Ugh.

from here

I don’t want to go to bed at night. I don’t want to get up in the morning. I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to study. I don’t want to write. I don’t want to think. I don’t want to go out. I don’t want to stay home. I don’t want to care for children. I don’t want to play. I don’t want to be an awful mother, and I’m an awful mother when I'm depressed.

I keep thinking, “I just wish I was normal!” and making myself cry.

Unconditional Parenting by Alfie Kohn

Just over a week ago, I wrote this line: “I don’t worry quite so much about ruining my kids’ lives anymore, which is really nice.” That very afternoon I borrowed and started reading Alfie Kohn’s Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishment to Love and Reason, and about a chapter into it I thought to myself, “OH MY GOODNESS I’M TOTALLY RUINING MY KIDS’ LIVES.” After reading another chapter I was so depressed I signed up to Netflix and ate the remaining stash of chocolates hidden at the bottom of our fridge. (I’ll quit sugar next week.)

The book points out the fact that both punishments and rewards are ways of manipulating children to do what we want them to, which isn’t a particularly respectful way of relating to another human, nor is it a useful way of encouraging the development of internal regulation, independence, and morals. According to Kohn, in terms of the effects on a child’s psychological wellbeing, smacking’s not that different to timeout, and timeout’s not that different to praise – all of these are methods used to try to control our children’s behaviour so that they’ll do what we tell them to and earn us parenting points when next in public. They’re also ways we teach our children implicitly that our love for/happiness with/acceptance of them is based on how well they follow our rules, live up to our standards, and don’t embarrass us.

*	UNCONDITIONAL	CONDITIONAL
Focus	Whole child (incl. reasons, thoughts, feelings)	Behaviour
View of Human Nature	Positive or balanced	Negative
View of Parental Love	A gift	A privilege to be earned
Strategies	“Working with” (Problem solving)	“Doing to” (Control via punishments and rewards)

I say “we” when really I mean “I”. This book was seriously painful to read. I’m so guilty of withdrawing love - rather than reaching out with grace – when I’ve been hurt by or when I’m disappointed with someone. The economic model of interacting with others is the only one I know: You want my love? Earn it. You hurt me? You pay. We should always be even, or as even as possible. (I can see that my egalitarianism is damaging and childish when taken to this extreme, but it comes so naturally to me I literally cannot imagine a world where I relate to other people any differently! This book completely dismantled my whole framework for relationships. It sucked to read it. I’m so thankful I did.) 

As gut-wrenching and guilt-producing as this book was (I thought I was parenting completely differently to the way I was parented! I didn’t realise I was offering exactly the same thing, just in nicer packaging!), it was also practical and helpful. There will be many changes implemented as a result of my reading it; one of which: I will (try very hard to) no longer bribe my children. Mo’s sweet tooth has meant he can be convinced to do almost anything as long as he’s promised a sugary reward afterwards, and we’ve taken advantage of this far too regularly. The most obvious change for us in this regard will be dessert: there’s an interesting argument in the book about letting children listen to their bodies and decide for themselves how much they need to eat (and about the detrimental effects of constantly overriding this). (This ties in to Ellyn Satter’s ‘Division of Responsibility in Feeding’, which is something I read yonks ago but have mostly ignored simply because I haven’t been bothered thinking it through: When it comes to food, adults decide where, when and what, and the children decide whether and how much.) We’re not going to use the dessert bribe to force our kids to eat anymore.

It was interesting to think about how permissive parenting is typically seen as less acceptable than controlling parenting, and what that means for how I act – and want my kids to act – around others. It was interesting to think about how I can change my language and reactions to encourage Mo and Hazel to think about other people rather than themselves (the other day I gave Mo a dried apricot and he asked for one for Hazel, too, so that she wouldn’t feel left out when he returned to the lounge room. In the past I’ve said things like, “That’s so considerate and kind, buddy!” Kohn suggests something like: “Hazel will feel so loved when she sees you’ve thought of her!”). It was good to be forced to think about how I can step back and guide, rather than hang over and control, my kids.

I found Kohn’s argument for unconditional parenting (which makes up the majority of the book) to be an incredibly valuable tool for trimming off the parts of my parenting practice that weren’t consistent with my parenting philosophy. (Fortunately for my mental health and diminished chocolate supplies, when Kohn moved from the Whys to the Hows of unconditional parenting, I realised we already do – or aim for, at least – a lot of what he suggests.) This book makes the perfect prequel to How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk and I highly – HIGHLY - recommend it for anyone who hangs out with children and/or parents on a regular basis. 

* The table above is copied from page 19 of the book.

Girly

I was terrified of having a girl, with a fervour that probably should have alerted me to the decreasing sturdiness of my mental health. Hazel is now 2-and-a-bit, and I’m completely smitten with her; I’m glad she’s a girl, and wouldn’t have it any other way. Having said that: While a lot of my fears have so far not materialised (I’ve had no weird moments where I’ve seen her as a mini-me, for example), some have, in scary, I-really-don’t-know-what-to-do-about-this ways. In my post about these fears back in 2013, I wrote, “How do I let her be whoever she wants to be? What if she’s nothing like me and loves PINK and TUTUS and NAIL POLISH?!”

If you were to take Hazel to a shop and let her pick out anything she wanted, she would almost certainly return to you with tutus and nail polish, both of which would be pink. Tulle makes her gasp with wonder, she’ll immediately sit down and remove her sandals at the sight of shoes in a store because she intends to try on every single pair, and jewellery fascinates her. She touches fabrics as we walk past the clothes section and points out her favourite items: “Oooh, Mummy, I like this one!” 

Very early on, Hazel had an opinion about what she would and would not wear (Mo, on the other hand, still lets me pick his outfits for him; I really need to stop doing this, but I care so much about colour-coordination! It’s a conundrum). I’ve mostly bought Mo’s shoes and clothes for him without him by my side; he’s refused to wear only one thing in his lifetime, and this happened approximately three months ago.* Hazel rejected her first thing when she was approximately 18 months old, and has since continued to regularly say no to clothes she deems not-okay for whatever reason. For the past year or so I’ve been too worried she’ll refuse to wear something I’ve chosen for her to risk shopping without her. On a sandal-finding expedition a few months ago, Hazel made a beeline for all that were shiny, glittery, flowery, or, preferably, all three at once, while I held up plain-coloured options and asked, hopefully, “What about these ones?” We ended up compromising: simple, undecorated, gold.

Hazel’s latest thing is wearing dresses. She loves dresses. She won’t wear shorts, despite the fact that shorts don’t trip you over when you’re walking up stairs or make climbing at the park tricky. “Shorts are awesome!” I tell her. She respectfully disagrees. (I recently pulled out a jumpsuit for her and helped her put it on; when dressed she looked down and cried, horrified, “Mum, these look like shorts!”) I watch all of this with scientific interest. I’m in two minds about her wardrobe decisions: on the one hand (mind?), I love that she chooses what she’ll wear, and I therefore don’t have to. I love that she’s already fighting for her opinion. I love that she strongly believes layers of skirts over dresses or vice versa is a valid fashion call.

On the other hand, my watching has led me to the following observations/hypotheses:

Firstly, Hazel now knows what clothes and accessories “are for” little girls and what “aren’t” (the inverted commas look odd here, but I can’t work out where else to put them and I’m almost 100% certain that some need to go somewhere in that sentence). She’s seen plenty of girls (and no boys) wearing or carrying Frozen paraphernalia, for example, so she points it out when we wander by the t-shirts/lunch boxes/backpacks/whatever other random thing Elsa has been printed onto. If I’d taken her to a shop and let her choose her own backpack for preschool, I’m pretty sure she’d have picked a Frozen backpack, even though she’s never seen the film or developed any kind of feelings – besides familiarity – towards the characters (and this is why the options I presented her were carefully selected to include zero Disney princesses). Does this mean her decisions are probably based on what she thinks little girls like, or “should” like, rather than on her actual taste? And if that were the case, would it be a problem? Don’t we all do that a little bit? What even is “actual taste”? And why haven’t I noticed/cared when Moses has done exactly the same thing? HUH?!

Secondly: Hazel, like every other person I’ve met, rather likes having people admire her, and she has learned that dresses seem to do the trick in this regard. It seems to be impossible for adults to look at a little girl wearing a dress and to not exclaim over how utterly adorable she is. Even on Mo’s cutest days, he never got half the attention in public that Hazel can get merely from wearing a flipping dress. She was given a free cookie this morning just because a shop-owner couldn’t get over how gorgeous she was. People comment on her looks all the time. She’s started twirling for strangers (where did she learn this?!)! TWIRLING, PEOPLE. I feel like there’s some kind of classical conditioning connection here, although I can’t work out whether it’s the strangers who have been trained to bubble over with praise at the sight of girls in dresses, or whether it’s Hazel who’s started salivating at the thought of eliciting said praise and making her wardrobe decisions accordingly. Someone’s the dog here and someone’s the bell, I’m sure of it. It all makes me feel uncomfortable. Also, Hazel’s started complimenting other women on their clothes, because she’s learned that’s what you’re supposed to do! “I love your dress!” she tells our neighbour; “I love this flower on your top!” she tells her grandmother.

So. My precious two-year-old appears to have already been sucked into a system I’m a huge anti-fan of. I try to balance this out at home by pointing out and commending things like her persistence and her kindness, and by not making any kind of deal about what she’s wearing or how ridiculously gorgeous she is. I can’t ask random people to start complimenting her on her non-appearance-related strengths, but I could ask that of the gushy people we see fairly regularly, such as her preschool teachers. Should I? Or should I make changes at this end, by, for example, pretending her dresses are suddenly not options for a while (Hazel in four years’ time: “Mum, remember that time it took you years to wash all of my dresses, and then none of them fit me anymore?!”) and forcing her to wear shorts, so that people may feel less compelled to comment on her looks (and – bonus! – so that she can climb unhindered). Or would that be stifling a valid part of her which needs to be expressed, just for the sake of making me feel less icky?

These are not rhetorical questions! If you have any answers, advice, sympathy, feedback, or reproaches, I’d dearly love to hear them. Well, maybe I wouldn’t dearly love all of it.  Things I’d particularly love to hear: “Didn’t you have a pink bedroom when you were younger? Then what are you fretting about, you turned out great!” (To which I’d reply, “Why thank you, lovely reader! It was apricot, actually, not pink, and it’s kinda weird that you know that about my childhood, but that’s sweet of you to say!”). Things I may need to hear but wouldn’t dearly love hearing: “You need to relax and just let it all be, you crazy, over-analytical control freak.” Things I don’t want to hear: “You suck. Just generally. I hate you.” Those are your guidelines.

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* Mo refused to wear something because it was purple-ish, and “purple is for girls.” What’s happening to my children?! WHAT AM I DOING WRONG?! *tears at hair*