Fruit! Eat As Much As You Can (Afford)

For many families, easier said than done.

One of the most basic things I do for my kids as a parent is provide them with fresh fruit. As much as they want, every day.

We all know that fruit is great for health. The message has been drilled into our minds by posters in doctor offices and schools, ads in magazine and on television. The links between eating more fruit and avoiding a whole host of health problems is well established. Fruit is high in fiber, provides many nutrients, and is low in fat and calories. Filling up on fruit means being less likely to fill up on junk. The FDA says it. The American Cancer Society says it. The American Pediatric Association says it.

Simple: eat more fruit. But is it?

I decided to write this post because I'm starting to notice the financial consequences of encouraging my kids to eat as much fruit as they desire. I only have two children, and they are only 2 and 4 years old. And yet I find myself spending nearly a third of our grocery budget on just fruit. I try buying the fruit on sale, but it spoils more quickly and often tastes past its prime. Luckily, my family can afford to make cuts in other areas of our budget to make room for all that fruit.

My eldest is enrolled in a state subsidized preschool program which offers free breakfast, lunch, and snack. After seeing the menu, and because we can afford to, I turned down the free food. The main reason? Fruit. Regulations require a certain number of servings of fruit. But they also allow the fruit to come in the form of fruit juice from concentrate, sweetened applesauce, and sweetened fruit cups. Since the price of fresh fruit is so much higher than for these processed, sugar-added alternatives, guess what gets served for more than half of the requirements? I wanted to do better for my kids.

But shouldn't we as a society want to do better for all kids?

The FDA recommends 1.5 daily servings of fruit for kids, and 2 for adults. Half a cup is generally one serving. One serving is one small apple or banana, an eighth of a cantaloupe, or a couple handfuls of grapes. It's not a lot of calories, maybe 30-100 per serving, depending on the fruit. Considering that kids need anywhere from 100-1800 calories per day, fruit should account for about 20% of our caloric intake. The average price of one serving of fresh fruit costs 28 cents. To achieve the minimum number of servings a day for everyone, a family of 4 would spend about $14 a week on fruit (That's assuming that everyone actually eats their share and nothing goes bad. Those of us with young kids know why that's funny.) According to the US Department of Agriculture, families of 4 are spending between $147 and $289 per week on groceries. If those families spend $14/week on fruit, then fruit accounts for about 10% of their bill. So that works out, if a family of 4 can afford at least $147 per week (over $7,000 per year.)

For a family of 4 straddling the poverty line, $7,000 per year is about a third of their gross income. Which explains why so many Americans are on SNAP benefits (food stamps) and why school breakfast and lunch assistance programs are so common.

Looking at the numbers and the failure of government-subsidized programs to provide 5 servings of fresh fruit to school children, I consider the 1 in 5 American children living in poverty, and I wonder how often those 21% of American children even see a fresh piece of fruit.

A poster at my daughter's preschool.

*Take a step back*

This is a small issue compared to many others impacting poor children. Beyond just fruit, millions of American children are food insecure.  Insufficient early childhood care and education take a huge toll. So does violence, as 60% of kids are exposed to violence or crime in their homes, schools, or communities.

This blog post isn't actually about advocating for the inclusion of more fresh fruit in government food assistance programs. I wish America were at the point where that sort of advocacy could be a reasonable priority.

This post is really about putting things in perspective. Middle and upper class American parents like me are worried about making sure our kids are offered a wide range of fresh fruit on their plates, daily, while children who might live just miles or even blocks from us are skipping whole meals.

And while the majority of households receiving government food assistance include children, conservative media demonizes them as freeloaders, and politicians are yet again cutting already insufficient SNAP funds.

As a society, can't we do better than this? Or will we who are lucky remain content and complacent, so long as we can serve up a bowl of fresh blueberries for breakfast to our own kids?

Chewbacca Goes to the Salon

Nothing too fancy, just a little off the top, please.

The other day one of Lysi's best friends came over to play. He's been coming over regularly since he was 18 months old (he's now 5), so knowing his way around, he pulled out a familiar drawer, and upon seeing a bunch of dolls, asked, "Hey, where are the blocks?"

Oh, yeah, sorry, the giant Mega Bloks, Tinkertoys, letter blocks, and generic wood building blocks got replaced with dolls because our two girls (ages 2 and 4) didn't play with them anymore.

"That's okay." He said, walking to a large storage cabinet in another part of the room, "I'll just play with Legos."

Yes, while all the other building toys have been tossed aside for stuffed animals and dollies, Lego has remained as the only building toy our girls still enjoy. But that's OK, because they really enjoy it.

I've already gone on here and here in praise of Lego's new sets which target girls, because at least for my girls, it is working. Here's what I mean:

Pet salon is busy. Not sure if Ariel is a customer or staff.

First of all, as a typically girlie girl, Lysi has something she can still do with her rough-and-tumble boy friend, and which they are both passionate about. When they were both two and three years old, almost any toy was fine for playing together. But now she's asking to play puppy and house, paint and dance ballet, while he wants to fight ninjas and make things explode. With Lego they can combine their interests and play together without either feeling as if they are totally giving in to the other.

In fact, this boy friend was so intrigued by the details in the Friends pets that he asked his parents for several for Christmas. The biggest bonus for me is perhaps getting to see things like Chewbacca going to the pet salon.

What 2 four-year-old girls made in 20 minutes.

Second, just as Jesus Diaz claims in his post Hey, Anti-Lego Feminists, "Lego for Girls" Actually Kicks Ass, Friends and Disney Princess sets can and will be broken up and made into new stuff by any typical kid, which is exactly the point and why Lego toys are so great for encouraging creativity, imagination, and early building of STEM skills. I thought about Diaz's post today when Lysi and another four-year-old girl built this awesomeness (according to them it is a fishing dock combined with a launching pad for a rocket ship - how sweet is that?)


Third, the Lego sets marketing to girls are not dumbed down in terms of their complexity or how much bang you get for your buck. In Why Lego Friends is not one of the worst toys of 2012 (and why Mega Bloks Barbie is), David Pickett reports on his comparison of construction complexity of various lines of Lego sets and Lego competitors. He writes:

If we assume that constructions sets with similar price points will result in completed models of equivalent size, then we can use the piece/dollar ratio of construction sets as a rough indication of the complexity** of one building kit relative to another. The higher the piece/dollar ratio, the more building is involved in a given set or group of sets. This is a way of quantifying the differences that are obvious to the naked eye in the above comparison of the Friends and Babrie sets. I charted these values for sets from nine different themes and found the average pc/$ ratio for each line of products. The product lines I used were LEGO Friends, Mega Bloks Barbie, LEGO City, Mega Bloks World of Warcraft, LEGO Ninjago, LEGO Paradisa, LEGO Lord of the Rings & The Hobbit, Mega Bloks Skylanders and Mega Bloks Halo. 

Much to my surprise, Friends came in second (Halo was highest) with a ratio of 9.8. 

Diaz argues that the heavily themed sets are a "back door" to hook kids on Lego and eventually interest them in other sets that are even more challenging and spark even more creativity:

Once the radioactive Lego brick bites them, they become hooked. The next time they will want one Lego set just because it seems cool or more complicated. The space shuttle. A Lego creator building. A Technic car. Both girls and boys would pick those and build whatever they want with them.

Two preschoolers concentrating for an hour and politely
taking turns following an instruction manual - just because
they wanted to build a scorpion. Lego must be magic.

When I first read that, I wanted to believe it, but I didn't know if it would be true for my kid. Now I'm watching it unfold just as Diaz described. As Lysi flips through her Lego magazine, she gasps and exclaims, "Whoa, cool! I want that!" at sets of robots, tow trucks, and airplanes. She's become such an impressive builder already, that she and her before-mentioned boy friend together built the scorpion from Lego's more challenging Creator line. It is a set geared for kids ages 7-12, and she and her friend intensely built it over an hour and 15 minutes, politely taking turns following the steps in the instruction manual.

As a parent, I must just say: Dude, that is so much cooler than watching her dress and undress fashion dolls for an hour. 

Risking Life and Limb to Birdwatch

The last thing the AAA guy said was, "I have no idea how you're going to get your car out of there." 

Let me back up. This past Saturday I attempted something very foolish for the sake of my child. I tried to drive my 2-wheel drive sedan up a quarter mile, curvy drive that was covered in a sheet of ice. Why did I do something so stupid? Because at the top of the drive was a local environmental center offering a free children's program about snow. 

The center had sent out an email that morning warning that the drive was icy, but that cars were making it up driving in low gear with a bit of speed. I figured if I didn't make it all the way up, I could always just back down in reverse. I made it most of the way up, but then slowed to a stop. In my attempt to go in reverse back down a sharp curve, I slipped and backed right into a giant rock and tree. 

Now the problem when my car is stuck nearly a quarter mile up a steep, icy drive was that no vehicle which could tow my car out could get up there and pull without the risk of sliding right into my car. Which is why two days and two AAA guys later my car was still stuck. 

Thankfully, Monday morning (after two more cars got stuck on the same drive) the city sent out a salt truck. A couple of city employees dug my car out, and I was able to get a tow to pull me out. The total cost was mostly a lot of worry, a day off work for my husband to watch the kids, and a backache and sore leg muscles from me shoveling and walking up and down an icy drive. Could have been much, much worse. 

Oh, the dumb things we do for our kids. 

After I first got stuck, while I was calling AAA and fretting about what to do about my car, my daughter was cutting out paper snowflakes, dropping salt and food coloring into blocks of ice for sun-catchers, and making maple icecream. Being only four years old, she had no concerns over the car or my anxiety. She was simply having a lovely time learning about snow. 

When she finished her suncatcher, we took it outside to hang up. An array of resident birds such as chickadees and cardinals congregated around bird feeders next to the environmental center. My daughter and I watched them flutter, hop, and peck with shared delight. I looked down at her wondrous expression, and said, "Even though the car got stuck, I'm glad we came." 

(Okay, I must admit, I wish we'd just parked at the bottom of the hill and walked up. Had things gone any worse, I'd really be kicking myself.) 

I'm glad for the mindset and habits I've developed as a parent regarding my kids' education and exposure to nature. With modern conveniences, and especially living in a city, it's easy to forget where we come from, and the environment that we're dependent on, ecologically speaking. 

Winter is the season that reminds us that nature is still in charge. It is the most inconvenient and violent of seasons. School is canceled. Colds and even life-threatening flu and pneumonia become more common. People break bones slipping on ice. Trees fall, weighted down by snow, damaging property. In these modern times it is still relatively easy to ignore the harshness of winter by staying indoors. But then the heating bill arrives. 

Garrison Keillor is known for the colorful stories about harsh winters in Minnesota he tells on his radio show A Prairie Home Companion. On one episode he remarked: 

Growing up in a place that has winter, you learn to avoid self-pity. Winter is not a personal experience, everybody else is as cold as you, so you shouldn't complain about it too much. You learn this as a kid, coming home crying from the cold, and Mother looks down and says, “It’s only a little frostbite. You’re okay.” And thus you learn to be okay. What’s done is done. Get over it. Drink your coffee. It’s not the best you’ll ever get but it’s good enough. 

I don't want to worship or idealize nature. The biosphere is neither good nor bad, but awe-inspiring in its complexity, and humbling in its enormity and power.

I hope to get my children interested in the scientific investigation and understanding of nature. I also hope to instill in them an appreciation for nature as it is experienced through both first-hand experience and artistic expression. This is no simple task, as I live in the developed world in the year 2014. My children could easily go their entire childhoods without ever seeing a forest or farm. 

This week we bought some bird seed, gathered a few pine-cones, and are making bird feeders in the hopes of attracting some resident birds to our own front yard. 

Nature education must be an educational priority, just like reading and math, history and science, art and movement. That's why I drove up a treacherous, ice-covered hill, so my kid could cut paper and play with ice, salt, and food dye.  

Addendum I: Here's a wonderfully informative website about snowflakes. 

Addendum II: Since I'm on the topic of nature education, Happy Darwin Day 2014! 

A More Grounded Winter Holiday

I didn't get around to doing (secular) Christmas cards in December. I was too overwhelmed with work and other holiday season activities. But I absolutely love the tradition of sending cards every year. It's a small but meaningful gesture to friends and family that says, you're important to us.

Cards are physical, and just as a hand-written letter tends to carry more meaning than an email, a card, even a simple photo card, tends to carry more weight than e-cards. Cards are more time consuming and costly than electronic gestures, so I understand why so many people have given it up.

I, however, refuse to totally surrender to the hectic nature of the holiday season, and so instead of just dropping the cards altogether, I pushed them back six weeks and am sending out Groundhog Day cards. Since I had now ample time and I'm a woodcut print-maker, I even made my own cards, one of which you see pictured here, and had my daughter help hand-color a bunch of them. (Inside the cards I'll include the obligatory cute pic of my kids.)

I love this idea, and plan to adopt it as a new family tradition. It's so secular humanist! Here's a fun, cute holiday explicitly connected to nature and the seasons. There are no religious or spiritual trappings. And who couldn't use a pick-me-up in mid-winter after the excess and vacation days of the holiday season are long gone?

Although Groundhog Day has its origins in mild superstition, few people literally believe that groundhogs possess supernatural powers to forecast the weather. There will be no billboards erected by the faithful, urging us to be more pious in our observations of this holiday. Just contradictions between the predictions of Punxatawney Phil and all the other furry prognosticators (Buckeye Chuck, Holtsville Hal, Malverne Mel, Wiarton Willie, etc.) Such disagreements only emphasizes the playful and democratic nature of the holiday. 

Modern Groundhog Day has its origins in my adopted state of Pennsylvania. However, its cultural evolution goes much farther back and across the Atlantic. German settlers originally celebrated February 2nd as Candlemas Day. Like Christmas, that's a Christian holiday, but which marks the Presentation of Jesus at the Temple. Also like Christmas, it's clearly a Christianization of earlier, Pagan celebrations, specifically having striking similarities in its date and associated customs to the Celtic holiday Imbolc. 

Groundhog Day shares a parallel history to "Christmas", with the one exception being that it has a distinctly secular name. The term "Christmas" is stuck in a sort of linguistic limbo where it has both a Christian and secular meaning, depending on who uses (and celebrates) it.

In addition to cards, our family celebrated Groundhog Day by attending two winter festivals. On Saturday we went to the Wagner Free Institute for Science's Winter Wonderland, and heard a storyteller talk and sing about how animals cope with the coldest season. Today we attended the Briar Bush Nature Center's Winterfest, where we met many live animals, made groundhog stick puppets, and shadow puppets of local fauna.

In final praise of Groundhog Day, while I loved Bill Murray in Scrooged (actually I love Bill Murray in anything), his performance in Groundhog Day brought this once exclusively North American holiday to the world's attention.

All and all, Groundhog Day is pretty darn cool. 

Kid Climbs on Sculpture, an Excuse to Mock Art

My friend Dave posed for this photo as a joke because he 

doesn't share my love for Mark Rothko paintings. That said, 

despite not being into this one piece, he values and respects 

art and would never let his toddler touch it.

Earlier this week, gallery owner Stephanie Theodore tweeted a photo she took of a child climbing on a Donald Judd sculpture on display at the Tate Gallery. For those who don't know who Donald Judd is, he's one of the most famous American artists from the 20th century, and his sculptures are worth millions.

Before I go further into the meat of this post, let me respond to the original tweet. I wasn't there and I certainly can't know whether the parents were knowingly dismissive toward museum/gallery etiquette, or merely ignorant. Mistakes happen. I won't go as far as calling them "bad parents." However, they would have been very sad parents had the child done any damage.

I share Stephanie Theodore's shock, and I would have done exactly what she did: first she told the parents why the kid shouldn't be doing that, and when they ignored her, she told the guards. And of course she also snapped a photo and tweeted. Of course she did - because it's a friggin' kid climbing all over a Donald Judd in the Tate! As a gallery owner who makes a living in the arts, Theodore would have been an idiot to not tweet that.

Now on to the real bee in my bonnet.

The photo tweeted by Stephanie Theodore.

Unfortunately, I stumbled on this story on Gawker, and made the horrible mistake of reading the comments. As I've come to expect when certain types of art (in this case from the Minimalist movement) are brought to the attention of the general public, Philistines come out of the woodwork to call the work junk and mock the art establishment that gives it value.

Many of the comments go so far as to morally denounce Judd for his success, such as this gem:

If your shelf-looking sculpture sells for millions of dollars, and you don't donate at least half of that to charity, you're fucking horrible.

That would be difficult seeing as Judd's been dead since 1994. Although I do wonder if this person is equally outraged by anyone who, against the odds, ends up producing something worth millions of dollars.

By the way, at least according to one study, the median salary of artists is $43,000/year. While this sounds comfortable, it is a far cry from millions (especially when you take the student loans into account.) More importantly, this median only represents the people who succeeded in turning their artistic aspirations into a career. The vast majority who study and practice art, especially fine art, work day jobs or live off spouses for years, and never make a living solely off our work. But by all means, piss all over the giants in our field.

The award for irony goes to the countless people who mocked a Judd sculpture for looking like shelves from Ikea. Not only was Judd an actual furniture designer as well as fine artist, but I guess they don't know that the Minimalist movement in art was a driving influence in design across the globe, including the aesthetics of Ikea.

As a working (and struggling) artist, as someone who values art, and as a parent who aims to raise kids to appreciate the arts, I'm so sick of this shit. 

We artists and art dealers, collectors, curators, critics - everybody who makes up the art world - are basically a subset of nerdom. To quote today's wikipedia entry on Nerd:

Nerd (adjective: nerdy) is a descriptive term, often used pejoratively, indicating that a person is overly intellectual, obsessive, or socially impaired. They may spend inordinate amounts of time on unpopular, obscure, or non-mainstream activities, which are generally either highly technical or relating to topics of fiction or fantasy, to the exclusion of more mainstream activities

Indeed, we spend an inordinate amounts of time on unpopular, non-mainstream activities. We tend to be intellectual. We often have our own, unique social quirks. The mainstream tends to not "get" what we do. And while some who don't share our interests still respect us and acknowledge that our creations/writings/purchases have value, others mock us and insist our activities are nothing but pretense.

I don't get sports fandom. What I mean is, I've watched games of basketball, baseball, football, soccer, and I feel bored. However, when I look around at other spectators and see expressions of deep emotional engagement, when I overhear people going into very detailed debates and discussions about strategies and plays, when I notice that there is an entire establishment of writers, historians, and museums constructed around sports, and when I see how sports have widespread appeal across nations and class divides, I recognize that this is a valuable, meaningful part of the human experience.

So while most people don't get Judd's work, it's important to acknowledge that the reason it's worth millions is because there's actually a lot to it. In its full context, to enough people, Judd's work evokes as much passion as Paul "Bear" Vasquez's reaction to a double rainbow:

Calculating What SAHMs (and dads) Are Worth

Someone just posted this graphic to facebook - that the average stay-at-home-mom is doing labor that in the paying market would be worth over $113K.  (They compare it to a second graphic that shows "Working Mom" as earning only around $67K.)

My immediately thought is that is bullshit. I know what day care workers, housekeepers, and drivers (which is most of what stay-at-home-parents do) get paid, and they sure as hell don't make six figures!

After looking closer at the details, I see how they get at such an inflated number. Basically they consider a bunch of stuff that typical stay-at-home-parents do as highly skilled (and thus highly paid) labor such as Facilities Manager and Psychologist.

I don't know if the people who created this are trying to be funny, but obviously it's bullshit to just state that stay-at-home parents do that sort of work when they have no professional training or experience in those fields and certainly couldn't just go out and get a job doing that sort of work.

Also, that's just an inaccurate description of what stay-at-home parents are doing. For instance, just because I have heart to heart chats with my close friends about relationships, hopes, and fears, and my friends' mental health might improve because of those chats, doesn't mean that I qualify as a mental health professional and that hanging out with me is worth an hourly rate of $38.02.

So I can't take it seriously. But if this is meant to be funny, I don't get why this is a subject to treat so lightly.

Divorce rates are still high, and it is well documented fact that single women with kids are disproportionately represented under the poverty line and while fathers tend to do better financially after a divorce, mothers tend to do worse. Of course the explanation behind these trends are that mothers tend to be the ones to put more time into childcare and domestic chores in a marriage, which means that they are sacrificing their long-term and future career while their spouse is benefiting from their labor. It works out fine if they stay married because as a family they can regard the working parent's paycheck as something they earned (and will spend) together. But if they divorce, the one who stayed home is screwed.

Salary.com provies a calculator where you can work out what your additional labor as a parent is supposedly worth. I tried to be more realistic about what I do as a SAHM, and came up with this list of duties:

Housekeeper 624 hours at a rate of $10.49
Cook 416 hours at a rate of $13.97
Day Care Center Teacher 2,184 hours at a rate of $13.47
Van Driver 364 hours at a rate of $14.02
Laundry Machine Operator 156 hours at a rate of $10.25

Total salary for the year of $59,188.

Are you fucking kidding me? More feel-good bullshit. After all, the average nanny makes less than half that.

My calculation is so high partially because it takes overtime pay into account, despite the fact that no day care workers, cooks, van drivers, or laundry machine operators are raking in mad overtime hours with time and a half. Hell, these days they are lucky if they can score a job that's full time.

It is the norm - in this shitty economy with growing wealth disparity - for every working class stiff to do all kinds of extra labor for no extra pay. Commuting. Balancing schedules for multiple jobs. Coordinating work schedules with those of our spouses and kids. So how can we say all this extra work is worth any money when nobody is actually getting paid for it?

My own modest calculation is really even less than $59K because you have to figure that about half of that housework, cooking, and laundry I'd be doing even if I didn't have children. So let's knock off about ten grand and then we say that as a SAHM I'm, in theory, worth about $50,000. Yeah right.

That is more than I could make if I didn't have kids and was just working full time in my profession (artist/teacher). Of course in reality I'm not making jack shit because being a stay-at-home-parent pays nothing.

So gee, thanks salary.com for reminding me of how much work I do for zero pay, and how much I'm financially falling behind every year, despite all the work I do. Checks for imaginary money always makes people feel great!

How about instead of living in lala land we acknowledge that this is a shitty situation. That too many people in America either work way too hard for barely enough pay, or live in poverty or totally dependent on the generosity of relatives because they can't find work that pays a living wage. That we don't as a society put a real value on the work of parents who are rearing the next generation.

This isn't a topic that calls for cutesy graphics and fake checks. We need to decide what sort of society we want to be part of, and take steps to achieve that vision. A good start would be increases instead of cuts for food stamps, subsidized day care and preschool for all Americans. And next would be truly universal health care that is simple and easy to use. We've got a long way to go before I actually feel like I live in a society where what I do is "worth" $59,000.

Two Good "Nurture" Books for Skeptical Parents (Or Any Parents, Really)

Like many American parents of my generation, since having kids, one of my main pastimes is reading about the latest in understanding childhood development. This isn't a casual interest. It is a serious undertaking with the goal of developing optimum parenting strategies. Or at least it was.

 The American middle class is shrinking. Good jobs for people without college degrees have largely been shipped overseas, but the rising cost of higher education has way outpaced wage increases. Rising health care expenses have cost many people their homes and retirement savings. Many of my peers are choosing to have less kids or no kids because they don't want to be forced to choose between saving for their children's education and saving for their own retirement.

In short, American parents of my generation are all too aware that we do not live in the economy of our parents. We fear that if current economic trends continue, things will be even worse for our kids. So we're desperately searching for anything that might give our kids an edge.

Like most parents in my demographic, I was reading to my first child before she was even a year old. When she turned three I started her on Suzuki Piano, a pre-ballet class, a phonics program, a Spanish language program, and began doing age-appropriate math exercises on an almost daily basis. One might think I felt like a super-parent, but that was not the case. As a former teacher at a small, independent school, I was aware of progressive theories in early childhood education that insist that workbooks and flashcards are no-nos. I had also been reading about current theories in early childhood education for a college course I was teaching, and these supported the idea that "play is the work of children". As a result I became increasingly anxious that all the piano, ballet, language, and math might eat up too much of the much more valuable play time. I sought a middle ground out of uncertainty.

In January my local secular humanist group's book club read the book The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out The Way They Do by Judith Rich Harris. Just recently I finished reading NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman. These books are similar to each other in that they both challenge common assumptions about how to best raise children to be intelligent, moral, confident and capable individuals. Both books are written for the layman, specifically targeted at parents. Both rely on scientific research to support their claims, though they are written by outsiders; Bronson and Merryman are journalists, and Judith Rich Harris had dropped out of graduate school and was writing college textbooks on developmental psychology when she began to form unique conclusions based on comparing the research of others.

What I like best about both of these books is that even though they assert their own conclusions about several aspects of childhood development and the ability of parents to influence children's development, parents would have a difficult time developing any formulaic strategies in response. This is partially because the analysis presented is complex and nuanced. It is also because both books, especially The Nurture Assumption, emphasize the important influence of factors other than parenting.

Scientific studies require narrowing a focus down tight and conducting experiments in very specific context. Therefore it is usually only after many related studies are compared and analyzed over a significant period of time that we can start to see a complete enough picture that allows us to develop effective strategies for achieving specific goals in the real world.

Unfortunately, too often the results of specific studies are reported and people immediately react based on assumptions that go beyond the scope of those studies. For instance, parents read reports about how babies who hear more words develop more extensive vocabularies more quickly, so then those parents begin babbling on in a contrived manner endlessly to their infants and toddlers before they (or the researchers who did the studies) understand the more complex mechanisms behind those results. In NutureShock, the authors explain how the popular series of Baby Einstein videos were developed based on research in childhood development. But because the maker of the videos made false assumptions about what the research meant, the result was a product which achieved the opposite of its intended results. (Babies who watch the videos end up having smaller vocabularies.)

As a parent seeking optimum strategies for giving my kids an edge in an uncertain economy, these books have left me feeling a bit dis-empowered. NurtureShock convinced me that I couldn't trust common wisdom or even my own intuition. And The Nurture Assumption left me thinking that I have basically no control over the values and personalities that my children develop. Yet I feel I'm better for having read them.

Being a skeptic who was raised religious, I've been down a similar path before. I'm at peace with the idea of no cosmic justice or afterlife. In fact, I've now come to a point where I find my secular worldview preferable, not only because I think it is true, but because I find honor in having the courage to face an imperfect universe, and humble awe in viewing life as a precious, fleeting, gratitude-inspiring anomaly. I can, too, come to peace with the idea that my parenting style is but one (perhaps even minuscule) factor, in a complex wave of elements that will influence who my kids become. More than just come to peace with it, I can see how much that takes the pressure off and allows me to more fully enjoy parenting.

My oldest child is now four. She still does Spanish, math, ballet, phonics, and Suzuki piano on a regulated basis (although combined these all take up a relatively small percentage of her time, and stimulating free play time does dominate her waking hours.) I no longer feel so torn and anxious over whether I'm doing the best job I can or not. After a year, these supplemental activities have become an integrated part of her and my lives. They have become simply what we do in our home. It feels right because we both often take pleasure in them, and there is a ordinary give and take going on between mother and daughter.

Once upon a time I made a plan. I had developed a formula because I felt that was necessary. But it's not a formula anymore. Now I'm just being the parent that I am. I see that the approaches I take and choices I make for this child will be somewhat different for her younger sister, because they are different people. If there is an optimum parenting style for raising them, I can't know what it is, so why worry about it?

Life is uncertain. Making choices is complicated. Of course I'm going to keep trying to give my kids an edge in the world in the best ways I know. But most of the time I'll simply enjoy watching them grow up.