points out that if you cancelled the one or two lessons a week that you kid really hates going to, you might have time for another kid.
Myth 2: Kids need to be supervised to be safe
Caplan buys into the Freerange Kids philosophy, and even quotes from that book. He argues that today`s children are the safest in the history of ever, and that the chance of your child actually being kidnapped from the playground across the street is so remote that it isn`t worth you losing a lot of sleep (and time) over it.
He encourages parents to let their kids roam free, so that parents can have some downtime and be less stressed and more able to actually enjoy being parents when the kids come back inside.
Myth 3: Over-parenting can change your child`s life
This may be his most challengeable argument. He says there’s no point in spending a lot of time on one individual kid, because twin studies (he’s big on identical twin studies) show that separated twins raised by different parents still turn out pretty much the same. Thus, your children’s futures are largely genetically determined, and as long as you help them reach their full potential by feeding them nutritious food and loving them well, they’ll be just fine. Investing hours and hours on flash cards and piano lessons won’t actually have much of a measurable effect on who they are.
Personally, I found this to be a slightly odd argument. He’s trying to convince me that I should parent more kids, while convincing me that my parenting doesn’t make a lick of difference.
The point he should have made clear, is this:
If I want to have a child who turns out to be brilliant or famous, or good at music, or good at science, having more children improves my odds more than simply trying to turn my single kid into a prodigy. I know what it is to be the only child, and thus the seat of all hope and disappointment. I think THAT would be a great argument to have more kids, but I actually heard it from my mother when I was a teen.
I also felt really bad for adoptive parents when reading his twin studies, because he makes you feel like a total lame-duck parent, just a sparrow raising a cuckoo. But he does go on to say that if you do really want your parenting to make a difference, you should adopt from the 3rd world, because you will really be giving them a noticeably different and better life and helping them reach a potential they would not have reached in an African orphanage.
So there’s that.
Myth 4: We have too much population already
Caplan fights this argument with an economist’s point of view: more population is better, he says, because a higher population can support more people with fewer dollars spent per person. Sort of like Wal-Mart.
As the baby boomer generation ages and the younger population shrinks, the taxpayer burden gets heavier because fewer workers are around to help pay pensions for all of those old people. We’re like an upside down pyramid. Instead, the younger population should be larger, so that each person contributes a small amount of money while providing MORE social services to those who need it.
He also points out that our environmental and poverty problems are not a matter of how many people are in the world, but how unfairly the wealth is distributed and how messy our technology is. He points out that the best way to solve our current problems is to have some visionaries invent cleaner technology, more ways to use our world sustainably, and better ways to share the world’s wealth.
He says the best way to increase our chances of producing the next world-saving genius is simply to produce more people. It’s like buying more lottery tickets to improve your chances of hitting the jackpot.
I actually found this a convincing argument. I have always said that intelligent people SHOULD breed, because higher IQ is correlated to a lower birth rate, probably due to things like foresight, and putting off children until a higher level of education has been completed.
But since IQ is at least partially inherited, filling the world with more stupid people than smart people seems like a great way to not only supply morons like Akin as potential leaders, but to idiots to vote for them as well.
—
Ultimately, I can’t say this book convinced me to have more kids.
It spent far too much time trying to convince me that my parenting doesn’t matter in the long run (even he couldn’t argue that parenting doesn’t make a HUGE difference in the short-term, resulting in either a pleasant well-balance kid or a crazy brat), which was hurtful and not particularly inspiring (yes! I want to have more children who I will be unable to influence on a long term basis!) and not enough time on arguments like:
The book is full of interesting statistics, research and data, but it’s not very convincingly written. However, I am inclined to check out that Free Ranged Kids book, since he quotes from it constantly and seems to get a lot of his data from there as well.
He also promotes cry-it-out and I sometimes get the feeling from him that he is against abortion (he spends a lot of time arguing that you owe it to your future children to let them be born, which sounds suspiciously pro-life). That, plus his economist’s arguments for increasing the population, made the book feel a tad right-wing, and I wasn’t overly comfortable with it.
I would say that Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids makes some interesting points, but isn’t very convincing, because he can’t argue the fact that people with small children are overall less happy than people who don’t have kids at all.
All he can really do to fight that is point out that people who have children are happier and more satisfied with their lives 20 years down the road.
That’s nice to know, but it doesn’t help me when I’m wondering how much more sleep my husband can lose without turning into The Hulk.
16 Saturday Feb 2013
Posted in Life and Love
Food seems to be a shared obsession in my house.
Not only do PH and I have food issues, but our dog and cat constantly act like they have never been fed, ever.
Inexplicably Loved Cat is possibly the worst offender. When he was 12 weeks old, he stole a hunk of gouda out of the fridge, took off with it down the hall, had the plastic wrap off of it and ate most of it before Perfect Husband chased him down.
He is particularly obsessed with carbs, especially corn based products. If you have a bag of Smart Food, you cannot get him off of your lap.
It’s totally bizarre, because cats are carnivores, who don’t even digest carbohydrates properly. It’s like a horse being obsessed with meat.
Anyway, Owl has learned that his food just isn’t safe if he leaves it unattended.
After a couple of traumatic incidents where he returned to his cereal bowl to find that the food had disappeared, Owl has become hypervigilant about the cat.
If he needs to go potty while eating, he spends the entire time worrying about his food.
“Kitty no eat my food!”
“I won’t let Kitty eat your food. He’s not even in the room.”
“NO EAT MY FOOD, KITTY!”
“Owl, honey, he’s not even here. Let’s go potty.”
While he’s peeing he will point warningly at the slumbering cat and said “YOU STAY! NO EAT MY FOOD!”
“He is asleep. He isn’t eating your food.”
“No eat my food. No! STAY ‘WAY!”
“He is UNCONSCIOUS. YOUR FOOD IS SAFE.”
Owl is under the assumption that our cat is a ravenous beast, willing to consume anything and everything. Much like Owl, in a way.
If Inexplicably Loved Cat sniffs ANYTHING, Owl will storm in saying “No, Kitty! No eat it!”
The cat has been warned off from eating Owl’s coat, Owl’s hat, Owl’s boots, THE COUCH, and even the TV remote control, which Owl felt was in such peril from the cat’s depredations that he personally chased the cat away from it.
Between the cat eating our electronics and the dog drinking Owl’s pee, apparently nothing is safe from the ravenous appetites of the inhabitants of this house.
It’s surprising we still have a roof over our head, really.
OM NOM NOM
19 Wednesday Sep 2012
Posted in From The Owlery
So, thanks to summer long days, I guess it’s been a while since Owl was outside at night. I took him to a friend’s house and left her house late.
When I went to carry Owl into the house he suddenly looked up, then clutched my neck tightly in fear and cried out,
“Sun OFF! SUN OFF!” and pointed at the dark sky.
I wonder what it’s like to suddenly realize that the sun has gone out.
“No, no, honey,” I said, “The sun just went to sleep. It’s night time. See? It’s dark out.”
“Sun aseep. Dark out.” He took a moment to chew on that. Then he pointed again. “A plane!”
“No, honey, those are stars. The stars are out, because it’s night time.”
“Stars out. Night time. Dark.”
“Yes, it’s dark because it’s night time.”
He thought about this for a minute, and then cheered right up.
“Hi, stars! HI, DARK!”
18 Tuesday Sep 2012
How do you feel about your hair?
I hate mine.
It’s fine, it’s thin, it never has any body. Even hair spray makes it sag. I could spray it with shellac and it would droop against my face after an hour.
My mother learned early on that I couldn’t have the long french braids that my friends all got to have. Barettes slid out within minutes. So did elastics. Any additional length to my hair just made it hang down heavier, so that if it grew much past my ears it simply became a curtain of greasy locks that clung to itself in strings.
So she settled on a pageboy bob for me, and it worked pretty well, and I’ve never really strayed far from it.
Then
Now
Except for one unfortunate incident.
It happened when we lived in Dutch Caribbean.
It started out so innocently. My mother and I were out, doing some shopping, and my hair had grown a little long over vacation so my mother decided to have it trimmed. She walked me into a salon, sat me down in the barber’s chair, and said to the Dutch hair dresser, “The same cut, only shorter.” She demonstrated a few times with hand signals that she wanted a trim of around an inch or so.
Then she patted me on the shoulder and went to do some shopping.
When she returned, she found her daughter staring in silent, polite horror while the barber carefully applied gel to her hair and massaged the remaining two inches into Bart Simpson style spikes.
TRUE STORY.
THE GUY CUT MY HAIR TO TWO INCHES LONG ON TOP, SHAVED ME AROUND THE EARS, AND THEN SPIKED WHAT WAS LEFT.
20 Monday Aug 2012
Posted in Life and Love
Tags
books, children's fiction, kids, mortimer, munsch, psychology, reading
One of my friends sent us Robert Munsch’s Mortimer as a gift when Owl was born, and it’s one of the only books that he actually listens to, rather than constantly interrupting the narrative by pointing and yelling shrilly, “A TRUCK!!”
PH and I read it differently, though, and it has led to discussions about Mortimer’s motivations.
We can’t really agree on just what Mortimer’s problem is.
For those who don’t know this classic tale, it goes thusly:
Young Mortimer goes upstairs to bed and is warned to be quiet. He responds with “Yes! Yes!” and then proceeds to sing so loudly and joyfully that he drives his family to distraction.
He is visited, in turn, by his irate father, by 17 siblings (Mortimer is actually a Duggar, I guess), and two police men. Each time he is scolded and told to quiet down, he is even more emphatic in his agreement to do so, yet his noise actually gets louder and louder.
Everyone starts arguing with each other about what to do with him and he eventually starts singing softly to himself and then drifts off.
How I See The Story:
As a dog trainer, I see this as a basic story of operant conditioning. Mortimer, as one of 18 children, doesn’t get a lot of attention and he gets so wound-up that he is willing to take even negative attention.
His bedtime antics are rewarded by the constant visits upstairs. Once the attention ceases (everyone gets wrapped up in each other), Mortimer slowly winds down and drifts off. When I read Mortimer to Owl, Mortimer’s “Yes! Yes! Yes!” has a casual tone, like “yeah, yeah, yeah.”
When he winds down at the end, I trail off and fluctuate my pitch, as if he’s a tape recorder that is running out of battery.
Perfect Husband reads it differently.
How PH Sees The Story:
PH sees Mortimer as a child who is sadly afflicted by some kind of mental disorder. He wants to be good but is simply unable to control his deep seated drive to create chaos.
When PH reads Mortimer, his yesses have a frantic note as Mortimer becomes increasingly intimidated by his scolders. Mortimer’s father makes him a little nervous, his siblings’ wrath en masse makes him even more desperate to behave, while the policemen send him into a near-grovel of promises to shut up.
However, no matter how much he tries, he just can’t seem to suppress the devil inside him who simply MUST MAKE NOISE. In the end, when he has wreaked so much havoc that flower pots are flying and the family baby is looking distinctly worried, Mortimer finally finds some kind of satisfaction in his soul.
He sings his song once more, quietly, but this time it has a triumphant note, and then he goes to sleep content.
We are each fascinated by the other’s interpretation. How can such a simple tale be told in such different ways?
So I went online to find out more.
I learned that Mortimer was Munsch’s first book, and that unlike many of Munsch’s characters, he wasn’t drawn from life.
I even listened to Munsch read the work, and his telling ran right down the middle between my telling of it and PH’s.
So we may never know what really makes that little bald kid tick.
But Owl seems to enjoy hearing the story no matter who is reading it, and maybe one day he can read it to us and give us his own interpretation.
I’m looking forward to that. Maybe it’ll give us insight on why our little noise maker won’t go to sleep.
If you read Mortimer to your kids, how do you tell the story?
08 Sunday Jul 2012
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Remember cereal boxes when we were kids? They usually had cartoons, occasionally puzzles, and promises of prizes inside, like this:
Cereal boxes seem to have changed rather dramatically since the 1980s.
I was looking at the back of my cereal the other day and saw that it consisted of a single cartoon.
Let me take you through it…
Aw, he’s playing hide and seek, and there’s a kitty!
Aw, his friend was hiding behind the kitty.
That’s right, he just got incinerated and his ashes are ALL OVER HIS FRIEND’S FACE
Mmm!
Eat Cinnamon Corn Pops, kids! They long for the sweetness of death because they’ve witnessed too many atrocities perpetrated by murderous sphynx-like tabby cats.
DELICIOUS!
11 Friday Sep 2009
Posted in Pointless Posts, Well, That's Just Stupid
