Balance

I want my kids to attain all their potential. To that end, I know I need to set high expectations, ensuring they get challenged enough to meet them. On the other hand I have got my mothering instincts wanting to hold their hands, and provide them comfort and encouragement. I find it is very hard to attain a balance between the two. Things get even harder because I believe the point of equilibrium is constantly shifting with the kids ages and abilities. Setting expectations is one thing but at what point am I helping too much, protecting too much and not giving them independence to fail? This often gets clouded.

We have a two story house, and for some reason both my girls have been scared to go upstairs by themselves. After a while it seemed like even if I was upstairs with them, they were scared to go to another room by themselves at night. Then they were scared to sit in the car for a few minutes by themselves, while it was parked in the driveway. If I had to run in to grab my purse, they would come running after me. This was followed by fear to go into the garage alone to fetch something. I had been away from them for over a month, so initially I chalked it up to separation anxiety. I tried to be supportive and comforting by not leaving them alone and accompanying them if they were scared. Two months down the line, it seemed like either their fear was feeding itself or the fear had just become a device to get my attention. Either way it was getting annoying as hell! Finally I declared that I find it ridiculous that they are scared to go from one point to another in their own house and I am done escorting them. This doesn't seemed to have improved things - they now try to get each other to accompany them upstairs. Now I wonder if I swung to the other extreme by completely dismissing their fears,.

Another example, the girls will often declare they are putting up a dance show, give us and then I have to sit and watch 10 minutes worth of twirling, leaping etc. These performances are completely unrehearsed, so they will do a thing or two then stand and think, or argue, about what to do next and then do a couple other things. In the past I dutifully sit through, praise what I like and clap. The performances are getting boring though so at the last show I declared, "if you expect somebody to sit and watch you for 15 minutes, then you need to put more effort in the show. Next time I expect better planning and some advance rehearsals." Did I raise the bar or crush their spirits? I don't know.

Review: Reviving Ophelia

I was hoping to write a review after I was finished with the book, but I am finding it very difficult to read the book so I might as well just write why it is a difficult book to read.

The problems with teenage girls that the author talks about are disturbing and in some way I am glad that I am aware of them so hopefully with my daughters I will be better at spotting signs early. I, however, cannot help but wonder if the author's view of the world isn't completely skewed! She is, after all a therapist, and the girls she is seeing are the ones that have been brought into therapy. I don't think parents would take their kids to a psychotherapist unless the problems were severe, so a vast majority of girls she is interacting with have serious problems. The author talks about one teenage girl that she has seen outside therapy, I think her niece, who still seems 'normal' with a joy for life and then the author comments "I wonder how long this will last". In any case the world the author is talking is about does not seem like the world I live in. Somewhere she says that our perception of what constitutes family is all wrong because we think of family as mom staying home with kids and dad working. I was surprised to hear that because I know maybe one family like that, and know that in today's world that is an exception rather than the norm.

Secondly what I have read till now seems like a big rant against the culture and media - a lot of blame. There seems to be no structure to the book itself. The book is divided into chapters but I really see no difference between one chapter and the other. It is just one description after another of the same problem, and she has not presented any solutions yet, except maybe taking the kid to a therapist like herself.

So overall I am not finding the book enjoyable or useful, and doubt I will ever finish it because I have so many other interesting books to read.

New astrology

As I was once again figuratively banging my head against a wall after another bout of "I'll say no to whatever mom suggests" with my 8 year old (What am I going to do when she is a teenager!!), I thought in my head that if I took her to a specialist she will definitely get diagnosed with Oppositional Defiance Disorder. And then I was struck with another thought from all my readings of Linda Goodman in my teens, that my daughter is an Aries; of course, she is going to butt heads with me.

Has this new wave of labeling people with all kinds of disorders the new astrology of our times? There was a time when we tried to find the clue to a person's personality and ways to works with it with their sun sign. Now we try to do the same by getting them labeled with some kind of "disorder". Does it matter what label we give them - Aries or ODD? Isn't what is more important in the end is how we work with the person and live harmoniously with them?

Too much stuff

I was away for a month for a family emergency (no, nobody died), with kids left in the care of their dad and grandma. On returning home I found all our worldly possessions - toys, books, clothes and the rest of it, that I had sorted, boxed and organized for years, out in the open, strewn on the floor, stacked in shelves, stuffed under tables and beds. I was horrified. I lost it for a few days and I think everyone including the kids were wondering whether I should have just stayed away!

On some reflection I realized that it is not anyone's fault that they could not keep things organized. The problem is that we just have too much stuff and I am convinced, more than ever, that I need to drastically reduce our possessions. I spend too much time taking care of "things" and not enough time caring for "people" and that is plain wrong. For the past year or so I have been extremely wary of buying anything that is going to sit around the house. I give it a lot of thought and only buy what we really, really need. This is not enough. I need to get more aggressive in reducing what we don't need - we need to come down to absolute minimum, and then slowly add high quality thing that we cherish and that last us a while.

I noticed that the only way my girls play with Legos and Lincoln logs is use them as food in their doll and animal games. We invariably end up with little bowls full of Legos and Lincoln Logs, often mixed up with other stuff and I have decided not to spend minute them. Yesterday I packed away Lincoln logs in a box to be donated, but couldn't get myself to get rid of the Legos. I put them in a "save for later" toy box. Does depriving my girls of Legos make me a bad mother?

Paper paper everywhere

My kids like to work on paper, loose paper. We are always swimming in the stuff and it seems wasteful, not to mention hard to manage. For example, they were playing this game with some choices written on paper. I would have torn one sheet into pieces and written a choice on each piece. My kids use a whole sheet for each choice. I am horrified at the amount of paper we recycle each week. When I can I always encourage the kids to take a paper out of the recycle pile, and use the back. But I am not always watching. I have tried hiding our plain paper, tried a rationing system but it hasn't worked. For one, I am just tired of having to police the paper!

As kids we always did all our work in notebooks. I like that idea and I have tried to get my kids a ruled pad for writing and blank paper sketchpad for drawling. I have explained to them many times that how it is easier to save and preserve their work if it is a bound notebook, but it doesn't seem to sink in. Even with a notebook, they tear out a page if they want to work on it! Sometimes they use multiple papers to carry out an idea, then tear those pages out and staple them back together. It is completely insane!

On this trip back to India, kids in my family were on their summer vacation so I had ample opportunity to observer kids at play and amazingly all kids have a 2-3 that they write or draw in! So why is it that my kids only want to work on loose paper whereas the kids in India stick to notebooks?

I think the difference is in how the schools in each country operate. In India, all schoolwork is done in notebooks. That is how it was when I was young and that is how it is now. Kids have a notebook for each subject - mathematics, language, science etc. Sometimes there are separate ones for homework and schoolwork, but all the work for the school year is contained in a handful of notebooks. In the US, kids do most of their school work on loose sheets of paper. For example my daughter has to practice 10 spelling words each week. She has to do multiple exercises with the words every day of the week, and hand in the work every Friday. Here she gets her words on a sheet of paper on Monday, does each exercise on a blank sheet paper through the week, uses both sides only if I catch her and insist on it, staples the week's work and hands it in. I bet if the same exercise was being done in a school in India, there would be "spelling notebook" created early in the year, and the students would do all their exercises in that notebook and hand in the notebook every Friday. Hmm...maybe I should suggest this to the teacher.

Close to nature

I am in India these days and I am fascinated by how close to nature and cycles of nature life is here, even in heavily populated cities. "Being close to nature" doesn't imply taking a walk in the woods and hearing birds - that is much more easily and pleasantly accomplished in the US. What I mean is that here relatively small natural phenomenon affect daily life much more than in the US, where only something big like a hurricane affects daily life. Here is an example.

It is almost mango season here and when I got here trees were loaded with green mangoes, on the verge of ripening - tart and sweet. Then we had a week of flash storms - strong wind and rain lasting only for couple of hours or so every other day. Lots and lots of green mangoes fell from trees. The very next day after the storms the vegetable markets were full of many varieties of green mangoes being sold at throwaway prices and within a few days my mother, my aunts and our neighbors were busily preserving green mangoes in a variety of forms for rest of the year. Tarter varieties were sliced and dried in the sun to be used in dishes that need tartness. The chunkier tart mangoes were pickled in oils and spices. The sweeter varieties were made into chutneys and sweet pickles. I had no idea so many things could be made with green mangoes!

Another example is how well people know when the season of a fruit or vegetable is, almost down to the week of the month. It is very common to hear "Oh you want to eat Dussehri mango. You are leaving on the 5th? It is close. They usually start coming to the market around 10th." or "If you had come two weeks ago you could have had wonderful radishes. Now they are bitter and no good."

I cannot imagine this happening in the US. Yes, we hear of a crop being spoiled but it never ever changes the selection in the grocery store. Store selection is not much affected by the season either except for maybe berries. After having lived in the states for 15 years, I still don't know when certain fruits and vegetables are at their prime. Of course there is the berry-picking season and apple-picking season, but when is the cauliflower-picking season? I should start visiting farmer's markets more often.

Milestones

When our kids are little we track all the little milestones - the first solid food, the first word, the first step. As they got older I stopped paying attention to milestones and hence I thought I'd record the milestones my older kids have reached this year as they turned 6 and 8.

1. My older one started talking to her friends on the phone. Doesn't do a lot but seems comfortable with calling up people she wants to talk to
2. My younger one learned to tie her shoelaces. I bought her shoes with laces, quite accidentally, and she became a pro at it in two weeks. I have never bought my older one tie-up shoes and so she still can't do laces.
3. My older one has gotten more conscious about dressing/undressing in front of others. She also becoming more aware of her body.
   
4. Older one has started doing a little cooking. She makes very nice chocolate muffins from a recipe she got on a Barbie website, I think, and needs almost no help during the process. She can also make herself a scrambled egg with some help.
5. The girls walked to school on their own. OK so they did it once and didn't want to again. They come home from school by themselves too. I go to pick them up and then stand around chatting to other moms. They take the keys and leave, and reach home 5-10 minutes before I do. It is still something that would not have happened last year.

What about your kids? Have they reached any such noticeable milestones?