Here are 2 articles about parenting. I don't have kids, and I never want to have kids. However, these are well- written articles.
Oct. 31, 2016 "Knitting: a cure for parent shamers": Today I found this article by Perri Klass in the Globe and Mail:
As a pediatrician, I spend many hours thinking and worrying about children and their parents, individually and in the aggregate. But when I have a chance to escape, I like to hang out at Ravelry, a great knitting and crocheting website and, I might add, a notoriously sticky one: People come, and they stay.
I click through 10, 20, 200 versions of the same popular shawl pattern, looking intently at the different yarns that people have used, the color combinations, the way the shawl looks in worsted weight versus fingering versus bulky. Or maybe I start with some yarn from my stash and spend a happy 20 minutes or so looking at all the different projects people have fashioned from that yarn — hats and baby blankets and sweaters and shawls.
It’s soothing and inspiring and relaxing and stimulating, even when certain pattern preferences and color choices are frankly incomprehensible to me. Why put in all that time and effort to knit an elaborate lace shawl, counting stitches and following a complicated chart to get that openwork pattern of leaves and tendrils — but do it all in that peculiarly harsh electric blue? Why spend months on a sweater designed to be elegantly loose and flowing, but deliberately shorten and tighten it so that it cuts right across the belly in a less-than-graceful way?
Here’s the thing about the online knitting world: We look at one another’s projects, and we sometimes shake our heads in silent wonder at the choices other people make.
But when we comment, we say nice things. Love this. Favorite this. Wow, beautiful, congratulations, great colors. There’s an implicit understanding that when someone posts a photo of a completed project, what you’re seeing is a product of love and care and time, choices and sustained effort — and you should either cheer or else move on.
What, after all, do you gain by pointing out that the colors clash or the fit is not exactly flattering?
Or at least, that’s how it has always seemed to me, from looking at the posted photos and reading the comments that people make, though if someone does post something rude about your project, you can take that comment down.
So I asked about unkind comments at Ravelry Help, and got an immediate email back from “Sarah,” who told me, “Overall issues are fairly rare. We don’t usually have issues with unkind comments about projects. There are occasional unkind comments regarding patterns or regarding other issues outside of crafts (politics, for example) within the forums.”
So I could draw the obvious conclusion here, which all you knitters (and crocheters) will probably have leapt to long ago: Is it possible that knitting makes us nicer (knicer?) while child rearing makes us crankier and more critical?
There’s an awful lot of public shaming that goes on around being a parent, and I’m not just talking online — or even in the doctor’s office.
And when you’re out in the world with a small child, you know people are looking at you, and you know some of it isn’t kindly. Some parents are so apologetic about their babies’ potential for acting like babies on flights that they hand out goody bags to their fellow passengers in hope of averting adult anger and disapproval.
But you remember that terrible trip when your own child was screaming on the plane much more distinctly than the many trips when it was someone else’s kid.
Most of us writhe inside when a child acts up in a restaurant, but we don’t really expect the parents to go table to table murmuring, “She’s usually great in restaurants, and that’s why we came so early and we chose this place because it is so clearly not a fancy place where people might come for romantic dinners.”
Tantrums in the toy store — been there. Noise at the library, meltdown in the mall, you name it.
There’s no way to take this public embarrassment out of parenthood — you accept the job of civilizing a child, you test the process by taking that child out into the world, you’re going to have some moments you would just as soon have lived through in private.
But in the age of our great common internet living room, it’s kind of striking how that Greek chorus of disapproving curmudgeons stands ready to tell you clearly and absolutely that you’re dangerously overindulgent, criminally under involved, cruel in your adherence to traditions, or unconscionably cavalier in your willingness to let them go.
Parents today! Mothers today! If they would only put down their smartphones and pay attention to their children! If they would only stop spoiling them and giving in to them over everything!
The children are being dangerously ignored by their self-centered, screen-focused, me-generation parents. No, wait, the children are being dangerously coddled and attended to and overindulged and pampered by their incompetently anxious, hovering helicopter parents.
I admit I always wonder how anyone gets away with typing any of this stuff without feeling like a character actor playing a tight-lipped codger in a vintage movie, coming on screen for a few minutes to drip comic vinegar. But the world is apparently full of people waiting to draw themselves up and intone some version of “why, when I was a child…”
It is indeed part of my professional responsibility as a pediatrician — one on one, in the privacy of the exam room — to let parents know when they’re doing something that is inadvisable or downright dangerous.
Take the Kool-Aid out of the baby’s bottle; it’s bad for the teeth. You don’t have to give your toddler junk food just because he points to it and cries. That’s a beautiful amulet, but it’s dangerous to put anything around a small child’s neck.
But when I have to give that advice, health advice, risk-and-danger advice, or setting-limits advice, I try to do it gently. I try to remember that most parents are doing their very best, sometimes in circumstances harsher than any I’ve ever had to face with my own kids.
I would like to suggest that everyone who has posted more than one comment in the last two years passing judgment on other parents learn to knit as soon as possible. Winter is coming, and we all need scarves. There are some really nice, easy patterns on Ravelry, and you can download many of them free — and then you can choose your yarn and put your heart into it and make something beautiful.
With luck, the people who see it in real life and the ones who admire it in the photos you post online will respect the effort you put into it, and offer praise and encouragement. And if they don’t have anything nice to say, they won’t say anything at all.
Nov. 29, 2022 My opinion: This part "It’s soothing and inspiring and relaxing and stimulating," reminds me of how you feel looking at Pinterest.
Mar. 10, 2017 "Taking stock of toddler's tall tales": Today I found this article by Micah Toub in the Globe and Mail:
The first time I seriously thought about the lies between my toddler and me was around the time he turned 2. On that fateful day, I asked him if he’d had a poo, and he answered so promptly and with such an unusual certainty that I knew something was up. I smelled a lie.
Half a year later, it’s still his go-to fib. He never wants his play interrupted and so, according to his fake news, he never does a No. 2.
Not that he’s the only one lying. While he’s consistent with his, the untruths going the other way have run the gamut. The streetcars are broken so we can’t ride them. That cookie was the last one. And, yes, Daddy and Mommy are going to sleep now, too.
For a long time, I laughed off the mutual deception, but lately I’ve been wondering – and worrying – about our underlying motivations.
Why the dishonesty, and was this going to continue forever?
Research out of Dr. Kang Lee’s lab at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education has shown that 30 per cent of two year olds will lie about a transgression.
That goes up to half by the age of three, and then 80 per cent or more after the age of four.
While I don’t have statistics to prove it, I’m fairly certain that by adulthood everyone lies – including to their kids. I’ve discovered, however, that my parental lies are more problematic than the ones my son tells me.
Toddlers’ lies are inspired by wishful thinking, says Ann Douglas, author of 14 parenting books, including last year’s Parenting Through the Storm.
“If a parent asks, ‘Did you break this?’ and you wish you hadn’t, you’ll be tempted to say no,” she explained. Although a deceitful child can cause concern, these early lies should actually be celebrated.
“He has made a psychological breakthrough,” Douglas said of my son who never poos. “It means he now understands that other people have other ideas in their heads, so it’s possible for him to not tell the truth.”
Dubbed “theory of mind” in the field of psychology, this cognitive milestone also means a child is on his way to building the ability to empathize.
Lying becomes a red flag, says Douglas, if an older child who has learned the difference between truth and tall tales still lies about almost everything.
In her experience, Douglas says parental lies are motivated mostly by exhaustion, and “bridging the gap between what they want and what you can deliver.”
When I asked around for these fictions, I discovered they are vast and, in some cases, incredibly creative. One of the more common stories is that the ice-cream truck plays music when it’s out of ice cream. One mom said she told her baseball-devoted toddler that Jose Bautista loves broccoli. And there was this amazing one: “I told my daughter McDonald’s is closed because ‘Old McDonald’ is old and tired of making French fries.”
While Douglas says parental lies are understandable, honesty is better in the long run. “Do you say, ‘No, we can’t go to the park because someone took all the slides away?’” asks Douglas.
“Or, ‘We can’t go because Mom and Dad are exhausted, but we can do something else.’” The latter, she said, may result in disappointment, but the attendant tantrum is actually a hidden opportunity.
“Every time you help another person work through a difficult situation, it cements the bond between you. They can count on you to have their back.”
If you go for the lie instead, it teaches the kid that this is a valid strategy for emotional regulation and getting through tough times.
After learning about this downside of dishonesty, I have tried to move toward a zero-lie policy.
When I recently told my son that we’d be saving the rest of the cookies in the jar for later, I admit I was surprised that the world didn’t end.
There was a series of whines, and an angry hand slammed onto the table, but the next day he was already trying out this new idea of waiting for something: “I’m saving that for later,” he told me about an apple slice one second before eating it.
The odd fib still slips through, though, and to be honest, seems harmless. Like, is it really so bad to tell my son, who has recently become obsessed with the Beatles, that John Lennon loves to eat the fish his Daddy makes him? I mean, the once-macrobiotic musician likely did when he was (cough) alive.
In any case, it doesn’t matter, because my toddler decided two could play at that game. “No,” he replied. “John Lennon does not like to eat fish.”
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