If you're a parent of any age, you should watch the TV show "Parenthood." The season just ended, so you can catch up from the beginning. It will resonate with many experiences in multi-generational parenting and possibly with your own childhood.
It sure did with mine.
So many well-meaning parents trying so hard. So many rebellious children driving them crazy. And no one using Dr. Spock as a guide. Thank god.
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All today's hot button issues are covered. Boomer parents sharing TMI. Interracial dating and marriage. Absent, irresponsible fathers creating single parent homes. Infertility. Infidelity. Workplaces run by post-adolescent billionaire nerds. Teenage sex, drinking, drugs. Rebellion. And, of course, Asperger's.
That one didn't exist when I was a child. Neither did ADHD, at least not by name. Intelligent teenagers were often given Ritalin, including me, supposedly to help them overcome "mental blocks" in the one or two subjects they couldn't seem to master in school.
That wasn't so bad, but I shudder to think how Dr. Spock would have tortured Asperger's children.
The child on "Parenthood" with Asperger's is a brilliant little actor. There are times you just want to strangle him. But on the show, as apparently in today's parenting, all behavioral issues are handled much differently. With sensitivity and responsive, responsible parenting.
Child psychiatrists. Life coaches. Tutors. Strategies. Schedules. Reward systems. Laissez-faire acceptance with plenty of love and support.
Where were those attitudes when I was a kid? (That's me on the right, not looking very happy).
My childhood was chock full of horrors perpetrated in the sincere belief that a pediatrician guru named Dr. Spock knew best, especially on the subject of appropriate age-related behavior.
Oh no he didn't!
Anyone who grew up during the 1950's and 60's knows what I'm talking about. Child rearing Dr. Spock's way was all about molding character through discipline. Marine boot camp type discipline.
Think I'm kidding?
Thumb Sucking Sucks
We know now the sucking reflex is a natural instinct, helps infants strengthen their jaws for feeding, brings comfort if the mothership is not in the vicinity.
When I was a baby, pacifiers were seriously taboo, considered a "crutch" for mother and baby. Not to mention their use would result in crooked teeth.
But how to stop a baby (me) from sucking her thumb? You will only believe this if it was done to you.
I swear --and my poor mother still apologizes to this day-- my infant sleepers had special ties at the wrists to secure my outstretched arms to the crib rails. Viola! No way I could get my thumbs to my mouth.
I must have looked like a tiny Jesus on the cross, struggling just as mightily to ease my pain. The result: I learned to suck my tongue. Which I do to this day, according to my husband, in my sleep. How attractive that must be. Yuck!
Revenge of The Poo
Speaking of yuck, I fought back when I was 8 months old. I'd been napping, and someone apparently forgot to tie me down. My grandmother heard me gurgling in my crib and came to get me.
Her shrieks rang through the house.
While I slept, my diaper had filled. When I woke up I somehow managed to take it off ... and realized how much fun all that soft squishy stuff could be.
I was literally covered in poo. So was the crib. On the wall was my very first abstract cave drawing, direct from my own um, inner essence.
Warning: not for the squeamish (what, there's more??) Yep. Completing the scene, I was happily, contentedly ...wait for it... sucking my thumb.
Reason prevailed, that was the end of the Jesus experiment. My mother realized I was, in my own infantile way, sending a clear message of disapproval.
Never mind. Something much worse was to come.
Wired for Pee
Fast forward, I'm 3, in a big girl bed. Which I wet regularly. They tried everything. Denied me beverages hours before sleep. Woke me in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom.
Even punished me after the fact, making me sit for 30 minutes in the wet, smelly sheets. No, they weren't monsters. Well, my mother wasn't. She was following Dr. Spock's advice.
Here comes the torture part. Really. Actual torture. It's hard to believe now, and for this my mother, no matter how she rends her garments and begs forgiveness, only gets a pass because I love her, she's 88 and nothing can change the past.
Are you ready?
A special pad was placed on my bed and plugged into the wall. Ominous, right? Right. When the first drops of urine hit that pad, a loud buzzer sounded and a live electric shock was delivered to my body. Honest to freakin god.
Not a real big shock, supposed to be just enough, combined with the buzzer to wake me and send me to the bathroom. Of course the shock was also designed to prevent future bed wetting ... through negative conditioning.
It worked. But not in the manner planned by the so-called "experts." Every time that buzzer blared in the middle of the night and that truly painful shock zipped through my back, butt and legs, I'd leap off the bed ... and wet my pajama pants. Well, what the hell did they expect?
So, to my mother's credit (sort of), another form of discipline was tossed in the trash. Along with my early sense of safe haven and self esteem. I continued to wet the bed until I was 9, mostly, we now know, because I had a small, under-developed bladder. But also, I suspect, from a deep well of outrage and anger.
Wait, there's more.
Sleep TIGHT
It should surprise no one that I was a restless sleeper. Many children are. They can be found hanging off the side of the bed, or completely turned around, head at the foot, sometimes even sleeping on the floor.
I was in the head-at-the-foot category. No big deal today. Our kids have duvets, Transformer quilts, whatever. Loose covers. But when I was a kid, sheets were tucked in tight with military precision, bottom and sides. As a kid you sort of lay there like a little mummy, mostly on your back. Good for posture.
At some point during the night I'd inevitably move, turn, even under the constricting blankets. Many mornings I'd wake up in darkness, unable to lift my head, screaming with fear. My head was trapped under the tightly tucked covers at the foot of the bed.
Easy solution: leave the sheets and blankets untucked, loose. Surely you jest. How would I learn to sleep properly to align my body for strength and flexibility? How would I learn to do what I was told.
Needless to say, from adolescence till today, nothing on my bed is ever tucked in. Certainly not me.
EAT!
One more I'm sure anyone of my generation will remember. It's not so much torture as just plain stoopid. You had to eat everything on your plate. Every. Single. Thing. Children were starving in China.
I'll pay anyone who can tell me what that had to do with a kid sitting defiantly in front of a half-empty plate of cold scrambled eggs in Philly.
I have one heart-stopping memory of storing peas in my cheek, excusing myself from the dinner table, going to the powder room and bending over the toilet to spit them out.
Suddenly there was my father, all 6'2'' of him, blocking the bathroom door, looming over me like Black Death, a terrifying sight, thundering, OH NO YOU DON'T! YOU'LL COME BACK TO THE TABLE NOW AND EAT THE WHOLE BOWL OF PEAS AND MASHED POTATOES!
And they wondered why I became a chubby kid.
Hog- tied. Shocked. Tucked. Force-fed. And so much more. Frankly, it's amazing I managed to grow up with any sanity at all.
But I did.
By all accounts, including my own, I became, and still am, a wonderful mother. Just like all those patient, enlightened moms on "Parenthood." Who never heard of Dr. Spock.
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Max Rivlin-Nadler
drlaura2
Kristina Lakes
mhold
L in the Southeast
Jane Brogan
Salon.com
Comments
Steve, you are lucky, trust me. I have to say that our family, warts and all, is pretty much that close. I don't know if that's a blessing or a curse.
AJ, not sure if you're being sarcastic, but there was much more in my later childhood that required me to in fact be very brave.
Roger, if only they'd followed their better instincts, eh.
Some doctors are numbnuts. Really.
Rated
Kellylark, I can understand parents caring about good nutrition, but really, forcing food into us, wow. Did you get the "children are starving" lecture?
Lea, I don't know whether to celebrate or mourn for your childhood. You were saved from some of the worse indignities, but still, even in our house, sick as it was, there was also a lot of love. On the other hand, both of us seem to have survived and created loving families. Yea, us!
loveinmexico, I never heard of Dr Sears, but the methods you list seem wrong and downright dangerous to me. It does have a lot to do with listening to men rather than our own strong instincts and the experiences of other Women.
mginmn, you make an interesting point, most of us emerged sane enough not to pass those barbaric methods onto our own kids. I should have mentioned that in the Dr. Spock days, I was "toilet trained" at 12 months, of course I wet the bed!
Joan, you are such a sister to feel my pain. Locked in the house, yow! Poor baby. We have yin and yang attachment issues... every time my mother or my parents went out, I'd run down the street after the car until one of the neighbors could catch me and carry me home. I don't think my parents ever looked back.
I agree with love in mexico about mothers going from the extreme of spock to the other extreme of sears-- why do they listen to those guys?
caroline marie, we're skewed a bit older and younger in the generational grouping, but our family's lucky to be so close and loving. Not that there aren't just as many conflicts and face-offs.
As for the "baby doctors," I don't know why so many women listen to them. I relied on my mother (do's and don'ts), my older sister, my friends. My only bible was "Your Baby and Child: From Birth to Age Five" by child psychologist and mother Penelope Leach. I would still recommend that book today.
My mother propped a bottle and that is how I was fed: laying there alone with a bottle propped in my mouth. Another genius thing from the sixties. My sisters and I always say we were raised by angels because our parents were completely incompetent in that dept. rated.
Dr. Spock was around, of course, but I was raised by the tried and true method -- shaming. Mercifully, neither of us had bed-wetting issues, but if we had them my mother would probably have made us wear a sign "I Wet My Bed." A child with Aspberger's would not have survived in our spare-the-rod-spoil-the-child household. The kid on Parenthood would have been "knocked into the middle of next week."
If I had experiences like yours, I must have repressed them. And the family isn't talking.
Deb, I know he became a peacenick and recanted, but far too late. I don't know which was worse, you being propped to feed alone or we being breast fed at a bridge table with our mother and everyone else smoking!
Lezlie, shaming is just as bad, creates such a sense of anti-love and abandonment. As awful as my stuff was, at least they were "trying to help me." Ha.
This reminds me of a Mad TV sketch from years ago, where the kids are looking through a family photo album, and discovering pictures of themselves slathered in crisco (instead of sun protection), their pregnant mother on roller skates with a drink in one hand and a cigarrette in the other, etc . . . with each new, indignant discovery, the parents exclaim "WE DIDN'T KNOW! Things weren't like they are today . . . "
Golden Zuma, and you were so adorable!!!!
You had the look of "what is that thing and what is he doing? I need to get down from here, go over there and check!"
Zuma, you're such a peach! I might also have had that look because I wanted to yell, Get that new creature out of my mother's arms!
Neil, I know. I am still haunted by your stories.
As far as Dr. Spock goes, such tactics are known in the modern age as abuse. Thankfully parents, and the law, has progressed towards helping children and not harming them (emotional or physical).