Welcome to Think of the Children
Hi friends,
This is the first in what I’m hoping will be a series (maybe a miniseries? who knows?) of weekly newsletters. Every Sunday, I’ll send you three things that have been on my mind about parenting, education, and possibly other topics. Also, there may be typos, and swearing. One day I’d love to feature interviews with folks who are doing interesting work in the parenting/education spaces, so if that’s you and you want to chat on the record, please let me know! If someone forwarded you this newsletter, you can subscribe here (it’s free!).
Back to School … in May
My kid is going back to in-person school in a couple days, and I’m freaking out. Not because of COVID risk — not really. All the data I have about transmission within a school setting (as long as the school is doing a reasonable job of following the state Department of Health’s regulations) tells me that the risk of catching COVID at school is really, really low. So it’s not COVID I’m worrying about (which is, you know, still kind of a novel experience at this point).
No, it’s all the other stuff. After more than a year of basically sitting around the house, I had let myself forget about all the minutiae we used to have to manage on a daily basis.
One of the ways my anxiety and my struggles with executive function show up (hi, friends) is in situations where there are lots of steps that get stacked like dominos. Clean out the lunch box after school and rinse it so that it will be dry when you pack the lunch tomorrow. Go through the folder of papers from school. Pack two clean masks every day. Wear sneakers if it’s a P.E. day. Etc., etc., etc. It’s overwhelming and exhausting and it usually feels like too much! Which (sort of) brings me to my next point:
Cognitive Dissonance
I’m part of the spring cohort of The Barnraisers Project, which means that once every couple of weeks I get on a Zoom with a group of people and we talk about what anti-racist organizing looks like for white people. (You should join or support the project! It’s incredibly awesome!)
This past Friday, we were talking about cognitive dissonance — the discomfort when two ideas clash. And even though we were talking about stuff like racism and wanting to be a good person and community values and all of that, all I could think about was my daughter’s breakfast dishes.
Here’s where I have a lot of cognitive dissonance: I know it’s good for everyone in my household if my kid is responsible for stuff. The evidence is extremely clear that “Those who had done chores as young children were more likely to be well-adjusted, have better relationships with friends and family and be more successful in their careers.” And yet I find myself doing the dumbest things, like:
Putting away the silverware (supposedly my kid’s chore) while she plays games on her iPad
Getting my kid’s bedroom ready for bed while she reads instead of just … letting her do it?
Putting away all my kid’s art supplies, thus ensuring that the next time she needs anything, she will bug me about where it is, because she doesn’t know where it is, because I’m the one who put it away (facepalm)
And now I can add all the school-day tasks I just described to this list, because in the Before Times, I always struggled with delegating these responsibilities to my kid, even though she is fully capable of doing these things. Why? Why do any of us do things our kid is perfectly capable of doing? For me, it’s usually because I’m unwilling to deal with her unhappiness.
This is extremely uncool! If I can’t deal with my kid being unhappy, I am going to react really badly when she is unhappy. And, you know … she’s going to be unhappy sometimes! So, this weekend I am working on resolving that cognitive dissonance by pondering the question my therapist asked me once, which has continued ringing in my head like some sort of ominous bell:
What are you willing to do to get the thing you say you want?
The Summer Scramble
The past several weeks of my life have been filled with another sort of cognitive dissonance. Instinctively, I look forward to summer: I love warm weather, my birthday is in June (gifts welcome! I love chocolate, coffee, enamel pins and wall art that tells me I’m amazing!), and as someone who works in education and who, as a parent, gets worn down by the demands of the school year, summer seems like it should be a break. But … it isn’t. And it never has been.
Even in the Before Times, there were huge gaps around the care that was available locally for school-age kids during the summer. I mean, OK, “huge,” maybe I’m being dramatic. What I really mean is that every year about this time, I go, Shit, school lets out around June 26 and none of the summer programs start until after the Fourth of July and aaaAAAAaaAAAAAhh what are we going to do?! And then the same thing happens at the end of the summer — there’s a 7- to 10-day gap between when the programs wrap up, and when the school year begins. (One year, the school year got delayed by like a week at the ABSOLUTE LAST MINUTE and I swear you could hear the collective gasp, groan and wail of parents all across the area when that email hit our in-boxes.)
But this year, with COVID still very much a thing affecting K-5 kids who can’t get vaccinated, the gaps aren’t just gaps. They’re valleys. Chasms. Grand Canyons! The full-day, summer-long program my kid used to go to all summer? Not happening. The other full-day, summer-long option? It’s probably just going to be a half-day program. The science center, the children’s play space, the Audubon Society, the museum — their programs simply aren’t.
First off, I know it’s a tremendous privilege to even have these choices (in a normal summer), and to be able to (kind of) afford them. But that’s not an aside — that’s the actual problem. I wrote last year about all the reasons us parents lost our minds when in-person school shut down, and all of that still holds true about summer programs and day care. In short: In a world where only about 1 in 5 families has a parent at home, where income inequality continues to rise, where health care and housing costs continue to chew up more and more of people’s incomes, and where a majority of Americans have insufficient child care, none of this is easy.
This is the part where I want to say there’s an easy solution that you can, like, donate to or click something to support, because wouldn’t that be great? But even solutions like Elizabeth Warren’s universal child care proposal can’t fix the underlying problems that continue to hollow out the middle class and create more and more have-nots.
All of this is on my mind as I shuttle between Facebook pages and websites and group texts to try to patch together some kind of plan for how we’re going to make it from June 29 to … ok I literally don’t even know when school starts <facepalm>. I keep thinking that it shouldn’t be this hard while simultaneously being very aware of the fact that, as hard as it is, I have access to options that many, many people simply don’t have — in part because providing those options is very hard and often very undesirable.
Quote of the Week
"There are far more mothers seeking nannies and daycare spots, more activists calling for universal subsidized daycare, and politicians promising it, than there are reliable allomothers signing on to provide it. Those who seek one-on-one infant care ... would do well to make it emotionally and materially worthwhile to their potential caregiver."
— Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, "Mother Nature" (Pantheon Books, 1999)
This Week’s Links
Some things I’ve bookmarked this week:
The Quest for “Perfect” Parenting is Screwing Us All (Gail Cornwall, The Atlantic)
Coded Language in Education (Class Trouble) (please donate + download if these resonate with you!)
The Problem with Parenting Styles (Sarah Wheeler, The Inclusive Educator) (cw for adult language)
Closing Notes
This turned out to be really long! I cannot offer you any guarantees about the length of future newsletters, sorry, but I do welcome your feedback, including if you want to tell me Emily I started reading your newsletter but I couldn’t finish it because you wrote too many words. Please, if you enjoyed this newsletter, I would love for you to subscribe and/or forward to folks you know.