Beyond Girls and Boys

(Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

This week, I’m very proud to announce that you can find me on Black Girl Dangerous:

“Beyond Girls and Boys: Teaching Gender to My Kids”

 

10 Reasons Why Maria Kang Is Wrong Wrong Wrong

I don't work out. I lift my kids.
So I have biceps, but not a taut tummy.
Also, I don't know how to Photoshop out my nipples.
(Photo by Kevin Miller)

... and one bonus one!

(If you don’t know what I’m talking about, read this.)

1) “What’s Your Excuse?” My job isn’t fitness, and my body is not an ad for my business.

2) Some of us have priorities other than appearing fuckable to 20-year-old guys.
 
3) Not all of us have a stay-at-home-husband. Or a partner at all. Or relatives who can take the kids anytime for free. Or money for sitters. Or access to licensed, good quality day care. Gee, you know what might help with that? Universal child care.
 
4) Why don’t all moms work out while their kids are playing at the park? Maybe because they are enjoying a moment to themselves. Maybe because they are trying to have a little adult social life as a break from being around children all day. Maybe they have kids who demand a lot of attention. And maybe women who make different choices than you have completely legitimate reasons for doing so.
 
5) Being skinny isn’t the same as being fit.
 
6) Over-exercising is a thing.
 
7) Fat-shaming is bad for everybody. Including the children. Maybe especially for the children.
 
8) Different bodies are different. It makes my heart ache to think that Kang has struggled with an eating disorder in a quest to attain the societal ideal of a “perfect” body. Maybe if we didn’t define “beauty” in such a narrow band along the spectrum of our body shapes and sizes, no girl would push herself to such extremes to look a certain way.
 
9) You know another Asian-American woman who has struggled with an eating disorder? Margaret Cho. Cho has coped with this through being a bad-ass feminist and GLBT advocate. Instead of internalizing norms of feminine beauty, she has dedicated herself to challenging and dismantling them. I know which solution I’d rather choose.
 
10) My tummy is no longer taut because my abdominal wall stretched out when I grew two human beings inside of me. Maybe we, as a culture, should try to honor these bodies that have created life. Doesn’t that have its own beauty?
 
And the bonus reason Maria Kang is wrong wrong wrong:

11) Now I have to explain that not all hapa-Pinays from SacTown are like this. 

Not enough reasons? Don’t worry, there’s plenty more.

Special thanks to HapaMama Grace Hwang Lynch and Cynthia Liu of K-12NN for the thought-provoking Facebook dialogues that led to this post.

Spanking: Afterthoughts to Fight or Flight

The Pick-Up-The-Kid-N-Go method.
(Photo by Kevin Miller)

So low is the profile of my blog and, apparently, so aligned the audience that I haven’t received any countering arguments or comments to my post on spanking. That doesn’t mean that I haven’t imagined any. 

Reading over it again, I realized I missed one obvious argument: “Well, if it stopped her from hitting you, wouldn’t it be worth it?” 

Except that wasn’t what happened. In the days that followed, Silver ratcheted up the hitting. I don’t know if my example had made it acceptable to her, or if she liked it because she realized it was an easy way to provoke me, or if she had her own toddler logic, but it took me weeks of NOT hitting her in response to undo what I had done in a single flash of suspended judgment. 

I wrote this post while visiting my father-in-law in Florida. He happens to be a developmental psychologist, and he read it the next day. (In fact, my husband was raised by two developmental psychologists, which must explain why he’s so calm and balanced. I find it immensely reassuring that he finds our kids exasperating and mentally exhausting sometimes, too.) 

My father-in-law talked with me about some of the current research on spanking. He noted that much research shows an increase in aggression in children who are spanked, but that one researcher in particular, Diana Baumrind, cast doubt on this connection. Baumrind’s 2001 study on the effects of spanking,* which is well-respected for its thorough methodology, demonstrates that “an occasional swat, when delivered in the context of good child-rearing, has not been shown to do any harm.” From a New York Times article: 

Dr. Baumrind described findings from her own research, an analysis of data from a long-term study of more than 100 families, indicating that mild to moderate spanking had no detrimental effects when such confounding influences were separated out. When the parents who delivered severe punishment—for example, frequently spanking with a paddle or striking a child in the face—were removed from the analysis, Dr. Baumrind and her colleague, Dr. Elizabeth Owens, found that few harmful effects linked with spanking were left. And the few that remained could be explained by other aspects of the parent-child relationship. 

“When parents are loving and firm and communicate well with the child,” Dr. Baumrind said, “the children are exceptionally competent and well adjusted, whether or not their parents spanked them as preschoolers.” 

My problem here is that, for me, spanking came out of a place of anger and frustration, and I can see all too clearly the slippery slope that such an “easy and fast” discipline method can lead to. Escalation from “an occasional swat” seems inevitable. 

Would it have made a difference if I had spanked my daughter in a calm mental state rather than a heated one? I will never know. But if I am calm enough to rationally apply spanking, then I am calm enough to use alternative methods of discipline. If I am not calm enough to use those methods, then I am not calm enough to spank, and I have to walk away. 

The temptation of spanking is that it is a quick enforcement of an ignored “No!” But oftentimes a child’s misbehavior has an underlying cause, an unmet need or unexpressed emotion. If my choice, when I am calm and rational, is to quickly enforce my will with a spanking, or sit with my child to find the root cause of her anger, I will choose the latter. 

This requires a luxury of time that I don’t always have, but as a middle-class American WAHM of only 2 children, I probably can indulge in this luxury more than many parents. My choice means probably several “wasted” hours, waiting for children to blow out their tantrums. And I do mean hours. My daughter, in particular, has hurricane-level tantrums, and each one can take at least an hour to blow out. 

Many families don’t have this luxury of time. A parent who has to get to a shift on time, or a school-aged child who will be punished for excessive tardies, or a parent overwhelmed with caring for multiple children or even multiple generations... the list of exceptions is long. (In the cases when I simply can’t wait, I pick up my child and we just go, kicking and screaming all the way.) 

Ultimately, however, I cannot conscience teaching my children not to hit by hitting them. It will likely be years until I know if I have made the right choices. Or I may never know. But every day that I don’t spank my kids, my heart is at peace. I’m not sure I can say that about any other aspect of my parenting. 

*I haven’t checked to see if this study has been updated. I do have issues with the fact that the demographics of this study are homogenous, and that the researchers only tracked the children until the age of 14. My own “detrimental effects” of spanking didn’t appear to myself until I had my own children.  

Fight or Flight

(Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

I belong to a group called Multicultural Kid Blogs, and a couple of my fellow mother-bloggers posted recently on spanking. Cordelia Newlin de Rojas explicated the role of spanking in French parenting, while Kim Siegal contemplated it in the context of her new home in Kenya. Both discuss their observations, congruent with research presented in NurtureShock, that in a culture where spanking is considered the norm, children don’t find it psychologically damaging, nor does it result in increased aggression. (I should also state that they don’t advocate spanking, and they don’t spank their own kids.)

The aggregated research on the effects of spanking seems to be inconclusive, likely because it would be difficult if not impossible to assess how spanking affects every child in every culture while controlling for other factors. 

I don’t want to delve into the science of spanking, however. Instead, I want to provide a snapshot of the way that spanking has played out in my life.

Frequently as I parent, I ask myself, WWSMD: “What Would a Senegalese Mom Do?” From carrying a baby on my back to benignly ignoring my kids sometimes to making my daughter watch her little brother, this question helps me keep perspective on American parenting. But one tradition I haven’t adopted is hitting. Senegalese children can be hit by parents, extended family, or even neighbors if they are truly out of bounds of good behavior. “Damay simi sama daal!”—I’m taking off my shoe!—is a threat every Wolof child understands. Although I choose not to hit or spank, I am uncomfortable with declaring that no child should be spanked, ever. I don’t wish to be a cultural imperialist—the road to hell, and all that. I know plenty of people who can declare, in various languages, “I was spanked, and I turned out fine!” Rather, I want to add my voice to an anecdotal history of spanking.

Both Newlin de Rojas and Siegal specify that spanking means a slap with an open hand on the behind, not done in anger, but as a controlled method to enforce discipline. They try to draw a firm line between spanking and beating. 

I grew up in the 1970s, when spanking was very much the norm in the U.S. My parents spanked rarely, as a last resort because I had gone beyond the pale and—I am certain now—they had run out of other discipline options. I remember clearly my dad saying once before spanking me, “This hurts me more than it hurts you.” With parental hindsight, I now understand what he meant. Yet I can simultaneously call bullshit on this assertion now as easily as I would have if “bullshit” had been in my vocabulary at that age. To compare his emotional pain to my physical pain is to compare fruits of the genus malus with those of the genus citrus.

Oddly, I don’t remember any of my particular offenses that led to the spankings, only the spankings themselves, and the feelings of pain, humiliation, and shame that accompanied them. I assume they “worked” in that I avoided being “bad” sometimes because I was afraid of getting a spanking. I do remember times when I had done something “bad” —usually a mistake, like breaking something—and wanting to hide my act because of that fear. 

The day I decided I wasn’t going to be spanked anymore is as clear as the other memories are murky. I had been playing around with my dad, and I was in high spirits. I tried to get him to drink milk diluted with water. I couldn’t stop giggling. I had, in short, been bitten by the silly bug. I wanted his attention, my energy spiraled upwards and upwards as I fought to hold it. At some point, I knew I had pushed the boundary too far, and I could tell my dad was ready to spank me. 

I immediately backed up against my grandmother’s cabinets, my hands over my butt. I might even have been baring my teeth. I recognize now that I had entered fight-or-flight mode. I didn’t know how I was going to stop my dad; but I was determined with every fiber of my being NOT to get spanked. 

Whatever was in my eyes, my dad didn’t spank me, and neither parent spanked me again.*

Fast forward to my own parenthood, and the only day I experimented with hitting my child. This was not the “official” definition of spanking. I was mad and at the end of my tether. I had exhausted my other parenting tactics. So I was already frayed when my 2-year-old daughter slapped me... and it hurt. What seemed quicker than thought, my hand reached out and smacked her on the thigh, hard enough to sting. She recoiled from me, shock and hurt in her face, and said plaintively, “Don’t hit me!” 

I realized, in that moment, I was contradicting with my actions the core moral imperative I was trying to instill in her: don’t hurt people. If children learn best through modeling, I was providing the worst example. I felt like a beast, and I knew I was a hypocrite. 

That’s when I decided I would not hit my children. I can’t raise my hand without imagining a dog flinching in anticipation of a blow. That’s not the relationship I want to have with my child. 

But digging deep, thoughts and memories provoked by my colleagues’ posts, I realized this isn’t the only reason. Recently, my son has started to bite me when he’s frustrated. I’m still getting used to this new response, so he keeps slipping in bites before I can defend myself, and they hurt. Particularly yesterday, when his bite landed on my nipple. 

Nothing pushes me into a rage with my children as when they hurt me. “DON’T HIT/KICK/BITE ME!” I snarl. And I can feel it, my animal self, the fight-or-flight coming to blot out my reasoning centers. I have to walk away, choose flight instead of fight.

I have only been hit by a few people in my life: my parents and my grandfather. 

When my children inflict pain on me, it returns me immediately to that moment, my back up against my grandmother’s cabinets, my hands protecting my body. It’s not a moment I want my children to have.

So I say no. And it will stop. 

(What happened in the weeks after I spanked my daughter in the coda to this post, Afterthoughts.)


*I realize that the combination of my last post and this one make it sound like I had a truly terrible childhood, and I just want to tell you, No! Really! My childhood had lots of happy times! Just as Tolstoy found unhappy families more compelling as literary fodder, so do I with the less happy moments of my childhood. NOT that I’m comparing my writing to Tolstoy’s!

Readings:

Are French Kids Better Behaved Because They Are Spanked? (InCulture Parent)
Do read the comments, since “French parenting” is hardly a monolith, as some of the comments point out.

Rethinking Spanking from the Land of Kibokos (Mama Mzungu)

Is Spanking a Black and White Issue? (The New York Times)
When casting around for other articles on spanking, I came across this roundtable discussion. Much talk of spanking in the U.S. centers on African-American communities, possibly because it is more acceptable, or because African Americans speak more openly about it, or both, or for a bunch of other reasons. (Certainly amongst my friends, those who discuss it with a certain nonchalance are African American, although not all my African American friends were spanked, or describe it nonchalantly.) I think I remember, although I cannot find it nor be sure that I really read it, an account that argued that African-American parents enforce discipline more strictly because acting “out of line” carries higher consequences for black kids in American society than for white kids. (Certainly Trayvon Martin’s fate—among several others—would bear out that theory.) I want to draw particular attention to Daphne S. Cain’s contribution, where she writes, “Corporal punishment is not counter to mainstream parenting practices; it is actually the norm” as a counterpoint to the discourse that spanking is not acceptable in American society.

Another realization I had when composing this post was that this is the only scene I remember from the entirety of Ingmar Bergman’s film, Fanny and Alexander.


 

The Personal Is (Still) Political

(Photo by Kevin Miller)

I want to stay in bed.

It feels like too much. The government shutdown and the debt ceiling showdown. Attacks on SNAP and ACA. Funerals of victims from the Westgate Mall in Kenya. The Canadian government muzzling scientists. The ongoing deaths of honeybees. The continuing gun debate after the mass shooting at the Navy Yards. And on and on and on.

When I was a child, my mother and her terrible, horrible, no good, very bad boyfriend would sometimes have screaming fights after my bedtime. I would wake to the crashing of things being broken. I huddled under the covers, terrified, paralyzed, eyes closed, wishing it would stop. On the worst nights, my mother would scoop me up, pajamas, comforter, and all, and bundle me into the back seat of her car to flee to my dad’s house. My mother and I would squeeze into my twin bed. The next morning, we returned to her house, and the clock would reset until the next time.

Decades have gone by, but it still comes: paralysis; hopelessness; the feeling that I can’t escape, I can’t make it change, I can’t make it stop. I want to stay in bed, but I’m a mother now. My family needs to be fed. My children need to be cared for. My household needs to keep going. They require money, effort, time, presence.

It comes particularly when I am sick, or stressed, or overwhelmed, or underslept. At least one of these conditions accompanies me every day of parenthood.

Parenting is hard for everyone. No less true for being oft-repeated: each child is unique, which makes advice by experts, family, and passersby of limited utility when raising your own child.

Most exhausting are the echoes of my own childhood that run in the background of my mind, the constant, constant, every-single-interaction fight I wage with my past whenever my kids are squirrelly, fussy, or just plain defiant. My goal is to be patient, to listen, to maintain firm limits while allowing my children to express their “big feelings.”

When I am tired or hungry (again, most of the time), I eventually start to lose the battle. My intellect gives way to patterns deeply etched in my psyche, patterns of yelling, of biting sarcasm, of calculated grown-up words to make a child feel small and ashamed to push against parental power. I am learning to bite my tongue and walk away, which only leads my daughter to run after me, hold my legs, cry, and otherwise completely exacerbate the situation I am trying to escape. I go to my bed and lock the door. Mama time out.

I want to be there for my children; but sometimes, I dread the emotional minefield.

It’s layers upon layers. Near the surface, stresses of adult life: finances, politics, family, sex, time pressures, obligations, balancing. Underlying these, trauma from my childhood dredged up as I relive it through my own children. I push back against ingrained habits carved into me before I knew childhood could be different. The mother-drive pressures me to make it better for my kids, I have to make it better for my kids.

I inherited a history of depression passed down generation to generation, a switch flipped in my genes for self-preservation, a legacy that means that any setback or barrier puts me in fight-or-flight. In clinical terms, I have anxiety and panic attacks. In non-clinical terms... I don’t know how to describe it. Like walls closing in. Like a personal raincloud. Like the apocalypse coming and everyone is going to be raptured except me.

I just want to stay in bed.

(Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

I don’t write this to say poor me. I am hardly unique. I write this because none of us parent in a vacuum, because no day is a discreet moment in time. Every day is a convergence of the past—history, ancestry, echoes and reverberations. We try with every fiber to make the past clean for our children, a source of strength, not a weight holding them back. We look at them and see expanding possibilities. I want to lift my children up, not push them down.

Remember your diaper bag? Remember how light it was unwrapped at the baby shower? And then you put so many small objects in it. Diapers. A pacifier. Wipes. Changing pad. Extra clothes, each piece so tiny. A jacket. A blanket. Clothespins, to hold the blanket on the stroller. A bottle and extra formula, maybe. Or a nursing cover. Plastic bags to hold pooped-on clothing. Teething ring. Snacks. Water. Phone. And then, with the baby on one arm, the diaper bag on the other no longer felt light.

I feel this way now. Each piece by itself is not so weighty, but taken together, they burden me. What if we could lighten the load? What if I didn’t have to worry about affording enough child care? What if I knew I could get a job and still be available to pick up my kids after school, stay home with them when they are sick, go to parent-teacher conferences? What if I didn’t have to add fundraising for our schools to my to-do list? What if I could feel confident that we would have enough money to put our kids through college and retire? What if I didn’t have to worry that my husband or I might get seriously ill and drain our account on medical bills?

When I say universal child care, single-payer health care, a living wage, flexible work, paid family leave, accessible education, it all sounds so abstract. But when I live the worries, every day, it feels beyond real—it feels material.

I can’t escape my past. I can’t change how I grew up. I can’t stop the way memory and history trip me up on the path to being the kind of parent I wish to be. But with a little more support, maybe it would be easier to get up in the morning.

Resources

National Organization for Women
Moms Rising
National Partnership for Women and Families
National Center for Children in Poverty