Parenting Blog

My Aha Parenting Moment this week came when I picked my 13 year old up from her day camp to accompany her to get her working papers so she can be a camp counselor.  I had been on my feet all day running errands in New York city with a heavy laptop on my shoulder.  I was hot and my feet and shoulders hurt. I wasn't looking forward to two hours in line.

Now, to be fair, my daughter was distracted.  She had borrowed a friend’s Ipod and it wasn’t working – apparently someone had spilled a soda on it – and my daughter was worried she’d be blamed, and was too busy rushing to dry the ipod to explain to me what was going on.

So in that first minute of our meeting up, I couldn’t understand what she was telling me about the ipod as she rushed past me, and she was impatient with me to the point of rudeness.

“Alice,” I said, wearily,  “I’m sorry I’m not understanding you. But please don’t use that tone of voice.”

She looked taken aback.  “I’m sorry, Mom.  I didn’t mean to be rude.  Mom, are you ok?”

And that was my Aha moment.  As parents, we give 110% to our newborns, asking for nothing in return.  As each day passes, we are able to give a tiny bit less, as we allow our own needs into the mix.  As each year passes, we can expect a bit more consideration in return. And finally, we produce a child who is so considerate and emotionally mature that she is able to drop her own upset and empathize with someone else, even in the midst of her own mini-crisis. Our kids meet us halfway in the relationship.  READ POST

This week’s Aha Moment was triggered by the interview on my radio show with Peggy O’Mara, the editor and publisher of Mothering Magazine.  She said that she completely endorses the basic principles of what’s usually called Attachment parenting, but the name pushes everyone’s buttons.  She hates that parenting that’s instinctive and natural to all of us should need a name.

“There does seem to be a backlash against Attachment Parenting,” I agreed.  “Why do you think that is?”

Peggy’s answer? “I think it’s because we set these high expectations for moms to deliver their babies without medication, to be attentive to their babies’ cries, to breastfeed, to hold their babies a lot – all of which of course are good for the baby.  But then, we give moms no support."  
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I was walking down a NY city street last Sunday when I saw a young family out walking.  Mom was pregnant.  Dad was holding the hand of his two year old son.  The little boy was crying. “Up!” he said. “Up, Daddy!”

“No,” says Dad. “You’ve been up on my shoulders all morning.  You walk now.”  He was literally yanking his kid’s arm, half pulling him along the sidewalk.

The boy cried harder.  I was so glad I wasn’t him.  I was also glad I wasn’t his mom, who was too pregnant to carry him and looked pretty unhappy.  And I was glad I wasn’t his dad, who must have had aching shoulders.

Then I realized that it was early afternoon, and clearly nap time.  Apparently, this boy had been out all morning doing things with his parents.  So naturally he was having a meltdown.  Not a great time for dad to be setting this limit.  Not a great time to be anywhere except home, putting this little guy down for his nap.

Now, I don’t doubt Dad was tired of carrying Junior.  For all I know, he had a bad back, and could have put his back out if he lifted any more.  It’s so hard to balance our needs against our kids.  Who knows what drove these parents to have their tired toddler out on the street half the day, without even a stroller?  Maybe it was important.  Maybe the kid refuses to get into a stroller.  And who am I to judge this dad and his aching shoulders?  

But I do know that moments like this are important in a child’s life, because they teach our kids defining messages.  Like whether the world is a nurturing place.  Whether the child is lovable enough for his parents to care about meeting his needs.     READ POST

My Aha Moment parenting this week came while I was reading some brain research. Neuroscientists have found that the critical period for the development of certain parts of the brain coincides precisely with the critical period for attachment development—during the first three years of life.

Dr. Allan Schore, from the Department of Psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, has done a lot of research on the orbito-frontal cortex. If you’ve lost track of yours, it’s located above the eyes in the forehead area between the left and right hemispheres. The orbito-frontal cortex plays a central role in the development of empathy, emotional memory, infant attachment and emotional regulation. Schore believes that the process of parent-infant attunement has a direct impact on the development of the orbito-frontal cortex. The neurons located in this area are particularly sensitive to the emotional expressions of the human face.  When a parent holds her baby and gazes lovingly at him, it stimulates the neurons in this area to develop.  These neurons form the foundation of the child’s later moods, relationships, self esteem, and ability to control himself.

My Aha moment was realizing that the majority of babies in the United States are in daycare during much of this developmental period.  Are their brains developing optimally?  I doubt it.  How many daycare workers are holding babies and gazing lovingly at them?  They simply don’t have time. As Penelope Leach says, those infant smiles are so slow in coming with babies.  You smile at a two month old, and it takes her awhile to make contact with her facial muscles and smile back at you.  That dance is part of what develops the neurons in the orbito-frontal cortex.  But by the time the baby smiles, the daycare worker has moved on. Even while feeding, babies are often propped with bottles rather than held.  I’m not criticizing the daycare workers.  They are ill-paid and usually have little education in child development.  Why should they be expected to love all those babies the way parents would?  In fact, how could they?  But even if they have the inclination, they certainly don’t have the time.

All of which means that the epidemic of children unable to regulate their emotions and behavior – and often growing into adults who are medicated – may be related to the prevalence of infant daycare in our society. Even when kids come out ok, how much better off could they have been if they’d had more of those loving gazes?

This is the kind of subtle effect that it’s hard to trace, that may not show up in studies of kids in daycare.   So all this worrying parents do about playing classical music for their babies to make them smarter, and getting them to read early?  And here we may be compromising their brain development – and their later happiness and life adjustment - in much more fundamental ways.

My other Aha moment was how many times I’ve heard the view that something that happens before a child can talk won’t affect them, because they won’t remember it.  And here we’re finding that some of the most important brain development takes place mostly before kids can talk! I’ve had parents say to me that babies don’t need their parents when they’re little – that anyone could be holding them or feeding them.  They point out that babies often don’t seem to know the difference during their first six months.  Well, babies may not show that they know the difference, but their brain development, and their life adjustment, turns out to be shaped by those early interactions.  Seems to me our society needs a little Aha Moment about this!  READ POST

My Aha parenting moment this week came when my 13 year old ignored me.  She and a friend had watched a dvd over the weekend that needed to go back to the store.  It was her responsibility, of course, but I offered to return it while I did some errands.  I dropped it in my bag, and promptly forgot about it until I was walking back into the house.  Now, the video store is only a block away, so it wouldn’t be a big deal to go back out.  But I was tired and it was the last thing I wanted to do. I’d been willing to do her a favor, but since it didn’t work out – all right, since I hadn’t followed through on my offer to her – I thought it should be her responsibility to return the dvd.

Which might have been fine, except that my daughter was in the middle of a new book that just came out, one she’s been waiting months for, and she was at the climactic point.  So when I told her that she should walk the video back to the store before we ended up owing a late fee, I don’t think she even noticed that I was talking.  She looked at me blankly, said “uhuh.” And went back to reading.

Now, I’m a pretty calm and patient mother.  Normally I would have handled this differently.  But I got mad.  I raised my voice to her, which is something I almost never do.  She apologized, put her book down looking a bit hurt and unjustly maligned, and went off to the video store to return the dvd.  Meanwhile, I was left wondering why I had gotten angry at her. After all, I could have accomplished the same objective calmly, without upsetting either of us. Which is, of course, what I’m always advising other parents to do.

Now, I’m a psychologist. I know that anger is always a defense against some more threatening feeling that we don’t want to feel.  So I make it a practice in my life to notice when I get angry.  Rather than acting on that anger, I try to pay attention to what’s under it.  Am I hurt?  Afraid?  Sad?

Sitting there, I realized that my daughter ignoring me gave me the message that she didn’t care about my needs, my being tired.  I had taken on the job of returning the dvd, and it was my obligation to complete that job.  The fact that she was lying on the couch, happily reading, while I was exhausted, was irrelevant. My needs weren’t important.  

Feeling that my needs didn’t matter made me feel unloved and unlovable, which hurt.  In fact, it hurt so much it made me angry, and I yelled at her.  

The first Aha moment was realizing that none of this was objectively true.  In fact, my daughter is generally very considerate towards me.  She was simply engrossed in her book and not focusing on me. In other words, her behavior was information about her, not about me, or my lovableness.  So why had I interpreted it this way?

The second Aha Moment for me was when I realized that my reaction went straight back to my own childhood, when I often felt that my needs weren’t important.  It still hurt.  In fact, it hurt so much that when I stumbled across it here and now, I automatically shifted into anger so I wouldn’t feel the hurt. My poor daughter just happened to get the brunt of it.

So I sat there on the couch feeling how much it had hurt to get the message that my needs didn’t matter when I was a kid, how much it hurt to feel so unloved and unlovable.  I tried to resist the impulse to blame my folks, who were doing the best they could.  I tried to stay out of anger altogether, which is just a tempting way not to feel the hurt. And when my daughter walked back in the door, I apologized for yelling at her, and gave her a big hug.

My daughter was fine.  To her this was no big deal.  We had a nice evening together.  But I spent the evening wondering, what if ALL the things we get upset about in our current lives can be traced back to our childhoods?  What if all our annoyances, all our judgments, all the baggage we carry around instead of forgiving, what if ALL of that is just a defense against feelings from childhood that hurt too much to tolerate them?  What if every time we yell at our kids, we’re sacrificing them to the wounds from our own childhoods, the wounds we can’t bear to face, so we respond instead with anger?  READ POST