Is it just about figuring out which hoops to jump through, yes ma’aming and no sir’ing, or something else?
Read my letter to my future sons-in-law in today’s WORLD online edition.
Warning: Opinionated Mama Bear is on her soap box, causing Papa Bear to say even he wouldn’t qualify under these standards. The Oldest Girl Bear, however, gave my list her two thumbs up. And, even though Papa Bear hasn’t (yet) removed an engine block from a car, she still loves him. That ought to give a boy hope.
Not even you.
Yes, you.
You may have your children in the most coveted Montessori school in town. You may feed them Annie’s organic cheddar bunnies instead of those red-40 laden Cheez-Its. You may rinse them after swimming because skin is, after all, the largest organ. You may keep them from sleepovers with questionable families, from public restrooms, from rated PG-13 movies for the potty humor, from food preservatives, and from Internet predators.
But, you are not perfect.
You can watch the children out the window each and every moment they are out in the yard and you can listen in to their phone conversations and you can wash their clothes with seven rinses and you can run a Hepa filter in your home and you can avoid antibacterial products and you can refuse vaccines and you can hand brush their teeth with non-fluoride toothpaste and you can remove sharp objects from their rooms and you can sit in their Sunday School class to make sure they aren’t being taught heresy and you can screen the babysitters.
You can hold an MBA or a Jurist Doctorate or attend night classes to improve your mind and you can do yoga five to six times a week and you can drink nasty green whole food type drinks and you can wear a wide brim in the sun and slather your hinterparts with 75 SPF sunscreen and you can marry Mr. Right and you can rise early and you can cook from scratch.
But you still aren’t perfect.
The problem is, you want to be perfect. I do, too.
That’s why we feel guilty at night. And around three in the afternoon. And just before dinner.
Do you like feeling guilty?
Me neither.
So give it up. Not the trying part, just the perfect part. Nobody even likes perfect. Just ask Barbie.
So, I’ve been blogging about Nurture Shock and, after letting it steep a bit realized something was bugging me: Why is it we trust so much in science to help us raise our children anyway? Granted, I was happy to find new studies that show that it is OK to sometimes fight in front of the kiddos, but did I need a scientific study to tell me that? Hm. This has me wheels a clickin’.
It’s not for everyone, but it can and does work. Meagan Francis and her husband started their family at the tender age of 20 and don’t regret it.
Read about her here. Just goes to show young mothers aren’t doomed to failure and, in fact, can have lovely and loving families, no matter how soon they got started. Bravo, Meagan.
Anyone interested in the difference between law and grace can get a great back-to-back comparison by first checking out Rabbi Yonason Goldson’s take on Tiger Wood’s public apology and then comparing it to Michael Hyatt’s view.
This last week I spoke to someone who told me about a scandal that had just occurred at a local Christian school. She fell into what we all tend to fall into when presented with situations we don’t understand: Aghast judgment. “What was he thinking???” “HOW could he have done that?” etc. In other words, THIS sin is heinous, beyond forgiveness. MINE, well, it’s just a little bitty struggle. Like a white lie, my (arrogance, pride, self-righteousness, judgmental spirit, unforgiveness) doesn’t really count. After all, those aren’t dark and ugly sins like murder or infidelity.
Let’s not forget that some of the worst sinners in the Bible were godly men. David, both adulterer and murderer, was a man after God’s own heart, for pity’s sake. If we, as Christians, have anything in our hearts but love, forgiveness, and grace toward Tiger Woods, we indict ourselves.
Let’s also not forget that Tiger Woods is a human being, and no matter what line he crossed, he deserves forgiveness just as much as any other sinner does. Christian response to his confession should be bathed, not in cynicism and mockery, but in the abundance of love and forgiveness Christ lavished on us.
Hyatt adds: “For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses” (Matthew 6:14, 15).
Anyone claiming the cross of Christ should take those words very, very seriously.
Every year about this time I think I am going crazy. Then I remember: It’s February– time for my mid-winter breakdown. Days are short, dreary nights are long. The holiday glow has worn off like last summer’s tan, but it is still too early to order seeds from Burpees. Complaining, sour attitudes, and snippy tones abound. And the kids are being rotten, too.
Stuck in the house the majority of the time, the kids become grouchy with each other and the little ones fuss the day away. I put on Barbie Rapunzel for the third time and am so depressed by my mousy, static-laden hair and alligator skin that I find myself foraging around for the leftover Christmas candy even though I hate chocolate.
In my sixteen years of parenting there have been more joys than I could have possibly imagined. But there have also been some long, dark days: The week my husband was gone on military training and my toddler and baby got hoof and mouth disease where the insides of their mouths were covered in sores that no medicine could soothe. The time the baby burned her finger and slept no longer than ten minutes at a stretch all night long. Breast infections, teething, croup, stomach bugs. For some reason, when these things occur during the summer, it is not so bad. But, during the winter, it is enough make a mom run in one direction for miles, stopping only to eat Hostess cherry pies at random gas stations.
Short of dropping off a few ‘items’ at the orphanage, there is no easy answer. But now that my kids are older I have one distinct advantage over when they were small: I know there is an end to it. No matter how many colds they get, no matter how many teeth they are cutting all at once, no matter how much they bicker, it will end. I used to feel that the squabble settling and the Desitin smearing would go on until I was in The Home. I thought I would be more wrinkled than a month old potato and still reminding the kids to put paper on the toilet seat.
But then, one day I realized that the kids dress, bathe, and potty–all by themselves. They cook. They clean. They mow the yard. It’s a mystery how it happened, but don’t underestimate the power of growing up.
So, on these cold, long winter nights, when depression and discouragement crouch at the door and, like the unmatched sock box, threaten to undo you, take heart: Your children will become self-sufficient. They will learn to get their own drinks of water. They will learn how to make their own peanut butter sandwiches. They will.
So, remember two things: Spring is only thirty-one days away and, despite what your cotton-filled winter brain may tell you, this (mess, illness, noise level, attitude, household disaster, pile of ironing, filthy high chair tray) will pass. And–after a couple decades–you may even miss it.
Parents, resign as mediators and, instead, work on ways to help your children enjoy each other the way they enjoy their best friends.
According to Nurture Shock authors, Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, parents need to realize kids have no incentive to be nice to their siblings: They’ll be there, no matter how they are treated. Why be nice? But when children truly ENJOY each other, they become internally motivated to get along, smooth out rough patches, and play nicely together.
Sounds great, but HOW?
For one, get rid of your children’s books that talk about siblings. In one study, 261 books, meant to ‘encourage’ sibling affection actually did the opposite. Even though the books ended happily, they inadvertently (we hope) give children great ideas of how to mistreat each other. Let me rephrase: Many times, a child learns previously unknown ways to torture each other simply by reading what other mean siblings do to each other. Think Berenstain Bears or Sesame Street.
There’s more there on sibling relationships, but let me sum their findings with this quote by Dr. Laurie Kramer: “If kids enjoy one another’s presence, then quarreling comes at a new cost. The penalty for fighting is no longer just a time-out, but the loss of a worthy opponent.”
Question: Do your children enjoy each other? If not, why not?
As I have been reading Nurture Shock, something jumped out at me.
One of my daughters, age seven, is a reading fiend. She has read over sixty books since the school year started and those are just the ones I’ve monitored and counted. Without any prompting, she sits down and writes stories and diary entries and poems in her multiple notebooks. We have noticed this and made comment of it, even calling her ‘Our Little Writer.’ But, once we started doing this, she started bucking, insisting, “I am NOT going to be a writer!”
Fine, we say, not understanding what’s going on in her little story-filled head.
After reading the research on praise, I wonder if, by ‘labeling’ her (albeit in a positive way), we are somehow pressuring her, somehow making her feel this is her only option, or somehow taking away from her the ownership of her work or the joy of her internal rewards for reading and writing.
Subsequently, I am backing off on even mentioning her reading/writing and seeing what will happen. I’ll keep you posted.
Question: Has your child lost an interest in something that you have been praising them for? Is it possible they might be feeling pressured and lost the joy somewhere along the way? What can you do about it?
Can one measly hour of sleep really be that important?
Absolutely, say Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, authors of Nurture Shock: New Thinking About Children.
Sixty percent of high schoolers say they experience extreme daytime sleepiness.
Fifty percent of adolescents sleep less than seven hours per night.
Elementary children are averaging one hour less sleep per night than they did thirty years ago.
Why is this? Too many activities. Too much homework. Television. Cell phones in kids’ rooms. Parents who feel guilty for being gone all day and keep the kids up later in order to spend time with them.
But what’s the big deal about one lost hour?
A bunch. According to Nurture Shock, “Because children’s brains are a work in progress until the age of 21, and because much of that work is done while a child is asleep, this lost hour appears to have an exponential impact on children that it simply doesn’t have on adults.”
An impact that includes moodiness, depression, and obesity.
Dr. Avi Sadeh at Tel Aviv University gave some fourth graders directions to go to bed thirty minutes earlier and some directions to go to bed thirty minutes later. He was worried that depriving children of one measly hour of sleep might not have any effect at all. He needn’t have worried.
The performance gap that lost hour caused was huge. “A loss of one hour of sleep is equivalent to [the loss of] two years of cognitive maturation and development,” said Sadeh. In other words, a tired fourth grader performs like a second grader.
In fact, every study done on this topic shows a correlation between sleep and grades, especially in high school: Teens who averaged A’s slept 15 minutes more than those who received B’s. B students 15 more minutes than C’s, proving that every fifteen minutes counts.
What exactly happens when a child is tired?
1. Neuron plasticity is lost. Kids cannot encode new memory.
2. With sleep loss, the body cannot extract glucose from the blood. The prefontal cortex suffers, and with it, a child’s ability to complete a goal, or contemplate the consequences of actions. They become impulsive, stuck on wrong answers, and lose the ability to come up with creative alternatives to those wrong answers.
3. Without enough sleep, children cannot embed memorized material like vocabulary words, multiplication tables, and historical dates.
4. Sleep deprived children become more negative: Negative stimuli gets processed in one part of the brain, positive in another. Sleep deprivation hits the area with positive stimuli the most, resulting in a tired child being able to recall the negative memories better than the good ones.
Teens: A Special Case
During puberty, a teen’s biological clock shifts. Melatonin keeps flowing for 90 minutes past the point when it stops for children and adults. That’s what makes teens want to stay up later. At dawn, when teens need to get up for school, melatonin is still being released all the way through their first period in school. (Teens are responsible for half of the 100,000 sleep related crashes each year). Some high schools have adjusted start times to accommodate these findings and have had startling results: SAT scores in tested areas rose from 683/605 to 739/761 in one year. That’s a 56 point boost in math and a 156 boost in verbal scores. Teens with more sleep report more motivation and less depression. Typical ‘teen’ traits like being negative, withdrawn, disengaged, bored to tears, or moody are also symptoms of chronic sleep deprivation. “Might our culture-wise perception of what it means to be a teenager be unwittingly skewed by the fact they don’t get enough sleep?”
Additionally, a study in KY showed that later start times resulted in a 25% decrease in car accidents among teens. But, despite the growing evidence, school districts are wary of change: Moving start times later would mean doubling bus drivers and the bus fleet.
Sleep and Obesity:
Sleep loss increases ghrelin, our hunger signal, while depressing leptin, our appetite suppressant. It increases our stress hormone cortisol, which in turn stimulates our bodies to make us fat. Your child’s growth hormone, necessary for the breakdown of fat, is disrupted. Studies show tired children are fatter than children who sleep more. In fact, kids who get less than eight hours of sleep have a 300% higher rate of obesity than children who get ten hours. In one Houston study, obesity in middle-schoolers and teens increased 80% for every hour of lost sleep.
Convinced yet?
I asked a friend of mine, a manager at a local sleep center, what his recommendations are:
1. Give kids a consistent, seven-day a week bedtime.
2. If possible (as in the case of homeschooling), allow your teens to stay up later and sleep in until they wake up naturally. Again, set a bedtime, even if it is 11:30.
3. If your child wakes up, seems confused, and appears to still be ‘asleep,’ do not touch or talk to the child. Hand him a blankie of some kind and he will go back to sleep.
4. Remove clocks and light sources from bedrooms. Turn off electronics, especially those with lights on them.
On a personal note, I’ve noticed that this past year, with my husband out of work, our family has slept more than ever before and we’ve hardly been sick at all. If the above reasons don’t convince you, perhaps the prospect of having healthier kids will!
Question: What practical steps can you put in place to help your children get that magical extra hour of sleep each night?
Nurture Shock’s chapter on praise offers perhaps the most boat-rocking information of all:
The Self-Esteem Myth
Perhaps the biggest finding Bronson and Merryman illuminate is the work of Dr. Roy Baumeister. Results of self-esteem studies from 1970 to 2000 wildly vascillated or were inconclusive, prompting the Association of Psychological Studies to ask Dr. Baumeister to review the literature involved. He did so and concluded that self-esteem research was, according to Bronson, ‘polluted with flawed science.’ He concluded that high self-esteem didn’t lead to improved grades, or career achievement Neither did it reduce alcohol use or violence. Baumeister calls his findings, “the biggest disappointment of my career” and has moved over to Dweck’s side, recently publishing an article showing that for college students struggling in a class, ‘esteem-building praise cause[d] their grades to sink further.” Further, he concludes that parental focus on their child’s self-esteem is related to their own pride in their child’s accomplishments, saying that “when they praise their kids, it’s not that far from praising themselves.”
Question: Have you bought into the self-esteem myth? How can this new research impact your parenting?
Next time: How lost sleep leads to higher obesity, harms emotional well-being, and lowers IQ points. Parents of grouchy kids tune in:)
