The Making of an Ivy Leaguer

A Manhattan mother sued her 4 year old’s pre-school for not properly preparing her child for an Ivy League education. That would be like me suing Gatorade for not giving my kid the nutrients to be an Olympic athlete. The mother claimed that the $19,000 a year pre-school had the children doing finger paints and teaching shapes and colors (gasp) instead of preparing for the ERB, an admissions test children must take to get into New York City’s highly competitive, elite private schools and that by not preparing her properly, it damaged her daughter’s chances of one day attending an Ivy League school. The mom called the pre-school’s program more of a “big playroom” rather than the advertised age specific learning curriculum she wanted for her daughter. She says her daughter was forced to play with 2 year olds, and became bored by the less than stimulating atmosphere. She accused the school of committing fraud, wants her $19,000 back and is organizing a class action lawsuit for other parents dissatisfied with the pricey school’s ways.

The pre-school we sent our daughters to, which wasn’t much less than the one this Manhattan mom was paying for, was organized, creative chaos. We lovingly referred to it as a “semi-hippie” environment which was completely developmentally based, child led learning. The school’s nickname around town was, “The Naked School” because most of the time when you arrived to pick your kids up at the end of the day, they’d be running around in a diaper, undies or au natural, digging in the mud, smearing paint on themselves or others, dressing up in construction hats or frilly dresses – usually the girls in the hats, the boys in the dresses. In fact when my oldest went to kindergarten, her biggest adjustment was that she’d have to keep her clothes on. On the first day of school she earnestly asked us, “You mean I can’t take my clothes off?” She was somewhat disappointed, but she got over it.

Our pre-school did not believe in work sheets or skill drills. They read to the children, supported their play, encouraged their imaginations and curiosity, guided them in getting along with each other and showed them how to use their words to express who they are and what they needed. They supported the children’s learning, and they supported the parents as we discovered how to parent and how to help our children learn. As kindergarten approached, some parents worried that their kids wouldn’t be properly prepared. I remember one parent meeting which turned tense as a father complained that he didn’t see enough focus on ABCs and 123s. Others grumbled in agreement, expecting that very pricey tuition check to deliver more than clay sculptures, finger paint drawings and unabashed nudity. But we had faith in what they were doing (or we were too naïve to know we shouldn’t) and realized that, for our child, this was the program that would work for her. And it did. Without the pre-school using flash cards or worksheets, alphabet drills or comprehension tests to prep her for kindergarten, without us fretting over her classroom skills and competencies, Nicole left pre-school and entered kindergarten at 4 years old, about two years above grade level in English and math and ready for her academic career which would some day lead to…whatever school she wants to go to.

The other day, my youngest, Natalie, informed me that she was going to Stanford for college. I told her I thought that was a fine school but asked her what she was going to do if she didn’t get in. She informed me that even if she wasn’t accepted, she was going to go. She planned to show up anyway and go to class every day until they had no choice but to let her in. That’s the other thing our pre-school instilled in our kids – unbridled self-confidence and the idea that anything is possible. Stanford better look out, Natalie is coming, like it or not.

I think a great deal of craziness like this woman suing her pre-school is because some people don’t have enough meaningful things to do in life. If this mother had more to do, she wouldn’t waste her time fretting that her four year old might some day not get into Harvard because of a bad pre-school experience. So, you had one bad year, the next will be better. Colleges, even the Ivy League, don’t judge kindergarten math scores when evaluating you for acceptance. I’m sure the Manhattan mom's kid is smart, I’m sure she’ll do well in life regardless of a bad pre-school match, but to sue over it? Crazy. The funny thing would be if after all that, the kid decided to go to a state school. Who’s the mom gonna sue then?

For more on the story, check out the NY Daily News piece - http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2011/03/14/2011-03-14_manhattan_mom_sues_19kyr_preschool_for_damaging_4yearold_daughters_ivy_league_ch.html

Bad Day at the Grocery Store

Not that going grocery shopping is ever a really pleasant experience for me – I generally hate it – but last week I had a particularly rough time. I’m not one of those people who actually enjoy strolling the aisles, looking for new items, sampling the cut up fruit in the produce section, seeing what’s cooking in the deli. I usually am sandwiching my grocery run between work or school or some other unmovable deadline and have about an hour to do two weeks worth of shopping. I have so much to get because most of the time I wait between shopping trips until my cupboards are bare and I’m sending my kids to school with marshmallows as a snack and trying to pretend there’s some type of nutritional value in it.

I hate being rushed and every time I am in the store, I am rushed. Rushed or badgered. The badgering usually happens when I make the mistake of bringing my children with me and I have to endure trying to hurry through the store while fending off pleas for Pop Tarts and Doritos which they try to surreptitiously sneak into the cart while they think I’m not looking. But I’m always looking – that thing about mothers having eyes in back of their heads – never believed it when I was a kid, but now that I’m a mother, I know it’s true!

Then there is the price issue. I hate that everything is so expensive. I know that I’m frugal, not only out of need, but by genetics. I come from a long line of cheap on one side of my family – cheap to the point of ridiculousness in some cases, as I remember my father wearing his shoes until he had holes in them…really, on a doctor’s salary??? And I know I have to curb that instinct in myself. But I do find the price of food at the grocery store so irritating, particularly these days – a buck each for an apple, $5 for butter, $25 dollars for a value pack of steaks – where’s the value in that??? Also, I’m so appalled by the prices of everything that I walk through the store talking (often to myself) about the price of the items (which incidentally seem to be put in smaller size packages just as the prices are going up).

Then at check out, I leave the store with over two hundred dollars of groceries in about a bag and a half - bags which I had to supply myself. I hate it. So basically, a trip to the grocery store for me is about being rushed, frustrated and talking to myself to the point of looking like a lunatic. You can see why the overall experience doesn’t thrill me. But now, I have something else to worry about at the grocery store – my daughter.

I ran into the store last week to buy a few items and dragged Nicole with me. At the check out line, I started chatting with the grocery clerk, an affable guy who is probably as old as some of the shoes I have in my closet (remember my father and the holes???). We talked about movies and the weather, he gave me my receipt and I pushed my cart filled with the bags I brought and about enough food to feed us for a day, to the elevator. As the door closed, Nicole said, “Oh, I wish I were ten years older.” I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about. I couldn’t even imagine. And then it hit me…the grocery clerk. After picking my jaw up off the floor I asked her to repeat what she said to clarify. I have this paranoid fear that I’m losing my hearing or going slightly crazy (a fear which didn’t develop until I had children), so I often asked my kids to repeat what they’ve said so I know the crazy is coming from their mouths and not me. Nicole rolled her eyes and repeated the horrifying words she’d said only a moment earlier, “I wish I were ten years older…” Brain cells were misfiring as I tried to figure out if I should show her how horrified I was by her statement, be angry or act calm. I felt I had to have the right response, I just had no idea what that was. Instead I said the oh-so-mature and well thought out response, “Yuck.”

I realized the phrase, “Oh, I wish I were ten years older,” is one of many phrases that I really don’t want to hear from my kids as they grow older. It started me thinking about others that are on my list of phrases you never want to hear your child say:

I woke up with this weird tattoo.

A lot of girls do it at this age.

It was only 3 or 4 grams.

They said it would be off my record in six months.

He does not wear more makeup than I do.

Spring break in Vegas!

I’m sure there are others, many others I will shudder to hear. For now, suffice it to say, I won’t be going back to that grocery store for a while. I could try online grocery shopping with at home delivery. But I’m afraid of what she’d say about the delivery guys.

At the End of the World

We live in Los Angeles, in the city, not the mountains. It’s been decades since the city saw anything approaching white wintry weather. Yet last weekend it hailed, and then it snowed. This weekend it’s 80 degrees. Wacky weather like this always makes me wonder if the end of the world is coming.

As we sat at the table eating lunch and the first pieces of hail started to fall, my daughters started to scream. They’d never seen hail before, never seen snow actually falling. They are true California girls and since neither David or I have any need to rush up into the mountains and subject ourselves to the cold and snow we moved out here to get away from, the girls haven’t seen a great deal of the wintry stuff! Nicole was scared – had all kinds of questions about what the hail was and why we were having this crazy weather. All over the country the weather had been weird during the week – from massive snow on the East coast to flooding in the Midwest and now snow in L.A. As we sat watching it hail, there were more screams and laughter, great excitement mixed in with a little concern about what was going on with our weather, our environment. I jokingly said, it was the end of the world. Nicole, who has a tendency to take everything I say very seriously, panicked and started to yell at me not to say things like that. That of course prompted her father, who can’t resist an opportunity to tease her, to wonder aloud if we shouldn’t be packing up, getting ready for the final judgement. That sent Nicole off the deep end. Natalie, however, looked up from her lunch and asked, “At the end of the world, will there be more quesadillas?” That’s my Natalie, never one to miss lunch.

But the world has seemed as out of whack these days as the weather. From the retaliations to the protests rolling across the Middle East, to the shooting rampages in the U.S. and dealing with the pain and suffering of strangers, friends and family coping with the economic crisis as we look at paying $4.19 a gallon for gas and two hundred bucks a week to feed a family of four, things seem as if they are in constant flux, looking for normal, but not knowing what normal is anymore. It worries me, I find no calm in it and I struggle with how to explain the nuttiness of the world to my kids – informing them without upsetting them.

They are no longer of the age where I can turn off the TV and pretend that they are too young to know what is going on anyway. They need to know, want to know. Even if I did try to shelter them, they get information from other sources now anyway – friends, TV, radio, Internet - so better to “mom up” and tell them directly rather than letting them hear it in the streets. Nicole, my oldest, was in the room when the news reported about a man arrested for the kidnapping and rape of a middle schooler. She heard the lead to the story before I could change the channel and asked me about it. I explained in the most basic, non-descriptive way that the man had tried to take a child and hurt her. Nicole clarified, saying, “He tried to have sex with her.” So much for keeping it simple. I worry how much she knows about things that I think she doesn’t know yet. After that, it opened up the floodgates for showing her tidbits from the news and seeing her reaction. I let her watch an interview with Charlie Sheen ranting about tiger’s blood and letting his girlfriends (I resisted the urge to call them bimbos) raise his kids and asked her what she thought. Nicole looked me straight in the eye and said, “He’s crazy, mom.” Funny how perceptive kids can be.

Things feel out of whack right now. As I get ready for the morning and consider going out to the beach today – after cleaning up the yard from last week’s snow – I am beginning to wonder if maybe the end of the world is coming. But if so, no need to worry. As Natalie has confirmed, at the end of the world, they will be serving quesadillas. In that case, how bad could it be? I hope mine comes with chicken.

What’s a Mother To Do?

A mom in Florida, tired of her teenage son’s bad grades, decided the only way to motivate him to improve was to humiliate him. She drove him to a busy street corner, made him get out of the car and walk around with a body-size sign which read, “GPA 122…honk if I need an education.” I get her reason for doing it. She felt desperate, unable to find any other way to motivate her son to do well in school. She’d tried helping him with homework, grounding him, lecturing, taking away his phone and other privileges, but nothing worked. When she and the boy’s father, both of whom failed to finish high school, took their son into the principal’s office to discuss the problem and the boy ignored them all, the mom had enough. That’s when she got the idea for the sign. But honestly, when has humiliation ever worked on anyone to get them to do anything you wanted them to do? Getting a teen (or in my case a tween) to do anything you want them to do, when you want them to do it, can be next to impossible without Herculean effort. Getting a teenage boy with school issues to do better in class by parading his failure on the street corner and having cars honk at him – not a great plan. It certainly won’t be the “ah ha” moment in this kid’s life which will cause him to mend his school ditching, homework avoiding ways. It will be a horrible memory burned into his soul that will cause him pain and resentment and may make him to act worse instead of acting better. But for his mom, it was, perhaps in her mind, an easy fix to a desperate situation.

In the article in the Tampa Bay Times, http://www.tampabay.com/news/humaninterest/article1152321.ece, the mother, Ronda Holder, 33, explains that she has five other children, all of whom are doing well in school. She didn’t want to see her son, James, 15, end up on the streets because he didn’t get an education. She said that up until last year, his grades were good, but then when he entered 8th grade, his grades suddenly tanked. There are so many things unsaid in this case which make me wonder what is really going on. When a good student’s grades suddenly go bad, there is usually a specific reason: conflict with teacher or another student, bullying, an undiagnosed learning issue, joining a troublesome social clique. The response to the change isn’t humiliation, but investigation. Asking to see his homework and offering to help is a start, but before going to the principal, the intervention should start with the teacher. If the parents and teacher together aren’t effective, then the next step (which eventually happened after the sign incident) is to try to arrange for tutoring. The mom should have also looked into learning and psychological assessments to see if those were affecting her son’s grades. But really, the first place she should have started was with her son, sitting down with him, talking, taking the focus off of the grades and trying to get to the underlying issue of the sudden downturn in performance. All of that is a lot of work, it’s frustrating and difficult and confusing. Some parents don’t know the steps to take to deal with difficulties in school and don’t have the support either at school or from those around them to guide them on a path that helps the situation rather than aggravates it. Yes, James is now getting the help he needs – he’s enrolled in an after school tutoring program, and his grades are improving, but not only was he widely (thanks to tv and the Internet), publicly humiliated (hell, I’d be surprised if he doesn’t get his own reality show), his family has been red flagged by the Florida Department of Children and Families because someone who drove by, saw the sign felt that the mother’s actions constituted child abuse. And in some ways, it did.

This is a tough and sad story to me. I don’t side with the mother’s action, but I understand it. But I also feel as if her action, her parenting misstep could have been avoided. Kids without an education, young black men, in particular, are at extreme risk of being lost to poverty, drugs and crime if there is no early intervention. And certainly, this was a case were a good kid was about to be lost. It is clear that this thirty-three year old woman, a hair dresser without a high school diploma, who was only 17 when her son was born and had five kids soon after him, was trying to do the best she could. She values what she didn’t get – an education – and wants better for her children, which is admirable. Except humiliating your child isn’t that way to do it. And sadly, before she got to that point, there wasn’t a teacher, counselor, principal or other parent she could turn to who could help her navigate the problem without resorting to the sign. Not only had her son fallen through the cracks at school and not received the help he needed, but the mom did, too. Before DCF puts her family on lock down, I hope the school and community uses the incident as an opportunity to look at what services they have for parents to help them deal with situations before they become desperate. In this case, it was humiliation by sign. In another case, it could be worse. Remember the mom, also in Florida, who shot both her teens for mouthing off? Yes, that is extreme compared to the sign incident, but the similarities - a desperate parent with no support or help in a troubled situation - are clear. Both cases, in their own way, are tragic and avoidable.


BTW – a recent blog post I wrote is being featured in a Black History Month blog-a-thon on Momsrising.org. Check out the articles at: http://www.momsrising.org/blog/celebrating-black-motherhood-and-families-a-black-history-month-blog-carnival/

Tigers Belong In a Zoo

I haven’t read Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (Penguin Press) yet and I may not unless I have time to kill at the airport. It is the book everyone has been up in arms about since excerpts of it were released in the Wall Street Journal. It’s the kind of story parents like to take up arms against – over achieving mother who emotionally torments and severely restricts her children from the simple pleasures in life like playdates and leisure time in order to turn them into the type of uber achiever she requires them to be. The book has a provocative title that makes for a great headline – Tiger Mother – and an attractive, accomplished mother whose own credentials – Yale law professor – make it tough to argue with the notion that just maybe her way, the Chinese way – makes for better parenting. But it doesn’t. No one way is the way. There is no one child or one parent. Each are different, each require different approaches and styles to help and guide the children on the road to the person they are destined to be – not the person that I as the parent require them to be. If there was one way that was right, raising children would be much easier than it is.

I hate these types books because it gets people in an uproar - there were actually almost ten times more comments posted on the Wall Street Journal website in response to the story on this book than there were on coverage of the Arizona shootings. Really? How one parent raises her kids (brags about it in print and uses cultural comparisons as a weapon in her argument) is more compelling than a political assassination attempt where lives were lost and serious questions were raised about gun possession and the identification and support of the mentally ill in our country? To me, that’s a sign that our priorities our out of whack.

The controversy around the Tiger Mother book reminds me of the brouhaha that sprung up a few years back when Lenore Skenazy wrote about letting her 9 year old son take the subway home by himself in New York City. Her stunt reinvented her writing career and made her the guru of the free range parenting movement, which promotes a hands-off parenting style.

Free range parenting, tiger mothering, I guess if you want to sell a book, you have a gimmick, but gimmicks are not the best way to raise children. I think that somewhere in the middle is where the path lies and the path twists and turns differently for every family. You will be influenced by your own upbringing, by your cultural traditions, your own family/work life juggle - in some cases even by what meds you are or should be on. But you will find your parenting path without clinging to or rallying against books like Tiger Mother. Honestly, as a parent, I really have way too much to do than to worry about a mom who won’t let her kids go to sleepovers or playdates – it just means my tv watching, computer game playing, junk food indulging kids won’t be socializing with her robotots. And I have the feeling that regardless of how I raise mine or she raises hers, they will all turn out just fine.

Plastic Bubbles

I was sick this week. So was one of my daughters. No one likes being sick, at least not as an adult. I have vague memories of enjoying it as a kid, probably because missing a day of school felt like a treat, not a burden. As a kid, I could curl up in bed, sip soup, watch reruns of Hawaii Five-0 (the one with Jack Lord) and doze off while recovering from whatever ailed me. I didn’t have to worry about all the work and email catch up I’d have to do, all the appointments I’d miss or how I’d pick up my kids from school if I was laid out.

I’d been fighting this thing for a week, thought I was better and then relapsed. It came on suddenly, first the feeling of exhaustion, then the sore throat, and stuffiness, then the constant feeling of being chilled to the bone. No matter how high I turned up the heat in my office I couldn’t warm up. I think at one point I had the thermostat on 80, causing anyone who came to my office to stand at the door and comment on the sauna-like quality of the room rather than enter.

My daughter’s teacher was sick and the classroom aide said half the class was out. Another parent emailed to tell me her doctor had warned a nasty virus was going around. As careful as I am about germs (okay, mildly neurotic is really a better way to describe it), I was surprised I picked something up. I hate to admit it, but I’m the type who wipes down phones and light switches, stopped using bed spreads in hotels after seeing a 60 Minutes report, and hand sanitize with religious fever after a trip to the ATM because of an article which said the buttons were dirtier than public restroom toilet seats! But despite all my efforts to stay germ free and healthy, a bug found its way into our house.

I don’t get sick often and my kids are pretty good when it comes to dodging colds and the flu as well. But here we are, buried under the covers, shivering, coughing, sore throats, feeling generally miserable and wondering if we’ll feel better before going through another box of Kleenex. My oldest kid, the only one in the house who is healthy, suggested we wrap ourselves in plastic like John Travolta in that movie, the Boy in the Plastic Bubble. But then my younger kid reminded her that he died at the end of the movie. Honestly, it was so long ago that I don’t how the movie ended – I just have memories of him spending his life in a bubble to ward off germs which would mean nothing to the rest of us but which would be deadly to him. There is so much concern, so many reports and studies about how many ways we can come in contact with nasty germs and get sick – that I am starting to feel like John in the bubble. But sometimes, despite how careful you are with the 409 and the hand sanitizer, there is a germ with your name on it. So I’ll sit back in bed, sip soup, doze off and see if there are episodes of the new Hawaii Five-0 on t.v.

Working Mothers Make Kids Fat

A new report (http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110204/hl_afp/healthusobesitychildwomen)
has linked childhood obesity to working mothers. Researchers from the American University at Washington, the University of Chicago and Cornell University, found that in a study of 900 elementary- and middle-school-aged children in 10 cities whose mothers worked, those kids were more likely to be overweight than kids with stay-at-home moms. The report claimed that the reason for the disparity in weight between kids from working vs. non-working moms was the tendency of working mothers to feed their children more fast food, processed/prepackaged food and junk food than stay-at-home mothers.

I’m irritated by this report on several levels. Do working mothers really need yet more things to feel guilty about? Don’t we have enough trying to juggle marriage, family and work without being accused of inadequately feeding our children just because we want to (and in more cases than not) need to work outside of the home. There are already so many things working mothers feel guilty about – missing soccer games, class field trips, not being able to attend school meetings scheduled at 9 am. Many would go to therapy to address our guilt if we had the time or money, but we’re too busy working and feeding our kids Jack-in-the Box to relax on a shrink’s couch. This type of research really isn’t beneficial to supporting working mothers or for that matter, working parents. Because let’s face it, dads have to claim some responsibility too. Mom’s are the only ones coming home exhausted and stuffing their kids with fast food rather than dragging themselves into the kitchen and cooking up something with at least two colors of vegetables in it.

Another reason this report bothers me is that in the last ten years I think much has been done to bring together the parenting community and to mend the rift (real or imagined) between working and stay-at-home mothers. There has been an effort to unite around mutual concerns for our children through support groups, online forums, parenting classes, all designed to discuss, share and learn best practices for how to raise our children regardless of whether you punch a time card or not. In my opinion, this type of research only goes to widen the divide.

Instead of research like this which concludes that working mothers feed their children worse than stay-at-home moms – and yes, I have often ranted in this blog about having nothing in the house to eat and sending my kids to school with carbo loaded lunches not because they were training for a marathon, but because there was nothing in the fridge to send except leftover mac and cheese and pound cake - but that is the exception, not the rule. There are so many ways that working moms can and do keep up high nutritional standards despite pursuing a career:

•Shopping and cooking for the week on Saturday and Sunday so that healthy meals can be refrigerated to eat the rest of the work week
•Serving frozen fruit smoothies with yogurt when there’s no fresh fruit in the crisper
•Tossing canned veggies with just about any pasta in a pinch

Those are just a few tricks in the working mom’s arsenal to fire off before hitting the drive-thru. My favorite go-to is online shopping at 4am to order groceries (with free delivery) when a trip to the store conflicts with too many late nights working. Those are all viable alternatives to the fast food and junk food that this report says is the diet of kids of working moms.

I bet those researchers thought this was a helpful addition to the conversation about childhood obesity and its causes, but honestly, it’s not. It feels like a gross generalization about the state of how working mothers feed their children based (probably) on a limited group of research subjects. How and what working mothers feed their children, any mother for that matter, will vary by region, education, socioeconomic status, ethnic background and a variety of other factors that make me very skeptical of the conclusions in this report. I think rather than lay the blame for fat kids at the door of working mothers, perhaps the emphasis should be more about encouraging all parents to support healthy eating and lifestyle choices for all our children.

In my initial anger at hearing this report, I had a fleeting thought of driving by the University of Chicago and in protest, pelting the building with Twinkies. I still might do it, but I have a conference call and a meeting at work later and probably won’t be able to get to the grocery story to stock up on junk food.