"Quality time" R.I.P.

The promo for Gymboree that arrived in my Inbox this week seemed like just another innocuous press release. But the marketing strategy caught my attention. The longstanding company is pitching their moms and tots play and music programs as an opportunity for "quality time."

And here I'd been thinking that inane phrase - dreamed up to appease folks riddled with guilt over quantity - had gone the way of those annoying Baby on Board signs.

Gymboree cites a recent University of Maryland study showing that today's moms spend more time focused on their children than mothers did 40 years ago - 14 hours a week versus only 10 hours for moms in 1965. The catch? According to those surveyed, not enough of it was "quality time."

"What's lacking is enough truly engaged time between kids and moms," says Gymboree. (The answer is, of course, to enrol in 12 classes for $200 right this minute, but that's beside the point.)

Is anyone else out there as tired as I am of these meaningless studies measuring parenting today versus 40 years ago (before it had become a verb). After all, it's kind of like comparing playtime in front of Halo to playtime involving Cowboys and Indians.

And what exactly are these 14 hours a week anyway? Does it include accompanying kids on playdates? Doing their homework for with them? Or generally hovering over them whilst they play at things we were kicked out of the house to do? Does it include shared screen time in front of Dancing with the Stars?

I was a 60s kid, and back then moms played a supporting role in childhood, inhabiting a separate adult world for much of the day, and not prone to overthinking the matter. But in the event I needed mine - nightmares, blood, bedtime stories - I got her 100 per cent. That was plenty good enough for most of us, who somehow managed to amuse ourselves and survive a world without tobogganning helmets or childproof caps on the Aspirin bottle.

Many of today's moms, as this story reveals, are determined to second-guess their way through motherhood. God forbid they clean the house or do laundry when they're kids are awake. And what's up with that mom who laments taking her kids on errands and for haircuts instead of playing with them in the snow. No wonder this generation is so damn tired.

In the interests of our health, let's ditch the "quality time" myth for once and for all. Let's just call it paying attention. And you don't have to make a big production of it. You can do it in the grocery store, or the car with the DVD player turned off or lying on the grass looking for cloud shapes. You can do it while teaching junior to dry the dishes or feed the cat.

More to the point, you don't have to spend hundreds of dollars to attend moms and tots music lessons or Gymboree. And people marketing their programs, however fun and healthy they might be, shouldn't insult us by suggesting otherwise.

Peel off the bubblewrap

The following also appears in the Life Section of today's Toronto Star, as part of a regular monthly column.

I only played with matches once in my life.

My mom was watching. She peered from around the corner as her little girl sat at the kitchen table and opened the matchbox. She watched while I took out a match. Watched as I lit it, then held it in my hand to study the flame. She watched it burn down to my fingertips, as I gasped and blew it out. Then she rushed in, kissed it better, and asked me to recite the lesson I had just learned.

I never played with matches again — because I learned you can get burned.

Modern parents, no doubt, would be shocked. We’re more than a little conflicted when it comes to letting our kids face consequences. We may know deep down that they should, but we can’t stand the thought. We prevent. We protect. We interfere.

We get rid of play structures that any child could possibly fall off. Drive the kids to school in case of random maniacs. God forbid they should ever throw snowballs in the schoolyard, ride scooters without a helmet or go to the park by themselves. We manage their relationships — with teachers, coaches, and through playmates.

When they are teens, we give them cellphones so they’re never far from our help or advice. We can even track them via GPS when they take the car.

Funny thing is, we are overprotecting the kids at a time when, by most measures, children and youth have never been safer. The paradox is that all our rules and coddling may actually be setting them up for danger.

This warning is issued by Michael Ungar in his new book Too Safe for Their Own Good: How Risk and Responsibility Help Teens Thrive. The Halifax social worker, who counsels troubled youth from a range of socio-economic backgrounds, explores how the bubble-wrapped childhood is robbing kids of the risk-taking and responsibilities they need to develop as healthy adults.

And worse, provoking them to seek it through reckless behaviour.

His analysis makes sense. Kids, and particularly adolescents, learn by taking chances, making judgments and experiencing mistakes. It’s called growing up. If we don’t allow them to do that by loosening the apron strings, they may bust out of them, and resort to more extreme measures: drugs and alcohol, running away, sexual promiscuity, gangs or crime.

Alternatively, they may flounder quietly, becoming depressed and compliant. Or turn into adults who just can’t cope.

“In our mania to provide emotional life jackets for our kids, helmets and seat belts, approved playground equipment, after-school supervision, an endless stream of evening programming, and no place to hang out but the local mall, we parents are accidentally creating a generation of youth who are not ready for life,” Ungar writes.

It’s hard to blame parents for all this. Over the past two decades, we have been inundated with parenting literature, experts, talk shows and coaches, all reinforcing the message that every single decision from the time of conception calls for huge angst and analysis; that anything we do will make or break our children; and instilling a false notion of what we can and should control.

Yet in the face of this booming child-rearing industry, 24-hour news stations blast us with a steady stream of bad news about how the kids are actually turning out. Young girls dressing like “prostitots.” Epidemics of online bullying. Gangs and guns. Binge drinking. Teen depression. The air of entitlement. Plagiarists. The narcissists of “Generation Me.”

Ungar’s book is refreshing for several reasons: He is practical rather than alarmist. He provides context for how we arrived at this parenting dilemma. He has a lot of faith in teens and what motivates them. And he has advice on how parents can start letting go.

He’s also an international expert on resilience, an approach that emphasizes promoting the positives instead of preventing the negatives. In other words, promoting conditions to help kids thrive, and building on their strengths and relationships, rather than focusing on zero tolerance.

In a recent phone interview, Ungar explained how Too Safe for Their Own Good emerged as a result of his observations over two decades working with youth. He noticed that many teens from disadvantaged families and living in dangerous neighbourhoods were faring well. At the same time, a growing number from stable, middle-class homes who had everything they needed and minimal exposure to danger were depressed, anxious and acting out in perilous ways. He wanted to explore the reasons.

He concluded that the key is found in four powerful messages that all kids, regardless of their background, need to hear from adults and peers. They need to feel that they belong, they are trustworthy, they are responsible and they are capable. And these all go hand-in-hand with taking on risk and responsibility.

For parents, it’s a balancing act that takes practice. Too much risk puts kids in danger; too little curbs their growth and psychological development.

But Ungar has suggestions, among them that parents need to take a hard look at where they can ease up on rules and when they need to clamp down. Allow kids space to express themselves — in their rooms, through music, or their hair colour. Instead of just saying no when your 15-year-old begs to go on an unsupervised weekend, suggest an alternative that will fulfill her craving for space or independence

See yourself as scaffolding rather than a life jacket. Be a supervisor, not a dictator.
“It’s not just about something inside a kid,” says Ungar.

"It’s about us providing opportunities for them to realize something powerful about themselves."

Missing the early years

There's a knot been building in my chest lately and until today, I didn't know why.

It's summer. There are tiger lilies and cicadas zizzing in the afternoons and melting tar that sticks to your shoes. Jumbo freezies. The rumble of wheels starts outside my bedroom window at the crack of dawn as the parade of tricycles and wagons and strollers start rolling by.

I love this time of year, when you can hear children outside calling to each other after supper and smell the cut grass. I should be basking in contentment. But there's something else there instead.

I've been cruising around the parenting blogs lately and I think it's been stirring things up, making me wistful. Her Bad Mother is in a haze of sleep-deprivation. Over at Bub and Pie, little heads are curly following afternoon naps. Reading it, I can just feel a groggy baby's flushed cheek against mine. Hello Josephine gets out her sidewalk chalk. And Mom 101's daughter just turned one.

I'm lapping it up. But more and more finding myself preoccupied with trying to somehow recapture, just for a few minutes, a time and place I never prepared myself to leave. Even though it's long gone and I know there is no going back.

My babies are grown. It's summer and no one is throwing sand. There are no yellow plastic dump trucks in my flowerbed, no squeals of excitement as plump little legs wobble away from the long arm of the cold sprinkler. No circle of dead grass where the plastic wading pool used to sit.

When did I stop slamming the popsicles against the counter and doling them out by halves? Where are the jars of snails and caterpillars that used to line the mantel? I can't remember the last time someone picked me a bouquet of dandelions.

Recently, there was a twinge of recognition when one of my favourite bloggers wrote "it's shaping up to be a long, long summer . . . " I remember feeling that way every single year, 'round about the second week of July. Because the days can be hard when there's no nursery school and your friends are on holidays and it's too hot to push a stroller and no one seems to be napping and the toddler has heat rash and the baby's teeth are coming in and you just feel so so weary and stuck.

But then one day - so much faster than you think and before you can even absorb the significance - they're biking off to the park on their own. Bugging you for change to get a slurpee on the way home.

They trade in the wagon for a skateboard and no longer notice the garbage trucks.

And you start thinking about putting in more hours at work, and reclaiming your life a bit, getting together with your girlfriends without any toddlers underfoot. Once in awhile you can even nip out for a plate of pasta with your spouse and leave the kids at home with a video.

This summer, for the first time in 17 years, we will be home for a brief period with no children. They will all be off on various overlapping adventures.

Three of the four are now bigger than I am. I can reach up and hug them goodbye, but it's not the same as hoisting them on my knee and feeling their chubby arms in a stranglehold around my neck. Their eyes and their focus have started aiming outward at the rest of the big beckoning world. Mine has shifted too. It's exciting. It's necessary. But sometimes hard.

There are so many things - from the exhilarating and poignant to the miserable and robotic - that I swore I'd never forget from those blurry, busy years. But it's not as easy as I thought to reach in through the cobwebs and pull out the memories at will.

So today, despite that lump in my throat, I'm grateful for the online adventures I read about that help bring some of them back. Making me happy and sad and proud and thankful all at the same time.

Move over for Daddy

The following also appears in the Life Section of today's Toronto Star, as part of a regular monthly column.

You can dress it up as "gender equality" or "choice feminism" or "mothers' rights." But when it comes down to it, the hot-button issue in many modern households is really about which adult puts the pasta on, who unloads the dishwasher and who hauls themselves off the couch after a 12-hour day to go fill the bathtub with SpongeBob bubbles.

And don't forget the bagel seeds on the counter either.  Because you never know when an unwiped countertop will be just the thing to push a grown woman over the edge and make her go ballistic.

Arlie Hochschild called it The Second Shift. More recently, in her much disputed essay "Homeward Bound" in The American Prospect, Linda Hirshman described it as "the domestic glass ceiling."

They are referring to the fact that while women have made big inroads in the workplace, they still bear the brunt of household chores and child-rearing duties. In other words, even if they have paying jobs, the gender gap reigns once they leave the office or the shop floor.

A slew of studies have shown this, but most working women don't need statistics to prove what they already know.

What we do need are strategies to fix it, or to at least turn the beast around so that we don't drop dead of fatigue or shrivel up with resentment by the time the kids leave home.

At the risk of offending the sisterhood, I have a little one. How about we start letting go of the reins? Even though everybody knows we can all do it better because, you know, we're The Mothers.

We might not want to admit it, but when you're the one who carries the baby for nine months, gives birth, breastfeeds and, in most cases, acts as primary caregiver/household manager for the early months, it's hard to let go of the notion that you're the Superior Species.

The thing is, if women want equality on the domestic front, we have to be willing to move over and give the guys some room. And keep our mouths shut too, even if we have to bite our tongues until they bleed.

A recent issue of Canadian Family magazine gave voice to the frustration some fathers feel about their status as executive assistant. Among their top beefs: being treated like the babysitter; being shut out; and people assuming they are incapable idiots.

"Parenting can be pretty territorial," Montreal psychotherapist Vikki Stark told the magazine. "A lot of women are giving lip service to equal parenting, but they really want to keep control."

The theme is also found in the 2004 book of essays by men writers called The Bastard On The Couch, in a section titled "Can't be trusted with simple tasks."

"Sometimes I just want to give up trying to be a coparent," writes Fred Leebron, a Pennsylvania father of three married to a professor.

He adds: "I can't compete with my wife in this arena. She can compete with me in the career arena, sure, but I can't compete with her in the parenting arena."

Leebron recalls that when his first child was born, the nurse advised him not to copy his wife when he handled the baby. "Be yourself."

But 'fess up fellow mothers. Do we really want them to be themselves? Or wouldn't we rather they do it exactly the way we tell them - or not at all?

I admit it. I have rediapered the baby. I have rearranged dirty dishes in the dishwasher. Bitched about the shortage of green vegetables on the plate. Even - and it kills me to say it - told my spouse he reads the stories too fast.

I have wondered aloud if, in the event I get hit by a bus, the children would go the rest of their lives without clean sheets or having their fingernails cut.

And my God, why wouldn't it drive me crazy that he could manage to "watch the kids" and read a book on the sofa at the same time? I, on the other hand, never would have permitted myself to try. And whose problem is that?

Which takes me to the suitcase analogy, a godsend for those of us who need visual images to grasp the problem at hand. If I insist on grudgingly carrying all the suitcases in the house - laundry, toilets, homework helper, dental appointment duty - I rob everyone else of the chance. No one can pick up a suitcase and share the load unless I put it down first.

I was forced to remind myself of this recently, when I took my real suitcase and headed off to the airport for a 10-day vacation with a friend. I left in a frantic state, with no food in the fridge, no clean laundry and no 10-page list of instructions. And guess what? They all survived. Had the time of the lives in fact, doing things their way. The sheets were changed, the house was clean, the homework got done.

I forgot to ask about the green vegetables.

Prepare for takeoff

Uh oh. Or should I say, "throp-throp-throp."

You know about helicopter parents, don't you? They're those folks who embrace child-rearing so single-mindedly that they can't resist hovering over every development in their young ones' lives. They could teach the pharmaceutical giants a thing or two the way they know how to lobby - just to make sure their kid gets "the right" Grade 3 teacher. They're the ones who "help" the 11-year-old build a catapult for the science project that looks as if it could have been assembled at MIT. They organize the kids' part-time jobs, figure out which universities they should apply to and then, when the kid has a head cold, don't hesitate to phone college dean and ask him to take chicken soup to the dorm room.

Now, according to this story, heli-parents have soared to new heights. They are taking their parenting style into the workplace. And by that I don't mean their own. Seems the managers at some of America's top corporations have recently found themselves standing back in horror as the 20-something job applicants arrive for their interviews trailed by - brace yourselves - mom or dad.  You know, just to make sure the work environment is appropriate and the pay package is up to snuff. One appalled college recruiter has dubbed them "the kamikaze parents."

Please tell me this is not setting a whole new standard for the rest of us to live up to. Because these days it's all I can do to get the field trip permission forms signed on time. My kids would never survive in the big wide world with me as their headhunter.