Parenting Pet Peeves

I try to be positive, I really do. But I battle a deeply ingrained cynical streak. I try to be nice, and truth be told, people and things get on my nerves. In the parenting world, there are things I can’t really take any more. Especially when people say them in reference to my child. Actually, when they say them at all. I wonder why some people become parents. Really.

For example:

1. “He’s just doing it to get attention.”

Um. Yes. Kids need attention, and if you don’t want to give your child attention, you really should have thought about that before having one. I do get that some people have children not after a rational thought process, but at the whim of their hormones. Still, pay attention to your child. And if you don’t like how your child demands attention, then teach him appropriate ways to ask for attention or for what he needs. At the very least, consider if you weren’t trying so hard to ignore your child, then maybe he wouldn’t be sticking an entire box of Legos up his nose trying to get you to notice him.

2. The Terrible Twos

I feel for two year olds. They’re still relatively new to the planet, no longer infants, still babyish, mostly toddlers, but they’re in between a pile of milestones of talking and physical coordination. Really, any of us, would get frustrated when we constantly bump our heads against our own limitations and somebody else’s boundaries, then someone has to go and call them terrible on top of it. My husband and I started getting warnings about how the Twos begin at 18 months; I put a stop to it being called terrible. Inevitably, these parents roll their eyes at me and utter an “Oh, you just wait…” Maybe so. People did the same to my husband and me when we were pregnant and dared to suggest that surely it was possible to parent, travel, sleep, and not have a house full of plastic crap that the baby industry deems necessarily for your child’s survival? “Just wait…” parents, siblings and friends said.

Well, guess what? We sleep, and have slept from the beginning and we travel and we don’t have a house full of crap that Babies R Us says we need. So there.

Yes, I do have exhausting days as I interact with my son as he tests limits and boundaries and as he wants to grab anything with a cord or buttons or as he wants to watch movies all day and when I say no, he cries. I get frustrated. I wish he would nap like he used to all day long. But I still wouldn’t say he’s terrible or that this age is terrible.

It just seems unfair to label the kids without even giving them a chance. It’s like assuming children growing up in the lower class inner city are criminals in the making before they’ve completed the 8^th grade. And it negates the gifts of this age, that in one day, my son says 10 new words or takes himself to the toilet without any prompting from my husband or I.

3. The Dinner Table Dynamics.

Clean your plate. Eat three more bites. Eat your vegetables. If you don’t finish, then no dessert. If you’re not hungry enough to eat your dinner, you can’t be hungry enough for dessert.

Blah blah blah.

This all strikes me as Depression-era parenting, or back in the day when families didn’t know the next time they would eat so they really had to take advantage of their meals, not just for their appetites but for the nutrients their bodies needed to survive.

Despite the recent recession, I doubt kids still need this at the dinner table.

Dare I say that I even think it is disrespectful? Kids need to learn to listen to their own bodies and they can decide for themselves when they are full. When half our children are obese, does it really make sense to instill in them that they need to clean their plate even if they are full? Does it benefit them to teach them that they can get their parent’s approval if they eat three more bites?

And the dessert? You might as well say to your child, “Yes, you’re right to not like vegetables and to like dessert.” Also, honestly, as an adult, when I want dessert, I do eat less dinner, otherwise I get full. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I have no problem teaching my child to do the same.

Plus, this whole thing is weird. I mean, no one says to my child’s grandparents, “Eat three more bites, then you can be done.” Because it would be weird. Adults get to say when they’re full, why not teach children to respect and listen to their bodies and say when they’re full too?

4. “He needs to get a grip on himself” or “He needs to calm himself down.”

Whatever. I have met adults who do not know how to get a grip on themselves or calm themselves down. My son is a child, and he is still actually learning about his emotions, as children do when they aren’t quite two.

I want my child to learn to be compassionate and respectful. The best way to teach him this near as I can tell? Treat him with compassion and respect.

5. Smacking and Spanking

Recent studies on smacking and spanking all show that it leads to more aggressive children and even contributes to school bullying and as a result, school violence. Yet parents still smack and spank their children, largely because, as one or two has protested to me, “I was smacked as a child. It is an apt punishment.”

Really?

I admit, I am a bit neurotic when it comes to parenting, and I am often asking myself about the larger picture in terms of what my actions are teaching my son. But the smacking seems like a no brainer.

Mostly, it gets on my nerves when I see it on the playground. Or when someone else’s child smacks my child. Then the parent or nanny rushes over and smacks their child, (so it becomes clear where he learned it) and then what happens? The child smacks my child again (for his getting in trouble), because now, as they inevitably protest, they are playing make believe and my child is the baby while the other child is the parent.

It’s enough to drive you batty.

Selfishly, what I hate most about this, is when I insist my child not be babysat by people who smack, spank or hit their children, even if these same people are friends or family, I’m the one who looks like a total witch. Granted, this is a small price to pay to insist on my child being respected, so I’ll pay it.

These are the people on your island

When my husband Kent and I decided we wanted to live overseas, our friends and families warned us to do it before we had a family, because you couldn’t really travel once you had a family, or that you could but it was very difficult. When we then said we were trying to get pregnant, our same friends and family shook their heads and shrugged their shoulders as if we were lost causes and there was no hope for us.

But why not? Just because most people settle down when they start a family and find a house in the suburbs doesn’t mean every one has to. Especially when I have a phobia level fear of the suburbs. We still had places we wanted to see; did having children mean we were supposed to give that up until they left home? What? Who said?

My husband looked for work overseas, found a job that would take us to Singapore (but first to LA), I got pregnant, had our son (while still in LA). My husband’s Uncle Charlie told him that he had rocks in his head; we took that as a blessing and off we went.

It turns out people were wrong. You can travel with a baby and it is actually easier than people say or think it is. At least we’re finding it to be.

In Singapore, we met a lot of expat families who, like my husband, had found work that took them to Singapore. Singapore is relatively child friendly. They have clean sidewalks where you can push your prams and strollers. You can have a full time live in nanny for not much more than a car payment.The doctors do over medicate (ie they will prescribe antibiotics for teething pain and just about everything else) and it is too hot to play outside unless you happen to be at a water park, but other than that, lots of families love it there.

But when my husband’s project ended, we decided to come to Bali so he could recover from the exhaustion his long work hours left him with. Once he was well rested, we could figure out what was next for us.

Yet in Bali, we’re tempted to stay and create a home here. Part of this is the beauty of the island, the lush green and terraced rice fields, the cheaper cost of living for a higher quality of life, the beautiful people, and to a large part, the quality of the expat community.

Turns out we are not the only ones who one sat up in bed one day and decided they wanted to take their families overseas to live.

We’ve met numerous families who are actually spending their entire year traveling. Every where else that I have lived, it has taken me at least 3-6 months to really make friends and cultivate friendships, yet in Bali, we meet other families, instantly discover we have a variety of things in common, whether it’s what we do or want to be doing for work – or how we want to work (a few hours here and there and from a hammock vs. a cubicle) or we’re hoping to find viable alternatives for our children’s education. More so than anywhere else I’ve lived, we meet people who want to live lives that set good examples for their children – lives where they don’t have to sacrifice any of their values.

We’ve met a family we affectionately call the Australians. Ginny and Chris have four children, all about two years apart. Ginny is still breastfeeding her youngest who is three weeks older than Fyo. This seems a small thing to have in common, but when we lived in Singapore, I was one of four women still nursing a toddler. When Fyo and I had a bit of a rough spot, I went to a breastfeeding support group. Needless to say, Fyo was months older than any other baby there and the lactation consultants’ advice? Wean him. She said this despite the WHO poster behind her head that proclaimed “Nursing Mothers Make the World a Safer Place – Breastfeed for 2 Years.” Obviously, I ignored the Lactation consultant’s advice having decided she was grossly uninformed. So when I met Ginny, with a solid 8 years of breastfeeding to speak from, I asked her every question I had been saving up since I left LA. She probably felt as if she had been ambushed by a La Leche League meeting. She gave me lists of books to read for the next phase of parenting. She and Chris parent in a very similar style to Kent and I, so I was relieved when I discovered that I enjoyed being around her children. It is probably politically incorrect to say so as a parent and a person who supposedly loves children, but there are loads of children, I don’t enjoy being around. There are children who in fact grate every last nerve I have. Ginny and Chris have spent four years living in the Bush in Australia and are spending a year in Bali and traveling around SE Asia. With all four children. And Kent and I were warned you couldn’t travel with one.

Another of our favorite families, John and Sarah from the UK are spending the year traveling with their 3 ½ year old daughter. Fed up with the rat race, and education system in London, they are interviewing new places to live and raise their daughter. They share Kent and my dream of living and working everywhere as writers. Both husbands have a love of music they want to work with.

We met a family from the Netherlands that I started talking to on a dirt path in the middle of a rice paddy only because their children are so beautiful they literally took my breath away. The conversation started like this:

Me: (GASP) (recovering breath) What beautiful children!

Fleur: (in her beautiful person and beautiful parent voice): I could say the same to you.

Over breakfast we then exchanged contact information. A few weeks later, we had lunch. We talked about how we were doing our children’s health differently as we had found most physicians practice medicine from a fear of liability more than an interest in good health. I had talked to Ginny about education and how I do really believe in home school, but I want to spend my day writing and working on my projects – how do I do that and home school my son? I don’t know that I want to spend the time every day – I have reservations about how it would work in our lives. But Fleur educates her six year old daughter at home and she doesn’t do it at all in the way I had imagined: spending six hours a day at the kitchen table going problem by problem on some math worksheet. I then asked her all the questions that had been cluttering my mind. It turns out she incorporates it into cooking and making dinner. Their lives and daily activities become about their children's education. And she does this despite home school being illegal in the Netherlands. She too gives me a list of authors to read that I eagerly look up on Amazon when I get the chance.

I can’t count how many times I have heard the now clichéd quote from Hillary Clinton about how it takes a village to raise a child. It does. I’m not disagreeing with that even as I hate clichés. But I would also say it takes a village – a community- to raise a parent. It is just as important – if not more so – for parents to have each other to talk to and commiserate with, to learn from, exchange resources (whether it be reading lists or take out delivery menus), form babysitting co-ops, and so on. I would even suggest that parents mistreat or disrespect their children, it's not out of ill intent, but out of fatigue and their own lack of support or emotional resources. Half the time when I see a parent speak disrespectfully to a child, it's really just because they are tired.

As Kent and I explore our options about where we want to live, travel and create home, this has become one of our major criteria: we want neighbors and community. We want to live next to families. We want to create a village as much as we want to create a home.