Pepita

Parenting Library

I have a lot of parenting books. Note that I do not claim to have read a lot of parenting books. I keep them around as talismans, I guess, hoping that the fact that I have purchased them shows the universe that I really am trying.

Frances is beginning—just beginning—to develop the ability to entertain herself for more than 10 minutes at a stretch, though, and I have decided to use this time to actually read some of the theory and advice I’ve been accumulating. I plan to report on the experience of assessing and trying to apply some of this new wisdom in this space. Here are the books that have been bedside-table adjacent for weeks, months, or years:

 

Positive Discipline for Preschoolers by Jane Nelsen, Cheryl Erwin, and Roslyn Ann Duffy

Discipline is not my forte as a parent. One problem is that I’m conflict averse, which means that I tend to avoid confrontation until I am too angry/scared/sad/whatever to deal with it in any sort of reasonable way. The other problem is that I believe that there is such a thing as a reasonable way even when dealing with very small children, by which I mean that I have been expecting Frances to respond to logic since—oh, I don’t know—she was born. Needless to say, this hasn’t worked out all that well.

 

Raising Your Spirited Child by Mary Sheedy Kurcinka

Frances’s teachers say things like “Frances is so full of joy!” and “Frances is so full of life!” a lot. A whole lot. Sometimes, there’s a note of barely suppressed panic in their voices when they say these things. Given that Ted and I  know very well what Frances is full of, we understand that this is Montessori-speak for “Frances can be a bit of a hellion.” I’m hoping that this parenting classic will help me to work with, rather than against, my daughter’s rather strong personality.

 

How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish

On occasion, I try to pay attention to what comes out of my mouth when I’m talking to my child, and I’m often appalled. I don’t think that anything I say rises to the level of outright verbal abuse, but I do find myself speaking in ways I would never speak to an adult. So, it might be a good thing that Frances has mastered the art of totally ignoring me, but her ability to tune me out kind of contributes to the proliferation of crazy talk. Frances and I do communicate very well much of the time, but I would like for us to talk productively in difficult situations, too.

 

Liberated Parents, Liberated Children by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish

I think I bought this book because people who buy the above book on Amazon also buy this book. The title couldn’t be more 1974, could it? 

 

 

 

Playful Parenting by Lawrence J. Cohen

It turns out that I don’t like fun. It’s possible that I never have, if by “fun” we mean wacky, imaginative play. (If by “fun” we mean sharing alcoholic drinks and well-crafted foods with fascinating grownups while telling funny stories in which the punchline includes the word “ontological”, then I love fun.) As a small child, I tended to name my babies whatever was on the package they came in: Rub-a-Dub Baby is the earliest example I can remember. I liked to devise outfits for my Barbies, and I enjoyed arranging their hair in complex configurations that required a lot of braiding, but I did not use them to enact complex narratives. What I’m saying is, I’m not a natural when it comes to making a game out of cleaning up toys, for example. Every once in awhile, I do have a moment of inspired goofiness, though—often enough that I know that I would like to cultivate more.

 

The Idle Parent by Tom Hodgkinson

I was so excited by Tom Hodgkinson’s parenting columns for The Telegraph (here’s a sample) that I bought The Idle Parent before it was released in United States. My first act of idleness after this purchase was not reading it.

 

 

The Picture Book: A Defense in Three Volumes

UPDATE: Well, don’t I feel foolish. You’d think I’d have learned to stop trusting New York Times “trend” stories by now (remember the hipster potbelly craze of last year?) Pragmatic Mom has alerted me to the fact that one of the parents quoted in the original Times story was, in fact, misquoted—you can read about it here. Pragmatic Mom also makes the entirely plausible suggestion that cash-strapped parents are checking out costly picture books rather than buying them these days. While I regret jumping on the bogus trend bandwagon, I am glad that I was inspired to review some truly excellent books.

ORIGINAL POST: In a recent New York Times article, Julie Bosman reported that parents  are feeling pressure to get their kids reading “chapter books” at an earlier age, believing that books with lots of words and no pictures will better prepare their children for doing well in school. Publishers are responding by producing fewer picture books.

This is a shame. It’s sad, first of all, because it supports the idea that visual literacy is unimportant. My family likes picture books because we like pictures. My daughter recognized the work of Tibor Gergely by the time she was  two, and now she’s interested in learning how illustrations come to be. We talk about techniques and the choices artists make, and these conversations often find expression in her own artwork. Not many four-year-olds, I suspect, are eager to try gouache.

But this trend is also distressing because so many picture books are simply so wonderful. Two of my friends—one a librarian, the other a professor specializing in children’s literature—opined that many picture books are much more sophisticated than the majority of chapter books, and they’re absolutely right. I think that any creative person will tell you that limitations can be motivating, rather than inhibiting, and I believe that the formal constraints imposed by the picture-book format often inspire genius.

There are, of course, many ways to be sophisticated. If Bertold Brecht has a counterpart in the picture-book world, it may well be Margaret Wise Brown. And, for reasons I cannot elucidate, the sublime marriage of word and image produced by Nancy Willard and Alice and Martin Provensen in A Visit to William Blake’s Inn puts me in mind of Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon. But when I read Bosman’s article and considered the protestation of my friends, three picture books new to my acquaintance immediately sprang to mind.

Volume I

Cinderella, retold and illustrated by Barbara McClintock
Countless authors and illustrators have recast Charles Perrault’s Cinderella, and many acknowledge their source material and remain faithful to it. The feature that sets  McClintock’s version apart is her conscious decision to recreate the fashions and interiors of the reign of Louis XIV—the era during which Perrault, a French civil servant, composed his fairy tales. This information is provided in an author’s note in which McClintock lists Watteau, Fragonard, Jean Cocteau, and Tintin among her influences. This Cinderella opens up so many avenues for further exploration, and it gives the folklorically-minded parent the opportunity to explain that Cinderella was not a princess invented by Disney in order to sell licensed products. (Pepita readers can, by the way, expect to see more on the aforementioned issue in a future post.)

Volume II

Summer Birds: The Butterflies of Maria Merian by Margarita Engle, illustrated by Julie Paschkis
Engle captures the essence of the scientific revolution in the experience and voice of one real-life girl. As Maria Merian quietly and carefully documents the lifecycle of butterflies and other insects she explodes the long-held belief that these tiny creatures were born fully-formed out of mud. Thus, wisdom received from the ancients gives way to a science based on meticulous observation. Paschkis’s paintings are not just nice pictures: Her mixture of fantastic imagery from illuminated manuscripts with more naturalistic representations offers a visual version of the intellectual evolution Engle describes in her text. Together, author and illustrator introduce young readers not only to a key moment in the history of science, but also to the idea that worldviews are contingent and mutable.

Volume III

Beowulf: A Hero’s Tale Retold by James Rumford
The pen-and-ink and watercolor illustrations are rendered in a manner that implies action—quite suitable to a hero story—and Rumford uses standing stones and runes to create a vivid sense of otherness. The dragon flying from page to page is a subtle evocation of the important concept of fate or wyrd: Beowulf’s end is present at his beginning. My first time through the book, I got a faint whiff of anachronism from the  tonsured monk visible in some pictures, but then I re-read the afterword and realized, when I saw this monk looking straight at me from the dedication page, that he is the scribe who set down Beowulf in the ninth century. Very nice.

The afterword is also valuable for giving young audiences a concise history of language and the study of language in Britain. Rumford describes the Anglo-Saxon of Beowulf, and explains that this ancient tongue persists in the “powerful, straightforward words that form the backbone of our language.” Rumford then goes on to reveal a detail of his text that only the most careful reader would catch: In retelling Beowulf, he tried to restrict himself to modern English words derived from Anglo-Saxon, and his exceptions are few and well-defended.

While the story of Beowulf might be a bit bloody for the very young, the violence would hardly be disturbing to any child raised on fairytales. I can even imagine giving this picture book to high-school students along with a few excerpts from Seamus Heaney’s translation and a sample passage in the original language. At the very least, I can say for sure that I would much rather give  a “reluctant reader” Rumford’s slim-but-artful volume than, say, the 224-page Sir Fartsalot Hunts the Booger. While I cannot say that I have actually read the latter book, it seems safe to present it as evidence that more words is not always better.

The Princess Project

We reach here the very principle of myth: it transforms history into nature. We now understand why, in the eyes of the myth-consumer, the intention, the adhomination of the concept can remain manifest without however appearing to have an interest in the matter: what causes mythical speech to be uttered is perfectly explicit, but it is immensely frozen into something natural; it is not read as a motive, but as a reason.—Roland Barthes, Mythologies

Ted and I had a lot of trouble finding common ground on a name for our child—there was a spreadsheet involved, complete with a complex scoring system—but since resolving that minor crisis, we have, for the most part, remained a united front when it comes to parenting.  Sure, we may differ on issues like how many pairs of shoes a little girl needs and the sort of table manners we can reasonably expect from a preschooler, but we share similar viewpoints and values when it comes to such serious matters as the role of princesses in our daughter’s life.

When Frances was very small, Ted and I were united in our efforts to keep princesses out of our home. No “Daddy’s Little Princess” onesies. No tiny tiaras. No princess-centric bedtime stories.  The princess ethos, we felt, is one of being rather than doing. It’s about being pretty, being glamorous, being entitled, and—often—being helpless. We wanted our girl to be self-sufficient, confident, and adventurous, and we certainly didn’t want her to believe that conventional good looks and high-status parents are more important than personal achievement.

We could not, of course, protect our daughter forever. We knew that, sooner or later, contact with other children and with the culture at large would mean that our daughter would encounter princesses, much as she contracted a viral infection after her first visit to the playground at Island Park. And, now that Frances has, in fact, discovered princesses, Ted and I have realized that continuing to forbid princesses altogether would only increase their allure. So, we have sought to channel her interest by giving her a dress-up wardrobe with plenty of frills and sparkles—we use the slightly less laden word “fancy”, rather than the fraught “pretty”,  when talking about these clothes—and by seeking out books that offer an alternative vision of princessdom. Now, I would like to share some of our favorite princess stories.

Tatterhood and the Hobgoblins by Lauren Mills
This is not only my favorite princess story; it is also one of my favorite stories altogether. The heroine rides a goat and brandishes a wooden spoon. She rescues her sister from goblins, and then the two of them go sailing off on adventures before settling down to marry their princes.  This is a Norwegian folktale collected by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe (you can read it here). Lauren Mills’s retelling is faithful, and her illustrations have a Rackham-esque charm.  

Princesses Are Not Quitters by Kate Lum, illustrations by Sue Hellard
Ted discovered this one awhile ago, and it remains in heavy rotation. It’s the story of three bored princesses who decide that it might be fun to trade places with their servants for a day. Of course they learn that their lovely, effortless existence is supported by a whole army of servants, and this revelation leads to much-needed labor reforms in their land. Don’t worry, comrades: I’m making it sound heavier than it is for comic purposes, and the loopy, water-color pictures are really delightful.

Princess Grace by Mary Hoffman, illustrations by Cornelius Van Wright and Ying-Hwa Hu
This book is new to us—it was mentioned here, on one of my favorite parenting blogs—but Frances and I have both grown to like it. The protagonist, Grace, is a big fan of Cinderella, Snow White, and the rest of that tulle-swathed clique. When her teacher announces that two girls will get the chance to be princesses at a community festival, she daydreams about being one of them. But, after doing a little research, she discovers some real-life princesses who did more than wear pretty dresses, and she inspires her teacher to transform her students’ participation in the festival. Hoffman manages the difficult feat presenting a positive message about diversity without being heavy-handed or boring.

Melisande by E. Nesbit, illustrations by P.J. Lynch
This tale has no uplifting lesson to impart. The titular heroine is, like most storybook princesses, the hapless victim of a parent’s poor choice. But Melisande is a treat for grownups familiar with fairy-tale conventions, and the lush, witty illustrations bring the story to life for young companions.

The Apple-Pip Princess by Jane Ray
I’m not wild about this one, but Frances likes it and the collaged illustrations are pretty cool. My objections are not moral or philosophical, but, rather aesthetic. This book is a bit drippy—there’s a real whiff of scented candles about it.

The Paper Bag Princess by Robert Muncsh, illustrations by Michael Martchenko
The Paper Bag Princess hardly needs my introduction, but this collection would be incomplete without it. This book has attained the status of a classic, and I feel sure that it has served as an inspiration for other, similar stories since its publication. I do seem to recall reading a critique in which the reviewer got cranky about the fact that the brave and resourceful Princess Elizabeth ends up alone rather than partnered with a prince. I have a few responses to that complaint. First, it seems based on the premise that it’s bad to be single, which, I would argue, it is not. I will also add that stories don’t have to end when we turn the last page. When the heroine heads of on her own, readers and listeners are free to imagine whatever kind of future they want for her, and to discuss their visions. And, finally, while, sure, it might be nice to imagine Elizabeth finding herself a nice Oberlin grad who appreciates her for her mind and is really conscientious about the equitable division of household labor and childcare—if, of course, they choose to have children—a story written with that ending would have sucked, as purpose-built stories generally do.

Archival Interview with Jessica Berger Gross, Editor of About What Was Lost

NOTE: This interview was conducted in 2007. I’m retrieving it from the archives because the book was just reviewed in USA Weekend.

Almost 1 in 4 pregnancies end in miscarriage. I didn’t know this until I had a miscarriage of my own. I was surprised to learn that it’s so common, since women almost never talk about it. I wasn’t able to find anything much written on the subject, either. I can’t say that the cultural silence surrounding miscarriage made the experience worse—I don’t know if anything could have made it worse—but it certainly didn’t make it any easier. 

The anthology, About What Was Lost: Twenty Writers on Miscarriage, Healing, and Hope, is a much-needed addition to the literature of mourning. I contributed an essay, and I recently interviewed the collection’s editor, Jessica Berger Gross, for Literary Mama. We talked about loss, the publishing process, and what it’s like to edit a famous author.

The House in the Night

I bought The House in the Night during the brief period during which I thought books about night and sleep and such would help ease Frances into bed. I was naïve then, and slightly addled from lack of sleep, and my plan did not work. Nevertheless, this is a wonderful book that Frances and I both enjoy. The text is simple and slightly incantatory—it makes me kind of sleepy, anyway—and the pictures are amazing. Illustrator Beth Krommes certainly deserves the Caldecott Award this book just earned.

An Interview with Jessica Berger Gross, the Editor of About What Was Lost

Almost 1 in 4 pregnancies end in miscarriage. I didn’t know this until I had a miscarriage of my own. I was surprised to learn that it’s so common, since women almost never talk about it. I wasn’t able to find anything much written on the subject, either. I can’t say that the cultural silence surrounding miscarriage made the experience worse—I don’t know if anything could have made it worse—but it certainly didn’t make it any easier.

The new anthology, About What Was Lost: Twenty Writers on Miscarriage, Healing, and Hope, is a much-needed addition to the literature of mourning. I contributed an essay, and I recently interviewed the collection’s editor, Jessica Berger Gross, for Literary Mama. We talked about loss, the publishing process, and what it’s like to edit a famous author.

“The Ones Who Weren’t”

Miscarriage takes a lot of different forms. Sometimes, it happens so early in a pregnancy that the woman never even knows that she was almost a mother. Sometimes it happens later, when the pregnant woman, her partner, her friends, and family have already fallen in love with the growing baby. In an essay posted earlier this week on Salon, Joyce Maynard describes having a miscarriage the day before she was scheduled to have an abortion.

It’s a sad story, and a complicated one. Mourning a miscarriage is, almost always, a complicated business because our culture has no set rules, no rituals, for mourning the loss of a child who was never born. This ambiguity and ambivalence makes the loss even more difficult to deal with, I think, than it might otherwise be.

In the absence of custom, knowing how other women have experienced miscarriage is particularly helpful. That's why I’m so pleased to be a part of About What Was Lost: Twenty Writers on Miscarriage, Healing, and Hope. This anthology is the source of Maynard’s Salon essay, and it will be published in January.

Baby-Name Book Review: 7000 Baby Names: Classic and Modern by Hilary Spence

7000 Baby Names was next to Beyond Jennifer & Jason… on the shelf at my local library, so I grabbed it. It’s pretty terrible. While it’s true that you will find names here that you almost certainly will not find anywhere else, it’s also true that there’s often a reason why you won’t find these names anywhere else. For example, I’d say it’s going to be awhile before anyone not affiliated with the white supremacy movement names a little girl Adolpha. And I don’t know how the Persian name Anal is supposed to be pronounced, but I’d say that, to an English-speaking parent, it hardly matters.

Book Review: Easy Labor: Every Woman’s Guide to Choosing Less Pain and More Joy During Childbirth by William Camann, M.D., and Kathryn Alexander, M.A.

Perhaps no woman entering her eighth month of pregnancy can resist a book called Easy Labor. I certainly couldn’t, and I’m glad I didn’t. I found this book to be informative, well-organized, and eminently sensible.

Written by the director of obstetric anesthesiology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, this book offers a thorough, up-to-date introduction to medical pain relief during childbirth, and it explains the benefits and risks of various drugs and procedures, including various types of epidurals. It also provides detailed descriptions of alternative, or complementary, pain-management techniques like Lamaze, aromatherapy, and birthing balls.

Technical information is augmented with testimonials from mothers, physicians, midwives, and doulas. There’s a section in which caregivers recount a variety of real-life childbirth scenarios, and each story is followed by some interesting analysis of what went right in that situation and how things might have gone better. There’s also an entire section devoted to caregiver’s stories of their own experiences giving birth.

The book proceeds from the premise that there’s no single, correct way to give birth—which I appreciate—and from the idea that education and communication are the best ways to insure a positive experience in the delivery room. All of the caregivers seem to agree that women should be aware that childbirth is painful, that they should think about their pain-relief options before labor begins, and that they need to be able to trust the people helping them give birth. One doctor put it this way: “Everyone associated with the process of childbirth, from the parents-to-be to the obstetric anesthesiologist, has as his/her primary concern a safe, happy outcome.” I think that this is an important reminder, because so much of the information I’ve encountered as I’ve researched childbirth seems to assume an adversarial relationship between the mother and medicine, while my actual relationship with my ob/gyn has been one of mutual respect and clear communication. My doctor has birthed a lot of babies, and I feel that I can benefit from the wisdom of his experience. I don’t think he’s going to try to trick me into procedures I don’t need and don’t want; if I did, I would have searched for another healthcare provider.

The other lesson that the doctors and doulas assembled here want to drive home is that women need to be flexible when it comes to giving birth. A birth plan is an excellent tool. It provides guidance to everyone involved in the delivery, and if it’s the product of careful, well-considered research, it means that the mother is probably as prepared as she can possibly be for the experience of childbirth. But a birth plan isn’t a script, and women should be ready to reconsider if her caregivers suggest that another course of action might be better—not just more pleasant, but safer—for the woman herself or her baby. Again, trust and respect are critical: Caregivers should honor a woman’s wishes for her birth, but the woman should be willing to trust the knowledge and expertise of her caregivers, too.

Having read Easy Labor, I feel better prepared to talk to my ob/gyn about pain management during childbirth, and I feel much more confident about having a birth that’s good for me and for my baby.

“Afflufemza,” wherein the problems of affluence are recast as the struggles of feminism

One of the core beliefs of Second Wave feminism was that women in power would speak for all women. Well, now that we have some women in power—not as many as we might prefer, perhaps, nor in as many places as we might like, but some—it seems that one thing we can count on them for is to speak for themselves. Thus, we have Maureen Dowd and her gal pals crying in their drinks about the loveless lives of well-educated, well-remunerated, well-connected women. And we have the Mommy Wars.

You might suppose, given all the ink spilled over the battle between stay-at-home moms and mothers with careers, that the choice of whether or not to work was the most pressing issue facing mothers today. You might also conclude that there is a right answer and wrong answer when it comes to staying at home v. working outside the home. Hence all the hairsplitting and maddeningly circular logic from women like Caitlin Flanagan, women who pursue successful, paid careers while praising the virtues of the domestic life because their offices happen to situated inside their houses rather than in a high-rise downtown.

What you would never know from most of the articles and op-ed pieces is that, for a lot of women, work is not a matter of choice; it is, rather, an absolute necessity. It seems that the moms with media access have little inclination to speak for these women.

It seems, however, that this might not be such a bad thing. In her Atlantic Monthly review of the new anthology, Mommy Wars, Sandra Tsing Loh makes it pretty clear that the only thing worse that an affluent essayist who neglects her sisters in the lower classes is an affluent essayist who actually tries to feel their pain. As she discusses an essay by the book’s editor, Leslie Morgan Steiner, Loh writes:

Steiner [argues] that although stay-at-home moms do, in their own intimate way, add value to their communities, “without the money, the power, and the loudspeaker successful careers bring, women will never have the collective bargaining power to make the world better for ourselves, our children, and all the women who can’t leave abusive husbands, the ones who wear veils, the moms who earn less than minimum wage cleaning houses and don’t have choices about birth control or prenatal care or any other kind of care.”

Then there’s the affluent essayist who not only feels the pain of her lower-class sisters, but the affluent essayist who tries to co-opt it.  Loh quotes Sara Nelson, editor-in-chief of Publishers Weekly:

About half of the mothers of kids in Charley’s class are working at least part-time. There’s Maria, who designs handbags; Lauren, who works in advertising; Paulette, who writes children’s books. The mother of Charley’s friend Nick is an independent management consultant. And for the most part—and I gather this is unusual in the fiercely competitive world of New York private schools—there’s little conflict between the employed mothers and the ones who stay home…

Still, there is some tension bubbling under the surface. One morning one of the stay-at-home mothers referred to herself, quite pointedly, as a “full-time mom.” Those three words made my blood boil. I’ve been a mother every second of every day for the past ten and a half years, whether I’m researching an article or pushing a swing. Would anyone dare to suggest that a woman who worked in a factory, or as a cop or a firefighter—a woman who worked at least partly so that her children could have food and shoes and the occasional trip to Toys “R” Us—was any less a mother than my school acquaintance, who’d had the privilege to opt out of the workforce?

Loh answers Nelson’s rhetorical question thusly: “No, but apparently someone would dare to suggest that elective employment in the upper reaches of the publishing world is on a par with wage slavery and required-second-salary public-sector work.”

Loh notes that, even though writers like Nelson and Steiner might make indistinct gestures towards the classes from which their hired help spring, none of them refer to any real social action they have taken: “I didn’t notice any successful career women in the book mentioning specific campaigns they’re waging on behalf of the less fortunate, nor did I catch to what women’s or children’s charities proceeds from the book will be given… These days, I suppose, it is feminist enough an action to edit a women’s anthology, get on Oprah, sell a million copies, and make a pile of cash….”

It’s that “pile of cash” that bothers me the most, as putting more money in the hands of these women can only inflame their “afflufemza,”  a disease described by Loh “wherein the problems of affluence are recast as the struggles of feminism” and lead to more anthologies like this one.