RaggedyMom showed me this CNN story about developing children’s social maturity. In a fourteen-year study, the preschool children of mothers who described a picture using emotional language showed more empathy and better social skills when they got older.
Read more on Empathy, Mother-Guilt, Shabbat, Career Skills, Anger, and Idleness…
I wrote about keeping babies hydrated in hot weather at Green Prophet.
Squawkfox compiled a list of the best frugal advice from 41 bloggers, dividing them into categories and adding eye-catching graphics. You can see them all here.
How can you stay home with your baby and not end up in the loony bin? Below list the strategies that helped me the most. I believe they are helpful for employed mothers, and fathers too—they are ways of coping with the intense demands of parenting and balancing your needs and the needs of your family. When my oldest was born I decided to stay home with him, because I believed it to be the best thing for my him. And I set out to make it the best thing for me too. Here are some things that I did:
Ynet interviews Dr. Hanna Katan, religious Zionist mother of thirteen and gynecologist with a sub-specialty in fertility. Katan considers a large family to be the ideal and has served on a committe to encourage secular mothers to have more babies. Her own mother raised eight children and served as a role model for her.
Read more on Dr. Hanna Katan: Large Families,Yes. Demanding Careers for Mothers, No….
Next week begins the three weeks of school vacation for the seven-day Passover holiday. The organization Working Parents for Change is working for the government to have fewer vacation days from school and more activities for children during the summer holidays.
Read more on Working Parents and School Vacation in Israel: Proposal…
Lily left a comment on a recent post suggesting that “working mothers” and “stay-at-home” mothers often wish they were in the opposite category. I know I occasionally fantasize about picking up a briefcase and closing the door behind me each morning, leaving someone else to deal with the mess and the tantrums. I imagine how much more people would respect me, if I had a prestigious job.
I am leaving my family behind in a few minutes, as I am on my way to a two-day conference. My husband took off from work.
What about you? (I guess this question is mainly for mothers, but all input is welcome.) Do you think about what life would be like had you chosen a different work/home balance? Either now, or in the past?
Haveil Havalim, the Jewish and Israeli Blog Carnival, is up over at Frume Sarah. Check it out.
Read more on Do you wish you belonged to the "other" group?…
Never one to turn down free professional advice, I didn’t hesitate when blogger Therapy Doc suggested an interview here on my blog. Coincidentally, while “visiting” my blog TD and her husband are in Israel visiting their son in yeshiva; see here (the end of the post) and here.
Feel free to leave questions for Therapy Doc in the comments. My own questions are in bold.
How did you manage the demands of work vs. family when your children were small?
How did I juggle work and family? A lot didn’t get done.
My kids would probably say I put patients first, and that’s true. My kids seemed okay, but my patients did not.
But it’s not so simple. Both require quite a bit of attention. I was the parent that slithered in at the back of the auditorium late for the school play or for whatever ceremony they had (and they used to have tons of those) and the one who never participated in PTA.
I was extremely lucky, poo, poo, poo, kineyenhara (these are anti-voodoo measures) in that my first degrees seemed to prefer Benevolent Neglect. It’s my world view that the less input the better, when people are struggling to determine who they are. People (see, kids are just small people) subliminally know who they are and it’s their job and delight to fine-tune that. The line, “You had your life” is one of my favorites.
Parents and teachers, of course, should help, should make suggestions based upon obvious aptitudes. They should look out for real potential and encourage a child’s aspirations. I think it’s good to let them try, however, to do the things they think they want to do, even when you’re pretty sure they’ll fail.
And you can’t coach too much. Children who get a steady diet of coaching tend to tune it out. Wouldn’t you?
How did you meet your own personal needs during that time?
What? I had personal needs?
What was your biggest challenge as a mother of school-aged children? A mother of teens? As a grandmother?
We all have them, challenges, and I’m grateful for them. I’ve been pulled in so many directions (including east, Jerusalem). I think deciding where to establish my life and the lives of my children, Israel or America, surely took up a lot of RAM. Still does.
As a parent of school-aged children, I was mostly on the lookout for their emotional health, which was hard because, in case you haven’t noticed, kids fight, and kids are mean, and if they’re stopped in one way, they’ll get you another.
The challenge with teens for me didn’t have anything to do with my own children who seemed pretty well put together and talked to us freely (when they weren’t not talking to us).
My worries were about their friends, so we always had kids over, talked to them when they would let us, encouraged them to hang out at our house. I didn’t have this concept of bad influence. All children are good. They need more influence to get through life. They’re all our children.
Everyone knows (if they’ve been reading my blog) that my greatest challenge as a grandmother is managing my feelings of separation.
A word to other grandmothers, those who do have the opportunity to mentor and enjoy their ainiclech (grandchildren) every day, every week: Be sensitive to those of us who miss ours.
What do you think is the biggest concern of parents today? In the Orthodox Jewish community? Are there issues that should be getting more attention?
Probably the hardest and most important challenge for parents today is teaching kids about healthy relationships and sex. (Use the word, go ahead, it’ll free you.) They’re exposed to so much that is NOT healthy. It’s in the air, the shmutz. It’s everywhere.
Are eating disorders becoming more common and do you have any suggestions for preventing them?
I don’t know if they’re more common or not. I worked with a professor at Hebrew University and translated a study that compared anorexia in the kibbutz from the fifties to the sixties and seventies. Anorexia was virtually nonexistent on the early kibbutzim, where a person’s worth had to do with how much he could give, not how good he could look. In the sixties, when Israel became more industrialized, this changed. Now, of course, anorexia and the other eating disorders, including obesity, are prevalent and have been for years.
To prevent it, I tell parents to eat well themselves, shun the garbage, exercise, and MOST important, teach their daughters real sports at a young age. Let them throw the ball, run the bases, enjoy their bodies. It’s more about being in touch with one’s body and what feels good than anything else (except when there are really good psychological reasons, and I’m not going there today). Empty feels Good.
What do you mean by that?
I think most of us like that empty feeling. We feel good after a fast, we feel good when we’re hungry after exercise. We feel good in the morning, too, before we eat. Some of us don’t like breakfast for that very reason.
It’s one of the reasons that those who really like food, but stay thin, take their eating slowly. They take the time to savor, to enjoy the sense of taste. Kids who are “anorexic” as teenagers often stop voluntary fasting (anorexia) when they get married. That’s another story, and sure, I’ll get to the eating disorders one day. For now suffice it to say that eating is healthy. Not eating is healthy. It’s a matter of timing.
Any words of wisdom for those of us with challenging teenagers?
Yeah. Keep an eye on them. Buy a leash. And listen to them without falling to that temptation to answer back. Always ask another question. Assume you know NOTHING. They often think that you do.
And get therapy, sure. For everybody.
Therapy Doc, thank you for sharing your wisdom with us. Enjoy the rest of your trip.
Read more on Teens, Sex and Eating Disorders: An Interview with the Therapy Doc…
I recently met a lawyer who quit her job after the birth of her third baby. If she had to do it again she told me she would become a teacher, despite the low salary and status. She wants a profession that allows her to spend time with her children.
In an NYT op-ed, Linda Hirshman argues that we need to encourage highly educated women to come back to the work force after their babies are born:
Should we care if women leave the work force? Yes, because participation in public life allows women to use their talents and to powerfully affect society. And once they leave, they usually cannot regain the income or status they had. The Center for Work-Life Policy, a research organization founded by Sylvia Ann Hewlett of Columbia, found that women lose an average of 18 percent of their earning power when they temporarily leave the work force. Women in business sectors lose 28 percent.
In this series, I want to explore issues regarding home and career from a very personal perspective. I know that all mothers work, and perhaps I work harder than many–as one friend said I don’t always make things easy for myself. While challenging at times, staying at home is definitely the easier option for me.
My mother, whose yahrzeit is this week, stayed home with us. In the early fifties, even married women rarely went out to work. She told me that at their wedding my father, a Holocaust survivor, had $300 in his pocket and owed $300 to his aunt Shirley. Still, she stayed home and scrimped and saved while my father taught in a Talmud Torah and earned a PhD. She took care of my father in a way that is unheard of today, taking care of all of his needs and allowing him to focus on his scholarship.
My mother prepared me for motherhood as well as she could and taught me the value of homemaking. When I married she told me that I shouldn’t feel obligated to work, and that making a home for my husband and myself was a valuable use of my time. (This statement was as heretical in the late 80s as it sounds today.) With our lifestyle at the time, finances weren’t a concern and my husband didn’t feel he needed to have any say in what I did. I worked part-time and finished my MA between the time I married and the birth of my oldest.
Motherhood was a shock to me. I grew up the youngest child of older parents, without any extended family nearby. Except for babysitting, I had little exposure to young children, and frankly I was never really very good at dealing with them. I found myself with few natural instincts when it came to mothering my first child. Well, let’s say that I know now that all mothers have them, but mine were as yet unearthed. My mother guided me long distance, I read a lot and I observed other mothers. It wasn’t really enough, though, and I wish I had made more of an effort to find experienced mothers who could have “mentored” me. Part of the problem was that I was very independent and was used to managing on my own. I thought I could learn everything from books. Also, I didn’t really know what kind of mother I wanted to be. My mother never yelled or hit, and I valued that, but her old-fashioned, Dr. Spock approach didn’t appeal to me. Because I breastfed and she hadn’t, there were many things she couldn’t teach me.
Update: My older sister pointed out that my mother had told her that she was always very proud of breastfeeding all four of us. That may be so; my mother told me that she stopped nursing me at a month old because “she didn’t have enough milk.” I’m sure that what she told both of us was accurate. The fact remains that she did not have much basic breastfeeding knowledge.
Read more on Why I made a career out of motherhood–Introduction…
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