A blog where I take a look at books I'm currently reading to my kids, toys they're playing with, and dispense some completely off-the-mark parenting advice.
Don't eat stuff off the sidewalk...you don't need it, so don't eat it.
--The Cramps
I suppose I'm starting another theme pertaining to hypothetical questions, but this one has come up recently as a model of the slightly different parenting styles of my wife and I. It concerns a question that has been plaguing kids for centuries.
Why does bread have crust and why do I have to eat it?
The answer I explained to my daughter. The crust is the outside of the bread that gets the most heat when it gets baked, therefore it's darker. That's it. It doesn't taste different than the rest of the bread. However, kids don't choose food on taste alone. Texture, specifically whether it smells/feels/looks yucky determines whether they eat food. So with boiled whole potatoes, I take off the skin. With broccoli, only the crowns are eaten, not the stems. When I made my daughter her first peanut butter sandwich, she didn't want the crust, so I politely cut them off for her. When my wife made a peanut butter sandwich, my daughter asked for crust removal and my wife refused. I had set a bad precedent. Now we give her the whole sandwich, but she eats everything but the crust. Either way it gets wasted.
To me, you have to pick your battles with kids. It takes all of five seconds to cut the crusts off, and if I remember right I didn't like them when I was a kid either, so my Mom cut them off for me, too. After a while, I got over my "crusts are yucky" phase and learned to enjoy them. I would rather battle with my daughter about not hitting her brother and going to bed on time. My wife, on the other hand, views it annoying that she is asked to do this in effort to encourage our daughter to get over her reticence about certain foods. She's already a picky enough eater that we don't have to indulge this as well.
I suppose this comes down to the difference between my wife's personality and mine; I'm easygoing and she's pragmatic, though not harsh. However, she can also be easygoing and funloving with the kids, and I can be pretty stern with them as well. I'm a heavy-thinking person, I always have a lot of mental gravitas on my plate and need to do something simple for my kids to get me out of that. I think kids like a little indulgence, but in the long run it may catch up with me. Next my teenaged daughter is going to ask whether she can stay out late with her friends, to which I'd respond 'no', and she'll say: "But you used to be nice to me and cut the crust off my bread!"
UPDATE: Proposition 8 passed by a slim margin in California.
The U.S. is hitting an election on November 4th and here in California there is a proposition on the ballot that seeks to nullify a court decision earlier in the year which allowed same-sex couples to marry in California. Here is an ad currently running on TV in support of Proposition 8.
The commercial's panic is pretty humorous, but pulling the "look what it's going to do to our children" implication is often pretty effective in passing these kinds of measures. Six years ago, the voters passed an amendment to the California state constitution that defined a legal marriage to be only between a man and a woman, and this amendment was struck down as unconsitutional, thus legalizing same-sex marriage in California. Now the religious nuts trying the same thing again.
I mention it on this blog simply because it uses children in this way. The hysterics are that if nothing is done, children will not only think that being gay is OK, but will actually WANT to be gay. It poses two widely ridiculed notions that religious nuts believe, that being gay is a choice, and therefore you can make someone gay by making it accepted. The book they refer to is actually a stand-in for a real book that recently topped the list of the most banned books in the US called And Tango Makes Three. The story geared at preschoolers to third grade is about two male penguins at the Central Park Zoo who make a loving couple and who desire to lay eggs and have children like other penguin couples. Instead they adopt an egg and nurture it until it hatches a daughter named Tango.
While the ad is humorous, it does get one thing right. In the state of Massachusetts, where another court decision legalizing same-sex marriage passed, it requires that public schools teach that being gay is acceptable and have a curriculum that shows gay couples as being normal. Similar things could happen in California. However, if Proposition 8 passes, then schools couldn't talk about it at all. Although I feel that it's important to talk about such questions at home when they come up, there are many households who don't discuss it all and where a child growing up gay may feel society is hostile to it. Also, many people know gay couples with children. If every child is told only stories and situations where straight couples are the only partners, then wouldn't that confuse kids about gay couples? If they aren't talked about, a child would wonder, then why aren't they?
Understanding same-sex couples isn't something that requires kids be older and have maturity. They don't understand gender roles, and in a loving household they understand that affection is normal part of life and that human beings hug and kiss each other all of the time. Kids don't care if it's two men or two women, they accept whatever their parents do. And yet, they feel it necessary to teach kids about September 11th in schools, even in kindergarten. How do you explain that to a child? Violent events are OK to teach in school, but love is not? How do you explain terrorism to a kindergartner without keeping them awake with nightmares. My daughter had to learn about 9/11 in kindergarten, but should couldn't tell me an inkling about what it meant.
Why should a married straight guy with children care about this issue? It goes beyond just a ballot proposition. To me, just having to explain why it exists breeds intolerance, a law that exists only to regress something that is more widely accepted. I want my kids to feel that being gay or having friends that are gay is OK. Most kids understand that anyway, so it creates a generational conflict to pass a law like this. Also, I have some personal experience - within my circle of friends in middle school and high school, there were four guys who we suspected were gay. My friends were all geeks of some kind or another, so my group of friends were all the social outcasts, and it was natural that gay guys would hang out with us since no one else would understand. Of course, in the eighties and in a conservative city like I grew up in it was common to make passing jokes and innuendoes that gay was a synonym for anything derisive. I made such suggestions, too. The eighties was also a strange time. The hypermasculine intersected with gay culture in places like music, but gay figures such as Boy George were seen as cultural artifacts and not real. One of the old money elite in my school called me gay because I crossed my legs in class, to give you an idea of the homosexual panic that was going on. That guy, by the way, the product of patrician WASP-y family, was at my ten year reunion, fat, drunk and jobless.
Out of that environment, two of the four gay friends I had in school committed suicide by the age of twenty-five. One, not realizing that he was gay slept with another friend and couldn't deal with the ostracizing he got from his family and his own guilt, so he hung himself. Another just practiced whatever extreme of life he could, doing drugs and killing himself slowly until he hastened it along by swallowing a bottle of pills.
Had they been just told in school early on that being gay was OK, maybe they would still be around.
"...And it was still hot." This is probably my favorite line of the book, the very last one. It is significant because it is a quintessentially dual meaning line common to many children's books, that is that children and adults will interpret the line in different ways. I suppose that is true for most culture one encounters in life. I was watching a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie not too long ago, admiring the elegant and fleet foot work, and my son was following along, trying to imitate the tap dancing, as if it was something fun that all adults do.
The story of Where the Wild Things Are is almost negligible. A mischievous boy named Max dressed like a monster is sent to his room without supper and he imagines his room to transmogrify to a forest and a voyage to an island populated by monsters who regard him fearfully enough to make him king. After some wordless frolicking on the island, Max realizes he is really hungry and misses his family, so he returns to his room to find his dinner waiting for him "still hot." The dual meaning of the last line: to children, the hot meal represents comfort and becomes the most important feeling after the adventure described in the story, and to adults it is humorous for the same reasons, and an indication of something only adults know, that the only time that has passed is in Max's imagination. Kids on the other think a long time has passed, since that's what the story says and is a surprising afterthought.
The book is unusual in some respects for the middle, where there is nothing to read and only shows several pictures of Max and the monsters frolicking. These days it seems that every picture has to have narration, so when I read to my daughter she expects me to describe what is going on. Instead I just let her ask me questions about it, such as saying which of the monsters is my favorite, a common distinction kids ask for validation (it's the one that looks like a rooster, by the way).
The main trope employed in the story is one where an imaginary world is placed in an ordinary setting without a transition of some kind - it happens without comment. There is perhaps a history of this, beginning with C.S. Lewis' Narnia books or The Phantom Tollbooth, where a vehicle is clearly described to go to an imaginary world, then leading later to books like this one or say Harold and the Purple Crayon where the world is created spontaneously. Today, it is common to see people just existing in an imaginary world as a matter of fact, which not surprising since kids can instantly put themselves actively into a setting via a video game. Unfortunately, it seems as though the aftereffect is that kids can't really differentiate the two, whereas earlier stories focus on a clear transition between the terrestrial and the imaginary. There is no clearer definition than in the Lewis novels, when the world of an England under attack from the Nazis leads to haven in the world of Narnia.
Not a toy per se, but a record. Yes, a vinyl record that one played on something called a 'turn-table'. As a kid, I had a few records, mostly Disney records, that I played on appropriately enough a Disney toy turntable, with Mickey on the underside of the lid and his arm acting as the arm of the record player.
I used to try to get Mickey to pick his nose, but that's another story. Many long hours were spent listening to my Haunted House 33 RPM record, a collection of stock foley sound effects created at Disney Studios and put together as a collection of "scary sounds". Some of the sounds were later used for the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland, while others had been previously used in some cartoon shorts. In fact, the cover for the record at top came from the concept sketches for the Haunted Mansion from the early sixties. The record consisted of one side of narrated stories related to the sounds, which try to put the kid in a scary frame of mind, things like "You're near an old dark mansion, and suddenly you see a light in the tower...you go to the house and never come back!". That's followed by a collection of haunted house sounds, wind, thunder, creaky doors and groans and screams, and cat noises. Every story has a scary concept, and all of them end with a blood curdling scream which is supposed to be yours. The same exact two screams. One goes "Wha-wha-whaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!" and the other "Whaaaaaa-oooooh-waaahhh-oh!" and trails off. Talk about getting some mileage out of the few sound effects. The cat noises come back again, and the narrator tries to get you to picture your sweet loving cat turning against you, hissing and howling. My favorites are the attempt to make cutting down a tree scary, you hear, saw, saw, saw, saw, saw and then one of those two stock screams presumably as the tree falls on you. The Martian landing, where you the space traveller become lunch for Martians (indicated by two foley artists eating celery). The best is the Chinese water torture, where the narrator refers to them as a "clever race" and then after you hear water dripping for a few minutes, and unsettlingly, the sound of your torturer adjusting themselves in a creaky chair. Finally, the narrator, acting as the victim, blurts out "Ching-chong-ching" etc. supposedly as a confession in Chinese. Well, that's 1964 for you. The second side consists of a collection of just sounds for use in your own stories and for sound effects in your own Halloween haunted house. Those same two screams again appear on the "collection of screams and groans".
I loved sound effects records when I was a kid. You sat there and tried to invoke the images they suggest, merely from sound. Imagine that, an afternoon spent listening to sound effects and using one's creativity. Wow, how far we've come with media these days, with video games, CGI effects, where nothing is left to the imagination that's not explicitly laid out. You don't have to take a step without someone holding your hand, and all we had were measly sound effects records and books as a platform for the imagination.
Our nearly two year-old is ready to be potty trained. When he's home, he walks around in just his underwear, tells us when he needs to go, holds it until he can get near a toilet, has an accident now and then, and only wears diapers to bed. Great. In a day when I've seen 5 and 6 year olds still in pullups, our little guy is ahead of the curve.
The trouble is, he is still not quite two yet and isn't big enough to...stand up easily to pee. So in the many months we've been training him up to now, he's been sitting down on the kid's potty to go. He is a boy, and it's his right and privilege as a male to stand up to pee, which affords lots of advantages over the delicate female, who require a 'special place' to go. You have a portable bathroom pretty much anywhere if you have to bad enough. Plus, you can get in and get out of public restrooms in relative ease. In some countries in Europe you have toilets right out in the open for convenience. You try going in one of those, you uterus carriers.
I've tried to encourage him to go standing up in the potty, to some success, but in thinking about it I hesitate teaching him this skill because honestly most guys aren't very good at it. Which I don't understand. You just point it and let gravity take over. But having used public restrooms so many times it is baffling to me how many guys can't hit even the urinal, which is even more foolproof than the sit-down stall toilet. It's on the rim, the floor, the wall; in the sit-down some guys don't bother to lift the seat. You'd pass it off it were a few malcontents, but it is a feature of every public restroom.
So perhaps, for cleanliness sake, it might be better to keep my son sitting down. On the other hand, all those guys who can't hit the seat may have been taught by their mothers, clueless as to the logistics of how to pee standing up, since fathers often have the attitude that potty training and child rearing in general is women's work. I'm going to take the bull by the horns then and teach him mastery of the skill that the other gender could never perform. That other gender may be playing pro basketball (without dunking) or even playing high school football (only kickers, snicker), but they will never pee standing up! Huzzah!
As an aside, I want to share with all of the ladies out there the secrets of male genitalia/bathroom oddities that my wife had never discovered before having a boy at home.
1. Pushing it between our legs when we have to go number two. Unfortunately, the muscle that governs the pee reflex and the poo reflex is the same, and sometimes it's hard to control which comes out when. Women know this when they go, I'm sure, but they don't have to push their junk between their legs when going like a transvestite prostitute trying to convince an in the closet married guy that he's actually picking up a woman (wink, wink).
2. We can't control it once it starts. When my son has an accident, my wife doesn't understand why he suddenly can't stop it and then hold it until she can get him to the potty. You see, it's like closing the barn door while the cows are on their way out. Or it's like closing the dyke while the water is flowing out. Or it's like...I'll stop with the similes. You get the picture. It isn't happening. Especially when you get to be in your late thirties, you REALLY have no control. Once I was in the bathroom while my son was crying, and my wife wondered why I couldn't stop and go to check on him. "I just can't," was my response. She didn't understand.
3. Because it's there. The explanation as to why males from one year-old to ninety year-olds pull, adjust, scratch their junk. The only limitation is that if it hurts, we don't do it. Except if that turns you on.
