My husband and I have heard from hundreds of Americans whose lives have already been helped by this historic legislation. One father pushing his daughter in a wheelchair on a tour through the White House saw the President and asked to speak with him. He thanked my husband for making it possible for him to spend time with his little girl, who was dying of leukemia, without fear of losing his job. This is real “family values” legislation.
WE CAN GO much further to allow and encourage parents to be there when children need them, most critically in the earliest weeks and months of life. Children do not arrive with instructions, but they do confer the immense and immediate responsibility of figuring out how best to care for them. Parenting does not all “come naturally,” but ready or not, it comes. The village as a whole owes expectant and new mothers and fathers its accumulated experience and wisdom, and the resources they will need to tackle the important and exciting task ahead.
The World Is in a Hurry, Children Are Not
Many things we need can wait. The child cannot.
Now is the time his bones are being formed;
his blood is being made; his mind is being developed.
To him we cannot say tomorrow. His name is today.
GABRIELA MISTRAL
One Mother’s Day, when Chelsea was about four years old, we were at church in Little Rock. During the children’s sermon, the minister brought all the kids up to the front of the church and asked each of them, “If you could give your mommy anything in the world today, what would it be?” When it was Chelsea’s turn, she answered without hesitation, “Life insurance.” That broke up the congregation, and after the sermon a life insurance agent came up and offered to sell me a policy.
Later I asked Chelsea what she had meant. It turned out she had heard someone talking about life insurance, and she thought it meant that you could live forever. It was one of those “Kids say the darndest things” episodes, but to me it was the best Mother’s Day gift I could have received. This tiny child wanted me to live forever. Isn’t that what being alive is all about—being loved like that?
Of course, children can’t hang on to us forever, nor can we to them. Long before they lose us entirely, we relinquish them to their independence, in a series of surrenders that begins with our surrendering them to the world beyond the womb. Down the road, we surrender them to caregivers, teachers, employers, spouses—to the village, for good and ill.
We are right to think that with each step they take out into the world, they take a step away from us. As children develop, their sense of self unfolds. They learn to respond to their names, recognize their reflections in the mirror, and find their designated places at the dinner table. Learning to walk, kick a ball, or wave bye-bye allows them to explore the boundaries of the self, to discover where they stop and the rest of the world begins.
Initially, they tend to attribute godlike powers to adults, who, after all, provide everything that sustains them. A toddler watching a squirrel run across the yard turns delightedly to a parent and requests, “More?” And every parent knows the helpless feeling of hearing a sick child’s plea to make an earache or a sore throat disappear or kiss away a scrape.
Given the powers they vest in us, it is tempting for us to see our children as extensions of ourselves. Too often, we try to correct our own flaws through them, even to right the wrongs done to us in the past. If you bite your nails, your child had better not bite his. If you are poor at math, you want her to be an Einstein. If you have a wicked temper, you pray that he will be blessed with the patience of Job. This impulse is understandable; we’re only human. But parenthood is not a second childhood, and children are not miniature versions of ourselves. From the beginning, they are individuals who must be respected for who they are and are meant to become.
As children continue to grow and to learn, they develop a sense of their own power. The process of individuation is fascinating for parents to watch, but it can be painful too. What parent hasn’t felt a pang the first time a toddler learning to walk bumps his head or the day a five-year-old starts school? It is difficult not to interpret a daughter’s emerging independence as rejection, not to take a son’s distinctly different tastes as a comment on our own.
It surprised us to discover that Chelsea did not like hot dogs or hamburgers—when we went to McDonald’s, it was strictly Chicken McNuggets for her. That was easy to laugh about, but differences that go beyond fast-food preferences can be disconcerting. Bill, who loves nearly every kind of sporting event, relished watching Chelsea play soccer and softball. When she decided in high school to concentrate on ballet instead of continuing with team sports, he was disappointed, but her mind was made up.
Does inevitable independence mean that children need us less as they grow up? Exactly the opposite. They need us every step of the way. Paradoxically, in order to become their own autonomous selves, kids need us to talk with them, to listen to them, to read to them, to play with them, to teach them, simply to spend time with them.
The moments when a child arrives at some astounding new insight or makes a major leap in development, like forming his first letter or riding her first bike, are hugely pleasurable and never to be forgotten, but they are also far less frequent than many television commercials would have you believe. “Significant” moments arise out of long stretches of togetherness that may look uneventful to us but are crucial to helping children develop, both emotionally and intellectually.
ONE SATURDAY afternoon when Chelsea was about two, Bill was carrying her around and trying to talk to her, but their conversation kept being interrupted by the ringing of the phone. Finally, as Bill reached one more time to answer it, Chelsea, determined to get his attention, bit him on the nose.
Needless to say, he got her message. Kids need our time, and lots of it. In fact, child development experts believe “unhurried time” with a few loving adults is as important to children as good health and a safe environment.
For adults, time has many dimensions. We reflect on the past, worry about the future, and, increasingly, lament how the present flies by. Work spills over into time that used to be reserved for family, leisure, and other pursuits. This is partly because businesses downsizing and other economic stresses have “upsized” workloads, increased commutes and overtime, and wreaked havoc with our daily routines. These changes take an emotional and spiritual toll too. The growing sense that little is stable or permanent in our lives—families, neighborhoods, jobs, or values—clouds our priorities. So many of us have become part of what Secretary of Labor Robert Reich has called “the anxious class,” for whom worrying is a way of life.
We also allow modern technology, with all its “labor-saving” inventions, to render our private time captive to beepers, buzzers, and bells. Instead of working less, now we can conduct business from our bathtubs or our cars. And rather than be ashamed of this, some of us boast, “Boy, I nearly killed myself last week. I worked eighty hours….” Even our nonworking life has become less leisurely and more like work. We can, if we choose, shop or surf the Internet twenty-four hours a day.
American mothers, both those who stay at home and those who work outside it, spend less than half an hour a day, on average, talking with or reading to their children, and fathers spend less than fifteen minutes. Most parents know that this is insufficient. In a 1993 study of working parents, two thirds said they didn’t spend enough time with their children. Another study found that a good portion of the time parents and children are together is likely to be spent watching television, when they relate not to each other but to the set. Mothers who stayed home spent more time watching television with children than those who did not. And for all mothers, time away from the TV was spent not talking but doing household chores.
If we only stopped to listen to them for a few minutes, kids could tell us that we move too fast, for their good and ours. Watch the serenity of a baby taking in everything that happens around her, absorbing the messages of her new environment. Every mom
ent has significance to her.
The present is very present to children, especially young children. They do not recognize, let alone comprehend, demands on parents’ time other than their own. And inconvenient as it is to admit, they don’t need or appreciate “quality time” so much as “quantity time.” That does not mean they require our every waking moment. But there are limits to what we can expect of others who care for them, and there is no substitute for regular, undivided attention from parents.
THE FIRST years of life are not just important; they are more crucial to shaping children than any other time. Even before they can speak, children are extremely sensitive to the messages adults send them. From the way we touch them and our tone of voice when we bathe or change them, they sense whether we enjoy their company, whether we are paying attention or are just going through the motions, whether we are listening.
I remember vividly a little boy who was being observed and treated at the Yale Child Study Center because he was having difficulty relating to people. The psychiatrist treating him was convinced that he had trouble distinguishing between fantasy and reality, a perception the boy’s parents came to share. One day the boy’s father took him out in a rowboat off the coast of Maine. Suddenly the boy began to scream, “Look, there’s a whale, there’s a whale!” “Right, right,” said his father, without even bothering to look. But it turned out there was a whale.
The point of this story, which I refer to as “The Boy Who Cried Whale,” is an obvious one, but it bears repeating. If we bring preconceptions to our relationships with children, we will be unable to hear what they are trying to tell us. If we listened to them more—and more attentively—we would have far fewer angry, aimless, ill-defined adults. And chances are we would be more mindful of how we talk to them.
At any playground, for example, you will find parents hovering around the sandbox, comparing notes on their kids’ progress in walking, feeding themselves, speaking, and toilet training. Children not only develop at their own paces; they have different gifts. A friend of mine with two-year-old twins notices that her little girl can recite the words to simple songs and talk up a storm, while her son, though less verbal, can build towers with blocks and shoot a ball through a three-foot-high basket.
Children who are subjected to constant comparisons may lose heart in their pursuit of a developmental task or abandon it altogether. Instead of quietly celebrating children’s special ways of unfolding, we often make their uniqueness occasions for criticism and comment. Practically from the time children have learned the words to “Itsy Bitsy Spider,” we are already ranking them: “She sings well.” “He’s tone-deaf.” Why not encourage them all? Eventually the ones destined to be great singers will emerge from the pack. In the meantime, other children—even tone-deaf ones like me—may enjoy singing for the mere pleasure and sense of belonging it brings. (When I tried out for Bye Bye Birdie in high school, I was given a part in the chorus on condition that I dance but not sing. I didn’t mind lip-synching; I just loved being part of the show.)
ON A HOT summer day in 1982, Bill and I were campaigning, together with Chelsea, on behalf of his candidacy for governor of Arkansas. We were walking up and down the streets of a small town, visiting with people about the election. Chelsea was holding my hand when I approached a group of women and children and introduced myself. I said to one mother, who was holding an infant, “I bet you’re having fun, playing with her and talking to her all the time.” The woman looked at me in amazement and said, “Why would I talk to her? She can’t talk back.”
Betty Hart and Todd Risley, two researchers who have dedicated their lives to learning how kids learn, have much to tell us about the importance of talking to children. In their book, Meaningful Differences, they tell how they recruited forty-two couples of varying socioeconomic and educational backgrounds, who allowed their babies’ everyday interactions to be recorded one hour per month over the course of two and a half years.
While the families differed in income and educational background, all were stable and functioned well. The poorer parents and less educated parents were just as devoted to their children as more affluent parents, the researchers found. Yet they interacted with their children less, and the families as a whole were more isolated. For example, they did not venture out to places like the zoo or museums as frequently.
The biggest difference among the various households, though, was in the sheer amount of talking that occurred. The more money and education parents had, the more they talked to their children, and the more effectively from the point of view of vocabulary development. At the rate they were going, by age three, the children of the best-educated, most affluent parents would have heard more than thirty million words, three times as many as the children in the least-privileged families.
There were also significant differences in the ways parents talked to their children. On average, the parents with the most income and education tended to speak more affirmatively, conveying frequent and explicit approval with statements like “That’s good,” “That’s right,” “I love you.” Working-class parents generally praised their children, but less frequently, and they more often voiced statements of disapproval, such as “That’s bad,” “You’re wrong,” “Stop,” “Quit,” “Shut up.” Poor parents praised their children even less often and criticized them even more frequently.
Children’s linguistic accomplishments appear to have less to do with the economic and educational advantages of their families than with the ways in which their parents communicate with them. Regardless of material advantages, children whose parents spoke frequently and affirmatively with them had larger vocabularies, as measured at age three. Follow-up testing in the third grade confirmed that the benefits of early language exposure persist, and do not seem to be caused by other factors, such as race or schooling.
This finding has great significance in a society such as ours, where children who start off learning verbal and analytic skills are more likely to be hired for the best-paying jobs later in life. It should give us hope that all parents, whatever their income or education, can offer their children a good intellectual start in life by learning a few simple rules about how to talk to them. Talking not only more but more constructively—painting “word pictures,” telling and reading stories, and making the effort to speak positively—is something every parent can do.
Even in casual daily interactions with children, parents are teachers, and home is a child’s first and most important classroom. For most of human history, in fact, home provided the only schooling children received in survival skills, job training, parenting, and becoming citizens of the larger world. Since the industrial revolution, in most advanced societies the lion’s share of the task of instilling academic skills and knowledge has been delegated to formal education. But parents still play a crucial role.
As always, though, coaching parents is the first step. As less affluent and educated parents become aware that their own children can benefit from the kinds of experiences more privileged children get, Hart and Risley observe, they are more likely to give their children the advantages that are within their reach and to demand help with the “immense responsibilities a technological society has so casually assigned them.”
MOST EARLY teaching and learning takes place in an unstructured fashion. “Play is the learning of childhood,” says Dr. T. Berry Brazelton. But that does not mean the process will flourish without thought or planning. Kids need activities that engage them, physically, emotionally, intellectually, and sensually, not hours spent passively in front of the television set. Young children thrive on play that is spontaneous and responsive rather than goal-driven. Small kids appreciate small things. They don’t need expensive or elaborate toys. Often a cupboard of pots and pans or plastic containers or a sock turned into a hand puppet is enough to fascinate them for hours.
My own mother was terrific at thinking up simple, imaginative activities to do with us. I remember how one time she took a cardboa
rd box, filled it with sand, and spent the afternoon helping me to create a miniature world in it. We put a tiny mirror on the sand to make a lake, stuck in some evergreen twigs to make a little forest, and imagined adventures there for my dolls. Sometimes my mother and I would spend hours having picnics in our backyard and pointing out the shapes we saw in clouds.
The simple activities I shared with her became favorites of mine with Chelsea. We often spent hours in the backyard at the governor’s mansion, stretched out on a quilt and looking at birds and clouds. We also used to lie on our backs in the front hallway when no one was around, watching the dancing rainbows the sun made as it struck the crystal chandelier.
Play continues to provide intellectual stimulation as children grow up. The marathon games of cards, Monopoly, and Clue that absorbed my brothers and me and our friends for long, rainy hours drilled us in basic concepts of math and logic.
An interest in science can be nurtured early and easily too. As every parent knows, children are fascinated with living things. Planting a garden with your child or taking care of a pet teaches valuable lessons and provides equally valuable time together. Dinosaurs are a surefire way of luring every preschooler I’ve ever met to the local natural history museum. Hanging a thermometer and barometer on the back porch can be an introduction to learning about the weather.
What adults consider work can often be made child’s play. Many children find “real” activities just as engaging as toys, and they’re also educational. Setting the table, for example, provides an opportunity to practice counting skills. Waiting for the cookies to come out of the oven is great motivation for learning to read the clock. Reading recipes aloud, step by step, gives older children practice with comprehension, and measuring spoons and cups give their fractions a workout.
It Takes a Village Page 9
