Simplicity Parenting (32 page)

I acknowledge that my recommendations won’t work for everybody. One mom told me: “My husband doesn’t think he can
live
without TV sports at home. I think he could, but I don’t think I can live
with
him if he’s denied!” On a “Top Ten” list of dangers to a developing child, “miserable parents” certainly has to be included. So, short of getting rid of the television, I suggest moving it (and the home computer[s]) out of children’s bedrooms and communal rooms, and putting them into the parents’ bedroom or a den or family office. This helps families equate the “family room” with shared activities other than television. It makes a real and symbolic difference, moving the television from the center, to the margins of daily life. Some families who limit television also report benefiting from intermittent television “holidays” of a week or a weekend. Such “breaks” help them simplify, and be more conscious of how much television they’re actually watching. It also helps them develop new leisure habits.

However you choose to limit the use of television for your family (both in terms of time spent and the quality of shows watched), know that you are making a difference; it does help mediate some of TV’s negative effects. Less than half of American children ages eight to eighteen report having any rules pertaining to their television viewing.
²³
Yet studies corroborate what I have found: When parents do make and enforce rules to limit viewing, children spend more time reading and less time using and being exposed to electronic media of all kinds.
²⁴
With limits on screen use a “given” in your home, the specifics that work best for your family will evolve as your children grow and their needs change. Simplifying screens and the use of media takes creativity and commitment. But then again, so does everything involved in being a family.

Involvement

Do you remember those grainy science class films of egg fertilization and cell division, as a fetus grows in the womb? Beyond all that is miraculous about new life, there is also a mathematical beauty to it: the coming together and splitting apart, how two makes one, how division first requires union. I sometimes imagine parenthood in the same way, as a series of coming together and pulling apart movements. There are geometrical shapes involved, too, like the ultimate oneness of a woman pregnant with child. I imagine a new father cradling his newborn, seen from above, as a sort of yin-yang symbol of connection. What’s the counter image to the woman pregnant with child? Is it parents in a driveway, with their son or daughter, loading up the car for the big move to college? What are the ties that bind us, across time and distance? The ties that, like a membrane, must stretch without breaking, as a child circles out and back again, out and back again, on toward independence?

Biology informs the movement of life and the drive toward independence. As a fetus develops in the womb, cells are dividing in a complex dance choreographed by the infant’s unique DNA. Fast-forward six years, and there is a pain in your back as you jog behind your daughter on her first two-wheeler. You’ve been up and down this stretch a good ten times, she’s been wobbly, but now she is turning around, flushed and happy: “It’s okay! You can let go!” And it is. It is okay; you can let go.

It’s okay because she really wants to ride a two-wheeler, just like her friend Ellie. It’s okay because there is no middle ground; a hand at the back of her seat is the same as a third wheel. No tricks and no help; in the end there is only her, balancing. It’s okay because she is ready, and she is tough. It’s okay because you’ve been there, for her and with her, so consistently that she has internalized your support. That’s why she is ready. And why she is tough. That’s why you can let go.

A child’s first steps, first friends, the beginning of school—they are all driven by her need to explore, to know, and to master. With any luck, her biological push toward independence has been supported by
your
biological need to protect, nurture, and delight in her. Her successful, eventual division is dependent on the strength and support of your union. If the process were entirely biological and unconscious, perhaps it would be as smooth and geometrical as cells dividing in a petri dish. But the movements behind these two drives—yours to protect and nurture,
hers to explore and separate—are not always smooth, not always in concert. In fact, they’re often at cross-purposes, with many opportunities for missteps and bad timing. Luckily, it is not just biology that accompanies this parent-child dance. There is also the powerful force of love. Love may be messy (“What do you mean, you want to get your driver’s permit?”), but it is the only force strong enough to contain and mediate these two biological forces with any sense of rhythm and beauty. With anything even approaching grace.

Let’s look at this dance of parent-child involvement, and how to simplify it.

Base Camp

The security that we build for a child will be a “base camp” that will serve them, hopefully, throughout their lives. It is the hand at the back of the bike seat—at first real and essential, and eventually metaphorical—but always calming, supportive.

No parent needs to be convinced of the tremendous growth that takes place in the first three years of life. A baby usually achieves a weight four to five times that of their birth weight, and doubles in length. By the end of its second year, a baby’s brain weighs three-quarters of an adult’s brain weight, though it is twice as active as an adult’s and will remain so until puberty. The baby’s neurons become larger and more powerful, growing axons and dendrites, so by the time a child reaches three, each neuron has formed as many as ten thousand connections. That’s about a quadrillion—give or take a few—or roughly double the number of connections that are seen in an adult brain.

As a baby is growing, in deep exploration of their sensory world, we are, hopefully, providing what they need for this remarkable growth: security and connection. A three-month-old baby grasps his mother’s finger and takes in her scent as he nurses; she has him tucked in close, safe and free from too many distractions. As he explores, she protects; as he attaches to her, she bonds to him; the connection is strengthening, the dance is in full swing.

One way that we protect our children, especially in their first few years, is to act as a filter. For our small ones, so new to the world, we try to screen out some of the world’s noise, its crazy sensory onslaughts. And we do so with good reason, biologically. The hippocampus, which regulates sensory input in the brain, acting as a sort of neurological filter, is quite slow to form. We do what the hippocampus can’t yet. By
mediating input, we reduce stress, allowing the baby to interact freely with its world. Erik Erikson called this critical period that of “trust versus mistrust.” As we soothe the crying baby, as its hunger is met with food, trust wins over mistrust. Rudolf Steiner equated it with breath: the child “breathes” in the environment and “breathes” itself out into the world. If this “breathing,” which is as critical as eating, is unimpeded, the child can continue to explore with security. Security and hope.

Even at three or four months, even firmly connected to the breast, a baby is exploring its world. With her attention, she leaves and returns to her mother; she watches the light play through the window and then returns her gaze, with comfort, to her mother’s face. The toddler’s first steps may be toward you, as you sit beckoning with outstretched arms. But as a semisturdy biped she’ll quickly move away—off to see this, to touch that—and then back for a snuggle, or just back to safe proximity with you. With trust the explorations can continue; they can lengthen in time and distance. The security of your child’s attachment, and the strength of your bond, will be their base camp for an entire childhood of exploration.

This struggle between trust and mistrust is central to a child’s development. If a baby’s needs are not responded to, if his primary attachment to a caregiver is weak or inconsistent—if mistrust wins—then he will have trouble forming attachments and empathizing with others. Clingy and anxious, he will respond to the world as though it were a platform laid on water: slippery, unstable. Without a firm attachment to a loving caregiver, a child can suffer from chronically elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol. Cortisol is a neural hijacker, bullying out learning and other functions to make room for its floods.

However, when a child is able to explore from a foundation of loving connection and security—when trust wins—he gains the freedom to grow. Without high levels of cortisol he can regulate his emotions. Free of the stress-regress cycle, he is better able to learn. Secure in his attachment to his parents (or parent, or loving caregiver), he has a base camp. Unmoveable, it is the safe place he leaves to explore, and the safe place he circles back to, the foundation from which he ascends. He can develop his will, exploring and pushing his way toward a sense of self and independence.

This is a defining paradigm for us, too: trust versus mistrust. It is central to our development as parents, to our role in the parent-child dance. Yet for some of us, trust never wins. Still “spotting” a child who can walk and run, we remain stuck in a state of arrested development.
Our fears and worries overshadow our trust in the world, and our trust in them. Most of all, our fears eclipse our trust in our own instincts.

Remember Annmarie? When she felt that
worry
best described her experience as a mother, something was amiss. Her development as a parent was being hijacked. Stuck in a stress-regress cycle, Annmarie was caught in the deep primal urge to protect her children. They were saying, “It’s okay! You can let go.” But she just couldn’t hear it.

When we let our fears overshadow our trust, we’re abandoning the base camp, trying to “go with” our children. Picking up stakes, we’re dismantling what they really need, and boarding the helicopter. But base camps aren’t transient; they aren’t portable.

Helicopter Parenting

Annmarie has plenty of company in her fears: 76 percent of American parents feel that raising kids today is “a lot harder” than it was when they were growing up, according to a 2002 Public Agenda survey. Only 20 percent of the parents polled felt that their job was “about the same” in difficulty as their parents’. What ranked highest of the added pressures parents feel today? “Trying to protect their child from negative societal influences.” Fifty percent of parents polled said they worried “a lot” about someone kidnapping their child, with drugs and alcohol (55 percent) and negative messages in the media (39 percent) also ranking high on the list of worries.
²⁵

Have the threats to our children increased, compared to a generation or two ago? Have “negative social influences” grown, or is it the scope and influence of the media—in our homes and our lives—that has expanded dramatically? The lead story of any local news program—a missing child, a convicted child molester out of prison—will confirm that good news doesn’t sell. Fanning parental anxieties, on the other hand, definitely does sell. Details at eleven. In 1985 the
Denver Post
won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles that took a closer look at the child abduction fears that were sweeping the country. The feature documented that 95 percent of missing children are runaways (most of whom come home within three days) and that of the rest, most are child custody disputes.
²⁶

Annmarie’s mother, with her front door unlocked and eight children going in and out, probably didn’t worry too much about potential kidnappers. What has changed? Fears for our children’s physical safety have helped fuel the exodus from neighborhood yards and parks. According
to one study, more than 90 percent of parents named safety as their biggest concern when making decisions about whether to allow their kids to play outside.
²⁷
According to the Justice Department, the number of kidnappings of children by strangers has not increased for the past twenty years.
²⁸
Yet a single incident can seem like a crime wave when it is parsed and sensationalized.

The media, pervasive and relentless, play a large part in parental anxieties. When graphic details of the same unfortunate story are broadcast through countless media outlets—from network and cable news to Internet and Palm Pilot news feeds—its emotional effect is exponential. A sense of danger becomes heightened and personal when horrors are delivered right into our living rooms, when they follow us throughout the day, wherever we go.

When a new mother is nursing, she begins to notice how her diet—yesterday’s onion soup or very garlicky mashed potatoes—affects her milk. A morning spent with a fussy, colicky baby will make her think twice before pulling out leftovers for lunch. An emotional diet high in fear and sensationalism can be transmitted to our children, too. Long after babies are weaned from the breast or bottle, they continue to nurse from their parents’ emotions. We sometimes increase our vigilance—sucking up every intimation of danger, feeding on every hint of concern—in a misguided belief that this increases our children’s protection. Really, though, it only increases our anxiety. It not only pollutes our well-being as parents, it affects the way we see the world, and the way our kids do, too. It lengthens and broadens that shadow of fear, so we see danger first and foremost, before we see a situation’s joy or possibilities.