Читать книгу Free-Range Kids - Lenore Skenazy - Страница 16

Did you read What to Expect When You're Expecting? Of course you did. Or your spouse did. Everyone did. I did. I found it very helpful.

And horrible.

Like most advice out there for parents.

Helpful because when you're wondering if those gas pains are really contractions, it's there to give you a clue. (Baby's head emerging? Not gas.) But even though at times the newer editions bend over backward to reassure moms-to-be that they should “lose the guilt,” the basic premise of this book is that there's a right way and a wrong way to act when you're pregnant, and a whole lot of dilemmas and potential pitfalls along the way. Or, as the introduction to the fourth edition cheerfully proclaims, “More symptoms and more solutions than ever before.”

That's good, because moms just weren't worried enough.

Let's take a glance at the twenty-nine pages on “eating well.” (Not to be confused with the brand extension, What to Eat When You're Expecting—a whole book. By the time you're done reading it, the baby's in law school.) Naturally, the authors tell moms to try to eat a balanced diet. Fine. But then they go on to say that this isn't just a question of trying to eat a few more spinach salads and a little less Kahlúa cream pie. No, the writers ask moms to kindly remember that “Each bite during the day is an opportunity to feed that growing baby of yours healthy nutrients.”

Not each meal. Not each day. Each bite has to be carefully considered if you're going to be doing the right thing by your child. So “Open wide, but think first.”

What are the consequences of a single bite you don't “think first” about? Oh … maybe the slow class at school for junior. Maybe weight problems for life. Or worse. After all, eating the precise number of calories and nutrients suggested by the book can offer “impressive benefits,” including “better birthweight, improved brain development, reduced risk for certain birth defects… .”

Aieee!! If that doesn't make mama throw her baloney sandwich out the window, what will? On the other hand, if that mama cannot resist the deli meat and gobbles that darn sandwich right down to the crust, she is left to feel that she's a horrible person. A lax, no-good, baby-damning baloney addict—at least compared to the will-of-steel baby mamas the What to Expect authors applaud. Even in the food chapter's little box about not feeling guilty, they jauntily say, “Lose the guilt, hold the deprivation, and allow yourself a treat every once in a while.” A treat that will make “your tastebuds jump for joy.” And what exactly would that fantastic treat be?

“A blueberry muffin.”

Not even a cupcake. I guess frosting is the What to Expect equivalent of crack.

Now listen: on the one hand, it's hard to argue with a book that says pregnant women should be eating well. On the other hand, it's hard not to argue with a book that drives pregnant women crazy. “It tortures them and it tortures me,” says obstetrician Dr. Craig Bissinger of the book he dreads seeing his patients waddle in with. As a teacher, lecturer, and deliverer of 8,000 babies, this is the sum total of his dietary advice for expectant moms: “Just eat like you have your whole life, but eat a little more.”

So much for the “each bite” advice—advice so picky and so extreme that it's bound to make any mom self-conscious. (Aren't the people who think about the consequences of each bite generally referred to as anorexics?) It is exactly that hyperconsciousness—the worry that at any second we could be doing something terribly wrong that will hurt our children forever or, alternatively, that any second is another opportunity to produce the perfect child if only we don't blow it—that is one of the reasons we're so worried about our parenting capabilities. Even before our kid is born!

After birth, of course, it never ends. Go to the parenting section of your library or bookstore—or maybe you're there right now (so buy this book already!). In front of you awaits a wall of “expert” advice so daunting, you may want to cry. Then again, maybe you're there because you're already crying because you think you're such a bad parent.

This is not the place to look for reassurance. It's not that there's no good advice to be found here. Dr. Spock is still calm and good, though dead. (The new Dr. Spock is Robert Needlman, who is just as calm and good, with the added advantage of being alive.) Emily Oster's data-driven Cribsheet is reassuring, telling parents that breastfeeding is not a must and kids in daycare are not less attached to their moms. The books on child development can clue you in to why your toddler isn't taking your every helpful suggestion yet. (“Sweetheart, let's not climb on the eighteenth-century porcelain elephant.”) And of course, if your child has been given a diagnosis of something you want to read up on, it's great that these books are here.

But …

I went flipping randomly through a whole bunch of these books, and I guarantee that if you tried to follow the advice in even a chapter or two of some of them, you would fail or at least forget the million particulars that you're supposed to do. And then you'll feel bad. Examples?

The Happiest Toddler on the Block—ah yes, let's compete for whose kid is happier—teaches parents how to talk to their tantruming tots. It is not enough to tell a child who is freaked out by a broken cracker in her snack, “It's OK! It's OK!” No, you must “Save your reassurance for after you respectfully reflect your child's feelings.”

That's right, folks. There is a wrong way to calm your children down, and it's by reassuring them. So next time you're talking to your kid, don't do what comes naturally. Think hard about what an expert told you to do and then talk. Otherwise, you'll be doing it wrong.

What if you want to encourage good behavior in your child? Saying “Yay!” is no longer enough. Happiest Toddler suggests rewarding kiddos “with a pen check mark on the back of their hands when they have done something good.” At night, “count the checks and recall what he did to earn each one. He'll end his day feeling like a winner!”

I'm not quite sure why this activates my gag reflex, but it has something to do with the fact that we are hereby expected to notice, cheer, and physically record every wonderful little deed our kid does that day, and then repeat it back, like the king's vizier. “First, my Lord, you woke up and did proceed not to throw your binky across the room. Huzzah, huzzah. Then, my Lord, when it was time for the day's morning repast, you did splendidly wield your spoon like a big boy …”

Without that litany, would the king end his day feeling like a winner? Perhaps not. Do you want to raise a kid who needs to hear his accomplishments reiterated every night as he gazes at the physical record of his wonderfulness?

Just asking.

Then there are books telling us how to communicate with our kids—and not just basic advice like “Try not to yell very much.” No, they tell you the exact words, like you're a bumbling amateur who needs a script to say the right thing … or else. Some of these books read like they're giving advice on how to navigate a tricky job interview. So in a book with the really promising title Am I a Normal Parent? there's a whole section on how not to quash your child's will to live when he asks if you like the picture he drew.

“How do you respond?” asks the book. “One way to help your child trust your response would be to take a minute or so to really look at the drawing and then, instead of commenting on the final product, say something about the process. For example, you might say, ‘I like the way you drew a black circle around the sun to make it stand out. I also like the red shirt on the boy in the picture. It reminds me of the shirt you wore to your last birthday party.’ This will help your child feel like your response was not a lie or a brush-off, but an honest reflection of what you have seen.”

So I guess “That's beautiful, hon!” makes them think we're total liars and the world is a stinking cesspool of phonies? Really—I can see where the author wants to help parents relate to kids, but it seems to me that the more worried we are about the ramifications of every remark we make, the more stilted we become. We are not relating to our kids as kids. We are relating to them as complicated cakes we have been given to make, and if we don't follow the recipe exactly—a recipe given to us in painstaking detail by an expert chef angling for a TV baking show—the whole thing will collapse.

That same book has a whole page about whether to tell your child the tooth fairy is hooey—a topic parents have grappled with ever since winged ladies roamed the earth. Why do we suddenly need an expert telling us how to broach this touchy subject? Or any subject? Or every subject? Including—let me rant for another paragraph or two—a whole tome on potty training?

The Potty Training Answer Book asks many of the questions you may or may not have been wondering about, including, “What books and videos should I choose for my child's potty library?”

Her what?

You know—a how-to library filled with picture books like I Want My Potty, It's Potty Time, and even, I kid you not, What to Expect When You Use the Potty. (Thankfully, not for pregnant women.) The Potty Training Answer Book lists a full twenty books you might want to get your child about the issue.

And six videos.

Is your child studying for an advanced degree in Potty Studies? Has she been invited to present the prestigious “Scatological Preschooler” lecture at Oxford? I got through a college course on twentieth-century Russian history with less reading. But the Answer Book then suggests some “favorite potty training resources.” Because twenty books and six videos are just not enough.

Simply bringing the kid into the bathroom and plopping her on the toilet is not an option anymore. And simply asking your friends, “What worked for you?” is now considered about as sensible as asking them, “How would you perform a triple bypass?” It's not that potty training is such a breeze—I know it's fraught with frustration, and, for the record, I did give my kids Everyone Poops and some picture book my sister sent me, so it's not like I braved it alone. But when an author starts telling you not only to read potty books aloud to your child but to “extend your child's favorite potty stories and songs into everyday play situations” and to “use hand puppets, finger puppets or spoon puppets to have a conversation about potty training” and also to “retell stories from books and videos while you are driving in the car or walking to the store” and then to make your kid his own “personal potty book” complete with photos Of Him to “increase his self-awareness” so he can “reflect on the images,” and on and on, and this whole one-hundred-plus-page volume is considered a sane and helpful reference book rather than the feverish ravings of a bibliophilic, paid-by-the-word, bathroom-crazed, puppet-pushing potty brain—clearly, we are depending way too much on experts who make us think we have to do way more than necessary to help and understand and ultimately save our kids.

Where did this bizarre reliance on these folks come from? And can we wean ourselves off it?

Jillian Swartz, co-founder of the online magazine Family Groove, believes it all started the same way the Food Network did, sort of.

“Every ten years or so,” says Swartz, “a new, once-mundane job becomes deified. Think: Chefs in the nineties and handymen and home decorators in the two thousands.” About twenty or thirty years or so ago, another lowly job suddenly became chic: motherhood. (And, to a lesser extent, fatherhood.) “With this,” says Swartz, “came the fetishization of every last mother-loving detail of parenthood, and an ever-burgeoning breed of experts to propagate this often mind-numbing minutiae. Pile on top of that the rise of Citizen Media and all the (mis)information online and we're all just swimming aimlessly in the murky waters of child-rearing do's, don'ts, who's, what's, how's, when's, and why's.”

The avalanche of expert advice—and non-expert advice with nonetheless very enticing headlines—undermines our belief that we are equipped with enough common sense to deal with most child-rearing issues. That battered confidence, in turn, leads us to look ever more desperately to the experts wherever we find them. At the library. In parenting magazines. On our phones. But a lot of those experts give advice so daunting and detailed and frankly non-doable (does anyone really want to spend the day retelling potty stories with the aid of a spoon puppet?) that we feel like failures.

Then when—surprise—our kids turn out not to be perfect, we know who's to blame. Us! If only we'd made one more pretend forest out of broccoli spears, our kid would be a veggie fiend. If only we'd put aside that deep-fried Oreo in our second trimester, she'd be in the gifted program at school. And if our child is cranky? Uncommunicative? Headed for five to ten years’ hard labor? That just might be because we told her, “Look, sweetie, a broken cracker is not the end of the world!” instead of saying, “Oooh, your cracker broke. Sad sad sad sad sad!” and respectfully relating.

The experts told us what to do, and we screwed up.

So what's the alternative? Reading every book and article and trying to do absolutely all the stuff they recommend? (She asked rhetorically.) Or avoiding the experts entirely and perhaps missing out on some good advice?

Well, it's obviously somewhere in the middle, according to a bona fide expert on experts, Dr. Stephen Barrett. Barrett is board chairman at Quackwatch, a non-profit group that examines the health advice being given to the public and flags the information that is scientifically unproven—or just plain wrong.

If you're looking for answers and don't know where to turn, Barrett says, “Look for credentials.” A book by the American College of Obstetricians, for instance, or a site run by the American Academy of Pediatrics. “I don't recommend that people use Google to search for health advice,” Barrett adds, because so much of what pops up is wacky. “The Internet has made many people more visible. I'm not sure that when it comes to advice, this is helpful.”

I'm not sure, either. That's why Barrett's other suggestion—“Ask your doctor”—seems obvious, but smart. If you have a whole lot of questions, then ask your doctor to recommend a reliable book.

But of course, plenty of parents don't trust any of the old “reliable” sources anymore. They're more ready to believe the ones who say, “Whatever you've heard is fine, isn't.” So sometimes, even if there's reassuring news—such as that the FDA has determined that the chemicals in plastic baby bottles are not going to change your child's sex—it's hard to hear that message because it's the nay-saying “experts” who get the attention and airtime. (Did I mention in the media chapter preceding this one that fear sells?)

Every generation since the 1960s has grown up distrustful of any company or institution that says, “Trust us—you can trust us.” Thanks to Ralph Nader and his cadre of consumer advocates, America learned that car companies were aware of brake problems but hid them from the public, even as cigarette manufacturers knew they were giving us cancer but pretended that they didn't. Thus was automatic skepticism-bordering-on-cynicism born.

But over the years, as we stopped trusting additives and preservatives and pesticides and food coloring and Western medicine and unfiltered tap water and pretty much anything that wasn't an organic turnip in a recycled tote bag from Whole Foods, some of us just threw up our hands and decided it was impossible to trust anything or anyone. (Except Tom Hanks. He tops every trustworthiness poll.) The minute we heard something new and nefarious about a time-honored product or practice, a whole lot of us were ready to embrace it. Shampoo gives you cancer? We knew it!

The Web can confirm these fears—and spawn new ones. Is your water safe? Your cereal? Your sandbox? But as Barrett points out (knowing full well he will sound like just another “establishment” source not to be trusted): most companies really do not try to sell us deadly or defective products. Even if they have no corporate conscience whatsoever, doing wrong is still not worth it to them, because if they harm a single child, they'll have to recall millions of products. Or millions of us will join a class-action suit. Either way, that will hurt their bottom line.

So we have a choice: we can trust the self-proclaimed experts warning us that our body wash is toxic—and by the way, so is everything else—or we can just be glad we're living in a hygienic, regulated society that truly isn't teeming with killer products.

In 1946, Dr. Spock famously began his baby care book with these reassuring words: “Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.” The mantra of today's experts—“Trust us. There is so much you don't know”—seems designed to drive us mad.

To calm down, remember that the best child-rearing advice boils down to the old basics. Listen to your kids. Love them. Keep them out of oncoming traffic.

And when you're pregnant, don't eat a baloney sandwich in oncoming traffic, either.