A Facebook memory popped up recently that reminded me of a quote from a parenting book that I read a while ago. This quote seems more relevant now than ever. The source of this quote is How Toddlers Thrive:
"Remember, it's not your job to make your child happy. ... The truth is this: No parent can make his or her child happy all the time. Children know how to be happy. What they are not so good at is handling the hard times. This is where you, the parent, come in. Want happiness? Our job is to set them up to handle life more and more on their own, and to gradually let go. At the center of this is helping them deal with life's hurdles. ...By supporting them to handle negatives in life--negative feelings, disappointments, rejections, errors, and setbacks. That is the biggest gift you can give your child...From there emerges happiness. ...The catch is that a child can only have this competence if we let them face the tough times...and help them through." I wanted to reflect a little bit about this, because recently I have noticed that my son is just on an emotional rollercoaster. Around his birthday, he really wanted a birthday party. My husband and I didn't think it was going to turn out well, since he had been in and out of school all year (due to the pandemic) and has not had steady in-school friendships as a result. But I can't protect him from social disappointment forever, right? He really wanted a birthday party because we had done a just-us-at-home celebration for him in 2020, and he was willing to take the risk that maybe only a few kids would come to his party. We ended up hosting an outdoors party at a neighborhood playground, and it went fine, even though I was nail-biting for two weeks after sending out the invites, because we were only receiving No's in return. It was not a birthday rager, but my son was happy to have a few of his classmates and a few family friends come to celebrate with him. He even wrote out party invitations to his stuffed animals and told me that "the stuffies RSVP'ed and said they would definitely be there!" And, in the end, he told me that he had a great day because his friends came and made him feel very special. Then, my son had a real heartbreak when his beloved grandparents left to return home after a month of staying with us this summer. I don't know when the next time will be that we could see them, because we don't feel comfortable flying until the kids are both vaccinated. But, I held him multiple days and let him cry in my arms, until he started to feel better. We read a book about a grandma (The Most Beautiful Thing by Kao Kalia Yang), and talked about how even when grandparents are not physically next to us, the memories that we made with them stay with us and become a part of us. I talked to him about how, even though my mom has passed, she is still with me because I have so many wonderful memories of her, and that while his grandparents are far away, we can look at photos and be reminded of those special times he spent with them. I helped him print out some photos, let him take charge of updating our family album, and I hung up in his room a photo of him holding hands with his grandparents, so that he can look at it often and be reminded daily of how much they love him. The day that we switched my son to a new gymnastics class (shortly after he turned 5, he aged out of his previous gymnastics class), I was nervous about that transition. When we took him to the new gym location, we learned that because of their lack of windows and COVID precautions, they do not allow parents to hang out and watch the kids. So, it was a drop-off-and-see-ya-later situation. Given that it was a new class, a new coach, and a new location, I did not know how it would go, but my son was totally fine in the end. Currently, my son is undergoing a lot of emotions as his friends are transitioning out of the pre-K class at different points in the summer. It is mixed, I am sure, with anxiety about Kindergarten. I have not talked to any parent who has an incoming Kindergartener, who is not nervous about the transition, but I think about how the Kindergarten teachers are pros at managing this transition, and how much personal confidence my son is going to gain after managing this transition (which will take a little while, I am sure). As people learning to find themselves, our kids need this type of challenge to help them grow beyond what is already comfortable. I have to remind myself that it is good -- and necessary -- for them to be challenged this way. Without smaller challenges, they cannot gain the confidence that they need to tackle bigger challenges. On a related note, I recently read the book Simplicity Parenting by Kim John Payne, a long-term counselor and Waldorf educator. I love his book and his podcast by the same name, both of which advocate for simplifying our kids' lives (fewer activities, fewer toys, less screen time, less adult news, narrower set of choices, stricter daily rhythm, and fewer books even!) in order to give their brains a chance to self-heal and to grow at an appropriate pace that maximizes their mental health. When our kids feel challenged, his podcast and book offer many practical ways to ease the tension/balance between what is asked of the kids and what they are able to give. I highly recommend it. As a parent, what do you worry about? What part of those worries can you reframe as necessary and beneficial for your child's growth?
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This fall, my older child is headed to Kindergarten, and I have many feelings about this! First and foremost, I am excited for him, because this past year has been unpredictable in so many ways, that I hope Kindergarten will finally bring with it some more predictability and stability in friendships. I am also curious as a parent to see how he will respond to adversity and setbacks in this transition. For most of his life, he has attended the same daycare -- from about 14 months old to now, age 5. This past year, however, has shown us that he has a resilient side to him. During COVID, we have had to adjust his routine and school attendance patterns many times based on local public health data, our visits with his grandparents, and his therapy needs; he has bounced back from the many changes and disruptions by remaining mostly cheerful and optimistic. I am sure Kindergarten is going to hold challenges for him, but I feel hopeful that he will grow from those challenges and become a stronger person for it.
As a parent, of course I also have some anxieties as well. Mostly, I am still trying to figure out which elementary school my child should attend. Our district has a system of lottery-based enrollment into specialized public schools, as well as a public neighborhood school where you are guaranteed a seat. We are currently on the wait list for a particular specialized (projects-based) school in our neighborhood, and it seems quite likely that we will receive an offer by the end of the summer. I feel fine with sending my child to either that choice school or our neighborhood school based on their programs alone, but I have heard some anecdotal stories that indicate that my son may face some racial prejudices in these schools. (What parents from the local families of color have told me is that he will almost certainly have those negative interactions no matter where he goes, and the administration is either going to brush my concerns under the rug or be blatantly racist themselves. Such is the deep systemic issue of segregation in our city.) Another major issue I have learned about our district (and this is common knowledge) is that some essential academic services are funded by the PTA. The state and local governments chronically underfund public education (due to insufficient local taxation), and so every year, each school's principal creates a "wishlist" for the PTA that might include things like: hire a counselor and an art teacher. The local PTA for that particular school looks at the list of requests and approves what they think they can fundraise to support, and that is how the budget becomes complete for the year. This system is horrifically inequitable, because as our local elementary school has a PTA budget of around $250,000 per year, an elementary school in another part of the city that is predominantly made up of families of color could not consistently raise enough funds to have so many on-going programs and benefits for the students. On paper, each school is funded the same amount per student, but in reality, resources vary greatly from pocket to pocket in this huge district. What I have heard parents of color phrase it as is that they are put into the impossible position of choosing: Do I want my child to grow up in well-resourced, overwhelmingly white, schools that will subject them to regularly occurring racist experiences, or do I want my child to grow up in a diverse neighborhood with under-funded schools? I know this is not a problem unique to our city, but it breaks my heart that the opportunity gaps run so deep. And yet, another problem is also that the public schools in the more affluent parts of town are in competition with private schools. Our city has a very high attendance rate of private schools (22% of all K-12 students), and many of these parents who are donating money to the local PTA to make sure their kids receive the best-funded public education do not want to share that PTA pot with schools in other pockets of the city. At a certain point of financial contribution, the wealthiest of those public-school parents will start to consider pulling their kids out of the public schools and paying for a private education. The odds are stacked against equitable public education funding in our on-the-paper "progressive" city. This past year, as I was looking for opportunities to head back to work, I also looked at working in public versus private schools. When I left my teaching job two years ago, I was sure that I would end up in a public school next, but a pandemic and a steep public school budget cut later, I was scrambling to find any job available. In the end, I took a private school teaching job, with lots of questions about the role that I play in furthering the inequities of this broken system. (I don't regret my choice, because months later, I still have not seen any public school jobs be posted in my area of expertise, and I have been keeping a fairly close eye. That honestly is crazy, because generally there is a lot of demand in my area. I feel relieved that I had made the right choice for our family to take the private-school job that came up, when it did.) In the fall, our baby will be starting daycare for the first time (after being home for the entire pandemic thus far); our big kid will be starting Kindergarten; I will be teaching at a new-to-me school and having my first driving commute in years; my husband will need to manage the dropoffs of both kids in the morning via bicycles, since we only have one car; I will be picking both kids up and dumping big kid's bicycle in my car everyday. It will be a lot of changes! I am feeling intimidated just thinking about the huge changes ahead for our family, but I also feel so fortunate that we have been able to take so much family time this past year to slow down, breathe, and be with one another. I wanted to give a little update on how I talk to my son about math at home, since I realized that the last time I had a post about math was before Christmas. This post is mostly for me, to remember what I did with L when my daughter becomes a similar age, but maybe this would help someone else as well. 1. For many weeks, we did division math using snacks. After Chinese lesson everyday, I would hold out a handful of yogurt puffs to my son, and ask him, "If you split this evenly with your sister, then how many can you get?" I would throw him any number even or odd, up to about 8. Let's say I hold out 7 yogurt puffs, then he would look at it and say, "3." To see if he's just guessing, I would ask, "If you take 3, then how many would remain?" Sometimes he would answer incorrectly at first, and correct himself when I posed the follow-up question. (If there is a remainder, that extra puff always goes to me.) Recently, I also occasionally would throw in a division by 3 problem, but only with 3, 4, or 6 puffs. ("If you, your sister, and I were to split this evenly, then how many can you each take?") What I like is that these problems are real, they are quick, they give us daily practice, and my son is practicing visual division, which helps him to decompose small, single-digit numbers into parts visually. 2. On Thursdays, we keep our son home because he has feeding therapy and OT. On those days when he is home with me, my son often says that he wants to stay up a little extra after I put his sister down for a nap. (He does not nap anymore, but he does quiet time still. He tries to get out of it if he can, so I've leveraged this to my advantage to get him to do some math.) If he wants to delay/shorten quiet time by an hour on those days, then I ask that he uses part of that time to do math with me. He enjoys this! I rotate through what we do -- we've done subitizing review with 10 frames (like I put down a small quantity of colored magnets, then uncover it quickly for him to see, then cover it back up and ask him how many he sees and why). We also use the cards Tiny Polka Dots quite a lot. We use them to play "War", and I ask him questions like, "Who has more?" "How many more do you have than me?" "If I want to have as many as you, how many more do I need?" I like the cards because they are a mixture of different representations -- some cards have numbers on them, some have colored dots arranged in different forms, some have dots filled into ten frames. I also like varying up what I ask him during each hand, so that he is constantly practicing hearing language that signals either addition or subtraction, without explicitly saying "plus" or "minus". 3. Recently, his class in pre-K started doing some addition and subtraction. I decided to reinforce this at home, but to really focus on the process instead of the answer, because I worry that at school he may receive a different message. Instead of doing division problems like we used to do with the post-Chinese lesson snacks, I have been giving him small numbers at a time (any number between 1 and 4), and asking him to give me the running total of how many yogurt puffs he has eaten. We just started this exercise this week, and I can see that he understands counting-on, but needs some more practice for fluency. (No problem, I love that it's something we can practice together.) I always ask L to justify each answer to me, even when his answer is correct. I try to suspend feedback about whether he is correct or not, until he has justified his answer with a verbalized process. Yesterday, when we were doing this, at one point he had already received 13 yogurt puffs, and I was going to give him another 3. I asked him how many that would make, and he said 17. Instead of saying that he was wrong, I asked, "Okay, how did you get that answer?" When he started to explain, I pointed out that he had skipped 14 in his counting sequence, so he re-counted and changed his answer to 13+3 = 16 without me telling him that 17 was originally incorrect. Subsequently, I asked, "Okay, so now that you have had 16 puffs, how many more will I need to give you so that you can have 20?" He initially said 5, but again, in the process of explaining himself, he changed it to 4 without me pointing out any error. This is the power of asking kids to articulate their process! They can and should do it as soon as they start to learn early math (and they should do it throughout the rest of their math career). Accuracy does not matter as much as the practice in articulating their thought process. 4. I also want to encourage my son to see math as an open-ended endeavor, while still practicing decomposing numbers into smaller numbers. (I just feel like decomposing numbers is a really good number sense practice at this age.) So, today I asked him, "If I want to give you 5 yogurt puffs, then I can give you first how many, then how many?" He was happy to say, "Oh, I have an idea. You can give me 2 and then 3 puffs." I obliged. Then, I asked him, "Now, if I want to give you 7 yogurt puffs, then I can give you first how many, then how many?" He thought for a bit longer, then said, "5 and 2!" I liked that, but I wondered if he could see that 7 could also decompose into 3 and 4? So I asked him, "Okay, and I also want to give your sister 7 puffs, but I just gave her 3. How many more should I give her?" He thought about it for a little bit, and then told me 3. I said, "Okay, so if I give her 3 and 3, that makes 7?" He said, "Oh, no, 4! 3 and 3 make 6, so 3 and 4 make 7!" I love this dialogue, because I can see that he is thinking about number relations flexibly and creatively. 5. My son and I just started looking at the (Western) abacus again. A little while ago, we practiced putting two-digit numbers on the abacus. Like if we had the number 32, he learned that it means 3 tens and 2 ones, so he would move 3 rows of 10 beads over on the abacus, and then on the fourth row count out two more beads. Yesterday and today, we brought that notion back in talking about percentages. We have an Amazon Echo at home, and it always reports the likelihood of rain showers via percentages. My son, who has not yet turned 5, cannot understand what that means. I realized though, that I could just show him visually on our abacus. First, I move all the beads to the left, and tell him that is 100%, which means that it will definitely rain. Then, I move all the beads to the right, and tell him that is 0%, which means that it will definitely NOT rain. Then we count out 88 beads to represent 88%, and I ask him if that looks like it's more likely to rain or not? He is able to visually see that more beads are on the "rain" side than on the "dry" side, which means that on Sunday it will very likely rain. Not bad for a percent visualization that is friendly to a pre-schooler?? 6. There have also been the one-off talks about fractions at our house. We try to normalize using the terms "half" and "quarter" when talking about food. Our son knows what a half is (from talking about bagels and pizzas and such), and he also knows that "a half of a half" is a quarter. So the other day, while eating leftover sausages, I first gave him half of a sausage. Then, he asked for more, and I asked, "Do you want another half sausage or just a quarter sausage this time?" He said, "A quarter." I took out the full sausage and asked him where he thought I should cut it, in order to make a quarter sausage. He was pretty spot on! After that quarter though, he wanted another quarter. And then afterwards, he wondered who had more sausage -- he or I? I talked to him about how 1/4 + 1/4 + 1/2 make a whole sausage, which was also how much I had eaten. So we had eaten an equal amount! That was just a passing discussion, but I do try to go with the occasion and bring up math wherever possible.
7. A while ago, my son's school was doing a farm learning unit... I don't really know exactly what they learned about farms, but it inspired me to ask L if there were two cows and a chicken on a farm, then how many feet would there be? My son enjoyed thinking about it and explaining to me how he knew that it was 10 feet. Or, another time when he asked me if I am old enough to die soon. I said, "Well, I hope not! Actually, my grandparents lived until their 80s, and I am almost 40. So, that means I might have another 40 years to live! 40 plus 40 equals 80, because 4 tens plus 4 tens is 8 tens." My son was so tickled by the fact that 4 tens and 4 tens would make 8 tens. (It makes even more sense in Chinese, because "4 tens" is literally how you say "40" and "8 tens" is literally how you say "80." It helps to be bilingual sometimes.) Or, when my son, my husband, and I split two pieces of Twizzlers on our road trip, I talked to my son about how we first split the first Twizzler into thirds, and we each had one "third piece." Then we did the same with the second Twizzler, so in the end, we each had two "third pieces" (or 2/3 of a Twizzler). Conceptual math can be everywhere and it can all be so relevant to young kids! We just have to look for those opportunities. 8. We have not done any numeric writing practice for a long time, and only ever did a little bit, because I feel like writing is one of those things that is easier to learn once your hand/fine motor develops a bit more, but a couple of weeks ago, my son was so keen on writing and drawing various things, and one of the things he produced was a hopscotch that had numbers from 0 up to about 21. It was so cool to see him producing digits after not having worked on them for so long! (Even though he mixed up the order, like he would write "fifteen" as "51". I mentioned it casually at some point, but didn't stop him from writing whatever he wanted, because the point was more that he was taking ownership of this learning-oriented work during play time and produced it with so much pride and joy, which was so cool to observe.) Even though we have done mostly a mishmash of math stuff since L returned to pre-K, I feel pretty good about my son's math readiness for Kindergarten. I head back to work this fall to teach high-school kiddos, but I know that I will still keep a close eye on his math development. I am excited for him to have daily math time next year, and for math learning to be more social for him!!! I know I have written already about growth mindset, but I feel like I am constantly learning about it from different angles. In my own life, for sure, but also through my children's eyes. One thing that I am a firm believer in is that it is very hard to teach kids things like growth mindset and resilience in a vacuum. In order for kids to learn how to foster growth mindset and how to maintain resilience, they must actually feel challenged. The greater that challenge they have to overcome, the more of an opportunity we have to help them shatter existing negative self-beliefs.
When we first started feeding therapy, and I noticed my son having some traction right away with the exercises, I idly wondered whether learning to eat new foods would help him in building a growth mindset in other areas of his life as well. Then, we started OT and (more recently) working with him actively on his fear of stairs, and in the past week, I noticed some amazing changes about him. The first is that he has been trying lots of new foods -- almost every couple of days, he is trying a food that is slightly new to him, and usually on his own accord. Even though there are plenty of things he still won't eat, he has started eating lots of foods with mixed texture and 3 or 4 ingredients mixed together, which he used to only eat in de-constructed form. And, amazingly, his risk-taking does not stop there... A few days ago, my son suggested that I could ride my bike, carrying his little sister, and he could ride his bike behind me, and we could head to a little green area 1.25 miles from our house. To get there, he would have to ride in the (mostly residential) streets, because I couldn't ride carrying his sister in the street and keep an eye on him on the sidewalk. I was a little nervous, because I didn't know how it would go, with me carrying a toddler and keeping an eye on a new rider behind me. But, since it was his idea completely, I didn't want to discourage his enthusiasm. We did it! It was an adventure! The roundtrip distance was 2.5 miles, and that was the longest distance he had ever ridden in the streets. It was a nice adventure for all of us, and I was impressed that my son was the one who suggested the trip, and that from beginning to end, he did not complain or express any negativity. My son has always been extremely resistant to drawing. This has always been a concern for me, because drawing is not only an emotional outlet, it is a way to practice being creative, to practice risk-taking, and to communicate our understanding in non-verbal ways. To encourage him to draw, we even had some family crafts nights, so that he could have some positive associations with the act of drawing. But, maybe seeing us drawing actually discouraged him from drawing on his own? I don't know, but that is one theory I have read in a RIE parenting group, offered by Janet Lansbury herself. Anyhow, this week I have been super excited to see L draw a variety of objects via chalk, on our sidewalk! He drew a steam train, an octopus, a spider, a backpack, a bumble bee, a rainbow, a bike trail, balloons, and some stop signs. I try very deliberately not to give him feedback on his drawings, because I don't want him to feel self-conscious at all in his budding hobby. I am just so thrilled that he has immersed himself, on two consecutive days, on drawing chalk on the sidewalk and really seeming to be "in the zone." Today, I took L to his first gymnastics class ever. Since he has physical anxieties on the playground and still some anxiety about descending stairs (although they are getting so much better), my husband and I felt that we wanted to make a conscious effort in working with him on gross-motor development. I took him last week to an indoor playground at our local gymnastics academy, and he loved it. (He had been there previous to COVID, but this was the first time going in well over a year.) When I looked into wait-listing him for gymnastics classes, I saw that one weekday introductory class at a different gym actually had an opening. I immediately jumped on it, with plans to take him there through the end of the summer, if he is interested. (The program charges month-by-month.) Before the class today, my son was extremely nervous, and told me that he definitely would not participate in the gymnastics class. His tone was such that he was looking for a fight. Instead of giving him a fight, however, I said, "You are feeling very anxious about the class. I understand how you feel, and that is totally normal, because it's new and new is always scary. Here, I will take you there and you can just check it out. You don't have to do anything if you don't want to; you can just sit there. I just want you to check it out." I also reminded him that recently, he was super nervous to go indoor-climbing with his dad, but ended up enjoying it (with lots of gummy bear bribes). A little while after, shortly before we left for the class, L told me -- to my huge surprise and trying-to-act-very-casual delight -- that he had decided he would participate in the gymnastics class today. After we got to gymnastics, I could tell that it was very challenging for my son. He is such a bright kid in many ways, but he is usually awkward in navigating physical tasks. He was visibly (and audibly) super nervous about all of the tasks, but he participated 100% and tried so hard to do every drill. He even climbed up a steep (almost vertical) A-frame that was almost 5 feet tall and climbed down on the other side, all by himself without the coach nearby, which I would never, EVER have imagined him to do today. This kid is a rock star!!! My husband was not there to see his risk-taking, but when I relayed what had happened at the gym, we agreed that it is a glimpse into the kind of learner that our son is -- he doubts himself almost always, but he will still give things his best shot, and in that process, he can sometimes shatter his self-doubt and surprise himself. It made me wonder if all of the work that we have been doing with him across eating and OT are starting to pay off in other areas of his life, like I had hoped? I don't really understand child development and psychology, but if those therapies are the reason for his change and willingness to take on new risks and experiences, I am just so hugely grateful. The past few weeks of parenthood have been a bit of a rollercoaster. During 2020, my son developed a sudden fear of the stairs in our house. He had trouble descending the stairs without help. Since this coincided with our keeping him at home during COVID, we chalked it up to mental health impacts from being kept at home. (Our friends' kids had potty regressions around the same time, so we felt like all kids were understandably struggling with COVID disruptions.) I worked with him to climb and descend the stairs from the bottom, first just 3 steps and back down. Then, 5 steps and back down. Then, 7 steps... etc. until he was able to mostly get down the steps by himself. (Our stairs have 14 consecutive steps, straight up and down without spiraling.) He was still nervous and would hold the handrail with both hands, gingerly taking each step. We figured it was a fear that might ease up over time, as he would need to take the stairs everyday to get out of our townhouse. When we finally sent him back to school (around October 2020), we felt sure that his remaining fear of the stairs would naturally dissipate, but it did not. It lingered, until recently I noticed that he was so scared of letting go of his second hand on the railing, that he could not carry anything down the stairs with him. If he wanted to carry something small, he would throw it down a few steps, onto the middle of the stair well, and then descend half of the stairs with both hands on the rails, and then pick up the object.
When I mentioned to my son that we would begin to practice carrying an object down the stairs, he felt panicked and actually regressed even more. One morning soon after, he was unable to walk down the stairs at all. We had to carry him down the entire set of stairs a couple of times that morning, just to get him to school. (I thought about keeping him home that day from school, but we also did not want to disrupt his routine so much that we created an even bigger problem in the long run.) That day, I called his pediatrician and left a detailed message, but did not actually get in touch with them for a few days (they have a pretty frustrating system of leaving phone messages, no direct line that can go through to a nurse). That day, without having heard from his doctor, I decided to try something new on my own. After doing the same practice of walking up and down the stairs in small chunks, I tried asking him to stand with me on the top step of the stairs (eg. one step down from the very top) and to sing a nursery rhyme with me. I wanted him to sing, because it gives him a somewhat lengthy exposure to being in that scary part of the stairs, while breathing in and out to help him stay somewhat relaxed. (And he loves singing, so it was a good way to distract him.) That first day, we sang three or four times during different parts of the day -- when he came home from school, before nap, after nap, and before bedtime. By the end of the day, he began to be able to sing on the top step while patting his second hand quickly on the hand rail (still holding on to the rail tightly with his first hand). Over the course of the next few days, we would repeat this exercise multiple times a day, and he began to be able to take his second hand farther and farther away, high-fiving me and waving at me and even laughing at my fabricated fart sounds interleaved into the nursery rhymes. We kept doing this exercise, and I could see that my son was feeling more and more relaxed going down the stairs each day. Today, we started practicing singing on that top step while he patted both hands on the hand rail, and he was able to let go of the hand rail completely and give me a double-handed high-five while singing. After singing, he casually walked down the stairs, like himself in pre-COVID times. Tonight, he remembered at bed time that he had forgotten his toy airplane upstairs. I casually asked him to go fetch it himself, and he was at first resistant. But, with a little nudging, he went upstairs to get the airplane and came down the stairs with no issue. I stayed inside his bedroom to wait for him, to show him that I felt confident he could do it without me there to even watch him and cheer him on. Once he came downstairs, I gave him a high-five and felt so proud of this kid for pushing through so many times. What I learned from this experience and from the experience of working with my son on feeding therapy (and from working with my daughter on early-intervention physical therapy to address torticollis) is that our kids' brains are very plastic. They can learn, and more importantly, they can un-learn ways of thinking and being. What feels to them like a huge wall of impossibility can be taken apart, piece by piece. It takes trust and joy to make that happen, and when it does, it is the greatest lesson on growth mindset. It has not been an easy year, but I feel so proud of my son for having made strides in the things that are the hardest for him. (Next steps: we signed him up for a very basic gymnastics class, and my husband plans to take him rock-climbing semi-regularly to help him to work on gross motor skills. They went together for the first time yesterday, and although my husband had to bribe our son with a bunch of gummy bears, my son was able to push through his fears and do some successful climbs at the end -- and enjoyed it! We are also working with his OT on simple daily exercises that we could do at home to improve his balance and comfort on un-even surfaces.) I love this kid to the moon and back, and we feel SO proud of him for trusting us deeply and constantly working with us to push through his self-doubts. I read somewhere that we cannot guarantee our kids a happy life. In fact, it is almost guaranteed that they will have many obstacles that we cannot foresee, and it is our job to teach them perseverance, so that they will be prepared when the time comes. Parenthood is such an amazing journey, and I feel so privileged to already see how my kids are both able to persevere on their own terms. This week marks the end of early intervention services for my daughter! I feel so excited. By all measures, she is thriving developmentally. (She still has anxiety around strangers, but I think that is mostly because of COVID and the fact that she has been at home with me instead of in daycare.) It has made such a tremendous difference in her skills and confidence.
When I told my son that his sister is ending her therapy services, he said to me that he plans on continuing feeding therapy and OT forever. That made me laugh, because I thought that he hates both of those services, based on his poor behavior during the sessions. Whether or not it's just him saying it in the moment, that's a good sign that he finds some tangible value in those therapies, right? (And he has already come a noticeable way in growing as an eater!!) During COVID isolation, the person that I worried about the most was my dad. Since he lives alone in L.A. and we are fairly COVID-cautious, we had not been able to visit him for well over a year. Finally, this spring, we made it happen!! We drove down the coast to Los Angeles, stayed with my dad for a few days, camped in the area, and then drove back up the coast and mostly camped along the way. We had done this same road trip a few summers before with just our oldest kid (then two years old), but this time we had two kids in tow, a more compressed time frame (only about 2 weeks total), and it was a different season of the year. I had some anxiety going in to the trip, but surprisingly, everything went off without a hitch.
Here were some things we considered in our trip planning:
In completely other news, a note on milestones! I am super proud that my son finished the first box set of Sagebooks before we left on our trip. He now can read 100 of the most common Chinese characters! While on the trip, we only briefly reviewed for about 10 minutes, one day in the car (I had prepared some sentence strips in case he was bored in the car and interested in doing Chinese practice), and it did not seem to affect his retention. We came back home and this week he seamlessly slipped back into reading new lessons. Hurray! To celebrate his accomplishment, I had made him a picture book using mostly characters he has learned thus far. It was amazing to see him opening up the picture book I made and just reading it to himself. But, the clearest testament to his language improvement was that he was both interested and able to have simple conversations in Chinese with my dad during our visit, which he had never done before! It was so sweet to see their budding relationship. My son, who can be very resistant to affection and "strangers", held my dad's hand during a short hike near the Hollywood hills. I am certain this would not have happened, if my son and his grandpa still had a gaping language barrier. It made all of the Chinese lessons we have done thus far at home feel totally worth it. Our daughter is also picking up a ton of words as she approaches her second birthday (later this month). To my delight and surprise, Chinese is still her dominant language, although she is very interested in speaking bilingually and would often say the same word in both languages. I am trying to pause to enjoy this moment -- all of us still being home, and her still being so cuddly, joyful, and sweet. (I hope that cuddliness never changes, but my son has definitely outgrown that phase?) Looking forward to longer and brighter days in the weeks ahead. I want to confess that I am not a religious person. I am not religious, and I would not really say that I am even spiritual. I believe in a general moral compass and doing our best everyday. I know that is dangerous, in a way, because we are human and our view of what is right or wrong is limited to our subjective experiences. But, I also have trouble reconciling that scripts handed down from ancient times could do better to dictate what is right or wrong, than what we are able to collectively perceive and understand right now as humans. So, there it goes, my imperfect faith in humanity.
Anyway, that is a roundabout way to explain that often, when I am in a place of struggle, I have to look inward for optimism or inspiration. I don't look outwards because I think that someone else might come and save/comfort me from my troubles, but I look inward and try to shift my perspective, so that I can find something to appreciate about every moment, even the challenging ones. I don't know what it says about me that I was able to do this even when my (beloved) late mother was very ill. I remember visiting her while she was undergoing one of her last rounds of chemo treatment, and she looked so frail and ill and deeply unhappy. I remember talking to her when she had the energy to talk, and then silently telling myself that those days were hard -- so hard, in fact, to see someone who was always such a source of optimism and strength in my own life to be so devoid of life -- but that some day, I was going to look back on even those days as still the "good days", when I still had her around. I felt so much gratitude that not only did she make it until the birth of my son, but that they always had a mutually joyful relationship in their brief interactions. (He's much more challenging these days, and he also cannot remember her, besides recognizing her from pictures. A part of me laments that she can't be here to see him having grown so much and accomplished so much, but another part of me thinks it's probably better that she only had sweet baby interactions with him.) During the pandemic, looking inward for optimism has been extremely helpful. 2020 was very hard as a whole, but I found myself constantly shifting to a mode of deep gratitude for health, family, nature, and love. Today, I wanted to sit down and write a love letter to my husband, particularly through the lens of my son's recent therapy. (He started feeding therapy a couple of months ago, and is due to start OT in May, when we get back from our road trip, to address some vestibular and sensory issues.) My husband won't actually read this, because he's not much of a blog-reader or a social media person. But, I wanted to write it for myself, as I have wanted to for some time. We have been together since September 2006, and married since March 2013. During that time, things have not always been peachy sweet, but I have always appreciated our deep love, friendship, support, and partnership. Over time, I have come to learn that my husband is very different from me. I love and appreciate him for our differences, even though sometimes I do feel frustrated for our differences as well. I try to focus on how our differences strengthen both our marriage and parenthood -- as my friend recently said to me, "I have always thought that you and G complement each other very well, both as humans and as parents." My husband is a self-taught, engineering, persevering kind of person. From things small to large, he likes to always try to do it by himself. When the toilet breaks, instead of calling a plumber, he would happily spend two days on the bathroom floor, taking apart all parts of the toilet, fixing the leak and learning about how the toilet works (and then refer fondly to the incident for years afterwards). When our wooden shutters broke in Berlin, he parked himself in the living room for over an hour, trying to fix it, instead of heading outside with me as promised. This guy converted our grill to a natural gas grill, even though technically you are only supposed to do it if you are a certified plumber. He has written an entire distributed database from scratch and is in the process of creating a new programming language. No biggie, but this guy likes to do everything by himself. He once started a company from scratch and then sold it, and he has started multiple business ideas since. I adore and respect that can-do spirit about him. --BUT, the flip side is that my husband never likes to ask for help. He does not like to follow recipes or Lego instructions; he does not like to watch YouTube tutorial videos; he does not like to read parenting books; and he does not like to seek therapy (for us or our kids). He feels like other people's insights are mostly too general / not that useful. The most sensible way to learn, he thinks, is by trying things out yourself and then adjusting the course based on your own intuition. I feel like that is where I come in. In school, I was proficient at playing the "school game." As a student, I did not like ambiguity (something that I still struggle with as an adult sometimes). If I started a task, I wanted feedback right away to know if I was on track or not. I liked drafts of assignments, and then improving based on feedback. How that translates to me being a parent is that I devour parenting books, digest their philosophies, try them on my kids, read tons of articles, talk to other parents in my community, and am enthusiastic about seeking additional professional help if I am still in doubt. I am the over-researching antidote to G's under-researching self. By ourselves, I think each of us would have floundered perhaps as parents. Trusting others' professional opinions on everything and trusting others on nothing seems each to be too extreme, by itself. Together, however, I think we do strike the right balance. With both of our kids, I would suggest here and there that they might be a little off-the-norm in certain areas. Like, our 4-month-old is taking an hour to drink just 4 ounces of milk? Our 6-month-old still can't really roll over or push her chest up with both hands? Our 4.5-year-old still is scared to walk down the stairs and to lather on sunscreen? My husband would do his part to resist, resist, re-s-i-s-t.... until he breaks down and says, "Okay, fine, you seem very concerned, so let's just look into it." I know that therapy is not his thing, and he would rather see our kids experimenting, persevering, and finding their own way through to the other side of any challenge, but the important thing is, he acquiesces and compromises. And then once the therapy starts, although I still take the lead in filling out the forms, scheduling the visits, and running the show, my husband shows up with his warmest, most enthusiastic self. As far as the kids could tell, we are on the same front, rooting for their therapy success. And for that, I love and appreciate my husband more everyday. We don't need to be the same person, or to see eye to eye on everything in parenthood. Maybe he is right, and maybe I am just a paranoid mom. Or, maybe I am right, and our kids need extra help. But, I love that in spite of his preconceived notions and inclinations, he supports my decisions, big and small, in our marriage. And that has always been the most defining character of our relationship. I often feel like parenting is challenging, because it's the ultimate projects-based learning experience. You go into it with almost zero expertise, and you hope that after 18 years (or in our case, 18+3 years, because our kids are 3 years apart), you would still want to hang out with this partner. So far, so good. <3 I have been reading Helping Your Child with Extreme Picky Eating to help my big kid with his eating issues. I love this book. It is so clearly respectful to the child and emphasizes all the reasons why it is important to lessen pressure around meal times and to trust that the child will explore new foods on their own timeline. I also live in the real world and understand that maintaining that trust is hard when you are facing a challenging eater, but the book helps me to at least wrap my mind around this philosophy so that I can really give it a shot. The thing I like the most about the book is that it makes me feel like the authors really see my child. I know that they are writing about a general category of kids, but the descriptions they use feel so vivid to our family's experience, that they might as well be sitting in my dining room.
Feeding therapy is going surprisingly well, actually. We are only five weeks in, and miraculously, every week my son has gained and kept up with one new food item! (Each week, we try about three new foods during the 45-minute feeding therapy session, so he is still rejecting plenty of foods. I feel that the feeding therapy was a very good decision on our part, and it has already moved us in the right direction, but it is clearly still necessary for him to continue the professional help.) I don't take this progress for granted, because I have read threads on different forums about picky eaters either trying a new food during the therapy session and then not keeping the food up at home, or picky eaters not trying any food at all per suggestions. One thing that has been very powerful for us in the therapy process is introducing new foods that are related to existing favorites. For example, last week we tried to introduce guacamole, immediately after my son ate some avocados. (If you are wondering why guacamole would be challenging for a child who eats avocados, this is what I am saying -- you and I are living two separate parenting realities. This is why I feel so supported and seen by this book, as a parent struggling with this issue.) My son ended up eating the entire serving of guacamole that day, even though initially he would not even touch it with his fingers. In the book I am reading, they describe this as a "bridging" strategy for connecting what the child already eats with what you would like them to eat. (They also offer other bridging strategies.) I used to think that you can just keep putting any food item in front of a child, and offer it enough times until they eventually try it. Now, I understand that for my son, at least, that strategy is very unlikely to work. He needs to be offered tiny little steps from where he is, to go all the way to the new food. It takes a lot of patience and forethought, but it seems to make a difference. For example, my son has been successfully eating small pieces of new (unfamiliar) cheeses tucked inside a tiny Cheezit cracker sandwich (2 crackers holding a piece of cheese in the middle), as a treat at the end of every lunch meal that I serve at home. He likes these fun / funny Cheezit "sandwiches," because he likes the cracker and he thinks that this way, he can't really taste the cheese. But, after eating the Cheezit sandwich for a few days in a row, I was able to convince him to open up the sandwich to eat the cheese on top of a single cracker (like an "open-faced sandwich"). This way, over time, I can change it up to put the cheese on more bland crackers, and -- tada! -- he will just be eating regular crackers with those new cheese varieties at that point. These are many tiny bridges, intentionally connecting where he started and where he needs to go as an eater. It sounds a little exhausting, perhaps, to think ahead this way, but trust me, it is way less exhausting than trying to deal with the emotional rollercoaster of a child who skips meals because they feel overwhelmed by everything on the table. I also feel incredibly grateful that we decided to get feeding help when we did, because I don't have actual caloric concerns at the moment for L, and I don't believe we have permanently damaged his relationship to food. I think ideally, we would have found feeding help even sooner, before L fell into the rhythm of being served a separate meal from us. But, when I read through the book Helping Your Child with Extreme Picky Eating, I was affirmed that we did not do too many things to cause further food-related anxiety. (We only bargained with him minimally, and we never tried things like sticker charts or bribing with desserts.) We did start to go down the route of inviting conflict during meal times about two months ago, but stopped things from spiraling downhill when we sought help from a feeding specialist, and for that, I am so grateful. Related to this, I have been thinking about the parallels between family dinners and watching my child on the playground. I accompanied my other child (my toddler) to the playground today, and frankly felt a little disappointed, because most of the time at the playground, she was carrying two tiny pieces of fruit from a tree back and forth between two places on the playground. She only used the playground equipment minimally, which made me feel a bit like, "Okay, we could have just gone outside of our house, if she was going to just do this, instead of walking 20 minutes to get here?" Although I gently suggested a couple of times for her to play on the slide or the swing, I did not insist on her playing with anything. I did not tell her, "This is a waste of my time," or confront her with, "Why are you not interested in the equipment today? What's wrong with them?" If I did do that, I think it would have been very inappropriate. But, why do we feel like we should do that at meal time? In fact, we feel like it's our job to get our kids to eat "enough", and that if our kids decide to ignore meats for 6 months, that there is a real problem to fix, maybe through coercion. Maybe we feel like they need to eat because we spent so much time cooking the food, and what's wrong with this food anyway? --Today, on the playground, I was reflecting about how kids will be kids; thinking about the connection between trusting them to have autonomy on the playground and trusting them to make their decisions at the dinner table, helps me to refocus on why Division of Responsibility makes sense. I always think about how we, as people, have a hard time learning abstract things in a vacuum. It's hard to really teach a child about growth mindset, when they are not actively working through a challenge. It's hard to teach a child about compassion for others, if they rarely encounter people who are differently-abled or who are in a different socioeconomic situation. Likewise, I try to look at situations like the one we are in -- where we are trying to work with our son through something that is really tough for him -- and consider what insights we are gaining as parents, as we work through this challenge together. (I am pondering this from a parenting perspective, because I think it's a bit more obvious what my child is gaining from this? He is slowly gaining more confidence with food, which must indirectly impact other aspects of his confidence and self-perception.) I am still thinking about this, but I know that what we gain as parents has something to do with deeper trust, joy, empathy, and patience. Viewing through that lens, we are maybe exactly where we need to be in our journey to grow as parents. Yesterday, a white shooter killed eight people at three spas in Atlanta. Six of the victims were Asian women. Today, I feel grief for the lives lost (not just those killed yesterday, but the Asian elders who have been targeted and attacked all over the country), fear for my family's and friends' safety, and an overwhelming concern that this is not just "a phase," that violent racism against Asians may well be a permanent condition that my children and my community will have to contend with indefinitely.
Today, more so than on any other day, I feel that it is relevant to say what is on my mind, to give myself grace, and to take up space in the world. Actor, writer, and activist Simu Liu wrote a very relatable piece here about how our Asian immigrant parents practice being invisible: "Most of you reading this would not give my parents a second thought if you saw them in line at the supermarket or passed by them on the street. Like so many immigrants, they are a part of an invisible minority that came to a new country and promptly proceeded to make themselves as small as possible: they smiled and nodded at everyone (sometimes through tightly clenched teeth), paid their taxes, never caused a ruckus and never wanted to be an inconvenience to anybody." If you saw my parents, you would not think twice about how they gave up professional jobs on the other side of the ocean to earn a joint income of less than $50,000 a year in a country whose language they did not speak, because they were anxious about possible military action by China to subdue Taiwan. You would not know how my dad got up and drove me to an opening shift at Starbucks at 4:30am everyday when I was in high school, or how proud my mom was to see my sister graduate and get her first chemistry lab technician job that paid a salary. Our parents worked tirelessly with the sole goal of raising their kids in safety and to give their kids a chance at a professional life. Unlike many white American families, the dream of a working-class immigrant parent is not one of personal fulfillment; they project their life's hopes and dreams completely onto their children. This practice of self-effacement can sometimes impact the way children of immigrants show up in shared racial spaces. I know that for myself, I have to work hard to have the courage to take up space, especially if my perspective or experience are not shared by those of the dominant culture. And being small and invisible has not protected us from becoming scapegoats for America's problems. Today, of all days, I decided to cancel commitments in order to take time to grieve and process. I decided to make space for myself, and to be okay that it's going to come out incoherent at parts. Something about the way we are raised by parents who gave up so much to move to another country gives us the feeling that we need to work hard in order to validate their very real sacrifices. I think this is true of all immigrant families, not just Asian ones. (I've heard the same sentiment from my husband's good friend from college, who is a Guyanese immigrant.) The harmful myth that Asians are "model minority" was created to sow division between Asians and other oppressed minority groups. I grew up in a suburban neighborhood with plenty of Asian kids, and we occupied all parts of the academic spectrum. Besides being used as a pawn for white supremacy to shame/silence other races and to deny needed resources to the Asian-American community, I find also that being a "model minority" means that our academic success is never celebrated for the effort that it took to get there. From the outside, it makes us a faceless mass to college admissions teams, each student interchangeable with the next. At a job, we are tokenized as increasing "diversity" while we are expected to not raise issue with the status quo. Who really hires an Asian employee to shake things up? It's just not what is expected of us, based on racial stereotypes. My initial response to these attacks is -- how absolutely horrible that the aggressors target the weakest and most defenseless folks, again and again. What kind of monster attacks 80- and 90-year-olds? Do they choose to do it because they know that elders hold our community together? What about these women who are attacked -- what were their names, faces, and stories? Is the mainstream media going to mispronounce their names after humanizing their mass murderer, thereby continuing to add salt to the wound? One of the many things that I thought about today is how we must teach our children to not internalize the hate that others have for us. It is sad that I even have to think about this, but this thought came up when I was talking to my son about the events of Atlanta. It went pretty much like this: Me: "Yesterday in Atlanta, six women who are Asian -- meaning they look like me -- were shot and killed by a white person with a gun. It happened because... remember how I was saying that our former President did not like people who are not white?" Son: "Yeah, Donald Trump, right?" Me: "Yes, well, he was the one who poorly managed COVID and caused so many people to die from COVID. But just because COVID originated in China -- really, it could have started anywhere -- he calls the sickness 'China virus', and he continues to use that term, even yesterday on the news. People who voted for him believe him and they think that Chinese people are responsible for COVID and all the deaths, so one of those crazy people shot those six women who look like me, because they think those women are Chinese. Those women might not actually even be Chinese, but they look Asian, like mama. Do you understand what I am saying? This is important." Son: "..." Me: "I am telling you this because we have to be careful when we are out and about, to protect ourselves, since we are Asian." Son: "I am not Asian, I am just white." Me: "Well, you are both Asian and white. People who look at you will think you are Asian, because you look like me." Son: "No, I am not. I am only white." (shows me his skin) Me: "Why do you say this? ....Is it because you are scared that you could be hurt for being Asian?" Son: (looks away sadly) "Yes..." Me: "It's okay, I understand. I am not saying we will get hurt. We just have to be careful. And most importantly, I am not telling you what happened to say that I wish I weren't Asian. I am very happy and proud of being Asian. Think about it; you speak two languages. It's a beautiful thing. I am very happy about who I am, and you should feel proud of who you are, too; but I feel angry that other people are trying to hurt people who look like us." Thinking back about our conversation, I can think of many complexities for my son. Someone of his dad's race gunned down six women of his mom's race. There is a lot to unpack and to work through there, especially if these events continue to occur. (My husband and I do our own share of unpacking at home between the two of us. Race is a continuous dialogue for us.) Speaking of self-hatred that can often develop within Asian folks (I don't think I personally suffer from this, but in high school I did wake up everyday trying to pull my nose so that it would over time grow more European -- and hence I definitely worry about the same self-erasure that my children are bound to experience sometime during their lifetimes), here is an excerpt from Cathy Park Hong's Minor Feelings, which I read a chunk of before needing to return it to the library. This excerpt is from a New Yorker book review, and it reminds me of all the ways that Asian-Americans internalize the judgment that others have for us. “In the popular imagination, Asian Americans inhabit a vague purgatorial status... distrusted by African Americans, ignored by whites, unless we’re being used by whites to keep the black man down.” Asians, [Cathy Park Hong] observes, are perceived to be emotionless functionaries, and yet she is always “frantically paddling my feet underwater, always overcompensating to hide my devouring feelings of inadequacy.” Not enough has been said, Hong thinks, about the self-hatred that Asian-Americans experience. It becomes “a comfort,” she writes, “to peck yourself to death. You don’t like how you look, how you sound. You think your Asian features are undefined, like God started pinching out your features and then abandoned you. You hate that there are so many Asians in the room. Who let in all the Asians? you rant in your head.” I don't feel competitive with other Asian folks, but in Ali Wong's book Dear Girls, she made a similar observation that Asian folks can sometimes feel like they need to outshine other Asian folks in shared spaces. As a parent, I definitely worry about my children growing up to feel this way (rather than kinship) towards other Asian folks -- a hidden impact of white supremacy boxing us in. Racism against Asian-Americans comes in many forms, and it was present long before Donald Trump (although, make no mistake, his "China virus" and "kung flu" rhetoric fuels the anti-Asian flames and xenophobic tendencies that are already embedded in American culture and history). Recently on Twitter, someone remarked that all schools should learn about Lunar New Year, not just those schools with Asian students. Similarly, students with no classmates of Asian descent should still learn about Asian history in the U.S., because Asian-American history is U.S. history. Every school in the U.S. that is offering French (a colonial legacy) should be swapping it out for either Chinese, German, or Arabic. This is so reasonable, yet such an unimaginable ask; the systemic omission of relevant cultural learning is racism, and it is the reason why Donald Trump's anti-Asian rhetoric is so effective. Wondering what you can do on a daily basis to dismantle racism? Ask to see your child's school's syllabus on integrating diverse stories and histories. It's not enough that we individually educate our children at home about our own cultural and ethnic histories; we should be advocating for widespread quality education for all children in our communities. Needless to say, organizations should be taking a stance in the on-going crime against Asians, similar to how organizations around the country took a stance during the BLM protests of 2020. Your child's school should be sending out a statement; your companies should be making a statement. The lack of action on the part of organizations to do so, especially in geographical areas where Asian folks reside and these crimes are happening, is complicit and reinforcing the forced silence and invisibility of our community. It implies that our struggles don't matter even to organizations that recognize black plight, and that crimes against Asians are somehow of lesser significance, when it is clear that we are literally dying. Lastly, two links that I found to be helpful today: an excellent educational resource to use in schools and a spoken-word piece that embodies all the rage that I cannot myself articulate. Brace yourselves, friends, for a long fight ahead. |
About MeBorn in Asia, I have spent more than a third of my life living outside of the U.S. thus far. I currently reside in the Pacific Northwest with my techie husband and two biracial children. Categories
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