In the spirit of the Family Day

From the web-site www.parenting-boys.com

Are You Ready for Children?

Mess Test: Smear peanut butter on the sofa and curtains. Now rub your hands in the wet flowerbed and rub on the walls. Cover the stains with crayons. Place a fish stick behind the couch and leave it there all summer.

Toy Test: Obtain a 55-gallon box of Lego’s. (If Lego’s are not available, you may substitute roofing tacks or broken bottles.) Have a friend spread them all over the house. Put on a blindfold. Try to walk to the bathroom or kitchen. Do not scream. (This could wake a child at night.)

Grocery Store Test: Borrow one or two small animals (goats are best) and take them with you as you shop at the grocery store. Always keep them in sight and pay for anything they eat or damage.

Dressing Test: Obtain one large, unhappy, live octopus. Stuff into a small net bag making sure that all arms stay inside.

Feeding Test: Obtain a large plastic milk jug. Fill halfway with water. Suspend from the ceiling with a stout cord. Start the jug swinging. Try to insert spoonfuls of soggy cereal (such as Fruit Loops or Cheerios) into the mouth of the jug, while pretending to be an airplane. Now dump the contents of the jug on the floor.

Night Test: Prepare by obtaining a small cloth bag and fill it with 8 – 12 pounds of sand. Soak it thoroughly in water. At 8:00 PM begin to waltz and hum with the bag until 9:00 PM. Lay down your bag and set your alarm for 10:00 PM. Get up, pick up your bag, and sing every song you have ever heard. Make up about a dozen more and sing these too until 4:00 AM. Set alarm for 5:00 AM. Get up and make breakfast. Keep this up for 5 years. Look cheerful.

Physical Test (Women): Obtain a large beanbag chair and attach it to the front of your clothes. Leave it there for 9 months. Now remove 10 of the beans.

Physical Test (Men): Go to the nearest drug store. Set your wallet on the counter. Ask the clerk to help himself. Now proceed to the nearest food store. Go to the head office and arrange for your paycheck to be directly deposited to the store. Purchase a newspaper. Go home and read it quietly for the last time.

Final Assignment: Find a couple that already has a small child. Lecture them on how they can improve their discipline, patience, tolerance, toilet training, and child’s table manners. Suggest many ways they can improve. Emphasize to them that they should never allow their children to run riot. Enjoy this experience. It will be the last time you will have all the answers.

It is a family day in Canada.  I am reading books on parenting because my six-year-old son alone gives me as much headaches as (I am assuming, of course) a whole soccer team would.  I am reading on parenting and I am still nowhere.

That is an excerpt from Jeffrey Bernstein “Liking the Child You Love”.

Joking about my inability to find a way to outsmart my son is what is left for now.

PARENT WANTED POSITION:

Mom, Mommy, Mama, Ma

Dad, Daddy, Dada, Pa, Pop

Job Description:

Long-term team players needed for challenging, permanent work in an often chaotic environment.

Candidates must possess excellent communication and organizational skills and be willing to work variable hours, twenty-four-hour shifts on call.

Some overnight travel required; travel expenses not reimbursed.

Extensive courier duties also required.

Responsibilities:

The rest of your life.

Must be willing t be hated, at least temporarily, until someone needs five dollars.

Must be willing to bit tongue repeatedly.

Also, must possess the physical stamina of a pack mule.

Must screen phone calls, maintain calendars, and coordinate production of multiple homework projects.

Must have ability to plan and organize social gatherings for clients of all ages and mental outlooks.

Must be willing to be indispensable one minute, an embarrassment the next.

Must always hope for the best but be prepared for the worst.

Must assume final, complete accountability for the quality of the end product.

Responsibilities also include floor maintenance and janitorial work throughout the facility.

I have a little trouble-maker at home, that is, my son, a six year old.  Clever, defiant and impossible to manage.  I have reached an impasse and now I am on the quest for solutions.

I read some books, but they turned out to be useless.  This is a new approach from Alfie Kohn “Unconditional parenting”.  I guess I will be quoting this book once in a while because it seems to make sense so far.

So, here we go:

“…there is something conspicuously insufficient about saying that our primary goal is for our children to be happy.  Personally, I wouldn’t’ want my kids to be perpetually miserable social activists, but neither would I want them to be so focused on their own well-being that they were indifferent about other people’s suffering.  Neither would I want happiness to be purchased at the price of their being unreflective, shallow, or unable to become outraged about outrageous things.  Edward Deci put it this way: “When people want only happiness, they can actually undermine their own development because the quest for happiness can lead them to suppress other aspects of their experience… The true meaning of being alive is not just to feel happy, but to experience the full range of human emotions”.  In sum I don’t think it’s possible to give any answer other than “Yes, but…” to the question “Do you want your child to be happy?”

 

from “Unconditional parenting” by Alfie Kohn, page 239.

In her article “Roll Back the Red Carpet for Boys”, Donna Laframboise points out that feminism has caused a significant warp in societal perception of which sex is being more discriminated than the other.  The facts tell us that males, especially in their early ages, face more troubles than females.  Yet, society remains blind and deaf to these facts and with persistence worth better application continues focusing on girls’ problems.  In order to stop practicing favoritism blindly towards girls, the author calls for openness, consistency and fairness towards both sexes.  I agree with the fact that males have problems and I support the idea of fairness, but I disagree with the interpretation of the given facts. 

According to Donna Laframboise, males commit suicides more often than females, and they are more prone to alcoholism, addictions, unemployment, homelessness and crime involvement.  Males even do not live as long as females.  The author tried to track males’ misfortunes back to school ages, when they are being outnumbered and outperformed by females.  As to what are the reasons for this disparity, the author adduces some contributing factors.  Firstly, boys suffer from learning disabilities more often than girls.  Secondly, boys are the objects of more frequent and inadequate punishment by dominating female teachers and their own parents.  Thirdly, boys are confused by incompatible goals, such as masculinity and intellectualism, and they more often decide on masculinity in order to be attractive to girls. On the other hand, the societal lack of attention to boys’ problems led to the situation when boys themselves accept this “status quo” without much complaint.  Underlying this phenomenon is our inertia of thinking, when we readily apply double standards towards boys and girls.  For girls’ failures we blame society, but there is nobody to be blamed for boys’ troubles but boys themselves.

I agree with the author that males have a lot of problems that deserve our fair attention.  But I do not think that these troubles have anything to do with feminism.  The shorter lifespan of males is a result of biological wiring and is absolutely irrelevant to the feminist activity.  The higher suicide, alcoholism, crime involvement rates also have to be ascribed to the biological and psychological differences between males and females.  But following the author’s reasoning, let’s take a closer look at school ages.  In my opinion, the dominance of female teachers in school might be somewhat unpleasant for boys, but not to such extent as to lead to five times higher suicidal rates in young males.  If we agree that boys prefer to be masculine rather than intellectual, then where are those Apollos, gods of sports?  In fact, we see that boys do not choose to be intellectual and often omit to go in for sports.  My engagement in sports never hindered my intellectual development.  On the contrary, it was complementary to my academic achievements, because it helped in developing such valuable skills as self-discipline, time management skills and will-power.  Therefore, to me, Donna’s argument about a boy culture is not very authoritative.  In my school years in Russia, I witnessed similar situation, when girls outnumbered and outperformed boys.  There was no strong societal message for boys to excel in masculinity, and they did not.  On the other hand, our boys could not care less about their academic performance either.  I think, the reasons have to be found somewhere else.  For example, boys tend to be immature longer than girls, sometimes as long as they live.  Why boys do not seem to care is because they are sure that when they grow up they will make up the time in the workplace, which has not failed yet to be male-dominated.  That is partly the answer to the question why feminists and society does not call off their concern about females.  In workplace, females are left in the rearguard with all their academic achievements, while males “skim the cream”.  Females have to try twice as hard to get half of what males have got without much effort.  That explains females’ stronger motivation for academic performance in school.

But I am far from underestimating boys’ troubles, the only thing I want to accentuate that we have to look at the situation in its broader context.  Feminism cannot be blamed for boys’ misfortunes, because feminism is not trying to achieve its goals at the expense of males.  Rather we have to be aware of problems of both sexes at the different stages at their lives and treat them accordingly.  Most importantly, we have to discard our idea or reducing both sexes to the common unisex denominator, but instead open our eyes and minds to the biological, psychological and gender differences of females and males.  I agree with the author of the article, that it is about the right time to do so with all fairness.