Should Twins Be Separated in School?

The Motherlode blog grappled with this, and while my emphatic answer was yes, as pointed out in the blog, many adult twins said they wish they had not been separated.  My twins would have never wanted to be separated – they were 5 years old and they had spent virtually their entire lives together – so I am glad NYC DOE made this decision for me.  As I said in my comments to the post, my twins made great strides apart, and though it is much more confusing for us as parents to deal with double sets of instructions and trips and worksheets that are similar enough to make one crazy, it is much better for them to be separate during the school day.

 

Choosing to Latch On

The backlash against New York City ‘s Latch On initiative has been swift and strong, coming from all stripes of female commentators, from FoxNews to the Daily News to Feministe. Mayor Bloomberg is depriving mothers of “choice;” dictating what they should do with their breasts and of course, making them feel guilty for choosing formula.

This policy is not doing any of those things. Continue reading Choosing to Latch On

Santa Issues

Santa Claus has an expiration date. Every parent who has introduced Santa Claus to their kids knows this. You get a few good years and then the doubts start creeping in. Other kids at school are usually the catalysts in this process, which seeps through school lunchrooms with the first signs of frost every year. Usually it’s the hand-me-down scoffings of older siblings. Sometimes, however, it’s an axiom discovered through a child’s deduction alone. Continue reading Santa Issues

When Maternity Leave Hits Home

My daughter dragged my lofty Feminist principles down to earth.

The cold slap of reality came with a note from her 2nd grade teacher. Just over a month into the school year she was announcing that she’s pregnant and will be going on leave around her due date in February. Presumably, she’ll be out until May.

Now, my first reaction was a very human one. Good for her — there certainly was nothing as rewarding in my life as being a mother. And who does not love newborns?

My second reaction was equally — but less proudly — human. My daughter will have to adjust to a new teacher midway through the year.

This is a girl who’s already pretty shy. She’s very bright and genuinely wants to follow rules and be a good kid. That tendency to follow rules and do what’s expected leads her to identify strongly with the authority figures in front of her. To suddenly displace this figure and swap in a stranger for three months would be a pretty violent blow to her sense of world order.

The timing isn’t ideal either. Second grade is where the educational rubber begins to hit the road. Math commands a significantly greater share of classroom time than previous years. Reading skills are assumed and developed. The unofficial but unavoidable labeling known as Tracking, by teachers, fellow students and self-creating individuals alike, begins to form. And, lest we forget, the very official and equally unavoidable standardized tests begin at this stage to lock students into the academic trajectories that will propel them through the rest of their lives. These are not stakes to be trifled with.

Maternity leave, however, is sacrosanct. My own was crucial. When this same daughter and her twin sister were born ten weeks premature, my leave at the time allowed me to spend eight weeks at her side in the hospital NICU and then another two months bonding at home.

After giving birth to her younger sister February of this year, I took full advantage of my law firm’s three months full pay and one half pay, and tacked on another, painfully unpaid, month. That leave gave me the chance to exclusively breast feed my new baby, a relationship I have been able to continue while working because of our strong start. Breastfeeding was something my first daughter was too underdeveloped at birth to ever really get the hang of.

Women need this time. Infants do too. I look with envy at some of the countries that realize this while we in the U.S. lag. In Sweden parents split 480 days of paid leave at 80% salary between birth and the child’s eighth birthday. Our Nordic friends manage this while reaching a 5.5% GDP Growth rate in 2010, nearly doubling the 2.9% registered by the U.S. in the same year. Their economy is a fraction the size of ours, but clearly, valuing family during that period of a child’s development isn’t devastating their bottom line.

The United States is, after all, one of only three nations in the developed world with policies that exclude paid maternity leave. (We are in the company of Papua New Guinea and Swaziland.) My daughter’s teacher’s leave will be unpaid.

So after reading the note I asked my daughter, “Are you excited that your teacher is having a baby?”
The gloom settled immediately onto my little girl’s face. She looked away, mumbling that she didn’t want to talk about it. Further pressing went nowhere. Appeals to her 6 year old commitment to forward leaning public policy, I feared, would be fruitless.

How can I tell her that it’s good that her teacher will be gone for three months? How can I tell myself it won’t make a difference at all to her education? Can anyone truly reconcile the human cost of political ideals?

This is where I have to begin: in all likelihood, everything will be fine. Beginning one day this winter the kids in my daughter’s class will have to learn math from someone else for a while. Maybe the kids can all write letters to the new baby and do art projects and this can be a thread that pulls together the many chunks of learning that might otherwise fall away. Maybe. But even if it’s not, it’s still the right thing. Call it Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand or the Golden Rule, I want the same right to those critical first few months after childbirth and so I will defend that right for others. The benefit is worth the cost.

My daughter may have to study harder this winter to make up for the disruption to her classroom routine. That’s not a bad thing. The broader lesson is better yet. I don’t want her to suffer in any way. But I’d be happy if, by getting pulled between grounded reality and high ideals, she managed to grow.

Posted in the Huffington Post

The Redshirting Debate Continues

[Guest post on NYT Motherlode blog, Sep. 26, 2011]

When I read “Delay Kindergarten at Your Child’s Peril” by Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt, I felt vindicated — almost the way I felt when I read the recent article that chocolate has some impressive health benefits.  (Phew.)

Having digested Malcolm Gladwell’s strident arguments in his book “Outliers” that being the youngest in the class was a huge disadvantage, and the 2007 article in the New York Times Magazine that touted the benefits of delaying kindergarten, I was very hesitant to put my twins, born in November 2004, 10 weeks premature, into kindergarten when they were still 4.  Granted, this week’s Sunday Review article is not the first to argue that putting young kids in kindergarten may actually benefit them. Around the time my twins were entering kindergarten (though too late to change their start date), I read articles arguing just that, but the weight of authority seemed to be that younger children would be educationally damaged for years.

My own children were still in the NICU the January after they were born, unable to breathe on their own. It seemed as if their actual birth date should not even count, but they were set to go to New York City public schools, and the cutoff for the New York City Department of Education is Dec. 31.  I was told that if I put them in nursery school another year, I may risk their being placed in first grade anyway because, thankfully, they were not showing any delays.  And there was the escalating cost of the nursery school tuition to consider.

So I counted my fortunes that my kids were healthy, and into kindergarten they went, at 4 years 9 months old, with kids born in January 2004 and even a few born the December before who had received a waiver.  I  was not even pregnant with the twins until May 2004.  My kids were a cluster of cells; these kids were four months old.

My father told me I was crazy to worry. He said that the twins were fine, and echoing the arguments Wang and Aamodt made this week, he said they would do better being the youngest.  He  skipped a grade in his Canadian elementary school, so was always the youngest, yet he was valedictorian of his high school class, and earned merit scholarships to college and law school.  I told him that anecdotes were just that, and that studies trumped his singular experience, impressive as it may be.

For us, it turns out (at least so far) that my father was right.  It may not be right for everyone, but my children are indeed fine and I am confident that for them, going to kindergarten at 4 years old was the right decision for a lot of the reasons that the Sunday Review article points out.  They benefited from being around older kids.  I caught myself last year, when my twins were in first grade, worrying that they were not being challenged enough.  Type A as I may be, even I realized the irony of that.

My youngest daughter was born this February, so she will among the oldest in her class. Do I have to worry about her being disadvantaged by being the oldest?  Maybe I can listen to Mr. Gladwell for her case.

Copyright New York Times 2011

 

Working More, Earning Less

This great collection of charts on Mother Jones shows how the United States stacks up to the rest of the world in terms of productivity, wages, income, and vacation, and how it stacks up against itself historically.  The charts show again the ever widening rift between the top 1% and the rest of us, and the impact our service and information based economy has on the number of jobs available.

And yes, the charts remind us that the U.S. is one of only tiny number of nations that offer no paid maternity leave (our company includes Swaziland and Papua New Guinea).   Not the kind of American exceptionalism we should be striving for.