Tag Archives: family

Liking, learning, languages

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Looking at the Petit Filous ads, I wonder – can you get a lifestyle from a language?

One of the great things about Facebook is that you ccan get back in touch with people. Today, I’ve been looking at the photos of my Frnech friend’s new born son.
French friend? Yes, I apologise for the turn of phrase.
When I was younger, we made friends with the people staying in the next door gite, while on holiday near Colmar.  As it turned out, they actually lived about 40 miles from us and I spent my teenage years learning French with a purpose.  It all seems so much more worthwhile when you have someone you want to be able to talk to.
Through this I enjoyed what we shared as culture, and  the differences too.  I gained access to a whole different way of thinking and a way of looking at the world.

I also speak some Spanish.  I chose to do so because my 13-year old self thought that it was better to learn a language spoken so widely in the world rather than German, spoken in only one country.  Now I’ve several Germna speakers in my circle of friends, and no one Spanish speaking.  I keep feeling embarrassingly monoglot.

So when it comes to teaching my son languages, I want to start early.
After all the theory behind language lessons in primary schools was about cutting money and improving GCSE results by not requiring a lang- I’m sorry, was about children soaking up languages more easily early on so that they learn a love of them (I guess this is the same theory of learning that leads to atheists saying that children should not learn about God’s love until they are old enough to decide to do so…)

But while it is natural to me as a francophone that my son should learn to speak the language of our neighbours, is it rational?  Is it the most useful thing he could do?
What about Spanish?  My theory still holds, plus I found travelling in California that it was very useful to speak Spanish. Even Gerorge W Bush spoke Spanish.
What about the language of the BRICs?  As Europe and the US decline as world powers, surely there’s a point to learning Hindi, Chinese, Portuguese, even Russian?

We’ve decided to start with what we know.
After a few goes yesterday, learning in English and French, my son now sings:

Fairer Jacker, Door May Voo, Sonic May A Tina, Ding Dang Dong!

Which isn’t bad for a first go.

We have the Muzzy VHS tapes in French and Spanish too.
These were given to us by a lovely B&B owner in Salisbury (we’d highly recommend a stay there, and please also make a donation to the Meningitis Trust if you have some spare pennies).
We need to dig out the video from the roof to be able to play them, but we think it might be time to get them going…

There are apparently lovely Fench clubs here in Ashford too, including holiday clubs for toddlers, so may be starting with what we as parents know, and starting with French.

Then the rest! Ciao…

Some things I learned about “real” life, work and childcare…

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image from http://www.boloji.com/women/0103.htm, please do read the excellent article there

I’ve met so many lovely, intelligent women this week.  We’ve been talking about working and childcare.  (This is probably because the common theme to the various groups I’ve been meeting is children rather than because it’s a particular preoccupation…)

It’s been a real eye opener.

In my working life, I am surounded by highly educated, ambitious people.
Most of them live in London. Many don’t have kids.
They pretty much reflected my real life when I was newly married and lived 20 minutes from the office and everyone I knew was terribly high powered and some were (self?) important and the office would not be able to do without them.
The other people I met then were living in a tower block with 5 children with at least one called Kayden or Precious.  But I never really knew them, I just got chatting to them at the Health Visitors’ clinics as we waited to have our babies weighed.

That’s no longer real life.  I mean that in the sense of, if I woke up one morning and the office wasn’t there any more, I wouldn’t be walking past the site of it each day.
Real life for me is in my hometown.
And that means that real life people are the ones I now meet.
The musings below are widescale generalisations.  There’s no stats included because I’ve been chatting with new friends, not interviewing research interviewees.  Becuase of the way things have worked out socially, I’ve not really met single parents so that side of things doesn’t feature.  And I guess it is right to focus on those in most need.
But I wonder if it’s given me access to a group of women who don’t often get heard about and so their norms get overlooked?

The women I meet here that don’t work seem to have three or more children.
And there’s a lot with three children.  I’m beginning to wonder if the logistics of three are actually slightly simpler than two, because the stats show that once you pass three, one parent is then pretty much forced to take on the role of the stay at home car driving, child-oriented parent while the other brings in the money…

So most women here work.
But I’m not meeting high powered business women – presumably I need to do that by talking to them either at their workplace or on the train to London when I commute rather than behind a pushchair in the town centre?
No, most of us here seem to work part time for someone else.
Some are, say, working a few hours in the evening when their partners can do the childcare.  Or working the lunch shifts in town to fit in with the school run.  Or volunteering. Or supply teaching.  Another has a husband in the sort of job where she’s expected to take on the pastoral side.
I’ve met so many teachers too, often married to other teachers, fed up with the 9-3 jokes and wondering how to fit their own kids in.
So many have stepped down, either in terms of their actual jobs or their ambitions.  Local jobs count.
Most think I’m insane to have a roundtrip commute of over 100 miles.

Most of the women I meet work part-time. We know there are disadvantages to this in terms of lifelong earnings, pension, and career prospects.
So why not do more hours?
The response is who’d look after the kids?
The primary concern is not the long term but the day to day logisitics.

But surely the answer here is childcare?
Well, when we talk childcare, the response is that, even with the staff pretty much on minimum wage, the cost is too high.  We’re talking nurseries really.  Talk about nannies and you’ll hear what a guffaw sounds like.

I tested the idea that seems popular in feminist circles that actually even if the cost is the same as or slightly more than what one working parent can bring in, the parents should take the hit now, so to speak, for the sake of the future earnings potential and pension provisions.
This was greeted universally with horror.
The issue might make sense to economists, who apparently were touting the same approach to saving for pensions on the radio this morning, but the main question from the real people I know is what on earth do the people who suggest this think we live on that we can “take a hit” in the short term?
I’ve heard stories of taking in lodgers, the ruination that going a few pence overdrawn the day before being paid and losing your whole next day’s pay to the bankcharge. I’ve even heard about not being able to afford to pay into the state pension, let alone a private one.  And yes, that’s even with tax credits in play.  But what can you do if the available jobs don’t meet the cost of living – a living wage if you like?

There is also an issue of childcare availability.
It’s not really a question of provision for 3 and 4 year olds, although the thing that upsets parents is not getting the place they want for their child when parental choice is the most touted concept in education.
I know some mums taking their children to two different schools each day because they’ve not got places for both at the same one.  Not only is that disruptive for a family, but it has an impact on whether parents can work. Logisitics matter.  Not to mention the carbon footprint issues of this sort of thing!

Actually, work-wise, the availability of wrap-around care is the most difficult – a limited number of nurseries are available for children 6 months plus and fewer still offer the full wrap-around hours, and even fewer of them are conveniently located for commuters.
I’ve only had one actively recommended to me by the parents who send their kids there – and that’s the most expensive, naturally.
And the school-level wrap-around care provision appears not to be at every school but for some it is at a centrally-designated school a good drive away!

But finding a childminder to wrap around other nurseries or schools is also a nightmare – finding someone you are happy to leave your kids with, who has space for children of the right age, and who takes and collects from the right schools is not simple, even with the information available from Kent children and families information service…

Family matters
Because leaving your child with someone is not just a matter of that person having a paper qualification.
You have to be happy that your child is looked after as you would wish, and often even the best is a compromise at heart because it’s just not you doing it.  Is it any wonder so many of the parents I’m meeting seem to seek to avoid doing this?
And while mostly we all seem to be begging time from the grandparents, we shouldn’t be counting on it as who knows when it might suddenly not be available?
And there’s the big unspoken secret too – parents actually want to spend time with their children, see them grow up, see the firsts, help them learn and develop.  However much childcare is available, ultimately many parents are going to want to raise their own children directly if they can.

So what are people doing about all this?
The majority of people I’ve met are married or in marriage-like long term relationships.  That affects the approach that’s taken.
Basically, those that can, seem to think as a couple – whose job or career takes precedence, how to handle the logistics, even to the extent of working out how to live with each other’s pension provisions.
For the majority of people I’ve talked to about this, they recognise that this isn’t ideal for them as individuals but they see it as part of the reality of being a family and having children.
While with one eye on the divorce stats this may not seem wise for individuals. Just as pre-nups are not popular or common in the UK, I think there is still an innate social (small “c”) conservatism and a dash of romance in the country overall.  We don’t want to think about marriages failing.  And we don’t want to plan on the basis that ours would be one of them.
So families balance the childcare between them, prioritising local over high paid, working out sometimes complicated logistics, choosing between them who gets the career rather than both trying to in order that they get to see their children rather than have someone else raise them.

But that raises a small question for me.  If families are doing all this, then how will the need for better childcare provision that would allow them to do otherwise be identified?  And which companies are going to do that research with parents in order to see if there’s a viable business?

Unwrapping this one is going to be a bit more complicated than even I’d thought…

Why this image makes me unspeakably angry

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bounce and spinWhat on earth is all this about???
Have you ever seen a pink zebra?  Why is there any need for a pink version of a perfectly good black and white “bounce and spin”?  Yes it’s a lovely, happy girl in a green t-shirt that’s riding it, but honestly, who came up with this – “y’know, we’re selling loads of the bouce and spin zebra, so I don’t know, let’s make it appeal more to girls. What about making a pink one?”

Let me calm down for a moment. And visit Pink Stinks as an antidote.
 Natasha Walter’s book “Living Dolls” is getting a lot of coverage at the moment.  The criticisms of this book seems to be that, in getting older, Walter has lost a sense of perspective, that feminism that has got us to where we are has given women “free choice” and that if they choose to strip off as “empowerment”, fetishize pink, be judged on their looks etc. etc. then that’s their choice. She’s even been accused of not having a sense of humour. 
But she has a point. Several in fact.

She points out that Marks and Spencer markets toy irons as “Mummy and me” – and they do.  My son loves the realistic toy iron at nursery and shows off to us how he can use it.  But I am finding it hard to buy him one for playing at home that isn’t pink.
Toy kitchens seem to have pink plastic all over them – yet my son loves Cbeebies’ “I Can Cook” and carries around a measuring cup and wooden spoon shouting “yum! Taste!” when he’s watching it.  Sure I can buy him the pink kitchen, but why on earth is it pink?  Our kitchen is black, white and charcoal with flashes of lime green in the accessories – my son wouldn’t associate pink with kitchens.

I love buying him clothes, but it doesn’t matter where I go, I’m lucky if the section I get to choose from is even half the size of the girls clothes section.  He has school shoes, wellies and a pair of crocs for the beach, but again the choice is much more limited for boys. Do baby girls have more feet(!)?
But we’re teaching our kids that girls have to have more choice (or more clothes).  And when that includes croptops for tweenagers, push-up bras for nine year olds and sexually provocative slogan t-shirts, as opposed to combats, cheeky monkey-bad boy t-shirts for boys we have to wonder what we’re playing at.  

This isn’t something new for me to worry about.  When I was at university I had a column in the university newspaper “Bare Facts”. 
It came about because I had been submitting sports reports on a regular basis (at the time I was dating the American Football team captain, which apparently made me the First Lady and gave me a responsibility to do things to promote the team), and because a friend and I had written in to the letters page about the clothes being worn in the Union.
As we were writing we had a bit of a problem.  We were feminist not prudish, felt that women should have more self-respect than to dress as they were rather than because it was something from which men should be shielded for fear of their actions being uncontrollable, and while we were grateful that the women had the choice to dress that way if they wished we had to wonder what led them to choose to do so. This was the mid-nineties and we were observing a trend that Natasha Walter has now written about… 

I’ve never been silph-like, but I was a happy 12-14 and I think made the best of my particular best assets.  I didn’t object to the bratops being worn with microshorts that seemed to be increasingly popular because I couldn’t wear them, but because these were women studying for degrees, and as Dara O’Briain puts it in “Tickling the English” surely getting a degree means not having to expose your body to get anywhere in life.

My worry is that in accepting “glamour modelling”, lap dancing and pole dancing as empowerment, sacking of older women from anchor roles for wrinkles on TV but accepting older men as having “gravitas”, focusing on women as individuals rather than on society and family (hence the debate in the press on whether maternity leave has damaged women in the workplace rather than whether by concentrating just on women rather than parental leave it has damaged a family’s free choice to arrange childcare between the parents),by businesses not considering how culture in workplaces including presenteeism damage the chances of women who do not act like the men do getting to the top means the problem perpetuates despite starting off with loads of very bright women lower down in the workforce, that some how we’ve missed the point of feminism.

It wasn’t supposed to be about us getting the right to sleep around, dress provocatively and behave as badly as the men in the name of free choice was it?  I really hope not.  I hope that if anyone tries to write a book on the new feminism now, they realise its ok to say that it’s still a work in progress…

3 reasons why Copenhagen needs to succeed

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I’ve just read that progress at the Climate Change conference talks in Copenhagen are “too slow”. I’ve done some tricky negotiations in my time, but I can only imagine how complex and what interests need to be handled in this sort of event.
It’s not even that there’s a for and against argument – it’s not sceptics versus ecofundamentalists, it’s nations (and blocs such as the EU or G77-China) with a complex pattern of interests and views that need to be taken into account in reaching a conclusion that everyone can sign up to.  

Look, if you want the scientific analysis of climate change, this is not going to be the blog for you. 
I’ve no truck with the denier/ sceptics who always seem to be on the side of business that doesn’t want to change what it has already invested in even if it brings about the end of the world as we know it.
But nor do I feel it’s right that environmentalism has become a belief system. 
We can’t have zero impact on the earth in an industrialised or post-industrialised country – to have no impact, even an agrarian society would be a mistake.  What we can do is to try to minimise the impact that we are having.
But there’s no one right way of doing so.  Attacking Climate Change secretary Ed Milliband for being honest enough to admit that he and his partner use disposable rather than reusable cloth nappies without considering that the reusable ones don’t just spring into existence and there’s a remarkable absence of cotton fields here in the UK – it just shows that a greener-than-thou mentality is alive and well and living in yummy mummy England. Presumably not the same mums driving t5he kids to school in a 4×4 becuase “it’s safer” though…

But Copenhagen needs to succeed.
Here’a a quick top 3 of why…

1) As any parent knows, I don’t care who is responsible for this mess, I just want it cleared up NOW, otherwise no one will be getting any kind of treat at all for the forseeable future… 
Is climate change entirely man-made? A natural phenomenon? A mixture of the two?  
I’m inclined towards the mixture argument because the fact that there have been ice ages in the past indicate that the temperature of the planet does vary over time, but I gather that the vast speed and intensity of change is what appears to be being dictated by our actions and the science backs that.

But the point is that this is a sterile debate. 
It really doesn’t matter whether it was me or mother nature alone that got the environment to this state, someone’s got to sort it out and if we can see that CO2 emissions and our energy guzzling ways are having an impact then we need to sort that out. 
It’s all feeling a bit like those cigarette companies that go there’s no proven link between cigarette smoke and lung cancer while having to pay out compensation to smokers, while all the time seeking out new ways of getting new customers hooked (such as the dispicable practice of selling individual cigarettes for a few pennies to young people in Africa who would not be able to afford the price of a whole packet). 
Or people as fat as me or fatter who pretend its all genetic rather than accepting that appropriate exercise and a better diet with more fruit and veg and less processed food in it would make a difference.

Something is happening (at the very least the weather is getting more extreme) and we can’t just throw up our hands and say will of the gods these days, so we have a responsibility to try to do something about making the lives of the people on this planet easier as it happens.  Think of them as the potential consumers for the goods or services that you produce if you need to have some kind of economic rationale behind it.  Gordon Brown mentioned green technology in his response to a question about whether it was right to give the developing world money to combat climate change in the midst of our own recession – and he was right to do so because if you can’t get people to understand the moral case, show them how their wallets can be aided and you’ll get their attention…  

2) Explaning it to the kids
There’s an old proverb that we don’t own the earth, we’re looking after it for our children.  It may be trite, but there’s a truth behind it.
I’ve blogged at length on recycling (here, here), and also mentioned that greener living is presented as the norm on Cbeebies.

Ed Miliband has a child in nappies.  That means that he is part of the same generation as me. 
That means that at least some of the negotiators at Copenhagen are not wise sages of an older generation - they’re my generation. 
So it’s my generation’s responsibility to get it right, right now. 
We can’t be the generation that saw things happening but dismissed them as not our problem to handle – how on earth would we be able to look future generations in the eye and say:
“well, although we had scientific results that showed that there was a serious problem we were more bothered about leaked emails whether there was collusion to exaggerate the problem becuase that excused us from taking the problem seriously and… what’s that? Email?  That was an electronic communications system which we used on our personal computers.  We used to sit with electric lights on, listening to music on electrical devices all the time not just on wind-up radios, our big flatscrren TVs eating power while we talked with people not just here, or in the same town but right across the world through email, skype, IM, twitter, facebook etc.  Those were the days, eh?  Life without power cuts. Who’d've thought it, eh?”
The 21st century is the century wherw we’re learning to live online as well as in the real world.  I wouldn’t want to only be able to cope with the online world, and then only if the power was available.  
My parents’ generation are having a tough enough time explaining to mine how as baby boomers they afford to live in a house with more bedrooms than people, can retire at 60 and expect to live the rest of their lives with their needs taken care of by the working generation, but my generation struggles to afford a mortgage on ex-Council houses, looks set to work well beyond 70 and will need to make pension and health care provisions becuase while the NHS free-at-the-point-of-use is sacrosanct for politicians at present, with more people living longer something’s going to give at some point. 
Now skip to explaining to my child how we see cars to pop around in and aeroplance flights as a right, electronic goods as necessities, meat as something for more than one meal a day… and however selfish the babyboomer generation may seem, we’re just as bad, just differently…
Just occasionally we’ve a chance to not screw it up for them - can we really not take it?    

5) Basically Copenhagen needs to succeed because we all need a bit of a kick up the arse on this stuff…

`In a world of market economics, if there’s enough consumer pressure, the market shall provide.  We’re starting to see this a bit but at the moment it’s still a bit of a niche – still, Cadbury’s Dairy Milk has gone free trade, so may be just may be…  But we’re not there yet and while simpler, cheaper but non-environmentally friendly alternatives persist, there’s little chance that we’ll switch.

We are encouraged to focus on what we CAN do, but while few of us consider the Prius as first car choice at present (price and space for child car seat and boot space for buggy tend to dictate our choice along with fuel economy and emissions rating) we need to be aware that shipping it over to where we are is a source of carbon emissions. 

I mentioned the nightmare of disposable nappies which take thousands of years to rot down – but while society requires working parents, buckets of napisan and constant loads of washing are not appealing, and the (expensive) nappy collection services don’t seem to operate outside London.  Besides my son got appalling nappy rash which is not aided by reusables.     You can get unbleached, biodegradable disposable nappies - they were better, but still not as absorbant as the planet-killers…

We could eat less meat and dairy – cows in particular produce methane and contribute to global warning but if we’re still doing so in the full knowledge that we greatly increase our risk of bowel cancer through ham, sausages and other processed meats I suspect militant vegetarianism to save the planet is on a hiding to nothing.

Even when it’s made easy, we don’t do it – the fuss about changing over to more sustainable lightbulbs shows that even simple changes that can make a big difference still don’t have full public support – although we’ve been using them for years in my house and have got used to the idea of them “warming up”.

As for planning and land use, local councils need to sort out their recycling policy to cover plastics (not good enough to say that its uneconomical to recycle plastics because oil is a finite resource and if we don’t start reusing we’ll run out) and while I know new-build environmental standards are high, rainwater harvesting and solar panels ought to be mandatory just like decent insulation… more on this soon.

So we need Copenhagen to succeed because deep down, most people are inherently small “c” conservative and won’t change unless they’re persuaded that there’s something wrong with what they were doing before that is now unpalatable to them.  Bottom up does sometimes need the support of top down.

A mother of a big issue…

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MOTHER clipart

Interesting, thought provoking Comment is Free piece in the Guardian today, on early years parenting. 
Why is it increasingly contraversial to suggest that the best people to raise children, especially when they are very young, might actually be their parents?

Making up my son’s mind on God…

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I’m feeling a bit insulted.
As you will know if you are a regular reader of this blog, I’m a parent.
I have an adorable toddler. He’s very clever, resourceful, ingenious. I love him more than anything else in the world.
Both my husband and I have admitted to each other that if it came to it, we’d save him over each other in a life or death situation. Ultimately, love to the point of self-sacrifice is part of being a parent.
And that’s a theme we’ll come back to.

But what he’s not is either:
a) a toy to be manipulated by his parents; or
b) capable of abstract reasoning in the absence of evidence. 
Children learn through the example of others, through practice, through observation. 

So I’ve just seen this report in the Belfast Telegraph about the new atheist poster from the Bristish Humanist Association for Christmas.  If you want to see an intellectual atheist’s view of it, I’m sure you’ll be able to access that via my friend Jon Worth’s blog soon.

Kate Foster age 11 www.kidstalkaboutgod.org(picture is by Kate Foster, age 11, kidstalkaboutgod.org – I’ll put  one of my son’s on as soon as he can draw something that isn’t a train!)

But here’s my view as a parent, and Christian.

1) As a parent, it is my responsibility to raise my child to be the best that he can be. 
Most parents want the best for their child. 
They will differ in their views on what “the best” means – in educational terms for example it could mean the most expensive fee-paying school, a multi-cultural, multi-ability school that everyone from the local area attends, or one that specialises in developing a specialist skill that their child may have (or indeed their intellectual ability overall).  Elsewhere it could mean a daughter getting the chance to go to a school at all, a son getting to stay on rather than leave to work to keep the family fed…  the point is that most parents are driven to get the best that they can for their children.
While there are bad parents who care nothing for the offspring they bring into this world, If you are a devout Darwinist I guess you’ll say that the genes that want the best chance of survival condition me to believe and act in ways that should enable him to do so.

Being the best you can be means instilling values, right from the very beginning - for example small children are naturally selfish (“mine!”) as their sense of self develops, and they need to be taught to share.  How do you start to decide what values you will be teaching your child? 
Asking people what’s important in terms of values is inevitably subjective, and the values of some won’t fit all – but are there some clear, inherent values: fairness, tolerance, liberty, justice, the pursuit of happiness that are self-evidently “a good thing”?  
Um, no.  Self-evident is a problem because things that become self-evident are the result of generations of conditionment: our values in the Western world are likely to have been derived  from principles followed in ancient Greece, the Roman empire, revolutionary France, empirial Britain as well as from great thinkers and philosophers and, like it or not, from the dominance of the Christian religion over the majority of the public and the decision-makers for the last nearly 2000 years. 
Nietzsche believed that christian “values” had corrupted the natural state of humanity and did not believe that society should address the needs of the poor and weak but that the strong had a right to be dominant – a position recognised in the mediaeval world (outside the frontline parts of the church) and increasingly in the deprived inner cities (where the voluntary sector – primarily still from religious motivation – steps in).  I don’t believe that looking out for those in need can be evolutionarily advantageous (unless someone cares to explain to me how?) and in a Nietzschian world could only really be seen to be of use in bringing about a sense of weakness and dependency rather than a wish to take up arms, become strong and assert their rights to more.  So why do it?  Because, somewhere inside we have a feeling that it’s the “right” thing to do.
But it’s a judgement call, right?  It’s a question of relativity – you can choose one path or another, but there’s no ulitmate right and wrong, just what you can do to satisfy yourself and your view of making the world a better place.
But of course religions take a different view.  In the Judeo-Christian tradition, values are derived from what God wants us to be like to be the best we can be – i.e. like him, the ultimate source of goodness.  God the father, who sees us as his children loves us and wants us to love him back – a feeling every parent knows.  But equally, being a parent means correcting and chastising, with love. So there is right, and there is wrong, it’s not relative and God is the judge.  

I don’t think I can raise my child properly without instilling values in him one way or another – an if I am a Christian, act as a Christian, attend church, pray etc. then he will learn through observation and wanting to join in, i.e. practice.  Should I be caveating my actions with there’s no obligation on you to join in, son of mine, and what I’m doing and saying may be incorrect, irrelevant and is something for you to think about only when you are older?  What nonsense.

2) Do parents or others have the responsibility for my child?
A small but valid digression. 
A friend used to worked in children’s policy.  She has no children of her own, but because I do, was telling me about something she was working on, a scheme to extend the Red Book (in the UK this is a book that the NHS gives parents to record a child’s development and vaccinations in their early years) through to age 7.  My husband and I reacted with horror. 
As recorded in my old blog www.thoughts.com/rose22/blog, I’ve had more contact with organs of the state in the first two years of my son’s life than practically ever before, and as a loving, responsible parent I’ve not always welcomed the tone of some of the encounters.  Here’s a couple of short extracts:

My son had a tough start in life: he was tiny, arrived earlier than expected if not actually premature, although he could latch on I produced no colostrum, and he got an infection in hospital that weakened him to the extent that he then couldn’t feed and ended up tubefed in special care.
Before special care, we fought and fought to be “allowed” to give him a formula top up. A midwife told us that giving him formula was “the equivalent of giving him a MacDonalds” but he was genuinely starving and starting to get dangerously underweight so the paediatricians asked if we’d mind doing so.
The first formula, SMA gold, made him vomit – we’ve since found out that it’s the one most commonly used in postnatal wards despite the fact that the babies that need formula most also tend to be most sensitive to it. When a baby is already underweight and thr vomiting also brings up any breastmilk they’ve managed to take in, then it’s downright dangerous.
…  
I was already feeling policed (the Red Book of early childhood issues and vaccination records, the sheer volume of paperwork involved in his life at nursery etc.) but now I know that just having given birth to him does not make him mine.

The idea of closer scrutiny of my son by “experts” from outside the family, ever tightening frameworks that attempt to track and measure his physical, mental, social, and many other types of development against some identified standards, the idea of that progress being recorded and potentially required to be provided for oversight by someone representing the state in some capacity from birth to seven is frankly a bit scary.  And I say that as someone with a large number of family members engaged in those sort of state roles.  

Others have written, and rather better than I would about the changed relationship between adult and child in recent years - the recent case where adoption was ruled to be more valid that the right of the birth family to live together when an allegation was found to be untrue, the apparent assumption that adults have malign intent when spending time with children that must be disproved that has resulted in the need for all adults spending time with children (including authors visiting schools) to be subject to a criminal record check.

To bring us back to the theme of the Humanist/ Atheist poster, the demand to bring up children in a secular way feels like an intrusion into my private sphere in much the same way. 
Breastfeeding or bottlefeeding my child was about sustaining him in his early physical life and people tried to tell me how to do that (even manhandling my breasts – shudder…).  Hugging and kissing him, talking to him, playing with him was part of his social and emotional development - and I can get government guidance on good ways of doing these things.   I’m told he needs a certain number of portions of vegetables (5 a day), an amount of physical exercise (change 4 life) and so on.  There’s not one area of his life where there isn’t someone trying to advise me, tell me how to do what I’m doing even better, and even how not to worry about it (“good enough” parenting).

It’s all feeling a bit like “there’s an app for that!”
Well, child development, learning of values, culture, tradition, citizenship etc. are not apps that can be plugged into a child when the basic unit has been assembled and the intial software installed. 
Children are more than just organic computers and the stories, the fairies and wizards, the magic potions and tales of bravery and terrible decisions are part of the way in which they learn how to cope with the real world. 
I realise it is dangerous to juxtapose a sentence on fairies and wizards with one on religion (I know about the unicorn hunting task in the atheist children’s camp) but I don’t believe you are being fair to a child to not raise them with religion.  Not only with they not understand the culture and tradition of their family and society and their motivations and values, nor will they learn about and respect the cultures, traditions and beliefs of others and their motivations and values, nor have exposure to the stories, histories and themes that help shape them in their values and outlook on life and in deciding what is important.  I think it’s my choice to make. 

Besides, English literature teachers are already reporting that students are increasingly unable to understand the literary classics because they don’t understand the religious references within them and the consequent character motivations… 

3) Raising a child deliberately to believe in nothing is not a neutral position
I mentioned above how children learn.  Children observe the world and ask questions. 
Perhaps he is too young at present, but I would fully expect a child like mine to ask some day “why do we go to church?” 
After all, his father and I have both asked that ourselves in the past, stopped going (valuing sleep over singing on Sunday mornings) and then, after our individual feelings of being drawn back, challenged, a love beyond ourselves, started going again, praying more regularly and more.

I have no fear of this – just as I have no fear of him learning about other religions, and indeed what it means to believe that there’s nothing more to it all than this.  Ultimately I hope he’ll believe in Jesus as his saviour, but personal belief can’t be forced when its about a relationship with God, only nurtured.  In the end, for all believers, it’s a personal choice and decision as well as truth they know in their hearts. 
 
But please, let’s stop this rubbish that raising a child within a faith is tantamount to child abuse.  I realise that shock value and, yes, insult are probably the intention of such statements.
Such statements are offensive to the billions of people across the world trying to raise their children in what they believe to be a way of truth that will help their children both make this world a better place, and to be in the best situation possible in the next life, wherever and whatever that may be. 
It’s also deeply insulting to those who have suffered real abuse, physical or psychological, for some of whom hope and salvation have come from religious faith.

The contention seems to be that children should be free to learn about good, solid science (would this include selfish genes and memes?  What about multiple world theories? Was the big bag ex nihilo or was there something before that exploded, and if so what was it and how did that come to be?) while they are growing up, but not be introduced religious thought until they’re old enough to make up their own minds.
However, atheism, the belief that we can live without God and that he doesn’t exist, and to explain the world in terms that do not include him is a faith position. 
So telling parents to raise their children without God is actually imposition of a faith position, the position that there is no God and that a life can be lived fully without mention of one.
 
 4)  Filling the vaccuum
The trouble is, every time idealistic atheists start on about how the world would be a better place without religion, I start hearing ringing cash tills in the background.
 
John Lennon’s “Imagine” is both depressing and unrealistic.  Depressing because he is singing the old atheist line that the world would be a better place withough religion because everyone would instead focus on making this world a bettter place and would live in peace, and hopelessly unrealistic because the evidence we have from secular states (not just the communist USSR or China but also those with enforced secular constitutions like France or the USA) is that they are no more peaceful, just, equal and genuinely happy than those where religion is practiced (or part of the constitutional settlement). 

The funny thing is, it seems to me that it is not the presence of religion in whatever form that poses the biggest threat to happy, fulfilled humanity in the western world.  It’s the lie that to be happy, fulfilled people we need more and better of whatever is available.
A few months ago I think it seemed that we’d got a lid on it – the avarice, the spend-to-feel-good, the fake-tan-bleached-hair-nails-done-designer-clothes school of self-esteem could be replaced by a quieter, greener life, with organic veg boxes and community allotment schemes.  This was at the height of the credit crunch where we seemed to think that the role of the bankers in economic meltdown and the corruption of politicians and those that serve them in the Fees office at Westminster might mean that everything was really about to change.  But it rarely ever does. 
The lack of organised religion does not automatically bring about a happy, caring-sharing community, it reasserts the pursuit of self-interest,  the Nietzschian values that I mentioned above. It also seems to mean that more people believe in luck, fate, cosmic ordering, clairvoyancy and other bits of assorted quackery or the words of snake oil salesman… exactly the sorts of things that rational atheists such as Ben Goldacre fight the good fight against.  These things fill the vaccuum.  And I think that’s worse.

5) Self-sacrificial love
I mentioned that the role of a parent is essentially one of unconditional love, but that love means not just allowing a child to do whatever they want but helping them to learn, grow and be the best that they can be.  And that can mean giving them the chance to grown up knowing the love of God, the comfort, the security, but also the challenge and responsbility that that love engenders.
 
At the risk of incurring more wrath, I’d also point out that my faith is not about earning points and following rules to get into heaven. 
It’s about belief that God is my father who knows me and loves me (I’m lucky enough to be able to say as much as my Dad here on earth does) but who also expects the best of me and has the highest standards ever.  God set the rules that determine what all this is about and will decide on what happens next when all this ends and has been clear that this will include holding everyone to account.  Jesus has already paid the price for me for the bad things that I’ve done that I would inevitably have to answer for when meeting God at the end of time, somethig that could happen at any time. 
To deny my child the information about this love, and to withold the chance to embrace it, would be perverse given that I love him.

As a parent I put my son’s live above my own – I brought him into the world and he deserves that.  Parents do this in small ways all the time (accepting that their careers get held back becuase they cannot work all hours any longer, doing endless taxi driving for after school activities and play dates) and as I set out at the top of this article, they would (usually without hesitateion) place their child’s life above their own in a life-or-death situation and usually above their partner’s too. 
This self-sacrificial love may certainly be the result of selfish genes looking to ensure the latest version survives.
But it also reflects the love of God for us, the ultimate sacrifice of Jesus as God paying the price to set us free from the cost of the justice that we deserve.  Some might argue that a God of love would just forgive us all whatever we’ve done.  But if he did not uphold the principle of justice, we’d not have the concept and he would not be worth worshipping as no one would bother.  That would be the actions of a neglectful and simultaneously indulgent parent, and certainly not one I’d want to be like.
I’m sure this all sounds bizarre and it’s easier just to think that the bad go unpunished and there will be no judgement or if there is that we can answer for ourselves, thanks. 
But I’ve never wanted to disappoint my Dad.  If Jesus did what I think he did and rose from the dead, then what he said matters and is an amazing thing to offer to someone, anyone, and indeed everyone throughout all time.
So Jesus’s offer is a payment that I choose to accept, open to all and from which I’m equally free to walk away. 
True freedom isn’t doing whatever we like, but doing what we know to be right, for the good of all and in love.

As a conclusion, I’m going to borrow the words Iused in my previous blog:

I know that in the long term a parent-child relationship is something that has to be developed, worked at, and ultimately it is a process of loss and separation for the parent and growth and self-discovery for the child.
The child ultimately belongs to his or herself.  But I had always thought that, unless a crime was being committed, the pace of that process was a journey that my child and I were free to take at our own pace.

So, thanks for the cute poster.  But I intend to offer my child the chance to grown up as a Christian, in a loving relationship with God, and to exercise my judgement as his parent to make the decisions that enable him to be the best he can be until he has enough information and independent thought to make up his own mind. 
Because you can present the science, you can hand over a copy of the bible or any religious text of your choosing but if you don’t talk about it, don’t explain it, don’t live it then how can you expect understanding.
As the Etheopian Eunuch said to Philip when he was asked (in Acts Chapter 8 ) whether he understood the Jewish bible he was reading “How can I, unless someone explains it to me?”  A chance at that understanding, early in life, is probably the best gift a parent can give their child.

Update: not the only blogger to have noticed this poster, and the debate continues on www.joelitobarski.eu and www.sarabedford.com/blog where I posted the following:

I blogged on this too – I like your analysis.
Of course atheists have the right to prosthelytize – amazing though that they feel the need to unless atheism is becoming a belief system more than just a worldview.
For me, this campaign was about trying to force an unreasonable contention onto the private sphere of the family.
I understood the purpose of this campaign to be to normalise the message that raising a child outside the religion that their parents practice should be the social norm, because God doesn’t need to feature in children’s lives and religion is a lifestyle option to add on later if it’s wanted.
After all, when Dawkins has contended that raising a child within their parents’ religion is tantamount to child abuse, and talks about society stepping in, what other way is there to take a poster such as this?
However I’m glad to hear that the BHA acknowledge that in practice this is not practicable. But then what are they asking for? Just that parents don’t ostracize children that make an informed decision not to practice a religion? That’s not what the poster says!
I also concluded that no one can force someone to believe, that is not how belief works. That’s just culture, not faith. 
But it would be unnatural for parents that practice a faith not to encourage their children to follow it too if they genuinely believe that it is true and leads to salvation.
So I’ll do so with my son – and if he decides its not for him, I’ll just have to accept it.
NB I rebelled and returned after much questioning and reading once I realised that the resurrection had actually happened. Why wouldn’t I want to share that with people I love?

Why is my Maclaren pushchair safe here but not in the USA?

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maclaren

Yesterday evening, I heard that the lovely and relatively expensive pushchair I own may potentially amputate the tops of my toddler’s fingers if he plays with the folding mechanism.

The press coverage reported that in the USA, a special hinge-covering kit would be made available to all affected buggy owners.

I – along with probably every other Maclaren-owning parent in the EU – started trying to find out if:
i) the US buggies were differently constructed to ours;
ii) the hinge covers would be made avialable to us too.

Tonight we found out.  According to the BBC, Maclaren has decided that we consumers in the UK (and indeed the rest of the EU) will just get extra advice because they are compliant with existing EU safety standards.  We’ve no idea whether these safety standards are tougher than those in the USA, but either way, the buggies are the same but apparently require a physical amendment in the USA but nothing extra in the EU/UK.

Maclaren say that there have been many fewer cases in the EU than in the USA despite much higher sales.   
But there may be more to it than that. 
There’s a cultural issue here – are Europeans (and Brits in particular) more likely to assume that an accident is just an accident and not something to sue over?

A friend has put forward the following alternative theory for why there’s no action being taken here:
In the UK we have a claim limit so unlike in US where this company could be sued for millions, here you can only get few quid.
Thus since the financial risk is lower, there is no point in spending the money on correcting it, who cares about customers who have already paid their money. 
Actually, I want this to be untrue. I really don’t want to believe this of a reputable British company.  It’d be nice if they’d take action to prove that they do care about the children whose wellbeing we put into their hands whenever we use their products.

In the USA, consumer law appears to have been effectively privatised – if something goes wrong, you sue.
We seem to be heading that way here too – look at the rise of accident and personal injury law firms.  you can’t even do a quiz on facebook without an advert for them appearing these days! But we are not as far down the personal line as the USA.
Of course, in the UK we don’t really do class action lawsuits.  It’s not the way that our consumer law is set up.
In any case I’m under the impression that class action lawsuits are pretty much a bad thing – that they only benefit those that are able to jump on the bandwagon at the right time rather than all consumers affected overall.  But they are there in the USA because of this weakness of consumer law. 
It’d be sad indeed if we went for this approach rather than have more general consumer law that was able to helpeveryone affected, not just those able to take legal action.

So, am I a happy Maclaren mummy?
Well, in general I like my Maclaren techno XLR – I bought it because it was light for its size, easy to fold, fitted onto a London bus and easily down the aisle (unlike, say, a bugaboo) and formed part of a travel system with its Recaro car seat which was terribly useful when e.g. going for a dental check-up and needing the baby to stay asleep. 
However, I’m on my second XLR already - the first dropped apart in the snow in January this year leaving me to lug it home with my son strapped into a cloth baby carrier around my waist (I’d had it for more than the one year guarantee period and the cost to fix seemed disproportionate in comparison with the price of a new one in a colourway I liked more). 
So I was only on two cheers anyway.
Now I’m feeling a bit overlooked and as if the manufacturer takes my future custom for granted.

Finally, how do I know that my son’s going to be safe?
Short answer – as with much in the world of parenting – is that I don’t. 
No situation with a child is 100% safe (and even if it is physically safe, you’re probably stunting their emotional development by not allowing them life experiences).
So this is really tricky – he loves his pushchair, and climbs in and out, I’ve tried to stop him attempting to put it up by himself but that’s easier said than done unless you stand guard over the pushchair at all times. 
I’ll do my best, of course I will.
But if there’s a little plastic hinge cover that could give me just a little more reassurance and maximise his chances of retaining all his digits, I’d welcome it, please, Maclaren.

Update – apparently trading standards in the UK have said that, as the buggies pass the tests here, there’s nothing that they can do. My point is less that I want trading standards action but that I’d like the little bit of plastic as a matter of goodwill…
Update 2 – and we have it! According to the Times Alphamummy blog, hinge covers are now available…

Penelope Trunk unpacks a difficult issue

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Penelope Trunk didn’t mean to do us a favour.
She may be a famous social network expert (over 20,000 follow her Twitter feed, me included), known for the combination of business and personal tweets she makes, but it’s one tweet combining the two that has caused controvery both in the USA and here in the UK too.
Last week she tweeted: “I’m in a board meeting. Having a miscarriage. Thank goodness, because there’s a fucked-up three-week hoop-jump to have an abortion in Wisconsin.”

There’s been a rush to judge her, and she’s now written a “Comment is Free” article for the Guardian explaining that she’s not a monster.  She already has children, hadn’t intended to be pregnant, was at great risk of having an unhealthy baby, her partner doesn’t believe in abortion and frankly pregnancy and miscarriage screws with your emotions.  She didn’t mean to trivialise miscarriage or indeed abortion.
I’m witholding my judgement on all that.  I think the wording of the tweet came across as callous, but miscarriage messes you up a bit – I guess she deserves the benefit of the doubt.  She certainly doesn’t deserve the death threats.

What she’s managed to do, without really intending to, is to bring the intensely personal grief of miscarriage into the public domain.

Because a miscarriage is intensely personal.  And because it’s personal and tragic, you’re not “meant” to talk about it.
And most of the time you just have to get on with it.  One Evening Standard columnist talks about the choice between passing it off as flu or strapping yourself into a giant pad and heading off for that meeting anyway – as if having to ignore the little tragedy is a price women just have to pay for the chance of being in the workplace.  I tried it – you are not necesarily going to be able to do this and act normally!

And all the while the extent of your loss is obvious to you – the dull stomach ache, the parody of a normal period, stuff that I barely want to recall let alone write about.
Your body responds to being pregnant- for anyone that hasn’t had it it’s rather unpleasantly like the worst PMT you’ve ever had: heightened sense of smell, weight gain, really uncomfortable breasts.
And you can get all that even if you miscarry, continue to have all that even when losing what could have been your baby.
Actually the weight gain is a complete pig of a reminder.  You can’t help but think about Catherine of Aragon, first wife of Henry VIII who is known to have had a number of miscarriages.  And she became bloated and unhappy and Ann Boleyn managed to tempt her husband away from her. I hate the way miscarriage can make your mind work.

And the grief.
It’s the grief that’s hard to explain. What are you actually grieving for?
And that’s where the abortion point comes back into play.  It would be quite hard to explain to people who only really think of a six or seven week old embryo as just a ball of cells that your mourning a life that didn’t get to happen.
You’re grieving for what might have been, upset that all the excitement, the future planning that you’ve done explicitly or subconsciously has just come to an end.
I’m not sure whether medical staff still refer to miscarriage as spontanteous abortion, but some of the older literature does and it seems to assume that comfort can be draw from the fact that it occurs usually because there was something wrong with the developing embryo.  For what it’s worth, no it doesn’t make you feel much better.
Your hormones have also got all geared up for pregnancy and the shock of their readjustment leaves you on the verge of tears a lot of the time.

Then there’s the guilt.
It feels like everyday there’s a new new story about something terrible that you could do to your unborn child that would result in loss or permanent disability.  And when the miscarriage starts you wonder – what if I hadn’t carried that box? What if I hadn’t had that glass of wine/ piece of blue cheese/ dodgy prawn/ slightly undercooked bacon?  What if I’d managed to lose the weight? What if I’d taken the exercise a bit easier, or done a bit more?
What if I’d managed to be less stressed?
So again that conspires against anyone talking about it.

I’ve not really experienced the relief that Penelope Trunk describes, but then she’s over 40 which brings greater medical risk, and already has the number of children she wants.  And although the language she used to express her private thoughts was what really shocked (convention has it that every child should be wanted, miscarriage a tragic loss not something to be celebrated) it is legitimate to feel like that.

Family planning is still a modern phenomemon – in our want-get society of instant gratification we forget that this stuff is not easy.
Even in my grandparents’ generation not every child was expected to live to adulthood, and having ten children was not just about a lack of contraception but an acknowledgement that not every pregnancy  would result in a child and not every child would make it through childhood.  The whole process of conception, pregnancy and raising small children is a real reminder that while we might try to live ordered lives there’s a wild, uncontrollably biological side to our lives and we have to accept and live with the consequences of what happens to us.

At my age and when you have a child of toddler age, you and the other mums you know are likely to be trying for a second child (possibly third if real gluttons for punishment – the quantity of work per child is not simply twice as much but apparently much more even though you know more what you are doing). And, if you get talking about it, you discover just how many people you know that have had a miscarriage.

Penelope Trunk says “it’s part of being a woman”.  I think I know what she means.