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
Tag: kids
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
Are Moms and Dads Interchangeable?
My story about whether the gender roles can be fully reversed – a subject that has continually intrigued me – on the New York Times Motherlode Blog:
There has been a lot of talk about the desire for 50/50 parenting on Motherlode and of course the complaint that women still have the “second shift.” But even if the man does all the work that women traditionally do, as my husband happily does, therefore leaving the mother fully freed to take on the role traditionally played by the father, is the problem solved? Did I manage to reverse the gender roles and be the “father” who goes to work at the law firm? Nope.
Six and half years after the birth of our twin daughters and almost five months after the birth of our third daughter, my husband has truly been the hands-on parent. We have never had a nanny nor a babysitter — not through their rocky beginning after a two-month neonatal intensive care unit stay, not through their terrible twos and threes. We have not even had a housekeeper. In the nearly seven years I have been working as a litigator at a large law firm, he has never asked me to come home earlier, or do any household chores. I am slightly embarrassed to say that I am not entirely sure how to work our washer/dryer. And yes, our apartment is pretty clean and our twins are pretty good kids due in large part to his excellent parenting.
For the first few years, I drove myself crazy with guilt when I missed their bedtime (a frequent occurrence) and felt as if I was not billing hours for the firm or seeing the twins, that I was doing something wrong. I turned down almost all non mandatory work or social events in the evenings. I had to make it to every pediatrician appointment. The twins took the earliest “gym” class offered in our neighborhood so I could attend some of it and run to work late, often making it up late in the evenings. I felt compelled to squeeze in a few drop ins on the “mommy and me” preschool they did in the afternoons when they were 2 years old. All I remember about those drop ins is that I was answering e-mails on my BlackBerry most of the time I was there, and that the caregivers in the class were overwhelmingly nannies, with a few moms, and, of course, my husband, his six-foot-four-inch frame looking quite out of place crouched by the play kitchen.
Eventually I realized trying to do all this while working full-time as a big firm litigator was tearing me apart. I needed more time with my kids. I swallowed my ego, and asked for a reduction in my hours (and pay) at the firm to 80%, which made it slightly easier on me emotionally and physically, though of course not on us financially. This was something that, pre-twins, I would have never thought I would do. It is not typically something a father would do to help a stay-at-home wife. It is something, however, that I have never regretted.
I understand fathers feel substantial guilt as well about working too much and missing kids’ events – balancing work and family is not just a woman’s issue. They want to make it home for their kids’ bedtime too. But I could not fully step in the fatherly role even with that caveat. I believe there was something pulling me home that most fathers do not feel, even though I had someone at home doing absolutely everything that needed to be done, and usually doing it better than I could (yes, my husband even changes diapers better than I do!).
Is this biology? Social norms developed over centuries? A few months after the birth of my third daughter, I think biology plays a larger role than I previously thought. I cannot readily discount the physical process of pregnancy, labor and nursing. I am the one with the breasts, after all, that were designed to nourish the baby I birthed. We are not penguins or seahorses – it is the woman who carries the fetus and is uniquely equipped to feed it. Instead of latching the baby onto my breast where she suckles the warm milk, her little body nestled close to mine, I am forced to use a motor with odd-looking silicone tubes and plastic flanges to extract the milk from my breasts every three hours, usually wearing a bra that allows me to do this while simultaneously typing e-mails.
It is with this in mind that I trade my sweatpants for my suits, and prepare to go back to work after my maternity leave, breast pump and framed photo of my infant in hand. I am pulled between my primordial desire to care for my children and my post-feminist desire to use the skills I have honed over the past decade to earn a living for my family and let my more than willing and capable husband stay home and take care of the dirty dishes and diapers.