Weekday morning, early summer, my kids are playing outside. Not in the backyard. Not in our enclosed, danger-proof, visible-from-every-window backyard.

They’re cavorting out front. Where there are driveways, blind corners, and a teenaged neighbor with a Pontiac and a lead foot. Where there may be oleander. Or vicious dogs. Or a gun-toting, candy-dangling, meth-addled pedophile.

Maybe not. But from where I sit at this computer, I can’t see my kids. And though it makes me sound deranged, I admit this simple scenario puts me on edge. It fans a smoldering lump of fear deep in my gut. As they explore the world beyond our porch, their voices grow fainter, and the voice in my head grows louder: “Lady, you ain’t doing your job.”

Am I insane? Yes. Also no.

Journalist Lenore Skenazy says such parental paranoia is the common and natural result of sensationalistic media reports on ghastly kidnappings, gruesome murders, and freak accidents — all of which make society seem far more dangerous than it actually is. Her book Free-Range Kids argues that Americans have become so unnecessarily fearful for our children’s safety (kneepads for crawling babies? helmets for wobbly toddlers?) that we suck all the joy out of both parenthood and childhood.

Continue reading Off-Leash Kids

When I was born, the doctor misspoke. “It’s a bo… ,” he told my parents, “a girl!” I work hard to avoid pondering what it is the guy thought he saw. My dad was surprised to feel a twinge of disappointment. “It only lasted a split second,” he assures me. “And I probably wouldn’t have felt it at all except for Dr. Slip.”

I don’t begrudge him his momentary grudge. As the mother of boys, I know that being a yin and begetting a yang can make a parent uneasy. My boys like to beat on things, jump off stuff, and generally behave in confounding ways. And when I shepherd my three-year-old to the bathroom at 2 a.m., I’m ill-skilled to help him aim. Or shake. You might as well ask me to repair a blown head gasket.

Thus do I feel a certain kinship to the fathers of daughters. Girls are complicated, and raising them is tricky — especially when your model for “father” is the fella who taught you to throw a long bomb and “take it like a man.”

I know a guy who cursed when he found out his wife was pregnant with a girl. “I remember distinctly yelling ‘#@$%!’ in the muffled cone of silence my car offered,” he said. “At the time, it was just one more thing that I felt was not going my way. I would come to the realization years later that it’s your child’s personality you fall in love with, and it’s irrelevant what that personality is attached to.”

Continue reading Fathering Females

Okay, class, time for a math quiz.

Take your child’s attitude. Multiply it by 24 students. Subtract 11 weeks of summer vacation, but add $5.3 billion in education budget cuts.

That’s what our kids’ teachers cope with daily, from the second their coffee kicks in to the moment the blessed bell rings at 3 o’clock. And we parents are grateful, of course we are. As the school year ends, though, it’s hard to know how to express that gratitude. Or, frankly, how to wrap it.

Some families bake cookies to show thanks. Others give potted plants, scented candles, or handmade greeting cards. I’ve heard of parents bestowing teachers with cashmere robes, Tiffany necklaces, and even $300 cash.

“Are we supposed to be supplementing their income because they are ridiculously underpaid?” asked a mother I know, whose confusion echoes my own. “Or is it purely a token of appreciation, in which case, should it come from the child or the parent?”

So I did what I’d be too ashamed to do without the defensible guise of “column research.” I asked teachers what they really want. And some of their answers surprised me.

Continue reading End-of-the-Year-Gifts for Teachers

Pregnancy is a slog. For me, there was 4 p.m. nausea and 2 a.m. charlie horses. There were sore breasts, fat feet, and a humiliating resemblance to the Fantasia hippos when I slipped, foolishly, into sexy lingerie.

“Poor you,” my compassionate husband often said. “You’re going through so much.”

Each time, I told him the same thing: “It’s okay. You’re doing the swim lessons.”

Different people dread different points on the parenthood continuum. Some fear labor and delivery. Others cower from potty-training. Others cringe at the notion that someone will eventually hand their graceless offspring a driver’s license.

My personal Misery Milestone is the one that has me leaping from a soup-like public pool with a slippery toddler and plodding through cold puddles on slick cement in search of a restroom where I must wrestle with said toddler’s rubbery swimsuit and stand dripping and shivering while he uses the toilet, then looks up at me with chlorine-reddened eyes and chatters, “R-r-ready to g-go b-back in?”

Any mom who’s been baptized in the church of swim lessons, who’s donned her least revealing tankini and descended hesitantly into the wet world of “kickers” and “splashies” and other words one would never say in a board room, knows that swim lessons don’t improve as your child ages. They just shift.

Continue reading Pool Spawn

Parents can be so smug. We think we have life’s puzzles solved, and that our kids are callow dimwits desperate for our guidance. Admit it: We think of them as dense, doughy biscuits requiring the heat of our unparalleled wisdom to rise to their fluffy full potential.

Lately, though, I’ve been wondering if we’re wrong. If, in fact, our car seat-bound offspring are the ones who have the answers and we grown-ups are too culturally programmed, too set-in-our-ways, to see it.

The notion strikes when I ask my three-year-old to put on his shoes. Or clean up his toys. Or turn off his video, come upstairs and take a bath. That’s when he looks at me with utter impunity and says, “I won’t.”

There’s no willfulness in his voice. No shame. No guilt. “I won’t.”

He’s simply stating a fact, letting me know we’re going to have a problem here if I insist on pursuing this ridiculous mandate.

There’s a look of — is that peace? — that crosses his peanut butter-smeared face when he says it, and I’ll admit the whole situation stymies me. My linear adult thought process goes like this: How do I get the child clean if he won’t get in the tub? How “clean” does a person really need to be? What will his preschool teachers whisper when they notice the same dirt smudge that was on his knee yesterday…and the day before?

Continue reading My Son's Peaceful Defiance