August 2009
12 posts
10 tags
Chapter Thirteen: School
Most children seem to like school most of the time. The one thing that’s really bad about a lot of schools today is that parents spend too much time there. Helicoptering and mucking things up. Unless your child is having trouble, is a bully or is being bullied I think you should stay out of the fray. If, for example, you have already been a Class Mom once, sign up for yoga at the Y or bead shoes...
13 tags
Chapter Twelve: Single Parenting, Sports and...
I was a competitive golfer by the age of seven and a competitive tennis player by the age of nine. I have two daughters whose idea of physical exertion is to walk fast while shopping. The Universe works in strange ways.
My son, however, loves sports and it was with some confidence that I dropped him off at the Little League field for the first time. I was a single mother and working by the time...
10 tags
Chapter Eleven: Being Present
You don’t just wake up one day with a reasonably civilized 15 year old. Years and years of being present are required. In addition to being physically present, I mean mentally and emotionally. If you’re drunk, you’re not there. If you’re always on the cell phone or the computer, you’re not there. If you have ADHD and are in constant motion and distracted, you’re not there. Conversely, you can be...
9 tags
Chapter Ten: Routine
Having a baby is disruptive. The sooner you develop a newborn’s schedule for eating and sleeping, the more time you will have for your principal pastime, worrying. My mother told me, among other things, to bathe the baby at 10 a.m., feed her, burp her and put her down for a nice long nap. The added bonus was that it would give her a sense of security to know that certain things happened at the...
10 tags
Chapter Nine: Bedtime
With infants at bedtime, the less snuggling the better and it’s one of the few times less snuggling, rather than more, is good. When they are several months old, if they cry when you put them down, the rule is to let them- anywhere from 20-45 minutes or until you die. When they are young toddlers, snuggle, read and tuck them in, ever so gently. It’s such a sweet time and sooner than you think you...
10 tags
Chapter Eight: Boundaries and Manners
Unfortunately for children, especially older teenagers, not everything you do is their business. However, the reverse is true. Remember, among your many charges is to keep them off junk and out of jail, and to ensure that they are decent citizens of the planet. Thus, by all means, knock and ask if it’s ok before you enter their rooms. Don’t read their e-mails, rifle through their drawers or call...
10 tags
Chapter Seven: Respect
I’ve heard parents who are just hideous, complain that their children aren’t respectful. Mind you, they think they’re automatically entitled to respect. What’s up with that? If you want your children to respect you, model respectful behavior to others - especially children, especially your own. Treat them gently and with great care. They are watching you and they will get who and what you are. Do...
9 tags
Chapter Six: Humor
Laugh early and often with your children. Laugh at them, with them, and around them. And mostly, laugh at yourself. When I was going through a terrible divorce and the children were very young, I worried about them because there wasn’t much to laugh about. I thought Murphy Brown was really funny so I instituted a homework ban for that half hour and made them watch with me. It wasn’t that it was so...
10 tags
Chapter Five: Speaking of Therapists
Therapy is expensive. Feel free (something should be) to throw up on your mother, your minister, your best friend, your worst enemy, your brother-in-law, a neighbor or anyone else who’s ever had a child. Massage every lousy childhood memory of your own. Relive every slight and the horror of adolescence. Ruminate. Obsess. Dwell on your parents’ every quarrel, the fourth grade teacher who...
9 tags
Chapter Four: Finials
Once, and only once, I went to a parenting seminar. I would have gone to others, but after the baby was born I spent every spare, sleep-deprived moment I had trying to complete my own bath, or merely synapse in the comfort of my own home. The speaker, the expert, was clever and funny. He described what it was like for him to be a new parent. His story went something like this: “I was sitting in a...
8 tags
Chapter Three: Uncle Wiggly
When my first child was about 3 months old, I came home from work to find her crying in the arms of her babysitter, Jane Sewell. I presumed as my mother and grandmother had, that the baby was “hungry, tired or needed to be changed”. Nurse Jane Fuzzy Wuzzy, as we began to call her because we remembered Uncle Wiggly, was not rocking or patting her or singing. She was just rubbing the baby’s head...
9 tags
Chapter Two: Pregnancy
By 2013, 50% of all obstetricians/gynecologists will be women. Find one.
July 2009
3 posts
8 tags
Chapter One: When you're it
Enjoy your youth. Go to school, finish school. Read. Travel, if you can. Loll about. Do some really nice things for other people. Rent. On more occasions than not, be recreationally irresponsible. Stay out late dancing. Dream in the bathtub. Develop an identity and hang on to it. Figure out what you believe in and polish it up. Put yourself first and then, slowly, begin to leave behind the...
8 tags
Foreward
If a license were required to have children, with a certain number of prerequisites to be completed before accreditation, there would be no need for this book. People more learned than I could teach others who, if they didn’t get it, could actually flunk parenting and be judged “not yet ready” which, in many instances, would be a blessing. I’m not a therapist, a counselor, a member of the clergy,...
8 tags
Some years ago, before I started the chocolate business, the children asked if I would write down some of my thoughts about parenting. I’m pretty sure they wanted a written record to show their therapists. At the time, one of my peripatetic investment banker friends wanted email updates from home as she traveled the world so I pounded out a few chapters in between sending and receiving emails to...