bearing blog

The importance of taking temperatures.

We have had a lot of feelings around here for the last two years.  Feelings of loss, feelings of anger, feelings of relief from time to time. 

In that time, two of my kids have been diagnosed with disorders that bear the names of feelings:  one with anxiety, one with depression.  I've become very caught up in all things "feeling."  There are medications for these conditions, of course, but those don't get you there on their own; therapy is part of it too, sometimes for the individual kids, sometimes including one or both of us parents; occasionally Mark and I have had a session with the child's therapists and without the child. 

Therapy means lots of talk about feelings.

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One of my young people, the anxious one, has been given a diagram called a "feelings thermometer."  I'm told that it goes by other names, with the most clinical-buzzword-sounding being SUDS:  the Subjective Units of Distress Scale (Wikipedia).   

One version of the emotional temperature scale for a younger child.

It's basically a form of "On a scale of one to ten (or zero to ten), how anxious are you feeling right now?" 

You would think that something this simple would not be very helpful, but I've been amazed at how much it's helped. The more reading I do about ways that clinicians use the scale, the more I try to use it in everyday conversations. 

I suspect that one of the reasons it's helpful in our family is just that it yields a number within a number range, which even if it is entirely subjective, is a landscape that...certain people in the family... find to be comforting and reliable, like a well-blazed hiking trail.  

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Notwithstanding the quirks of our comfort zones:  it also gives us a low-impact way to inquire about the well-being of the anxious young person. 

All types of measurement change the value being measured, but some do it more than others.  At the beginning of our journey from "this kid is a worrier" to "we need help if we are going to help this kid" to "this kid is in treatment for an anxiety disorder", any attempt to ask about anxiety tended to create more anxiety. 

Take a seemingly simple question like "How are you doing today" (yes, I know that in many circumstances this question is not perceived as simple).  Sometimes asking it would precipitate a complete meltdown; I think the act of self-examination itself triggered anxiety.   But the number is somehow less weighty, maybe because it doesn't force much engagement with language. 

At first it was difficult for the child in question to nail down the part of the scale, and there was some hemming and hawing, and prompting from us.  But with practice it became a very quick way to check in:  "What's your emotional temperature right now?" gets a numerical response almost right away, with only a few "um"s.

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One thing I found really helpful as I went on reading about how people use the thermometer:   Different parts of the scale call for different kinds of support. 

At the very top of the scale—let's say betwen 8 and 10—the anxious person may be incapable of language-based reasoning.  There's no point in, say, insisting that they just get back to their schoolwork, or that they explain what set them off.  There may not even be a point in trying to talk them down, or reassure them with language.   Instead, depending on what works best with this particular person, it may be time for a cuddle or a hand lightly stroking the back; or an invitation to go to a quiet place and rest, with another or in private; or a suggestion to engage in vigorous activity or in some self-soothing behavior that the young person has practiced and found to work for them in the past.  (more on that below.)

Towards the bottom of the scale—say below 5—even if the anxious person is not totally at peace, they can reason and think and perform tasks, independently or with others.  They can engage in therapy, they can be encouraged to stay on task, they can consciously choose behaviors.  They can also practice deeper relaxation techniques to bring the number lower still.

In the middle, when a moderate amount of stress is being experienced, there is an opportunity to develop self-regulation.  Here is where the young person (as well as their parents!) can learn to notice when the temperature is rising and then do something about it.  Take a break, switch to another task, practice breathing exercises, get up and stretch, try a visualization, get up and fetch something to use as a fidget... all these things are behaviors that have to be learned.  It is here, in the zone of moderate stress, where they can be tried, tested, and practiced; later when the emotional temperature goes through the roof, they can call on these techniques to help bring them down.

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One of the things I have learned by using the emotional temperature scale is that what a kid looks like on the outside is not necessarily a great indicator of what distress level they would report on the inside.  And yes, if you had asked me about this before we were using the scale, I would have said "of course that makes sense, everyone exhibits distress differently." 

But I did not have, then, so much personal experience with how the same person can exhibit distress differently at different times.  A child who appears to be quietly playing a favorite computer game may be, in fact, calm and happy, and often they are.  But a child who appears to be quietly playing a favorite computer game may also be trying desperately to use the computer game to distract from intense internal distress.  A child who is flailing around in the playroom or, grunting with effort, whacking the hanging punching bag with a stick, not answering when called, may be physically expressing anger and distress.  Or they may be absorbed in an imaginary game of swordfighting.   

I often tell the kids, "I can't read your mind; you have to tell me."  I regularly need to remind myself of that as well.

Sleep timing and other potentially poor choices.

I have sleep on the brain this week. 

I am a big believer in the importance of getting enough sleep, probably because I've never (not even when I was much younger) been able to function well after missing it.  I'm highly assertive about myself going to bed on time, taking naps, and resting extra on weekends.  Also, I'm a morning person.  But for the past six months or so I've been having a sleep problem:  not insomnia exactly... more that I start getting tired in the afternoon, and by the time 7:30 or 8 pm rolls around I'm absolutely ready for bed.  And then I do go to bed, leaving the teenagers to clean the kitchen (no problem there) and Mark to send the youngest two to bed all by himself (he's rather good at this, but I don't blame him if he would like me to do my part sometimes), because, well, see above:  highly assertive. 

And then I pop awake at two or three in the morning... if I manage to get back to sleep again, I'll pop awake at 5... and my alarm really goes off at 6.

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Long story short, I bought one of those light therapy devices, the wearable kind, which makes you look slightly like a cosplayer fan of Geordi LaForge* and shines bright LED light down at your face for 20-40 minutes.  Most people who buy this are putting it on first thing in the morning, when they wake up, because most people who buy this thing either have difficulty getting up early in the morning, or they live somewhere that's too dark for happiness and they need to trick their brain into thinking they get to sit outside and enjoy a beautiful sunrise.  But if you fall asleep too early and get up too early, you might be eligible for a diagnosis of Advanced Sleep Phase Disorder, which sounds like "Long-Untreated, It's Gotten Extra Bad Sleep Phase Disorder" but really means "The Opposite of Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder."   And that sort of person is supposed to wear the thing shining down upon them in the evening.  So that's what I've been doing for the past few days.  No improvements seen yet, but I'm hoping that at least the placebo effect will start kicking in soon.

Geordi LaForge. Not Data.

(No, I haven't gotten a diagnosis.  Yes, I have sought the help of Doctor Google, M. D.  Why?  Because as far as I can tell there aren't any unpleasant side effects, and buying the thing and trying it out is significantly cheaper than seeking a diagnosis first.  If it works, I'll come out way ahead; if it doesn't work, I'm set back by way less than the cost of a specialist visit.

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The homeschooled teenagers who live with me also have inconvenient (to me) sleep schedules, but it goes the other way.  They stay up late (ok, that helps with getting the kitchen cleaned up; I drowsily noticed plate-clattering noises from downstairs when I turned over in bed at 11:45 pm last night).  If left to their own devices, they sleep in well into the morning and sometimes even the afternoon. 

The 16yo boy has, after a couple of years of trial-and-error, adapted his schoolwork routine remarkably well; he rarely, now, misses turning in his homework assignments on time.   This morning, as I often do, I came down for my coffee to find on the counter the algebra book and a sprawl of mostly-finished homework; he'll have time to complete it before it's due early afternoon.   I saw a similar pattern in his older brother, who's now doing fine in college as far as I can tell:   given the freedom to set his own schedule, he adapted early to a routine that's not all that unusual among college students.

NOTE:  I mean, I didn't do that when I was a college student.  I preferred 9 a.m. classes; I badly needed to go to sleep by 11 p.m.; and I successfully avoided all-nighters for my entire undergraduate education except for twice (thank you, enforced group projects with assigned partners who did not share my self-care priorities).  But I can see how it can work.

The 13yo girl has only just been given control over her schedule this year, and is still in the trial-and-error phase.  Occasionally I need to firmly suggest that what she is exercising is procrastination rather than Scheduling Work To Happen At A Time More Convenient Than Right Now, Namely Later, When I Will Really Be Motivated.   But I am also seeing some creative problem solving; lately she's initiated a daily trek to the public library branch, where she has the opportunity** to do her homework in an environment of enforced quiet. 

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I mentioned that I really believe in sleep.  I especially believe in sleep for teenagers:  quite literally, one of the benefits of homeschooling that I always tick off when asked to explain myself is that we are free to find a sleep schedule that suits our bodily needs, instead of conforming to whatever schedule the school district imposed upon us in order to marshal its transport resources.  So I'm inclined to (mostly) let them sleep when they want to sleep.  Occasionally the outcome of this plan, confidently prescribed by Erin-the-believer-in-getting-enough-sleep, is a little shocking to Erin-the-natural-morning-person. 

I didn't really expect, the other day, after a late scout meeting, that when I said "Tomorrow, since we had to stay up late, you can sleep in," that one of the teenagers would actually not come downstairs until 2 p.m.   Who would voluntarily miss the whole morning?!?   What is this sorcery?

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So, here's a question that I think is open:   Is it a problem if a teenager, able to set their own schedule, chooses to sleep as late as 2 pm on a regular basis?  

Note that it's not just homeschoolers.  Around here, high school juniors and seniors can be dual-enrolled in college courses that might not start until late morning or afternoon; and of course there are some young people who are in vocational programs, or not in school for whatever reason and working jobs for now.   Is it a problem?

I think I'm a little privileged, as a natural morning person.   The class of American morning people seem to have been able to take a position of power in which they have set expectations for early starts to all kinds of businesses, including many that really don't have to have early starts.  So I think there's a prejudice against sleeping late and going to bed late, a prejudice that implies moral laxity or sinful sloth, when it's really just a matter of timing. 

Some people have trouble getting up in the morning.  I'm not much good by dinnertime and am almost incapable of staying up late.  It's not that hard for me to imagine an alternate world where school starts at 3 pm, where bosses expected all employees to do productive work late into the night and didn't let you start until after lunch.  This would be a world that would fail me and call me lazy.  So I'm sympathetic, and I try not to assume that sleeping past an arbitrary clock time = dangerous malingering.

And nobody denies that sleep deprivation is bad for your health.

On the other hand.... we live in a scheduled time, and one day the sleepy teenager may be a sleepy adult who is required to be at a desk, or on a line, or at a post, by 8 in the morning.  In the winter.  Is it better to train them to be able to ignore their body's needs, so they can meet their economic needs?  Will the teenager who is allowed to sleep regularly from 3 in the morning to noon, develop a sense of entitlement?  (The same entitlement, because aligned with the world, that I feel to keep my schedule of sleeping 11-to-6?)

Is it a good idea to practice the flexibility needed to keep a variable schedule ("OK, on Tuesday and Friday mornings you can sleep as late as you want, but Saturday there's a 9:30 class and on Wednesday I need you to be up in the morning because I've got something to do in the afternoon")?  Or is it better to be consistent, getting up at the same time every day aligned with the earliest regular appointment, preferring regularity to getting, on average, enough?

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The whole point I am trying to make here is that I think it's obvious that this is an open question.  The answer here is "It Depends."  Different families, with different schedules and different needs, are going to approach the question in different ways and come to different conclusions.  They may change their policies from one teen to the next, as well.

It's also obvious (to me) that a large number of people will have strong opinions that only one answer is correct.  I say those people are wrong.

Third obvious thing:  Even the parents who make the decision that is the best choice at the time, with all the available information, and carefully and selflessly choosing for the good of their individual children... well, some of them are going to find out later that maybe a different choice would have led to a better outcome.    It turns out that they were missing information that would have helped them make a choice with a better outcome. 

(Missing information, because they can't see into the future.  But I digress.)

Like, maybe they pick the get-up-early-every-day option, because they truly are convinced that sleep schedules can be shifted.  Maybe with the help of dark shades on the windows, special sunrise alarm clocks, melatonin pills, and light-therapy devices like the one I just bought.  They expect that the child is going to need to learn to get up by 8 AM eventually, so they do their very best to enforce it.  And then maybe their child turns out to have some kind of sleep disorder that they couldn't predict, one that's very resistant to all the light therapy, and maybe losing sleep turns out to have awful consequences later, like exacerbating a tendency toward depression or anxiety.  Maybe in the end, after years of bad grades and employment struggles, the now-grown-offspring finds their niche working in an industry with late nights and late starts, or works remotely for people in a different time zone.  Maybe it becomes obvious in retrospect that, if everyone had only respected the teen's needs early on, they would have thrived under those expectations all along.

But at the time, it didn't make sense.

Or, well, you can write the alternative.  I'm living it now.  I'm letting the kids take naps if they say they're tired, and rarely wake them up before ten-thirty, and occasionally sleep as long as they want even if that's through lunch.  It seems best to me, because I think sleep is important for health, near the bottom of the hierarchy of needs.   And I do wonder if someday they're going to come back to us and say, "Mom, Dad, I really wish you had forced me to get up in the morning and drink some coffee or Mountain Dew or something and start staring at my books and papers by 8:30, like all the other kids, because now I have to get to work on time and I still haven't learned to accept it and sometimes I sleep through my alarm and people get angry at me."

(You can write the alternative, because I just tried to write that one, and I'm fully aware I can't do it in a convincingly parallel fashion.)

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What's my point here?  SO MUCH of parenting is like this.  SO MUCH is doing the best we can, with the information we have at the time.  And SO MUCH of the answer to the question "is this good?  are we doing things that are good for our kid?"  is not going to become clear until YEARS after it's too late to change our trajectories.  Should we train this teen to work WITH their body or DESPITE their body?  We... don't... know!  It could go either way!

From "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade," of course.

We might choose poorly, and not know it till later!

I'm talking about sleep.  That's important, but... there are even more serious parts of parenting.  Homeschool, private school, or public school?   What sort of food should we make freely available, and what sort should we restrict, and how much?  How should we help a young person who, we discover, is engaging in risky and perhaps illegal or addictive behavior:  leap into assertive action and require immediate treatment and behavioral change before it's too late, or move carefully and prioritize a message of acceptance and unconditional love?    Should we give our children lots of freedom and plenty of responsibility for their own safety, or should we take steps to protect them from foreseeable hazards; and which hazards, and for how long?

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If serious outcomes do befall our young people,  experience (see:  media) suggests that someone, somewhere, will confidently say it's all our fault***, as if we had that crystal ball.  When easily it could have gone wrong the other way, and then there would be just as many someones, somewhere, who would confidently say that that would be all our fault.

Much better not to listen to those someones. 

You know what's even better than that?  Not to make decisions coming from a place of fear of those someones.   I confess that I have a hard time with that one.

 

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I picked that .gif up there, "He chose... poorly"  for a reason.   In the movie referenced, the villain had a bad outcome because he chose poorly.  It wasn't the other way around, the way the someones often reason:   the bad outcome didn't make his choice poor. 

And what did "choosing poorly" mean, in the Spielbergian spirit? 

Not the choosing from a place of fear; not the choosing from a place of reduced choices; not choosing from a place of inevitability of bad outcomes; not choosing from a place of ignorance, even. 

No, what was wrong here was that the villain chose from a place of extremely misplaced priorities.  The villain chose from a position of moral poverty.   

That---unlike the other ones---is the kind of poverty that we, we parents, are bound to avoid, and all of us competent to avoid if we wish.  

 

FOOTNOTES

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*I had to seek the help, once more, of Doctor Google (D. F. A.?) to get this character name correct; my first guess was "Data"

**I'm no fool.  There, she also has the opportunity to play computer games we don't have at home and read books for fun, and also to sit in comfy deep armchairs.  I will judge this tree based on its fruits.  But I'm not going to say NO, either.  

***Let's be real.  It'll be the mother's fault.

St. John Bosco and how to *not* punish kids (a repost).

St. John Bosco, like St. "Mother" Teresa or St. "Padre" Pio, is one of those whose names started to sound a little weird when their popular monikers got altered by the application of sainthood.  He's often "Don" Bosco even though his name is John-actually-Saint-John-now, "Don" being the honorific applied typically to diocesan priests in Italy.  I think this is because he, like they, like some others -- Thérèse comes to mind too -- is one of those saints that once you know them, you just sort of make friends with.  The "saint" can feel a little embarrassing between friends.  Or because a straightforward humility, a groundedness, is so much a part of their persona that they succeed in never feeling... I don't know, lofty.  

Here's a repost about Don Bosco for his feast day, Jan. 31.  In which I write about why I take him as my personal role model in his approach to child discipline.

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My personal parenting/discipline ideal has always been to avoid punishing kids.

I get the impression from other people that the idea alarms them, because it sounds a lot like "avoiding discipline;" perhaps it calls to mind the stories of parents who insist their offspring can do no wrong.  You know, the kind who sue the school when their child is suspended for cheating on a test or something like that.

That's not my point.  By punishment, I mean those arbitrary unpleasantnesses inflicted in return for misbehavior:  the spanking, the grounding, the confiscation. Mrk and I aren't what you'd call permissive parents.  We try to be authoritative, if not authoritarian.  We use the term "obedience" with the kids and are clear about what it means and why it's important.   But (this is our ideal, mind you, not always the way we manage to make it work) we try not to get to the point where we need a "punishment" in the first place.  

We try to let them experience the consequences of their actions, insofar as it isn't dangerous.  

• Didn't pack an extra dress like you were supposed to?  Well, I guess you'll be wet and uncomfortable now that you've run through your friend's sprinkler in your clothes.  
• Refused to eat your lunch at lunchtime?  Ooooops, snack time isn't till 3:30, I guess you can have some of these plain almonds I keep in the car for emergencies.
• Shrieked at each other in the car while we were running errands?  After all that, I (honestly) don't feel anymore like taking you out for lunch, so instead we're going home and having tuna sandwiches.

On the occasion when something truly egregious happens -- such as when one of my kids came to me and admitted that a long string of perfect scores on math assignments had been faked -- consequences are meted out rather than merely allowed to happen; but we really try to have it make sense.  In the case of the spurious perfect scores, since I had no way to know whether the child understood the material, the child was assigned double math lessons for as many days as the lessons had been faked, each day doing the regularly scheduled lesson and at the same time re-doing one of the lessons from before.  That plus a long conversation about honesty.  And dangerous misuse of a tool around here is very likely to result in revocation of privileges to use said tool until competency and proper respect for risk is demonstrated; that's just common sense, not a punishment.  

It was difficult for us to figure out when our first was very young, but we hit our stride eventually, and he grew out of the normal frustrations of toddlerhood into an earnest child and now a delightful teenager, and that has given us a lot of confidence as we continue to bring him up, him and the four that have followed.  It's true that I yell more than I wish I did, and lose my temper.  It's an ideal I fail to measure up to.  But I still strive for that "no-punishment" ideal.

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I notice, however, that this isn't language I tend to hear from my fellow Catholic parents much.  Indeed, at more than one parish I've seethed while listening to a priest (including in the homily at my daughter's baptism) cheerfully recommend vigorously and frequently spanking small children.  

I think this is an American Catholic phenomenon, borne of being caught between a decadent permissive culture and an army of evangelical Protestants -- in many ways, serious American Catholics are constantly playing "keeping up with the Bob Joneses," and so, for better or for worse, we have been inculturated with what I personally see as a break-the-child's-sinful-will, thou-shalt-honor-us-because-of-the-ten-commandments sort of  attitude toward child discipline.  

The exceptions are the super-crunchy attachment parenting Catholics.  Am I one of those?  Sort of; as a young parent, AP wasn't good enough for me and if you were foolish enough to ask me about it I would talk your ear off about how I was into "CC" parenting, which stands for "continuum concept," which, well, some other time....    

I did have plenty of role models for the way that I felt was right for me to parent my kids, but I lacked Catholic ones.   And that's why I was so excited when I first learned about the educational philosophy of St. John Bosco.  AKA "Don" Bosco (1815-1888) because that's what you call a diocesan priest in Italy.   Here's Wikipedia on him, for some background:

At that time the city of Turin had a population of 117,000 inhabitants. It reflected the effects of industrialization and urbanization: numerous poor families lived in the slums of the city, having come from the countryside in search of a better life. In visiting the prisons Don Bosco was disturbed to see so many boys from 12 to 18 years of age. He was determined to find a means to prevent them ending up here. Because of population growth and migration to the city, Bosco found the traditional methods of parish ministry inefficient. He decided it was necessary to try another form of apostolate, and he began to meet the boys where they worked and gathered in shops, offices, market places. They were pavers, stone-cutters, masons, plasterers who came from far away places, he recalled in his brief Memoirs.

The Oratorio was not simply a charitable institution, and its activities were not limited to Sundays. For Don Bosco it became his permanent occupation. He looked for jobs for the unemployed. Some of the boys did not have sleeping quarters and slept under bridges or in bleak public dormitories. Twice he tried to provide lodgings in his house. The first time they stole the blankets; the second they emptied the hay-loft. He did not give up. In May 1847, he gave shelter to a young boy from Valesia, in one of the three rooms he was renting in the slums of Valdocco, where he was living with his mother. He and "Mamma Margherita" began taking in orphans. The boys sheltered by Don Bosco numbered 36 in 1852, 115 in 1854, 470 in 1860 and 600 in 1861, 800 being the maximum some time later....

In 1859, Bosco selected the experienced priest Vittorio Alasonatti, 15 seminarians and one high school boy and formed them into the "Society of St. Francis de Sales." This was the nucleus of the Salesians, the religious order that would carry on his work....In 1871, he founded a group of religious sisters to do for girls what the Salesians were doing for boys. They were called the "Daughters of Mary Help of Christians." In 1874, he founded yet another group, the "Salesian Cooperators." These were mostly lay people who would work for young people like the Daughters and the Salesians, but would not join a religious order.

Bosco's capability to attract numerous boys and adult helpers was connected to his "Preventive System of Education."

Don Bosco explained his "preventive system" in an essay, "The Preventive System in the Education of the Young," which can be found here.  It begins by contrasting his "preventive" system with the "repressive" system.  The "repressive" system, he says, has its place "in the army and in general among adults and the judicious, who ought of themselves to know and remember what the law and its regulations demand."  

The repressive system consists in making the law known to the subjects and afterwards watching to discover the transgressors of these laws, and inflicting, when necessary, the punishment deserved.

According to this system, the words and looks of the superior must always be severe and even threatening, and he must avoid all familiarity with his dependents.   

In order to give weight to his authority the Rector must rarely be found among his subjects and as a rule only when it is a question of punishing or threatening.  

But Don Bosco's system is different:

[The preventive system] consists in making the laws and regulations of an institute known, and then watching carefully so that the pupils may at all times be under the vigilant eye of the rector or the assistants, who like loving fathers can converse with them, take the lead in every movement and in a kindly way give advice and correction;  in other words, this system places the pupils in the impossibility of committing faults.

This system is based entirely on reason and religion, and above all on kindness; therefore it excludes all violent punishment, and tries to do without even the slightest chastisement. 

"Excludes all violent punishment, and tries to do without even the slightest chastisement" being what I was going for all along, I was so glad to find this.  

The basic idea is that children are closely supervised at all times by leaders who care for them, model good behavior, encourage reception of the sacraments, participate in their games, and converse with them frequently about behavior norms in a way that "appeals to [their] reason" and "generally enlists [their] accord."  Close supervision and "forewarning" means that there is little chance for a child to commit a fault. Don Bosco believes that young people misbehave, initially at least, because of inattention, not malice:

The primary reason for this system is the thoughtlessness of the young, who in one moment forget the rules of discipline and the penalties for their infringement.  Consequently, a child often becomes culpable and deserving of punishment, which he had not even thought about, and which he had quite forgotten when heedlessly committing the fault which he would certainly have avoided, had a friendly voice warned him.

To apply this system Don Bosco lists several principles of education and discipline.

1.  Close supervision by the people entrusted with the children.  "[The Rector] must always be with his pupils whenever they are not engaged in some occupation, unless they are already being properly supervised by others."

2. Moral teachers who actively lead the pupils to and in each new place or activity. "Teachers, craftmasters, and assistants must be of acknowledged morality... As far as possible the assistants ought to precede the boys to the place where they assemble; they should remain with them until others come to take their place, and never leave the pupils unoccupied."

3.  Allow rowdiness and physical activity.  "Let the boys have full liberty to jump, run, and make as much noise as they please.  Gymnastics, music, theatricals, and outings are most efficacious means of obtaining discipline and of benefiting spiritual and bodily health.  Let care be taken however that the games... are not reprehensible.  'Do anything you like,' the great friend of youth, St. Philip [Neri] used to say, 'as long as you do not sin.'"

4.  Encourage and promote, don't force, the sacraments.  "Frequent confession and communion and daily mass are the pillars which must support the edifice of education, from which we propose to banish the use of threats and the cane.  Never force the boys to frequent the sacraments, but encourage them to do so, and give them every opportunity.... [L]et the beauty, grandeur, and holiness of the Catholic religion be dwelt on..."

"Avoid as a plague the opinion that the first communion should be deferred to a late age... When a child can distinguish between Bread and bread, and shows sufficient knowledge, give no further thought to his age... St. Philip Neri counseled weekly and even more frequent communion."

5.  Exclude bad materials and trouble-making people.  "[P]revent bad books, bad companions, or persons who indulge in improper conversations from entering the college.  A good door keeper is a treasure for a house of education."

6.  Brief daily reflections -- a sort of community examen.  "Every evening after night prayers before the boys go to rest, the Rector or someone in his stead shall address them briefly, giving them advice or counsel concerning what is to be done or... avoided.  Let him try to draw some moral reflection from events that have happened during the day... but his words should never take more than two or three minutes."

7.  Love before fear.   "An educator should seek to win the love of his pupils if he wishes to inspire fear in them.  When he succeeds in doing this, the withholding of some token of kindness is a punishment which stimulates emulation, gives courage, and never degrades.... With the young, punishment is whatever is meant as a punishment.... in the case of some boys a reproachful look is more effective than a slap in the face would be."

8. Do not  shame children.  "Except in very rare cases, corrections and punishments should never be given publicly, but always privately and in the absence of companions."

9.  Employ patient reason and religion. "[T]he greatest prudence and patience should be used to bring the pupil to see his fauly, with the aid of reason and religion."

10.  No corporal punishment.  "To strike a boy in any way, to make him kneel in a painful position, to pull his ears, and other similar punishments, must be absolutely avoided, because the law forbids them, and because they greatly irritate the boys and degrade the educator."

 11.  Clear communication of expectations.  "The Rector shall make sure that the disciplinary measures, including rules and punishments, are known to the pupils, so that  no one can make the excuse that he did not know what was commanded or forbidden."

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I think these principles of Salesian education and discipline are sound ones that speak for themselves, principles that seek to form and transform human nature rather than to fight against it, and principles that respect and elevate the dignity of both child and educator.    When I discovered Don Bosco I felt I'd finally found someone who was truly on my side.    

If only I'd known about him when I was having to make post-baptism chitchat with Father Spare-the-Rod!

 

St. John Bosco, like St. "Mother" Teresa or St. "Padre" Pio, is one of those whose names started to sound a little weird when their popular monikers got altered by the application of sainthood.  He's often "Don" Bosco even though his name is John-actually-Saint-John-now, "Don" being the honorific applied typically to diocesan priests in Italy.  I think this is because he, like they, like some others -- Thérèse comes to mind too -- is one of those saints that once you know them, you just sort of make friends with.  The "saint" can feel a little embarrassing between friends.  Or because a straightforward humility, a groundedness, is so much a part of their persona that they succeed in never feeling... I don't know, lofty.  

Here's a repost about Don Bosco for his feast day, Jan. 31.  In which I write about why I take him as my personal role model in his approach to child discipline.

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My personal parenting/discipline ideal has always been to avoid punishing kids.

I get the impression from other people that the idea alarms them, because it sounds a lot like "avoiding discipline;" perhaps it calls to mind the stories of parents who insist their offspring can do no wrong.  You know, the kind who sue the school when their child is suspended for cheating on a test or something like that.

That's not my point.  By punishment, I mean those arbitrary unpleasantnesses inflicted in return for misbehavior:  the spanking, the grounding, the confiscation. Mrk and I aren't what you'd call permissive parents.  We try to be authoritative, if not authoritarian.  We use the term "obedience" with the kids and are clear about what it means and why it's important.   But (this is our ideal, mind you, not always the way we manage to make it work) we try not to get to the point where we need a "punishment" in the first place.  

We try to let them experience the consequences of their actions, insofar as it isn't dangerous.  

• Didn't pack an extra dress like you were supposed to?  Well, I guess you'll be wet and uncomfortable now that you've run through your friend's sprinkler in your clothes.  
• Refused to eat your lunch at lunchtime?  Ooooops, snack time isn't till 3:30, I guess you can have some of these plain almonds I keep in the car for emergencies.
• Shrieked at each other in the car while we were running errands?  After all that, I (honestly) don't feel anymore like taking you out for lunch, so instead we're going home and having tuna sandwiches.

On the occasion when something truly egregious happens -- such as when one of my kids came to me and admitted that a long string of perfect scores on math assignments had been faked -- consequences are meted out rather than merely allowed to happen; but we really try to have it make sense.  In the case of the spurious perfect scores, since I had no way to know whether the child understood the material, the child was assigned double math lessons for as many days as the lessons had been faked, each day doing the regularly scheduled lesson and at the same time re-doing one of the lessons from before.  That plus a long conversation about honesty.  And dangerous misuse of a tool around here is very likely to result in revocation of privileges to use said tool until competency and proper respect for risk is demonstrated; that's just common sense, not a punishment.  

It was difficult for us to figure out when our first was very young, but we hit our stride eventually, and he grew out of the normal frustrations of toddlerhood into an earnest child and now a delightful teenager, and that has given us a lot of confidence as we continue to bring him up, him and the four that have followed.  It's true that I yell more than I wish I did, and lose my temper.  It's an ideal I fail to measure up to.  But I still strive for that "no-punishment" ideal.

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I notice, however, that this isn't language I tend to hear from my fellow Catholic parents much.  Indeed, at more than one parish I've seethed while listening to a priest (including in the homily at my daughter's baptism) cheerfully recommend vigorously and frequently spanking small children.  

I think this is an American Catholic phenomenon, borne of being caught between a decadent permissive culture and an army of evangelical Protestants -- in many ways, serious American Catholics are constantly playing "keeping up with the Bob Joneses," and so, for better or for worse, we have been inculturated with what I personally see as a break-the-child's-sinful-will, thou-shalt-honor-us-because-of-the-ten-commandments sort of  attitude toward child discipline.  

The exceptions are the super-crunchy attachment parenting Catholics.  Am I one of those?  Sort of; as a young parent, AP wasn't good enough for me and if you were foolish enough to ask me about it I would talk your ear off about how I was into "CC" parenting, which stands for "continuum concept," which, well, some other time....    

I did have plenty of role models for the way that I felt was right for me to parent my kids, but I lacked Catholic ones.   And that's why I was so excited when I first learned about the educational philosophy of St. John Bosco.  AKA "Don" Bosco (1815-1888) because that's what you call a diocesan priest in Italy.   Here's Wikipedia on him, for some background:

At that time the city of Turin had a population of 117,000 inhabitants. It reflected the effects of industrialization and urbanization: numerous poor families lived in the slums of the city, having come from the countryside in search of a better life. In visiting the prisons Don Bosco was disturbed to see so many boys from 12 to 18 years of age. He was determined to find a means to prevent them ending up here. Because of population growth and migration to the city, Bosco found the traditional methods of parish ministry inefficient. He decided it was necessary to try another form of apostolate, and he began to meet the boys where they worked and gathered in shops, offices, market places. They were pavers, stone-cutters, masons, plasterers who came from far away places, he recalled in his brief Memoirs.

The Oratorio was not simply a charitable institution, and its activities were not limited to Sundays. For Don Bosco it became his permanent occupation. He looked for jobs for the unemployed. Some of the boys did not have sleeping quarters and slept under bridges or in bleak public dormitories. Twice he tried to provide lodgings in his house. The first time they stole the blankets; the second they emptied the hay-loft. He did not give up. In May 1847, he gave shelter to a young boy from Valesia, in one of the three rooms he was renting in the slums of Valdocco, where he was living with his mother. He and "Mamma Margherita" began taking in orphans. The boys sheltered by Don Bosco numbered 36 in 1852, 115 in 1854, 470 in 1860 and 600 in 1861, 800 being the maximum some time later....

In 1859, Bosco selected the experienced priest Vittorio Alasonatti, 15 seminarians and one high school boy and formed them into the "Society of St. Francis de Sales." This was the nucleus of the Salesians, the religious order that would carry on his work....In 1871, he founded a group of religious sisters to do for girls what the Salesians were doing for boys. They were called the "Daughters of Mary Help of Christians." In 1874, he founded yet another group, the "Salesian Cooperators." These were mostly lay people who would work for young people like the Daughters and the Salesians, but would not join a religious order.

Bosco's capability to attract numerous boys and adult helpers was connected to his "Preventive System of Education."

Don Bosco explained his "preventive system" in an essay, "The Preventive System in the Education of the Young," which can be found here.  It begins by contrasting his "preventive" system with the "repressive" system.  The "repressive" system, he says, has its place "in the army and in general among adults and the judicious, who ought of themselves to know and remember what the law and its regulations demand."  

The repressive system consists in making the law known to the subjects and afterwards watching to discover the transgressors of these laws, and inflicting, when necessary, the punishment deserved.

According to this system, the words and looks of the superior must always be severe and even threatening, and he must avoid all familiarity with his dependents.   

In order to give weight to his authority the Rector must rarely be found among his subjects and as a rule only when it is a question of punishing or threatening.  

But Don Bosco's system is different:

[The preventive system] consists in making the laws and regulations of an institute known, and then watching carefully so that the pupils may at all times be under the vigilant eye of the rector or the assistants, who like loving fathers can converse with them, take the lead in every movement and in a kindly way give advice and correction;  in other words, this system places the pupils in the impossibility of committing faults.

This system is based entirely on reason and religion, and above all on kindness; therefore it excludes all violent punishment, and tries to do without even the slightest chastisement. 

"Excludes all violent punishment, and tries to do without even the slightest chastisement" being what I was going for all along, I was so glad to find this.  

The basic idea is that children are closely supervised at all times by leaders who care for them, model good behavior, encourage reception of the sacraments, participate in their games, and converse with them frequently about behavior norms in a way that "appeals to [their] reason" and "generally enlists [their] accord."  Close supervision and "forewarning" means that there is little chance for a child to commit a fault. Don Bosco believes that young people misbehave, initially at least, because of inattention, not malice:

The primary reason for this system is the thoughtlessness of the young, who in one moment forget the rules of discipline and the penalties for their infringement.  Consequently, a child often becomes culpable and deserving of punishment, which he had not even thought about, and which he had quite forgotten when heedlessly committing the fault which he would certainly have avoided, had a friendly voice warned him.

To apply this system Don Bosco lists several principles of education and discipline.

1.  Close supervision by the people entrusted with the children.  "[The Rector] must always be with his pupils whenever they are not engaged in some occupation, unless they are already being properly supervised by others."

2. Moral teachers who actively lead the pupils to and in each new place or activity. "Teachers, craftmasters, and assistants must be of acknowledged morality... As far as possible the assistants ought to precede the boys to the place where they assemble; they should remain with them until others come to take their place, and never leave the pupils unoccupied."

3.  Allow rowdiness and physical activity.  "Let the boys have full liberty to jump, run, and make as much noise as they please.  Gymnastics, music, theatricals, and outings are most efficacious means of obtaining discipline and of benefiting spiritual and bodily health.  Let care be taken however that the games... are not reprehensible.  'Do anything you like,' the great friend of youth, St. Philip [Neri] used to say, 'as long as you do not sin.'"

4.  Encourage and promote, don't force, the sacraments.  "Frequent confession and communion and daily mass are the pillars which must support the edifice of education, from which we propose to banish the use of threats and the cane.  Never force the boys to frequent the sacraments, but encourage them to do so, and give them every opportunity.... [L]et the beauty, grandeur, and holiness of the Catholic religion be dwelt on..."

"Avoid as a plague the opinion that the first communion should be deferred to a late age... When a child can distinguish between Bread and bread, and shows sufficient knowledge, give no further thought to his age... St. Philip Neri counseled weekly and even more frequent communion."

5.  Exclude bad materials and trouble-making people.  "[P]revent bad books, bad companions, or persons who indulge in improper conversations from entering the college.  A good door keeper is a treasure for a house of education."

6.  Brief daily reflections -- a sort of community examen.  "Every evening after night prayers before the boys go to rest, the Rector or someone in his stead shall address them briefly, giving them advice or counsel concerning what is to be done or... avoided.  Let him try to draw some moral reflection from events that have happened during the day... but his words should never take more than two or three minutes."

7.  Love before fear.   "An educator should seek to win the love of his pupils if he wishes to inspire fear in them.  When he succeeds in doing this, the withholding of some token of kindness is a punishment which stimulates emulation, gives courage, and never degrades.... With the young, punishment is whatever is meant as a punishment.... in the case of some boys a reproachful look is more effective than a slap in the face would be."

8. Do not  shame children.  "Except in very rare cases, corrections and punishments should never be given publicly, but always privately and in the absence of companions."

9.  Employ patient reason and religion. "[T]he greatest prudence and patience should be used to bring the pupil to see his fauly, with the aid of reason and religion."

10.  No corporal punishment.  "To strike a boy in any way, to make him kneel in a painful position, to pull his ears, and other similar punishments, must be absolutely avoided, because the law forbids them, and because they greatly irritate the boys and degrade the educator."

 11.  Clear communication of expectations.  "The Rector shall make sure that the disciplinary measures, including rules and punishments, are known to the pupils, so that  no one can make the excuse that he did not know what was commanded or forbidden."

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I think these principles of Salesian education and discipline are sound ones that speak for themselves, principles that seek to form and transform human nature rather than to fight against it, and principles that respect and elevate the dignity of both child and educator.    When I discovered Don Bosco I felt I'd finally found someone who was truly on my side.    

If only I'd known about him when I was having to make post-baptism chitchat with Father Spare-the-Rod!

Children, safety, and the sixth commandment.

At home we say that my six-year-old, who will turn seven in January, is in first grade. He is an outgoing and cheerful child who loves to meet people. So I was really looking forward to starting him in religious ed at our parish this year, because that is one of the first "classroom" experiences our kids tend to have. Meanwhile, I looked forward to starting him slowly at home with memory work from the St. Joseph First Communion Catechism, as I have done for all the other kids. I have a little personalized copybook printed just for him, and we take two years to work through memorizing and copying the answers to the questions:

Who made me?

"God made me."

Did God make all things?

"Yes, God made all things."

Why did God make me?

"God made me to show his goodness and to make me happy with Him in Heaven."

It is not just memorizing and copy work, although I find it is a good vehicle for practicing handwriting and for stretching the child's memory. As I introduce each one we talk about it: what it means, why we use some words and not others, sometimes different ways to think about the answers, which of the answers seem easy to grasp and which answers are so difficult that grownups still argue about them when they go to college and other grownups write whole books about what they mean. Six- and seven-year-olds, I find, are proud to be learning about things that are so important and difficult that grownups argue about them.

We add one or two of these per week, and to get through the whole First Communion catechism it takes about two school years, so I start in first grade. By the time second grade rolls around and the parish sends home the packet of things To Be Learned before First Confession and then First Communion, our children have hardly balked at learning the Ten Commandments and the Act of Contrition and the Five Steps To Prepare For Making A Good Confession and the like. I have rolled it right into their copybook and each year it has become part of the memory work.

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But as I have said, I look forward to enrolling our kids in our very good parish religious ed program in part because I like them to have a classroom experience with other kids and a teacher, just that little experience of collegiality and being a school-kid, complete with chairs and desks and chalkboards, evenings in the parish school.

So I was more than a little disappointed when my 6yo arrived for his first day and there weren't any other first graders in his class.

Demographics, the religious ed director told me. The recession. There are only about 15 six-year-olds among all the families registered in the parish, and the others go to the school and so they don't need Wednesday night religious ed. There just were not a lot of kids born in 2009-2010. My ten-year-old daughter in the same parish had 43 First Communicants in her cohort, maybe a dozen of whom were in religious ed classes with her.

The school was willing to devote a first grade teacher to my one little boy, but in the end -- he will turn seven this year -- we decided to send him to second grade, and so everything is accelerated. It is the better option for him under the circumstances, but I wanted for him to get a year older first. I wanted to have time to teach him my way for a little while.

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I was talking with a good friend over coffee the other day. She wanted to pick my brain about sex education for children and teenagers, something that I thought was kind of funny because she seems like the sort of person who would have absolutely no difficulty talking about anything at all with anyone. But as we talked it became clear that she is thinking hard about how to thread the needle between a healthy sex-positivity and anything goes, between encouraging moral behavior and fueling shame (or worse, shaming others), between a culture of chastity and the dark side of what she called "purity culture" (the notion that purity can be lost and afterwards you are permanently worth less; cf. comparing human beings, usually girls, to used wads of chewing gum and the like).

I am not sure I added anything to that idea other than "back to the Theology of the Body for you!" Because that is what authentic and sex-positive Catholicism looks like. But we talked a little bit about our different styles and how she is very assertive ("let's sit down, son, it is time for us to talk about Internet porn") and at least for young children I tend to be watchful about questions and respond to them instead. I don't want to burden them, too early, with things that they might not be ready for, I said. But as they grow older I try to spark the questions when it seems time, mostly via artful curriculum choices. So, for instance, my 10yo daughter and 13yo son are both getting Life Science this year with human reproduction included. I tend to stick to the clinical and academic, and I surround it with the social and moral context to it as we go, as it seems necessary.

I called that a "retreat" compared to her style, but she didn't think so. "The other Catholic homeschoolers I run with, it seems like they are afraid to teach their kids about the biology, because it might get them interested in sex." She felt social pressure.

"But what did you mean, specifically," she asked me, "about 'burdening' them too early? Like, what specific knowledge is a burden to a child who is too young for it?"

And that question really gave me pause. I realized I had been saying that for a long time, without ever articulating something specific to myself. I ended up telling her that I remembered a deep sense of revulsion, something not quite shame or fear, but a desire to get away, at the ages of eight-nine-ten if ever one of my parents wanted to speak to me about sex or puberty or any such thing. I have heard it said that this is a natural impulse, possibly self-protective, that many children have; I have also wondered if I felt unusually unsafe in that territory because that was around the time that my own family broke down around me, and there was no context in which it would have been safe to discuss morality or justice or consent. So I don't know, but the memory of that feeling of horror has made me reluctant to impose the feeling on my own kids. I "retreat" (at least in theory -- we shall see if I managed it, I guess) to a clear and age-appropriate explication of biology and a clear and age-appropriate explication of our duty to act justly to other human beings and never to use them as a means to an end, and draw the connections when I get the chance.

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From that conversation I discovered at least one thing that I think can burden a child too young for it, and that is a certain way of looking at the sixth commandment: "Thou shalt not commit adultery."

My six-year-old, the one thrust a bit too soon into the first-communion-prep program, is supposed to memorize the ten commandments because of the first-confession-prep which precedes it. Memorizing the ten commandments is completely fine with me. I get that the ten commandments can also be used as a handy memory aid when one is examining one's conscience. But I have always been a little bit bothered by the "child's ten commandments" they offered to us to make it easy for the kids.

"God comes first" is fine. "God's name is holy" is fine. "God's day is holy" is fine. All of them are fine until you get to number six, and then the children are offered as an alternative to "Thou shalt not commit adultery,"

"Be pure."

And -- I don't want to teach a six-year-old that this is what the sixth commandment means.

For one thing, it isn't accurate.

For another thing, none of the real ten commandments are about what you should "be" -- they are about what you should "do." Breaking one does not change you from who you are -- a human being, a child of God -- into something else.

For a third thing, "thou shalt not commit adultery" is a call to acting justly towards others, whereas "be pure" sounds like something you do within yourself, without reference to anyone except yourself and God.

I know where this comes from. It comes from the commendable practice of using the ten commandments as a sort of mnemonic for examinations of conscience, or possibly from the way that the Catechism organizes its discussion of the moral life around the structure of the ten commandments. All the possible sins against chastity are gathered together in section six.

And the teachers are trying to come up with a way that they can teach the children to start obeying the sixth commandment right away. They think "Be pure" is a child-sized version of it.

"Be chaste" would be better, I think.

But even better would be to teach the seven-year-olds this: Seven-year-olds cannot violate the sixth commandment.

The sixth commandment is for their sake. It is meant to protect them. But it is not aimed at them.

When they get older, they will need to incorporate it into their own behavior.

But right now, it is not aimed at them.

The St. Joseph First Communion Catechism pointedly reassures its readers that young children do not commit mortal sin. Before going on to explain that grownups do commit grave sins, and sometimes so do even big boys and girls, it says about young children: God protects them in a special way. They learn about both venial and mortal sin now for completeness, and because later they will have to wrestle with both kinds; but for now we reassure them that they cannot endanger their own souls at the age of seven.

I like this formula, and I think we should adopt it for the sixth commandment.

I don't think seven-year-olds need to be burdened with the worry about whether they are "being" pure.

I think seven-year-olds should understand clearly that if they are exposed to unchastity in their families, if someone inapproriately sexualizes them, if they come upon explicit materials or media -- it is because someone else has sinned against them.

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This post turned out way more rambly than I thought it would, but it has been helpful.

I always have taught the meaning of "Thou shalt not commit adultery" to my young children like this: It exists to protect children and families. The sixth commandment means that mothers and fathers should work hard to make a safe home for children. It means, "Do not find another person who is not your husband or wife to be with," because children need to grow up with their mother and their father.

I have always felt confident about teaching that. In part because kids get it: They know that their parents, and other adults, are supposed to take care of them and keep them safe. And also because as they get older, they can come to understand that all of chastity serves justice for children. Chastity exists to put the needs of children above the desires of adults. I want my kids to know my marriage as a mantle of safety wrapped around them, and I want them to remember that mantle when they grow up and know where it came from, and what that means for their own decisions.

 

Will they be safe people for children?

Not "be pure" but "be safe."

"Be safe," in the sense of "be a person who offers safety to others." Especially children, I think I will be more purposeful about rejecting the "be pure" formulation, starting today. Even when we are well-meaning, we take serious risks when we teach simplified versions of the words of Scripture or of sound doctrine. It may be more difficult, but it is always safer to stick with the original.

 

 

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Unreasonable expectations in design.

True or false:

It is irresponsible and negligent for a parent to take a picture of his or her small child in public, especially at a crowded, dangerous place like the zoo. Every photograph of grinning, sticky-faced siblings, posing in front of the aquarium or the cat house, is evidence of the crime of child endangerment.

Silly?

Well, let's think about what has to happen for a parent to take a photo of her child in public. First the parent has to let go of the child. She needs both hands to manipulate the camera or the smart phone. Then she has to step a few feet away -- maybe a dozen feet or more, certainly out of arms' reach. She has to take her eyes off her charges for long enough to select the proper settings or apps before finally locating them in the viewfinder. Once the picture is taken, she may pause to stow the camera away before returning and once again securing the child in a firm grip.

She lets go. She steps several feet away. She looks elsewhere. It is long enough.

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What I see in the great rush to condemn the mother (it is always the mother) of a small child who crawled into the gorilla exhibit at the Cincinnati Zoo this week: a widespread refusal to believe that bad things can happen to "good people like me." She MUST have done something wrong (i.e., "something I would never do") for a terrible thing to happen to her child.

It's very important for some people to put distance between the grieving and themselves. I see this elsewhere; I often read articles about cycling accidents, because I am interested in traffic safety in my town, and let me tell you, getting hit by a drunk driver when you had the right of way is no excuse: you should have been more aware or you shouldn't have been on that road, you two-wheeled freak. We all know that many cyclists today completely ignore the law. So it goes.

I think we can extrapolate from the evidence (many small children at zoos, the existence of preschool educational programs at zoos) that it is widely believed (whatever some folks may think) that a zoo is a good place to take small children for a fun family outing. So to go so far as to say "well, of course you don't take a 3-y-o to a zoo, that's for older children" is, shall we say, OUTSIDE THE MAINSTREAM of thinking.

The notion that no reasonable parent would ever enter a situation where a 3-year-old might escape her notice long enough to get into serious trouble is a little more understandable, given the low amount of experience that many people have with the wide variety of three-year-olds. Most people only ever parent zero to two of them.

Some commenters who take a position closer to my own have been focusing on "It's not possible to keep your eyes on a three-year-old 100% of the time so they can't escape." I'd like to point out that we don't really WANT mothers (it's always mothers, isn't it) to do what would be necessary to prevent three-year-olds from escaping. Because we would have to do more than just watch them all the time. We would have to grip them all the time. That is why I began by having you think about picture-taking, how it is an utterly normal thing for parents of children to do at zoos, take their child's picture; and how the act of taking a picture contains within it all the possibility that allows for an escaping child.

There's this strange thing about children: they want to explore the world around them. They will pull and actively try to escape you. The zoos, along with science museums and other places that attract children, incidentally, have this odd feature (often, not always) -- they have exhibits here and there that seem to encourage children to explore the environment. "Please touch," they will have signs up for the petting zoo, or they will have fish tanks that are down near the eye level of toddlers, or they will have buttons to push and things like that. It seems almost as if the zoos.... EXPECT there to be three-year-olds with their parents, three-year-olds who are not buckled into strollers! I think the last few times I've been to the zoo I've even seen groups of preschoolers on a field trip, not with their parents, but with teachers and chaperones!

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I'm very sorry that the zoo had to shoot the gorilla. I'm thrilled that they apparently had a backup plan with a "dangerous animal response team" that included a take-down-the-animal plan. This was good planning for a situation that, however unthinkable it may be, clearly someone had thought about it in advance. It's the zoos' job to keep people away from the animals and animals away from the people.

And yet... sometimes people get in.

Isn't it also the zoos' responsibility to protect the animals from people who might harm them? Is it really reasonable to assume that visitors will police themselves sufficiently that the exhibits need not be made secure?

I'm thinking back to the last time a determined adult got into an exhibit (it does happen) and wondering if anyone was discussing whether zoos have a responsibility, grounded in the welfare of the animals, to make it impossible for determined persons to get into the exhibits. I think they do have a responsibility to make it very difficult for a determined adult to get into an exhibit. It is a completely foreseeable risk that a determined adult will TRY to get into an exhibit, and it really ought to be harder for a determined child to get in than a determined adult -- so if the zoos designed to make it extremely difficult for determined adults to get in, it ought to be that much harder for a determined child to get in.

It is a known risk that people occasionally attempt to breach the barriers -- not just children, but also adults. Zoos face a design problem that we should probably acknowledge: their mission is to bring us close to the animals while their responsibility is to keep us separated from them. I have some respect for the argument that this design problem, with its inherent tension, represents a set of risks that is not worth the benefits; that is a value judgment and we can come to different conclusions about it. I don't have any respect for the argument that this design problem doesn't exist.

Without saying anyone was at fault, I'm going to say that the design of the exhibit is probably the ultimate cause of this disaster.

OK, then... why don't you go so far as to say "the zoo was at FAULT," then?

Because design problems that involve inherent tensions between two design goals are notoriously difficult, and designers can act in good faith from start to finish, with the best of analyses, but still bad things can happen. I simply don't know enough details, and likely you don't either.

Is it possible to design a zoo in which all barriers CANNOT be breached? Yes; would people want to go to that zoo? Would those who argue for better habitats for the animals' welfare be pleased with that zoo? It's possible that the designers really did act in bad faith, that they designed an exhibit that they knew was not up to whatever the commonly accepted standards of zoo barriers were at the time. That would be a kind of fault. It's possible that the zoo staff acted in bad faith: that they disabled safeguards that were part of the system put into place by the designers, or that the barriers were not well maintained, or something like that. That would be a kind of fault. But it's possible to have a design that turns out to BE FAULTY (in retrospect) without any person actually being "at fault."

The public may have unreasonable expectations of the designers here. Not that it isn't reasonable to have as your GOAL "no one shall breach this exhibit." But that the public hasn't taken the time to really imagine what the tradeoffs would be that would make it literally impossible for no determined person to breach the exhibit, and they haven't considered that some of the things that make exhibit-breaches possible would make them enjoy the zoo less. Might even make them complain about the poorly-designed exhibits.

Here are some links for your perusal.

Last week at the zoo in Santiago, Chile, a determined man got into the lion enclosure, and the zookeepers shot the lions.

Last month a determined woman got into the tiger enclosure at the Toronto zoo.

This one goes the other direction. Less than three months ago, at the same zoo in Cincinnati, the polar bears breached their first enclosure.

About six months ago, another woman was determined enough to pet a tiger that she got into the enclosure at the zoo in Omaha.

2014. Copenhagen. A determined man entered the polar bear enclosure.

2009. Berlin. A determined woman entered the polar bear enclosure.

In the last link, a zoo official says of the exhibit, "It is already safe... People who want to jump in will always find a way."

For the sake of the animals as well as the people, maybe we should be asking why that is good enough. It simply isn't true that a zoo can't be built with barriers that visitors can't breach. We certainly try to manage it in prisons that hold human beings and in museums that hold valuable artifacts.

To ask why we accept risks is not necessarily to mandate that we remove risks. I respect those who argue that the benefits of zoos aren't worth the risks of bringing the public in close contact with animals. That Even though we don't come down in the same place, they and I recognize that there is a tension between the risks and benefits of zoo design, that it is acceptable to run some risk in order to reap some benefit, if the benefit is good enough.

It turns out that there is also a tension between the risks and benefits of bringing children out into the world. If we are going to cut the zoo enclosure designers any slack here, if we are going to say about those who build barriers to protect the animals "You can't be expected to stop every determined person from getting in," then we also have to be ready to say about all those charged with children, "You can't be expected to stop every mischief that could possibly happen."

In both cases, we could. But we choose not to. Because there are risks in that direction too.

 

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Mother's Day -- in the life.

I got up early on Mother's Day to go for a run around Lake Calhoun before Mass. I think this will be my summer Sunday routine -- I like running outdoors, and I much prefer the cool mornings before the paths get crowded.

The Lake Calhoun loop is a near-exact 5K. To make the circuit is to be treated to a pleasant series of vistas: the downtown skyscrapers in the distance, sailboats and kayaks on the lake, families of waterbirds, children swinging from the play structure at the 32nd Street Beach, blue water reflected in the plate-glass faces of the sprawling homes atop the bluff, towering apartment buildings standing sentinel where Lake Street dives into the bustling neighborhood of Uptown.

Something there is in me that loves apartment buildings. I lived in one-bedroom city apartments by myself for about two and a half years at the end of college and the start of graduate school, and I think back with nostalgia. I liked their smallness, the ease of keeping them tidy, the door that opened a few steps away from a noisy city street. I liked that it was never quiet, that the sound of human activity just outside never stopped. I liked that the space was all mine. I liked the foompf sound of the gas furnace in the first apartment coming online in the winter, and the faint scent of warm dust rising from the electric baseboard heaters in the second apartment when I turned them on for the first time. I liked the sound of sirens and car horns coming in through the windows when I first slept with them open in the spring. I liked having my own mailbox in the row, to open with a little key. I liked never having to think about snow shoveling, or clogged gutters, or lawns, and that when the ceiling leaked it wasn't my job to fix it or pay for it, but only to call and ask.

I have a house now, because I have a whole family to raise in it. (Still a city house, with sirens and car horns and a short walk from a busy commercial district.) When I run around the lake and see the sprawling big houses, I wonder who lives there, wonder how much the house costs, but don't want to trade places with them. Sometimes, though, I feel a little pull towards the upscale apartments at the edge of Uptown. Or towards the ones near the university, in a different part of the city. I think how lovely it would be not to have to get in my car to drive to the lake, but just to step out the front door to go for the run. I think about walking to restaurants and shopping and movies. I think how much better the sirens and car horns of Uptown would sound than the sirens and car horns of south Minneapolis. I think about living in a building with a concierge.

For a long time I assumed that as an empty nester someday I would return to apartment living. I am neither a gardener nor a bird watcher. Even sitting in my own space outdoors with a good book could be accomplished just as neatly on a balcony as in a yard. I could maybe have a few potted plants there, which would never require mowing. I am a strange sort of introvert: I like nothing more than to be alone in a crowd. I want to be near where people are, but in no way obligated to interact with them. I am a city person. I want to live where there is a sidewalk (and have never understood why suburbs seem to treat this accoutrement as optional or undesirable). Maybe I won't grow old in Minneapolis, because the icy winters can be dangerous when frailty sets in, but a small city apartment somewhere -- not necessarily a cheap apartment! -- is how I pictured retirement. I let myself think of that when I ran around the lakes.

And then one day recently I sat up straight and exclaimed to Mark: "Wait a minute! I'm going to be the matriarch of a large family! What if they all want to spend Christmas with us?"

Yes, folks, I had been a mother for fifteen years, had given birth to five children. I had updated my self-image many times since then: from future scientist to ever-present homemaker, from sedentary to sometime athlete, from chemistry/engineering nerd to Nerd Across The Catalogue of elementary and secondary education. From expecting to travel whenever and wherever and however I wanted to waiting twenty years to visit another country. I stopped shoving a wallet and keys in my back pocket, and became a carrier of voluminous handbags stuffed with a change of someone else's clothes. All this happened quite naturally.

And yet in all that time I had not gotten around to updating my vision of the future.

+ + +

I am not saying I won't have my city apartment to retire to. I have a suspicion that we will turn into the snowbird types (possibly reverse snowbirds), with a place to call home in the city and a place to call home near the mountains, and maybe we'll have both a place that is small enough for two and a place that is big enough for all our descendants. I don't know; it is still far too early to make plans, and maybe even too early to dream about it.

My point here is just that motherhood, parenthood, has a way of sneaking up on you. After all, I still think of Mother's Day as primarily a day I need to acknowledge for other people, not a day meant for someone like me; eventually my associations may shift, but they haven't yet, even though my children wrap me little presents to open each year. I guess it may go on happening my whole life, this transformation, outside and in.

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The expert's temptation.

This year in home education, a milestone I've looked forward to:  my eldest son, now in tenth grade, begins General Chemistry.  Also precalculus -- not quite as fun for me to teach as proof-based geometry was, but still, it makes me smile.

For a long time, I didn't expect to teach General Chem at home, even though I'm entirely capable of it.  Because:  labs.  Mark may be quite handy around the house, but I didn't expect him to construct me a fume hood.  And how to dispose of used reagents safely?  And --  all that glassware!  I knew, of course, that one can buy a fully-stocked chemistry kit for homeschoolers; all the catalogues have them.  But I guess I have been a bit snobbish about chemistry:  I never really thought a home-grown chemistry lab could be adequate.  I wanted a proper laboratory experience.

I mean, good enough if you don't have other options, sure.  But we do have other options.  Here in Minnesota, high school juniors and seniors can take courses for credit at a number of local colleges and universities for minimal cost.  (The program's also open to high-scoring sophomores who attend institutional high schools, but not to homeschooled sophomores.  Go figure.)  I have been telling people for years that I intended to have my kids take chemistry in their junior year through the college-credit program, especially so they could take a course in a "real" laboratory.  I figured that we could do physics at home instead.

And then as sophomore year approached, I found myself thinking:  How involved is a first-year high school course anyway?  

I personally racked up a lot of time working with laboratory equipment in high school, it's true.  But now that I think of it, some of that was in the second-year course (yes, I had two years of high school chemistry -- also two years of physics).  And a lot of it was extracurricular activity, such as setting up demos for the summer elementary school chemistry camp, and hours of prep for inter-scholastic science competitions, and sometimes just messing around in the back prep room that joined the two chemistry classrooms.  (Was there really a glass jar half full of mercury on the bottom shelf, glistening dully through a thick layer of dust? Or have I manufactured that memory?  It seems that by 1990 such things should have been long gone.)

Anyway -- what labs do first-year students really do at the lab bench?  Flame tests (not the stupid kind involving methanol, but just putting saltwater-damp probes into Bunsen flames).  Weighing a precipitate to find how close you came to theoretical yield.  Calorimetry -- in practice, this consists of known masses of ice and warm water mixed in a Styrofoam coffee cup with a thermometer thrust through an insulating lid.  I remember the most difficult lab, in the sense of being easy to screw up so that you had to start over and risk being late for English class, being acid-base titration with its impressively towering buret and frustratingly sticky stopcock.  I vaguely remember doing one thing that required a crucible.

Anyway, I spent some time researching, and I found a microchemistry lab kit and manual that began to make me think that we could do an adequate job with the laboratory at home.  Microchemistry:  why didn't I think of that before?   Tiny quantities means less waste, mitigation of safety hazards, and next to no disposal issues.   And after all, there will be a chemistry lab in college.  It's not like this is the last chance the kids have to experience laboratory work.  The fundamental skills of observation, meticulous direction-following, keeping a good notebook, writing detailed laboratory reports are the same everywhere.  

It's the perfect example of how to play to the strengths of this homeschool while mitigating its weaknesses (like no fume hood or convenient hazmat disposal.)

Paper chromatography lab, one of the first in the manual.  With a toddler in the house, the safest place to work is a relatively inaccessible upstairs room with a large table.  A pitcher of tap water and a plastic dish tub serves as a portable sink.  Distilled water comes in plastic jugs at the grocery store.  I purchased a plastic eyewash-station bottle (green-lidded bottle) and sterile eyewash solution from an occupational safety supplier.

 

Microchemistry lab supplies use small quantities, measured dropwise from calibrated dropper bottles and reacted in the tiny wells in plastic reaction plates (there are 96 wells in the plate at my son's elbow).  The reused glass yeast jar contains fruit juice from the kitchen -- one of the liquids subjected to the chromatography lab along with bromophenol blue, copper nitrate, and assorted household dyes.

+ + +

 I'm not just teaching my own son, but two other teenagers.  We meet twice a week for 45 minutes, and if you're thinking, "That's not nearly enough lecturing to teach high school chemistry," you're right.  I wish I had time to teach the teens by lecture 4 times per week.  

If we took two years to get through general chemistry, I could do it; that's exactly how I taught proof-based geometry, which went swimmingly and was a lot of fun too.  The kids studied geometry at half-speed with me for two years, and on the other days of the week they studied algebra at half-speed for two years.  At the end of two years, they had one credit of geometry and one of algebra, just as if they'd done them sequentially.

(It occurs to me now that for future cohorts of children, I might be able to do something similar with science:  Chemistry at half-speed in a full lecture format, while the kids study some other thing at half-speed the other two days of the week:  biology or physics, perhaps.  Two years to do two credits of science.  It could work, perhaps.  H. and I will have to talk about it.  I already have a fully written evolutionary biology curriculum that has no labs, so... it could work.)

As it is, though, instead of following a lecture format, I am following a reading-recitation format.  I am more tutor than lecturer.  With only the barest introduction from me at the end of the previous class meeting, the students read a few sections and work assigned problems (I assign the ones with the answers in the back of the textbook, so they can check their own work).  Then when we meet around my kitchen table, I uncap my dry-erase marker and ask, "Any questions?  Did you have any trouble working any of the problems?"  We work some of the problems together, and then I tell them things like:  The most important thing to remember from this chapter is such-and-such.  Or I tell them a nifty mnemonic (how do I know it's nifty?  My high school chemistry teacher taught it to me, and I haven't forgotten it) to remember which of the gaseous elements are always found as diatomic molecules.  Or I give them a list of ions and molecular formulas that they have to memorize because they are going to come up again and again, and set them quizzes on it until they stick.

+ + +

I'm enjoying something about this that I also enjoyed about plane geometry and am (mostly) enjoying about my son's precalculus work:  Having already set up the schedule so that I know what they are studying each week, I can walk into my class sessions cold.  There are, it turns out, a few consolations for the stay-at-home geek, and one of them is finding out twenty years on that you've still got it,  or at least can fake it in front of newbies.

+ + +

So here's the temptation:  After a few weeks of high school mathematics and science going so well, having put a fair amount of work into designing a course that is rigorous and emphasizes the strengths of the homeschool while mitigating the weaknesses, I sometimes start to think:  Gosh, it's a good thing I've got such an extensive background in this material!  Otherwise how would I ever make sure that my kids learn this?

It's an understandable temptation.  Who doesn't want to justify our past decisions (such as devoting years of our lives to study a field in which we never wind up employed)?  Who doesn't want to feel essential?

But it's one that I am compelled to reject as contrary to my philosophy of education.  Not that it's bad to arrange it so that one's children can learn a subject directly from an adult who's specifically trained in that subject.  This is a great choice!  But -- contrary to what many people imagine -- it is not an essential choice. Being an autodidact has merits too, such as the training in self-discipline, self-examination, and resourcefulness required to find out what one does not know and then to track down the necessary resources to learn it.  Sometimes what's learned on one's own sticks better than what's drilled into one by others.  Probably the optimal mix of an education is one that includes some training by experts along with some mix of self-directed study -- with the exact recipe varying quite a bit from family to family and from student to student.

Even less essential is that the parent specifically be the expert.  Not for nothing am I teaching chemistry and geometry to two other families.  I'm their non-parent expert, brought in in an informal brain-bartering arrangement.  In return, I call on H's skills and (to me) astonishing patience and resourcefulness teaching writing and language arts to all our offspring over the age of four.  Yes, yes, I can write, but can I teach writing?  If I had to, I'd try, but I'll tell you one thing -- I don't enjoy it much at all!

I've also paid money to bring in experts (as in:  music education) and -- admittedly my favorite solution -- I've taught myself subjects so I could turn around and teach them to children.  I'm a quick study, but in principle anyone can do this.  One of the great advantages to this method is that the learning process is fresh in the mind.  Having just learned something presents some surprising advantages to the teacher.

(Something I learned in engineering school:  when a graduate student is not entirely sure that he or she understands a topic, it is a normal occurrence for the student's advisor to assign the student to teach the unsteady topic to undergraduates.)

So, yeah, we subject-experts have to watch how we talk about our expertise to other people, even to other homeschoolers, lest we plant the seeds of the idea that self-teaching is impossible, that experts are always and everywhere necessary.  The answer to "But what qualifies you to teach your own children?" always and everywhere has to be:  I am their parent.  I am motivated to give them whatever they need to see them succeed.   We often look outside ourselves for those resources, but the fundamental resource that powers it all is the resource of self-gift that resides in the very fact that we relate to them as parents are meant to relate to their children:  as mentors in all of life, and education is not really separable from that.

The confidence that learning of some kind is out there to be grasped by anyone with the drive, whatever their immediate limitations, is a fundamental assumption of home education -- and I would say, a fundamental assumption of humanity.  You can do it, if you want, and if your priorities can be so arranged.  It's an optimism that one can never have as long as one is dependent on experts.

Changing room.

After a few weeks of working on it, I decided that our 19-month-old was toilet-trained enough to be sure we weren't turning back.  

So I pulled all his clothes off the changing table shelves in the laundry room, carried them downstairs, and hung them in the first-floor closet.  

I asked Mark and my 15-year-old to carry the changing table downstairs to store it in the basement, and when that was done they carried up an old kitchen cabinet and put it in the place of the changing table.  It took some cleaning up and a cloth to hide the wood-glue stains on the laminate, but now it's another clothes-folding surface, and a place to stow the trash receptacle and some baskets for sorting outgrown clothes and lone socks.

Today I gathered up all the cloth-diaper covers and put them in a tub and snapped on the lid, and carried it to the basement, where I left it on the changing-table shelf.  In another tub, I packed up all the infant cloth diapers, and in yet another, threw some more baby items (bibs, the bag of jumbled pieces of the manual breastpump, receiving blankets).  Down they went.

 While I was at it, I carried down the infant car seat and stowed it next to the changing table.  Then I boxed up some infant clothes in good condition, clothes that had been lying around waiting for me to do something with them.

I hesitated with the box.  Take it out to the car, to deliver it to charity?  Or set it aside to be stowed in the deep recesses of the attic?

+ + +

It's a matter of probability, I tell myself, not so much a matter of plans.

Very soon I will be forty-one years old.  I have three to seven years left, perhaps, in which Mark and I might decide to try for another baby, or in which we might find ourselves surprised by one.   I've not had a surprise yet, not in seventeen years of NFP, so I count that probability low; and I don't expect that we will try for another baby, certainly not the way I expected it when we had one, two, three children.  I didn't exactly expect it when we had four; I hoped, though.  

I'm not sure if I hope or not now.  Five is lovely, and my most recent pregnancy was hard.  

And we talk about the future differently these days.  "Three years from now," we say, "four years from now, perhaps we can do such-and such," and we've mostly stopped adding "if we don't have another baby."

+ + +

"We can get rid of these things," Mark pointed out, "because if it turns out that we need them again, we can afford to buy new ones."

Yes.  I've already gotten rid of a number of things.  And on the other hand, I saved all the maternity clothes that I really liked, on the grounds that if I needed them again it would be sad not to have the good ones.  Those clothes take up  just a box or two.  And it's really only for a few years.  When I'm forty-eight I will have no reason not to toss the sealed box in the car and tote it down to the crisis pregnancy center or the charity thrift store.  It's not like I risk keeping it around for the next twenty years because I won't know if I need it or not.

And the same for the changing table, right?  And the diaper covers?  And the last box of baby clothes?  It's just a few more years that they might come in handy.   And then I can get rid of them.

+ + +

 Probability:

"By age 40, a woman's chance is less than 5% per cycle, so fewer than 5 out of every 100 women are expected to be successful each month. Women do not remain fertile until menopause. The average age for menopause is 51, but most women become unable to have a successful pregnancy sometime in their mid-40s."

It's nothing you would want to count on if you were intent on avoiding pregnancy for some terribly serious reason.  And I have plenty of friends who had babies in their early-to-mid-forties.  

Still, I also have plenty who didn't.

+ + +

Then there's this:  If I lived as long as my own mother lived, I would not see my youngest, now a toddler, finish high school.   If I had another baby, and lived as long as my own mother lived, I wouldn't see that new one start high school.

I can't help but be troubled by this one.

+ + +

Packing all the baby stuff up felt awfully final, and not in a good way, even though I'm not actually getting rid of it yet.  Somehow I'm reluctant to say, "Probably we won't have another," even if that is, literally, true.   Which leaves me reluctant to do the things that one does when probably one (two, really) won't have another, like give away the favorite baby clothes and the good maternity jeans.

I'm not sure whether the reluctance is based on a desire to mother a baby again; or on the very practical consideration that (probably) to do so would never be regretted while to choose not to do so might well be regretted, or being slow to accept this first limitation brought on by age and age alone; or simply the bitterness that always accompanies the closing of a door to the past.

 I remember feeling something like this when I was finishing college, getting ready to move on to new things, and some small part of me wanting to stay, knowing to do so wasn't possible.

In other words, I don't know what I'm trying to hold onto here.  Is it a gift of life I desire to give?  Or is it clinging to a notion of myself as a life-giver?

+ + +

It's a frightening freedom we enjoy.  I am healthy, Mark is healthy; we could go for it again, play the fearful and wonderful game.  We are completely aware that we could.  If we were sure we desired it, or sure we were called to it, we could rise to the challenge.

At the same time, not being called in particular, without a particular desire (only this empty feeling at the boxing up), we are also aware that we can go on as we are, shouldering our bags and hiking off into the sunset with these five.

Love is not a zero-sum game, but energy can be; and I sense a need to direct greater energy to my older children than I have had since the youngest first fluttered to life.  My last pregnancy was hard:  not dangerous to my life and health, just hard, as pregnancy often is.  Mothering this youngest one from babyhood into toddlerhood was beautiful, and I feel at the top of my powers; but all along I felt a pull towards those older children that went unsatisfied, and heard my voice saying "no" what felt like far too much.  "No, we can't do that because of the baby."  "No, I need you to do this instead because of the baby."

I had to push them all away, just a bit.  My arms were full, my energy went to produce milk, the hours of the day slipped by.  I'm not saying it was the wrong thing to do; they learned to sweep the floor and cook dinner and clean their rooms, they learned to take the bus.  They learned that I wouldn't always be there for them.  Which is true.  I won't.

But I'm not saying I liked that part of it.  And looking at my five beautiful children, one of whom I have to look up to now, I wonder if there really is enough of me to go around.   I think there is, barely, now.  But I know what it would take to push that over the edge.  Not that I'd do a bad job.  I would keep it together.  I always do.  

But I do want my kids to remember a mother who had time for each of them.  And -- looking back on the last two years -- I have not.

 It was for a good cause.  A great cause!   The youngest will be there for them far longer than I will.   I'm not sorry.  

But ... which to choose in the future?  Let's just say it is not obvious.

+ + +

"Three years from now," we say.  "Four years from now."  We think of places we'll go, things to show each other, things to experience with the growing children.  We have a vision of a new phase of our lives, the phase with no little children in it, the phase where even our youngest walks on his own two feet.

None of it is a guarantee.  None of it is ever a guarantee.  

I've never put the changing table away before.  I guess that is different.  I guess this is the first bifurcation between what might be and what else might be.  It feels important.  

And at the same time it's just housecleaning.

"He's not himself."

This week the 15-month-old was sick, sick, sick. The illness began back around Easter, probably on April 3rd; lasted a bit more than a week; seemed to be over by Monday, April 13, lulling us into thinking we could safely resume our normal schedule; returned with a vengeance on Sunday the 19th and continued until just now.

I think the little guy had rotavirus, because he had the classic symptoms (key among them the copious and foul, foul diarrhea) and none of the rest of us fell ill. Most people get this before age 6 and after that have immunity. The one-two punch took us by surprise; maybe he mostly shook it off, but not entirely, and we were just too quick to jump back into regular activities; or maybe the second wave, which did look a little different, was from an imbalance of gut flora. Who knows.

It was H who suggested that it might be rotavirus, since her twins fell ill at the same time with the same symptoms -- one much worse than the other, with my baby having it to a degree that fell between the two. We ended up cancelling a total of three co-schooling days (not in a row). I think we will be back in business on Monday.

+ + +

So, of course I spent the week with a feverish, listless baby sprawled or curled in my lap, buried in towels and spare old sheets from the basket we keep high up in the linen closet, only for births and for mass gastrointestinal illness. The washer and dryer ran constantly. I changed my clothes three or four times a day. I lived on chicken soup from an enormous pot that I made on the first day of the second wave, when I worried we'd all become ill. I offered the baby store-brand, pediatric electrolyte solution.

(A side note: Why, why, why must they put brightly colored dye in a drink that is meant to be given to vomiting toddlers?)

I offered him lots of nursing, too, and stayed close by so he could always have access to me, with a few breaks to run to the drugstore or grocery. I slept with the baby on a stack of towels and diapers. Even though (thankfully) he mostly slept at night and didn't throw up, I started awake at every cough, ready to leap into action. Tied-up garbage bags full of disposable diapers accumulated next to the changing table. The kids, not allowed to go to friends' houses or activities lest they pass the bug on, festered and whined and eventually settled in front of video games, and I quit making them stop.

+ + +

None of those are fun. They are miserable. But honestly, the worst part of it all is how the familiar little guy just... disappears, replaced by a limp changeling. Unable to use words yet, he cannot meet you on the verbal level and let you know that the "he" is still there, the mischievous, affectionate baby who knows you and whom you know. Eyes glassy, lids drooped, drifting in and out of a feverish doze; or arching his back and howling in pain and dismay. The only thing that remains is that he wants to cling and cling and cling to me; and that proves I am his mother and he is my baby.

I find myself singing favorite songs, trying to catch his eye. Sometimes, sometimes, a little smile plays across his lips and the eyes dart to make contact, briefly, and there he is, for just an instant. And then the eyes close and he's submerged again.

The peculiar uneasiness of the ill baby not being "himself" is something that mostly passes by the time they are able to verbalize. Even though you might say "She's just not herself this week," a child old enough to talk has to be very ill indeed before her personality entirely disappears under her illness. That happened to Maryjane when she was seven and her appendix ruptured; the first couple of days after her emergency surgery, she drifted in and out of consciousness, heavily sedated, and she really was not available to us. That was hard, because we were terribly concerned about her -- it would be several days before we would have confidence that the infection was clear -- and we couldn't really even ask her anything, or know that she understood what we told her.

I cannot imagine what it is like for parents of children who suffer from chronic illnesses that rob them of access to their child's personality, repeatedly or for longer. I know that many adults, too, face such a disappearance at the end of their lives, something I have not yet had to face closely.

When it comes my turn, I hope that things can never get so bad as to destroy my faith that "himself" or "herself" really is present -- somewhere submerged, sometimes permanently submerged, as long as breath remains in the body. Obscured, but still real.

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The end of outsourcing childcare?

My oldest is 14, nearly fifteen now, and he has grown capable and attentive to his younger siblings, and so Mark and I have been entrusting them to him for longer and longer periods over the past few months. I felt he had to get used to it gradually (maybe it was us who had to get used to it), so we started by taking the baby with us on walks to a coffeeshop for just an hour or two, leaving him to watch over the 11, 8, and 5yo; and then we took the 15mo baby with us while we went out to dinner; and then we started leaving the baby with him too.

So far, so good, and the outings where we leave the baby have still been fairly short. Mostly they consist of Mark and I walking the half-mile to the busy street where there are a few restaurants, and grabbing a beer together. (My new passion is a Belgian sour paired with a big basket of hot french fries.)

We pay him for these outings. I know that watching one's younger siblings is in many families considered an ordinary chore of the sort that teens are supposed to just do, as one clears the table or takes out the garbage. Some "babysitting" has been like that; I have been occasionally dashing out during the schoolday, and for that there has been no transaction. "I have to go sign up for swim lessons at the Y before the deadline, I just got the baby down for a nap, listen for him," I'll call to the 14yo, who is curled up in the game room with his iPad writing an English paper or something, and he'll nod and off I'll go, myself, in the van with two booster seats and one car seat and several more un-boosted seats, and all of them (except mine) empty and quiet. And I come back as fast as I can, not because I am worried about anyone but because I know that the 14yo has a stack of schoolwork as high as my arm to do and I want to free him up to do it.

That kind of thing -- the quick dash to the store, made possible by the extra Big Person who has suddenly materialized in my home -- feels like a clearing-the-table, take-out-the-garbage kind of task. But swinging my small bag over my shoulders and stepping out with Mark to (I can't stop saying it, it's still so amazing) go out to grab a beer on a weeknight is something extra, something that doesn't technically have to happen to keep the house running but is only made slightly easier if the kids are temporarily watched by someone else. It is the kind of thing that we get babysitters for, and babysitters are paid. I, personally, honestly feel that Mark and I would be abusing our office as We-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed if we ordered the teenager to babysit without pay merely so we could grab a beer.

(Unless there wasn't any beer in our fridge and we needed to go buy some. Then it would be "dashing out for an essential errand" and would fall into the chores category with clearing the table and taking out the garbage.)

The other reason we pay him is that he is old enough to be earning some money beyond the lemonade-stand kid stuff, and we haven't yet made up our minds to make him go out and get a real job (what's up with that kid? When I was fourteen years old I was itching to make some money I could call my own! Kids these days), and, well, this is an easy way for us to have him do it. And maybe learn some saving skills now that his own sweat is on the line.

Mostly it appears that he is using his nouveau-riche status to become an aficionado of expensive bottled root beer, but I am biting my tongue for now. It's his money.

+ + +

 

So I don't have a system for paying him or for figuring out how much to pay him or anything like that quite yet. The kid-who-is-old-enough-to-babysit kind of snuck up on us and we didn't have time to think about it What I have been doing, as a stopgap measure -- and I have told him, "This is a stopgap measure and we will figure out a more permanent payment thing soon" -- is pay him a flat five dollars on each occasion that we run out for a beer, regardless of whether it's for 45 minutes or two hours.

Yes, it's a pittance, but bear with me. Because the 14yo is inexperienced still, we have been keeping the occasions quite short, and we also have not been driving anywhere while he's in charge. We've remained strictly in our own neighborhood, within sprinting distance (well, Mark could sprint there, anyway). We're lucky that there are a couple of nice restaurants within the sprinting radius, but these outings still feel informal and short.

Think of it as a training wage.

Next week, however, I am sending him to take the famous Red Cross babysitter's training. And after that, seeing as how he will possess a certification of sorts, we're going to sit down with him and negotiate a real hourly rate. Yes, even though we are the parents, "negotiate" -- one of the things that the Red Cross training is supposed to include is "how to decide how much to charge," so I intend to make him apply that knowledge.

The hourly rate I am willing to pay my own teenager will be less than the rate I would be willing to pay an outsourced teenager. Working from home is a perk, after all. I expect the pay demanded by outsourced teenagers to reflect the additional time and expense of traveling to and from my home and the inconveniences of not being totally free, for example, to grab a snack from the fridge whenever they want, or to work on their own projects around their house if the baby goes down for a nap and the 5yo is comfortably ensconced with a video.

But the 14yo will, after that point, be doing real work for us, not just "let's take a walk and give him some practice watching over the younger ones" kind of work, and so he's going to be trading value for value.

A couple things still have to be decided (beside the hourly rate itself).

For one thing -- I still have to talk to Mark about this -- I suspect that our We-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed status will still come into play in that I think we will retain the authority to make him babysit for us sometimes (for pay) whether he wants to or not, taking into consideration whether he has lots of homework and the like. But we'll pay him.

For another thing, while the babysitting course includes basic first aid, there's another level. He could take the full first aid/CPR course, for example. I think I would like to offer (during wage negotiations) to pay for that additional certification and promise a raise should he complete it. I would like to encourage him to do this just as a matter of course. Taking CPR is not only a useful skill, it also would open the door to getting lifeguard certification, something I have often thought should be a graduation requirement for my homeschool.

+ + +

I feel flush with freedom, on the cusp of being able to go out for a date with Mark any time I want. Up till now we have been limited, not so much by the cost of a babysitter, but by a dearth of them. (Typically we have hired the babysitter to be in charge of everyone except our oldest, who has permission to do homework or read or whatever while we're gone, but is supposed to be available to answer questions or fetch things the babysitter can't find.)

There is, it turns out, a limited supply of teenagers who are sufficiently older than my oldest child AND not someone who is a Friend's Kid and therefore automatically bereft of perceived authority over my own children because they have played together in somebody's backyard or basement. And those teenagers have a limited supply of time.

I have gone so far as to contact the eligible teenagers well in advance and say "Do you want money? Whenever you want money, please tell me when YOU are free. Please. I want to give you my money. LET ME GIVE YOU MONEY."

After I had reserved the 14yo's spot in the Red Cross class, I still had a couple of babysitter dates on the calendar, including last night and (next week) the evening after the 14yo was slated to have completed the class. It seemed kind of silly, with him being so close to being able to take the place of the babysitter, to make him be babysat (after a fashion). So last night we took him, and the two next kids, with us, and left the two littles with the babysitter.

We went to the indoor climbing gym for a few hours, and all climbed together, something that most definitely cannot be done with a baby in tow. It was the first time we'd climbed together since our trip to France in the fall.

Mark and my daughter on the auto-belays.

 

Look -- I drew blood!

Then the five of us went two doors down to a pizza place, and we all fit together in one high-backed booth. The three big children, not having been enjoned to entertain littler ones, talked a mile a minute, about the climbing and the pizza and the root beer, and about the week's work, and what the baby did when, and the movies they hoped to see soon, and what they were reading in their schoolwork. We, not feeling we had to focus on each other with only a limited time to be in a restaurant, listened and laughed and drank pints of good draft beer.

I put my arm around Mark and kissed him on the cheek and said, "This is fun. I have the babysitter scheduled again for next week -- let's do it again." And so we will.

And so I don't think my days of outsourcing babysitter time are entirely over. And I am not at all sorry.

 

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