Tag: children

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Remember: we are living our ancestors’ wildest dreams.

I really appreciated this Instagram video (weird lemon template and all):

Remember: if some kid comes over to your house and can’t eat anything because he has celiac disease…that means he SURVIVED HAVING CELIAC DISEASE.

We are living our ancestors’ wildest dreams. Our children LIVE.

And quite honestly, this post gives me the same feeling as Hope Eyrie.

Leslie Fish – Hope Eyrie https://genius.com/Leslie-fish-hope-eyrie-lyrics

We are living in the future. And despite all the bad in the world, I think the future will keep getting better.

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Short opinions : ADA and charter schools

I don’t think I had realized this before: private schools and charter schools are not subject to the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Now, I haven’t fact checked that yet. However, assuming it’s true: I think that that is wrong. I don’t have foolproof ideas on how to fix it; I just think that private and charter schools *should* be required to all submit to the ADA.

I’ve met at least one family that does private schooling *because* their child is disabled and the public school can’t accommodate her as well. And I’m glad schools like that exist too.

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Fun Vacation, Relaxing Vacation, or Traveling With Children

A few years before I had my kid, I came up with (or possibly read about? It’s been a minute) a fundamental difference in vacation philosophy: do you go on vacation to Relax, or do you go on vacation to Do Fun Activities?

Neither kind of vacation is right or wrong, mind! They’re just different styles of enjoying yourself. I think this is somewhat related to, or at least similar to, extroversion versus introversion. Some people prefer to always be on the move, and some need down time to recharge.

If you’re planning a vacation with someone new/for the first time, you’re definitely going to want to discuss with them which kind of vacation they prefer. You should also factor in the location and cost when making that decision; for example, I would consider it a huge waste of money and travel spoons (and carbon expenditure, let’s be real) to fly to Japan only to have a Relaxing Vacation. If I’m going to another country, it’s because I specifically want to go there and do things there.

When you throw a kid into the mix, things get even more murky. Being a parent of a small child is like traveling around with a small robot that has self-destruction wired into its circuits. You cannot relax if you have a young child with you, unless there are other competent adults along for the trip.

This lack of ability to relax is called “Traveling With Children.” And it is not, ever, a “Vacation.” If you’re lucky, you can have small Fun Activity vacation slices within it, though!

We stopped going to the beach with friends because the house they rented every year had a pool, and we didn’t trust the entire complement of 6-10 childfree 20-somethings to always remember to shut the gate. (You don’t fuck around with pools. You just do not. They’re like guns in terms of danger to children, only they’re quieter and more appealing.)

We did take her to the beach for a family wedding, and we stayed in a house with a pool because we knew we could trust the grandparents (who were also in the house with us) to be diligent. They also gave us respite childcare so we could relax a little bit on the trip. But that was still mostly just a Traveling With Children trip, because we had no “relax” default mode. We were still “on” for 90% of the time.

If you have relatives who try to pressure you into going on Big Family Trips, you’re not a bad person if you can’t stomach the idea of trying to keep you tiny human alive in a strange place with no routine and no comforts of home. I’m profoundly grateful that my family helped us with caring for our child on those trips. But I’m also very aware that not every family is like that.

So, that’s my feelings about Relaxing Vacations, Fun Activity Vacations, and Traveling With Children.

This Onion article gives a pretty devastating take on Traveling With Children as well: Mom Spends Beach Vacation Assuming All Household Duties In Closer Proximity To Ocean

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Your reminder: end of life planning

Saw this tweet today, and thought I’d write a post about it.

https://twitter.com/AngryBlackLady/status/1609183979399438336?s=20&t=jb0ZW25N7l_Y44zkvimTwg

If you have any care for the people who come after you, you need to write a will.

It’s okay (not great, of course, but life is what it is) if you can’t afford the whole lawyer shebang at this stage of your life. Not everyone can afford to do the (important) legal part of their will. But all of us can do the emotional/mental labor of listing all our assets and debts, and writing down who you want to receive them when you die.

This goes beyond just bank accounts and cars and so forth. Do you have a collection of old Magic cards? A dear friend lost their brother this year, and he made sure to account for his collection in his last wishes. (I don’t know if he had a will or not. He was relatively young.) Anything you own will have to be disposed of when you pass, and your next of kin will be grateful to have some idea, any idea, of what you would like done with it. Even if the answer is “Sell it all to an estate sale company.” That’s still an answer.

If you have minor children, it becomes especially important to make sure they are cared for in the event of your passing. Do they have a Designated Guardian listed in your will? This isn’t a legally binding thing, but a court will take your wishes strongly into consideration when choosing a guardian for your child in the event of your death. Do you have life insurance? Who’s the beneficiary? Make sure it’s not an estranged parent, or anything like that.

Look, nobody likes to think about this stuff. But it’s important. A lot of what we call “adulting” is just the boring, painful parts of life that we do because not doing it makes things worse for the people we love. And since this is the time of year when everyone is being pensive and making resolutions, consider “making end of life plans” as an idea.

A friend of mine made a spreadsheet of Things To Do When You Are The Executor, when his father passed away. Here’s the folder for that. Note that none of us are lawyers, none of us are YOUR lawyer, and this is just a starting point for you to use in conjunction with your actual professional who has your back. But everyone needs a starting point, so if this helps you, I’m glad.

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Your kids aren’t feral. They’re TODA.

A few years ago, my mom group started looking for a term for those little moments where your kid is being, by any objective measure, a complete asshole to you and everyone else around you, but you don’t feel right being mad at them because it’s developmentally normal for them at that age.

Eventually, one woman came up with “Totally Obnoxious, Developmentally Appropriate,” or TODA, and it stuck. I’ve started using it in other groups, and I hope the concept spreads, because it’s just so important to be able to hold both things in your head simultaneously: that yes, it’s normal for your kid to behave this way; and yes, it’s normal for you to be upset with that. Both of these things are true.

Since I’m now seeing a big age gap between my child and my peers’ younger children, it’s been helpful to have the reminder that “this child has no control over their limbs, hates clothing, and wants to touch anything and anyone without a single care for that person’s consent” is not/NOT that child being feral! It’s that child being Totally Obnoxious, Developmentally Appropriate. And soon, they will grow into wonderful little humans who respect other people, because their brain will get there. Just as my child’s brain got there.

And boy howdy, am I not looking forward to adolescence. 😂 I think that’s when my friends with their sweet little upper elementary schoolers will wonder if my teen is feral. But she won’t be feral. She’ll just be TODA.

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Children are an {individual|collective} responsibility

A few years back, someone linked me to this essay by Barbara Kingsolver, from 1992: “Everybody’s Somebody’s Baby.” It’s a beautiful reflection on the nature of children in society, and what it means when we treat them the way we do.

My second afternoon in Spain, standing on a crowded bus, as we ricocheted around a corner and my daughter reached starfish-like for stability, a man in a black beret stood up and gently helped her into his seat. In his weightless bearing I caught sight of the decades-old child, treasured by the manifold mothers of his neighborhood, growing up the way leavened dough rises surely to the kindness of bread. 

Kingsolver

My working theory, here, is that in America, we see children as Not Belonging in public life paradoxically because so many of us have been pressured into having them. I know that I am lucky: I wanted children, and I have an amazing child. But other people are childfree by choice, and while some are benevolent towards the mere existence of children, others cannot stand to have them around.

I think the optimal solution, like most optimal solutions, lies somewhere in the middle: We stop pressuring people to have kids when they don’t want them; and we stop acting like kids are this horrible Other Species, barely even human (see the man who called a child “it” in the essay).

It’s absolutely appropriate to say that children should not be in some places; not every location, every entertainment, is intended to be enjoyed by every human. But bans like that need to be considered thoughtfully and reasonably. Take weddings, for example, the source of so much internecine drama. It’s absolutely fine for the people getting married to say “We would like to have a party that is just adults” – it sets a certain tone, it allows for fragile objects to be placed on tables, etc etc etc. But the spirit of that request does not mean banning the 17yo twin when her 18yo twin had the good fortune to be born at 11:47 pm, rather than 12:01 AM. It does not mean banning a nursing infant who is not even ambulatory yet (a ban which functionally also bans the other half of the Nursing Dyad). Acknowledging that children are part of our world means making places for children – not just banning them from things. Allowing the 17yo twin or the nursing infant does not require you to also allow the shrieking, running 5yo. (Though if you want the 5yo’s parents to attend, the best chance of that happening is to provide on-site childcare, since the logistics of babysitting in a strange city are dicey at best, and all the normal family caregivers are likely at the wedding already.)

And all this comes back to the question raised in the subject line here: are children an Individual responsibility, or a Collective one? My feeling is Collective.

(And I will ask another friend if I can get a copy of her essay “Parenthood, and the Irrational Concept of ‘Choice’,” to also post up here, because it handles the question of Individual vs. Collective so well.)

I found this tweet today, and it seems quite applicable.

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRfKUh7L/https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRfKUh7L/

This TikTok expresses a similar idea through an explicitly leftist lens: that if you build a community that is inhospitable to children, you functionally make it inhospitable to women, and all you will do is reconstruct the existing patriarchy.