emma_in_dream (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
emma_in_dream) wrote2012-02-25 12:26 pm
emma_in_dream) wrote2012-02-25 12:26 pm
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Two parenting books I would recommend to pretty much anyone (including non-parents)
I have read a lot of parenting books in my time. This is partly because I like to do my research and partly because my children are statistical outliers which means that I have spent hours pouring over books trying to figure out, basically, what was up with my kids.
This was particularly the case before Pearl got her diagnosis. I would read the books which would assume the child would walk at roughly a year and assure the anxious reader that lots walked later than that but that if they had any concerns they should see a doctor. ‘Later’ would not be defined and it certainly didn’t mention what to do if the doctors could not make a diagnosis and just kept prodding and poking your child and then saying doubtfully that perhaps she was just a slow developer.(1)
This experience of parenting books has led me to pooh-pooh the majority of the genre. I think they are fiercely focussed on… well not the wrong things precisely because they concentrate on feeding your kid and getting them to sleep. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say they are focussed on the 10% of the parenting iceberg which is visible.(2)
Here are some suggestions for parenting reading which contain virtually no suggestions on how to get your child to eat vegetables or to sleep through, but which consider the political aspects of parenting. (Political in the sense of exploring the interchange of power over parenting and that my politics favour the feminist. I eschew the sense of political meaning the short term chest thumping of politicians in parliament.)
Sandra Steingraber’s *Raising Elijah: Protecting Our Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis* (2011) really changed the way I view parenting and being green. She’s a biologist who specialises in environmental factors in cancers and endocrinal disorders, so she writes with the quiet authority of one who really knows her stuff. The picture she paints is disturbing – carcinogens and endocrine disruptors are everywhere. Where Steingraber is really strong is that she points out that as parents we are supposed to protect our children from these threats but that they are really so omni-present and so vast that only collective action can address them. She is really really worth reading: http://steingraber.com/
Steingraber made me aware of the extent to which the environmental aspects of parenting are de-politicised. For instance, pregnant women are warned not to eat fish because it contains mercury. But there is no public discussion of the fact that much of the mercury in fish is a by-product of coal powered electricity plants which also contributes to global warming which is something else the baby will have to deal with as an adult (and even as a child). Protecting the vulnerable child becomes the job of each individual woman but none of this energy is channelled towards tougher environmental standards for the big polluters.
There are a lot of green guides I refer to frequently because they inform me of how to make individual changes in my own household. But, as Steingraber points out, there is little point in doing this without also grappling with the political aspects of environmental change.
She writes: ‘This sort of public health approach -- surround kids with brain poisons and enlist mothers and fathers to serve as security detail -- is surely as failure prone with pesticides as it is with lead paint. Following all the popular advice, I do feed my children organic food. . . . But my children do not live solely within the bubble of my kitchen and property lines. . . . I am a conscientious parent. I am not a HEPA filter.’
Seriously, you need to read her. And also consider some of the sites of group action she highlights:
* Beyond pesticides - beyondpesticides.org
* Global warming - 350.org
* Greening schools - healthyschools.org
* Making breast milk safe - safemilk.org
* TEDX endocrine disruption exchange - endocrinedisruption.com
* Environmental Working Group - ewg.org
Another work I enjoyed reading is Daphne de Marneffe’s *Maternal Desire: On Children, Love and the Inner World* (2005) which celebrates spending time with babies and very little kids. It talks about the ways in which some mothers fall in love with their children, the joy and obsessive desire for connection, the ways it can hurt to have to leave them to go to work.
She also tries to come up with a category of good mothering which I had not even realised was a concept which our culture lacks until it was pointed out. For instance, a mother can be negligent in watching over her child, not taking enough care to keep the child safe. Or she can be over-protective and stifling. There is no category of exactly the right amount of care being given. Certainly there is no point at which people stop and say, well done, you are providing precisely the right degree of love and affection combined with space to allow growth. I now feel like I should be saying this to other mothers sometimes. Well done! (BTW: To me this is a profoundly feminist statement - work in an area nearly 100% dominated by women being applauded!).
In short, both well worth reading if you want to consider the emotions and implications of being a parent rather than just focus on getting your child to sleep (as I type my daughter is shrieking at me rather than sleeping) or to eat (hahahaha, no good at that either).
(1) I particularly loath those books which go through what your child should be able to do month by month because my kids, of course, lag behind. Even though I firmly believe it is just their physical development which is slow, this affects all the ways in which they can demonstrate their mental and social abilities so they wind up doing badly all round. (For instance, did Pearl gesture with her arms that she wanted to be picked up? No because her arm muscles were too weak to allow this kind of non-verbal communication as a baby or toddler.)
(2) OTOH, I suck at the feeding/sleeping parts of parenting so perhaps I just pooh-pooh the books in a defensive move.
This was particularly the case before Pearl got her diagnosis. I would read the books which would assume the child would walk at roughly a year and assure the anxious reader that lots walked later than that but that if they had any concerns they should see a doctor. ‘Later’ would not be defined and it certainly didn’t mention what to do if the doctors could not make a diagnosis and just kept prodding and poking your child and then saying doubtfully that perhaps she was just a slow developer.(1)
This experience of parenting books has led me to pooh-pooh the majority of the genre. I think they are fiercely focussed on… well not the wrong things precisely because they concentrate on feeding your kid and getting them to sleep. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say they are focussed on the 10% of the parenting iceberg which is visible.(2)
Here are some suggestions for parenting reading which contain virtually no suggestions on how to get your child to eat vegetables or to sleep through, but which consider the political aspects of parenting. (Political in the sense of exploring the interchange of power over parenting and that my politics favour the feminist. I eschew the sense of political meaning the short term chest thumping of politicians in parliament.)
Sandra Steingraber’s *Raising Elijah: Protecting Our Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis* (2011) really changed the way I view parenting and being green. She’s a biologist who specialises in environmental factors in cancers and endocrinal disorders, so she writes with the quiet authority of one who really knows her stuff. The picture she paints is disturbing – carcinogens and endocrine disruptors are everywhere. Where Steingraber is really strong is that she points out that as parents we are supposed to protect our children from these threats but that they are really so omni-present and so vast that only collective action can address them. She is really really worth reading: http://steingraber.com/
Steingraber made me aware of the extent to which the environmental aspects of parenting are de-politicised. For instance, pregnant women are warned not to eat fish because it contains mercury. But there is no public discussion of the fact that much of the mercury in fish is a by-product of coal powered electricity plants which also contributes to global warming which is something else the baby will have to deal with as an adult (and even as a child). Protecting the vulnerable child becomes the job of each individual woman but none of this energy is channelled towards tougher environmental standards for the big polluters.
There are a lot of green guides I refer to frequently because they inform me of how to make individual changes in my own household. But, as Steingraber points out, there is little point in doing this without also grappling with the political aspects of environmental change.
She writes: ‘This sort of public health approach -- surround kids with brain poisons and enlist mothers and fathers to serve as security detail -- is surely as failure prone with pesticides as it is with lead paint. Following all the popular advice, I do feed my children organic food. . . . But my children do not live solely within the bubble of my kitchen and property lines. . . . I am a conscientious parent. I am not a HEPA filter.’
Seriously, you need to read her. And also consider some of the sites of group action she highlights:
* Beyond pesticides - beyondpesticides.org
* Global warming - 350.org
* Greening schools - healthyschools.org
* Making breast milk safe - safemilk.org
* TEDX endocrine disruption exchange - endocrinedisruption.com
* Environmental Working Group - ewg.org
Another work I enjoyed reading is Daphne de Marneffe’s *Maternal Desire: On Children, Love and the Inner World* (2005) which celebrates spending time with babies and very little kids. It talks about the ways in which some mothers fall in love with their children, the joy and obsessive desire for connection, the ways it can hurt to have to leave them to go to work.
She also tries to come up with a category of good mothering which I had not even realised was a concept which our culture lacks until it was pointed out. For instance, a mother can be negligent in watching over her child, not taking enough care to keep the child safe. Or she can be over-protective and stifling. There is no category of exactly the right amount of care being given. Certainly there is no point at which people stop and say, well done, you are providing precisely the right degree of love and affection combined with space to allow growth. I now feel like I should be saying this to other mothers sometimes. Well done! (BTW: To me this is a profoundly feminist statement - work in an area nearly 100% dominated by women being applauded!).
In short, both well worth reading if you want to consider the emotions and implications of being a parent rather than just focus on getting your child to sleep (as I type my daughter is shrieking at me rather than sleeping) or to eat (hahahaha, no good at that either).
(1) I particularly loath those books which go through what your child should be able to do month by month because my kids, of course, lag behind. Even though I firmly believe it is just their physical development which is slow, this affects all the ways in which they can demonstrate their mental and social abilities so they wind up doing badly all round. (For instance, did Pearl gesture with her arms that she wanted to be picked up? No because her arm muscles were too weak to allow this kind of non-verbal communication as a baby or toddler.)
(2) OTOH, I suck at the feeding/sleeping parts of parenting so perhaps I just pooh-pooh the books in a defensive move.