ILX Parenting 5: I'm a big kid now

we're gonna have to come up with some arrangement for a few hours here and there but my first inclination is to lean on other parents we know or someone referred through our preschool co-op. feel like every nanny I see out in public is doing a shitty, half-assed job.

feel like every nanny I see out in public is doing a shitty, half-assed job.

totally sucks for all us parents but there is a part of me feels, like, who can blame them? the fact that J is my own flesh-and-blood son gives me, oh, i don't know, 75% more patience than i'd ever have with someone else's kids? even as J's actual dad i could still use more patience.

though i'm not discounting any frustration you should rightly feel. it totally sucks.

yeah it's partly kind of the nature of the arrangement - if you get paid a relatively small amount of money to watch a kid who you have no other connection to, it's the rare person who is going to give more than the minimum of a fuck needed. We thought this one was different, but I'd rather have K 100% safe with someone a little less dynamic or whatever.

the proliferation of nanny-dom is pretty interesting to me. such a thing was completely unheard of in my generation - I didn't no any kid that had a nanny. but post-90s it seems to have become increasingly common. maybe it's just cuz of where I am compared to where I grew up (urban vs. suburban) but this seems like a major shift in parenting in this country.

no = know

ugh

TBF, is it possible that more kids of our generation had stay-at-home parents? My mom was home until I was school-aged. I don't really know whether that was the norm or not, although i certainly had other friends with stay-at-home moms.

I mean I specifically remember having this one friend who had a nanny, which makes me think that maybe not many of my friends did.

i didn't know anyone who had a nanny growing up, but i grew up in the suburbs. some moms worked but almost all of them were home for their kids after school.

^^^yeah this arrangement was most common. I knew some moms worked, some didn't

My mom worked and said that she caught a fair amount of shit from people for that decision. She was a single mom so I'm not sure what they thought she should be doing instead... I grew up in a well-off, small town in rural Delaware so people were particularly judgy towards the single mom.

yeah & nowadays there aren't pensions that you're gonna keep getting if your spouse dies so there's more reason now for both partners to stay working, to keep their earnings steady & not falling behind, even if daycare / nannies eat most of the $ that one partner makes. well we didn't do things that way but we were both super young to have kids compared to others in my peer group / this board / etc; my wife's back in the work force now after staying home with three kids at the same time my friends are all starting to have their first kids.

Soooo we fired the nanny. And then our decision was confirmed by an e-mail from a friend who saw them at the park and said that she kept K in the stroller almost the entire time and sat on a bench talking to her friends. Really angry right now.

That's horrible! So sorry, Hurting. Glad you got rid of her. Makes me tear up just reading this.

So we specifically asked Nanny #2 not to take K to her own apartment (she lives in our building and did this with the kids she used to watch), and today I called and she was at her apartment

i mean that right there is all you need. "sorry it didn't work out! byeeeeeeeee!!"

yea good choice hurting

glad you fired her.

some friends of ours have this nanny who so fucking horrible, and they haven't fired her yet. it's crazy. she lost their toddler in the library and blamed it on the toddler, telling our friends "haha isn't H so stupid? she got lost in the library!" wild. and there are so many other stories about her just not giving a fuck. it's horrible but at this point our friends are really the assholes for not firing her. totally passive assholes. assholes who are insanely afraid of confrontation.

Man, the first one came back this morning and I was so happy to see her. She seems so fantastic by comparison -- there was never really anything wrong and we shouldn't have changed.

Yikes, marcos, that's really shitty of them. People can be that way though, slow to action for whatever reason. They are assholes, actually pisses me off just hearing about it.

i am terrified of confrontation but I would CUT a motherfucker if he/she's losing my baby AND bragging about it

if they don't give a fuck about their sole reason for employment then thry need to die in a fire

I agree

otm, I don't think I have ever felt so self-assured in my anger as yesterday when I was on my way home and just imagining what it would be like to see the nanny we fired (who had caused a big scene like a fucking baby when H fired her)

K has had a couple of rough nights, waking up crying a lot more than usual -- wondering if it's a delayed reaction stress kind of thing. Not only because of the shitty nanny but generally because of H going back to work and all the change.

The nanny caused a scene? Nothing is more frustrating, to me, than trying to understand someone who is in the wrong suffer the consequences for their actions and then feel it is all unfair.

http://www.aeonmagazine.com/being-human/children-today-are-suffering-a-severe-deficit-of-play/

Read this and the pondering of it is keeping me up late tonight.

Gosh, that's excellent. Is that theory well-known? I almost never see groups of unsupervised kids around anymore, especially not mixed-age ones; if I did I'd probably be a little uneasy at the sight, and I speak as someone who did a lot of it until my early teen years. I feel like I didn't do it very well though, somehow; that piece is making me reassess what was going on.

In our city we have this initiative called 'playing out' where neighbourhoods organise play sessions in residential streets which are temporarily closed off for this purpose - there are a few adults charged with keeping an eye on things but it's unstructured so kids can do what they want.

Our kid plays outside unsupervised with a group of other mixed-age local kids (between 6 and 13 or so). I know from going back to my parents' neighborhood, where I once ran amok with a similar group of hellions, that that's not the case everywhere. I guess both he and we are lucky. He's got those pickup football games, he's got tree-climbing, he's got both elementary school love drama and running around playing zombies/superheroes and pretending that sticks are guns or whatever.

Any of my recent visits to my old stomping grounds and I didn't really see anything like that. They live next to a huge playground and mixed-use sports field, but mostly I just see toddlers and littler kids running around out there. That may just be about shifting neighborhood demographics. Like there are olds there whose kids have already left the nest, but who wanted to stick around the neighborhood and a relatively smaller ground of younger families as those olds slowly move away/die off. But when I was growing up there, there were always multiple roving gangs of kids. And the kids I have talked to out there are all like "sport A; sport B; boy scouts; etc."

My wife, who is a public school teacher, thinks the schedule has way too little unstructured play in it -- sometimes they just don't get recess at all. And then some of the kids live in pretty unsafe neighborhoods and the responsible parents keep them off the streets, which unfortunately means not much free play time.

that's an interesting article and the gist of is so common-sense that it just has to be pretty accurate, but it's rife with sentences like this, the loose logic of which kind of pervades the whole piece and makes me slightly distrust it:

Over the same decades that children’s play has been declining, childhood mental disorders have been increasing.

also, cell-phone use has markedly increased, and the designated hitter rule has become thoroughly entrenched.

I blame fluoride

I grew up in a small town and played within a two block radius. When I was 12 I was allowed to walk to downtown which was several blocks away as long as I was with friends. It was fun going to Kress and buying cassettes and candy or a cone.

When we'd visit family in Mexico I had two friends who lived on my grandmother's street, both a year older. They would take me, geez, sometimes maybe two or three miles from my home base, across busy, busy streets, through neighborhoods, some the likes I had never seen before, and it was a bit scary but mostly thrilling and fun. We'd walk around for hours. I left the house at 10am and didn't return until 5 or 6pm. Later I'd take all my little cousins to those places the next day, group of eight children ages 5-11, I was 11 the first time I did this. I don't know how I never got lost.

Looking back I viewed the US as being more dangerous than Mexico. I felt safer in Mexico. The reality was I was just more confident in Mexico because my parents were too caught up and distracted with the visit to bother with our whereabouts and limiting us. My mother would give us the same scary-ass story every year we'd go: They steal children here, cut their arms or legs off, blind them and put them out on the streets to beg, so don't run off, be careful, stay with us. Knowing to look both ways before crossing the street, staying away from strangers and planning to run if anyone weird approached us seemed to be all we needed to know.

Article is basically entirely correct and is pretty much well understand by every child development expert not involved in government and the education "reform" movement.

And while I too find easy generalizations like "video games makes our children psychotic" generally kinda lame, it is impossible to reconcile the current fad towards largely indoor, over-structured childhood with anything approaching good mental health.

Found this one:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/10/my-daughters-homework-is-killing-me/309514/?single_page=true

So does anyone on here homeschool or unschool?

I remember watching Wiseman's High School for the first time in a sociology class in college. The class stressed intrinsic motivation in education. It required us to take the final whenever we felt like it, if wanted too. We were provided with a schedule of lectures, quizzes and movies to attend, or not, and a list of books to read or not, in any order. I ended up reading more than I was assigned and attended everything. There were several combinations of exercises, essays, quizzes, books to read etc... to get grades. This all worked for me.

What's unschool? I wish I could homeschool my kids.

We homeschooled. For various reasons, it turned out to not be the right choice for us, but I'd still go to bat for it for other people. Maybe we'll try again someday, but he seems to be doing okay in public elementary school.

I wish we had been able to better stay on top of what the local school system is doing in terms of progress in the basics. I mean, when you get involved in discussions with other homeschooling families, there's so much "oh, little David never even started reading until he was 10, but now he's 14 reading Dostoevsky..." You know, these anecdotes which assure you that, yeah, your kid will develop those skills at the time that is right for them. Which is great and all, and one of the benefits is supposed to be learning at your own pace, but when we had to re-enroll him in public school, he had a lot of catching up to do. Think he's there finally, but honestly, it took a couple years.

Unschooling is when you follow the child's lead when it come to learning. It is the belief that children have a natural curiosity and will to learn so you facilitate that by providing experiences. My neighbor use to unschool her child, at home, but always corrected anyone who said she was homeschooling.

Even though it's basically child-led homeschooling (which is what a lot of non-parochial homeshooling is)... people make weird distinctions about these things.

I hope I don't offend anyone with this, but I find the idea of "child-led" schooling to be a little like tourist-led amazon rainforest trekking.

some friends of ours have this nanny who so fucking horrible, and they haven't fired her yet. it's crazy. she lost their toddler in the library and blamed it on the toddler

But so this is the thing, I sort of get where the friends are coming from here! I have often lost one or another of my kids in the library, the supermarket, an MLB game, whatever. And when I was a kid my parents lost me in the mall, and I'm sure their parents etc etc. If I had a nanny, and my nanny lost track of the kid (but then found them again, obv.) I think I would at first be mad, but then I would ask, why do I expect the nanny to be better at keeping track of the kid than I, his own parent, am? Because she's getting paid to take care of him and I volunteered?

Pretty much.

Re "play deficit" -- I sympathize at one level but feel that in the end articles like this are primarily part of the "shame middle-class parents into feeling like they're DOING IT RONG" industry which is so successful in generating clicks and tweets. (see also: "massage prejudices of middle-class parents so they can feel like OTHER PEOPLE ARE DOING IT RONG.") my kid is bookish and likes plopping in his chair and reading, i'm not gonna be the guy to say "you're going outside and having an unstructured activity because i read in a magazine that otherwise you might get an anxiety disorder, OUT THE DOOR THIS MINUTE buster and don't let me see you till dinnertime."

the proliferation of nanny-dom is pretty interesting to me. such a thing was completely unheard of in my generation - I didn't no any kid that had a nanny. but post-90s it seems to have become increasingly common. maybe it's just cuz of where I am compared to where I grew up (urban vs. suburban) but this seems like a major shift in parenting in this country.

Two-parent couples are common everywhere, but I do think nannying is more geographic -- here in the Midwest I know lots of two-earner couples with enough money to afford a nanny but it's much more common to have 8:30-5 daycare. (Though I certainly know people with nannies, and it's not considered weird or putting on airs.)

xp but that's not really the point. The point is more that the constant "sit here and do exactly as your told and learn exactly this and then take this test and oh by the way never go outside anymore cuz the school can't afford outside and then when you are done go home and do a mess more schoolwork" is incredibly messed up. There are plenty of ways of getting it right that don't involve going camping or marauding bands of kids with sticks.

I just don't get where this happens. At my kid's school, which is a pretty normal school as far as I can tell, they play on the playground before school starts, and then again at recess, and then afterschool he goes to an afterschool program where they play outside some more. Lots of kickball.

There's a pretty large amount of literature out there about the decline of recess time and the rise of testing. Your school may have bucked the trend though. A lot definitely depends on where you live.

eephus, though not play, your kid is still doing something he enjoys doing that is also edifying.

The woman who lived next door to us in OK had her kids out all day during the summer. I saw that they knew how to play and had great imaginations and fun. They went inside when the sun went down. Did they read before bad, or were read to? Don't know. For me, not being interested in reading isn't great. I personally think it is important to cultivate an interest in books.

Lol, K threw a tantrum on the subway this morning cuz we got stuck and I didn't have the kind of cheese she wanted. Various women were offering unsolicited (useless) advice on what to do (like "put her head on your shoulder" uh yeah that's going to work with my giant wriggly 19-month-old). I guess it's the one situation in which the term "momsplaining" might apply. But I was like "psh, I got this" and I started asking K what noises different animals make. Works every time.

free unsolicited parenting advice from strangers = always a winner