Writer Neal Pollack indulged Salon readers with his failing technique as a parent when his toddler son was ejected from preschool for biting. At one point he referred to his son as a “little shit,” a detail that has since been changed once the drive-by parenting began.
Letters poured into Salon lambasting his account of his son’s behavioral problems, six pages of them, and blogs from across all spectrums raked Pollack and his wife across the coals. Few were kind or understanding. Most decided that the problem lay with the parents, in part because Pollack repeatedly expressed that he and his wife need time away from their son to earn an income and *gasp!* occasional time to themselves in order to preserve their marital sanity.
The article was a funny and engaging account of the darker side of parenthood, and any negative comments made about Pollack’s parenting are a knee-jerk reaction to expressing unpopular sentiments about what others think parenthood ought to look like. Though few seem to think it fit to say so, I stand squarely with Neal Pollack. My son is funny, cute, smart, and engaging. And sometimes I want absolutely nothing to do with him.
My mother will faint when she reads the above sentence, but I can guarantee that there were mornings where she woke up, remembered there was another day to deal with Lauren (the little shit, to say it kindly), and wished desperately for just one day she didn’t have to be a mom.
As far as I know I was a good toddler, but as soon as I hit puberty became a parent’s worst nightmare. Incorrigible was the term thrown about, something that accounted for all the things legal and illegal that I engaged in to piss my parents off and scratch some hedonistic itch that finally wore off during my junior year of high school. But not without a great deal of mediation and intervention.
To toddlers, biting and other “bad” behavior is a hedonistic itch that absolutely must be scratched. My mother was a preschool teacher for many years at the school Ethan currently attends. Every morning when the children and teachers would sit together in a circle to discuss the day’s plans, she said there were children who would get so excited — by the other children, anticipation of an activity or event, or pure amorousness — one child would turn to another and sink his or her baby teeth into the closest piece of flesh. If you’ve ever spent time with a toddler, you know what I’m talking about. You can see it in their eyes. Must. Bite. Now.
And as endearing as this impulse is from the outside, when it is your child doing the biting or being bitten, it is more than troublesome.
Ethan was a good baby, but as soon as he started attending preschool, became a manipulative master. He became the leader of a nasty love triangle in his preschool with two little boys who adored him but hated one another. On some days he endorsed the idea that the three should play together in peace, but on others he would choose one child over another and the one left out would be horrified at the rejection. Ethan, realizing his power, played each child off of one another until the teachers realized what was happening, stepped in, and called on E’s father and I to intervene. It only ended when one of the little boys moved back to Japan.
And then there was that time that an angry parent told the school that Ethan ridiculed her young son by saying that Koreans smell funny. My fucking kid, the little shit, sprewing racist bullshit in the most multicultural preschool in town that I chose in part so he would never spew racist bullshit on the playground. Are you fucking KIDDING ME? I tried to apologize to the boy’s mom the next week but there was a language barrier, and now a racial barrier, and she was not pleased to have to speak to the mother of a wee bigot on the preschool playground.
So, why the confessional?
Parenting is difficult work. Sometimes it is the Hallmark card that everyone is promised and sometimes it is just plain drudgery. Sometimes it incites internal scripts that leaves even the most competent and well-meaning parents feeling defeated, guilty, and inadequate. These scripts are the ones that Pollack wrote about, scripts that the Appropriate Police believe should be squashed in the name of preserving a parental propriety that doesn’t exist.
Most of us aren’t brave enough to publish unpopular sentiments, but why honest reflections on parenthood remain unpopular, recast as “articulate whining,” is a mystery to me. If anything you think parents would be glad to have an ideological partner out there somewhere willing to admit that, yes, sometimes we don’t want to be parents, and yes, sometimes we don’t like our kids.
Especially when they get kicked out of school despite a great deal parental involvement and concern. Just ask my mom.
My daughter is spending a whole week at her Grandma’s house this month. It will be the first time she has been away from me and her father for more than 12 hours. I am totally freaked out.
I feel guilty for wanting the time alone with my hubby. No Dora the Explorer for a whole week part excites me, though.
[...] in’ Addendum 6-1-05: Feministe gives another point of view on Neal Pollack&# [...]
The somewhat ironic thing is that parents who cop to hating the job now and then are usually much better parents. Wrapping yourself in alternationg layers of saccharine, denial, and guilt does not a healthy role model make.
Salon readers are a bitter lot, aren’t they? God forbid anyone who isn’t a Chilean peasant with genital warts should dare to hint that his or her life is anything less than a basket of flowers. And if you’re a parent, forget it.
I think part of what fuels this self-righteous condemn-athon is the sight of someone being able to vent these very common frustrations in a privileged forum, like Salon. I think there’s this subconscious impression that publishing an article about your issue somehow condones or validates it — which sends readers into a snit and gives rise to this need to smack that author down. Reading those letters, not just on the Neal Pollack article but previous columns (like the mom with nanny issues, for example) the message that oozes out of these outraged responses is “How dare you attempt to justify your attitude?” Even though a halfway careful reader can see that Pollack was bending over backwards not to give that impression. It doesn’t matter, because any kind of public confessional seems to carry with it an implied self-validation.
And of course, nothing assuages one’s own guilt feelings and resentments like punishing other people for them. We’re always least tolerant in others of the things we’re most ashamed of in ourselves.
As someone who plans never to have children (my partner and I made the choice long ago) I really enjoy stories like Pollack’s that cut through the bullshit notion that having children is one long, glorious state of perpetual bliss. As an outsider it seems to me that there is a veil of secrecy to the fact that sometimes being a parent really sucks. So I love to read things that pull that veil back and say “this job sucks sometimes and I really want to find a way to keep being an individual outside of just being a parent. It doesn’t mean that I don’t love my child or that I’m not going to do everything I can for them. It just means that I’m a person too and it’s ok for me to have needs outside of my child.” I’m not sure why but a lot of parents seem to be really invested in keeping that veil locked down tight, thus the intense venom spewed at Pollack and other writers like Ayelet Waldman.
I suppose those readers would be horrified to know that I’ve told me children, “You’re both adorable, and it has saved your lives on a number of occasions.” Then again, I was raised by a woman who tells me that she didn’t teach me to swim until she was fairly sure she didn’t want to drown me.
Parents not only have to be realistic about both the joys and trials of parenthood, but we’ve got to have a sense of humor about it, or all is surely lost.
Snowball, my best friend’s mother used to warn us before we went out for a night while we were in high school:
“No drinking, no drugs, no sex, no stealing. I believe abortion should be legal until the two of you are eighteen. Be good.”
I read all 6 pages of the Letters to Salon and some of the comments here and still have not seen anyone advocating what I did to my son when he bit me at the age of 19 months: I bit him right back. I bit him firmly, but not hard enough to draw blood, right on the bicep area and followed that with a stern voice: Biting hurts! No biting! He looked at me, stunned, and never bit me or another person again. Maybe I was lucky, maybe I just reacted naturally. Who knows? It was an authentic reaction. Toddlers aren’t all that skilled at empathizing and projecting the consequences of their actions, so feeling the exact pain he caused me may have been enough to understand that biting is not a tolerated form of expression. My biting him right back also gave him an indication of the consequence to him of biting another and that may have been all the “limit” he needed.
In my 15 years of parenting I’ve read numerous parenting books, many of great benefit, but one of the most lasting impressions I have is of the mother chimpanzees in the Jane Goodall films: while they were often nurturing to their babies, they also swatted the toddlers when they repeatedly resisted the mothers’ efforts to curb an undesirable behavior. The swatting wasn’t necessarily of the kind to cause pain as it was to remove the toddler from the mother’s immediate area, the message being that if you can’t behave acceptably, you can’t enjoy my presence. I found it worked well with my son when I pointed out to him that because his behavior was unacceptable, he could not be with me until he changed it. Invariably, he chose my company to being alone with his antisocial behaviors.
As most everyone has pointed out, parenting is hard work and is most successful when carried out with consistency. My son is now a happy, healthy adolescent navigating intelligently through the teen years. The process of parenting doesn’t end, it just evolves.
What bothered some people (me and my housemate, at least) was that Pollack didn’t seem to have any sympathy for the poor children being bitten by his son but expected us to sympathize with his plight as a parent. I don’t think it’s evil drive-by parenting to call someone out on acting like he doesn’t care about others, especially others who are children with no control over their situation.
My wife and I cannot have children for reasons that are mysterious and too expensive to pursue. As an outsider I am in awe that people my age and my maturity level make it through the day, much less raise something more evolved than wolves. Kids seems like feral angels, smelling and acting on fear, then suddenly blessing you with transcendant love. It’s our role as bystanders to try and support the best and maybe just ignore the worst.
But yesterday I couldn’t stand it. In the candy aisle at Costco I passed a woman balnacing a toddler, pushing a stroller and trailed by her 10-11 yr old son. Though they spoke some no-Romance language I could tell she had just told the boy he couldn’t have the boxed kiddy crack he was demanding. He stood there in his soccer uniform, in shin guards and spikes, gathering up all his first-bron son priviledge, and started to pitch a hissy fit, speking to his Mom alternately in their home language and English, the English used to convey sentiments he knew she couldn’t understand.
I hate whiners. I pulled even with him, leaned over and hissed:
Maybe it does take a village, because that kid was last seen pushing the stroller, and glancing over his shoulder. Of course, coward that I am, I got the hell out of there in case Mom turned on me. There are two things I fear in the world, mobs and pissed-off mothers, especially where their cubs are concerned.
I have to agree with Amber, I was really irritated that Pollack seemed completely unsympathetic about the children his son was biting. I’ve criticized the parenting drive-by phemonenon myself, but I think the brouhaha over this article is about more than just people feeling free to criticize.
My 5 year old niece has two scars on her beautiful face from a kid who repeatedly bit her in daycare. In the end the parents pulled the biter out of the program because they were unwilling to follow the gameplan the daycare created to get him to knock it off. My niece has since been seen by a plastic surgeon, who was unable to say if the scars will completely fade by the time she’s an adult. I don’t claim to be an expert on how to stop this kind of aggressive behavior in toddlers, but I would have felt a whole lot more sympathetic for Mr. Pollack’s family if he had just seemed more concerned about the reprecussions to the kids his son was biting.
I am very grateful that I was raised by parents who didn’t treat me like I was the center of the universe. As far back as I can remember, I was always aware that my parents’ lives included things that I wasn’t a part of, and that they had needs and moods that I had to accept. (Obviously I wouldn’t have articulated it like that at the time.) At the same time, from a fairly young age I was treated as someone who could to some degree think for herself, have opinions, and be my own person, which also meant managing the consequences of my behavior. My transition through adolescence was unusually smooth, and that I have had a good, comfortable relationship with my parents as an adult. Not only do I love them — I respect them, and I like them. My mom once told me that one of her goals as a parent was that I and my sister would become adults that she would enjoy knowing even if we had just met and weren’t related. So I look at the whole contemporary ideal of parental self-sacrifice and perfect unconditional love not only as too much to expect from any human being, but also as something that is ultimately bad for kids.
But I don’t think Pollack was unsympathetic to the other children. One reason that the essay may lack a specific mea culpa is because this is an article written for a mass audience, edited by others. If you’ve ever had anything creative published, you know that editors cut out certain language and whatnot that weaken the essay. I don’t know if this is the case, but it is important to note that a published essay is not the whole story or the author’s whole feelings, most especially if it is mediated by an editor.
Anyhow, I thought his sympathy for the other children was apparent in the horror he described in seeing the marks on the little girl’s leg and his horror that his own son had done such a thing. It’s there, it just isn’t blatant.
deborah—bite back! right on. i remember doing that.
thoughtful friends and family help parents by giving them the slack of time off from parenting.
jon—good for you. to quote tuttle from the movie “brazil”
“we’re all in it together”
I was one of the bloggers that sounded off on the Pollack article in Salon.
The point for me was not that Pollack was a bad parent or that he shouldn’t have kids, as some asserted. My problem with his piece (and his followups on nealpollack.com) was that he seemed unwilling to take ownership of the situation and assume responsibility for dealing with his child’s extremely disturbed and disturbing behavior, that he implied that the failure was somewhere nebulously “in the system”, and that he blathered that he was simply trying to “elucidate a legitimate sociological phenomenon, based on a study that came out the same day that my son got expelled, and to point out certain defects in our country’s child-care system.”
This is bullshit, pure and simple. As I point out in my article, ultimate responsibility for the raising of his child rests with him and his wife. I have no problem with him expressing that he needs space from his child at times or dislikes him at times; everyone does.
I think it is highly inappropriate, though, that he is spending time and effort to exploit his child’s behavior problems to promote his own career while apparently throwing up his hands and expecting some institution or another to fix (at taxpayer expense, presumably) the problems he’s sat back and allowed to take root in his own son. I won’t even go into his disturbing lack of affect regarding Sophie and the other victims of his son’s biting behavior; from the empathy he expressed toward her in his piece he may as well have referred to her as an inconvienient child-shaped automaton.
I have no doubts that we have not seen the whole picture of Neal Pollack’s family life. But what we have seen is a pretty repellent picture, and you’re kidding yourself if you think people that have or love children are going to read about this situation and not comment on it.
i didn’t read neal pollack’s article, and i don’t really care about it. i’m just revelling in the profound relief that i’m not the only mother who isn’t always enamoured with motherhood.
much like snow, i’m fond of telling my son, “you’re lucky you’re cute!”
Lauren:
Lauren, you’ve got to be kidding me.
…and then…
And the Pollacks’s response?
Please don’t tell me Pollack was “horrified” by what Elijah had done. Maybe when the teacher finally rubbed his nose in the situation he woke up and took some notice, finally, but the real horror had been experienced by those other kids for months previous.
Matt, I still disagree. I think what you’ve quoted is simply part of a traditional narrative. Basically what you’re arguing is that he wasn’t publically sorry enough, but I think there is evidence in the tone and mood of his article that indicate real dismay and disappointment.
How about this:
I think the choice of the word “guilty” thoroughly implies that he felt bad for what his son did to the other children. If all he had been experiencing was frustration at the prospect of spending a summer home with his son, “guilty” wouldn’t have been the appropriate word. Apart from that, I agree with Lauren — the piece has a pervasive tone of guilt on behalf of what his son did to the other kids. It also exhibits a sense of guilt about his own parenting skills, in that he seems to feel that he has failed his own son.
Honest discussion about parenting is a good thing. Is this author a perfect father? Nope. But is anyone? Most parents do the best they can with what they have. Enforcing this single narrative of “parenting is bliss” is dangerous and dishonest. Pollack put a crack in that, and, unfortunately, frank discussion about parenting frustrations — the very idea that parents (especially moms) should be anything other than completely self-sacrificing — is still very taboo.
Most people are afraid to cop to less-than-pleasant thoughts about our own kids. Anyone who doesn’t actually have one occasionally is either delusional, pathologically detached from his own mind or in some other way very seriously mentally-ill. The same of course goes for our thoughts about friends, spouses, etc.. Or is this Stepford?
I’m not arguing that he wasn’t publicly sorry enough. I’m arguing that nowhere in his article did he indicate he actually had a plan or tried anything significant to remediate the situation. Maybe he did, and it was edited out as you speculate in your post, or maybe he left that out so the piece would have more impact. Whatever. He still comes across as wanting to fob the problem off on someone else, regardless of whether he feels bad about it or not.
I certainly agree with you that the tone of his article indicated dismay and disappointment. This is, to me, one of the most frustrating things about it. Pollack knows things are going awry and he obviously has the intelligence and perception to figure out some options to deal with it (it’s not as if good references for struggling parents are difficult to find these days). Instead he’s more interested in bloviating about “the system” and documenting the scenario for his next book, “Daddy Was a Sinner,” (plugged multiple times on his website) than working to improve his son’s life.
I can’t believe anyone’s defending these narcissistic, self-absorbed, yuppie fools. Matt Wigdahl’s right on the money.
Hey Lauren,
Great post, and thanks for bringing some sanity to this discussion. I know Neal and Regina and Elijah personally. My son Emmett is a few months younger than Elijah, and our families trade babysitting duties once in a while. I would never, ever think of Neal and Regina as self-absorbed, neglectful parents, and I know the responses to Neal’s article have been really painful for them. People get so self-righteous about their own parenting skills that they feel the need to trash one of the most initmate relastionships between people they’ve never met. It’s disgusting. While people are typing out thier vitriol, what are their kids doing right then? Do they know? No, I guess impugning the behavior of someone halfway across the country is more importnat than interacting with their own kids. Drive-by parenting indeed. And not only that, they’re driving glass cars. Thanks. I’ll be back to read more of your blog.
She lifted the girl’s shirt. There was an enormous bite mark on Sophie’s back that was just beginning to scab over. Sophie’s dad had started calling the school. From here on, Elijah wouldn’t be allowed anywhere near any of the other kids. That would be his last day.
Lauren, I don’t see any “horror” expressed here, not even implicitly. And the bite was on the poor girl’s back, not her leg. I’ll bet her parents are glad it wasn’t on her face–Elijah might have disfigured her for life.
My problem with Neal Pollack is that, instead of taking it seriously, he joked about it with his son. Two year olds don’t get that kind of humor. All his son probably heard was that daddy was amused by the biting and sometimes, biting is okay.
Matt Wigdahl, I am with you and thank you for that well-written piece on Neal Pollack and his revisionism on this “satirical article”. I was astonished by the lack of concern either one of these parents had for the child, Sophie. If Sophie had been my child, I would’ve gone to the school and threatened a lawsuit after the first bite. After the second, I would have sought out Mr. Pollack and wife myself. What gives them the right to have a child that out of control in a daycare situation? Their child was a medical danger with an “incident report” an inch thick and all he could think of to say was how bereft he and the wife were that they’d have to deal with their biter after that? Come on, people.
And while I know parenting is hard, hard work, both of these parents seemed to think that living the summer with their own child was tantamount to a sentence in hell. I’m no drive-by parent and frankly I don’t care if you think that I am, but I know incredible selfishness when I see it, and it was all over that Salon article. THINK BEFORE YOU BREED. And don’t pretend you’re writing satire when 99% of the relatively erudite readers can’t detect a whit of it. After reading that piece, I couldn’t even remember the Yale study I was so freaked out. “He ruins our marriage!” Yeah. Is anyone wondering why this kid is biting for attention? It’s not a big leap, folks and clue to Neal: it’s not his brain chemistry either.
The comments from most of these people are not drive-by, they’re real concern for the child of seemingly really selfish people. And I’m a liberal feminist, so don’t think I’m some Freeper who’s into daily corporal punishment. Pollack was way, way, way out of line–that story was not satire and did not address the issue he was supposed to be addressing. It was one long and frightening self-indulgent whine.
Yes, Lauren, as your mother, I did have days when I wished I were not a mother. That was not too long ago, actually, when I did not know if the ….. better left unsaid. However, you, as your sisters and now Ethan and my other five grandchildren were precious toddlers, children and I thank God every day I have each of my daughters as adults.
Pollack’s experience is a reality that we forget all too often and he did a great job saying it for all of us!
I haven’t read the Salon letters yet. I did read the article the other day and considered writing a letter myself. I held off because my letter would have been nasty and disparaging to Pollack. I was surprised at how much his article annoyed me.
The first thing that occurred to me about the article was that a summer home with Mom and Dad sounds like precisely what their kid needs the most! This kid has a problem – a real problem that desperately needs solving. There is no way to soft-pedal this kid’s behavior – it needs correcting. The Pollacks should be overjoyed that they are in a position to help their child through this problem.
The fact that the Pollacks are work-at-home types, working for themselves, in semi self-indulgent fields, too, I might add, made his whining all the more absurd in my eyes. What did they think that they were getting into when they decided to have a child? If the idea of the two of them having to paint or write less while sharing the responsibility of watching the child is that painful for them, they really need to step back and take inventory. What happens to parents who have full-time jobs outside the home whose kids get kicked out of preschool?
I hate to admit it, but I felt like writing Pollack a letter telling him to stop being such a fucking baby.
My take on the Pollack article: it felt honest. Parents at their wits’ end, father who makes a spectacular mis-step or two (“only bite girls if they ask you to” said to a 2-year-old? WTF?) and who sees his genetic predisposition to emotional disturbance playing out in his son, and feels powerless to address the root causes of the misbehavior, mother who finds herself resenting the hell out of her kid and feeling guilty about it.
Yeah, there are plenty of examples of class blindness in the piece. I laughed out loud at this passage:
The families whose kids my wife teaches would be stunned to find out such a thing was even an option, much less mandatory. And yeah, Liberal Avenger has a good point in saying ” What did they think that they were getting into when they decided to have a child?”
Perhaps they didn’t think about this kind of thing because they hadn’t heard stories about how it can really be to raise a kid. Pollack wrote this story, and other parents and prospective parents can benefit from it. That’s a good thing. How useful would the story have been had he hid their mistakes or their expressions of weakness and exasperation?
I think all of us who have kids need time away from them, realize that our kids do horrible shit despite our best efforts, and that we make mistakes.
I don’t think that means we need to run and give hair-pats to every parent whose child behaves badly, on the notion that we all have shitty parenting days and so nobody, certainly not articulate, middle-class people like us, could ever actually be doing more than having an off day.
By the way, the inch-thick report file made my alarm bells go off, because from the tone of the article, it was the first time that Mr. Pollack learned how very problematic his son’s behavior was. Either the school was doing a very, very bad job indeed–that should NOT have been his first indication–or he was in extremely serious denial about his child.
Imagine that Mr. Pollack had diabetes (controlled through medication). Imagine that Mr. Pollack’s toddler — instead of biting other kids — had been having blood sugar problems at daycare. Imagine that Pollack had been given repeated, explicit descriptions, even demonstrations, indicating that his child had a serious, probably inherited, problem. Then imagine that Mr. Pollack, instead of taking the poor child to a pediatrician, wrote an article complaining that he was shocked, *shocked* that the preschool teachers wouldn’t be properly sympathetic to a child with medical issues! Pollack doesn’t WANT to give his kid insulin shots! Blood sugar testing is HARD! It’s bad enough he has to deal with his OWN problems, why can’t SOMEBODY ELSE deal with his kid’s medical needs? Important medical surveys have indicated that juvenile diabetes is a serious and under-treated condition, and yet NOBODY seems willing to take the responsibility for diagnosing Pollack’s kid, treating Pollack’s kid, and most important making sure that Pollack doesn’t have to feel “guilty” about the problems Pollack’s kid inherited!
That’s what pissed off quite a few of us who wrote those nasty letters to Salon. Yes, parenting is hard. Yes, every parent has times when they just don’t want to be around their child, even if they love them dearly. And THAT, sweet Lauren, is why some of us HAD THE F**KING SENSE NOT TO HAVE KIDS, okay? We looked at our brain-chemistry issues, we reviewed our families’ history of depression, alcoholism, flamboyant madness, and we decided NOT to pass these problems on to another generation. Or, if it was too late — if the kids had already been born — we at least had the MINIMUM intelligence to realize that heredity was not necessarily in our kids’ favor, and that behavioral issues might be the warning signs that they’d inherited our less-then-optimal neurological problems along with our “cute, charming, funny” bonuses.
Yes, the rest of us survivors are pissed at Mr. Pollack. He’s a smart, educated, well-read individual with more options than 97% of the world’s population. He KNOWS, from personal experience, that infantile “sullen rages” may be sign of serious biochemical problems that are best treated immediately — because not treating them only exacerbates the problems by adding social problems, “bad history”, to the medical issues. But, when he’s confronted with the reality that his offspring is physically endangering himself as well as other children, Pollack does nothing more constructive than write a long piece complaining that he & his wife are victims of… Society. Or overcrowded preschools. Or those dreadful, unsympathetic people like Sophie’s parents who don’t UNDERSTAND that Pollack’s kid’s assaults are just “misplaced affection”.
If he doesn’t suck it up & get some proper treatment for the poor kid, Pollack is guilty of medical neglect. He knows his kid has a problem, he knows the real root of the problem, and he’s making a public show of refusing to DO anything about the problem but complain. When his kid is taken into custody at age 6 for torturing the neighbor’s cat — or at age 8 for stabbing a classmate — or at age 12 for raping a 4-year-old in another “misplaced show of affection” — will the defense counsel be entering this article as evidence of criminal negligence?
Damn, I’m sorry y’all, but a lot of the stuff you’re protesting is clearly self-deprecating humor. I shouldn’t be surprised, because my dry jokes go unappreciated on my own blog, but damn. Give a man a break.
I don’t think most people get dry humor, so it’s a bit risky to use.
Lauren (and now Jill) I love your blog and am always thrilled when you pick up thought-provoking stuff like this.
I agree with Chris Clarke: the story felt very honest. The young parents I know (who are generally an over-educated, underpaid bunch) aren’t simply “whiners” who somehow forgot to think before breeding. Rather, they’re dealing with a hundred, often conflicting expectations: having meaningful careers, doing creative work, finding qualified and accountable daycare providers, worrying about raising children who are too needy/isolate/spastic/depressive/cerebral/, living at great distances from their families, coping with inadequate health insurance and family leave time, etc.
I don’t think that recognizing these as concerns means one is trying to pawn off parental responsibility on “the system;” instead it’s recognizing that ALL parenting (the good, bad, and the ugly) takes place within sometimes terrifically limited/ing circumstances. The result, judging from my friends’ experiences, is often feeling helpless or at the very least confused. I don’t begrudge Pollack for making that the focus of his piece (which doesn’t mean that I don’t feel sympathy for Sophie and her parents).
Shannon, as you are someone who knows the Pollacks personally I would certainly defer to your far greater knowledge of their parenting skills and personalities. I would like to ask you something, however.
Knowing what you know, would you send Emmett to preschool with Elijah? Why or why not?
What hypocrisy is this?
Does any of the following look familiar, Lauren?
“FIP n. abbrev. – 1. fucking inconsiderate parent. 2. parent who is so enthralled with the beauty and splendor of their offspring that said offspring is allowed to do whatever she or he pleases at the expense of other people.”
Neal Pollack is evidence that some people don’t have to be obliviously, disgustingly perky to be FIPs. There is a wide gulf between “Wow, taking proper care of children isn’t easy” and “Oh no, my son might have to spend time with his father! Why do I have to actually do any work here?”.
Ha! Fair enough. Funnily, I didn’t even remember that when I wrote this post.
Truthfully, I do think their willful blindness to their son’s problem became an issue when the inch think file (an exaggeration for the story, I believe) informed them their son did have a real problem with the biting. But I don’t think they were neglectful, as someone else asserts above. After all, they finally got it. (Or had to.)
Again, I think parts of this story were self-depricating, parts were painfully honest, and parts were sketched in order to give a good story to the readers. I still like the essay and find it indicative of the neuroses of many conscientious parents that I know, including myself. There is no shame in admitting that we fuck up. We all do. We’re a) just not as honest as we should be and b) don’t have such a public forum in which to hang ourselves.
Hear, hear, Lauren. Well said.
I would absoltuely send my son to school with Elijah. They play together and I wouldn’t have any fear of them being in the same room. And my son was bitten by a kid at his own daycare, and unlike some of the people here who were saying they would be down at the school ready to file law suits, we realized that this kind of thing happens. The parents of the biter were mortified, and probably as guilty as Neal did.
People, a inch thick file? And they never told Neal and Regina? Reprehensible, and not on the part of the parents (and also one of the I’m guessing satirical exaggearations that missed the mark).When Emmett was bitten, the parents of the other child involved knew right away (and we weren’t told and didn’t want to know who did it). That kind of thing should have happened at the Pollack’s school and sadly didn’t. Maybe everyone’s woes could have been averted if the school was also more active.
And for the people without children who are bent out shape about this and who are so excited to congratulate themselves on their own decision not to have children, you obviously haven’t spent any time around two-year olds if you think Elijah needs some kind of psychiatric help. He’s fucking two, people. Two year olds are filled with all sorts of anti-social behvior, partly because they’ve just figured out that they in fact operate in a social world, where other people have feelings and experience pain and you can’t lash out every time you don’t get what you want. Learning how to function in this new, wider world is a process of fits and start and experimenttaion. Also, kids are different. The same parents can produce a kid that bites and one that doesn’t. One that’s happy and one that’s morbid. Is that the kid or the parents? An intersection? My feeling is that the people who read all sorts of physchologicaal trauma into the Pollack household are just looking for something to be indignant about.
What if every detail in the story were the same, but Neal were a cop and his wife an ER nurse. Would people be lambasting them for the time they spent away from their son and the fact that he was in day care? No. The thing that has really struck me in the angry posts here and at other web sites is the hate people feel for Neal and Regina because they have “fake” jobs. Let’s think about this people. Citizens so enamored of the written word that they sound off about families they haven’t met offering all kinds of advice including retoractive non-breeding who in the same breath piss all over Neal becuase he’s “merely” a writer and doesn’t have a real job. Do I detect some envy here, blog posters? A little schadenfude masquerading as moral opprobrium? Yeah, I thought so.
My sister used to bite me until it drew blood. Nothing my mother did would stop the behavior until she called my grandmother in tears and asked for help. My grandmother said, “Bite her back.”
Yeah, put the pearls down.
My mom did not bite my sister hard, but she touched her just enough with her teeth to scare the shit out of her. My sister never bit me again–toddlers understand empathy but they are very literal. My mother didn’t spank us or use any other corporal punishment, but she didn’t see any other option than a direct empathy lesson.
If Neal and Regina bit Elijah, the critics would be shitting their pants. Unfortunately, it’s the only thing that works, other than waiting for the kid to develop the cognitive skills to translate one situation to another.
So many friends of mine have kids and frankly, I want nothing to do with it because of this shit. You’re isolated from family, friends cast judgement on your parenting decisions, you’re fucking paralyzed to do anything. Lauren, I sometimes wonder how you manage.
I have a toddler. He has teeth. So do the other toddlers. Also, toddlers are exploring their own power and autonomy. That is one of their many “jobs.” And everything but everything goes into their mouths.
Every parent, I assume, has to deal with this or related “power” issues around this time. I’m sure biting back works, but not so sure about the consequences (i.e. the “price”) of its working. I’m not dismissing this idea, just a little suspicious about its subtler effects on the student.
One technique that I have found invaluable re biting (and mostly it’s more pedestrian cousin, hitting) is this: when my son , say, hits me in the face, which he’s done, or hits himself in the head (not hard, mind you, but still I’m thinking “oh no, don’t be Rain Man”), what my wife and I have said to him is, “I see you want to hit. I will not let you hit me (etc.). If you want to hit something, hit the floor.” Then I demonstrate. It is actually fun to hit the floor. Once he discovered this, he was happy to have something to hit. Actually, there are various things, he can smash his blocks together, hit the wall, and so on. And he did have a mini-phase of going around testing to see what was okay to hit and what was not.
I also noticed that the key to making this work is to be really even-keeled with it, which is not so easy when you’ve just been slapped in the face (subsequently, there was a pinching phase, too). I realized that it’s essential not to trigger what I would call an impulse to shame, since the desire to hit etc. is engrained. It’s a matter of finding an outlet or ideally many outlets for it.
With biting, it was the same drill, and easier to deal with since obviously since birth he’s been given things to bite (i.e. teething things). “It’s not okay to bite me. I will not let you do it. If you want something to bite, here are several things to bite.” Usually it’s Sophie, his French rubber squeaky giraffe who looks like Jeanne Triplehorn.
Anyway, I know this is the long way around. My point is, it works for me to give choices for outlets for the impulse, completely acknowledging the legitimacy of the impulse while drawing very clear lines in the sand re what is and what is not acceptible.
Without the alternate routes, I fear his reaction would be, “but what am I supposed to do with this urge?”
All that said, there are obviously many ways to deal with these problems, since it’s nothing new and you don’t see that many adults biting each other, non-consentually. Cue Amanda.
Question. Why would a two year old need preschool anyways? And if the “inch thick” stack of papers from just one month is true or even close, why did the school wait to say anything?
I was really enjoying this website as a bit of relief after going through all the pages of letters that I disagreed with on Salon so much, then along came Matt. And Kristin with her ideas of lawsuits. And on and on and on. So now I’m going to go, because I’m getting all angry again and I don’t want that.
I’m glad you’re not my dad though, Matt.
And I’m sorry for not being all thoughtful and contributing to the debate, but I don’t have kids and I don’t work in a preschool and I don’t generally go around thinking that I know how people should raise kids or make peanut butter sandwiches or which type of closet organizer is the only kind you should consider buying. I just know that I’m glad my parents treated me like a person and I like knowing that there are parents like Neal out there, because that gives me hope. Parents like Matt and Kristin, though? Yeah, I’m just glad I didn’t grow up with them.
But whatever. I’m annoyed at people casting judgment on a writer and now I’m here casting judgment on the people who wrote that. That’s just making me even more annoyed…
Read the article, Alexandrine. He explains that they need quiet around the house for a few hours or they can’t get their work done.
Shannon, I can’t quite buy your argument that the more extreme elements of Neal’s essay were “satirical exaggerations”. In fact, I believe quite the opposite, based on the following from Neal’s own blog:
And according to the essay, the conference where they were presented with the infamous “inch-thick file” was not the first time they were informed of his biting problem; quite the contrary. It was, however, apparently the first time that they were unable to just drive away from the scene.
I do think that it is … unusual that a preschool wouldn’t make a much bigger deal over this behavior much earlier. My son was bitten at a parent’s day out program. Like you, I was of the mind that these things happen and that if it wasn’t an ongoing problem I wouldn’t worry about it.
The program did an excellent job of dealing with the situation. The biter was isolated from the other kids for the remainder of the day, my son was given appropriate first aid and was talked to about the event, my wife was called immediately and the incident was discussed with the director of the program that day.
I’ll tell you, though, that being bitten was traumatic for Thomas (as I would suspect it was for Emmett as well). He talked about it for days and showed the injury to us every day when we bathed him (it was on his back). It took a long time to heal. And he was 3 at the time. I cannot imagine what a two-year-old girl, repeatedly bitten over the course of months in an environment where she was separated from her parents, must have felt.
If Neal were a cop and Rachel were an ER nurse, I wouldn’t have written anything, because Neal would not have been exploiting his family to shill his new book.
Had he, for some odd reason, written the piece anyway, I’d still have written the same thing, as my point was never that they don’t have “real jobs”, but that they ignored a serious situation that went unremediated for a long time with a lot of other kids at risk.
[...] re Issue There’s been a lively discussion going on in the comments of the Feministe blog. I had origina [...]
One point on the issue of seeking professional help to deal with Elijah’s acting out problems: Child psychologists and psychiatrists don’t sit the kids down and demand that they explain their feelings. They watch the children play and play with them, see what themes come up in the play, and try to sort out what’s going on with the kids from that. So, if Elijah’s parents feel that he does need professional help they shouldn’t not get it because of his lack of ability to articulate his feelings–any decent therapist who works with children wouldn’t expect it. (Disclaimer: I’m not saying that Elijah does need professional help: I’m not qualified to make a recommendation on that issue and even if I were I wouldn’t have enough information on the issue from just reading Neal Pollack’s essay. I’m just saying that IF Elijah’s parents feel that he should get professional help, it is there and can be effective, even in a young child.)
I was surprised that you are so sympathetic about the essay — it struck me too as an example of FIPpery. It seemed like the author wanted everyone else imaginable — the kid, the school, the other kids — to accomodate so that he could get on with his life without any inconvenience.
I got that the column was exaggerated for comedic effect — but I didn’t find it funny. I’m not judging the real Neal and Regina based on the column — but I feel free to judge the “Neal” and “Regina” who are characters in the column, if that makes sense.
And yes, I’d probably be more sympathetic if the parents were a cop and a nurse, or a single parent who was going to lose her job if she didn’t have daycare. Not because poor people are morally superior to rich people, or because writing isn’t “real work” but because they’d have fewer options. Yes, it sucks to be stuck in the house with a bratty four year old and not to be able to focus on your work. But not as much as it sucks not to be able to buy food.
Thank goddess someone finally quoted that FIP definition. I missed the post where you first defined it and was totally lost and didn’t want to admit it, and couldn’t find it, and was sure it was something I needed to know. :)
I do wonder what I’ll do when (and I don’t say ‘if’ because I know it will most likely happen) my kids do something like this. Kids do crap like this all the time. With my neice & nephew, I remember the biting thing, and I remember biting back (not hard, but just enough to say ‘see, it hurts, doesn’t it’?) But I’m fairly sure if I did it in front of some folks, they’d be outraged & ready to call Child Protective Services on me.
Piaget says that children are not old enough to really understand abstract ideas like another person’s pain (real empathy) ’till they’re about 11 (the formal operational stage). At two, they are still in either sensorimotor (birth to age 2), or preoperational (2 to 7 years), stages, and are mostly operating like smart animals– experiencing the world in sensory ways which are going to include their mouths, their hands, etc. Why bring up Piaget and a theory that does have its problems here? Because we’re expecting to reason with children who aren’t cognitively wired that way yet, to say “I understand that you do XYZ and this is how that makes us feel”…. sometimes, there is no possible way that the kid is going to understand that. There has to be a concrete consequence for the behavior… I don’t necessarily mean physical punishment but something that the child understands better than rhetoric. Take away a privledge (no bedtime story till you can behave), put them to bed early, no ice cream, whatever. But therapy is not necessarily the first step here. This is NOT abnormal behavior, although it is a bit on the extreme side, and yes, it does sound like a call for attention. Putting a 2 year old into therapy for normal behavior, I think, would only cause more problems down the line.
The problem with the concrete consequences thing– it’s hard to do. If reading a bedtime story gets them to sleep quicker & we can take a deep breath and clean house, we don’t WANT to give that up. And an awful lot of parents are overtasked already, and we all have our failings & weaknesses too. It IS hard to be a parent. And some people shouldn’t do it.
I distinctly remember being bitten in pre-school. I had to have been younger than 4 because of where it happened. I don’t have a physical scar, but that I remember something so clearly (I can vividly picture the little boy’s snotty upper lip clamping down on my forearm, 30 years later) it must have been a big moment for me. And if I had been bitten in the face and scarred, I’m sure it would have been worse. So this IS a big issue, and I can understand why people sound off about it. But I think there was guilt in the tone of the story. And I hate it when people snipe at people for writing about their family as though that were “capitalizing” on family. As though we never write about people we know, to promote ourselves. Hell, what do you think Hemingway’s entire first novel was about? Do you think that ex-girlfriend liked the picture he drew of her?
Many of us DO think long and hard before “breeding”. I’ve been married almost 12 years before I did it. And yet, I fully expect my kids to do things that mortify me. I hope to deal well with them. But I know something will blindside me, and I’ll want to crawl under a rock. I have read all kinds of parenting books, talked with my husband about parenting, etc, etc. But my kids will still be kids, and I will deal with the discipline problems as they come. Sniping from the sidelines & drive-by parenting is patently unfair– none of us knows the full details of the story, and if we write, we all know that we all embellish for effect, leave things out, and that the whole story is never there. None of us knows how we would handle the situation until it happens. And I can say that I probably would handle it with some humor, some attempt to make a story out of it. It’s why I blog!
Anyway. I can’t think of a good way to wrap this up, but I guess I’d say, with Lauren, that all of us can surely think of moments when our parents would be mortified at our behavior.
I am certainly NOT going to “cast the first stone” at Pollack.
I also blogged about the article in question. I didn’t send a letter into Salon though I did contemplate doing it. However, I felt it would fall on deaf ears and be rather pointless. It would neither edify me, nor would it edify Pollack as I found it unlikely he would agree with anything I would have to say. It would appear that I wasn’t far off.
My issue was not with the fact that they didn’t want their relationship with their child to take away from the relationship they have with each other or to their jobs. I will be the first to rant (and have done so extensively) about parents who feel that their children are the center of their world. I find such behavior has a terribly negative affect on children and creates self centered individuals. I frequently tell my friends with children that they need to go out and spend more time with each other. Once the children grow up all you have left is each other and you have a responsibility to each other to make sure your relationship doesn’t suffer overmuch.
However, the tone Pollack gave forth was that they didn’t want to spend ANY time with their son. Interacting with him seemed to be a painful ordeal and something they were unable to do. Which was rather ironic as they were asking people unrelated to their child to do what they themselves could not do.
I have no issue with their career choices. Technically, I think their career choices are rather fun and could even be a better situation to raise children in. And I understand Pollacks need to have a certain amount of quiet to write. I am working towards a writing career as well and I cannot write with children underfoot. For that matter, I cannot write with a husband underfoot. Should I ship him off to daycare as well? No, I just wait until everyone goes to bed.
I have issue with the fact that their priorities seem to be a bit skewered. Whether sympathy was felt towards Sophie, it was never expressed. Not in the original article or in the rebuttal. It was all about them and actually not that much about Elijah. No issue was made about how being expelled would make Elijah feel or really how he felt in all of this. The expulsion was bad because it would inconveniance them and possibly label them as bad parents. Not because Elijah had a behaviour problem that needed addressing and because it might make him feel like a horrible person, which isn’t generally considered good at that age.
Wanting time away from your child? Completely normal and understandable. Frankly, the mother’s that talk about how their children are their lives and they would spend time away from them kind of scare me. But being terror filled at the idea of having to spend an entire summer with one’s own child is not exactly healthy. He’s two and while he bites, I’ll bet he’s pretty entertaining and a lot of fun. But baby Chuckie he is not, I’m sure.
Drive-By Parenting – Up in Arms
I love being a parent and I’d like to believe that my wife and I are good parents. We have a teenage daughter who in some ways is our entire world… That may sound extreme, but I honestly believe it to be the case. It is going to be very traumatic f…
Kitashla, if my boy was acting like baby Chuckie, I’d avoid him too. ;)
I firmly believe that if more children were breastfed for the recommended timeframe (WHO recommends 2 years), there would be no problem biting. It didn’t take long for my DS to learn that biting is unacceptable.
And here come the La Leche police! Please stop blaming the world’s problems on a lack of breatfeeding!
Lauren, personally I would too. But I don’t think Elijah was baby Chucky. He may be a biter but definitely not the stuff made of in horror films. *grin*
As for breastfeeding, I fed the first for 2 months until the birth control dried up my milk supply. I fed the second for 4 months, which at that point I had to go on a 2 week dose of percoset and vicodin and antibiotics for abcessed wisdom teeth and didn’t feel right breastfeeding at the same time. After two weeks of pumping and dumping my second wouldn’t have anything to do with the breast. Was kind of let down because it was going so well before.
Neither has had a biting problem. I’m pregnant with my third and I’d be willing to bet money he won’t either. Of course, I plan to breastfeed for a year gods willing, but that’s still not up to the “two year rule”.
It makes perfect sense to judge the characters “Neil” and “Regina.” If the events described and the narrator’s attitude were real, he and “Regina” would be the epitome of ineffectual self-centered parenthood. In the story their kid is rampaging and brutalizing a helpless little girl. “Neil’s” priorities are i) complaining about what hardasses the daycare people are about biting, ii) complaining about how hard it is to find daycare, iii) being embarrassed that his son’s a biter (a blow to his parental ego), iv) being vaguely put out that other people don’t see what a charming little fellow Elijah is, v) Worrying that Elijah has a mental illness, but dismissing therapy because insurance won’t cover it, vii) Being horrified at the huge hassle of having the kid out of day care for the summer.
I heard that the essay is based on real events–but we have NO IDEA how closely the storytelling maps onto reality. I’d prefer to assume that the real Mr. and Mrs. Pollack are decent, responsible people who are in a bind: their kid’s got a serious behavior problem, day care won’t take him, and now they’ve got to deal with childcare, work, and remedial behavior mod all at once.
The essay is a satire about a very unsavory group of people: atrocious irresponsible parents who write self-indulgent essays. So, let’s just sit back and enjoy a joke at their expense, since we all agree that the real FIPs are annoying as hell. I bet the real Neil’s laughing his ass off over the public outcry.
Interesting run of commentary. I truly have to wonder if all the “haters” have kids….because it sure as hell doesn’t sound like it.
Peanut bit like crazy from the moment he figured he could bite ’til he just grew out if it I guess. Most times when he bit though, another kid was annoying him. But, the biting almost got us kicked out of 2 daycares and yes, I am a single mom who had to have him in a daycare so this effected us greatly. And biting him back didn’t work. At. All.
Now he’s 5 and he hits and scratches. At 2 you cannot tell if a child had an emotional disorder bc so much of their regular behaviors could be misconstrued or misunderstood. It’s often why they wait to diagnosis a child with ADD/ADHD ’til their at least 7 so it will be easier to distinguish the behaviors related to a kids personality vs. any sort of behavioral problems.
Peanut is also seeing a shrink now to help him (and me) figure out what is causing these burts of angry tantrums. I feel bad when he hits other kids because I wouldn’t want someone elses kids hitting him. (And believe me, they have. Once kid pushed him off the top step once and he fell flat onto the floor which was at least 7 steps below).
It does take a village to raise a child and I think our society would be better off if we could just remember that. I’m reading Annie Lamott’s book called Operating Instructions now and she brutely tells us her truths.
I ranted about something like this after I read an article on Slate.com about the myths of motherhood. Some of the comments then, too, pissed me off bc it seemed the “haters” were missing the point.
N & R need their own space – every parent does. But when they seem to be missing is what Elijah is obviously very desperate to have, which is THEIR ATTENTION. One of Neal’s posts on his blog says:
The irony is that Elijah has been a delight since he got bounced nursery school. Sleeping until eight, affectionate, responsive, and hilarious.
He’s two years old. He needs and wants more attention from his parents than he’s getting. He gets frustrated (anxious? upset? excited?) so he bites. Biting leads to being expelled from school, which means that he gets more time with his parents, which means that now he’s a “delight.” This is a pretty simple equation – I don’t understand why N & R don’t seem to get it.
Kristin says, “And here come the La Leche police! Please stop blaming the world’s problems on a lack of breatfeeding!”
That is an incredibly mean-spirited comment to make.
In our daycare, the biters were all bottle-fed. None of the nursed toddlers ever developed into biters. In your grand wisdom, what evidence do you have? What datapoints have you collected to the contrary?
The point isn’t that breastfeeding might keep kids from biting–heck, by that logic, teaching your child to suck his or her thumb would be a great way to keep them from biting. The point is that breastfeeding for two years is not for every mom, and that there are other ways to keep your child from biting. Personally, I’d much rather take the ten seconds necessary to sink my teeth gently but firmly into my child’s pudgy little forearm than spend twenty-four months (minimum!) showing the little vampire that sometimes, he will have things in his mouth that don’t like teeth. So even setting aside the whole correlation-not-causation problem with your exeprience, it’s not a terribly good reason to advocate breastfeeding.
Furthermore, if breastfeeding advocates are right about the health and emotional benefits of breastfeeding, then this is pretty irrelevant to the question of whether breastfeeding is a good idea. Biting is common, usually minor, and usually solved just like any other behavioral problem–it can’t possibly compare to the host of psychological and physical problems that non-breast-fed children are supposedly destined to suffer from. So saying that you should breastfeed because it will nip biting in the bud is sort of like saying that someone should quit smoking because it will make their hair shinier.
PINY/Kristen,
Why are you opposed to breastfeeding?
I’m not opposed to breastfeeding at all. But I have a friend who couldn’t make it work for her, and I am opposed to the incredible emotional beating she took from self-righteous people who didn’t seem to understand that not every parent can achieve their version of perfection.
Why are you opposed to reading something before you respond to it?
I am not “opposed to breastfeeding.”
I am opposed to insisting that every woman breastfeed, especially for two years (again, minimum!). It’s not always an option–particularly since you seem to be saying that plastic nipples just won’t cut it, breast pump or no breast pump. Women who can breastfeed will breastfeed. There is no point to guilt-tripping women who don’t. It’s a particularly pernicious form of drive-by mothering, and it causes nothing but pain for perfectly good moms.
I am opposed to breastfeeding for me and me alone because, if and when I ever have a baby, I won’t have breasts. Don’t get me wrong, it’s tragic that I’ll be left with a wan, sickly, stunted child with an unholy taste for human flesh. But them’s the breaks.
PINY/Kristen,
Why do you hate America, rainbows, and puppies?
Anyway, I don’t get the breastfeeding thing. My sister bit me all the time because she was evil. She also hit me with a wire hanger. It’s cool; we’re friends now. Just not when I was 4 and she was 2.
Michelle, nobody is against breastfeeding. Nobody has been against breastfeeding since the 1960s. However, for lots of mothers, either physical or life circumstances interfere and cause them to wean kids sooner.
While nobody is against breastfeeding, there are a few people who are really, really against early weaning. If you’ve read any thread on drive-by parenting, you know that one of the largest categories of drive-bys are the “why aren’t you breastfeeding” comment.
That kind of uninformed, nosy interloping only serves to make new mothers, beset on all sides with social judgments, even more judged-on.
I’ve never met a new mother that doesn’t think breastfeeding is a good thing, if she can make it work with her body and her life. For those that can’t, telling them they have made the wrong decision is just mean. You won’t change their minds, but you will make them feel bad.
Michele wrote:
Nope. Both of my children breastfed until they were three, and that didn’t stop either of them from biting us, each other, and other children. If your child doesn’t bite, that’s wonderful, but the blessed meh is not, in my experience (and in the experience of many of my family’s attachment-parenting friends), a solution to the feature of the savage little beasts biting everything they can latch their jaws onto.
It ain’t this KristIn, it’s KristEn with the La Leche remark. I’m the crazy Kristin (according to the blessedly non-judgmental, child-endangerment-accepting Henri, who sadly left these boards in disgust after mine and Matt’s remarks) who would threaten that school with a lawsuit if my child actually came home with a bloody primate bite one day. I know, it makes me a hater. And it makes Henri feel happy I’m not his mama. Perhaps Henri enjoyed being bitten as a 2 year old. Who really knows? But see, I love kids and I get really pissed when they get hurt and NO ONE DOES ANYTHING, including the establishment that is there to protect my child when out of my sight. This is why lawsuit threatening works. It gets attention. And I would’ve been Neal Pollack’s worst fricking nightmare if his kid did it to mine a second time. Oui, Henri, I’m that bad. If my child came home with a 2nd bloody primate bite, I would visit Mr. Pollack, or anyone else. And it would be a very, very unpleasant thing for him.
As for breastfeeding, I’m all for it, but 2 years? Seems a bit long. Still, I wouldn’t fault anyone for it. I’d have to admire their tenacity. And the sheer strength of their noble nipples. As for it saving the world, I’m still skeptical.
Have to say, though, as a child of the 60s, my mom bottle-fed me and my 3 sibs. The doctors (all male) were telling women, “It’s better for the baby. You can measure how much you give them!” The moms bought it. I was our only biter. It was very strange because I was a very docile and happy child that had never done violence to anyone, even the sibs. I bit a neighbor 2 year old when I was 2. We’d just moved into our house. My mom was entertaining the child’s mom. She saw me chomp Kurt in his playpen. Didn’t draw blood, but my mother was mortified and angry. She came over to me and promptly bit me back. Not hard, barely touched the skin with her teeth. That was the first and last time I bit. And I was a bottle baby!
Strangely enough, my mother loves recounting that tale. It was the only time she ever used any kind of corporal punishment on me. Apparently, it helped make me the “hater” I am and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Is it possible that Ethan merely said the kid smelled funky and didn’t mention (nor notice or care) the Korean part? It’s quite possible Ethan isn’t one bit racist, but does have a superior sense of smell.
I hope you suggested such to the unnecessarily agitated (and clearly clueless) Mother and pre-school teacher.
Here are two data points for you, Michelle. My oldest, a girl, was bottle fed. (I tried breast feeding for about 2 weeks, but after she had to be admitted to the hospital for dehydration, I went to bottle feeding). She NEVER bit.
My son was breastfed until 15 months. He bit me (thank dog it was only me and not a kid) several times at around age 2 1/2. It was awful.
Bottle feeding sure didn’t corrolate with biting in my house.
Michelle –
Those aren’t datapoints; that’s just your impression of what you saw or heard about going on at day-care. As “evidence,” that’s anecdotal (i.e. not scientific and not persuasive), and extra suspect given your bias.
I generally agree with you that breastfeeding has all sorts of health benefits for the child and mother. How long one should do this, however, is up for grabs. My personal preference would be “as long as you can and not a minute longer.”
My own utterly unscientific study (to counter your day-care observations) offers the following interpretation about why breast-fed babies might not be “biters” at your day-care. Biting is about power and autonomy, independence, the exercise of will, separation from the mother (among other things). Babies who are breast-fed I’m betting experience this phase later than bottle-fed ones. As a result, they are biters because their development is being retarded by not having been weened yet. Again, unscientific, but it sounds about right. I would be interested in checking in on these non-biters when they’re a little older. See if they’re acting out yet.
p.s. exactly how are babies in day-care breast fed? Their mothers are there? No meals provided by the day-care? p.p.s. the human stomach does need to learn how to process actual food at some point? How does this work with the breast-milk for two plus years regimen (in the case of this question, I’m just asking; I assume it’s introduced gradually just like with bottle-fed kids; solid food is also a highly powerful addition to a kid’s world, also representing power, independence, etc. — do kids who are breast-fed into toddlerhood — and I have heard of kids getting breastfed up to five [!] — also experience this, experience it later, or miss out? Again, I don’t know.)?
In any case, it’s just not as simple as breastfeeding is the cure of all ills and those who don’t do it for 24 months or more are negligent. I’m quite sure there are as many cases of mothers breastfeeding their kids too long for their own selfish reasons having to do with not wanting to let the kid grow up.
Crap. I meant to say: As a result, they are NOT biters because their development is being retarded by not having been weened yet.
FridaySaturday Ten
Sure, it’s a day late, but better late than never. Here this week’s ten for your weekend reading.
Raed and Scott have some choice words for those outraged over the recent Amnesty International report and its cricitism of the U.S.
Along those…
I’ve been thinking about this article all week, and have written and erased several responses…
Quisp, to answer your question about breastfed toddlers, most parents introduce foods to breastfed kiddos the same way they would bottlefed. Breastfeeding is a supplement to the diet as the “real food” becomes more and more central (I would argue that breast milk is about as real as it gets).
I think there might be a correlation between breastfed toddlers and biting, because mothers who breastfeed toddlers have to work on training their children not to bite pretty early on, or be in a world of pain. Also, I have no idea if this might affect anything, but I’m pretty sure there are studies that prove bottlefeeding is not only nutritionally inferior to breastfeeding, it also doesn’t allow for the proper development of certain mouth and jaw muscles that are integral to speech. A crackpot theory (which I am not averse to spewing!) might be that non-breastfed toddlers are attempting to further this development by biting. ha!
Of course, there are always exceptions. And, of course, breastfeeding might have nothing to do with it whatsoever…but it’s an interesting point to ponder.
That said, I think Neal Pollack (whether the fictional character or the real) needs to pull his head out of his ass and heed the warning signs his child is exhibiting. I totally agree with the poster who compared ignoring childhood warning signs of mental illness or behavioral problems with ignoring signs of diabetes. I don’t have health insurance, either, but my kid with strabismus visits his eye doctor regularly, and both of my kids are in play therapy JUST to make sure some of the behavior I’ve seen them exhibit is given every opportunity to work itself out. Kids don’t need to be pathologized to get the help they need to cope…and even if it’s one exploratory visit for assessment purposes only, it’s worth it. Like many diseases, family history is crucial in making these kinds of decisions.
I am fully aware of how difficult parenting is, and I in no way would ever imply that a parent should sacrifice everything for their child. However, SOME sacrifice and/or compromise is necessary when it comes to children. I felt resentful of the attitude the Pollack’s exhibited about their son’s behavior because it seemed like a simple equation to me. The child is starved for one-on-one interaction, and is finding preschool difficult . The parents have jobs that are flexible and could easily accommodate a sharing of childcare responsibilities so work can get accomplished. One summer is not a terribly long time to give to a kid, particularly if the kid has a propensity to mental illness and is exhibiting signs of distress. If the Pollacks were friends of mine, I would remind them what I often have to remind myself “they aren’t children forever.” (and, yes, I would also tell them to pull their heads out of their asses…but I might say it in a nicer way.)
I have read the article, and the response on the author’s blog, and nothing in there indicates that it was a satire or exaggerated. As others have pointed out, it appears to be a plug for his book. While I was initially sympathetic, he lost me when a) he expressed no sympathy for the bitten children — yes he mentions the word guilt, but more at the expulsion than the biting, b) saying that the kid would be “screeching underfoot” even if they had a nanny, and c) believing the school should handle the entire problem and not expel a kid even if he is clearly a medical danger to everyone else.
I think the article was indeed very honest — and what is showed wasn’t appealing. If the author didn’t want equally honest reactions to it, best not to publish in the first place.