“You just let them cry?” a young mother asked me, sounding so appalled that I wondered if she was planning to report me retroactively to the Children’s Protective Services of D.C. “You let them keep crying? How could you be so hardhearted?”
But those of us who were bringing up our children back then were certainly not hardhearted, content to let them suffer while we selfishly indulged in fun and games. We tucked them in and read them books and brought them a glass, or two, or three of water before declaring that sleep time was starting right now. And if, after that, we hung tough, refusing to rush to their room when we heard their calls and cries, we restrained ourselves on the grounds that it was important to their development to learn to fall asleep at night unaccompanied.
I’m not even claiming that my way is the only right way for parents to handle bedtime. In fact, I do know children who, having spent their first few years either in their parents’ bed or with their mother or father sleeping in theirs, have moved without hassle to falling asleep on their own. But I strongly believed, and my friends believed, and I guess I still believe, that the nonnegotiable, each-in-his-own-bed bedtime is going to be, in the long run, good for our children. And I strongly believe that the nonnegotiable bedtime made raising children easier for us.
Raising kids was certainly also much easier back in our day than right now because these days parents seem to feel they’re always obliged to explain themselves to their kids while we parents felt allowed—I guess there’s no nice way to say this—to be more fascistic. While Toby this morning is wearing a little cute bib unabashedly lettered Benevolent Dictator, the benevolent dictators during the time of our young parenthood were Milton and me. This means we often replied, after we’d told a child to “Do it,” and he, instead of doing it, asked “Why?” with a simple, end-of-discussion, “Because we said so.” And if some child complained that we were doing something we’d said he couldn’t do, we never once hesitated pointing out to him, “That’s because we’re the grown-ups and you’re the kid.”
Again, Alexander and Marla almost never overdo the overexplaining thing, but we see many parents spending—wasting—enormous chunks of time trying to justify their requests and their limit-setting. Like interminably explaining why it’s not a great idea to draw on the living-room wall with Mommy’s lipstick. Like repeatedly suggesting that maybe she ought to let Daddy help her pour the milk since she’s missing the bowl and pouring the milk on the table. Like patiently documenting, perhaps with a few citations from the Geneva Conventions, some of the reasons why he might consider removing his foot from his brother’s face. Now don’t get me wrong: I believe there are times when sitting down with a child to carefully explain why this is expected and that is forbidden can help that child to decide for himself or herself to make the decision to do the right thing. But back in those harried days when I needed Nick, my most challenging son, to stop with his forty reasons why he found it absurd to be asked to wear his rain boots, the only way I could get three children out of the house and into the car pool on time was to say, “Enough now. Just put on the boots.”
Calling on my inner fascist on a regular basis made parenthood easier. So did—and here’s another chance to accuse me of child abuse—the judiciously and appropriately applied smack. I don’t think I ever hesitated to give my children a smack when I thought they needed one, especially when they let go of my hand and ran out into the street right in front of a truck. But almost all the parents of my children’s generation seem to strongly disapprove of smacking, arguing, and they probably do have a point here, that violence of any kind will beget violence. Nevertheless I found the smack, in certain fraught situations, more effective and more efficient than either a conversation or go-to-your-room Time Out, which is probably the most popular tactic these days for conveying parental disapproval. Indeed, I sometimes wonder about the effectiveness of Time Outs, recalling the little girl who, being told that her time was up and she could come back now, replied she was having so much fun playing alone in her room that could she please stay there just a little bit longer.
Actually, Nick’s wife, Marya, who very strongly doesn’t believe in smacking, but who sometimes finds that Time Out doesn’t quite do the job, has come up with what I regard as a clever technique for disciplining a wayward child. When Nathaniel, for instance, is persecuting his little brother Benjamin, Marya warns him a couple of times to stop, adding the second time around that if he doesn’t stop, “There will be consequences.” Nathaniel, who, with great passion, has told his mother on many occasions, “I hate consequences,” may nonetheless find it difficult to stop. And then his mother takes away a toy that he is fond of and puts it in the basement of their apartment building, where it will soon be acquired by another—and, we hope, more virtuous—child.
As a grandma who almost always defers to the child-raising rules of her sons and daughters-in-law, I have given up smacks and rely on Time Outs and consequences. But I still believe that dispensing with the occasional whack on the back of a hand or a backside may make it a little harder today to raise kids.
And another thing: Parents today seem to feel more compelled than I or my friends ever did to enrich their children extracurricularly, committed to transporting them after school and/or on weekends to a smorgasbord of life-enhancing activities. These deliveries and pickups, time-consuming and usually hectic, were of course also going on in my child-raising days, with plenty of parents (mostly female parents) routinely schlepping their children to piano, karate, ice-skating, drawing, ballet, and the occasional mother driving her daughter twice a week, every week, an hour each way, because of that daughter’s love affair with a horse. Even I spent one full year chauffeuring Nick to a Saturday-morning art class under the delusion that he might be the next Michelangelo or Paul Klee. But after that year, I decided that my children could take whatever lessons they wanted only when they were old enough to get to that lesson by riding on a bus.
And although I think that my friends and I tried to provide our children with assorted developmental opportunities, I don’t believe we perceived them as necessities, necessities without which they would be hindered in their climb from preschool to Harvard, necessities without which they would surely be lacking a competitive edge. But more and more parents today, in the hopes of helping their children surge to the head of the pack, are signing them up, ever earlier, for another and yet another enriching activity, urging them to keep practicing, pushing them to excel, engaging in what has aptly been called “hyperparenting.”
With their Spanish lessons, swimming lessons, soccer practice, a class called Music for Aardvarks, our various grandchildren have certainly not been deprived. On the other hand, they have not been hyperparented. But surely the pressure that many mothers and fathers feel today are making them spend more energy and time to pump up their kids than they can afford. Surely the pressure they seem to feel to burnish, before age two, their children’s CV makes it a lot harder to bring up their children.
Maybe it’s also harder because today’s children seem to grow up faster and smarter, picking up information at a considerably earlier age and demanding immediate answers to difficult questions. Not that the parents of my generation didn’t have to deal with difficult questions. But I don’t think we felt compelled to be quite as dutiful and detailed in our replies.
I’ll never forget the day that I was navigating our car through rush-hour traffic when Nick, age six or seven, gave me a poke on my upper arm and asked, “What’s the difference between a Jew and a Christian?” Feeling a little tense from running late and low on gas, not to mention that traffic, I wanted to terminate this discussion fast. “Christians believe that Jesus Christ is the savior of mankind,” I told him. “And Jews believe that he’s just a regular person.”
Nick sat in silence a little while, pondering the wisdom of my reply, and then he poked my arm again and asked, “So you’re saying that right when I was born, already I decided inside my head that Jesus Christ was no
t the savior of mankind?”
To which I replied, “Shut up, Nick. I’m driving.”
Am I proud of this? No, I’m not. Would mothers today respond this way? I think not. Indeed I am convinced that if there were a bumper sticker proclaiming WE BRAKE FOR THEOLOGICAL AND OTHER QUESTIONS, most young parents would paste it onto their car. At the very least they’d all say, “Excellent question!”
Many kids’ questions arise from the fact that they’re living in a far more perilous world than the world in which my friends and I raised our children. As a result they require a lot more guidance from their parents in sorting out what they hear—too much, too soon—about drugs, AIDS, pedophilia, and terrorism. Nathaniel was only four when his preschool teacher announced to his class that, by order of the New York Board of Education, they were going to have a Drug-Free Week, part of which involved having the students stand up and recite an “I’m drug-free” pledge. Arriving home and declaring, “I told the flag I’m drug-free, Mommy,” Nathaniel then required some clarification of exactly what it was he was talking about.
He also needed to understand, on the fifth anniversary of 9/11, when stories about the event were inescapable, why the two towers fell down and if the planes that crashed into the towers made a mistake and if it wasn’t an accident who were the bad guys. Marya, who on that harrowing day was over eight months pregnant with Nathaniel and on her way to her office in the South Tower, explains to me, “I didn’t want to tell him but he asked and I kind of froze and my feeble brain could manage to come up with just one thing—the truth.”
Someday I’ll show Nathaniel a special message tacked on that bulletin board in my office. It’s an e-mail from his mother, dated 9/11/01, and the time is 2:23:48 p.m., the time when Milton and I, quietly weeping in front of the television set and waiting for our telephone to ring, finally received her vastly relieving words, “Have been trying to call you but can’t get through. I am exhausted and sad, but grateful I wasn’t hurt and that, as far as I know, my colleagues are O.K.” Someday I’ll show him that message but for the moment his mother has hastened to reassure him that he shouldn’t brood about future 9/11s, that “we’ll do everything we can to keep you safe.”
Hyla, my Denver daughter-in-law, also wants to keep her children safe but she does not intend to inform her seven-year-old about pedophiles who kidnap, rape, and murder. She was, however, concerned about curbing Bryce’s risky habit of wandering out of her sight in public places like the supermarket or playground. Her solution has been to persuade him that he needs to stay close to her side, “because people who want to have children but can’t may sometimes take other people’s children home with them.” Although she omitted the horror stories underlying her warning—and there certainly seem to be more of them these days—she succeeded in making Bryce a bit more cautious and more fearful as, regretfully, he maybe needs to be.
Tony has had to alert Bryce’s sister Miranda, age eleven, to dangers that didn’t exist when he was her age—the dangers lurking in cyberspace for an innocent young kid with an e-mail address. Miranda has been told to never agree to meet someone who shows up on her computer screen, a someone who may sound like a way-cool girlfriend but in fact could be a grown man with bad intentions. And although she might not yet know or understand a term like “sexual predator,” she is now well aware that things may not be what they seem.
As for O, her concerns at the moment are still restricted to issues that Milton and I addressed with our own three sons, familiar issues like where do babies come from, does everyone die, is there a God. In a recent chat with her mom, Olivia scoffed at the notion that humans evolved from monkeys, insisting not only that God had created man on the sixth day but also that, on the third day, He had created rivers and trees and “all the sidewalks.” Her parents, however, know that any minute now they’ll be having talks with O about some of the tough contemporary matters that some of her cousins are already dealing with.
In a world where the morning papers and nightly news shows, with urgent words and vivid pictures, bring into every home the latest abduction or suicide bombing or schoolhouse massacre; in a world where two-year-old Benjamin is singing (along with a song he hears on the radio) that it’s “hard out here for a pimp/…tryin’ to get the money for the rent”; in a world where, taking a stroll with Miranda in a Denver mall, we pass a sweet-faced teenage girl whose T-shirt reads OVERWORKED AND UNDERFUCKED, children today are going to be exposed to confusing bits and pieces of awfulness, to far more information than my sons were barraged with when they were little boys. Their parents will have to provide some explanations and some answers about matters they wish their children had never heard of. In this world of TMI—too much information, too much difficult information—parents may find it harder to raise their kids.
Toby, out of the bathtub and into pajamas, is sleeping deeply in his crib now. Isaac, soothed by some stories from his daddy, has surrendered to slumber in his big-boy bed. And Olivia, our movie done, is fighting to stay awake as she lies beside me, three pillows propping up her curly head and her eyelids closing, then opening as she groggily fixes her gaze on my upper arms.
“How come you’ve got those wrinkles there?” she asks me.
“What are you talking about?” My voice is cold.
She points to what, despite my ardent efforts at pumping iron, could be called wrinkles.
I briskly reply, “I guess because I’m old.”
“Does that mean you’ll be dying soon?” she asks me.
Why am I letting this child sleep in my room?
“No,” I firmly, very firmly, tell her. “No, it definitely won’t be soon.”
At which point O, exhausted by this profound discussion of aging and mortality, falls fast asleep.
After which I give her a kiss and—what can a grandmother do?—I burst out laughing.
CHAPTER SIX
Other Voices, Other Rooms
Before the Alexander Five moved into our house for the summer, they considered renting a house of their own instead. “You can’t do that!” I protested when Alexander mentioned this alternate plan on the phone. “I’m going to write a book about this experience.”
On the other end of the phone I heard—dead silence. I waited. The dead silence went on, and on. “Are you still there?” I finally said, and Alexander replied: “You’re planning to write about us? You’re writing a book about us? And you’re not even asking us if that’s okay?”
On my end of the phone there was—dead silence. I was shocked into silence by what he had to say. I had spent almost all my professional life writing about my family. And I’d never asked for permission along the way. I finally found my voice: “But I have always,” I told him, “written about my children.” To which Alexander quietly replied, “Mom, we aren’t children anymore.”
A number of follow-up conversations ensued.
We eventually agreed that though he and Marla had the right to not be written about, I’d write the book, they would read it, and if (without censoring it) they gave me permission to publish it, then and only then would I try to publish it. As I’m tapping out these sentences I still don’t know what their final word will be.
Meanwhile, I decided that I’d acquire a little perspective by talking to people who’ve done what we are doing, people who had invited (or allowed) their grown children and grandchildren to live with them. Finding families who’d been involved in these three-generation living arrangements turned out to be a lot easier than I’d expected.
Grown kids (and their kids) moved in with their parents because they were switching jobs or looking for jobs, or renovating a house or trying to find an affordable house, or saving up money. Some stayed a few weeks; some stayed for well over a year. All of the families I talked with survived the challenges of living under one roof, and everyone is still speaking to everyone else. But while some sailed smoothly through days and weeks and months of intensive togetherness, others have had a significant number of…issues.
These issues sometimes arose over differing expectations or personal habits or child-raising theories. These issues sometimes arose because when grown children move back home, their relationships with their parents are subject to change. And these issues sometimes arose as a result of the inescapable reality that some family members are going to be less accommodating, less adaptable, and significantly less lovable than others.
Surely one big reason why things are working out well with the Alexander Five is that all of them—five for five—are so easy to love.
But “lovable” is not a word that would ever cross Allison’s lips when describing the three weeks, the “truly interminable” three weeks, she has just finished spending (or, as she puts it, “enduring”) with her younger son, his wife, Gayle, and their “spoiled rotten” daughters, four and nine, who—while her son was in between jobs and Gayle was on vacation—came up to stay at her summer place in Maine.
Gayle, who works long hours at a high-priced, high-profile advertising agency, feels guilty, according to Allison, about having so little time to be with her girls. As a result, when she’s with them, their time together must be wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, which translates, Allison says, into “no limits, nothing expected, nothing denied.” They never say “thank you”; they call their parents rude names; they eat whatever, whenever, wherever they please. And, as Allison documents, they respond to even the smallest disappointment by throwing extremely loud and lingering tantrums.
“You cut my toast in squares and I wanted triangles.”
Gayle says she’s sorry and toasts a new piece of bread.
It isn’t as good as the first piece. Daughter has tantrum.
“I told you my yellow sweater and you brought me this stupid ugly striped one instead.”