The Serial Babysitter's Semi-Serious Advice to Mothers...
I have a number of friends on Facebook who are mothers, and judging by their posts there, I have to say this:
Y’all worry too much, and about the wrong things.
NOBODY has a perfect childhood, and most people don’t turn out either axe murderers or Nobel Prize winners. So quit the fretting that Johnny or Susie might turn out average. Most people are, by definition, average. That doesn’t make them less of people.
The baby’s crying? Is he hungry, wet, sick, in pain? If the answer to all of these questions is no, and you just can’t put down what you’re doing to rock him while he screams his little fool head off, IT’S OK TO PUT HIM DOWN AND LET HIM CRY FOR A BIT. Babies cry. It’s their nature. You’re not a bad mother because your baby cries.
You know those old-fashioned contraptions called playpens? Those things that are basically cages for babies? Use ‘em. They’re brilliant inventions that let you get shit done while Junior plays happily by himself, not underfoot and unlikely to be accidentally scalded because you’ve accidentally tripped over him while cooking. He won’t grow up with all sorts of emotional issues from being put in a playpen with his toys for forty-five minutes so you can get supper on or take a damn shower.
Once they get to an age where they’re walking and talking and have the damn sense not to put everything they find into their mouths, YOU DON’T HAVE TO INTERACT WITH THEM ALL THE TIME. Got a fenced-in yard? Put a pitcher of Kool-Aid and some peanut butter sandwiches on a table on the back porch, and lock the little heathens out of the house all day. That’s what my mother’s eldest sister Sue (who was the summertime babysitter for her three younger sisters) did. Aunt Nancy, my mother, and Aunt Judy all turned out fine, with no more than the usual childhood bumps and scrapes. When they're old enough to know how to cross the street and not take candy from strangers, let 'em out of the yard and tell 'em to be home by suppertime. I have many memories of roaming our old neighborhood with my younger brother sans parents—we moved away from Greenview Addition when I was six almost seven and Eric was four almost five, and this would have been at the height of the child abduction scare. Other than the usual bumps and scrapes, we were fine.
If it’s making you nuts to be driving your spawn all over creation to soccer games and swim meets, DON’T SIGN YOUR KIDS UP FOR THESE THINGS. But how will they become socialized, you ask? Unless they’re homeschooled, they’re gonna be in a classroom seven hours a day, five days a week, nine months a year for at least 12 years. And unless you’re raising them in a cave, they’re going to interact with plenty of people of various ages and stations in life just through the process of growing up. Give ‘em some baseball bats and gloves and balls and let ‘em go play with the neighbor kids. They’ll figure out more shit about teamwork and sportsmanship and how to get along with other kids when they actually HAVE to get along with other kids, not when an adult is telling them how to run drills and breaking up their squabbles.
Rainy day? Legos, people. There is no such thing as too many Legos. And dolls. And action figures. And Hot Wheels. And books. Let ‘em be bored. Let ‘em figure out how to amuse themselves. It’s good for their little brains.
What should you worry about, in no particular order? Whether they have basic competence at the three R’s. Whether they’re kind to animals, babies, and old people. Whether they understand how money works. Whether they learn how to learn things on their own. Whether they say "sir" and "ma'am" and "please" and "thank you." Whether they will arrive at adulthood with a good bullshit detector. Whether they’ll grow up to be the kind of people you’d want as your friends.
Other than that, chill out. You ain’t a better mother for making yourself nuts.
And invest in earplugs.
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loveinmexico
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Comments
:-)
This is a great post. I hope your friends will read it.
Nora--I wish I still had my Legos.
Banana--Oh, trust me...karma set me up for little heathens a good 25 years before I wrote this post:). It's just that, from the outside looking in, it's obvious that my friends are good mothers and the kids are fine, but the ladies keep finding ways to torture themselves. "I'm not a good mother and I don't love my children unless I'm a martyr," seems to be the thought process, and quite frankly, that's bullshit.
And your best point. YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE A SOCCER MOM!!!
Geez!
Unsupervised time to play, either alone or with other kids. Learn to relate to your peers when grownups aren't around. Learn the educational value of occassional boredom. Keeping your kids perpetually entertained and busy is not necessarily better for you or them. Definitely teach them safety rules around cars and how to cross the street and find their way home. Teach them how to avoid suspicious adults and how to shout for help to attract helpful attention from other adults nearby if someone they don't know tries to carry or pull them away into a bad, dangerous situation. The odds are good they can play outside safely 99.9.% of the time, otherwise.
Rated.
so true
you left out the simple joy of a big cardboard box....
I have my own pet theory about the Super Mom phenomenon. It's fueled by a cohort of college educated stay at home moms who feel they have to compensate for being out of the paid workforce by proving that BEING A MOM IS THE MOST IMPORTANT JOB IN THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD!!!!! and turning into a full time job what my mother and her friends considered an important part of their life but not the whole of it.
In fact, motherhood is SO IMPORTANT that, judging from the number of pizza delivery guys and maid service ladies buzzing through my suburban neighborhood, moms don't even have time to clean or cook. It's all about their precious darlings, who require their round the clock attention.
AnnMarie--Thanks!
Trig--you said it-people become soccer moms by choice, though they don't admit that.
Stellaa--agreed, and thanks!
Shiral--It astounds me the number of kids who arrive at college having had all sorts of music/foreign language/whatever enrichment lessons, but no street smarts whatsoever.
Brian B--someday I'll write about the "Garfield House", a house with working escalator me and little bro built out of a cardboard box, legos, scrap fabric, pencils, etc. for a little plastic figurine of Garfield the cat my brother got in a Happy Meal. We spent the better part of the summer of 1988 on that.
Deborah--so true...
Us kids both turned out fine. I don't think either of us so much as broke an arm during our childhoods, and that wasn't because we were wrapped in bubble wrap. We climbed trees and jumped out of them and rode our bikes off a barn roof once, and one time when we were 9 and 11, we climbed up the TV antenna onto the house roof with a picnic and a camera and took pictures of the cars slowing down to stare at us.
Mrs. Michaels--You're right. It's a good lesson--my folks' lives didn't revolve around mine or my brother's either. There's a lot to be said for benign neglect.
Monte
High Lonesome--I'm not claiming to be any kind of expert, and some of this (locking the kids out of the house with a peanut butter sandwich and a pitcher of Kool-Aid) was said in jest. I'm just saying this from an outside perspective and as someone who's taught young children and taken care of more of them than she can count: The kids are OK. Quit driving yourself nuts trying to be perfect and do everything "right" and protect them from every possible harm, no matter how tiny. There are enough things in the world to worry about that you don't have to go looking for them.
You're not going to make an introverted child into the life of the party, a klutzy child into a jock, or a drama queen into the quiet and retiring type no matter what you do or whether the stroller you buy faces forwards or backwards (this was an actual, days-long argument I was witness to). Their little personalities and individual gifts and weaknesses are pretty much their own. What you CAN do is make sure they arrive at adulthood with the basic ability to fend for themselves, and that they know right from wrong and have compassion for others. Most anything else is just gravy.
And you aren't doing your kids any favors by running yourself into exhaustion over things that aren't life-and-death matters.
Lulu and Phoebe--Long live Legos, indeed.
Lilyrahel--Read a little more carefully. I did NOT command anyone to let their baby cry it out. What I said was that all babies cry, and that if you've taken care of all of the major reasons it could be crying, and you are trying to juggle eighteen things at once and can't for the baby's safety or your own sanity rock the baby and juggle those eighteen things simultaneously, YOU ARE NOT A BAD MOTHER FOR PUTTING THE BABY DOWN IN A SAFE PLACE WHERE IT CAN'T HURT ITSELF AND LETTING IT CRY FOR A FEW MINUTES.
By all means, though, if you don't feel comfortable doing that, DON'T. You're not a bad mother for never doing that either.
Mary--Mom kept a lot of our toys for the same reason. At my grandparents' houses, I remember playing with lots of toys that had once belonged to my parents and aunts.
Lisa--I really don't know how parents do it 24/7. My hat's off to you guys. It just saddens me to see girls I knew growing up beating themselves and each other up over the best way to deal with the sacred cow that is motherhood, when anyone looking in from the outside could see that the children in question were perfectly fine, regardless of individual differences in their childrearing decisions.
Sweetfeet--I hear ya. I taught Head Start in one of the poorest areas of the country. You'd see kids who witnessed all sorts of horrible things in their daily lives, kids who were being pressed into service to help Grandma make meth, kids who had to undergo surgery for severe lazy eye because Mom was too lazy to get the kid an eyepatch for the good eye when the condition was still mild enough to be treated that way, kids who we'd send home in one Pull-up on Thursday and they'd come back in the same Pull-up on Monday morning. That's child abuse and neglect. Letting your dry, fed, well baby cry for a couple of minutes to see if she can't get herself back to sleep, plunking your toddler down in a playpen for a short period of time for his own safety while you cook or clean or bathe, telling your kids to go outside and play...that's NOT neglect and abuse, and no one should feel like a bad mother for doing those things.
That "lock 'em outside with peanut butter and Kool-Aid" gig? Yeah. That happened. A lot.
We also had contests that consisted of "Who can run around the house ten times fastest?" And then, "Now, who can do it backwards?"
In the evening, my mum would take us all to Lake Michigan to swim before bed. I remember her sitting on the shore counting heads over and over and over. We always slept well.
Waking Up Slowly--When I was teaching and it was my turn to be in charge of "circle time", we'd have a game called "Dance Party." Every day. This consisted of me putting on a 33 of Fats Domino at 45 and making the kids dance. When the first ones started grabbing at their sides, it was time to stop and cool down for a few minutes. Then they were always much, much calmer during small group and usually pretty good for about an hour of indoor play before they started bouncing off the walls. Fortunately, if it wasn't raining, that was time for them to go outside on the playground. That was where we had the game "Monkey Hunting." I'd sniff the air and announce that I smelled monkeys. Cue giggling and scurrying of monkey-hooting, armpit-scratching children. I'd chase one down, catch it, and ask if it was a monkey. Of course the kid always denied this, so I'd test it--see if it looked, sounded, smelled, and felt like a monkey, and I'd ask it if it liked bananas. If so, IT'S A MONKEY! and it got carried off to the "zoo" (really, the sandbox) and told not to try to escape.
I don't think either of these games were in any sort of official pedagogy thing, but the kids seemed to like them and they burned off enough energy playing them as to make them behave themselves most of the time indoors.
Where he proceeded to slather it in shortening and then turned it loose. The kids spent quite a while yelling and screaming and chasing that piglet. When they caught it again they had to give it a bath and put it back with the rest of the pigs.
The kids had a ball. I about had apoplexy.
I'm eternally grateful he didn't head to the shop and get out the axle grease (It would never have come out of their clothing).
We have a park a few blocks away. He has biked there with his friends a few times, but I haven't let him go alone. He asked a few days ago and I told him I wasn't sure he was ready. He responded by saying, "Mom, if you don't let me do things, how am I going to prove to you that I can?"
I let him go. With pride.
If in doubt, it was, 'Excuse me, Joe's Mom, but could you please . . .'
Laurel--Years ago, I remember reading something about how in nearly all the great classics of children's literature--Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, the Narnia books, Winnie-the-Pooh, even the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes--nothing magical happens when the adults are around.
Krim--You know, I live in an area that's statistically a lot more dangerous than buccolic suburbia. Yet I see groups of little black kids playing on the sidewalks and in the parks without an adult in sight all the time in inner-city New Orleans. I really think that this "constant hovering=good mother" is a white, middle-class thing.
Malusinka--That's a regional thing. You probably wouldn't hear it much in New England and about half the time in the Midwest, but in Louisiana a kid who doesn't come to school saying that is likely to be considered rude and get in trouble with his teachers.