Tag Archives: children

Progress? What Progress?

Posted on by — Leave a reply

Yet again, Time Magazine has something interesting to read. This time out, I guess in observation of “International Womens Day” (who comes UP with these holidays?), Jessica Winter wrote a fabulously funny commentary asking that most obvious of all questions these days: “Are Women People?”

The answer is, sadly, no. We’re just about everything BUT people. Of course, according to former Massachusetts Governor and eternally animatronic GOP Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, “Corporations are people, my friend!” Yes, dear, of course they are. And the first day that a corporation shows up asking to date dd, I will drive to BassPro and buy the biggest shotgun I can get my hands on.

I also found it quite amusing that Winter came to the same conclusion I was discussing with a co-worker just yesterday: the lack of a Y chromosome is NOT a disability. Women can do all kinds of amazing things, excepting that whole (reliably) peeing standing up thing, and yet we’re still treated as second-class citizens. Even now, it still seems highly unlikely that this country is ready to elect a woman President – although I really did think Hilary had a good shot at it. The only female brought up to the podium on the GOP debate stage this cycle was just Rick Santorum in bad drag.

I feel like women are just under attack lately. Maybe it’s not lately – maybe it’s been a lot longer than that with seemingly no end in sight – but it seems like any lull has certainly been broken by just a spate of really horrifically anti-woman statements and actions that managed to make it to the news. Whether it’s being called “sluts” for using contraception, being threatened with transvaginal ultrasounds when deciding to have an abortion (I’ve had a transvag ultrasound – NOT comfortable) or just about any of the other WTF-inducing moments, I can’t decide whether I should strap my breasts down or whip ’em out and stand in the middle of an intersection.

Part of what frustrates me is that things continue to move backwards, even as we move forward in time. I’m a statistic, many times over, whether we’re counting the times I was sexually harassed at a workplace (years ago) or when I fended off a sexual assault so that it could stay in the “attempted” category. I probably know lots of other women who are statistics, too. I would like to think that all the complete tools that are out there trying to degrade the public standing of women, like the Limbaughs and the Santorums of the world, will one day WAKE THE F*%K UP and realize that they know women. The women they know deserve better than what they’re trying to do to all the women that they don’t know.

The other part is that I can’t protect dd from all of it. When I was a little kid, Gloria Steinem was always in the news, and Ms. was a title that working women were proud to use as a symbol of their independence from a male-dominated hierarchy. Now, I wonder how many women below the age of 30 could even pick Gloria out of a lineup, would even know what she went through to help get it to the point where it could be commonplace for women to be in roles other than steno pool, waitress, or on our backs. I want things to be better for dd than they were for me, as they were better for me than they were for my mom. That’s how it’s supposed to be, right?

There’s no reason to have to accept a male-dominated dialogue that favors mean soundbites over sound reasoning. There’s no reason to have to accept being treated like a walking incubator instead of a thinking, feeling person with an ability to make rational decisions about my own health care. And there’s just never a reason to listen to a hate-filled windbag from either extreme end of the partisan scale. Extreme views may win ratings, but they rarely win arguments.

When I go into the voting booth this November, I plan to fill in the oval for the candidates I believe to be least detrimental to women. None of them are really pro-woman (excepting maybe someone like Elizabeth Warren, who seems to be fairly self-aware about her whole XX chromosome situation). See, I don’t just owe it to dd to make things better…I owe it to myself.

Is “childism” real?

Posted on by — Leave a reply

Hanging out Sunday night, I happened across this piece – ‘Childist’ Nation: Does America Hate Kids? by Judith Warner. The concept is interesting: we, as a nation, seem to have swung back in some crazy-ass direction where now people are all okay for stifling the creativity, joie de vivre, and very safety of children in the country. Hmm. I think I beg to differ. I think it’s been around for a lot longer and is far more ingrained than any ‘ism’ can possibly express.

Sure enough, things like No Child Left Behind do little to show that we’re trying to handle the immense variation in children’s learning development, but standardized tests were around decades ago and didn’t seem to derail children from having useful and prosperous futures back then. (I had to pass four state-level standardized tests just to be eligible to graduate from high school, and somehow I managed to do that without ending up in a padded cell.)

And while the terrible tragedy of a young girl being run to death for having lied about eating a candy bar is just that – a terrible tragedy – it’s not like there weren’t screwed up parents for pretty much the entire history of, well, parenthood.

It seems like a week can’t go by without hearing some horrifying story of what someone’s done to a child: sexual assault (I’m looking right at you, Jerry Sandusky, and it makes me want to puke), physical abuse, emotional abuse…the list just goes on and on. It’s to the point where you almost have to go numb if you want to be able to listen to, watch or read the news; otherwise, you might lose your nut listening to the filth and bile that humankind seems to heap on itself, especially its most vulnerable population.

But, I’d like to point out that there’s more to it than that. Sure enough, Warner does point out that America’s lack of support for affordable, high-quality child care is part of the problem, and I agree 100% with her. I’d also like to note that it shouldn’t take Beyonce whipping out a boob in a New York restaurant to get people to agree that breastfeeding is okay in public. As far as I can tell, the only people who think bf’ing in public is offensive are those who see breasts as “tits” only. Au contraire – boobs can sometimes be breasts, sometimes be tits, sometimes even be BODACIOUS TA-TAS… – and whatever they are, it’s none of anyone else’s business. Feeding your child should be okay in a restaurant. People go to restaurants to eat, right? OK. (nods)

And setting aside the Tiger Moms and the Parisian Moms, and whatever other form of Titled Mom you want to come up with, kids need structure. They need boundaries. They need freedom to run while simultaneously being able to know that there’s a home to come back to. That’s why I get so completely annoyed when I hear about how we need to make sure that everybody gets a trophy whenever there’s a competition. No, they don’t. Whoever wins should get a trophy, and maybe the next 2 or so other kids. Everybody else just gets to see the trophies. Sounds harsh? Well, which is harsher – letting kids think that everybody always wins or teaching them that winning has to have some value to it or else it’s not really winning? I think of this exchange from the movie, The Incredibles, where the mother (Helen) is trying to make sure that her son, Dash, understands why his superpowers might be too much for competitive sports. She tells him that “everybody’s special”, which prompts his grumbling retort: “Which is another way of saying no one is.” We’re not all Usain Bolt, Michael Phelps, or {pick the really fast/gifted athlete of your choice}. Doesn’t mean we can’t strive for it, but doesn’t mean we’ll all get there. Teaching kids otherwise is actually crueller than giving them some dose of reality, in my opinion.

Where else do we fall down? All over the place. We medicate kids early and often when it’s not always clear that they need it. We leave parents of autistic children to fend for themselves all too often, when it’s clear that they need access to MORE assistance, not less. We actually debate whether or not dads should have access to paternity leave. We fill the shelves of grocery stores with countless boxes, jars, cans, and plastic cups of foods targeted to kids that are filled to the gills with high fructose corn syrup, chemicals and other crrrrap that growing bodies (or even fully-grown bodies) just don’t need.

Oh, I could just go on and on.

I’m not saying that kids don’t need to be separated from adults at times. I like having some free time to myself when no one is hanging on my leg, asking me whether they can watch “Wiggly Wiggly Christmas” for the umpteenth time, or jumping off the couch when I expressly forbade that not two minutes prior. But, the thing is: these are my kids. I take them as our responsibility. It’s up to me and dh to decide how to civilize these wild creatures who were brought into this world as a way for us to extend our family tree one more generation. I’ll do everything in my power to protect them from the stupid and mean people, but I know there will be a point when my reach won’t be good enough. At that point, I have to rely on them to be able to take care of themselves to some extent and call me in when they recognize that they need help. So I have to do what I can to prepare them for that eventuality, and the stupid and mean people keep coming up with new and exciting ways in which they can be awful to kids (and their parents, which has a trickle-down effect on the kids), so it seems to make the life of a parent that much more challenging.

Of course, no one put a gun to my head and made me have kids. And it seems like every generation has some point when parent A turns to parent B and says, “Are we really doing the right thing, bringing kids into {this} world?” (where {this} is always punctuation for some really awful thing, like nuclear proliferation, homophobia, or the rampant spread of reality TV). So maybe it’s just a never-ending cycle. On the other hand, there is somewhat of an antidote to this. If parents all over the place said, “I won’t be like that” and then actually WEREN’T that parent, and if employers, school superintendents, politicians, and everyone else went about their day trying not to be that guy, maybe we’d get somewhere.

As I’ve said to dd on more than one occasion, “Politeness costs you nothing.” I really do consider that to be true. It costs you nothing to be nice to someone, to do the right thing, to smooth the path for the person behind you. But it seems to cost you your very soul (if not various other possessions) when you deviate from that. Quoth Wil Wheaton, “Don’t be a dick”. Oh that more people could live their lives with this in their hearts. Kids – and adults – everywhere would rejoice.

Why don’t schools support working parents better?

Posted on by — 3 Comments ↓

This isn’t the post I’d originally planned to post.

My first draft of this, written two days ago – the evening after I registered dd for Kindergarten – was far more cranky. Now, I’m not sure how I feel. Numb? Frustrated? Resigned to it all?

The long and the short of it is that I’m dealing with the emotional aftermath of realizing how much about our lives will change once dd starts Kindergarten. Of course, there’s a financial toll, but we’ve been paying such enormous sums of money to our day care center for so long that I’m just not as sensitive to that anymore. You could say that I’ve been broken down by it all.

What I’m trying to get past now is the fact that so many things need to be cobbled together in order to ensure that dh and I can continue to work.

Let me say that again: so that dh and I can continue to work.

Why should putting our dd in Kindergarten, in a public school – no less – have any kind of impact on whether or not we have jobs? After all, public schools are free and that should be an enormous help, right?

Well…not quite.

We live in a town with excellent schools, so private schools aren’t a consideration. I’m perfectly at peace with that; the quality of the school district was part of our decision to move here, and we’re both the product of public schools. Of course, our property taxes are through the roof, but that’s a function of the high quality schools and a NIMBY streak a whole town wide.

So, it kinda hurt when we found out that we have to pay for full-time Kindergarten. The half-day is free, because that’s a requirement set by the state, but full-time Kindergarten comes at a cost of nearly $4K before you get to any before and after care.

Why on earth would you need before and after care, you ask? Well, school only runs from about 9am-3pm. With both of us working full-time and still having commutes to contend with, that schedule is impossible to match. We typically leave the house around 7am to get both of us to work on time (with a day care drop-off by *somebody*), and I’m the first one to the kids at 5:15pm, if I’m running on-time. So, that leaves us in the unenviable position of needing both “before-care” and “after-care”. If we’re okay with paying for the before and after care offered at school, we can pay more than $5K on top of the Kindergarten tuition. As it is, we’re only on the hook for an additional $4K because of a before-care arrangement I struck up with a friend who lives up the street.

Now, that’ll cover us from the start of school (around Labor Day) to end of the school year (late June), not including various holidays, Christmas vacation, and two school vacation weeks in the spring term. There’s still a gap of however many weeks (9-12) during the summer where we need to have a better plan than leaving dd in the house with a window cracked. She’s pretty nearly outgrown her daycare, so next summer (and maybe even this summer) we need a camp. That’s another $4K-ish, with hours running from about 9am-3pm/4pm. BUT, you can pay for before- and after-care! Sigh.

I’ve started to price out camps, and the timeframes they offer span anywhere from 6 weeks to 12 weeks, in costs ranging from around $200/week to nearly $500/week. It’s all mind-boggling.

I feel like I have to pull together this patchwork quilt of solutions so that dd will be in an educational and engaging environment year-around, since quitting a job simply isn’t an option. The cost of living in the eastern portion of Massachusetts rivals that of New York City or San Francisco – I know only a handful of families with stay at home parents. I don’t feel like I can take out this frustration on any of the nice people at the school; they are all awfully nice and they could easily tell that most of us were deer in headlights: unsure of what questions to ask because we’re not even sure what all we’re getting ourselves into.

I suppose that, as long as I’m willing to open my checkbook and do far more homework than dd will have to do anytime soon, I can get all of these resources lined up. It’s just more than a bit overwhelming and I only hope that I don’t let anything slip through the cracks. The room for error, when you can’t just spend days at home to cover gaps that you didn’t plan appropriately for, is just miniscule.