Sweet treat as a school reward?

I got a letter from a reader recently that I want to share:

Hi Denise,

I love your blog.  My only child, my son, is 5, and you certainly present an interesting take on many issues that I’ve faced as a mom.

I was wondering whether you had an opinion on the candy culture in elementary schools these days.  It seems like every other day my son is coming home with a lollipop that he got from the treat bag for being good.  Now, I’m delighted that he’s being good, but enough with the sugar already!  I certainly don’t remember being rewarded with candy by my elementary school teachers.  I just think it sends the wrong message on so many levels, when we’re trying to educate young people.

So I’m the “mean mommy” who has to ration the candy at home, and who writes to the teacher to ask whether she could please reconsider her rewards.  Is this an issue you face?

Thanks, and keep up the good writing,
Patricia

Ah, Patricia. Do I have an opinion on the candy culture in elementary schools? Yeah. Little bit of one. More on that in a moment.

First I want to address Patricia’s dismay over the treat-as-reward compulsion. I have two main problems with that. One is the very notion of connecting a tangible reward with either good behavior or good grades. Not a fan. Turns out, neither are experts you might consult on this issue. A lollipop (or a dollar bill or a collection of raffle tickets that lead to this or that prize) as a reward is a misguided means of motivation. It inevitably and dangerously ties a child’s motivation to do well with the promise of a treat. In psychological parlance, that’s external motivation: the child wants to ace the test or demonstrate good behavior not because it feels good inside, but because he wants the prize.

But the second reason is for the sheer fact that kids have access to way too many treats –in school and eslewhere. Not only is the lollipop Patricia’s son’s teacher gives him a poor way to motivate him to continue his good behavior or whatever, it’s probably just piled on to other stuff he’s handed all week long — at a Cub Scout meeting, say, or after his pee-wee soccer game.

Let me be clear that I’m not against treats, cupcakes, candy or anything like that. But without an effort at moderation, we’re all left either sliding down a slippery slope of cake icing, or banning treats outright.

Which is what our school principal tried, last year — she called down a moratorium on any food in the school outside the cafeteria or the scheduled (hopefully healthy) snacks parents packed for their kids. She seemed almost evangelistic about it, but I’m thinking she was as frustrated as I often am: why can’t we find a middle ground between the occasional, well-deserved and happily enjoyed birthday cupcake on the one hand, and total sugar-salt-and-fat-fueled gluttony on the other? Why can some class moms keep the party more focused on a holiday themed activity, with the treat as a side-show; while others can’t resist the candy aisle?

Before the ban, when my older son was in first grade, a Thanksgiving celebration involved making butter by shaking containers of cream and salt. But was that, and the corn muffins on which to spread the homemade, just-like-the-Pilgrims-did-it butter enough? Hell to the no: the class parents also provided a party spread that included — and I am not making this up — everything from cheese doodles and potato chips to Twizzlers and M&Ms. Row by row, the class lined up to fill a paper plate with their chosen goodies. Guess what?! Nearly all of them completely over-indulged in this uniquely American mixture of salty, crunchy, sweet, fatty fare. One of the class moms actually said to me, “Look at all the stuff they’re piling on their plates!”, as though it was some sort of wild surprise that when 6- and 7-year-old kids are presented with a buffet of snack and treat options, they’ll take a little too much of just about everything. Did she somehow think that they’d be discerning, or say things like, “Hmmm, Twizzlers and cheese doodles might leave my tummy a bit upset”, or “better just take one or two things; we’re headed to lunch in 10 minutes anyway!”

Of course they wouldn’t. Duh. You give kids an unlimited buffet of crap, it’s crap they’ll reach for.

But when my younger boy hit first grade, Year One (and, as it turned out, Year Only) of the ban, birthdays involved parents coming in to read — no cupcakes, no goody bags, no treats. And holidays involved a craft or other activities.

They felt the difference, and while having their parents in the room reading a book or helping with a craft was nice, they noticed the lack of celebratory goodies, and they didn’t like it.

Are you surprised to find that neither did I?

I don’t think kids should be handed donuts, cookies, candy, and chips every time they turn around, which is standard operating procedure these days. No one can go to a club meeting, a sport, or a playdate without treats. Even in our religious ed classes, catechists had to be told by the director that they should try their best to refrain from offering snacks during classes. The net effect, though, is that what I’d call legitimate treat times — birthdays, holidays — become less special. I say, get rid of the lollipops or M&Ms or Twizzlers as “prizes” for good spelling or good behavior; get rid of tables groaning with an overabundance of crap at parties; disassociate Girl Scouts and religious ed classes and soccer games from “chance to have a donut.”

Do that, and you can safely leave in place a cupcake on a birthday, or chocolates on Valentine’s Day, or freshly-buttered corn muffins on Thanksgiving.

Now that our principal has bowed to pressure and re-instated food “privileges” in classrooms, we’ll see how things go. Next up is Halloween. The school holds an adorable parade of the costumed classes, and often the teachers and class parents have parties afterward back in the classroom. Can we all reign it in? I’ll let you know in a few weeks…

And Patricia: Continue to fight the good fight!

So, I sent my new fourth-grader to school in a red shirt -- but I never "redshirted" him.

After reading this article in Sunday’s New York Times the other day, by Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt, about “redshirting” kindergarteners (that is, keeping them back a year if their birth date falls near the cut-off date, leaving them “young” for their class), I did one of those silent victory-arm-pump things in my kitchen: I had been right! Okay, well, at the very least, my own decision to send my sons to kindergarten at 4-and-three-quarters was validated: Manipulating school start dates may seem on the face of it to be yet another attempt to give your child an edge — who hasn’t heard writer Malcolm Gladwell’s contention, in his best-selling book Outliers, that January and February babies, usually the oldest in their classes, do better in life? We perhaps think an extra year in preschool will allow our younger-than-fives to get physically bigger, socially more savvy, and just, well, smarter; another year to get ahead on reading and writing. I always felt as though doing so was gaming the system for no real gain. According to these writers — authors of Welcome to Your Child’s Brain: How the Mind Grows From Conception to College — not only is the gain negligible, it actually comes with some losses, for all the kids.

This is particularly resonant right now, as both my boys’ birthdays are coming up in the next several weeks, both of them pushing the edge of the cut-off date for our district, which is December 1. And both are — of course — boys. Approximately 300 people (possible exaggeration; who remembers?!) asked me, as both were approaching kindergarten, if I was going to “hold them back.”

Hell to the no!

My oldest was actually a good case-study for considering a hold-back. A late talker, a November baby boy, a slightly (well, maybe quite a bit more than “slightly”) socially spacey kid, it would seem, if you believe the notion that boys are slower and less-quickly socialized than girls, that my boy was the ideal candidate for another year of prep-by-preschool. But here’s the thing with him: It was because of his developmental delays that I wanted to get him into kindergarten as soon as it was age-appropriate. He’d been in daycare since he was 19 months old, had been getting speech therapy since 23 months, and had been going to a special-ed preschool five days a week for two years by the time he was “ready” for K. If I held him back, what was I supposed to do with him?

Beyond the practical issues (what would he be doing in yet another preschool setting?) and the financial ones (boy, was I was looking forward to my daycare/preschool bill going down to one kid), I asked myself: Did I care if my child was the one presumably behind the eight-ball? And honestly, I didn’t — especially when you put the emphasis on the “presumably”: by whose metric might he be “behind”? Behind what, or whom? Yes, he was going to spend the first two months of kindergarten as a four year old, but he already knew the basic going-to-school drill: he was familiar with the bus, the backpack, sharing crayons at a table with other kids, and washing his hands before snack.

And despite the often-discussed fact that kindergarten is far more academically rigorous now than it was when I went (I like to say, and I mean it, that what I did in kindergarten back in 1971 is essentially what my sons did in daycare when they were three), those things I mentioned above? The backpack, the sharing, the predictable routines, the Pledge of Allegiance and hand-washing and circle time, and generally recognizing your environment and the other people in it? That’s all a kid needs to know when he gets to kindergarten. Everything else, as my son’s teacher wisely told me, they catch up on.

And if it takes a while for them to catch up? What’s the harm?

My second boy also started K at the tender age of four, though there’s much less that’s tender about my second son than my first. Mr. Social Butterfly (the “preferred friend” in his daycare), my younger kid was less a candidate for red-shirting. That said, aside from being calendar-age young, he’s also physically small (now a second grader, he’s the same size as some kindergarteners, my Skinny Minnie, and yes I know I shouldn’t call him that but I can’t help it; he’s such a squirt). He wasn’t great at some of the things that, according to popular wisdom put him at a disadvantage in kindergarten. For example, he wrote many of his letters backwards. He wasn’t great at scissoring, or coloring. And even though he’d spent the large majority of his young life in nearly full-time, out-of-the-house care, kindergarten tuckered him out in the first few weeks; his teacher told me he’d just lay his head down on the table at the end of the day, without a word (I know, cute, right?).

This may be either radical or mean of me to say, but honestly, much as I want my children to succeed in school and out, I don’t care if they’re the top or the best or the one with the best advantages, including this age thing. That’s why I did it, why I sent two relatively immature four-year-olds to kindergarten. The way I look at it, there are cut-off dates in every district, and school systems everywhere have their reasoning (which they change, too, from time to time). Given that there will always be some cut off or other, this means that some kids are going to be the young ones, and some are going to be the older ones.

Some will be, as in my older boy’s kindergarten class, the December and January and February Alpha girls who startled me with their wordliness and chattiness and (yes, even at 5) cattiness. Some will be like another November boy in that class, who didn’t talk at all. I spent some time in that classroom, helping out about once a month and you know what? Those Alpha girls would give me the lay of the land, telling me that (swear this is true) my son was the “best” boy; or that that boy (the other November baby) “doesn’t talk.” Not to be mean, just to clue me in. So I felt as though I were adding my child into a larger mix — from whom he’d learn, but also to whom he could offer a few lessons of his own (specifically, that not all boys are loud and they don’t all push, tease, or jostle).

Which was exactly what this article says is missing when parents try, en masse, to remove the younger, so-called disadvantaged kids from kindergarten classrooms. What’s lost in the evaluation parents make about whether their particular child might be a jump ahead by being the oldest instead of the youngest is an emphasis on how children actually learn. A classroom full of fully-five and close-to-six year olds might be easier for the teacher to handle, Wang and Aamodt write. That’s nice, though it doesn’t last. And when the work is relatively easy for these held-back kids or just plain older kids, they may try less hard. As for the younger kids: they are challenged by emulating the older ones (which is why it might be an advantage in some cases, the writers contend, to have a very bright child skip ahead a grade).

They also point out that kids’ brains, being so absorbent and busy in this age range, will basically be hanging around with nothing much to learn if they spend another year in preschool, waiting for their bodies or their “social skills” to catch up. It seems that younger kids like mine benefited from the increased in rigor from preschool to kindergarten, even if they had to be a little socially bewildered (my older boy) or tired out (his little brother).

They write:

Parents who want to give their young children an academic advantage have a powerful tool: school itself. In a large-scale study at 26 Canadian elementary schools, first graders who were young for their year made considerably more progress in reading and math than kindergartners who were old for their year (but just two months younger). In another large study, the youngest fifth-graders scored a little lower than their classmates, but five points higher in verbal I.Q., on average, than fourth-graders of the same age. In other words, school makes children smarter [my emphasis].

So it’s sort of ironic: the kids who benefit most from red-shirting are the younger kids in the next year’s class, who get the boost of learning from older classmates who should have started kindergarten a year earlier.

As they approach their seventh and ninth birthdays, I know my boys notice their relative youth; one of the first things my new fourth grader did in school this year was check the birthday chart, and he was quite happy to report that there are three other November birthdays — all later than his. Awesome.

Our pencils are all sharpened -- let's go!

Those of you who know me won’t be surprised to hear that I’ve entered my usual, hair-tearing, mid-to-late-August, why-is-summer-vacation-so-long phase of the summer. We’ve actually had a nice summer this year, even given that last year included our Disney vacation and this year we’re not doing much in the way of leaving town. The boys spent their usual six weeks at the YMCA day camp, which sounds like a nice, long time, right? That’s because it is a nice long time, and after that, what more break do they need? A couple of weeks to just chill at home without having to pack up and smear themselves with sunscreen daily for camp? Sure. Maybe. But they have, after camp ends, four-and-a-half weeks more of summer break before school starts up again.

It’s too long.

There are things I could do to fill in the time — for one thing, I could have signed them up for more camp (they did two, three-week sessions at the Y; there’s a third session that just ended last week). Or I could have tried other camps — certainly, there’s no shortage of sports camps, arts camps, science camps, theatre camps. Notwithstanding the fact that they aren’t into any of those activities enough to warrant it, I’m out of money for camp, quite frankly. Which also means I’m out of money for a vacation — last year was a big treat for us, and I’m so glad we did it. So, more camp, more structured activties, or a splashy vacation (though to be fair, we are going away next week, to a local spot, for two days) is out of the question.

What is not out of the question is the fact that both of us, my husband and me, have to work, so while I could spend these four and a half weeks loading up my kids’ days with museum and beach trips, movies, lunches out, shopping excursions, and so on, I can only do so much because a decent part of each day does still have to be spent right here, at my computer, working. Yes, yes, I know I’m highly fortunate in that I can juggle my work time as I see fit, and to be sure I’m doing just that, doing more work in the evenings and on weekends then I’d normally do. But for me, as with most freelancers I know, the juggling freedom is a double-edged sword. I can take whole days off, and I have, to spend with my boys — but the more time I take off, the less money I potentially earn, because not only do  I have to meet the deadlines already etched in my calendar, I also have to (or should, always) spend time marketing myself, beating the bushes for more work to put in that calendar so that a few months from now, checks will come in. That’s a long-sentence way of saying, I get no paid vacations.

And again, that’s cool. I understand and appreciate the trade-offs, the pros and cons of my self-employed work/lifestyle.

But it also means summer is too, too long.

I read a hilarious piece by The Daily Show‘s Samantha Bee in the Wall Street Journal online. She’s a comedian, of course, so her take is probably exaggerated for the laughs’ sake, but she goes on and on to great, coffee-spewing-out-the-nose effect about how when she was growing up in the 1970s, kids just wandered around, subsisting on candy and cartoons, their brains slowly rotting until school started again. Now, by contrast, she says, we’re supposed to enrich our kids’ IQs to prevent the summer backslide. And she’s having none of it:

I just don’t have any more energy to dig in and renovate my children into super-intelligent reading cyborgs for the first day of school. I can’t do any more rainy day activities with dry oatmeal in a cardboard box. I simply will not sing the “Fruit Salad Salsa” even one more time; if the children can’t get behind Neil Young that’s their problem until school starts up again. And my stern warnings have become completely senseless; “I’m warning you—if you don’t eat all your Gummy Worms you’re not getting any Sour Patch Kids! I am tired of wasting all this good candy!”

Frankly, from now until September the only learning we will be engaging in will be movie-based. I plan to let them watch “Star Wars,” and will continue to play it in a constant loop until they can imaginatively explain to me what it might feel like to “make the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs.” It’s all I can do to stave off the pandemonium that could be.

Ah, the pandemonium that could be: I hear you, Sam. Right now, my boys are in front of Boomerang (I think; I’m not actually with them at the moment) on TV, which is apropos considering it plays old-school cartoons (Tom & Jerry, anyone?). Later we’ll do the enrich-y thing, with a trip to the library and the bookstore. We go to the beach, usually in the afternoons after I’ve spent the morning alternately breaking up fights and interviewing experts for stories (it can get confusing; I am careful not to shout into the phone, “I don’t care who started it!”). They see movies with the grandparents and get together with friends.

Meanwhile, they’ve all but forgotten how to read, and to write (and I make them do it, believe me!), and I’m basically handing their piano teacher money every week so we can not practice piano all week, or not without grumbling and complaining that their mosquito bites make them too itchy to do the C-major scale more than once, halfheartedly.

Yeah, I’ve had it. Even what Ms. Bee says, regarding her 70s summertimes, is hazy becuase it’s probably not quite true:

…my childhood summer vacations were spent languishing in front of the TV watching Phil Donahue and eating Boo Berry until my skin turned purple. Nobody cared if I read. Nobody cared if I wore sunscreen, or pants. I was like a house cat; my parents barely even knew if I was still living with them or whether I had moved in with the old lady down the street who would put out a bowl of food for me. In the ’70s, parenting was like a combination of intense crate-training and rumspringa, so I would typically spend June through September burnt to a crisp and wandering listlessly around the city, verging on scurvy.

I bet her parents did care, and did want school to just start up again.

Our supplies are bought, our backpacks and lunchboxes are cleaned up and ready, Grandma bought the new Sketchers (thanks, Grandma!). We are ready. I am beyond ready.

T-minus 16 days…

[photo: Everystockphoto.com]

First day of school, last year. I can't help being organized, but I fear it triggers an excess of impatience.

Well, the title says it, eh? I’m confessing: I’m horribly impatient. (Those of you who know me are, I realize, sitting there rolling your eyes, like, duh.)

I want to be started with things, and then I want things done. When I wanted to become pregnant, I wanted it to happen pronto, and quickly became frustrated and upset when it took longer than immediately (6 months, for the record). I was sure we’d never find a house we liked and could afford (it took 3 months, for the record, though the closing process dragged for another 5 months until moving day because the house we chose, or that chose us, was owned by a guy whose finances were, let’s say, questionable). My husband likes to chide me for this sort of “we’ll never….” impatience, and in general he’s a very patient man (he’d have to be, with me, right?).

But there’s one way in which he’s not so patient, and because it’s the same with me, I worry. We are both impatient with our sons. Not cruelly so, but there are times I feel like we’re both hurrying them along, prodding them, and sighing impatiently when they dawdle or disregard us or otherwise act like, you know, distracted little boys.

True, both of our children know every single button there is and seem to delight in pushing them, over and over, to the point where even the spawn of Gandhi would be stomping around in parental looniness. But I’m finding I don’t enjoy being Mama Looney, and I don’t like seeing my impatient tendencies on display in my normally calm husband’s demeanor.

True, we’re both tired often, and busy all the time. True, too, that when you strive to raise boys who are capable and responsible, you feel (as we do) that slacking off isn’t the best approach. And true, most of all, that I’m constitutionally unable to be loosey-goosey. There are things I can’t compromise on, at least not easily. I’m too organized to be lax, and sometimes that feels like a big burden to carry around.

For example, I can’t just say, “oh, whatever” on certain rules or habits that pertain to sleep and eating (mostly because good sleep and decent meals are, I’m 100% sure, keep my boys healthy and not beyond-the-bounds-of-reason nuts). If there’s a birthday party that starts at noon, I know that food won’t be served until 2pm (I’ve been to enough kid parties to have this fact firmly in mind), so I make sure they eat a little something before they go. Case in point: at a recent amusement-park party with James, he seemed to be the only one who had eaten first. Meanwhile, a friend of his fainted from heat and hunger.

For another example, I can’t just stick a cold piece of toast in my kids’ hands and drive them to school because we were so lackadaisical that we missed the bus. We never miss the bus. I don’t get missing the bus. So I prod them to get up on time, prod them to finish their breakfast (which I also can’t compromise on; there’s a girl at Daniel’s bus stop who has a cookie and a glass of milk for breakfast, which would never fly at our house), prod them to go upstairs at the precise time they need to be upstairs so they have enough minutes to get their dawdling version of tooth-brushing and dressing done), prod them to get their backpacks sorted out. I don’t enjoy the prodding — but I can no more stop it than I can switch eye colors or the genetic lottery of my mom’s bad feet and my dad’s problematic skin.

So I’m impatient. But I’m looking, I’m keenly searching, for ways and times I can be less so, times I can deliberately let the guard down so my kids can see a more carefree mother in front of them. I can’t stop being organized or thinking four steps ahead, and we still won’t miss the bus, be late for piano lessons, or not have clean underwear on hand.

But there have to be ways to let down my guard. Right? Help me out here!

A long while ago, I wrote a post about how much more involved parents of my generation are in our kids’ schooling and schools than my parents — well meaning as they were — ever were in mine. As my kids have progressed through more school since then, it’s naturally remained on my mind. Just the other day, my third-grader brought home a book-report project with glowing reviews from the teacher. It was neat! It was comprehensive! It was clearly written! The accompanying diorama of the Titanic was fun and detailed!

So where’s my grade? Admission time: I made the diorama. It was my plan, though it was executed with the help of my son (he stuck the silver star stickers on the black-construction-paper night-sky background; he stuck the “HMS Titanic” stickers on the wooden boat that started as a $1 craft kit from Michael’s). In truth, I didn’t mind doing it, because the meat of the book report — actually writing about the book he’d read, a Magic Treehouse volume — was his responsibility; all I did was make sure he was following the directions of this particular project.

But when it came to the obligatory art-portion of the project … I had to step in. Thing is, he’s not good with the scissors the glue and the glitter, and never has been. Neither am I, frankly, but at least I have 36 years more experience in life as well as in crafts than he does, plus I can drive to Michael’s. My family is full of creative, artistic types, people with 3-dimensional imaginations and skillful patience with things like this. I did not get that gene. (Which is why, though my parents didn’t otherwise get involved to the level of showing up monthly in the classroom to be a secret reader or lead career discussions, my dad — who did get the art gene — “helped” us often, including a social-studies project on Inca farming, involving an overturned flowerpot covered with clay fashioned into a mountain slope, and a bottle of homemade shampoo with a creatively designed label he “helped” my sister make for a science fair).

Anyway, I’m thinking my “grade” as a parent would be respectably high. But in all the swirl lately surrounding how well (or, let’s face it, poorly) American kids are doing in comparison with the world, the focus may be shifting from demonizing teachers (No Child Left Behind, anyone?) to parents, at least in some cases: I was reading Lisa Belkin’s New York Times Motherlode column the other day, entitled “Whose Failing Grade Is It?”. It’s all about current legislative pushes in a couple of states to “grade” parents on such criteria as showing up (or not) to parent/teacher conferences, or being sure their children are well-prepared for school.

At first I thought, well, I’d get good marks! And then I realized that at least some of what these state legislators are asking parents to do (and hoping to punish them for not doing) are things my folks did at their minimum level of school involvement (i.e., not including 3-D Inca farming models or shampoo recipes): fill us with breakfast, pack us our lunches, make sure we had enough sleep, crack the whip when we dragged our heels over homework, show up to conferences. The difference from then to now, or one of them, is that while my parents did those things, they were leaving all the rest of it, for good or ill, up to the teachers.

Maybe this shift of blame is inevitable, as teachers have been taking the brunt for a while now, but I don’t think it bodes well.

As Belkin writes:

Teachers are fed up with being blamed for the failures of American education, and legislators are starting to hear them. A spate of bills introduced in various states now takes aim squarely at the parents. If you think you can legislate teaching, the notion goes, why not try legislating parenting?

It is a complicated idea, taking on the controversial question of whether parents, teachers or children are most to blame when a child fails to learn.

But the thinking goes like this: If you look at schools that “work,” as measured by test scores and graduation rates, they all have involved (overinvolved?) parents, who are on top of their children’s homework, in contact with their children’s teachers, and invested in their children’s futures. So just require the same of parents in schools that don’t work, and the problem is solved (or, at least, dented), right?

Time was that children’s behavior in the classroom reflected on their “upbringing” and parents were expected to reinforce an accepted truth that “teacher knows best.” But today’s parents are just as likely to see the teacher as the problem — a view that has been reinforced by presidents who accuse teachers of leaving more than a few children behind, governors who want to eliminate their collective bargaining and mayors who want to be rid of laws that protect teachers who have been in their jobs the longest.

I gotta say, I agree. Blame, if we want to use that word, should be shared all around, and there should be a realization that zeroing in on one individual or group for systemic problems doesn’t get any of us anywhere good. We can all point fingers and offer bad grades, but that doesn’t help put our kids on par with students in, for example, Singapore or China, who in some areas are blowing us out of the water.

What do you think? And what are you expected to do for your kids in their schools?

So I was just reading this article in the Sunday NY Times this morning, by Pamela Paul, about the phenomenon of bullying drifting down into younger and younger ages. Like kindergarten. Of course, bullying is a huge topic right now, given the rise in attention paid to the tragic stories of bullying leading to suicide in young teens, even though most recent stories are about older kids and homosexuality.

But this issue of the mean streak in kids as young as five? Unfortunately this is not a surprise to me. Mean girls (and boys) were around when I was a kid, and I saw it in action when my older son started kindergarten. My boy, now a third grader, has the double whammy of being on the younger side (this year, he is, to his chagrin, the youngest in his class; he’ll be turning 8 next month, mere weeks before the cut-off date and the turning-9 of some of his classmates), and being — I’ve always been upfront about this — a geek. Don’t get me wrong; I love that my son is geeky. He’s awkward, he’s unathletic (though he’s game to try things), he’s goofy. We were all kids once; I’m sure we all knew kids like Daniel. The kind of kid who only has a handful, even fewer, of friends; the kind of kid adults adore because he’s sweet and polite; the kind of kid girls and younger children feel comfortable around because it would never, in a million years, occur to him to tease anyone. He’s not rough, he’s not tough, he doesn’t run fast, and if he ever tries to insult anyone (his brother, us) he can’t even think of what to say. Mean does not roll off his tongue.

It doesn’t roll off his back, either, and any teasing he’s encountered serves the purpose of confusing as much as hurting him.

Back when Daniel was in kindergarten, I would come to the class about once a month to help out, which usually involved working with two or three kids at a time finish an art project, stuff like like gluing beaks and googly-eyes on a duck. When you sit with two or three 5- or 6-year-olds, you see and hear things. Here’s what I saw: One girl, a full head taller than anyone else in the class, telling a much smaller red-haired girl, “I thought at first you were going to be our friend, but I guess you’re not.” (And in case you’re totally siding with our little redhead, she let go a few zingers of her own, when she wasn’t running around the class like a banshee.)

Then there were two other girls who, upon realizing I was Daniel’s mom, said “Daniel is the best boy. Robbie’s the worst boy, but Daniel’s the best.” They didn’t have to tell me why. I’m sure it was because he was quiet, didn’t go to the kitchen play area and mess up their tablesettings during free play, and did what they said (if they said anything to him at all) on the playground.

But back to this article in the Times. It began with the expected anecdote about a kindergarten girl taunted for wearing “funky” clothes, and the “wrong” shoes (from Payless!), the whole bullying campaign orchestrated by one alpha girl.

But this piece was not just about the mean girls (and boys); it was about their parents. What role, the writer wondered, did they play? A big one, it would seem. After wondering what the culture has to do with the trending-down of meanness to the youngest kids (plenty; just watch TV shows aimed at kids — meanness is the new way to relate, and sarcastic comebacks are not just for grownup sitcoms anymore), the focus of the article turns to the trend toward tacit (or not so tacit) parental approval of what used to be called impolite behavior:

While peer influence is no doubt a factor, veteran teachers and school counselors say parents are often complicit. “Parents think it’s really cute when their 2- and 3-year-olds are doing ‘Single Ladies’ or singing the Alicia Keys/Jay-Z song,” Ms. Wiseman said. “But it’s not so funny at age 8, when they’re singing along to Lady Gaga and demanding a cellphone.”

A kindergarten teacher at one of New York City’s top private all-girls schools observed, “The mean girls are often from mean moms.” She was thrown back by the “venom” among 5-year-olds. They’ll say, “You only read ‘Biscuit,’ and we’re all reading chapter books.” Or, “Why don’t you brush your hair? You don’t look nice today.” And they’re not afraid of getting into trouble with a teacher. “Perhaps they can act that way at home without repercussions,” she said. “It’s untypical of this age group because they’re usually adult-pleasers.”

In certain cases, the parents themselves seem to be pleased. When her daughter Julia was in first grade last year, said Lea Pfau, a mother of two in Sherman Oaks, Calif., one girl threatened that, unless Julia did as she ordered, “I’m going to tell my mommy, and she’ll set up a meeting with your mommy, and you’ll get in trouble.” The girl then orchestrated a series of exclusive clubs in which girls could be kicked out for various infractions. “I was surprised by the fierceness,” Ms. Pfau said. “But I was more surprised at the other parents. Rather than nip it in the bud, they encouraged it.”

At first I was surprised to read this, but then it sunk in. I love that my son is a bit geeky, but other parents might not be so pleased with a child like mine, would be pushing him to like tougher things, to run faster and act more … aware. Sharper. Meaner. There’s a hardness afoot today that depresses me and makes me scared for kids with a softer side. Last year, my son dealt with a boy on his bus and in his class who said mean things to him. When he finally told me (“He said ‘I’m going to kill you,’ but he was just kidding, right Mom?”), and the boys were sent to meet with the assistant principal and the bus driver was told to keep them apart, I was heartsick.

Months later, when I asked Daniel how things were with this boy, he said, “oh, we’re friends now,” which I let him believe was true. Then I finally saw this boy, put a face to a name, along with his mother. And all I could think, of both of them, was “hard.” This boy was good-looking, in that way where you can tell exactly what kind of teenager he’ll be. He had cool-looking sneakers and a world-weary attitude. So did his mom. I wondered what she thought when she got the call from our sons’ teacher about the things he’s said to Daniel.

I can only imagine. And I can only hope that my boy remains the best boy, even if he’s buffeted by bullies from time to time, who tell him his hair is funny, or that he doesn’t run fast enough (both of which he’s heard).

Sure, kids can be mean; they always have been. But surely the response isn’t to foster a meanness in our kids, too — to harden their edges.

What do you think?

The story about the young man at Rutgers University who, after he found that a video of him having sex with a male partner had been live-streamed on the Internet, committed suicide, has me heartsick. I’m sick for him, for his family, for all the other teens unsure of how they fit in a world that still, still can’t deal with the fact that we’re all born different. I’m also sick for my own children, who are coming up in a world where being a homosexual puts you in a second-class category, shunts you aside, tells you you’re at best someone to be tolerated (or laughed at/with on a sitcom, a la Will & Grace); at middling someone to deny basic human and civil rights to; at worst someone to be bullied, beaten, driven to suicide.

Here are a few things I’ve been thinking about lately:

• My older son, in third grade, just did a unit in health on bullying prevention. Being that they are now all sophisticated third graders, they’re being asked not simply to parrot a line back to the teachers: “Don’t be a bully!” It’s no longer enough to give kids strategies to deal with a bully in their own life (walk away, tell a teacher). Now, they’re being told to Take a Stand. The example my son brought home, in his barely-legible notes (Jesus, they take notes already, in three-subject spiral-bound notebooks!), was something like, what if you see a bigger kid push a smaller kid away from some playground equipment? You’re supposed to Take a Stand. Tell the bully to stop. Defend the younger kid. Empathize with the victim, and make clear to the perpetrator (yes, they use the word “perpetrator”) that bullying is not cool.

So my question is, in light of the Rutgers story and others like it, what do I tell my nearly 8-year-old about the kind of bullying that doesn’t involve use of the monkey bars, but is personal? What do I tell him about kids not a lot older than he is who are bullied for their sexuality? Do I explain gay to him? Is it, like sex ed, one of those subjects for which you dole out information as they ask, in a level they can grasp? I’m asking because I honestly don’t know.

• The second thing I was thinking about involves a cute-kid story. My younger boy has been sad since first grade started that his best friend from kindergarten (“the best person in the whole wide world,” so I’m told), Connor, is not in his class anymore. Not long ago, he said that he was never going to get married. The reason, he informed me, was that “boys can’t marry other boys, and until I can marry Connor, I won’t get married.”

So my question is a version of the one I posed above: Do I tell a nearly-six-year-old that, in fact, in some states, he can marry Connor? That his mom and dad hope like hell that our own state gets on board with what’s right (with what’s inevitable) and lets gay men and women enjoy (some will debate the “enjoy,” but whatever) the right to marry legally?

It’s what I want to tell him, truthfully, but I have no idea how.

Those of you of a certain age may remember the TV show Soap, which aired from 1977-1981 (when I was age 11-15). I have not seen an episode since it was on TV (back when we had rabbit ears on the set and an antenna on the roof), but I’ll bet my lunch that what was shocking and racy and after-family-hour back then will probably read as unbearably quaint and wink-wink now. On Soap, Billy Crystal played Jodie Dallas, who came out as gay one (shocking!) evening. And as luck would have it, that episode aired on a night my parents, in an unprecendented move, allowed my sister and me to watch our favorite, illicit show on our own. Picture tween-age me, bounding down the stairs and saying, “Dad, what is ‘gay’?”

He stumbled and bumbled out an answer.

I don’t want to stumble or bumble, or nudge and wink and sigh. Listen, all of us enlightened modern parents will say flat out that bullying a gay kid (or harrassing gay adults, for that matter), is wrong. But what about making jokes at the dinner table? Isn’t that tacit persmission, from some parents who’d rather not address the matter with their kids (because their own feelings are unresolved or even ugly) for kids to tease or bully?

An article in yesterday’s New York Times tells more heartbreaking stories of gay teens — 13, 15 — killing themselves after relentless teasing and bullying. Listen, kids don’t get the message that it’s okay (on some level, overt or not) to treat different kids badly from nowhere, you know? I look around my kids’ classrooms and see the little faces pressed against the bus windows and think, surely some of them are gay. What if on the sixth-grade bus, my son witnesses a homosexual classmate being bullied? Will he Take a Stand? Will he understand?

So I’m asking. What should I do? What should we all do?

Right after this, he *almost* let me kiss him. Almost.

My second son, James, is bewildering and bedeviling in shifting measures, like all offspring, but I have been feeling for a while lately that, while he’s as capable as his big brother of winning or crushing my heart, I understand him better. To put it in actorly terms, I have flashes of brilliance and insight, dealing with him, where I can totally see his motivation.

Why? Because I am he, and he is me. Replace his penis and dormant male hormones with girl parts, let his hair grow (not a a lot, but a little; at his age my mom kept my hair cut in an early-70s pixie, the better to suit my superfine strands), stick him in Dr. Brown’s Delorean set for 2010, and he’d be me. First, in looks. Here’s a pic of me and my sister, when I was around 4:

That's me on the left, with the mini dress (cute, right?) and the Mr. Spock hairdo.

And then here’s James at more or less the same age as I am in the photo above. Also, you’ll note, he’s with his brother. I have more photos of him alone than my parents did, thanks in large part to easier photo technology, but still it’s harder to find photos of him than of his big brother, or without his big brother:

That's James on the left. It occurs to me that he hams it up in photos, with Daniel as straight man. Just like me and my sister.

Here’s how he’s like me in other than looks:

1. He’s gregarious, entertaining, smart and funny (what, you don’t think I am, too?!). That is, when he feels safe. Otherwise, he appears either painfully shy or snootily standoffish.
2. He’s got a dramatic streak 14 miles wide. Direct quotes: “Oh, now we’ll never get there!” (said on a normal-length trip to Grandma’s house marred solely by a short spate of traffic buildup); or “You never make macaroni and cheese” (which I do make pretty darned often, thankyouverymuch); or “I bumped my head and it really, really, really hurts,” when it quite obviously was the lightest possible bump in the history of kids’ bumped heads.
3. He’s a loyal friend, and even at the tender age of 5 1/2, he sees straight through cliquey-ness and cattiness and he instinctively avoids it. It’s cute to watch, because he has no idea that he’s steering clear of the knot of “in” boys because their interactions appear shallow or showy. He’ll say it’s because they’re too loud.
4. He’s not interested, at all, in pleasing grownups who attempt in good-hearted but exaggerated ways to be friends with him. So, teasing and tickling are out, out, out. This of course leads to some bewilderment and temporarily hurt feelings among relatives who don’t see him much, but he’s not giving it away for free, and he sees through a ruse from a mile away, so just don’t try.

I’m musing on this topic for two reasons today. One  is that, on this second week of summer camp after school ended, James is only just now easing into that transition. He finished kindergarten, which was a very big deal to him. The other day, when we were in the car and no one else was talking, I heard him say, softly to himself, “why couldn’t I just stay in kindergarten forever?” So my baby is at a turning point, and he’s not sure who he’s supposed to be, the big first grader, or the baby clinging to kindergarten. So while Daniel leaped eagerly from second grade to a return to the summer camp he loves, James has been more needy, so of course he’s on my mind (and keeping me up at night worrying) more than usual.

Which brings me to the second reason I’m mulling my little one’s resemblance to myself, physically and psychically: I’m trying to figure out the most effective way to deal with a child who is, you know, like me. My grandmother, rest her glorious, tart, sweet soul, used to say that you have to parent each kid the way he or she needs to be parented. Which sounds simple and makes sense, until you get to the part where you have to figure out what those needs are.

With James, I have to pull back from saying breezy, distracting things like, “Oh, but you want to go to first grade!” when he misses his happy, collegial kindergarten. Because of course he does want to go to first grade; of course he does know he’s a big boy; he knows that kind of response is a sop to his ego, which he’s not interested in.

He’s not looking to be distracted; he needs to be heard. You can’t play subterfuge with this kid. You just have to say, “yep, of course you miss kindergarten. Of course you do” and leave it at that.

I have to gloss over the dramatics and praise his good-friend status.

And I have to kiss him while he sleeps, because otherwise I’m not allowed. Come to think of it, was I like that, too? Paging my mom…

How do you shift your parenting styles to suit your kids’ needs?

James at his daycare "graduation"

I’m a big fan of daycare. Not just childcare (as in, having someone other than a parent taking care of a baby or child), but daycare.

My journey, as a working mother, to daycare, took me a year and a half and five nannies. Our first nanny, Maggie, was found only after I let go my new-mom fantasies about finding The Perfect Situation (a persistent fantasy, as I walked my newborn around the ‘hood during the snowy winter months I was on leave, was of running into a seasoned-yet-spry grandmother who had room and an empty crib just waiting for my boy).

Maggie was not that. She was a troubled divorcee from a depressed Northern English city who’d fled an abusive husband back home and landed in New York, eventually finding love with a local guy, but still horribly conflicted about having left her own children behind. She may have chased away her demons by working out too much and eating too little, but her babycare instincts were pure, and her love immediate and deep. Thinking back on it, Mags mothered us both, even though she was only a year or two younger than I. “Little Dan,” she called my son, wistfully, while telling me stories of her Daniel, back in the U.K.

I needed the mothering. Because I was clueless.

Sample phone conversation:

Me: “How’s he doing?”

Mags, whispering: “He’s napping in his crib.”

Me: “Really? How’d you get him to do that?”

Mags: “He looked sleepy, so I put him down, and he fell asleep.”

He looked sleepy, and she put him down. Genius, that woman.

A year later, though, we’d bought a house and were moving too far to keep Maggie. When the enormity of that fact hit me, I nearly backed out of the deal. I was dying to leave our cramped apartment, but on our last day, I clung to Mags, and we both cried.

Once in the suburbs, we blew through four nannies in a year. Gillian went back to school; Olga went back to Lithuania (which was too bad–I have a feeling she’d have had my boy toilet trained and speaking Russian at 18 months, and she might also have re-tiled our crooked kitchen floor in her spare time); Danielle quit, via email, with one day’s notice; and Christine? Gosh, I have no idea what happened to Christine. (If you’re out there, hon, can we have our key back? Thanks. Not.)

And that’s when I washed up, exhausted, defeated by nannies–and pregnant with my second son–at a local daycare. Where we stayed for the next four years. Louise, who ran the place (a licensed daycare facility, but run out of a small house that had been cleverly converted–a garage became a sweet infant room, with a blue-sky-and-white-cloud ceiling) could be mercurial, but she loved my kids and had a knack for hiring that meant  many of the same employees who were there when we started were still there when we left.

Whenever I think of daycare’s detractors, I think of a nose-wrinkling response I got from a woman I know a bit, whose young daughter is cared for by her (aging) mother in law (who is also, it must be added, caring for her even more aged mother. I leave you to figure out what’s better — a daycare staffed by energetic twenty-year-olds, or… well, you see my point). What she said about daycare matched a common reaction:

“Oh, I could never have strangers taking care of my child.”

Um. Yeah, strangers. How long were Louise and her staff strangers to my children? Five minutes? Ten? I left my second boy, James, in their care at 4 months or so. He grew up there, with Miss Allison, Miss Cathy, Miss Kaisha. Strangers?

Next argument: “They get sick more often.” They do? Mind didn’t. Next?

What about the possibility of abuse?

Err…. I’m not 100% clear on the stats, but I’m pretty sure it’s been researched and confirmed that most abused children are abused by people in their own families. One revelation I had about daycare shortly after Daniel started there was this: If a nanny, home alone with my nonverbal toddler all day long, was having a bad day and was lonely/frustrated/angry/tired/hungover, she had no backup. If one of the women at the daycare was in a similar situation? She could go make the lunches in the other room while the other workers picked up the slack and cuddled the babies. Right? Can I get an amen?

There’s this one: They’re more comfy in their own homes. Yeah? Doing what? There are a couple of nannies/sitters in my neighborhood now. I see them occasionally, pushing a listless-looking three-year-old on a park swing. Do either of them have anyone to socialize with? It’s true that nannying in the suburbs is harder, lonelier, but even still. I see those three-year-olds walking silently with a babysitter down the street, then I think of my own when they were that age, sitting at a diminutive table making a mother’s day gift or eating chicken soup for lunch, finding out which kids were good to be friends with and which had a problem sharing the trains, and I think, which is better?

Here’s one of my best memories of our little daycare. One day, I called to say I was picking James up early, just after naptime, because he had a pediatric appointment. We were in the midst of toilet training. I got there to see all the kids dozing on their cots. Miss Kaisha gently roused James and asked if he wanted to use the potty before he left. He willingly sat. And sat, and sat. (Obstinate little bugger; he knew, in his little lizard brain, that Mommy had things to do, an appointment to make, another kid to pick up at school). As my blood pressure rose (sure as I was that the kid would pee his pants either in the car or at the doctor’s), Kaisha crouched down next to him in the tiny bathroom, took his hands in hers, and gently stroked them while singing the ABCs.

I felt for a moment as I had way back when with Maggie. Like we were both being taken care of.

James didn’t pee on the potty then, nor did he have an accident (bladders the size of Kansas, my sons), but I give Kaisha total credit for maintaining the patience necessary to train him (and his brother before him; who was way more obstinate. In fact, Kaisha once confided to me that she enlisted the help of her own Grandma Gloria for ideas on coaxing stubborn boys to let it go already).

They made friends that we still see now and again, they felt love–and gave it back (Daniel, I”m sure, still has kind of a crush on a young woman named Miss Deirdre, a schoolteacher who worked at the daycare during summers, and I hope he remembers that, as a young man himself, and blushes happily when he does). They did the crafts, endless, endless crafts, things that I will not do at home with my craft-and-mess-averse personality.

They had a graduation that made me weep.

So yes, with kisses and apologies to Maggie, daycare was the best decision I made in their little lives. We all grew up there, really.

Like any parent, I’m appalled and saddened and horrified in equal measure when I hear stories like the one about Phoebe Prince, the Irish girl who, after moving with her family to South Hadley, Massachusetts, was so mercilessly teased–both in the halls of her high school and online–that she committed suicide.

Like any parent, I get my dander up when I suspect even a hint of a school not taking bullying seriously. But seriously? Most schools so, even if they are, sometimes, out of their depth (for lots of reasons: because so-called “mean girls” can be really mean; because boys and girls can be stealthy in their torment; because victims often don’t speak up; and because the whole arena of online bullying offers so many options for abuse that linger much longer than a hallway taunt has the power to do).

I suspect that many schools, if not most, deal competently with bullies, in this age of emphasis on educational psychology, as well as so much anti-bullying awareness. A local friend of mine, a trustee of her school board, told me a terrible story about a group of middle school kids who set up a Facebook page to torment a particular kid. To the school’s credit, once the story came to light, all the students involved got the heat. Not just the kids who created the page and spearheaded the abuse, but even any student who simply signed on as a “fan” of the page. And good for those administrators.

But here’s the elephant in the room: where are the parents?

Now, I don’t believe that parents of middle- and high-school kids can be as savvy about what their kids are doing as, say, I can. But I do believe that we all, as parents, should start as we mean to go on. I’m constantly walking a fine line between wanting to know what’s going on in my sons’ lives, the part that exists outside the boundaries of our home, and letting them be free to make friendships and deal with the sometime fallout of those friendships. And I plan to continue that, as best I can. I don’t plan to give up, and I think a lot of parents do.

I wrote about this last summer, when it began to occur to me that too many parents toss up their hands with a, “well, they’ll do what they’re going to do anyway, so why try?” attitude that drives me right around the bend. I know the counterargument: Sure, Denise, you smug parent-of-grade-schoolers. Just you wait until they are in middle school and it’s all slipping out of your grasp. But is it, really? Plenty does elude parents, I know. But what about being the voice they hear in their heads? What if you make it crystal clear, from babyhood onwards, what behavior is okay and what is absolutely not okay, consistently and constantly, firmly and clearly, so that by the time they are 13 and 14 and 15, and someone’s handing them a bottle of vodka at a party, or someone’s inviting them to join a Facebook group whose sole purpose is to bully another student, they hear you, or something like you (hopefully, it’s their own voice, but your words, your values), in their heads saying, “I just know there’s something wrong about this,” and having the wits and the cojones to stick to their moral and ethical guns.

I know it’s not perfect, and I realize that even good kids with tough, involved parents do the wrong things. But what’s the alternative? Giving in? Washing your hands of the whole thing? Leaving bullying education up to the school?

Or worse, blaming the schools or TV shows or the ubiquity and often poisonous anonymity of the internet for your own children’s misbehavior? I could go on, but Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen said it all so much better than I could have in today’s paper. He notes, accurately, that the Phoebe Prince story, like similar ones, arouses familiar emotions in a TV viewing, paper-reading audience because:

…it is about cruelty, which we do not understand; lack of empathy, which we find frightening; and conformity and coercion. But mostly it is about how little we know our kids, the little beasts who live among us and can sleep with a teddy bear by night and text-message a 15-year-old colleen to her death by day. Who are these kids?

Indeed: Who are they? But, he goes on to say, why aren’t fingers pointed at the parents?

The so-called South Hadley Nine, the bullies who have recently been indicted in the Prince case, says Cohen:

…clearly needed some parenting — some intercession or maybe, even probably, a parent to do what their child all the time wanted: force them to stop.

Yep. They needed parents. Parents who had not given up, on them, on the ongoing shaping of their moral sense, on their behavior.

It starts in the playground. And it does. Not. Stop.