Image by wordcat57 via Flickr

Should 11-year-olds be allowed to choose what foreign language to study or should it be up to the parents?

My son brought a note home from school the other day which said that 6th graders must now choose which language they want to start studying next year. The choices were French, Spanish, Italian and Latin.

“Italian!” my son said enthusiastically, no doubt propelled by his affections for Parmesan Reggiano, our former and very lively au pair from Rome and the descriptions of Venice in The Thief Lord. “Great!” I said, and considered the case closed.  And then I started hearing from other parents.

“My son wanted to do French, but I vetoed that,” said one. “Spanish is way more practical. More useful for the future.”

“I don’t know what to do,” said another. “My daughter wants to take Latin!”

That’s a problem? A daughter who wants to take Latin?

My friend’s husband continued, proving that parents can make anything into a problem, “And wait until you hear why she wants to take Latin — to improve her SAT scores!”

And so, being the impressionable mother that I am, I started thinking about my son’s choice of Italian. Spanish is the second-most spoken language in the world, after Mandarin. Italy is kind of small. I work at the UN and often wish my French were better…..

And then I remembered just whom I was talking to when I talked to myself this way.

When I was 16, on little more than a whim, and a desire to do something my older sisters hadn’t done, I started studying Russian. This was completely impractical. It was during the Soviet era, when the choices for Russian speakers were limited to academia or the CIA, neither of which interested me.  A lot of people asked why I wanted to take Russian, but my “why not?” answer was deemed perfectly reasonable, at least by my parents.  Russian language led me to Russian literature and history, a Russian Studies major in college, and later on a ticket to Moscow. I had amazing travels and experiences and then, lo and behold, the Evil Empire crumbled and Russia became not only an obscure destination but a place I could live and work and have even more incredible experiences and encounters with people who changed my life.

Thinking about this, I realized there was no way I was going to dissuade my son from taking Italian if that’s what truly interests and excites him. But it did make me remember one other thing: my Russian teacher was an amazingly gifted and dedicated teacher. I talked it over with my son and we decided that before he commits to a language we need to do a little reconnaissance and find out who are the teachers most likely to not only teach him to conjugate verbs in another language but also to show him a whole new world.

Oh, and my friends decided to let their daughter take Latin — in exchange for her promise that she will eventually also learn a language that people still speak.

I think I got off easy with my older son, who was thrilled on his 10th birthday to get a Swiss Army knife, a book about whittling and instructions that if he was ever seen whittling toward himself, the knife would be taken away.

But this year I am left wondering why my son thinks he wouldn’t like anything he might actually be able to use during a black-out. What is the continued appeal of the gizmo, gadget, electronic toy, even though I can list several (UCreate computer animation screen, Nintendo DS, even the Wii), which for my sons were, ultimately, more exciting in the wanting/receiving than the having? Why don’t they see that the gifts that are often underwhelming to get, like the book about how to draw cartoons that I gave my younger son for Hannukah, are often the ones they end up spending the most time using? Clearly, they don’t remember those toddler years when they never had as much fun with the big gift as they did with the giant cardboard box it came in.

Maybe my son has become addicted to what those judges on American Idol always say they are looking for: a “wow moment.” My son wants something over-the-top stupendous, something he never thought he’d actually get, something that gives this year’s birthday the stamp of bonafide greatness. Unfortunately, I think he equates greatness with great expense, a misconception I hope is more a sign of his immaturity than of being terribly spoiled.

I want my son to have a “wow” birthday, too, but I’m just not sure how to achieve this given his current wish list, which I don’t think accurately reflects how he likes to spend his time, which is outside and in constant motion. Yet at the same time, I want my son not to over value the “wow.” I want him also to appreciate the thoughtful gift that was purchased as an act of love — even if it doesn’t require electricity to operate.

Say what?

Had I noticed the email from the school last week, I would have known that the school was hosting a special visitor,  a representative of an abduction prevention program sponsored nationally by the Dignity Memorial network of funeral providers.  According to the overlooked email (gee, how did that happen?) the program aims to “empower children and their parents by teaching them how to recognize, avoid and escape potentially dangerous situations.”

I appreciate how challenging it must be for funeral homes to find appropriate public service/marketing opportunities, but isn’t it a little creepy for kids to learn about safety from a funeral director?

But what really bothered me as I listened to my son’s account of the program was the extremity of it. It’s hard to know when common sense safety lessons cross over and become alarmist fear-mongering, but I’d say it’s probably when you switch from talking about what to do when you can’t find your parents in the supermarket to how to locate a wire and cut it so you can disable the car that is speeding you to your doom while you are trapped in the trunk.

Thankfully, I didn’t have to expend a lot of energy reassuring my son that he would never be kidnapped, never have to find one of those car wires that the “funeral lady” described.  He told me that a lot of the information was interesting and smart — like how if they are ever followed by a car they should run away in the other direction — but that when the funeral lady started talking about kidnapping, he and his friend looked at each other incredulously and said “kidnapping????” and started laughing.

I don’t mean to make light of the issue. I can’t imagine anything worse than having a child snatched away. I’m still haunted by a Miami Herald article I read way back in the ’80s, before I could even imagine being a mother, about a woman’s years of searching for the teen-aged daughter who had disappeared one sunny afternoon from the bucolic streets of Coral Gables.

It would be easy to say, what’s the harm? Why not give children tips on protecting themselves even if they’ll probably never need them? But the harm is this: it fuels the fear that rules the lives of so many parents, that prevents them from letting their children walk to school alone or run an errand or play outside unsupervised or climb a tree because something might happen.

Yes, something might happen. Kidnapping might happen, even though the statistics make it very clear that the chances are infinitesimal. As Lenore Skenazy points out in Free-Range Kids, the number of children abducted and killed by strangers has held steady over the years  — about 1 in 1.5 million. Your child is much more likely to be struck by lightning (1 in 280,000, according to the National Lightning Safety Institute) or injured in the car that is taking him to school because you are too afraid to let him walk alone.

I’ll learn more about this program next week, when the school hosts a meeting for parents. I’m hoping that the program is less alarmist than my son’s description suggests. Perhaps the advice really will be empowering to parents in that it will leave us feeling that our children are now better equipped to have the freedom and independence they crave. That would be nice. But I have a hunch it will leave even the most level-headed of us feeling nervous.

A suburban Dallas school district has suspended a 4-year-old from his prekindergarten class because he wears his hair too long and does not want his parents to cut it. via Boy, 4, Chooses Long Locks and Is Suspended From Class – NYTimes.com.

What is it with adults and long hair? I’ve blogged about this before, wondering (and getting wildly divergent responses) when a child is old enough to choose his/her own hairstyle. Now we have parents supporting a boy’s penchant for long, curly hair while the school district says no way, it’s too distracting. The double standard is obvious here; I’m sure there are girls in the class with long, curly, distracting hair who have not been told to chop it off.

In our house, the battle rages on. Our middle school son loves his hair long — and stringy and greasy. I don’t mind the long hair, if he would just wash it properly. He is showering at the moment and I swear if I weren’t occupied at the computer I would not be able to resist sticking my arms behind the shower curtain and giving his head a proper scrub. His hair is super thick, but it’s still somewhat miraculous (not in a good way, obviously) how he manages to come out of a long shower and shampoo with hair that is still stringy and greasy.

My son thinks his hair looks awesome. I don’t want to undermine his confidence at his tender pre-adolescent age but there are days when he truly has a face/head that only a mother could love. What to do? Let him be until the hormones kick in and he suddenly cares what he looks like? Lop it off? Give him a hat? I think that last option would be against school policy. Too distracting.

Not long after that, a firestorm erupted on Twitter, with strangers wondering what kind of mother tweets during a crisis. The debate has been going on for days around the Internet, with critics calling Ross callous (and suggesting that if she had been paying as much attention to her child as she had to her Twitter account, her son would not have come to harm) and supporters (many who know her in real life, and others who have never met her) describing her as a caring mother who reached out to her virtual community during a tragedy. Announcing a Child’s Death on Twitter – Motherlode Blog – NYTimes.com.

My heart goes out to Ross, a military mom with a popular blog, mostly because of her tragic loss but also because she is, as noted on the Motherlode, experiencing the dark side of opening up to a virtual “community.” Even in moments of utter despair and misfortune, people who don’t know you or even read your posts will not hesitate to use their anonymity to take you down.

Why, then, do we allow athletic coaches — often in the same schools that are espousing more family time — to ask — nay, demand — that parents forgo a family vacation so their children can get in more  practice time? A woman I know whose son plays on his high school basketball team is determined not to be badgered. Her family is a third of the way through their project to travel to every state in America. Next up are Louisiana, Arkansas and Mississippi, which they plan to visit during Christmas break. The coach doesn’t want the boy to go. The family is sticking with their plan, but not without a lot of tension and guilt.The mother of another boy on the team wants to take him skiing, but the boy is too scared to miss a practice.

Is it fair to ask parents and kids to make these kinds of choices? I know some parents who refuse to let their children miss a practice or a game, saying that it’s an important life lesson to know that when you sign up for a team it means that you keep your commitments to the team. But shouldn’t we honor our commitments to our families, too?

Image by striatic via Flickr

As if wrapping yet another gift and having nine people for Hannukah dinner tonight weren’t enough, I just took a break for a wee bit more masochism and read two articles (here and here) about how overblown and present-laden this minor Jewish holiday has become here in America, where we all know that Happy Holidays really means Merry Christmas.

I know full well that Hannukah has become too commercial and too much like Christmas. But here’s the thing: I don’t care. Having grown up in a wishy-washy sort of Jewish family that some years celebrated Hannukah and some years exchanged presents on Christmas morning, I’m just happy that my children know “from whence they come” (to borrow a phrase from Adelaide in the very Christian musical “Guys and Dolls”).

It’s not easy being a Jewish child in December, especially in a town that has an official tree lighting and a visit from Santa at the village hall. My younger son has mentioned more than once how envious he is of his “half and half” friends who celebrate Christmas and Hannukah. It’s not just the present tally that makes him (ever)green, it’s the whole spectacle of the holiday.

Our Hannukah may be less than “pure,” meaning that my kids get more than chocolate money as gifts. But by lighting candles, eating latkes and gathering with family, we are celebrating our own religious freedom and our decision not to assimilate. If that is accompanied by unwrapping a long-desired toy or even a new (mon dieu!) video game, it doesn’t make it any less important.

According to Time, so-called “helicopter” or “bubble wrap” parents are being challenged by proponents of a new, more laid-back movement:

The insurgency goes by many names — slow parenting, simplicity parenting, free-range parenting — but the message is the same: Less is more; hovering is dangerous; failure is fruitful. You really want your children to succeed? Learn when to leave them alone. When you lighten up, they’ll fly higher. We’re often the ones who hold them down. via Can These Parents Be Saved: The Growing Backlash Against Over-Parenting – TIME.

As far as I can tell, the “insurgency” consists of a few good authors (Carl Honore, Lenore Skenazy) and child psychologists writing about the dangers of over-parenting. Sure, there’s interest in these books and, according to Time at least, some consultants out there holding workshops on how to chill out as a parent (attending such workshops, however, seems like over-parenting of another kind).

My guess is that books challenging helicopter parenting will be read mostly by people predisposed to the idea and the rest of the parents out there will be just as over-protective and over-achieving for their children as ever. Just go to your local PTA meeting or 10U soccer game if you don’t believe me.

But I got a reminder last night that there are other people out there who have the experience and perspective to get hyped-up parents to chill out and should be, as ever, heeded: wise teachers. Last night was teacher conference night at my son’s middle school. And despite the speed-dating aura of the back-to-back 10-minute conferences, I got some valuable insight from two teachers who have spent years working with 11-year-olds.

The first was my son’s music teacher. My son is considering taking up saxophone again and before I went out and rented another alto sax for him to not practice, I asked the teacher how much he expected the kids to practice, thinking he would say something like 10 minutes a day.

“Eleven-year-olds? Who are we kidding – between homework and after-school sports and activities, hardly at all.”

He explained that my son would have band practice in school three times a week and if, in addition to that, he played once or twice over the weekend, he’d be fine. It was a huge relief. I realized that my son could start playing saxophone again without feeling like it was a big commitment, and that maybe he would just find it…..fun. Like an 11-year-old should. Would he improve more if he practiced at home every night? Sure. But who cares? Maybe if he just really likes it, he’ll continue and will get serious when he’s ready to.

I had a similar conversation with my son’s science teacher. My son loves science and is getting As without working too hard. Thinking he needed to be challenged more, I asked the teacher if perhaps she could give him extra work to do at home. I thought he was being a little lazy, which annoyed me.

“I could give him extra projects to do at home,” the teacher told me, “but I doubt he’d do them.”

She was right — this was a boy who likes to spend as little time on homework as possible. Extra work would not interest him as it would cut into his basketball/football/computer time.  She advised me to just let him be the science-happy kid he is and urge him to keep his grade up next year so he can place into honors science in 8th grade. At that point, he will not only be much more challenged by the curriculum, but he’ll be ready to take it on. “It’s developmental,” she told me. “When he’s a little older, he’ll be ready to work harder. It will come from inside him.”

What a novel idea, studying as developmental. Indeed, why was I expecting my 11-year-old to buckle down and study like a 16-year-old facing imminent college applications? Why would I want my child to start stressing out about school and spending less time playing?

So much of this rampant “over-parenting” comes from our fears about the future, as if the 11-year-old who wants to play Runescape and shoot hoops in the back yard might turn into an adult who forgets to get a job or can’t get a good job because he doesn’t do anything other than play Runescape and shoot hoops in the back yard. It sounds too dumb for all these smart parents out there, but I think we do forget that our kids are …kids.

The best way to squelch one’s inner hyper-parent is to think less about what we want for our children’s future and more about what’s appropriate for them right now, at their current age and developmental stage, and then try to let them be. Whether we hover or not, they will grow up.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

At 7:20 this morning, while running to catch the 7:27 train to the city, I was the “the best Mom in the world.” Why? Because I was letting my 9-year-old son skip school to take him to the ticker-tape parade for the Yankees. I got that compliment several times today, not just from my very happy son, but from several commuting parents I ran into on the train into the city and again on the way home.

By 4:50 p.m., back home and on the way to pick up my older son from rugby practice, I had morphed into the “world’s worst Mom.” Why? Because I had told my parade-going son, who had gotten up at 5 a.m. from sheer excitement and who never once complained about the cold or the two and half hour wait to see his Yankees heroes, that he could not have a sleep-over tonight.

I knew he didn’t mean it, and that it was his extreme fatigue speaking when he pleaded with me and whined about how horrible I was. But his hyperbole, and my sweet but all-too-brief presence in his motherhood hall of fame, reminded me that while taking him to the parade was a really nice thing to do (and who are we kidding — no hardship for me), it is not the kind of thing that makes one “the best Mom in the world.”

Reaching that bar is a lot harder and takes not a few hours in a single special day, but many, many years. The journey is more fun, however, when you can punctuate it with the occasional grand and thrilling gesture. I may not be the world’s best mother, but it was one hell of a great day.

Image via Wikipedia

I have an acquaintance,  a successful foreign correspondent, whose serious television habit as an adolescent ended the day his fed-up mother grabbed his television and threw it out his bedroom window. What did he do? He started reading books. Or so he told me.

I thought of this tale when I read in the LATimes today that television watching among children is at an eight-year high, with children spending more than an entire day in front of the television in an average week.  My children are starting to watch more TV lately and I know it’s only going to get worse because it’s Autumn, which every parent know leads to the next season, Screens.

It’s inevitably winter when I start fretting that my boys are indulging in too much screen time, which for my older son means too many hours playing Runescape, which gives us both a headache, and for my younger son means too many episodes of iCarly, which makes him so sassy that I want to give him a Nickelectomy.

I’ve considered tossing the television out the window, but I doubt it would fit. And just unplugging the electronics is really not feasible. I’m a blogger and a telecommuter. My husband is not just a news junkie, but is employed by a television station. And then there’s the Yankees. And Mad Men.

So where does this leave me? It leaves me thinking not just about my bookish journalist friend, or about all the warnings in the LATimes article (childhood obesity, delayed language skills, missed opportunities to get the pure value of old-fashioned “play”) but also about my 19-year-old nephew Sam.

I adore Sam, who is smart, passionate, inquisitive, hard-working, outdoorsy and kind. But the reason I am grateful to him has nothing to do with any of that. I am grateful to him for having turned out all right despite the many, many hours he spent as a child watching television and playing video games, including the violent ones. Despite a childhood that was utterly and completely plugged in, Sam is anything but tuned out.

There are many reasons that excessive television watching is a waste of time, and many good things that happen — to children and families — when the screens are turned off. But what’s true in general is not an absolute for every child. It’s the larger context — the quality of the non-screen time part of life — that matters, not whether you’re fulfilling every item on the good parenting checklist.

Just as throwing your child’s television out the window will not turn him into a successful foreign correspondent, allowing your child to indulge in some television will not guarantee an adulthood as a flabby slacker.

Which is to say, go ahead and turn off the screens more often. Or leave them on and try to stop worrying about it. Either way, it’s not going to turn your child into someone he’s not meant to be.