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How to Be a Responsible Adult and Brush Your Teeth Properly
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How to Be a Responsible Adult and Brush Your Teeth Properly
Parents Should Ignore Their Children More Often
By Darby Saxbe
Dr. Saxbe is a clinical psychologist and a professor of psychology at the University of Southern California. She studies neurobiological adaptations to parenthood.
I recently spoke with an anthropologist named Barry Hewlett who studies child-rearing in hunter-gatherer societies in Central Africa. He explained to me that children in those societies spend lots of time with their parents — they tag along throughout the day and often help with tasks like foraging — but they are rarely the main object of their parents’ attention. Sometimes bored, sometimes engaged, these kids spend much of their time observing adults doing adult things.
Parents in contemporary industrialized societies often take the opposite approach. In the precious time when we’re not working, we place our children at the center of our attention, consciously engaging and entertaining them. We drive them around to sports practice and music lessons, where they are observed and monitored by adults, rather than the other way around. We value “quality time” over quantity of time. We feel guilty when we have to drag our children along with us to take care of boring adult business.
This intensive, often frantic style of parenting requires a lot more effort than the style Professor Hewlett described. I found myself thinking about those hunter-gatherers last month when I read the advisory from the surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, warning that many parents are stressed to their breaking point. There are plenty of reasons for this worrisome state of affairs. One is that we don’t ignore our children often enough.
The modern style of parenting is not just exhausting for adults; it is also based on assumptions about what children need to thrive that are not supported by evidence from our evolutionary past. For most of human history, people had lots of kids, and children hung out in intergenerational social groups in which they were not heavily supervised. Your average benign-neglect day care is probably closer to the historical experience of child care than that of a kid who spends the day alone with a doting parent.
Of course, just because a parenting style is ancient doesn’t make it good. But human beings have spent about 90 percent of our collective time on Earth as hunter-gatherers, and our brains and bodies evolved and adapted to suit that lifestyle. Hunter-gatherer cultures tell us something important about how children are primed to learn.
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A parenting style that took its cue from those hunter-gatherers would insist that one of the best things parents can do — for ourselves as well as for our children — is to go about our own lives and tote our children along. You might call it mindful underparenting.
Children learn not only from direct instruction, but also from watching and modeling what other people around them do, whether it’s foraging for berries, changing a tire or unwinding with friends after a long day of work. From a young age, that kind of observation begins to equip children for adulthood.
More important, following adults around gives children the tremendous gift of learning to tolerate boredom, which fosters patience, resourcefulness and creativity. There is evidence from neuroscience that a resting brain is not an idle one. The research tells us that the mind gets busy when it is left alone to do its own thing — in particular, it tends to think about other people’s minds. If you want to raise empathetic, imaginative children who can figure out how to entertain themselves, don’t keep their brains too occupied.
An excellent way to bore children is to take them to an older relative’s house and force them to listen to a long adult conversation about family members they don’t know. Quotidian excursions to the post office or the bank can create valuable opportunities for boredom, too.
Leaving kids’ screens at home on such trips can deepen the useful tedium. It also forces parents to build up their tolerance to their child’s fussiness, an essential component of underparenting. Parents too often feel the need to engage their children in “fun” activities to tempt them away from screens. But by teaching children to crave constant external stimulation and entertainment, intensive parenting can actually worsen screen dependence.
To be sure, when kids are upset, in danger or require guidance, parents can and should swoop in to help. But that is precisely the point: It is only by ignoring our children much of the time that we conserve the energy necessary to give them our full attention when they actually need it.
In recent years there has been a lot of hand-wringing about so-called helicopter parents and their hopelessly coddled children. But we rarely talk about what parents ought to do instead. In an ideal world, we would set children loose to roam free outdoors, unsupervised. As a small-town Ohio kid in the 1990s, I spent hours with my brothers playing in the creek behind our house, with plenty of time to get good and bored. When that sort of “free range” experience is not an option, however, mindful underparenting is the next best thing.
This approach can take the form of bringing children with you not just on boring errands, but also when you work, socialize or exercise. I was at my gym the other day when a father came in with his 4-year-old son. The two of them took turns working out with a trainer teaching them martial arts moves. When it wasn’t his turn, the 4-year-old scrambled around the gym and, when he got tired, lay on his belly on the mat and watched his father practice kicks. Observing the boy, his big eyes taking in a ton of social information, I thought about all the parents who say that they have no time to exercise because they’re too busy with their kids.
At the same time, I thought about all the gyms that bar small children. Even as parenting has gotten more intensive, public spaces, especially in the United States, seem to have become more hostile to the presence of children. I wrote most of my Ph.D. dissertation alongside my toddler in a coffee shop in my neighborhood that had a mini play area with stacking toys, board books and room to park a stroller. That coffee shop is gone now, replaced by a sleeker cafe where it’s hard to picture a stray plastic toy, let alone a rambunctious 2-year-old.
Parents have it easier in countries such as Germany and Spain, where you can find beer gardens and tapas bars situated right next to playgrounds, or in Denmark, where parents routinely park their infants in strollers outside cafes while they socialize. In such places you can relax and catch up with friends while children romp around — a reminder of how much easier parenting gets when we enjoy the social trust born from shared investment in care.
In other words, underparenting requires structural change, and not just the obvious changes that we think of as parental stress-relievers, such as family leave and paid child care. It also requires that as a society, we build back our tolerance for children in public spaces, as annoying and distracting as they can be, and create safe environments where lightly supervised kids can roam freely. In a society that treated children as a public good, we would keep a collective eye on all our kids — which would free us of the need to hover over our own.
A stolen skull, a severed statue and an Australian city divided
Dolls help children create wonderfully vivid and imaginative worlds, while also serving as unsettling reminders of the abyss
Avan Aval Adhu 705
Her unborn son's threat rang loud and clear in her voice and was heard by everyone present in the room. But while her reaction was shock and disbelief, she saw that their reaction was totally opposite to what she was going through. All their faces, regardless of human, dog, or fox, radiated a serene look that was as calm as a placid lake on a windless day.
Gayatri struggled to make sense of what her own unborn son had just conveyed, not quietly but angrily and without any ambiguity. She tried to interpret what had been asked of her although she knew there was no misinterpreting her child's request that had felt more like a command and an order.
Then, out of the blue, a memory came surging back and closing her eyes Gayatri slowly drowned herself in it.
The memory was of that day which happened to be her late father Prem's birthday and his last birthday for he died a few weeks later. Gayatri had returned home not to wish him but to pick up some clothes and ask for more money.
Drunk and high as a kite on grass, she had stumbled into his bedroom and had asked for money and before her father could say something, she had snarled at him and said, ' Please, I am not in the mood for any of your lectures or goody goody messages. At least not from you, a man who married a girl as old as his daughter and that too just a few months after his wife's death.'
Moving closer to him, she had looked down at his thin body and cancer-stricken face and had hurt him horribly. ' Mum died of cancer and here you are, dying of cancer. Maybe it is fate or maybe it is punishment for your sins against me and my dead mother.'
Smiling weakly, he had tiredly reached for the phone and pressing a button had called his close friend, Gupta uncle and had told him to do whatever she wanted or needed.
' Guptaji, please. Everything that is mine is hers. Thank you, my dear friend ' and ending the call had looked at her and she had looked at him and said, ' Yes. At least you realise that everything that is yours belongs to me. Only me.'
Raising his right hand that had first been savaged by cancer and then ravaged by chemo and radiation, Prem had beckoned her close, ' Gaya, come closer. Take my hand and listen to your dying fathers words and wishes'.
Gayatri had done so, firstly because she was happy that she was going to her what she wanted and secondly out of pity for a dying man who just happened to be her father.
Clasping her hand in his, her father had stared at her for a long uncomfortable minute and then had said, ' Gaya, I know you. I see you as what you are now and what you were back then as a child. But, importantly, I see what you will become one day for I have faith in my little one.'
Then with tears in his hollow eyes, he had made a strange request by asking her to promise something to him.
' Promise me. Swear on your mother's soul and on my soon to depart soul that you will be kind to your children when they are born. Promise me that you will look after them and love them the same way me and your mother have loved you and still do.'
Grunting, ' I promise ' Gayatri had stormed away from the room and that had been the last time she had seen her father alive.
Opening her eyes, Gayatri stepped back into the present and away from the pain and anger of her steeped history and opening her beautiful lips, whispered, ' I promise daddy. I swear on yours and mum's soul to love and respect my children and treat them like you treated me which was with grace and dignity.'
Getting up, she looked at all of them and then slowly dropping to her knees, bowed to all of them and said, ' Please forgive me ' and then slowly raising herself, gently touched her womb and asked her unborn babies to forgive her.
' Trust me, trust your mother when she tells you that she is a good and kind person. It's just my anger, my unreasonable rage that often clouds my mind and leads me disaster.'
Getting no response from any of her companions, Gayatri getting up, slowly sank into the sofa she had been sitting on and looked at all of them sadly and tiredly. Then without any warning, Dhana stood up and did exactly what she had done and falling to his knees, whispered, ' I see you my queen and I am here ready to serve you and your princes.'
The next moment, Tara and both the Buddha did the same and swore allegiance to her and her unborn son and daughter.
Far, far away from Paris, in the forests of Perumalvaram, Azhagan whispered, ' There are always two roads diverging and there is always a fork in the road ' and hearing him say that, Malar slowly untangling his unruly hair like his blind mother Avini had done centuries ago, asked him to expand on his thoughts.
Everybody has a little bit of the sun and moon in them. Everybody has a little bit of man, woman, and animal in them. Darks and lights in them. Everyone is part of a connected cosmic system. Part earth and sea, wind and fire, with some salt and dust swimming in them. We have a universe within ourselves that mimics the universe outside. None of us are just black or white, or never wrong and always right. No one. No one exists without polarities. Everybody has good and bad forces working with them, against them, and within them. Suzy Kassem.
Move over Moby Dick. Big Mama, the first humpback whale to have returned to the North Pacific's Salish Sea after decades of absence, is telling a new story about the global threat to whale populations.
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