Good thing Law and Order ended when it did for me, or else I wouldn’t have popped back onto twitter, seen this stream and had something to bitch about tonight.
Discovery Health’s Radical Parenting episode.
Disclosure: I didn’t watch the show, and a lot of my point of view has been surmised from posts reviewing the show, like this one.
I’m getting really tired of the constant labelling. What purpose does media serve, other than to create divisions, by using the word radical in reference to allowing a child of any gender to ignore the stereotypical gender roles and their denominating colours of pink and blue? How is global thought furthered by calling early potty trainers or elimination communicators extremists? Natural learners aren’t deviants, at all – they’re people who believe in learning, as most parents do.
These are all practices that are embraced and considered natural for parents to engage in, in most countries of the world. But for some reason, our little sector of the planet feels the need to cast about judgments and throw stones.
I breastfed until my daughter was done. She chose, not me. We started potty training when she showed initiative toward it – not sooner, because we didn’t have the communication (nor I the patience) in place for EC. If the media thinks that holding your baby over a pot to pee is militant, they should examine any other culture wherein wealth isn’t as prevalent or wasted. If ‘allowing’ boys to play with dolls and girls to wear blue while embracing their inner GI Joe is revolutionary, then I have to ask at a decibel-level just under a yell, why?
Why is that something to allow in the first place – it’s creative play. Creative play is shown, studies over, to create compassionate, open-minded and intelligent youth.
What do people who do consider this leftist see as the risk of allowing it? The stereotype, a homosexual child? A gender-confused one? Will little Billy will end up wanting to be Jill at 24 and you’ll be able to look way back in his history and remember how he baked cookies with mom?
It’s bullshit, narrow-minded, and as far as I’m concerned, a few minor rungs short of spreading hatred. It’s the media’s equivalent of us vs. them, normal vs. wrong, sane vs. unbalanced.
This kind of stuff is largely why I stopped following a lot of media – why I don’t have cable TV, read the newspaper or listen to the radio – the fear tactics, the creative labelling, and the need to put a title on every single little thing so that millions upon millions of people can all fit into little boxes that, ultimately, a corporation has created for them.
One of the first philosophical conversations my father and I ever had – and we had a lot, because even with the rest of it, we were able to talk for hours about nearly anything logic-based – was what was right and wrong. How that was determined. How do most know what’s ethically right? Or how to raise children? Or that 2+3=5?
Because it’s been deemed so, by a large group, adopted as a general rule, and taken in as a permanent scripture (whether that means biblically, or in a textbook).
Once upon a time, there was no universe, and that’s what people knew was right. A hundred years later, people could laugh at the naiveté.
Better example: How do you know that cigarettes are bad for you? Well, millions of people will tell you so if you ask (and often, if you don’t ask, too. Thanks, fuckers), and lots of those people are doctors, who’ve read or conducted studies and treated patients with various cigarette-caused disease. But less than a century ago, cigarettes were not only not bad for you, they were good for you for various reasons, not the least of which being that they helped you relieve stress during times of war.
But I digress, sort of. The point was to say that we live in a society wherein every moment seems to be throwing new information at us, and it gets hard to know which is the right fact of the moment. Whether soy will give you cancer or lower your cholesterol; whether you can trust a brand to use ethical trade/investment/sales practices; and whether (this was the real piss off, to me) unschoolers have children running around at all hours of the day, unwashed, without discipline, eating tons of doughnuts and ice cream, drinking soda like it’s all that’s left on Earth, playing video games and getting their educations from the trips to the grocery store.
Unschoolers aren’t anarchists. Unschoolers believe in natural education. Period. Just like any other kind of parent, homeschooler, afterschooler, Montessori-embracer, et al, Unschoolers want their children to learn, and to be successful and happy while doing it. Unschooling, just like any (and more) of the other education types I just listed, has a variety of differing practices.
I refuse to be boxed in with a label this show has created that denotes I might practice (what I consider to be just short of) neglect.
As parents, we’re responsible for the health and welfare of our children – I think we can all agree on that. This means, and here’s where some Unschoolers’ practices don’t jive with mine, that we have to look at a five year old and know he’s not emotionally prepared to decide whether to bathe at all. That the seven year old might not be the best person to make choices all the time about their diet. That some children, regardless of age might be able to express tiredness when they are tired, and therefore are capable of going without a set bedtime, but others will stretch themselves past the point of exhaustion, through to insomnia. And so, as parents, it’s our right to ensure that our kids aren’t dirty, on the path to diabetes and 42 cavities, and over-tired all the time. Even if we’re Unschoolers.
What this show did in (what I’m assuming was) an hour is create for viewers a picture of what Unschooling looks like. What they might have taken in is a dirty child, hopped up on sugar, extremely adverse to logic or self-discipline. Or, they could have seen parents that entrusted their children with their own lives. My gut tells me that those who are already versed in Unschooling might have had less judgment, but that’s an assumption.
But here’s the thing: they’re kids, man. They have to grow up a little bit, before they have the neural pathways to even be able to comprehend long-term results, such as malnutrition, tooth decay, diabetes, obesity, illiteracy, long-term sleep deprivation, dehydration, or inactivity.
Unschooling, to me, is quite simple. It’s the dismissal of an education system that was originally created to encourage drone-like behaviour for times of industrial growth. In Prussia. It’s believing that learning takes place during other hours, not just from 9 to 3, Monday to Friday. It’s saying, ‘hey, my kid can’t sit in a chair for 35 minutes, never mind a few hours until lunch time, but if he gets to run around, he learns about stuff twice as fast. So we’re going to a field to talk about geography.’ It’s providing extreme amounts of support and independence to your children, letting them pursue their own interests, but guiding them toward the tools to gain more knowledge in them. It’s allowing them opportunity and encouraging them to take it and run with it as far as they want to.
It’s why, for the people who do think so, I’m considered intelligent. My inherent ability to hyper-focus on a subject that I’m interested in and educate myself, using a variety of mediums that I know work for me, has given me a pseudo-graduate level of knowledge in a few areas. It’s not because I’m wicked smart, it’s because the opportunity and interest coincide. That’s natural learning, in a nutshell.
It’s why Microsoft exists.
Okay. Before you start hating on Bill, listen to the point.
MS used to be a really damn respected brand, and it was built from one little dude’s brain. (Incidentally, I think Stevie’s story is similar, but I’m not positive.) Bill was a nerd. Bill like computer stuff – what he had access to – so he bartered for more access, in his own time, and started living and breathing the things. Because he was Unschooling himself. His parents allowed him to stay out all hours, knowing he was safe in a gigantic room with a gigantic computer, because they saw the passion he had and the speciality he was amassing.
Get back in the Delorian, and we have Microsoft. And a once-veritable monopoly.
Had Bill’s parents assumed that what he was taking in school was enough, that a bedtime was to be enforced, or that he wasn’t to be trusted with all of this free time, you might not get to use Windows 7 or Vista. I know how sad you’d be, then.
After all of these words, I’ve convoluted (and proved) the initial message: media, like in tonight’s show, is too focused on classing people, which leads to people judging other people.
Some, after watching the show, are now thinking ew, Unschooling, and I’m sitting here going, ‘No! That’s not Unschooling! That’s Unparenting!’.
I haven’t read any of the posts about spanking that have been recently published and given the mommy world a new thing to raise up arms about. Except that I read Maria’s – as usual, completely logical, soothing and grab a coke-like – response. And I saw some words exchanged on Twitter – for once not throwing myself into a battle, defending those who didn’t ask for it, or calling judges judgmental while judging them.
But I have thoughts.
I used to be one of those.
The “I will never slap, spank, or use any kind of physical form of discipline against my daughter” ones. Because of how I grew up, I could say with a clear (high-on-pedestal) conscience that using body parts to teach lessons was a method of castration, belittling and taught kids only that they weren’t respected. I firmly believed that because my dad couldn’t hold his shit together when I pissed him off – and so went leaps and bounds overboard – that meant that everyone did that, eventually.
I thought, on some level, while also respecting a lot of you as parents, that if you hit your kid, you were an asshole who just couldn’t deal.
Turns out that I’m the asshole.
Because, as commenters in Maria’s post said, words can be so much worse than a spank.
Sarcasm has been thrown these parts. Zoë understands it as 90% joke and 10% what I’d really like to say when I’m frustrated or just fucking tired of the constant chatter and battle of wills that constitutes 14 hours of my day. She’s heard me say that my brains will explode all over a wall and she’ll have to clean them up with a toothbrush. She laughed. I laughed. It was funny.
Or was it?
What was it about me, that made me think that since I wasn’t hitting, I wasn’t damaging? What made me feel a little bad about yelling, but still have more than an iota of self-acceptance about it. Who decided that I could rightfully think that my three-year old had it coming – my shrill voice, or face twisted in anger?
I’ve whined back to her with a level of snark that I didn’t waa-ant to give her a hug since she’d just kicked me. I’ve pushed her aside and said, “Just. Go.” I’ve made her little lip curl up with a kind of sadness that doesn’t happen when her dad leaves, or she falls down, or she can’t find her doggie.
I’ve scared her into silent acquiescence.
I don’t win any awards, because I did it without spanking her. In fact, it might make me more cruel because psychological damage is much longer lasting than a stinging ass is – I know this one, for a fact.
But then.
She was younger – old enough to be able to listen the first six times, but young enough that if she were a different kid, distraction tactics might’ve worked – and she was playing with the hot water tap in the bathroom. I was right there, telling her not to touch them, removing her hand, carrying her off of the stool she was standing on and transporting her in front of her toys in her bedroom.
“Leave them alone. You’ll burn your hand” became, “I said…“ until it threatened, by the 13th time of her putting her damn hand back on the damn tap and turning it on (the hot water tanks in my apartment building are set waaaaaay above scalding, which is why it was such a concern), to become “get your goddamn fucking hand off of the tap.”
I’ve never sworn in her direction and I don’t plan to, ever. So instead, I breathed and said calmly, “if you touch the tap again, I will slap your hand.”
I thought she would have been scared. But I should have known better, since she’s my child and her father’s child, and we’ve both almost always been about the grandiose, “oh yeah? Bring it, fuckers” our whole lives. She is, too.
She looked at me, didn’t even weigh it out, stuck her tongue out of the side of her mouth and turned the tap. And I slapped her (wet) hand. Not hard, but come on, it was a wet hand.
And then, she cried and looked at me like, how could you?! and something in me broke a little and my eyes got a tad glassy, and just as I was about to gather her up in my arms and whisk her into a room I’d fill with love, she recovered herself and turned on the tap, again.
Shock doesn’t explain it. Especially when I asked her if she wanted me to slap her hand again and she held it out for me. I decided then and there that even if I was okay with physical punishments, they wouldn’t work for this kid.
But then.
She got tall enough and smart enough and wily enough to be able to come into the living room during the early morning or on the rare occasion that I took a nap without me waking. She would stand on the coffee table (that I’ve since gotten rid of), climb onto the window ledge, and open the window. We live on the second floor and below my window – one of those waist-to-ceiling-height numbers that swings open, not slides up or anything – is concrete. The odds of her plummeting to her death, if not pretty harsh injury? Extremely great.
Every time, I woke up because she wasn’t quite sneaky enough and I would hear her fucking around with the window’s lever, the table could creak once her full weight was put on it, or climbing onto the ledge.
On. To. The. Window. Ledge. Of. Death.
The first time, I freaked the fuck out at a decibel level equal to the chorus from this song. Then she did it again within a few days. And pushed her into her room, angrily, threatening her that if her Daddy was here, he would spank her and I would let him.
Which of course is a cop out because: a) I wasn’t taking responsibility for wanting to smack her, myself, b) I’d always told him that if he ever did hit her, I’d remove his visitation, since we were so polarized on the spanking issue, and c) he’s a huge softy when it comes to her, so even if he talked the talk about spanking her, I dunno if he ever actually would.
Anyway, I threatened that he would and she took it seriously for all of two days – during which time she also figured out how to unlock a previously undiscovered, unused child-safe doorknob lock thingy – and then I woke up to her doing it again, but this time, the window was open all the way.
I dragged her off of that window ledge faster than I’ve ever done anything before and I carried her into her room and I stood her in front of the mirror and I spanked her once – hard enough to hurt, but not for more than a few seconds – and before she could look at me, I walked out and left her there to look in the mirror at herself, crying.
I smoked. I shook. I wanted nothing more than to beg for her forgiveness. I wanted to, I don’t know, tell the world what an abusive failure I was as a parent, but when CPS has already been called on you once because you’re crazed and too honest about post-partum and resentment, you don’t exactly jump to publicize that you just purposely hurt your child.
I didn’t do anything but walk back in her room when we were both calm and explain to her why I had hurt her and to listen to her when she told me why it made her sad, and then to tell her how sad it would make me if she had fallen out of the window and died and I would have never seen her again.
She cried more, then.
I’ve walked around with guilt over that scene since it happened, never quite feeling right about it, always feeling as if it was my failure to wake up, or child-proof the window better, or throw out the table sooner, or move, that should have been blamed – not my ridiculously stubborn child, who will do exactly as she pleases, despite the consequences, even when she fully understands them.
But we didn’t repeat that scene, either.
Probably mostly because I got rid of the table. Still.
But then.
After the sleepover before last, she refused to go to bed at home. Two hours of whining, alternating with screaming, shrieking, yelling, kicking, punching, pissing and pleadings for hugs, kisses, massages, water, books, animals and blanket-rearranging had me frayed, to put it mildly.
We’re surrounded by neighbours in a wood-frame building. In her room, I can hear the conversations at a party next door, and I know if the woman upstairs is wearing runners, sensible heels or fuck me boots. You hear everything. Which means that there’s a very real possibility that one day, someone will complain about my daughter’s banshee-like pipes and we will get a warning and then we will get kicked the fuck out. So I told her that. Without the fuck.
I pleaded.
I begged for her to be quieter. To just stop. I was crying, I was so frustrated, asking her what do you want?! What will make you just. stop. and gotosleep! And she wasn’t talking, or reasoning, or capable of hearing me over the sound of her own vocal chords.
By this point, we were both too far gone to be calm, I guess.
And I got to the finger-jabs-in-the-air punctuated.words.said.through.teeth. point of the evening. She was warned. She was appeased, even. I said I was losing my cool and that if she didn’t stop shrieking, it was going to be a bad scene. In my scary mom voice.
I said, gruffly, “Good. Night.” and I turned out the light, and I shut the door.
Before I could turn away from it, she was twice as loud as she’d been before and I snapped.
The door was thrown open and I grabbed her hand and I slapped it. Like, for real. It didn’t leave a mark, later, but it did for the time that it took me to look her in the eyes as her face crumbled in on itself, to shut the door and rush to the window, almost hyperventilating, almost puking.
I had just become my father.
I hadn’t hit her as a means to quiet her or teach a lesson. It had been because I just lost it and being hurtful was the thing that happened – there wasn’t even thought involved. I was out of control and I was and still am, more horrified with myself about that than I’ve ever been about anything or anyone in my life.
Within two minutes, I was at her bedside with my face pressed up close to hers, crying and telling her I was sorry. Pleading with her to forgive me. Kissing her little hand, pressed between my two shaky ones, over and over. For ten minutes, I told her how wrong I was, and how she was so much more important and deserved so much better than that. For ten minutes after that I rocked her in my lap and smoothed her hair away from her tear-streaked face, dripping my own into her eyes.
For all of the time since that happened, I can’t think about it without crying and feeling nauseous. Snot’s running down my face right now but I don’t dare sniffle because it might be the thing that sets the gag reflex to malfunction.
So.
I was never going to spank my child. Not because I thought it was de rigueur to make such a statement, but because I knew from my childhood and from experiences with ex-lovers how fast the sleeping dragon can be awakened. How easy it can be to go from moderately annoyed to not aware of what you’re doing. I figured, with my child, I would never open the door, to allow any negative form of touch to be okay – despite its intended lesson.
But I did. And then, I did. And then, even if it doesn’t have a lasting effect on Zoë, it always will on me.
So, when you’re thinking about how someone spanking their child is wrong, think of that person and the circumstances, not just the act – maybe their child is about to jump out of a window.
And when you’re thinking that you’ll never fill-in-the-blank, consider if you can really promise that to yourself or the Internet.
And really, when you’re judging someone specific or a group of people for slapping their child’s butt or hand or cheek or whatever, think that maybe, just maybe, their self-judgment is a thousand times worse than you could ever berate them with in some blog’s comments.
Let’s help each other grow and heal, okay?
