In the past, this wouldn’t have been a question. Once upon a time, men owned everything, including the children. *Cough.* (I think we’ve moved past that, for the most part.) In our more recent past, the “tender years” doctrine held and kids went with their mothers, who were presumed to be the more nurturing parent. Now, things are flipping once again and more and more, fathers are getting custody of the kids, especially when Mom is a working mom and Dad has been taking care of the kids. Are working moms working themselves out of a relationship with their children?

In the state where I divorced, joint custody is the rule except in cases of obvious neglect or poor parenting. Neither gender is the presumptive parent, though I saw a lot of weight given to the parent making the most money (that’s another story). But in The New York Times’ Motherlode blog this week, another picture is painted. I am all for shifting social views on gender and parenting (after all, I am by choice one of the 2.2 million mothers nationwide who do not have primary custody of their children), but I don’t get it. Kids are being awarded to the parent who spent the most time with them? This seems as arbitrary as awarding custody by gender.

I’m especially troubled by the seeming penalty to women who work outside the home. In today’s shifting recessionary world, moms and dads do all sorts of things to make things work. I love that more and more dads are staying home with their children, and I love that more and more moms are able to work through the whole work-life balance problem and self-judgments in order to provide strong breadwinner models for their kids. Social views are changing, and they need to. But what I don’t like is this seeming backlash in the court systems around the country. How will women feel confident about being the breadwinner parent if there’s an ugly custody-battle specter hanging over their heads?

How about you? Have you experienced this? If your relationship were to go awry (knock on wood that it doesn’t), how would custody work for you?

Mean Lady didn’t like it when she saw a girl of about 6 run right onto a bouncy bridge where there was a 2-year old playing, toddling back and forth on his wee wobbly legs. And stand right where he was. And then jump. Hard. 2-year old predictably fell down and cried. Little girl ran off, but not before the Mean Lady cornered her and said that Jumping Hard like that on a bouncy bridge where there is a kid smaller than you is Not Cool. Little girl’s eyes got big and round and she edged away from Mean Lady, keeping a close eye on her for the next hour.

Mean Lady came out again to another little girl (does she have something against girls? or are they just mean these days?) who thought she could weasel her way through a narrow passage past Mean Lady’s youngest spawn, knocking him to the side. Mean Lady told Weasel Girl to Wait Her Turn. Weasel Girl ignored her, but not before several Mean Lady Eye Darts were embedded in her brain.

Mean Lady also appeared on the airplane after listening to a high-pitched squeaky voice behind her sing “He’s got the whole world in his hands” four or five hundred times while the back of her seat was being kicked repeatedly for an hour. Mean Lady’s scary smiling face appeared over the top of the seat and informed squeaky two-year old (nicely, smiling) that there was a Real Live Person in the seat in front of her and that while the Real Live Person understood how difficult it was to be Two and to be on an airplane that had to make an emergency landing in Fargo, North Dakota and was therefore delayed for hours and hours, this Real Live Person would appreciate it very much if she could understand that every time she kicked the seat, R.L.P. could feel it, thank you.

I have always hated it when people spoke to my kids unkindly. It hasn’t happened often, but when it has it felt like a slight on my parenting abilities — the implication being that somehow I should be able to keep my children under control at all times. My bunch is pretty well-behaved, for the most part.  And except for my youngest, who marches to his own Down syndrome beat, they are conscious of how they come across in public.

I am possibly the worst hypocrite in the universe, but I have come to the point where I no longer stay silent if other people’s kids are acting in ways that could hurt other people or are unsafe, or — in the case of the airplane — are just patently annoying. At the same time, I resent it when other people discipline my kids. That does make me hypocritical, doesn’t it? I mean, can I really have it both ways?

I figure it’s better to speak up. And I’d also prefer to be the person disciplining my kids if they need it, at least if I’m right there. I probably erred by not speaking directly to the squeaky seat-kicking two-year old’s mother (she made some oblique comments about me, saying to no one in particular that “some people should understand that two-year olds have been on an airplane all day,” but as I also had been on an airplane all that day myself and was feeling cranky, plus have have been on innumerable flights with my own kids and was successful in ensuring that they refrained from excessive seat-kicking, I ignored her), but I figured I’d treat the seat-kicker the way I would treat my own kids. Like a person who could be reasoned with.

Meh.

So, what do you think? Do you discipline other people’s kids? In what kind of situations? And how do you feel when other people — strangers — butt in attempt to discipline yours?

The latest thing? Yelling. The New York Times has over 300 comments on a post about the horrors of yelling at our kids, how guilty we feel about it, and how to make it all go away.

Don’t worry, I’m as guilty of yelling as anyone else. I have done it and no, I’m not proud of it either. I’ve gotten frustrated and angry and I’ve raised my voice. More than once. News flash — parents are human. We get frustrated. We yell sometimes.

Sure, there are alternatives. I’ve tried them. And I can say first hand that strategies like reminding, nagging, and counting 1-2-3 don’t work. Apparently, for my kids, yelling does. It startles them out of their constant reverie, the glazed-eye tune-out mode (you know what I’m talking about — kids really do hear wah-wah-wah when adults talk, just like in the Charlie Brown cartoons).

Now, as Lylah Alphonse (The 36-Hour Day) pointed out in her piece over at Boston.com, the New York Times piece doesn’t make a distinction between yelling, “You’re a terrible kid! You’re stupid!” and plain-ol’ yelling that comes from frustration and a desire to get the kid’s attention. That’s the kind of yelling that went on all day at my next-door neighbor’s house growing up, the ones I referred to as The Loud Family. Some people are just loud.

So I’ll be clear — yelling things that are hurtful, denigrating, or demeaning, that’s not okay. But yelling? In and of itself? Is that the same as spanking?

We’ve lost touch with our own sense of what’s right and what’s not for our kids, and instead we scour books, TV shows, and one another’s brains, looking for the expert to tell us how to be a good parent. I know all about this — when I was pregnant with my first child at the tender age of 20 I assumed I knew nothing and turned to Penelope Leach (Your Baby and Child) for answers. Twelve years later, doing it all over again, I threw the book away. You know how that goes.

So why the guilt? Why not just yell a little, be okay with it, and life goes on? No harm, no foul. Sure, I’d like to find other ways of expressing my frustration or anger than yelling. But that’s because I’m not yet 100% comfortable with those feelings in myself, let alone showing those “imperfect” feelings to my kids. But I also know that I’m headed for a world where I feel okay with my emotions (even the messy ones) and where I feel completely comfortable showing my kids everything that I am — which means letting go of the image of “perfect mom” I’ve been holding on to. And the more okay I am with everything that I am (and everything that I am not) the better a model I make for my kids.

So, with my permission (not that you needed it), yell away. With the following caveats:

1. No shame, no game. If you feel guilty about the yelling, your kids will feel it too. Which sends a mixed message. Gonna yell? Fine. Just do it loud and proud.

2. No playing dirty. I meant it when I said that words like “You’re stupid” aren’t cool. They’re not.

3. Keep it light. Play with this a little. I love the comment to Lylah’s post, which said (in part, and please go read the whole thing: I yell “I LOVE YOU” when I am leaving, I yell “OK, NOW I AM REALLY LEAVING”. Which has “playful” written all over it.

So what about you? Are you a yeller? Hanging on to any guilt about it? How do you feel about the whole yelling thing?

[photo credit: fireyes, SXC]

You know what I’m talking about. Your son in the ladies’ room with you. Your daughter in the men’s room with her daddy. It happens. But how do we feel about it?

My daughter, when she was 4 and 5, was frequently escorted to public restroom by her father. I was doing 24/7 nursing with her baby brother and Daddy was more than happy to assist his daughter in her time of need. I pretty much had to turn a blind eye to the whole routine and let go, but I remember being concerned with statements he made to me from time to time in an offhand way such as “men’s toilets aren’t all that clean.” He had been changing her diaper in public bathroom on airplanes and in restaurants since she was small, and I trusted that he was keeping her from contact with dirty surfaces, but it never entered into my mind until I sat down to write this post that my daughter probably was confronted with the sight of urinating grown men.

I don’t go into men’s rooms all that often. You sort of forget about the urinals if it’s not you who’s using them.

My son was another matter. When he was about five he stopped accompanying me to the ladies’ room and instead I’d stand guard outside the men’s room and wait for him to come out. I hated it but it was fine, which was a good thing since at that age he often had to go every 10 minutes. You do what you have to do.

There are other options.

1.  Take your kid to the restroom of their own gender. Befriend someone of that gender to oversee your child’s experience. In the end, your kid is safe and you’ve made a new friend. Hopefully.

2. Take your kid to the restroom of their own gender. Make a loud, grand announcement, clear the place out, and go in with your child.

3. Only patronize public places that have “family” restrooms. They’re becoming increasingly common.

4. Don’t leave your house if your child is between the ages of 3 and 8.

5. Pullups. Depends. Whatever holds it all in.

6. Men should be able to walk right into the ladies’ room with their little girls. Use the handicapped stall (if you’re breaking rules, you may as well break them all) where you both can fit. Anything ladies do in there is behind closed doors anyway, and what woman can resist a daddy-daughter moment? Pay no attention to the other women screaming or pelting you with their handbags.

7. I personally don’t mind other people’s little boys in the ladies’ room, but I draw the line at the ones who peer under the stalls.

Lisa Belkin at The New York Times’ Motherlode blog had the same question: how do you handle this in your family?

A six-year old Cub Scout, who frequently wears a shirt and tie to school because it’s a way to express his excitement about being there, is now suspended and sentenced to reform school for 45 days while his mom scrambles to provide a homeschooling alternative. All because he was excited over his new combination fork-knife-spoon and wanted to use it at school.

Zero-tolerance weapons policies have been established in schools all over the U.S., set in place to protect kids in large part as backlash from the Columbine and Virginia Tech shootings. Guns don’t belong in schools, and I think we can all agree on this.

But what’s disturbing is the lack of discretion. Is a spork-knife utensil wielded by a six-year-old the same as a semi-automatic rifle? To school officials, the answer is increasingly “yes.”

The whole thing smacks of the fear culture we’ve become caught in. We’re afraid to let our kids walk to school because we just know there’s a dark-windowed minivan lurking out there, ready to snatch our kids up after luring them over with pleas to help find lost pets. Kids playing outside? Same thing — unless they’re in a fenced back yard, chances are our kids don’t go outside alone. And I won’t even get into the whole crazy Swine Flu hysteria.

But I’m worried about the message we send our kids when they have to walk through a metal detector every day to get to school, and when a cherished pocketknife handed down from a grandparent brought to school for Show and Tell is treated the same way as a weapon wielded by a disturbed individual bent on hurting people. How are our kids going to understand what’s “good” and what’s “bad” if we treat them both the same way and paint them all with the same broad brush of fear?

There are two schools of thought here:

1. Zero-tolerance rules, taken to this extreme, are asinine. School administrators should be able to tell the difference in intent and adjust punishment accordingly. This kid wasn’t going to knife anybody — couldn’t a teacher just have confiscated the thing and sent it back home at the end of the day with a note to his mom?

2. Rules are rules. The kid broke the rules. He shouldn’t have brought a knife to school and his mom should have known better. There’s too much violence in schools anyway.

Where do you stand on zero-tolerance in your child’s school? Are we keeping our kids safe or have we gone too far?

So he decided to raise money for the train — by making felted wool balls at home and selling them in his school’s store. It all made sense. So he got to work. After the first day he decided that it would take a LOT of felted wool balls to buy a real live train.

Remember those days? Kids are relentless optimists. Who else expects to make a zillion dollars from a sidewalk stand selling cups of warm lemonade? I know I had high hopes when it came to selling magazines or greeting cards or sending in my Can You Draw This Pirate? artwork and winning a trip to art school.

But kids really do make a difference. Kids like yours. And I think we parents have an obligation to support them.

Zach Bonner, 11, saw homeless people in his community and wanted to do something to help them, especially children. So he decided to walk the 1200 miles from his home to Washington DC to raise money and awareness. Along the way (the trip took him 3 years to complete) he created his own non-profit, The Little Red Wagon Foundation.

Pat Pedraja found out how difficult it is to find bone marrow donors while he was sick in the hospital with leukemia at age 10. Though bone marrow wasn’t an issue Pat faced personally, he took on the cause as his own and, with his family, rented an RV and established Driving for Donors. To date, his organization has added over 10,000 donors to the National Bone Marrow Registry.

Eric Mitchell, a graduating senior in Puyallup Washington, needed a community service project in order to fulfill Eagle Scout requirements. With the aid if his scout troop he painted 350 storm drains in Pierce County, WA to raise awareness of the link between storm drains and water quality. Most people don’t realize the water that enters storm drains goes directly to local streams, lakes, and wetlands without treatment from the sanitary sewer system. Storm drains painted with “Dump No Waste – Drains to Stream” help promote awareness.

Ana Dodsen was adopted at age three from her native Peru. At 11 her parents took her to visit her native country and she was devastated by the poverty she saw there. She returned and founded Peruvian Hearts, an organization that provides much needed support and supplies to needy children in Peru. Dodsen has spoken in front of the UN and her work has been featured on CNN.

Inspired? Your kids can make a difference in your community — perhaps they already are! What pie-in-the-sky ideas have your kids had to help your community? What activities do you already engage in as a family to help others around you?

Here’s a list of ways kids can help out in their communities.

More ideas from Artists Helping Children.

Photo credit: octavioags, SXC

It all went swimmingly until I got the Death Flu. No one else in the house had it. Just me. I was doomed.

For five days I dragged myself out of bed at 6-ish and croaked greetings to my cherubs while stuffing bagels in the toaster and hoping they had lunch money left over so I didn’t have to walk an extra four feet to get a $20 bill from wherever I was keeping extra cash. By 9-ish they were all gone and I collapsed in a heap on the unvacuumed floor. Three hours to be Dead Mommy. If I was lucky I fell near the remote so I could turn Curious George off, otherwise I’d be doomed to three hours of PBS Kids until Eric got home and I had to muster the strength to walk outside and collect him from his bus.

Eric, the littlest, arrived back at 12:30. You’d think that some snuggle time with a three-year-old would be possible for a Sick and Dying Mommy, but not this one. He had the will and the strength of a rhinoceros, a small boy capable of staying awake for days on end. And I had to keep an eagle eye on him — at three, Eric-with-Down-syndrome had the self-discipline skills of a baby crocodile. He could not be counted on to be entertained (and stay in one place without wreaking havoc somewhere) with a nice DVD. The other two, in 2nd grade and 6th, dribbled in by 4 pm and had the gall to want things like DINNER. And BEDTIME RITUALS. And CALLIGRAPHY PRACTICE.

Okay, so I lied about the calligraphy. And they understood about the bedtime thing (sort of). But dinner … well, the point is, mommies really can’t get sick. I thought about this last weekend as I lay in bed shivering for two days, knowing I had the luxury to lay in bed shivering for as many days as I needed. Some of you know that my kids aren’t living with me now, and I never realized until now that there’s an unexpected perk to this — I can actually be sick.

You can’t.

My mom was never sick. Not once. Oh, she had the sniffles from time to time. And once she tore a ligament in her ankle and couldn’t work for a few days. But she was never sick.

Was yours?

I know there are exceptions (there was a lovely mother to my kids’ classmates a few years ago whose long and graceful illness and eventual death was incredibly beautiful and touching for the entire school community), but culturally, there just isn’t the wiggle room for us to be sick. Work needs us, families need us, kids need us. Sure, daddies step in and do what needs to be done, but for Order to be Restored to the Universe, mommies have to be Well and Whole and Able to Read Bedtime Stories Without Coughing.

As kids get older, they can fend for themselves a little better, but what do you do when they’re too little to be on their own long enough for you to have a nice bout of Bubonic Plague? I’m sure you’ve faced this before. How do you cope? Or do you fight it off as best you can and pretend you’re not sick? (ha ha) And if we work outside the home and manage to drag ourselves to the office, how do we justify/balance/manage collapsing at home to recover, just when the second shift is starting and the cries of “Mommy’s home!” come from down the hall?

[Warning: rainbow unicorn bubble world alert.] I’m thinking of a time when we live in real community, where we step in for one another when needed like this. Wouldn’t it be great if there was always someone to care for our kids?  Without question?  I’d love it if as mothers (and fathers) we didn’t feel we had to suck it up and not get sick because there just isn’t anyone else. Extended families used to do this. So how do you make being sick work?

• You walk on the sidewalk, not on people’s lawns, unless it’s someone you know well and you’re spending the afternoon there.
• You let people cut in front of you in the 10-or-less grocery line, but you try to burn holes in the back of their head the whole time they’re in front of you.
• Soup is lukewarm at the restaurant? Steak cooked a little more than the medium-rare you asked for? You eat it but you refuse to enjoy it.
• You won’t call anyone after 9 pm if you don’t know them well enough.
• You have an entire conversation with someone who stopped you on the street to ask directions, even though they creep you out a little, because you’re too nice to look the other way, keep walking, and ignore them.

Did your mother raise you to be nice? Mine did. In my mom’s world, nice trumped everything. if you couldn’t be smart, at least you could be nice. Good girls were seen and not heard, and if you were a teeny bit dramatic (aren’t all nine-year olds?) you got called “Sarah Bernhardt” and were shushed a lot.

That didn’t work for me, and I’m unlearning the niceness thing. And I’m teaching my daughter to speak out about what she wants and feels. I am so breaking this chain, the one that I can trace back to before my mom’s mom.

Yesterday I read a wonderful online chat with Rachel Simmons, who wrote The Curse of the Good Girl: Raising Authentic Girls with Courage and Confidence. Simmons says that girls in our culture are taught early on to be nice all the time, leading them to repress some of their most powerful emotions which in turn deprives them of the skills to express those feelings. Girls in groups have a reputation of being mean-spirited, sneaky. But if they don’t have any other way of expressing normal emotions, what else are they going to do?

Mad Men is wonderful social commentary, reflecting not just on the early 1960’s but on today as well — the women of Mad Men live in a world we thought we left behind, but the nice-girl culture is still with us. How many of you raised your hands earlier? As a group, we women have trouble saying what we want. And it’s up to us to teach our daughters differently. How? By unlearning what it is to be nice. By crossing the line into not-nice territory, and by doing it in front of our daughters. And by encouraging them to do the same.

It boils down to this: what kind of women do we want our daughters to see when they look at us? Someone who sacrificed her feelings and dreams? Or someone who cares enough about herself and those around her to give herself what she needs? We think there is selfishness in the second choice, and to that I say YES. Be selfish. Know your Self. Let your feelings show. Make your desires known. And teach your daughter to do the same.

There’s a fine line between standing up and getting along, and that line will be different for everyone. But if our girls have a strong model (that’s me and you), experience feeling powerful in their bodies with sports or dance, and are encouraged to openly share their thoughts and feelings, they’ll have a leg up on finding their own fine line.

I know you beautiful, thoughtful women (and men) have wisdom to share about this. How have you been touched by the nice-girl culture? How do you encourage your daughter to break free from the Curse of Nice?

Yeah, you. I’m talking to you. The Dreaded Spank. It happens. Toddler on the loose, darting for that busy street for the 3000th time? Permanent marker decorating the walls and carpet? Poop anywhere where poop just shouldn’t be? Swats happen. It happens. One quick reaction before rational thought sets in. Besides, some of us were raised with spanking. It seems … familiar. And don’t diapers provide padding?

But listen to this: a new study suggests that early spanking — and we’re talking the prime of toddlerhood here, kids who are between one and two — has some detrimental effects. Kids who were spanked at the age of one were more aggressive at the age of two and performed worse on cognitive tests at the age of three. Whoa.

We can argue that there are levels of spanking. Does a light swat over layers of diaper and clothes equal an angry hard spank? Doesn’t seem like it, no. But at the same time, from what I read of the study, a spank is a spank is a spank. Raising a hand to a small child is still a raised hand coming toward one small child.

I remember being spanked as a kid. It felt humiliating. (Hey! Maybe I escaped having to be a genius because I got spanked! Whew! Thanks, Mom & Dad!)

I keep going back to that spanking study. I have to admit, I’m a little bothered that they chose to sample only low-income families. Huh? But that decision was based on previous research that suggested these are the families that incorporate spanking more frequently. In the study, the average one-year-old was getting spanked 2.6 times a week. Yikes. Interestingly, and I’m not sure how to interpret this, verbal punishment — yelling, scolding or making derogatory comments — wasn’t associated with any negative effects as long as the child’s mother (the mother? what about fathers?) was otherwise attentive, loving and supportive.

It’s very easy to fall hard on one side of the fence here. Not many people are comfortable making a strong public case in support of hitting their children despite what they might do at home. Spanking just isn’t as popular now as it was in “Mad Men” days. But it still happens. Hey, no judgment here, really. Your toddler runs toward the busy street. You don’t stop to think. You just want to get a message across. I get it.

But the littlest kids, those one-year-olds, they don’t have much discernment. They are input-gathering devices, and it doesn’t much matter to them how they get it. Poop on the walls, what fun! Hiding in the spinning clothes racks at Target, yay! It’s all the same when you’re one. But that’s the time to use a different mode of getting the message across. Apparently hitting only teaches that hitting is okay, not that running into traffic will kill you.

What do you think? Would knowing that early spanking could make their child more aggressive and maybe not as smart help keep parents who spank from doing so? Would it change your mind?

And here’s a bonus question — if you were spanked as a child and came from a spanking culture and have chosen not to spank your kids (and kept your word), was that a struggle or a no-brainer for you?

Oops, wrong punch line. Actually, I am wishing there was a punch line, or at least that I could punch somebody (not really, but sort of) because my kids didn’t watch President Obama’s speech yesterday. They attend public school in a blue-state county where five years ago I saw way more Kerry-Edwards signs than I saw Bush-Cheney signs, and where the vote last November was predominantly pro-Obama, so I assumed they watched. Nope, neither kid who speaks knew anything about it. Huh. A non-issue.

Frankly, it only became an issue for me because over the weekend I heard what an issue this speech was for many parents all over the country. I don’t think it was particularly appropriate that the President, any President, speak to my child at his school via a television screen, but hey, this sort of thing doesn’t happen every day. The message was innocuous: stay in school, study hard, life is kind of tough but you’ll be okay. What’s wrong with that?

When my kids moved to public schools from the private school they had attended previous to that, I was a little taken aback by the picture of President Bush prominently displayed in every classroom. Whoa, I thought. That seems a little much. But then I reasoned, Hey, he’s the President and all, and kids should know this sort of thing. And it’s public school. In the end: no big deal.

But my kids’ district wimped out on the speech, citing “controversy” and “we’re not sure our internet connection can handle all those PC’s connecting at once,” both excuses sounding lame to me. Besides, the kids were shown the Inauguration last January. Give it a week and parents will forget all about it, the district seems to be saying.

Sure, my kids can watch the speech on YouTube. But they’ve missed out on an experience. When I was a kid, watching a speech by the President — any President, because what did I know about politics? — would have been a big deal. Memorable. And an opportunity to gather together, have a common experience, and feel special. This country’s President is talking to me. To me! Study harder? Um, okay!

I don’t think it matters what our politics are. Telling our kids that they are valued, that the future of our country rests in their hands, no matter who is doing the telling, cannot be a bad thing. So yes, I’m angry. And yes, I’m sad. And yes, I’m ready to do something about it. I’m not yet sure what, but I feel this was an important event for us, the controversy (and what that says about us) perhaps even more than the speech itself.

What about you? Did your kids watch? How did you feel about it beforehand? Did you feel any differently afterward? How has this experienced affected you?