Two Children in Poverty, a Century Apart

At the orphanage. My grandmother is in the center row,
fourth from the left. Year and photographer unknown.

I have been very sick for a week, and no end in sight. So today, while trying to force myself to stay in bed, I finally read the New York Times’ profile of Dasani, a homeless girl living in a shelter in Brooklyn. Once I started, I had to read the entire gripping, heart-wrenching account. 

“[Dasani] belongs to a vast and invisible tribe of more than 22,000 homeless children in New York, the highest number since the Great Depression, in the most unequal metropolis in America.” 

It made me think of another person I know who grew up in New York in poverty: my grandmother. 

My Armenian grandmother was born in Istanbul when it was still known as Constantinople. She arrived in New York at eight years old (although officially only five years old, for a lower fare in steerage), a refugee from Turkey who had escaped the Armenian Genocide. Her mother couldn’t support her, so she sent my grandmother to live in an orphanage for several years, until her mother married again and could afford to bring her home. My grandmother grew up in the city through the Great Depression. She was able to attend a public arts high school, which led to her first job copying French perfume bottles for a department store. She gave all the money she earned to her mother. 

In the course of her life in the U.S., she skyrocketed out of poverty into prosperity, a world away from where she started. She had a house in California with her own studio. Her husband owned his own business and passed it onto their sons. She died, essentially of old age, at ninety-seven and a half. 

Like many women of her generation, my grandmother safeguarded herself from deprivation, even in the midst of plenty. She bought oatmeal, canned tomato sauce, and soup in bulk. She cooked huge amounts of Armenian food—kufta, berag, lamajoon, kata, churag—and packed the leftovers into a second freezer. She hid money throughout the house; sometimes she forgot it, and we only found it after she died. 

Certain habits of caution and protection have lasted three generations, carved into my dad and me even though we have never known such want. 

When I read this story, about all the structural barriers that keep Dasani’s family trapped in a shelter for more than three years, I cried. My grandmother horrified me with stories of conditions at the orphanage, but the shelter trumps the hardships she endured. Adding insult to injury are the examples of Dasani and her family disregarded and unheard by those who are ostensibly charged with protecting children and the poor: housing inspectors, the Administration for Children’s Services, the shelter director. And above them all, the mysterious figure of Mayor Bloomberg looms, enacting laws from an abstract distance that affect their lives in concrete terms. His philosophy of ending poverty, based on ideology, instead closes down the family’s potential exits from the shelter to stable housing. 

In stark contrast, Dasani’s teachers and principal stand out as they try their best to keep her in school, to teach her the kind of impulse control she will need to succeed, and to provide structure and stability that she can find nowhere else in her life. 

America’s promise is deeply, deeply broken. That homeless children must survive in these places, just blocks away from $1.9 million condos, is profoundly immoral. We have absolutely no claim to the title “the greatest country in the world” as long as we are willing to allow children to grow up in circumstances like these. We must take steps to end such escalating inequality now. 

Charity is not enough. We need a transformation of how we conceptualize poverty. We need to take a hard look at the way inequality is built into the very bricks of our society. To provide Dasani with the same opportunities my grandmother had, we need to reconsider access to quality education, living wages, child care services, prenatal care, drug addiction and its criminalization, mental and physical health care, welfare, urban planning, and our institutional prejudices against women, against people of color, against the poor themselves. Most of all, we need to listen to the voices of people in poverty and take them seriously when they vocalize their needs. And their dreams. 

No easy task, certainly. But we have a choice. When faced with the problem of every child like Dasani, will we throw up our hands? Or will we roll up our sleeves and do the hard work?

Rest in (People) Power, Nelson Mandela

(Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

Madiba went home today.

The lesson of Mandela and the Anti-Apartheid movement is not about endings. I remember how elated and triumphant I felt in 1994, when South Africans of all colors went to the polls. But the path to liberation does not end with democracy. Democracy is but one step. We are still treading the path. 

That path started before Nelson Mandela, and it continues after him. No one person is a movement. Great shifts in history come from masses of people working together: drops of water that make a flood. 

After a liberator dies, power rewrites the story. So it’s up to the people to remember the truth. Human lives are never simple, nothing is just black-and-white. (Not even South Africa—the Anti-Apartheid movement included every constituency of the Rainbow Nation, including people of Southeast Asian and South Asian origins.) The South African constitution enshrined GLBT rights because people in the movement did not hide for the sake of the struggle, they instead made connections between racism and homophobia visible and visceral. The Anti-Apartheid movement aimed for nothing less than liberation for all, but only because people within the movement demanded it. 

Power sees liberation movements as the enemy. Power wants nothing more than Stasis, to continue itself into perpetuity. People want Change, because we are alive, because we grow and die, because we have children, because Life begins and ends and keeps going on, but never the same. 

Mandela gave us a gift. He gave us tools. We don’t need to mourn what we’ve lost. Let’s instead revel in the gifts we have received, in the knowledge we have gained. Power wants us to forget. We will not forget. For Madiba’s sake, and for all those ordinary, mundane freedom fighters whose names are forgotten to history, but not to their friends and families, we must remember. We have to take up the tools, well-worn. We repair and use them again. And we pass them on. 

******** 

Since the day of Mandela’s passing, I have heard from friends who are teachers that many of their students—elementary to high school—do not know who Mandela was nor what he accomplished. 

Zoë Wicomb wrote in The New Yorker, “Every schoolchild knows of his contribution to democracy in South Africa, of the sacrifices he made, of his status as an icon of reconciliation.” 

Apparently not. And they won’t unless we tell them.  


Readings on Mandela the man, not Mandela the myth:

"The Meaning of Mandela," The Nation 
"Don't Sanitize Mandela,"  The Daily Beast
"Three Myths About Mandela Worth Busting," Africa Is A Country
"That Time Reagan Vetoed the Anti-Apartheid Act," Colorlines.

Multicultural Kid Blogs has a tribute page to Mandela, including a link to an elementary school lesson plan about Mandela.

Between Superman and Princess Boy

So far this holiday season, the controversial gendered toy seems to be GoldieBlox, the toy that began as a scrappy feminist upstart to generate engineer girls, but lately has labored under criticisms that it reinforces stereotypes about girls (“all girls are oriented verbally”; “girls won’t touch anything that isn’t princessy”), that the toy is an inferior build compared with “boy” toys, and that it doesn’t inspire creative play as well as plain blocks do. And of course, their latest ad ignited a firestorm. 

I am reassured that if I don’t buy GoldieBlox for my daughter, at least I can still find plenty of toys, books, and materials to encourage her to play outside the Princess Box. (A Mighty Girl is always a good place to start.) But I’d say our most successful STEM program in our house is my husband’s brilliant “experiments in the tub,” which began as a one-night-only presentation, but was so highly lauded that now we have shows nightly. What is buoyancy and what are the characteristics of buoyant objects? How does air create propulsion in the water? What is displacement? What is water resistance? My husband has illustrated all these concepts using items around the house like rubber bands, air cushion packs, balloons, corks, and plastic toys. No extraneous purchases necessary.

So far so good with my daughter. Yes, Silver dressed up as Cinderella for Halloween and asked for dolls for Christmas, but she constructs forts, can identify all the planets of the solar system, and can now tell everyone at kindergarten that snowflakes have six-point radial symmetry. 

The Topknot
(Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

So what about my son? 

My fellow feminist and queer parents have identified a funny double standard: when our daughters play princess, we roll our eyes and wonder where we went wrong. But when our sons play princess, we cheer them on. 

I am heartened to see several breakthroughs recently for boys whose gender expression is, for lack of a less loaded term, more feminine. Are these boys queer? Are they trans? Are they straight and enjoy being “girly”? We’ll have to wait until they are old enough to say for themselves. But they are boys who embrace pink, who prefer dresses, who love nail polish. Most boys still get teased or gender policed in other ways when they want to wear “girl” dress-up or clothes, but more parents are defending their sons’ choices. As a result, attitudes towards Princess Boys are slowly changing in some parts of the U.S. 

Ocho has what I would consider typically three-year-old gender expression—that is, all over the place. His favorite color right now is hot pink. He did want to be a princess for Halloween, because, he said, “I want to be like Samantha”—Samantha* being the five-year-old girl he worships. At school, he will dress up in a tutu, then he’ll go outside and push bulldozers around. He plays with tool kits and dolls. He is growing his hair out and refusing offers of haircuts. Last time he grew it out, to keep the hair out of his face, I pulled his bangs up into a topknot. Strangers assumed he was a girl, even if he was wearing “boy” clothing. 

So my son is a Princess Boy, sometimes. And he is a Boy-Boy, sometimes. 

And I find myself wondering if he will continue this gender flexibility as he gets older. At some point, will he have to choose? Will Princess Boy become another rigid category rather than a fluid, permeable one? 

Right now, nearly all of my son’s friends at school are girls. He used to play with other boys at day care, but since he graduated to preschool, these friendships have fallen away. I assume one factor is that he has an older sister. But it also has to do with how our culture continues to define gender for kids. 

Which of these things is not like the others?
(Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

For example, my son doesn’t know about superheroes, unlike almost every other boy at his school. Our kids haven’t watched a feature-length movie yet, mostly because my daughter finds any kind of conflict in a movie scary. We’ve tried Lady and the Tramp, The Muppets, and even Winnie the Pooh. Each screening has ended the same way: Silver, who will happily hold all kinds of bugs that we find in the garden and stare unabashedly at blood, burst blisters, and x-rayed broken bones, will start to wail, “It’s scaaaaaaaaary!” So we stop. 

We don’t have any TV in our house (no cable or no digital antenna) so our children watch only the most benign shows on my laptop: Sesame Street, Wonder Pets, Olivia, Bob the Builder, the bland Canadian cartoon Caillou, and the charming British one, Kipper. Licensed characters are not allowed at our preschool, so this has helped to delay the pressure of keeping up with popular culture until kindergarten. 

I suspect that my son’s limited media consumption explains something about the way he enjoys play. Because he hasn’t yet seen conflicts modeled by superhero cartoons and movies, he doesn’t play good guys fighting bad guys. His imagination extends more towards playing a pet, or domestic family scenes, or pretending to be an excavator. Perhaps it’s just his age—the boys who play superheroes are older than him. But it means that the kind of play he likes will often group him with girls. 

This isn’t to say that he doesn’t do rough-and-tumble play. Both Silver and Ocho are very strong, and they get into wrestling matches where I can’t tell if they are laughing or screaming. (It’s usually both.) 

I find myself wondering, where is the middle path for Ocho, especially as he gets older? We try to construct it as much as we can in our own house. We’re happy to let him follow his own interests and imagination. When he puts on a sparkly crown for Thanksgiving dinner because, he says, he wants to “look more beautiful,” we smile at him with no reservations. We do the same when he puts on a firefighter’s hat. 

But he doesn’t live in a bubble, and I wish there were an equivalent of “A Mighty Girl” for boys, a central resource to encourage boys to grow up outside of stereotypes of manly men that isn’t exclusively Princess Boy, either. We know that feminism isn’t a women’s issue—it’s an issue for humanity. We can’t expand the spectrum of “masculine” and “feminine” solely for women and girls; we must expand it for men and boys as well.

* Name changed. 

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.