Shannon Phillips

Although he can get around reliably by scootching on his back, Robin’s now experimenting with moving around on his tummy—yesterday and today I saw him make some progress that way. He also will push himself up on hands and knees and rock forward and backwards in place, which my mother claims is a reliable indicator that real crawling will soon commence.

Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay’s Dance and Books & Islands In Ojibwe Country

My father, knowing that Louise Erdrich is one of my favorite authors, suggested I read her account of motherhood, The Blue Jay’s Dance—and when I told him how much I’d liked it, he sent me the follow-up, Books & Islands in Ojibwe Country. I loved both.

Dad was kind enough to tell me that my blog reminded him of The Blue Jay’s Dance. I think that’s because new motherhood suits itself very well to the style of writing that Erdrich adopts in that book, which is also the essential blog format: short entries, diverse in subject and not necessarily forming any direct chain of thought or experience, but turning and returning to the same themes.

Erdrich’s experiences are of course suffused with the particulars of her own life, but still one of the great pleasures of both books were the moments of recognition, the bits where I said to myself that’s right, that’s right! I did, felt, said, saw the exact same thing!

One of those moments, where she’s describing the power and flexibility of the Ojibwe language:

There are lots of verbs for exactly how people shift position. Miinoshin describes how someone turns this way and that until ready to make a determined move, iskwishin how a person behaves when tired of one position and looking for one more comfortable…Mookegidaazo describes the way a baby looks when outrage is building and coming to the surface where it will result in a thunderous squall.

Another:

For at night, as she curls up or sprawls next to me and as I fall asleep, I hold on to her foot. This is as much for my comfort as to make sure that she doesn’t fall off the bed. As I’m drifting away, I feel sorry for anyone else who is not falling asleep this way, holding on to her baby’s foot. The world is calm and clear. I wish for nothing. I am not nervous about the future. Her toes curl around my fingers.

I have written about co-sleeping before, but I skimmed over that part: how very sweet it is to fall asleep with a baby cuddled against you. I don’t hold Robin’s foot; his kicking reflex is too strong for that; but I do fall asleep with one hand around his belly, feeling the rise and fall of his breath. And for anybody who has ever gone to sleep hugging a pillow or a teddy bear, a baby is so much better.

I joke sometimes that a happy baby is my second-favorite kind of baby, but my favorite is a sleeping one. It’s because at these times I am flooded with the same serenity that Erdrich described.

Co-sleeping is nice for the baby too. There’s a whole bit in my baby book that made me feel smug about it:

But be aware of some possible problems ahead: As her separation anxieties intensify in the next few months, she may start to resist going to bed, and she may wake up more often looking for you. During this difficult period, you may need to experiment with several strategies to find those that help your baby sleep. For example, some children go to sleep more easily with the door open (so they can hear you); others develop consoling habits, such as sucking their thumbs or rocking…To repeat, this period can be extremely difficult for parents. After all, it’s emotionally and physically exhausting to listen to your child cry, and you’ll probably respond with a combination of pity, anger, worry, and resentment. But remember, her behavior is not deliberate. Instead, she’s reacting to anxieties and stresses that are natural at her age.

This “difficult period” is not difficult at all if you sleep with your baby! Nor is the baby anxious or stressed. He doesn’t cry, and he doesn’t display his sadness by rocking or thumb-sucking. He wakes up, finds his mommy right there, and instantly, happily, goes back to sleep. Problem solved!

I said before: people have big arguments about this but I don’t see what’s to argue about. Some people do it and some people don’t. Presumably everybody just picks the sleeping arrangements that work best for their family, right? There is nothing here to argue about. And I still believe that. I’m sure co-sleeping isn’t right for every family. But it’s working great for ours.

Anyway! Louise Erdrich! She’s an awfully good writer, and I really like these books.

Robin’s started doing that baby thing where he holds out his arms when he wants to be picked up.  I’m pleased as punch.  Anything that helps him indicate his needs makes life easier for me.

I was re-reading the baby book Dr. Simons gave us, as Robin is about to graduate to a new chapter (babies 7 to 12 months old). It has a whole section on what to look for in child care providers, including this sentence that made me stop and go “Whaaa?”:

Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) has gotten plenty of attention in recent years, and many parents now know the importance of placing a baby to sleep on her back to minimize the risk of SIDS. Obviously, this same precaution should be followed in child care settings, where 20 percent of all SIDS cases occur.

Twenty percent? SIDS always occurs when a child is asleep; only a fraction (a large fraction, but still a fraction) of children go to daycare at all; and the kids who are in daycare are awake most of that time. So if twenty percent of all SIDS cases occur in child care settings, then isn’t that incredibly suspicious? I mean, yikes. That’s a crazy statistic to be given without any explanation or comment!

I did a little more reading and found that, yes, SIDS is disproportionately associated with daycare. The risk is three times higher for a child in daycare, and the incidence of SIDS deaths peaks around 2-4 months, “which is about the time that working mothers return to work and place their children in child care.”

I don’t have anything against daycare—I went to daycare, and I was fine—but I think this should really be more a part of the conversation about SIDS. I got a lot of information about SIDS from the hospital but I had to tease out for myself this basic fact about the risk. I wonder if it’s something people don’t want to talk about because it suggests an even more unsettling possibility about the prevalence of child abuse in daycare settings?

Of course, SIDS is only one of the many, many things that scare me now. I used to be fearless, really, I lacked even the most rudimentary self-protective instinct. I liked high places, fast cars, big dogs, bad neighborhoods, dangerous substances. I liked fire and storms and things that blow up. This baby has transformed me into an utter craven coward. I’ve had a great time clinging to the back of a motorcycle and careening through traffic, but now I cannot push a stroller across the street without anxiety. Every motorist, and half of the pedestrians, are a potential threat to my baby. Thanks to SIDS, I am even afraid of naps.

The good news on that front, however, is that according to this study I just looked up, 90 percent of SIDS deaths occur before 6 months. So we are mostly out of the woods on that one, at least.

So Twitter? Is this website? Where people, like, post what they happen to be doing right that minute, and so you can, like, virtually follow people around looking over their shoulder all day? If you use Firefox you can get a Twitter plug-in so that new Twitter updates (which are called “tweets,” isn’t that precious?) automatically get displayed in your browser.

Anyway I made Robin a Twitter account, so if you need that level of frequency and granularity in your Robin-reportage, you can get it here. You’ll have to sign into Twitter and become a Robin “follower” before you can see his updates. Let me be the first to assure you that you’re not missing a whole lot if you choose to skip it.

I wrote a little while ago about how maternal love doesn’t come immediately, all at once. It grows day by day.

The crazy thing is that it hasn’t stopped yet. I loved that baby enough to die for him months ago. I love him even more today. It staggers me. I was looking at him tonight, staggered by love, thinking: the love I have for him, per square inch, is crazy! Crazy! I love his elbows! I love the corner of his nose! I love the crease at the base of his thumb! I love every little bit of this baby, more than truffles, more than rare stamps, more than anything. When will it stop? It’s just nuts.

There was one more thing I liked about The Unprocessed Child. Valerie Fitzenreiter includes an epigram for every chapter, and many of them are quite good. My favorite was from Gabriel García Márquez: “She discovered with great delight that one does not love one’s children just because they are one’s children, but because of the friendship formed while raising them.”

This quote made me think of something I overheard on our recent vacation. We were lucky enough to get to see both Nina and Elizabeth and also Erin and Felicia and their lovely children—for those of you following along at home, Nina is my BFF and our madrina, the maid of honor at our wedding and Robin’s godmother, and Erin is one of Sam’s best friends and stood up as a groomsman at our wedding. And Elizabeth and Felicia are both very dear to us and possessed of charms too numerous to mention. So seeing them was wonderful, and it was pretty cool for Sam and me to watch our old friends getting along like gangbusters.

What I overheard was Elizabeth asking Erin about parenting: “The things that are so annoying about other people’s children, is it different when it’s your child?” His answer was an emphatic yes, it is different, which I found tremendously reassuring as it’s something I’ve wondered myself. The Márquez quote kind of speaks to the same issue, and I like it because it suggests that it’s not just a trick of brain chemistry that makes one’s own bratty children so much more tolerable than a stranger’s brats. It’s the fact that you know them so well; and as Neil Gaiman says, it’s hard not to like someone when you know them really well.

(I should add that Aiden and Kayleigh—I hope I’ve got the spellings right—aren’t brats at all. They’re actually exceptionally charming. Kayleigh immediately made herself a big hit with the baby, and Aiden is a great conversationalist.)

Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling by John Taylor Gatto
Child’s Work: Taking Children’s Choices Seriously by Nancy Wallace
The Unprocessed Child by Valerie Fitzenreiter

All of these books pertain to homeschooling, and I ordered them all because we’ve become convinced that we can do Robin a lot of good by delaying his entry into the school system.

It’s well known in educational circles that children held back from entering kindergarten do better, when they do start school, than their younger classmates. They’re more ready for the work, it comes easier to them, and so they learn to think of themselves as smart and “good at school.” This early confidence seems to give them a boost throughout their academic careers:

After crunching the math and science test scores for nearly a quarter-million students across 19 countries, [Kelly] Bedard [a labor economist at the University of California, Santa Barbara] found that relatively younger students perform 4 to 12 percentiles less well in third and fourth grade and 2 to 9 percentiles worse in seventh and eighth; and, as she notes, ‘by eighth grade it’s fairly safe to say we’re looking at long-term effects.’ In British Columbia, she found that the relatively oldest students are about 10 percent more likely to be ‘university bound’ than the relatively youngest ones. In the United States, she found that the relatively oldest students are 7.7 percent more likely to take the SAT or ACT, and are 11.6 percent more likely to enroll in four-year colleges or universities.

The practice is known as “academic redshirting,” and it focuses on the benefits of relative age—it’s about trying to rig things so that your kid is older than his classmates. But absolute age (the number of days a child has been alive before entering school) has a beneficial effect as well, so long as the home environment is stable and nurturing. This is why Finnish children don’t even start school until age 7, and even then the first few years are mostly set aside for play.

Once I started thinking about keeping Robin home for a few years, I began reading up on homeschooling, and quickly ran across the intriguing concept of “unschooling.” It was unschooling that I really wanted to read more about, but I kept finding references to Gatto’s books on unschooling sites, so I ordered that one too.

John Taylor Gatto was a schoolteacher who was on three occasions named New York City Teacher of the Year. He became, however, deeply disillusioned with what he calls “the factory school system.” Dumbing Us Down is a collection of his essays blasting the compulsory schooling system—including the withering indictment of school that he delivered as one of his acceptance speeches for the Teacher of the Year award. The book is basically a polemic, light on statistics or developmental research, but worth reading for the insider’s perspective it offers into the educational system.

There are a few points he makes that seem very basic in hindsight, but that I had never really thought about before. One is that the structure of the school day, with its bells and its inflexible routine, is essentially teaching children that their studies do not matter. It doesn’t matter if you’re in the middle of a sentence in a story you’re reading: if the bell rings, then it’s time to put away your English book and open your math book. The real, unspoken lesson is that following the schedule is more important than satisfying any genuine curiosity or thirst for knowledge.

The other great lesson of schooling is submission to authority. Children have no say in determining their own curricula. They must raise their hand and be called on before they are permitted to speak, or to go to the toilet. They cannot announce that they are ready for a change in their environment, that today they would like to learn about dinosaurs, or to go to the zoo. They are forced to be passive receivers of information rather than active scholars seeking out knowledge. They are taught every moment of every school day that their lives are absolutely controlled by a higher authority. They are denied all autonomy.

And this is crazy, because there is nothing children want to do more than to learn, and to seek out experiences for themselves. You have to really, really get in a kid’s way before you can stifle that thirst for knowledge. “Why? Why? Why? Why?” is the constant refrain of childhood.

And this leads us to unschooling. Unschooling is basically homeschooling without a set curriculum. It’s about letting the kids follow their own interests. The idea is that they want to learn to read, they want to learn about the world, they want the math skills to handle money and so forth: all you have to do as a teacher is show them how to teach themselves, and they will.

I’ll say up front that I think unschooling is really interesting but I’m not totally sold on the concept. Since both my parents are professors, I have too much respect for the academic endeavor to believe that formal frameworks of knowledge are wholly unnecessary. But I wanted to read more about the experiences of parents who had done unschooling.

Child’s Work is a deeply personal account of a mom who was basically forced into homeschooling by the unique needs of her son, a musical prodigy. Ishmael was “a smart kid” but one with decidedly lopsided aptitudes, and such an idiosyncratic way of learning that he simply could not adapt to the classroom and the workbooks. Nancy Wallace decided that the school’s inflexible approach was doing her son great harm. For instance, Ishmael could read when he entered school, but the teachers wanted to force him to learn all over again using the “right” (a phonetic) method. Wallace quotes from a school report suggesting that Ishmael be held back:

Ishmael seems more comfortable at a third grade reading level; he still makes some mistakes in phonics and vocabulary skills. Testing should be continued before considering a higher level. The testing should be only for reading skills, as I already know that he can read adult materials.

This is clearly insane. A child who can read adult materials should spend his time reading, reading whatever he wants to read, not working with phonemes and flashcards and endless tests and watered-down Dick-and-Jane-type books just so the adults in his life can be satisfied that he is reading in the authority-approved way.

Taking Ishmael out of school was obviously the right thing to do, and he thrived at home, as did his little sister Vita—the Wallaces had such a traumatic experience attempting to put Ishmael in school that they never even tried it with Vita. I suspect Vita would have had much less difficulty than Ishmael, but then she never would have developed her “doll work”—and it is extremely touching to read about how seriously her older brother Ishmael regarded Vita’s dolls, helping her to develop the intricate social customs and succession struggles and even the wars that apparently plagued the doll kingdoms. It’s Wallace’s argument that none of this constitutes “mere play.” It was their work, and she took it as seriously as she took their music lessons and their essays.

Nancy Wallace is very honest about the challenges of unschooling. She fretted about how her children would learn algebra without being forced to study it. She fretted about socialization.

Vita and Ishmael did eventually develop an interest in mathematics on their own, but skeptics would find some ammunition in Wallace’s frank answer to the socialization question. Vita and Ishmael were so different from their agemates that they did not, by and large, enjoy playing with the neighborhood kids. They developed strong friendships with other adults, and with a few other homeschooled children, but they probably came off as weird, precocious kids. Nancy Wallace’s assertion is simply that that’s not so bad. They weren’t perfectly “normal,” but they were happy, confident, smart, talented kids and they were quite comfortable in adult society, if not very comfortable in kid society. So they were badly socialized from one perspective, but very well socialized from another. I would be curious to know if Vita or Ishmael themselves, now that they are grown, perceive this as a loss.

One of the things I like about Child’s Work, in retrospect, is that it is not really a book about unschooling. It is a book about raising Vita and Ishmael. Their needs and aptitudes were so specific that very few of the Wallace family’s experiences are likely to be replicated in any other homeschooled family. The only “lesson” Nancy Wallace really has to impart is the basic one about giving children freedom to pursue their own interests.

The same, sadly, is not true of Valerie Fitzenreiter’s The Unprocessed Child. One good thing about this book is that Valerie’s daughter Laurie is grown now, with her own blog, so it’s possible to see “how she turned out.” She turned out, by all indications, really well. Valerie Fiztenreiter did a good job raising Laurie. What Valerie doesn’t seem to realize, though, is that what worked for Laurie might not work for all kids.

Valerie is a pretty radical even for an unschooler. Where Nancy Wallace talks about the active role she played in her children’s education, despite the absence of lesson plans—”I cannot simply back away from Vita and Ishmael,” she writes, “I have to let them know that I am still with them, ready to respond in any capacity that might be useful”—Valerie Fitzenreiter advocates more disengagement:

It’s so difficult at times to remain silent when you see her doing something that she will have to redo later but if you remain steadfast and allow her to make the ‘mistake’ she will learn from it and try something different next time…I found that when Laurie was trying to figure out the answer to a question but did not specifically ask me, then it was best to keep quiet.

Valerie, furthermore, does not believe that children should have bedtimes (“the dreaded forced bedtime was another reminder that I was not in charge of my own life”), be expected to do chores (“Why should the child have any of the responsibility of taking care of the mundane chores required? The child will become an adult soon enough and be taking care of her own place”), be disciplined for sassing back (“Sometimes Laurie ‘talked back’ to me in anger. I took this as a sign that I was not listening and would make an effort to tune in to what she was saying”), or in fact be disciplined at all (“Discipline is scarcely disguised control…There were no threats, no spankings, no withholding of favors if she did not do something she had been asked to do.”)

All of this seems to have worked fine for Valerie and Laurie. I found the book’s tone, however, to be gratingly arrogant and presumptive. It honestly seems never to have occurred to Valerie Fitzereiter that different children may require different levels of structure and discipline. Her book is filled with anecdotes about other parents, which she oddly refers to as her “friends,” although the point of the anecdote is always to criticize the other parent’s skills while bragging about the success of her own methods. She never hesitates to make sweeping pronouncements about The One Right Way to Raise a Child, and she is very quick to condemn all other parenting techniques as abusive.

It is, for example, abusive to potty train a young child. It is abusive to refer to a child’s behavior as “bad.” It is “outrageous” to ask children to remove their shoes before entering the house, and in fact on this issue Valerie is as didactic as she is on every other one:

Maybe having a clean floor is of the utmost importance to you? You have to ask yourself if it is more significant than the emotional well being of your children and the overall harmony of your household. Constant nagging about the floor creates tension in you and in everyone else. If you cannot let go of your aversion to a less than perfectly clean floor then it would be better for you to be ever ready with a mop as opposed to making everyone else miserable with perpetual carping.

There are many more passages in The Unprocessed Child that equal the one above for condescension and judgmentalism. For someone who so stridently defended her own right to raise her child the way she saw fit, Valerie Fitzenreiter is awfully unwilling to extend the same courtesy to others.

For myself, I am still reading and thinking about educational strategies. Right now, I expect we’ll keep Robin at home for at least the first few years of grade school, and I’d like to try and capture some of the benefits of unschooling, but I also want to provide some kind of overarching intellectual framework in which his own interests and discoveries can be contextualized. So I imagine conducting formal lessons for a couple of hours a day, and allowing him to set the agenda for the rest of the day (with me present and engaged to provide help and guidance). My evolving thoughts on pedagogy, socialization, and homeschooling will definitely require another post.

When Robin makes his funny little baby noises, the natural tendency of any adult in the room is to make them right back at him. He finds this interesting, and amusing, and the game can be kept up indefinitely.

Today he was blowing raspberries, and I was imitating him, and then something changed—he would make a noise, and wait, never breaking eye contact, for me to make it back to him. There was an intent and an understanding that I haven’t seen in previous iterations of this game. He wasn’t just being amused by adults making funny noises. He understood that I was doing the same thing he was, that we were taking turns doing it, and that something was being communicated thereby. The noise was meaningful. It meant “I see you, I recognize you, I acknowledge you.”

Thbbbbt! “I see you, Mommy!”

Thbbbt! “I see you, Robin!”

Thhhbbbbt! “Yes! You see me!”

Thbbt! “That’s right! I sure do!”

It was a really exciting moment! He doesn’t know a single word, but I feel certain that we’ve had our first conversation.

“Spatilomancy” is the use of feces to divine the future, and all parents quickly become practitioners in this black art. It’s hard to tell exactly what a breast-fed baby is taking in, after all, except by studying his output. So new parents are instructed to scrutinize their baby’s poops, judging on both quantity and quality. We were provided by the hospital with a booklet that allowed us to chart the daily poops, and in the first weeks I filled it out religiously. The first few days’ diapers are tarry black and sticky, but the substance soon changes to something mustard-yellow and seedy, and then to copious amounts of liquidy brown goop.

A breast-fed baby’s shit doesn’t stink. Really. The smell reminds me most of buttered popcorn.

Breast-fed babies also don’t get constipated. The pediatrician—I’d better call him by his name, Dr. Simons, as I cannot seem to shake a tendency to refer to him as “the vet”—assured us of this during our visit the other day. Robin hadn’t crapped in three days, which made me nervous, but Dr. Simons told us this was perfectly normal. The difference between “constipation” and “not crapping in days” is that in the former case the poops will be hard when they do came, and the baby is in discomfort. In the second case, however, the baby can be perfectly happy and healthy, and the poop remains soft.

Dr. Simons said that in a clinic where he used to work, the interns used to keep track of the longest periods that breast-fed babies could go without pooping. By the time he left, the record stood at three and a half weeks. For a perfectly healthy baby! “Sometimes they just use up every bit of the milk,” he shrugged. “There’s just nothing left over.”

Robin delivered himself of a vast poopsplosion mere hours after returning home from the doctor’s office, by the way. I just thought that was a pretty interesting story!