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During last July’s 5.8 earthquake, 3-year-old Bronwyn told her 1-year-old sister, “We’re going for a wiggle.” READ MORE
Early Years (2-6)
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As mature parents, a couple together for 20 years before the baby, we had assembled a large and broad collection of friends. These people quickly transformed themselves, along with our families, into an ad hoc first-time new parent support group. Once they were over the shock of our jolly announcement, these folks came through for us, and big time. By big, I mean four, and by four, I mean the number of showers hosted on our behalf. There was a work shower, my family’s shower, his family’s shower, an arty friend’s shower, and, in between, showering ourselves with, I confess, our own purchases. With the showers came thoughtful gifts, including educational ones. Extremely and self-consciously and pointedly educational ones I might add, considering my husband and I are, after all, educators. So are many of our pals. Educational is an adjective often used to differentiate from fun, but it’s especially potent, even a little scary and intimidating if you stop to ask about its opposite. And under the right circumstances say, if you are 6 months old or even 6 years a stick is, for instance, both fun and educational. But in the marketing of products to the newly born, the nearly born, even the unborn all of whom seem to require more educating, and education-related products than the average college freshman parents and shower shoppers will find stick and carrot. People mean well, and they want the best for your little scholar. And since, as educators ourselves, we would clearly be challenging the mainstream commercial TV pap with thoughtfully subversive, i.e. educational, parenting, we became the obvious target of every kind of unlikely skills-building, cognitively challenging, MENSA-approved toy. We played along, of course. After all, we’d spun plenty of Mozart and Miles Davis when the boy was still in the womb, read to him, and fed him prenatal vitamins jam-packed with every kind of brain-building enzyme and mineral Dr. Sears or Dr. Spock or Dr. Brazelton could prescribe. After he was born, in those vulnerable, desperate sleep-deprived early months, I once worried that we were failing the lad. I had forgotten to hang the special black-and-white-patterned crib mobile designed to stimulate his eyes. Clearly, my child’s eyesight would be damaged or at least under-developed. Otherwise, we did pretty much what the educational toy industry and the shower brigade demanded: We propped him up in front of Baby Einstein videos, sang along to sing-along CDs guaranteed to make him a musician, and arranged the Baby Einstein interactive toys so that, when he crawled instead in the direction of the stick, he might at least catch a passing glimpse of the English alphabet. Among shower gifts was a book on sign language. There were music tapes in German, Spanish and French. (Why not Latin, I wonder?) Most provocatively, somebody gave us flash cards meant to teach him to read before age 2. Our thoughtful friends had set the bar pretty darn high. Which made it that much easier to quickly embrace failure, let the kid play with the stick, toss the flashcards and the videos in the closet, and reconsider the whole Baby Brain industry. In those early years, milestones appeared like a pop quiz at the end of a chapter in a baby book, monthly or weekly or even daily tests of our skills, not to mention the child’s. After awhile, the pace seemed to slow, taking on new forms. Instead of rolling over, it was counting. Instead of stacking blocks, it was reciting the alphabet, recognizing cause and effect, learning how to dress. More seemed to be at stake than ever before. What did it mean to backslide? Suddenly our son who seemed to know the alphabet well enough could no longer recognize certain letters. Or had he known it at all? Perhaps they had been only a string of fun sounds, a song featuring the irresistible syllabic slide of L-M-N-O-P and not 26 distinct letters upon which his entire future depended, God help us. We could have ramped up our response here, but instead decided to downsize our expectations and reduce anxiety and perhaps prevent some in our child. We stayed with the basics. Reading, for instance. As any parent knows, this is more about repetition than reading. It’s about syntax and association. It’s about language development. Some kids get it earlier, some later. Last week, just as we were feeling a little below average, as though we’d scraped our knees on the latest developmental hurdle, our 3 1/2-year-old organized alphabetically the mismatched collection of helpfully educational magnetic letters on the fridge. We confidently checked off that little developmental skill. Now we can worry about counting, telling time, reading and driving. He is figuring out jokes like that one, which pleases us. And we’re figuring out, once again, that the best parenting strategy is patience. He’ll get there and we’ll get there with him all on his own time. Lisa Alvarez, an English professor at Irvine Valley College, lives in Modjeska Canyon with her husband and 3-year-old son. |
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