lightreads | Entries tagged with parenting

The Opposite of Spoiled by Ron Lieber

4/5. Book aimed mostly at middle-class and wealthy American parents on the general topic of instilling smarts and values about money in children.

Good, but I suspect you could get all of this content in a few explainers. His overarching point is to talk about money early and often, which, yes, sure. And relatedly that children of middle-class and wealthy parents are more likely than children of poor parents to not hear these conversations. He then gets into various related topics – consumerism, instilling generosity, etc. and generally ticks through a list of various approaches parents have taken to actively address it. Interesting, and a good project, but as I said, if you don’t have time for a short book, I have no doubt you can get advice in shorter form.

The Baby on the Fire Escape: Motherhood, Creativity, and the Mind-Baby Problem

3/5. Profiles of assorted women artists (mostly writers, all no longer with us) with attention to their childbearing and motherhood in relation to their creative work. The tensions, the felicities, the trials, the pregnancies wanted and aborted, the books written in stolen minutes, the (mostly useless) men.

I really like the project of this book, and many parts of it are great and thought-provoking. The abortions and their circumstances are particularly interesting, and these are just the ones publicly spoken of. One has to assume, for example, that Ursula Le Guin’s life would have gone very differently had her well-heeled parents not paid for an expensive (and safe) abortion during college.

My problem is that I don’t like Julie Phillips’s brain. I knew this – her much lauded bio of James Tiptree, Jr. drove me nuts. But here I am back again for another dose of her judginess, her unsourced conclusory assumptions about people’s emotional lives, her intense desire to boil human beings down to pithy elevator pitches. At least she knows it? She says at one point in this book that she was trying to approach these women’s lives, often tumultuous as they are, objectively. But she found herself judging Doris Lessing for, gasp, pearl clutch, once having sex while pregnant with a man who was not the father of her child. Yes, Julie. I know you are judging everyone. It’s what you do.

Would have been great if by another author. But don’t listen to me, everyone else seems to love her.

Content notes: All the things that go with maternity -- many sorts of pregnancies accidental and not, wanted and not. Miscarriage, infant loss.

Oh Crap!

2+/5? IDK, man. There are a lot of potty training books, but this tends to be the one at the top of a lot of people’s lists. I skimmed it, and on the one hand, there is useful information here. And, significantly, it is very refreshing to read a parenting book in which the author, gasp, swears. Unheard of.

On the other hand, she has strong opinions about lots of things, and she is dead wrong about one of the major ones, which makes you wonder about the rest of them. She strenuously argues that, if you haven’t potty trained by 30 months, all is terrible and everyone will suffer and you must do it immediately and it is going to be so hard, you guys. Casterbrook, to the contrary, trained with ease and minimal drama in, basically, a weekend, at age 37 months. So whatever, lady. I also really could have done without her theories about why kids get constipated (she thinks it’s the fact that parents are on the internet? Or stressed out? Or something? This was super eyerolly and hard to follow). Also, the sidebar on how she cured her kid’s eczema with the paleo diet was definitely a thing I could have gone without.

So, honestly, don’t bother with this one. Just google a few potty training cheat sheets and pick and choose your methods. That basically what I did, in the end.

How to Talk So Little Kids Will Listen

4/5. That rarest of rarities, a parenting book that isn’t either fundamentally crap or something done in 80,000 words that should be done in 3,000. This is useful, practical, and realistic. It also has, get this, examples in every single chapter featuring disabled children. Is that even allowed? The bulk of parenting media would say absolutely not.

On a basic level, though, the authors of this book share my values (somewhere in the respectful/gentle parenting space, but with a very practical bent) so this landed just right at the right time. Have I mentioned Casterbrook has turned three and is, uh, very gloriously loudly worriedly explosively brilliantly independently three? If you want a testimonial, I had been talking to him for days about a repeated power struggle we’ve been having, and I was getting nowhere. So I implemented a suggestion in this book – having the three of us sit around the table and each come up with multiple solutions to help him do the thing he did not want to do, with my wife writing them down in a numbered list, and notating them with stars and crossings out etc. as we weighed our options. And I’ll be damned, but this book was dead right that pre-literate and quasi-literate children absolutely lose their minds over having their ideas written down like that, and it turned the whole situation around.

The Highly Sensitive Child: Helping Our Children Thrive When the World Overwhelms Them

3/5. Discussion by a clinician of what it means to be highly sensitive – she’s talking about having high perceptivity/reactivity here, not being thin-skinned – and how best to parent such children.

I read about half of this, skipping liberally, which is the treatment 99% of parenting books deserve. On the one hand, some of the things she describes did make me have that startled feeling of being seen – for Casterbrook, and also for little me, who didn’t like crowds or noise and who liked to think deeply about everything.

On the other hand, if you look at the works cited, um. It’s all her? She’s made this whole thing up? Out of her observations and experiences, sure, but let’s not pretend this is some scientific inquiry into a widely-accepted phenomenon (which she does, here and there). It’s a discussion of temperament, and how to parent a certain type the best. It did give me a few ideas for Casterbrook, but nothing I couldn’t have come up with myself.

Also, she identifies herself as a highly-sensitive person, and she’s really, really, really invested in how being one is a good thing. Not just, like, subjectively, but for humanity, guys. I get the urge to convince skeptical parents that their children’s feelings are real and valid – God knows my parents disrespected and trampled my feelings and bodily sensations basically constantly – but honestly. It’s all a bit much.

The Gardener and the Carpenter by Alison Gopnik

2/5. I liked her other book a lot better. The thesis of this one is, at its simplest, that parents should not try to mold their children into any particular kind of people, but instead should nurture the sort of people those children intrinsically are. Which, uh, no shit? I guess there are people who need to be told that, but I’m not one of them. And she has very little research evidence to draw on here, unlike in her other book, and while she writes well about abstract philosophical concepts, that’s not what I wanted (the “science” in the subtitle is misleading, honestly).

Also, not for nothing, WTAF, Alison Gopnik. Explaining that parental love for children must be real and profound because parents still love their disabled children is, hoo boy. No one would love disabled children if there wasn’t an imperative to, being the implication. It was one of those moments where your opinion of someone falls precipitously in the course of like ten seconds. And let’s be real here – she’s propounding ideas that I have strong experiential evidence to believe the majority of people also hold, though many of those people who believe these things would strenuously deny it. But she wrote it down, and presumably reread it many times, and her editors read it, and they were all collectively like yup, that’s a winning argument right there and just. Fuck all that.

The Heart of Parenting: Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child by John Gottman and Joan Declaire

2/5. What it sounds like. I know a lot of people like his advice on marriage, but this book is rough going. There are nuggets of good information here – specifically, the example scripts for how to help a kid find solutions to social/emotional issues without imposing a solution on them – but the packaging is dire. Basically, this was written in the 90's based on, as far as I can tell, observational data from the 80's. The good advice in this book is framed as 'do this instead of hitting your children or telling them that they're stupid.'* Wow, thanks. And don't get me started on the entire chapter designed to convince the reader that dads** can be good parents, and should be. I mean, not incorrect, but oi. Oh, and there's the thing where they pull some extremely 90's scare tactics – if you don't teach your kids to handle their emotions, they will end up in gangs, that sort of thing.

I was looking for something to help people who are already good at accepting a child's emotions and honoring them, but who want some more systematic ways of teaching them to think about feelings. This book does have some advice about how to teach that, but it's slanted so completely to people in another reality that it's practically useless to me.

*I actually really wonder how this study worked. Some of the narratives they report are clearly child abuse to my eye, but the book treats them as bad parental choices, which is a different thing. Is this the difference 40 years makes? Or were they just not saying that they reported a few families to child services? Probably the first one, based on context, which, I was raised in the 80's/90's and thinking back on some of what was considered normal, yeah, yikes.

**No queer families allowed here, btw.

Simplicity Parenting: Using the Extraordinary Power of Less to Raise Calmer, Happier, and More Secure Kids

3/5. A mild-mannered parenting manifesto about how to simplify life – stuff, schedules, rhythms, etc. A mixed bag, like most parenting books. This is part ‘well no shit, spending more time with your child will likely improve your connection,’ part useful, and part middle-class nonsense to solve middle-class problems by way of a large amount of additional work that we are selling as less work. More pointedly, if you are, say, working 2 jobs as a single parent and barely keeping everyone fed, this book is going to probably make you feel much worse, not better. Mostly, though, it’s funny to read this book in the year of our pandemic 2021. It’s all going on about how modern parents struggle not getting to see their children enough and I’m like *stares into camera*.

The Emotional Life of the Toddler

3/5. A book discussing the various phases and forces operating beneath the surface of toddler emotions, most centrally the alternating waves of independence drive and safety drive that bring toddlers in and out, in and out. Useful for the exercise in taking toddler feelings seriously and giving them the courtesy of allowing them to be complex. To be fair, I didn’t need a book to tell me that Casterbrook’s occasional objection to having his clothes taken off – the same clothes he objected to getting put on hours earlier – is often an expression of a desire for control over his body and his environment. That has always seemed obvious to me. But this book credits toddlers with even greater depths than that, and also described eighteen-month-old Casterbrook’s separation anxiety to the letter, so there’s that.

I’m not sure it offered up all that many actionable solutions for me at this moment, as I already have a peaceful marriage and a safe home and a degree of self-awareness. By which I mean this book made me aware of a lot of ways I could make Casterbrook’s separation anxiety worse, but didn’t provide any particular way I could help him right now, which is probably because I can’t, and only a bit of time will do that.

I do want to flag some weirdly heteronormative comments in this book about fathers and mothers as gendered roles. Particularly notable as the book thinks it is not engaging in that sort of thing, and occasionally noted where the author wishes there was more research into queer family dynamics to back up her impressions that dynamics do not differ all that much with straight families (not sure I agree entirely with that, but I could be persuaded either way by, you know, good research).

No Bad Kids: Toddler Discipline Without Shame by Janet Lansbury

3/5. Pretty sure this is just a republish of a bunch of articles from her website with some extra organization. Useful if you know what you are getting into with respectful parenting types and can take or leave things. E.g., no, Janet Lansbury, I will not stop wearing my toddler because he loves it and it helps him refill his connectedness buckets at the end of the day, even though you think it unduly restrains his body or whatever. I don't even know what her real objection to babywearing is, I just, for pity's sake.

But the thing is her general philosophy – set boundaries clearly and calmly, be consistent, explain, connect, slow down, lean into big feelings – is basically our style instinctively, so there are some useful parts here for helping us think through things. And she's annoyingly dead right on occasion. I bookmarked the bit where she's talking about handling toddler resistance to things like nail cutting and her suggestion is to get your toddler to participate by asking which nail to clip first. I recounted this to my wife and we laughed because LOL, for real, we have been low-level fighting him on this for months. He's a pretty chill little guy, but he brings out the big "no!" for that, and her suggestion is just so ridiculous.

…Then we tried it. And it worked? Damn it.

What To Expect: The First Year

3/5. The specific thing I liked about this book is the way of presenting milestones for each month by probability – something like your baby will probably, your baby will likely, your baby might, your baby might even. It gave me a better sense than other lists did of Casterbrook's moderately weird but not concerning rate and order of doing things. Otherwise, I skimmed chapter headlines in each month's chapter a few weeks ahead, and occasionally found something useful.

The thing is though, this book is for straight cis people. They have this little note in the beginning about how yes, they only refer to mom and dad, but all you weird queer people should just read in your family configuration, but they're definitely not going to make an effort to use inclusive language. Which, first off, fuck you. And second off, lol. The nouns are the least of it. I think peak this book is the bit about gender expression for toddlers which was like "haha, yeah, you well-meaning parent setting out to raise a baby who isn't sexist, that's cute, but girls grow up to be women and boys grow up to be men, and we're all born like that, and that's science, so there."

So yeah. Not for my family, and they pretty much told me so in the introduction.

Nota bien: Apparently there is a more recent edition than mine, but when you need accessible formats you take what you can get.

The Montessori Toddler: A Parent's Guide to Raising a Curious and Responsible Human Being

3/5. I've been casually skimming this for a while, but picked up speed when I found Casterbrook, age 9 and ¾ months, repeatedly climbing up onto a table and dancing up there. Oki-doki, we're doing toddler now.

This is good as a guide to what the whole philosophy is about, for better or worse. For the better: there are some useful things in here, like a suggestion I found immediately effective to not narrate while showing your baby how to do something because they don't know whether to look at your hands or your face and get confused. And the general focus on independence as a healthy value is refreshing, as is the emphasis placed on physical respect, which is something I was memorably not given as a child.

To the worse, my goodness, the contortions they have to go through to justify this whole ban on fantasy play for children are really something, eh. The contention is that children can't distinguish real from imaginary, which (1) how are they supposed to develop the ability to if they aren't exposed to both? And (2) is in the process of being heavily undermined by a growing body of really interesting research – see Alison Gopnik on this topic for a good overview. Relatedly, apparently you should only give a toddler open-ended dressup clothes like a scarf and nothing too specific like a firefighter costume, because after all, a toddler can only pretend to be a firefighter in a firefighter costume. Which . . . uh? Have you met toddlers? They can be a firefighter ballerina no problem, what even.

I also have nebulously bad feelings about the emphasis this book places on creating "beautiful" spaces for toddlers. The author doesn't define the word, and it is doing a whole lot of culturally-specific values work that rubs me the wrong way for reasons I can't articulate.

So yeah. Montessori* is on the table for Casterbrook's eventual education, but I'm never going to be one of those people who goes all-in on it.

*Yes, I know there are different societies and flavors and whatever, don't @ me.

The Philosophical Baby

3/5. A book at the intersection of child development and philosophy. How do babies (she generally means 1-3 year olds) develop a sense of morality? How about love? What is it like, cognitively, to be a baby? More interesting than satisfying. Lots of big ideas and big questions here, and a notable lack of meaty answers. This is admittedly partly the fault of the data pool – there are lots of experiments to talk about, but they are generally small and observational and rely on heuristics like "babies look longer at novel things or actions" which are probably true in general but not exactly ironclad. The chapter on the development of love was particularly unsatisfying, as she seemed to treat attachment and love as synonymous, which seems incorrect to me.

Worth Reading, though, particularly for the chapters on pretending and morality which convinced me solidly of something I've suspected for a while: that toddlers are far more accurate at understanding reality than they are generally given credit for. See, e.g., that three-year-olds reliably understand the difference between rules – we sit still at snack time at pre school – versus moral codes – we don't hit – and are capable of explaining why rules vary but morals don't.

The Happiest Baby on the Block

2/5. I hated this book, but have to admit I also consulted it several times over the past few weeks. It's intended for parents of colicky babies. Casterbrook is actually a pretty chill little dude (thank God, I was a nightmare baby, so we worried) but the advice here about what sort of noise and motion soothes babies is still occasionally helpful.

But lordy this book is obnoxious. He goes on about how various indigenous peoples (the word "primitives" gets used, for real) have ancient baby wisdom, and is simultaneously like "here's this 'new' science only I can impart to you." Hmm. That's just the tip of the obnoxious iceberg, but you get the idea. Oh, but also, why does your baby have to be the happiest? Why are we turning this into some neighborhood competition? Ugh. Also also, yes, the author of this book is that guy selling the $1300 "smart basinet," so … yeah.

All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood

3/5. A survey of the effects of children on their parents and caregivers. Includes the somewhat depressing stuff we've probably all heard – how children make marriages less happy. This book reviews the literature, questions some of its methods, profiles parents, and asks some interesting questions about how we really ought to think about this. If it is true that parents rate their happiness lower in moments of parenting, but remember the events more glowingly and are happier in retrospect, is that a bad thing? It's not like the memories are any less real.

Anyway, this is interesting, though the profiles ranged from fascinating to frustrating. Of course the woman trying to start a small business from scratch with three children under five at home with her all day feels a lack of autonomy and time management.* I mean…yes. That is not a kids problem. That is a money problem. I do particularly recommend the chapter on teens. Maybe it's that I've not spent any real time thinking about this, but the insights into why parenting teens is particularly fraught and particularly rewarding in terms of parent identity were interesting.

*Break for crying baby, diaper change, feeding, thoughtful staring at a lamp.

The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding

Hey, did you guys know that just a single sip of formula is dangerous?

Oh, and! Did you know that mothers who complain about how their babies don't sleep through the night must be bottle feeding, because bottle feeding is so difficult and terrible. But if you breast feed, you can accept multiple night wakings no problem. And if you can't, well, you need an attitude adjustment and then you can greet the new day "with a smile."

Did. You. Know.

Crib Sheet by Emily Oster

4/5. A how to decide book more than a how to book. E.g., what the data says about circumcision, potty training timing, safe sleep, etc. This book will clearly lay out which of the many supposed short and long term impacts of breastfeeding have actually been demonstrated to be true (a few, but not that many) but won't tell you how to breastfeed if you want to. I liked this and will keep it around for later references on sleep training and early education. And in general I found this to be a better book than her first.

Mostly, I'm just grateful for the section on the safety of light drinking while breastfeeding, because my god. I want a dark and stormy so bad right now, I could cry.