Like everybody, I know a whole lot about a few things, a little about a lot of things, and then next to nothing about everything else. I think it would be fair to say that I have above the average amount of knowledge on such things as disability issues, education, child development, behavioral assessment, and alternative and augmentative communication. I have patchy knowledge in health care. I have a lot of knowledge about caregiving techniques, how illness affects child development, spinal cord injuries, diabetes, children's cancers and organ transplantation. I have a lot of knowledge in the field of rehabilitation, physical and especially occupational therapy. But I don't know a lot about, say, cardiac care or a billion other things in health care.
I have an average amount of knowledge about a lot of basic things I need to know in my culture and community. For example, I know about the branches of government, how checks and balances (supposedly) work, how the electoral college works, and who my senators and reps are, along with a general idea of who most of the other ones are. But I am certainly not an expert in constitutional law. I know some about figure skating, but not as much as a figure skating coach or a world champion. I know something about nutrition because I've studied it some, but not as much as a dietitian.
I know nothing or next to nothing about--God--vast limitless amounts of stuff. Video games? Not a clue. Chemistry? Yeah, something about a periodic table. The history of Kazakhstan? Nothing except that it used to be Soviet. Taxes and investing? Not too much other than how to fill out the 1040 and that a stock is a little part of a corporation that you buy so you can hopefully share the profits.
You get what I mean. Everyone could make a list like this, and everyone's list would be different. In my Perfect Word(tm), everyone would work together to take advantage of each other's knowledge and help each other in their weak areas. We would fit together like a puzzle and be able to create some kind of gestalt based society, where we are all together more than the sum of our own little expertise and ignorances. We wouldn't waste energy trying to put each other down.
All that is an overly long introduction that will allow me the forthcoming rant without sounding like a complete arrogant know-it-all. Disabled people sometimes have a tendency to either completely downplay or completely go overboard talking about their abilities. The downplayers got into this habit by talking to one too many social workers who threatened to take away their food stamps or health care because they weren't disabled enough. The overboarders (such as myself) have gotten into this habit by having to beg and plead for jobs and opportunities where the employer felt we weren't capable enough. I have been accused of talking about my abilities too much. And I am self-aware to say that, yeah, I can do this sometimes. Once I was talking to an OT of my mother's and I said something like, "oh, I have a master's degree in all this stuff." This irritated my sister to no end. After I said it, I realized it just slipped out and was kind of a dumb thing to say, but I also realize how necessary it is for disabled people to go overboard in advertising their knowledge and abilities. My friend, Nik, is the biggest overboarder of all time. I kid him about it. Sometimes I have to remind him that yes, I believe you! I know you can do this already! But I also have to give him credit. He is totally blind and has always managed to find work and opportunities. Some didn't last, but some led to advancement. He can talk his way into almost anything because he is not ashamed to just tell you how great he is.
So now for the rant. This whole issue is a bit of a source of tension between me and my dad. Most of the time it is just a minor annoyance, but sometimes it just irritates the hell out of me. My dad could make a list of his knowledge like the one above. His would consist of trains and steel, welding, electrical wiring and carpentry at the top. (Stuff that is on the bottom of my continuum of knowledge.) Once we were waiting for the light rail and he was examining the track. He told me, by looking at the serial numbers or something, where the track was made, where the steel came from, how much steel per foot the track contained and how much it weighed. (Hence the name, Light Rail) Once, when the train stopped mid-track because it had a problem, he sat there and told me about what the whole problem was and what they were doing to fix it. He is not a stupid man by any means. He reads a lot of news sources and the Internet, he understands maps and map making. He is self-taught on the computer and knows a lot more about networking than I do. He can learn anything he is interested in. Because he has what I would diagnose as aphasia--trouble verbally expressing what is in his head--I think a lot of people in his life thought he was stupid. I never thought that.
However, one area that I think would be near the bottom of his knowledge continuum would be caring for children and knowledge of child development and, I guess what I'm going to call parenting skills. He likes to play around with the kids and this is what I remember most about him. He played around with us, mostly in a rough-housing kind of way, and he was fun. But as far as day-to-day parenting, my mother probably honestly did about 98% of that. Not unlike many other mothers throughout the history of time. Not unlike me.
But my dad dispenses his knowledge and wisdom to me about child-rearing on a daily basis. Now, sometimes the stuff he says is just so funny, I have to laugh it off. But sometimes it just gets on my nerves. Its not that he has ideas about the kids. That's fine, even if his ideas are not workable. I'm okay with his input in general. It's just how he gives it to me, and how he discards as worthless anything I tell him about my feelings about the kids. Luckily, he doesn't have a strong desire to take care of them, and so most things are deferred to me anyway, so it isn't that he is interferring. He's just not all that respectful of me. Basically, he thinks I know nothing. Any thing the kids do well, anything they know or will learn, is either genetically inherent in them, or they learned from TV, daycare, or their healthy start teacher or some other such "expert."
Now this is the guy that can't babysit my kids unless they are sleeping. This is the guy who will sit there while they play with the electrical cords right in front of him and do nothing. He will forget to get them out of their high chairs until they scream at him. This is the guy who will leave my 6-month old baby in a shopping cart alone while he goes two isles over to get something he forgot. This is the guy who let his two daughters, one 3 and one ten months old, escape the house and crawl down the steps and out into the street. (I know that's old, but that story just cracks me up.) This is the guy who causes countless unnecessary crying upsets because he will grab them out of a deep sleep from the car as if they were laundry soap. He has gotten a lot better over time (and the kids have gotten somewhat easier, which has helped.) And he still is helpful in that he is an extra pair of hands and sometimes, a driver. But I always have to keep an eye on him when he watches them. D always jokes that if we leave the kids with my dad that we'll come home to find Aaron drinking a bottle of bleach right in front of him while he sits there and plays with his computer. And if we said, "Dad! Aaron's drinking bleach!" He would say, "Aaron! Stop drinking bleach!" and go back to his computer. My dad doesn't babysit much.
When he does watch them, which is usually when I'm in the house but taking a shower or doing laundry or something, he sits them in front of the TV. Sometimes I will specifically ask him to play with them instead of TV, and always, they end up in front of the TV. Now part of this is just laziness, but part of this is because he honestly thinks that they need to watch TV or they won't learn their letters, numbers, colors etc. All the letters/numbers and stuff they now know he attributes entirely to shows like Sesame Street.
I'm not totally anti-TV. There are ways in which TV is helpful. The kids can see what a herd of galloping horses looks like or an erupting volcano or an ocean full of sea life better than I could show them. They get to see a variet of other people that have more talent in music or dance or art or acting than I could ever display. They get to see how different people live in different places too far away to visit. So I think that TV can be beneficial if it is used in small doses and is monitored for content. Also, I will admit to using TV for a babysitter. I simply have to as a single mother with no back up sometimes or I couldn't get the things done that need to get done. But I try very hard to limit it only to 1/2 hour a day. And it is usually things I have pre-recorded that I feel are the 'best of the best' as far as preschool programming goes. It is also mostly PBS or Noggin because they are commercial-free (although sometimes we do Animal Planet and zip through the commercials.) The commercials on Nick Jr. are ridiculous, and I don't want my kids marketed to at this age (or I try to limit it as much as I can.) I also don't let them wear media on their clothing as much as possible, because I don't like the kids to be walking billboards. (Since we do get second hand and gifts, we aren't totally media-free, but I try to limit it.)
Maybe I am a media snob, but I am backed up by the American Pediatric Association, the NEA, Montessori, Waldorf, and pretty much every educational/child development organization out there. The research is pretty solid and noncontroversial on this. Kids need to be interacted with as much as possible by real life humans in real life situations and too much TV interferes with that. I have said to my dad, "Could you learn welding or how to drive or how to build a computer or how to swim or ice skate by watching TV?" Maybe you would pick up a few things, but you would never master it. Kids will not master reading or language or math or anything by passively watching TV. I know this for a fact with my kids, because we watch the Signing Time videos a lot. And the signs that I use a lot they know. The signs I forget to use (like soap. I never use that sign because I usually have soap in my hands when I think of it.) they don't know. They watch the video that talks about soap and water and baths a hundred times. They know bath, they know water, they know toothbrush because I use them with them. They don't know soap. The research is pretty conclusive here, in my home and in all the other studies that have been done. Since I am just one parent with twins, it is even more important that they get as much interaction with me as they can.
But it isn't just that my father thinks that I'm being a tight-ass about TV. He isn't in the "Aw, it isn't gonna hurt them any" camp. He actually thinks that I am DEPRIVING them of learning because I limit their TV. How are they going to learn the alphabet if they don't watch Sesame Street? I say, they know the alphabet now because I taught it to them! Do you not hear me sing that damned song every day? Do you not see me talk about the letters we see around us all day long? Do you not see that whenever I give them their monogrammed blankets, I have them Identify the N or the A and then tell me whose it belongs to? Do you not see us do puzzles together, read books, play games, take advantage of every learning moment I can find? I honestly don't think he does. I think he just tunes it all out. I don't think he thinks I teach them anything.
The funny thing about this is that when I was teaching kindergarten, we would just groan when we heard that a student was coming in who stayed home with a father all day long while the mother worked. I know that all fathers aren't like this and we weren't being entirely fair, but quite often, these kids would come in having sat in front of endless hours of TV the first 5 years of their lives. And they would be SO BEHIND. They had all the merchandise for Elmo and Bob the Builder, but did not have the fine motor skills to hold a pencil, or know which way to open a book, or speak using pronouns and first person, or all kinds of things like that.
Speaking of merchandising, my dad has bought into the advertising for little kid crap hook, line and sinker. He is an advertisers dream. Naim is really into Dora, most likely because of the Christmas book he got, as I think he has only seen the show once or twice. If you have a kid that is into Dora or Blue or Elmo, you know the pain of walking around a store with him. Dora is EVERYWHERE!!! Advertisers lock into this preschool stage where kids want to identify the familiar and be reinforced for it. Dora is a simple animation that is dressed and looks exactly the same every time you see her. Kids go around the store and are excited to identify things they know out of a sea of the relatively unfamiliar. Dora! Dora! Dora! Twenty times over, right? Then, the parents are supposed to be so enthralled with their kids ability to find the 1/2 inch tall Dora on the side of a box of diapers and think the kid has a cute little crush on Dora. Which leads to giving the kid the item to stop the nagging, which leads to buying the product. I acknowledge Naim in a neutral, downplayed way when he identifies Dora. ("Yes, there's Dora over there. Now lets go get some milk.") My dad totally reinforces this. He gets all excited because they identify her. He acts like it's great and that they should get Dora everything. He (sigh) brings Dora up when they aren't even thinking about her! God! I work to get them to move on from Dora to something else and then he goes and brings her up. When she's not even around. Then for the next 15 minutes, they are frantically looking around TGIFriday's for the missing Dora and annoying me and everyone else in the process. The only thing more annoying than seeing Dora everywhere is to not be able to produce her when your kids think you just told them she is around.
(By the way, when they get to be five or six, the marketers start honing in on their interest in classifying and contrasting similar things. Then starts the collections Collect all four!! How many beanie babies do you have? and on and on till teenage years when its all about what is cool and like their friends.)
Speaking of comparing and contrasting, my dad compares the kids all the time. He gets mad when I tell him not to do this. Naim is the athlete, Aaron is the daredevil. Aaron is a mamma's boy, Naim is his own person. Aaron is smarter than Naim, but Naim is the funny one. Naim is the helpful one and Aaron is the lazy one. It goes on and on. And he really favors Naim. Which bothers me. Aaron does tend to cling to me, but I think part of that is because he is always with me. My dad always spends more time with Naim. Talks to Naim more. Always take him when we go to the car or the strollers or shopping. Aaron just isn't used to being with anyone else but me because he never gets the chance. Naim gets all the attention.
I'm trying very hard to not have my kids go through what my sister and I did. I absolutely think that my parents did not intentionally do anything on purpose, and I don't blame them for this. But my sister and I were constantly compared. Not only that, I think we were kind of systematically pitted against each other. I don't think my parents realized it, but they would bitch about my sister to me, and then bitch about me to my sister when they were mad at either of us. Then when they were mad at the one they were speaking to, they would say nice things about the other one and tell me I couldn't do anything right. And I think they did some of that to her as well, but possibly in a different way. There was always competitive tension there. Why can't I be more disciplined like her, and why can't she be more socially active like me. The underlying theme was that who we were just wasn't good enough. This is one of the things I would like to significantly reduce as much as possible.
Okay, this is my last bitch. I promise. And to some extent, this is just funny. My dad often talks about schools and teachers as if they are the experts and I know nothing. The ironic thing is, is that I AM a teacher. He says stuff like, "We won't know how smart they are until they get to school and get compared to the other kids." Okay. There is so much wrong with that statement I could write another twenty posts about it. But setting aside the philosophical for a minute, I am trained to assess kids. I mean, like I have certifications in several specific batteries of tests. Like about 1/3rd of what you learn in special ed is just classes and classes on assessments, statistics, standard deviations, norm referencing and all that fun stuff. I have assessed kids and written up their strengths and needs on so many IEPs that my eyes bleed just thinking about it. But, according to my dad, I only know how to teach special ed kids and since they are aliens from another planet, apparently, none of that knowledge could possibly transfer to typical kids. You kind of have to know about typical kids as your measurement stick in order to classify kids as special ed. Right or wrong, that's kind of how it works.
I don't want to sound like one of those moms that takes her kids accomplishments as her own. If given the opportunity, my kids would learn with probably anyone who treated them well and interacted with them. So this isn't about me being so great and everything my kids know being because I taught it to them. But y'all are moms out there. You KNOW how much we teach our children. How hard we work to make sure they are talked to, read to, played with, and loved. That they are safe and learn trust and empathy. That they have opportunities to get out in the world and have little adventures and meet other people. You know what you do and how hard you work to do it. Not like you have to have a stupid teaching degree or anything, you know that you've spent hours talking to people, researching the net and the library, observing your kid and constantly thinking and planning and revising and trial and erroring for your kid. I just get tired of hearing how my kids will only learn anything from god-damned Sesame Street or some preschool teacher from a guy who can't even be alone with my kids for 15 minutes before he tunes them out. I have worked hard with them to give them every opportunity to learn all that they know. They are doing great. And they are great kids on their own merits, but they are also great kids because I have worked hard to help them fulfill their potential.
He doesn't see me. He doesn't see anything I do that's of any value to him. None of my advocating or caregiving for disabled people is worth anything to him. None of my training or job experience is worth anything in his eyes. None of the things I do to try and be a nice person is seen by him. None of the long hours and energy and thought and commitment I spend raising his grandchildren mean anything to him. I'm just the kid who never made much money whose living in his house instead of being able to buy one on my own. He doesn't realize that I am giving him something, too. I made a choice to share my life and the life of my kids and even D with him. I wanted him to know my grandkids. To know me, who he hadn't seen a tremendous amount in the previous 15 years. I wanted to help fill a void after my mother's death for him, too. I didn't have to let him into our lives. I chose to because I thought it would be mutually beneficial. He doesn't see that I'm giving him something that is worth much more than cheap rent.
I think people rely on the TV too much. I also think some parents have gotten lazy and don’t want to take the time to teach their children. They just leave the teaching to the schools, which in general are not staffed to meet all the children’s needs.
Posted by: Angela | January 22, 2007 at 04:27 PM
Hi Lisa,
That is a hard situation with your dad. It must be something about men in that generation. They have these filters that don't allow them to ever see or realize the immense power and competence of being a good mother or adult woman. They have to be in the role of teacher all the time and their daughters as the students. Maybe it scares the crap out of him on some subconscious level that you are so competent despite unusual challenges. But i really get how hard it can be when your family and father does not see who you, who you really are and instead project some less powerful, smart, competent person on you. It's worth a rant or two now and then. Good rant!
Posted by: Kathryn | January 22, 2007 at 05:52 PM
According to my mother, when my brother and I were small, people told her we would grow up dumb if she didn't get a tv so we could watch Sesame Street.
Posted by: luolin | January 22, 2007 at 09:05 PM
Sometimes I think Cole thinks I want to deprive Nat of kid culture. She taught Nat about Elmo--as if kids need their parents to teach them about kid culture!
But I get your frustration with your dad. I was so pissed when my mom showed up on my doorstep last week, on 24 hours' notice and then when I cooked her a beautiful dinner, pushed it around on her plate and later talked about how we should have gone out. She likes and trusts restaurant kitchens more than mine! She told me she couldn't have any MSG! I dared her to find MSG in my kitchen.
Then yesterday, I asked her what five fruits or vegetables she'd had that day (we were talking about Nat's diet and favorite foods) and she said "2 kinds of chicken" I said "mother, chicken is not a vegetable." "But it was served with rice!" she insisted. "Mother, rice is not a vegetable," I explained. "Well then, what is it?" she asked, baffled.
She never cooked anything but frozen fishsticks when I was growing up. Fine. I don't care, but I am a frickin' self-taught nutritionist and pretty darned good home cook and saving my family money and feeding them healthy and my child has never had a fever and all she can do is complain about nonexistent MSG.
Bleah. Cole tells me that in my absence, my father compliments my parenting, but I have yet to hear a word of this myself. Do you think your dad might be impressed but afraid that if he tells you, you'll get a "big head" and he shouldn't let that happen, as your father and all...
I think sometimes maybe that's going on with my parents.
Not that it's any excuse to be a jerk. Or that you shouldn't be pissed.
Posted by: shannon | January 24, 2007 at 07:06 PM
Just one data point.My daughter had figured out her colors before she was two, read at a fifth-grade level when she was five, and is about to graduate with a degree in astrophysics. We've never had a TV. All she knew about Sesame Street characters she learned from books. I think your kids aren't missing anything.
Posted by: Molly | January 26, 2007 at 08:30 PM