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.

Does LAUSD Penalize Students for Investigating Educational Options?

My kid, like a lot of other kids this time of year, is looking into middle school options. Trying to be the conscientious parent, I sent Nicole’s teacher a note far in advance saying that we would miss one day of school the following week because she was going on a middle school tour and interview. In other words, she was going to miss a day of school to try out another school. Nicole collected all the work that was going to be done in class that day, stayed up late worked on it that evening (after attending classes during the day at the other school) and turned it in completed the next day. But the school wouldn’t accept the note I sent in because it said the district only considered illness and death of an immediate family member as excused absences. I remember getting irritated the last time I took my kids out of school - it was for the funeral of my brother’s mother-in-law, a dear lady who was like a grandmother to my kids – and I was told that because she wasn’t an immediate family member, it would be considered an unexcused absence. So basically, my husband and I will have to drop dead before the school will allow our kids to come see us into the hereafter. How comforting. But visiting another school to which you are considering sending your child, even if it is another LAUSD school, is called it an unexcused absence and according the LAUSD attendance policy – have fun with that little bit of light reading – after 3 full days of unexcused absences or three tardies of more than thirty minutes, my kid will be marked as truant, which can lead to consequences that include fines and prosecution of the parents. Really? So a kid gets dinged for trying to investigate educational options, perhaps ends up with something stinky on her record and her mom and dad get a visit from the city questioning what type of parenting we’re engaging in, which is a question I ask myself enough already. Particularly yesterday when I didn’t have time to get to the store to go shopping and found the only thing in the house for dinner that wasn’t unidentifiable, leftover from Thanksgiving - yes, that is cranberry sauce in the Tupperware on the top shelf- or made with so many preservatives and sugar that it won't spoil for another 18 months, were the fixings for macaroni and cheese and quesadillas – a carb and dairy fiesta without a vegetable or fruit in sight! Needless to say, my daughters loved it.

So I go and try to speak with the teacher about it. His hands are tied because it comes from the district and he suggests I talk to the principal, who says his hands are tied because it comes from the district. You’re getting the idea here - it comes from the district is the code word for buzz off and stop bothering us and we’ll placate you by passing you on to some anonymous person at the district office who will (because we know how flexible and accommodating large bureaucratic offices can be, particularly one like LAUSD who listens to its constituents about as well as my husband hears me when I’m asking him to take out the trash) ignore you. So I go talk to the office secretary – who oftentimes can move mountains when those above her can’t and I’m told (or dare I say talked down to) that I’m making more out of it than I need to, that those policies are in place for children who are habitually truant and that I should ignore the situation and just let my kid get the five unexcused absences that she is going to receive after we visit the other schools we are considering for sixth grade.

Surely I can’t be the only parent who is taking their kid to look at other schools and who is dealing with this issue, so I asked around to find out what the other parents were doing and most of them said they were lying and saying their child was sick. Clearly, I was the fool for trying to be conscientious and help my kid stay caught up on their work and told the school what we were doing. Silly me. I guess in my mind I couldn’t possibly imagine that you would be penalized for going to another school – even other LAUSD schools who schedule their audition/interview times during the LAUSD school day, ensuring that you will receive a tardy that day. Ah, the wisdom of the system. So, basically, LAUSD forces you either to lie or face the consequences for trying to get a good education for your child.

So, after bothering the secretary a second time, risking her wrath as she's raising her voice at me to stop worrying about this, it comes out what this is really all about…money. Foolish me. It’s always about money. Every day that a child is absent from school, the school loses funds from the state – I don’t know how much exactly, someone once told me it was $30 per day per student, but I don’t know for sure - but to keep from losing that money, they want your kid in school, even if your kid is involved in the academic endeavor (not going to Disneyland)of trying to figure out where they are going to go next on their educational journey. What if a kid does something stellar - wins an award, gets some type of recognition, has a chance for a special internship day and misses school? Unexcused! Next time I’ll know to lie.

So, does LAUSD penalize students for investigating educational options? Feels like it to me. And while I know these policies are in place to address the issue of kids facing real academic and attendance problems, why punish the kids trying to do the right thing along with those who are in serious academic trouble due to truancy? Don’t just lump them all in together under a blanket policy or staff who feel unable (or unwilling, I’m still cranky about how the school handled it but maybe because I’ve only had one cup of coffee today – no cream in the refrigerator because I still haven’t done the grocery shopping) to help. This is why the system is broken in so many ways, big and small. Unable to meet the needs of all, they focus on the punitive and not the supportive, the rigid and not the flexible, and on the ordinary rather than the extraordinary.

Behind Closed Doors

There is a street a few blocks over from my house that is very pretty. Tall palms trees and sidewalks usually filled with dog walkers and kids rollerblading. Impromptu games of hockey are played in the street. Doors are left open during the day as children run from house to house visiting their friends and there always seems to be someone sitting on a lawn chair enjoying a soda and chatting with a neighbor. There is even one of those portable basketball nets that someone has moved to the curb where their trash cans would normally be, inviting anyone with a ball to shoot some hoops. At Halloween, the neighbors on that street go all out, elaborately decorating their homes, dressing in costumes to hand out candy to the kids and drinks to the adults and so many people flood the block from the surrounding streets that you feel as if you're part of a Mardi Gras crowd. They are no less festive at Christmas. Most of the street put up light displays, winding long strands of white lights up the tallest palm trees or wrapping them around the trim of their homes. On the Fourth of July mini flags are posted on the lawns and kids decorate their bikes with red, white and blue and follow a fire truck up and down the streets in a makeshift parade. It feels like a happy street, not unlike the one I live on - only with better coordination on their holiday celebrations. Last week, a woman on that block tried to commit suicide at six in the morning. She misfired and shot herself in the face. A surgeon friend of mine told me they often see that in the ER because despite how determined someone is to commit suicide with a gun, they often flinch when pulling the trigger and instead of firing into their mouth, they shoot up or to the side, causing a non-fatal (but still awful) injury.

I'm up at 4am on most mornings. Not by choice. But I find it is the only time of day where there is true quite in my life. My family is asleep, most of my friends back East are still snoozing or just waking up and going to work so I can't even distract myself by calling another time zone. I write from 4 to 6 before I start my day. I heard the ambulance cut through the silence of my early morning work time. Its sirens where loud but brief, followed by two police cars which raced to the scene. I didn't find out where they were going or know what had happened until I read a small article in a local digi-paper, not even an article really, more of a police scanner report describing the incident on the lovely little street a few blocks over.

I asked friends of mine who live on the street if they knew who it was and how she was doing. But none of the three I asked were even aware it had happened. They were asleep in their beds or in the shower or listening to talk radio while getting ready for work. They didn't hear the ambulance which was gone long before they left their houses for work or to take their children to school. No one on the street had told them about it. It happened and it was over.

I was caught off guard by how much I was saddened by the incident. I felt badly that behind all those doors on that lovely little street there was someone so sad, so desperate, a woman my age, with kids and a husband and maybe a dog or two, that she would try to kill herself at six in the morning and no one, not her neighbors, her friends, or even her family knew how badly she was suffering. She might be another mom at our school or someone I pass and smile at while picking out ripe fruit at Trader Joe's or wave to when I take my infrequent early morning power walks down her block. It felt like we should have known, shouldn't have missed her pain. But somehow, because everything on the outside seemed as perfect and idyllic as the street she lives on, everyone missed what was going on behind closed doors.

Martin and Abe

My seven year old got confused between the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement. She kept insisting that her first grade teacher taught them about Martin Luther King, Jr. and all the work he did to help people during the Civil War. It was a hilarious conversation as I tried to explain the two different time periods and what went on during each. She looked at me blankly, almost sadly, feeling sorry that I didn't have my facts straight and continued to insist that King was a great leader during the Civil War.

A friend of mine who teaches community college told me of a similar incident with her students. She gave them a test about the Civil War and in their essays, some of the students wrote about Martin Luther King, bus boycotts and the March on Washington. Are kids today just not paying attention in class or is it that this history, which seemed so recent thirty years ago, happened so long before they were born and is now so far in the past that it is tough for them to incorporate it firmly into their knowledge bank?

I remember growing up in the late 70s and early 80s and knowing old folks who had participated in the Civil Rights Movement, who had suffered under the Jim Crow laws of the South, who had been turned away from lunch counters, threatened for integrating neighborhoods and who had satiated their thirst at water fountains marked "Whites Only." These weren't stories heard in class or read in history books. These were tales told by grandparents, aunts, uncles, the neighbor on the stoop, my first boss, who was famous as one of a group who integrated a southern college with armed National Guard escorts, walking through a crowd of angry protesters spitting and hurling things at her. Even as a very young child, I vaguely remember once or twice taking road trips to visit grandparents without stopping because my folks were concerned that we might have trouble finding a motel that would be okay to stay at because we were black. So recognizing what the work of the Civil Rights Movement meant for underrepresented groups is something that feels so immediate. Yet despite exposing them to books, museum exhibits and movies -including one I wrote about Martin Luther King, Jr. - Our Friend, Martin - the Civil Rights Movement is still only a vague concept to my children (and apparently others), history that is in some ways as unconnected to them as the Boston Tea Party, the Emancipation Proclamation, or the Women's Suffrage Movement. They don't understand the ramifications of those events in history, they only experience the benefits. Is it a wonder then that they can confuse the Civil War with the Civil Rights Movement?

I worry that in our rush to push only science and math in schools, we will continue to lose touch with our past - with a visceral understanding of people, events and social movements which dramatically transformed our world. I still get shivers when I think about the Hiroshima survivor who came to speak to my class in third grade. Her perspective on WWII and the bombing in the Pacific was something I never would have gotten from a history book, something that helped me understand that historical act in a way that was connected to a person, not something done to an anonymous group of people. It made me look at history differently, and unlike my children and many others today who mix up when Abe and Martin were doing their things, I will never confuse WWI with WWII even though both happened long before I was born.