Daycare Issue is Your Issue, Too, Toronto Moms and Dads - Part III of III

The parents who showed up at councillor Bill Saundercook’s office on two separate occasions this week to protest the one-year moratorium on day nurseries on High Park Avenue have a message for parents across the city.

This is your issue, too.

“This City decision sets a dangerous precedent for all of Toronto and anyone who needs daycare, or might need daycare in the future, should be angry about the decision,” says High Park constituent and parent Lindsay Viets.

“[What] makes this more than a neighbourhood issue is that council will be unifying all the varying by-laws from when Toronto was five different municipalities and applying them to the entire city,” adds Rebecca Keenan, another High Park resident and parent.

“The old, downtown city has always been more open to a blend of residential and commercial developments. Day nurseries, for example, did not need to go through the same hoops as other businesses, and could open on residential streets. The suburban municipalities, though, enforced by-laws that maintained a greater divide between residential and commercial properties and there is a push to have those suburban by-laws govern the entire city.”

Both Viets and Keenan were shocked by the ease with which City Councillor Bill Saundercook was able to carry forth a complaint from a handful of disgrunted High Park Avenue residents -- and that he chose to do so without consulting other area constituents.

Viets explains: “Saundercook was approached by a handful of homeowners complaining about a new daycare going in on High Park Ave. Saundercook took their complaints to City Hall and pushed through (at the end of the council meeting, on a day when 22 councillors were absent, no less) a decision to impose a one year ban on new [day nurseries] in the High Park area. He did not consult with any of his constituents beyond the original few complainers. I am astounded that a councillor can be so out of touch with his constituency. Ward 13 has one of the highest birthrates in Canada, and accessing daycares spaces is a huge issue for the many many young families in the ward.

Keenan is equally frustrated. In a post published to her blog, PlaygroundConfidential, she reported that she "could barely believe it" when she learned about the moratorium:

A vocal minority of extremely affluent home owners on High Park Avenue...were able to persuade Saundercook that their right to a quiet neighbourhood should come before the vast majority of constituents’ access to child care.

Viets feels that the homeowners complaints of daycare-related traffic and noise were overblown.

“The street in question is a grand, wide avenue, the widest and busiest in the neighbourhood. It has a parking lane on either side of the street (an unheard of luxury around here) and nearly every house on the street has a driveway, so residents are not even using the street parking. Additionally, many parents will be dropping their kids off en route to the nearby subway station, and will be walking, biking or taking the bus to the daycare. The noise issue is even more irrelevant. This is a busy street with a bus going by every 20 minutes, and the daycare would only be open during business hours. I doubt that the noise would interfere with anyone's enjoyment of their property.”

Now that the moratorium has passed, Viets, Keenan, and other junction parents are urging parents across the city to take up the issue before they find themselves faced with similar bans in their own backyards.

“Families do not have the time, typically, to keep abreast of these political details, but it is important that our representatives know our need and wishes,” Keenan stresses. “If parents want to affect political change they need to speak up. Write to your councillor to complain about a need for daycare, for example, or stroller access, or better playgrounds.”

Viets agrees. In fact, she has drafted a letter that parents can send as is to Councillor Bill Saundercook, Mayor David Miller, and their own Councillor -- or that they can adapt as they see fit).

One last thing. Don’t underestimate the power of blogs and Facebook and Twitter in coordinating your local political actions. You want to get maximum impact from the time you have to invest in creating a better world for your kids. Perhaps this snippet from PlaygroundConfidential will convince you that the hand that pushes the publish button and the stroller can change the world, starting in your own backyard.

I read the article and thought, alright, let me twitter that. At 3pm I noticed that neighbourhood blogger and organizer extradonaire, Irina Yu of Junction Parents, was teaming up with Alison of the High Park & Roncesvalles Mom’s meetup group to stage an impromptu stroller march protest outside Saundercook’s office at 4pm. Well, you know I twittered that. More than once. I then set about scrambling to get my children ready to go while spreading the word on Facebook, too, and learning that the Toronto Star would be reporting on and sending a photographer to our protest.

You Can’t Call Yourself a Family-Friendly City if You Treat Childcare as a Non-Issue - Part II of III

It’s one of those dirty little secrets that comes out in conversations between parents: how a society that pretends to be child-friendly is often anything but.

Shadow a family with young children for a day and you’ll get an inkling of what I’m talking about.

Someone rolls their eyes (or groans audibly) as they take their seats on a bus or (heaven help them) a plane with a baby or toddler in tow.

A nursing mother is subtly (or not so subtly) redirected to a less conspicuous spot in a restaurant or other public space so the sight of her feeding her baby won’t offend other patrons. You know, the kind of patrons who hate to see a baby eat.

All too often, society treats children as inconveniences (as opposed to members of the next generation that we have a collective interest in nurturing along) and their parents as the perpetrators of some crime against society, for bringing these unpredictable, noisy, uncivilized beings out into public.

And yet, when it’s time to feel pride in our country or our city, we're awfully quick to highlight its family-friendly characteristics. Never mind the fact that the data generated by objective third parties paints a very different picture than the one we may be carrying around in our heads. It’s much easier to feel a misplaced sense of pride than to accept the fact that Canada today isn’t the Canada it once was.

What happened this week in Toronto made it painfully clear how far out of touch some politicians have allowed themselves to become with the needs of real families in this city - and how willing they are to put the needs of a vocal few ahead of the rest of their constituents. That's a lesson parents in this city can choose to heed - or ignore at their peril.

But back to the politicians - and the lack of political vision they exhibited this week.

Being a child-friendly society, circa 2009, means making access to quality, affordable daycare a priority. As any employed parent who has faced a childcare crisis can tell you, childcare is the foundation upon which everything else is built.

When your childcare arrangement falls apart, your family and work lives cease to function until your childcare crisis is resolved. The crisis doesn’t just affect the family (in terms of massive stress, work-life conflict, and potentially lost wages). If affects the employer (who has to deal with reduced productivity, because an employee is off the job), results in unhappy customers (if that reduced productivity leads to unmet promises or reduced levels of service), and stressed out coworkers (who have to pick up the slack for the coworker whose childcare arrangement has fallen apart).

To put it simply, childcare isn’t a family problem. It’s everybody’s problem. That attitude should be reflected when childcare policy is being set at the national, provincial, and local level, don't you think?

And the Stroller Moms Marched Again - Part I of III

All parents have their limits. And when they’re pushed past your limits, they’re compelled to take action, whether the person who requires a reality check is a kid or a politician.

The folks at Toronto City Hall lost sight of that simple fact this week (and it really is a very simple fact, once you’ve committed it to memory: you can only push a parent so far).

You don’t have to be a genius to figure our that messing with daycare means that your going to end up with a lot of highly-energized stroller-pushing moms (and one dad) in your face (parents who organized their meet-ups via blogs, Facebook, and Twitter, by the way: this generation of parents knows how to put technology to good use).

With a chronic shortage of quality, affordable daycare in this city (and across the country) parents have no choice but to take to the streets to protest City Hall’s decision to declare a one-year moratorium on the creation day nurseries on a three-block stretch of High Park Avenue.

Toronto parent Lindsay Viets feels that parents across the city need to send a clear message to City Hall: this kind of action won’t be tolerated by the parents anywhere within the City of Toronto: that an attack on daycare anywhere in the city will be considered an attack on daycare everywhere in this city.

“This City decision sets a dangerous precedent for all of Toronto; and anyone who needs daycare, or might need daycare in the future, should be angry about the decision.”

Until it finds itself dealing with a surplus of childcare spaces, The City of Toronto doesn’t have the luxury of calling a moratorium on day nurseries. To do otherwise is to put NIMBY-ism before sound social policy. And what politician wants that kind of decision on his or her voting record, come election day?

Earth to out-of-touch politicians: Babies and toddlers might not be old enough to vote, but their moms and dads certainly are. You might want to make a note of that in bright red crayon.

The Mothers Who Made Me

Yesterday marked the 100-year anniversary of the birth of one of my grandmothers. My mom’s mom.

At various points throughout the day, I stopped to consider that fact. A century ago a mother I never knew gave birth to a baby girl who would grow up to become someone who would mean the world to me.

Surely this day must be recorded in a history book somewhere. It absolutely must.

 Then I started thinking about my other grandmother - another strong, vibrant, nurturing woman who stunned me and broke my heart by proving to be mortal at the age 94. That was 14 years ago as of this coming Tuesday, impossibly long ago, but every time I look at one of the books she gave me (she left me 13 cartons’ worth) or think of one of the life lessons she taught me (mainly about being patient with other people, even when you really, really don’t want to be), I hear the sound of her voice and I remember how wonderful it felt to be hugged by her.

I can't think about my two grandmothers without thinking about my mom: my lovely but complicated mom.

When I was young, I spent a lot of time wishing she were a different kind of mother - a mother who wasn’t so difficult or so angry. Now that I’m a mother myself, I simply marvel that she was able to carry on as well as she did, given the cards she was dealt and the decade in which she was raising her family. No one talked about mental illness back then. And as for family therapy? You have got to be kidding.

It wasn’t until after my mother died - when the grief-tide swept over each of us, threatening to drag each of us under - that my sisters and I realized what a strong woman our mother had been. She had battled with emotions like grief and despair for the previous 30 years and somehow had managed to carry on. We were in awe.

I feel blessed to have had such strong women in my life: two grandmothers who surrounded me with so much love and nurturing that I never had to question, for a moment, the fact that I was loved; and a mother who equipped me with the resilience to deal with life’s sunny days and stormy days (plus every emotional weather extreme you can imagine).

It’s great to be able to fall backwards and land on pillows of love and nurturing. But to survive in this world, you need those rough-and-ready resilience skills, too. Thanks, Grandma R. Thanks, Grandma B. And an extra big hug to you, Mom. I love and miss you all.

Photo Credit: Ann Dougals, 2009.

Creative Inspiration for Moms and Little Ones

Veronika Roux-Vlachova believes that all mothers are creative by nature, but that some moms can benefit from a little behind-the-scenes support for their artistic desires.

 “Motherhood definitely inspires art but often prevents us from experiencing due to time pressure and lack of planning. Once the first step towards art is made, mothers are inspired to see and to create more, creating a wonderful loop between motherhood and art, as one really feeds off the other."

An accountant turned business-development executive and entrepreneur, Roux-Vlachova has found a novel way to combine her passions for art and motherhood - and share those passions with other mothers who are eager to introduce art to their children’s lives, through her business, Art Strollers.

“After the birth of my first son, Carl-Edmund, I wanted to introduce art-related outings for our family, so we started going to the museum and the galleries a little more,” Roux-Vlachova explains. “Art surrounds us and introduces elements of history, culture and creativity. In addition to the creation process, there is an entire analytical thinking process when reacting to a work or when researching on an art movement. They are simply great activities for both parents and children."

“Then, while pregnant with my second son, Martin-Oliver, the idea to do gallery tours for mothers came one day while browsing some art works. A date was scheduled and the idea was to see if people were interested; over 40 mothers signed up for the first tour.”

Roux-Vlachova’s most recent program - Simply Babies! - provides mothers with the opportunity to obtain professional photographs of themselves creating art with their babies.

The setting is an art gallery. Ten mothers with children all engage in various artistic activities. Babies and toddlers draw, paint, sleep, run or crawl while photographer Andrew Taylor snaps away. The result: creative in the moment images of both mother and child....Workshops are scheduled monthly and limited to 10 participants.

Roux-Vlachova connected with Taylor through her work in the stock photography world and was very impressed by his knowledge and professionalism. “We came up with the idea of having mother and child engage in an art activity. It takes away from the pressure of posing for the camera and offers some fabulous moments to capture."

Art Strollers offers a variety of other child-friendly arts and cultural outings for mothers with young children. According to Roux-Vlachova, the majority of her clients come from a field outside the arts, but they are passionate about art and want to make art a regular part of their family’s lives. The benefits of doing so can be considerable.

“Looking at art with your children offers the possibilities for fabulous dialogues which can be as simple as shapes and colours or go more in depth in history. Toddlers often recognize objects in their day to day life in paintings and it offers a wonderful window of explanation as to how these objects were used in the past.”

To share art with your child is to carry on a creative dialogue about things that might otherwise defy expression. It's a conversation that can continue throughout your lifetime. What an amazing opportunity for both you and your child..

Do you make a point of creating art with your children and otherwise incorporating art and culture into their lives? If so, what are your favorite ways of doing so?

Number One Rule of Mommy Blogging: Be Upfront With Your Readers

This is the second in a two-part series about mothers and blogging. You can read part one below.

The comments in response to Trisha Haas' follow-up post about General Mills ("General Mills and I Had a Meeting of the Minds") provide a revealing snapshot of the state of mommy blogging, circa 2009:

Commenter Carrie of bilingualintheboonies.com:

Until bloggers learn they just can’t fire [off] and post, they will not be taken as seriously as mainstream media. Yes, many bloggers are just as serious and just as “important” but the overall tribe needs to learn some basics of journalism and writing if the blog thing is to grow beyond “Hey, let’s get this mommy blogger to write about us for yogurt cups.”

Lisa of Crazy Adventures in Parenting:

Clearly, Carrie, you are unaware of how blogging works. Blogging is our opinions - we get online, write our posts about things that happen to us, things we like, dislike, recipes we like and want to share.

I asked prominent and prolific Toronto blogger Catherine Connors of Her Bad Mother to comment on this discussion -- specifically whether mommy blogging is (or can be) journalism, opinion, or a mix of both. Here's what she had to say.

That was such an interesting discussion. There's a broader discussion that's been going on about this issue, especially as it pertains to advertising and reviews and such - about whether there should be accepted practices, whether bloggers should have disclaimers on anything they write that is or might be construed as advertising or advertorial, and a broader discussion still about whether the momosphere is changing a bit, with more and more mom blogs oriented toward marketing.

My view, which I know is shared by many others, is that there needn't be set 'standards' - and that such a thing kind of goes against the spirit of the blogosphere - but that bloggers and mom-bloggers especially owe to themselves (and the community) to really think long and hard about their own best practices and commit to those.

A blogger who is really clear about the kind of writing that she does, and the kind of 'space' that she maintains, does right by herself and by her audience, because everyone knows what to expect, and can make a clear choice about whether to read her or not.

I have nothing against marketing-type mom blogs, but am not inclined to read them. I'm just not interested. But many other women love those blogs, and flock to them. It's a matter of audience.

A blogger's responsibility is, I think, to their audience, and specifically to the audience that they want. My 'rules' - for example, that although I have ads, I don't do reviews on HBM, and that I don't endorse anything that I don't have a special personal relationship with/personally support (I actually spelled it all out here) - I think, are clear to me and to my audience, but these aren't the same rules that, say, one of WalMart's elevenmoms would subscribe to. But, again, we don't have the same audience.

[Note: See CommercialAlert.org re: WalMart's elevenmoms.]

Basically, the thing that I think everyone agrees on is that the one most important rule - if you can call it a rule - is transparency. If a blogger is clear and open about what readers can expect at her blog, then she's doing right.

Whether blogging is all opinion, or whether it can be considered akin to journalism - again, depends upon the blog. The only relationship that my own writing has to journalism may be some similarity to op-ed, but that's about it. I don't 'report.' But there are some blogs that do something like what is now called citizen journalism, and many blogs that do a very good job with critical analysis of events. But most traditional mom-blogs fall into the genre of memoir, and sometimes op-ed.

That said, I don't think that anybody who takes themselves seriously as a writer -- regardless of where or how they publish -- should fall back on statements like 'it's just my opinion!' when they're discussing issues, events, people or organizations. There are still issues of integrity and reliability at stake, whether it's a blog or the WSJ.

The story you linked to - her recourse to the cry of 'opinion! opinion!' rang a little hollow. Well-articulated opinion is always well-supported opinion. (When I got caught up in that wet-nursing controversy, the issue of what counts as opinion was a significant part of what I found challenging -  the person who wrote about me got the facts wrong. She told a story that misrepresented what happened, to make the story more controversial, and that, obviously, rankled. But she too fell back on the claim of "it's my opinion!" It was sorted out, but it was very, very frustrating.)

Note: Catherine Conners and I are among the contributors to Mothering and Blogging: The Radical Act of the Mommyblog edited by May Friedman and Shana Calixte (Toronto: Demeter Press, May 2009).

Respect the Mommy Blogger

This is the first in a two-part series on mothers and blogging. The second part continues, above.

General Mills recently learned a lesson that a number of other corporations have already had to learn through the Online School of Hard Knocks.

Respect the mommy blogger. (It's really not that complicated. Moms have always talked. Now they talk online, too.)

What led to this latest eureka moment was the publication of a BrandWeek article about General Mill’s MyBlogSpark program - and the backlash it triggered.

The article highlighted the success of the program, success being measured, apparently, in hits (5 million), comments (8000), and dollars not being spent on mommy blog advertising. (Why buy the ad if you can promote the yogourt on mommy blogs for free? That seems to be the point of MyBlogSpark.)

Blogger Trisha Haas of MomDot reacted to the BrandWeek article with what amounts to a mommy blogger call to action, urging her fellow bloggers to “GET A CLUE and get it fast”

If we don’t put together some rules on what we are doing with our blogs to work with PR and corporations, we are shooting ourselves in the virtual head.

Unfortunately, right now bloggers are pretty much equivalent to a woman in an abusive relationship that keeps going back over and over again. But not for the kids…..for the freaking yogurt cups.

Haas heard back from General Mills within 6 hours. No big surprise there. The company knows which member of the family is most likely to load the grocery cart with its products -- and who it can least afford to alienate online or offline. Ultimately, Haas felt that the concerns of mommy bloggers were heard.

Each corporation has to decide for itself whether it's ready to heed the growing rumblings of discontent from within the mommy blogging community by recognizing that a mothers' time has value. And be aware: other mothers are watching.

Mamapalooza: A Mother's Day Celebration of Motherhood and Moms in Toronto

Motherhood culture is thriving in Toronto. Here are just two of the latest examples. Mamapalooza is taking place this weekend and Demeter Press has an anthology about motherhood and hip hop culture in the works.

MAMAPALOOZA: CELEBRATE MOTHERHOOD AND MOTHERS

Mamapalooza is back. The annual Mother's Day celebration of everything mom is organized by the Association for Research in Mothering's Mother Outlaws.

This year's event, which will feature music, art, poetry, and more, is being held at the Bread and Circus Theatre in Kensington Market (299 Augusta Street) tomorrow from 1 pm to 5 pm.

You can find out more by downloading a copy of the flyer (.pdf).

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: MOTHERING AND HIP HOP CULTURE

Speaking of the Association for Research in Mothering (ARM), some of you might be interested in contributing to Demeter Press' upcoming anthology about Mothering and Hip Hop Culture. Here's a brief excerpt from the call for submissions. (You can download a full copy of the call for submissions here.)

Motherhood is an experience that has been ever‑present yet invisible in the global music genre of Hip-Hop. Yet this aspect of women’s experiences within the movement has garnered little or no interest from journalists, writers and scholars of Hip-Hop culture. Nor do we have any understanding of how mothers who remain Hip-Hop enthusiasts negotiate their relationship to the culture of Hip‑Hop and its music with their children. What are the spaces that motherhood occupies in Hip-Hop? Are there ways of understanding mothering in Hip-Hop along a historical continuum? What are some of the ways that motherhood complicates the very masculinist discourses around hip hop? How can we create an empowered and feminist Hip-Hop mothering, what would it look like and how would it challenge the status quo? How are mothers engaging with Hip-Hop, both locally and globally?

Abstracts are due August 1, 2009. Full papers are due January 7, 2010. You can find out more about Demeter Press and the titles it has published to date by visiting the Demeter Press section of the ARM website. The ARM website notes that Demeter Press is named in honor of "the Goddess Demeter, herstory’s most celebrated empowered and outraged mother."

How Perfect Do Reality TV Moms and Dads Have to Be?

It's not enough to be super mom or super dad anymore. You've got to be super parent and super couple, too -- at least on reality TV.

Face it. It’s not a fun time to be living in the Reality TV bubble.

As Jennifer Wilson-Speedy has noted, even Jon and Kate Gosselin -- the stars of Jon & Kate Plus 8 -- have fallen out of favor with the the ever-fickle viewing public (a public that continues to be rather unforgiving of parents who make mistakes).

Here’s the thing. In order to immerse themselves in the reality show experience, fans have to buy into the fantasy that the producers are selling them: in this case, that Jon and Kate are not only capable of surviving the pressures of raising eight very young children: their family and marriage are thriving.

Of course, there’s also the matter of the very unrealistic lifestyle being portrayed (at least as compared to Joe and Jane Average). Jon and Kate and their kids do fun and exciting things, like going on outings and taking trips. They don't stay home and deal with the hassles of getting the kids to daycare and doctors' appointments. That wouldn't make for very exciting TV. (Can you imagine an entire episode where the siblings are fighting in the waiting room at the dentists' office or wriggling in line at the bank? That would be bonafide Reality TV, but it wouldn't attract much of an audience (or, more critically, any sponsors). That's the irony of reality TV, isn't it: reality TV has become anything but.)

And so the viewing public appears to be falling out of love with Jon and Kate. It could be that shows about people who appear to be independently wealthy or whose lifestyle is being bankrolled by corporations simply doesn’t play as well in recessionary times.

There’s also the Octomom backlash to consider. Nadia Sulleman's pregnancy made people stop and ask questions about fertility drugs and family size in a way they really hadn't before. If we're starting to think about ways to walk more lightly on the planet, reality shows featuring families with huge families might not exactly be in tune with the times.

Could it be that the gossip magazines were just waiting for an excuse to pounce on one of reality TV’s once-favored families?

Here’s the sad truth.

Reality shows have a tendency to devour their participants. Did we honestly think things would be any different for Jon and Kate: that they'd be granted immunity forever?

If we did, perhaps we’re the ones who need a reality TV check.