Making parenting more 'adventurous'

Want to keep your kid up pall night? Have the neighborhood school kids look after your toddler? Don't feel like playing with your kid? It's all good. Other people do it! Maybe not your neighbors, but other people int the world. Just read How Eskimos Keep Their Babies Warm—And Other Adventures in Parenting.

This totally refreshing "parenting" book (I'm so over that concept, this verb—something we do, implying prescribed behaviors and benchmarks....instead of something we are—a relationship) gives snippets of how parents in other cultures deal with things like bed-time, eating habits, socialization, play. It approaches it all in a very open and à la carte manner, with the main idea not being what American parents do wrong, and aren't we so hapless, but just that there really is not one best way to do anything. So much depends on culture and environment.

One of the chapters I enjoyed most were the one on Argentina and small children not having a strict, set bed time. Whenever I hear about kids going to be at 6 or 7 pm (heck, I've heard of kids going to be in the 5:45 range) it just seems so early to me. Granted, we do the 8–830 range in our home, and everyone has their own schedule, but the strictness of insisting a kid be in bed at X hour, missing socializing, and doing real-world things with family and friends, missing life, is just sad.

In fact, it's more of the ethos of kids being more a part of life—going out to dinner with the family, even if its at 9 pm, going to parties and weddings that may last all night and catching a few zzzzs on chairs pushed together—that I think I love about the Argentina chapter.  Some would argue something like "If I tried to do that with my kid, they'd be a holy terror!" And I would just think, yes, probably, but its only because so many kids in America aren't brought up being a part of adult activities. (Uh-oh, I am sliding into the "what's wrong with America" line...it feels so inevitable, though...)

Another favorite chapter were on indigenous islanders (among other non-Western groups) who, though highly attentive to infants, just didn't play with their kids and thought this was a silly and strange thing. Author Mei-Ling Hopgood gives an interesting brief background on the history of play and toys in America that ties in well with the idea that adults playing with little kids is somewhat not natural and was something foisted on us (mostly moms, of course, as we were the ones at home when all this started mid-20th-century). And she tells of how smaller kids get swooped up into the activities of the older kids and learn socialization from their play in groups.

In most of these cases, parents just don't have the luxury to sit around playing with their kids, anyway, because they have work to do. And another great chapter talks about how small children in other cultures are enlisted to provide real and valuable help with family work, whether its grinding corn, doing the wash, gathering water or looking after little ones. It was really eye-opening to read about just how much children can do at ages we would never think of giving them work, 3, 4, 5. The children take pride in their work and it instills competence that many kids in America don't have even in college when they're clueless about how to even do their own laundry or cook for themselves.

I really enjoyed the book's approach of simply laying out these cultural differences as items of interest rather than necessarily practices we need to take on wholesale. I mean, obviously, it's not always possible or even safe to let small kids run loose in our cities and suburbs the same way people who live in rural settings without cars can, but there are definitely elements we can take away and incorporate, if we so choose.

The title portion, on how eskimos keep their babies warm, talks a lot about babywearing, which I love. One of the nicest things about this book is that some of the practices it describes are of the attachment parenting suite—especially the babywearing, and she mentions that that same mamas who send their toddlers off to play with the bigger kids and don't talk much to them were appalled by video of Americans who they felt let their babies cry too long and put them to sleep alone in a separate room. I like the way the book takes these "attachment" practices out of the realm of some academic philosophy on child-raising and presents in a simple and natural way of this is just what these people do.

The ideas in this post continue, moving on to a related, but different theme, on what teens need. I feel like being high-touch with infants and freer with kids as they get older is something I can run with, and so it was interesting, too, to stumble on a post from sex writer Susie Bright responding to the Atlantic article on mothers and careers...