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Talking in ALL CAPS

Thoughts

Sometimes it’s all in the phrasing: Love, children and equality

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Like most mother’s contemplating having a second child, I worry that it’s not possible for me to love my potential second child as much as my first. So when the article “Mom Confession: I think I love my son a little bit more” popped up, it really made me think.

Although I don’t doubt her sincerity that this is something she struggles with and wishes could improve, I do think that it was written in a intentionally provocative manner. If she were to say instead, I love both my kids, but with my son it is easy and I really struggle with my daughter, it would be hard to argue with wouldn’t it? Or even if she said that she finds herself favoring her son and being harder on her daughter it would be pretty easy to empathize with.

But instead, she decided to say that she actually love her son more than her daughter. This just rubs people the wrong way. I’ve heard many people point out that the daughter may read this one day and you can’t un-ring the bell. But even if her daughter manages to understand what her mother is going through and be able to deal with that, she may not be able to deal with the taunting of classmates who end up reading the article. Not to mention the possible implications for the son. It can be just as difficult for the son to read that his mother loved him best. It could make him full of himself or immensely guilty that his sister didn’t receive her fair share of his mother’s love and attention. And even more so because it’s out for the world to see.

But I will say one thing for this article – it did make me think. And I’ve realized that I may not love my kids all the same, I may love them differently and that’s okay. They will after all be different people with different personalities, strengths and challenges. but I know I’ll love them all just as much. And every child deserves to be told that.

Daylight Saving Time Sucks

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It is 9:55pm. My son just fell asleep. This is destroying my will to live. I realize it is only a hour difference. But before the time change, this would only be 9pm. That I could handle. But 10?  I am so tired. I’m trying to go to bed at a reasonable hour and I’m not doing much better than Gordie. The first two nights I tried to go to bed at 11 and ended up not falling asleep until 2 in the morning.

I am cranky and grumpy and tired. I’m even too cranky and tired to write a good blog post. There are a lot of reasons why I think it is stupid aside from my personal crankiness but I’m honestly feeling too exhausted to even bother getting into it.

There is nothing that you can tell me about sunlight or energy savings that will make this worth it to me. I think we should just pick the time we like best and stick with it.

A Critical Look at Research in the News: Parents Exaggerate Joys of Parenting

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I am sick of articles written (largely) by people who do not have children talking about how children make parents unhappy and people who have kids are stupid/ridiculous/deluding themselves. (Yes, obviously I should stop reading them, but that’s beside the point.) There seems to be a segment of the population that delights in exclaiming that parents are foolish to have had kids when any piece of research comes out that appears to support that position.

I’m frequentlyimage dismayed when I read newspaper articles talking about research studies. They often overstate or misrepresent what the (usually single) study actually found. Particularly in the headline in order to get a catchy title.

This can serve to rile up or confuse people unnecessarily. So, I’ve decided to examine articles that I find interesting and try to explain what the study actually found and how this corresponds with what its portrayal in the newspaper.

The first article article I’ve chosen is, Kid Crazy: Why We Exaggerate the Joys of Parenthood.

In their study reported on in this article, Eibach and Mock, tested how parents reacted to different types of information about parenting in two studies. In these two studies, parents were presented with either information about the costs of parenting or the costs and long term benefits. (It’s interesting to note that all the information presented to parents was of an economic nature. The benefits described were how children help you in your old age so you are more financially secure if you have children. This seems to be a rather limited presentation of the benefits of raising children.) The studies found that although parents feelings of emotional discomfort immediately after reading the negative material was higher than those who had read the positive and negative material, when tested after a delay, these negative feelings were gone. They also found that parents who read the negative material were more likely to say that they enjoyed spending time with their children and were planning on spending more leisure time with their kids.  (You can access the abstract to the original scientific journal article here.)

So, that’s what the research found. What did the article report? Here are a few direct quotes from the Time: Health article by John Cloud.

Now comes new research showing that having kids is nimageot only financially foolish but that kids literally make parents delusional.

But a new paper shows that parents fool themselves into believing that having kids is more rewarding than it actually is. It turns out parents are in the grip of a giant illusion.

Instead, parents glorify their lives. They believe that the financial and emotional benefits of having children are significantly higher than they really are.

Does this mean you shouldn’t have kids? Yes — but you won’t. Our national fantasy about the joys of parenting permeates the culture.

Of course parents should be commended for one little thing they do: maintain the existence of humanity. I praise them for that, but I think they’re both heroes and suckers.

These quotes show an obvious bias by John Cloud. But he is hardly alone in his interpretation of the results of this study. You can find article after article that contains the same basic idea: Parents are delusional and this study by Eibach and Mock demonstrates this to be true.

But in fact, the study did not find that at all. What this really says is that parents can be manipulated into exaggerating the joys of parenting, not that they actually do in their every day lives. Actually, being that parents tend to encounter both the various rewards as well as the costs of parenting, this simagetudy would seem to suggest, if anything, that parents do not do exaggerate the joys of parenting in their everyday lives. What it does suggest is that parents may do this when going through a particularly difficult period such as a child being sick, parents will increase their commitment to their children and exaggerate the benefits to help them through a stressful time. This seems like a good thing to me. But somehow it’s being painted as a negative.

Besides, the ‘delusion’ as they call it is nothing more than Cognitive Dissonance. This is a phenomenon can happen to anyone who is having to deal with two thoughts that contradict each other. Such as in this case, how happy you are to be a parent and the economic burden of raising a child (if you want to read more about cognitive dissonance, here is a great, easy to read article by psyblog). It’s really not surprising or noteworthy that this happens to parents.

Yes, parenting is difficult. Yes when you are cleaning up puke from 2 sick kids in a sleep deprived haze it is hard to remember why you thought this was a good idea. But there are not many parents who would choose to have a do-over.

 

Articles that I have used on this topic for this post:

http://healthland.time.com/2011/03/04/why-having-kids-is-foolish/

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/the-bottom-line-of-raising-kids-parents-rationalize-the-economic-cost-of-children-by-exaggerating-their-parental-joy.html

http://www.vancouversun.com/life/Parents+exaggerate+parenting+justify+costs+study/4379335/story.html

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21245495 (link to the academic journal article)

Talking to Your Kids About People With Special Needs

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One of the many parenting challenges that can leave even the best parent at a loss is what to say to your kids when they see someone with special needs. Especially when they react in inappropriateimageate or insensitive manner.

My brother has special needs. He is a bilateral amputee with a rare syndrome called Cornelia de Lange syndrome. He looks different. Even the littlest kids can see that there is something different. So suffice to say I have a lot of experience in this area.

Kids react to seeing people with special needs in a lot of different ways. Some cry, some point, some laugh, and some are truly scared and some are simply curious. I promise you that no matter what you child does, it is probably not the first time and it will certainly not be the last time that it has happened to that family.
Parents have a lot of different reactions too. Some parents just tell their child to be quiet and stop staring. I understand this impulse but you do miss out on a great learning opportunity. I find it the most awkward when parents just ignore their child’s comments. But I understand that they just don’t know how to deal with it.

So, what should you do? The first thing to remember is that kids are naturally curious. They’re not usually trying to be rude. Most parents and caregivers would like you to help your kids understand that people with special needs are people too and deserving of our respect.
If they are scared, comfort them. It’s natural for kids to worry that people may be hurt or be frightened of things that they don’t understand. With my brother, kids are often worried that my brother’s arms have broken off, that he is really hurt or that it could happen to them. I usually try to reassure kids that he is not actually hurt and that some people are just born different. I also point out that even though he doesn’t have any fingers, he still has feet. Pointing out things that they do share somehow reassures a lot of kids.

If a kid is just curious, I’ll encourage my brother to say hi. This is actually what I would suggest you do with your kids too. Just say hi. For the little ones, this may be enough. Kids who are a little bit older will probably have questions. Ask if it’s okay for them to ask some questions. Not eimageveryone will have the time or the patience, but many people will.

There was one time that even I was at a loss for words. We were at a conference for kids who are multiple amputees and we were sitting beside a boy who was about two years old. He had one finger on one hand and one and a half fingers on the other hand. He pointed at my brother and said to his Dad “That boy doesn’t have any fingers!”. I guess in his world everyone has fingers, he just hadn’t noticed that most people have 10 yet. It just goes to show that no one is exempt from having to deal with this with their kids.

Sometimes the Key is Realizing that You’re the One With the Problem

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Putting Gordie to sleep was starting to drive me crazy. I was especially frustrated because I felt like I was doing imageeverything right. But for some reason it was starting to take forever to put him to sleep. I was racking my brain as to what the problem was.

The first penny dropped when I realized that his three hour naps had become routine instead of being an anomaly. So even though I generally think that waking a sleeping child is not a good idea, I was figuring I’d have to start waking him up after 2 hours so he would be tired at bedtime.

Then it sunk in. He wasn’t tired at bedtime. I was trying to put him to bed before he was even remotely sleepy. He in fact wasn’t having a sleep problem at all. He was waking up happily at 6 in the morning, going down for his nap like a dream and was in a good mood all day. He just wasn’t ready for bed when I expected him to be ready for bed.

I was the one with the problem. I was grumpily being woken up at 6, I was tired all day and I was frustrated when he wasn’t falling asleep after over an hour of me trying to put him to sleep.

So instead of trying to change Gordie’s sleeping patterns, I decided to change my own behavior. The first (and easiest thing) I did was start putting Gordie to bed when he was actually tired at 9. The second thing I’m still working on. Going to bed earlier. I think that might make a lot of things better.

The first day I tried the new plan it was wonderful. Gordie got some extra time with his dad in the evening and when I turned the lights out at 8:45 he was asleep 15 minutes later.

Of course though as soon as I figured this out, Gordie got a cold and was only napping for 2 hours and crashing at 8pm. Figures.

How becoming a mother made me less judgemental

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It seems everywhere I turn I see things suggesting tHow becoming a mother made me less judgementalhat motherhood turns women into ‘mompetitors’: women who are strongly critical of each other and their differing parenting decisions. For me, I think it has been the opposite. Becoming a mother has helped me become much less judgemental and more able to see that even if it is not a choice I’d make or a method I would use, it can still be a good choice.

I have always tried to see things from other people’s perspectives but it’s not always easy. Before I was a mother, I didn’t understand why you wouldn’t want to breastfeed your baby. Now that I have had to deal with the frustration and the sleepless nights – I get it. I may not understand why you wouldn’t want to, but I certainly understand why you would choose not to or why you would stop. I was fortunate enough to have had a year of maternity leave and my son never had a drop of formula. But I couldn’t even imagine going back to work when my baby was 6 weeks old and continuing to breastfeed. Where do mothers find the energy? I applaud anyone who is able to manage that, but I really don’t think I could.

My son is now almost 2 and is now a pretty decent sleeper, but it has been a long and painful road. I didn’t want to use methods that involved crying it out when I felt he was too little to understand. Slowly, with a good night time routine and a healthy respect for the importance of naps, his sleep has vastly improved. This worked for us, but it was often difficult. At his worst my son was waking up every hour. Looking back, I’m not sure how we all made it through that alive. Despite deciding not to sleep train, I completely understand why other parents choose to do it and I respect that choice as well. Being sleep deprived is hard on your mental, physical and emotional state and for some people sleep training is definitely going to be the best option for them.

Being able to view these things with more empathy and understanding than I previously had has made me take a second look at things I have taken for granted in other areas of my life as well. It has helped me see that situations are often a lot more complex than they see at first blush.

I still have my own opinions and the way I want to do things, but I’m now much more accepting of people who make choices that are different from my own. Although something might be the right choice for me, it’s not necessarily the right choice for someone else.

Happiness and Parenting: The Limits of Social Psychology

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From a biological perspective, it is not a mystery why people have kids. But because humans are able to weigh the benefits and consequences of their decisions, a strictly biological explanation isn’t sufficient to explain why we have kids.

There have been many social psychology studies that attempt to answer this question by  examining whether people who have kids are happier than people who do not have kids. And study after study is consistent in finding that this is not the case. People who have kids are found to be happier than their peers with kids. The newspaper articles than proclaim that “Children do not make you happier” or that “Having kids makes you less happy”. Making people who have kids look like dupes for having kids especially since so many parents “claim” that they do derive happiness from their children.

One of the most recent articles of this type called The Myth of Joyful Parenting essentially states that parents delude themselves into thinking they are happier because children are so much work that they need to use this to explain to themselves why they do it.

To me this misses the point completely. I’m planning on doing a short series of blog posts to explain why I think that is, starting with this one – Happiness and Parenting: The limits of social psychology.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m a big believer in the scientific method. I have my Master of Science in experimental psychology. I have done research and I continue to be involved in research with my part-time job. But there are limits to what science can do, prove and explain.

I’m disputing the results of these studies. I have no doubt that they did in fact find that parents are less happier than non-parents. But what does that actually mean? What are these studies really studying?

The inherent problem with this type of research is that you can only observe what is, you can’t determine why it is the way it is. To be able to say that having kids makes you less happy you would need to randomly assign people who wanted say, two kids, into two groups. One group would have no kids, the other would have two kids and then you would test the parents in each group to see who was happier. There are some obvious flaws to this research plan, which is why it’s not done. For some reason people do not want research groups making major life decisions about how many kids they are going to have. (I know what is their problem?).

This setup would allow you to examine happiness with the population that is actually of interest and see if people who allegedly think children will make them happy and see if that does in fact occur. But even this study has problems. At what point to you measuring their happiness? It’s not necessarily a static variable. It could change over a day, or over the years. It could be dependent on how old your kids are. It’s also possible that this changes once the children have grown.

Because this study design is impossible most studies instead compare people who do not have children (most of whom would be by choice in our society) with people who do have children (which may be more or less children than they actual wanted. Even when a difference is found between these two groups we can’t know whether there is an additional factor that is in fact the cause of the difference. For instance, the difference in happiness could actually be due to people with kids tending to have a lower socio-economic status, or taking less vacations. Often studies try to take into account things like socio-economic status with statistics. But this can not be done for every possibility and can only be done for factors that have been identified. For instance, people who choose not to have kids may use a ‘happiness optimization rubric’ in making decisions whereas people who choose to have kids may use a ‘obligation rubric’. If this has not been considered by the study researchers there is no way of knowing if this is the case and whether their happiness levels could be the same with or without kids, just based on the obligations they take on (being someone who says yes instead of someone who says no).

There are studies that could be done though. For instance, you could compare people who wanted two kids and and had two kids to couples who wanted two kids but were unable to have kids. This would at least be a logical comparison. However, it could be prone to selection effects. People who have better adjusted to the fact that they are unable to have kids may be more likely to agree to participate in a study like this. If you are upset about the fact that you can’t have children, what are the odds that you would agree to participate in a study that probes this when there is no practical benefit for you?

You could of course also look at the reverse. People who didn’t want any kids but ended up having kids, compared to people who didn’t want any kids and don’t have any kids. However, I don’t think that many people would expect people who do not want kids to be happier because they have kids. Then again kids do have a way of winning you over. That being said, kids are a lot of work, a huge commitment and a sacrifice. If it’s not wanting to make, why would you expect it to make you happier?

People who want kids may not necessarily be happier if they are not able to have them. This might make them – sad.

Studies can only demonstrate what they have actually studied. But this is often very different from what is reported.

Next post in this series: Happiness and Parenting: Are we measuring what we want to measure?

“Play is not valued because it’s not accountable or measurable. We value the product rather than the process. Penny Wilson”

“Study after study has shown that parents, compared to adults without kids, experience lower emotional well-being — fewer positive feelings and more negative ones — and have unhappier marriages and suffer more from depression. Yet many of these same parents continue to insist that their children are an essential source of happiness — indeed that a life without children is a life unfulfilled. How do we square this jarring contradiction?

Two psychological scientists at the University of Waterloo think they have the answer. They suspect that the belief in parental happiness is a psychological defense — a fiction we imagine to make all the hard stuff acceptable. In other words, we parents have collectively created the myth of parental joy because otherwise we would have a hard time justifying the huge investment that kids require.”

But what are these studies really studying? The inherent problem with this type of research is that you can only observe what is, you can’t determine why it is the way it is. To be able to say that having kids makes you less happy you would need to randomly assign people who wanted say, two kids, into two groups. One group would have no kids, the other would have two kids and then you would test the parents in each group to see who was happier. There are some obvious flaws to this research plan, which is why it’s not done. For some reason people do not want research groups making major life decisions about how many kids they are going to have. (I know what is their problem?)

are we measuring what we want to measure

Studies that are done

Alternatives – people who wanted kids but couldn’t, people who didn’t want kids but got them

Not everyone makes their life choices based on achieving their optimum happiness. This is not strictly the domain of parents either.

Talking in All Caps

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imageApparently, I sometimes talk a little too loud for a normal conversation. Particularly when I get excited about what I’m talking about. It’s usually my husband who points this out to me, but he’s not the only one who has. I eventually came to the conclusion that it was probably true. That didn’t stop me from feeling embarrassed and getting a little prickly after having this pointed out to me however. One day though, instead of saying his usual, “You’re being loud”, my husband said, “You’re talking in all caps.” And instead of being cranky, I laughed. He helped me take something I’ve found frustrating and make it something I can laugh about. I’m hoping that this blog will help me do the same. Welcome to – Talking in All Caps!