Family round up

Isabelle is busy preparing for next weekend's ballet show - the culmination of the year's worth of ballet classes.

Aidan is enjoying school this term - his reading and maths are visibly improving.

Orla looks forward to Playcentre and has a special doll (Baby James) who she carries most places.

Ewan has 3 and a half teeth and is enjoying solids. He rolls heaps (back to front) and has rolled front to back at least twice when I wasn't looking.

The older children especially are looking forward to Christmas.

Don't worry, it's only temporary

On Tuesday, June 26, 2007, I blogged:

The bookcase and its books now (temporarily) live in the lounge.

Yup, they're still there....

Searching questions

- Mum?
- Yes.
- You know how there are people in the ballet school who have dark skin?
- Yes. (This should be interesting!)
- Well, then they can't have these undies you see (holding up special ballet "skin"-coloured undies) because they are the wrong colour. What would they wear?
- I don't know. Maybe dark coloured undies?
- But that's not fair. The undies might be the wrong shape, they won't fit under the leotard.
- So what you're saying is that your skin-coloured undies aren't skin-coloured if you don't have light skin and that that's not fair?
- Yes. Why is that?

Searching questions indeed!

Parenting for a Peaceful World

Well, I have finished reading the above book by Robin Grille, and it's due back at the library tomorrow. So, what to say?

It is a long book - longer than it needs to be. It could have been made much more punchy by quick summaries of other people's work (rather than what looked like long paraphrasing) and cutting out the occasional brain spew of rampant opinion. (Brain spews are of course quite acceptable in one's own book - or blog! But a few in here are just not in keeping with the main style of the book, which is a reasoned and referenced argument for re-examining and reprioritising how we raise our children).

The first part of the book looks at a psychohistory of childhood throughout the ages. It extensively references Lloyd de Mause and the Journal of Psychohistory - so much so that I wondered if I should just save myself some time and read de Mause instead. A quick google echoed two of my criticisms - that the history was really about child abuse rather than childhood, and that it required acceptance of the notion that emotional trauma in childhood was the root cause of war (and indeed any interpersonal violence). I find it hard to accept that any complex phenomenon can be explained by a single factor.

The model of a number of different child-rearing modes evolving over time (and co-existing) is an interesting one though. I liked how it avoids simple dualisms (such as "if you don't believe in unconditional parenting, therefore you must love your child conditionally" or "if you aren't attachment parenting, therefore your children are detached").

I found it interesting that not once did the author discuss abortion - perhaps because it fits uneasily into this model. I suspect that abortion is more acceptable overall in liberal families in the helping mode than in the stricter, authoritarian or sociailising families (who might place abortion squarely into the infanticidal mode of child rearing). This gap is surprising as he discussed foetal awareness later on in the book.

It took until part four (173 pages in) for the book to really hit its strides for me. I found the psychological spin on parenting and discipline styles genuinely interesting and a real contribution to the literature around this topic. The discussions surrounding emotional intelligence really had me thinking about my approach to life and personal growth.

And then I started pulling away again. Recovered memory syndrome...hmmm, I remember that from the 80s wasn't it? Recovering memories of your own birth? Well, not impossible I guess....maybe...I might be able to suspend disbelief.... Much of the last part of the book seemed to be relying on some fairly large assumptions and were almost a stereotype of what the layperson thinks of as psychoanalysis. Lie down. Get comfortable. Now tell me about your childhood....

So. I'm glad I read this book. It interested me. It engaged me. I particularly enjoyed the middle section and would like to come back to it again. But I hesistate to recommend it to everyone. Some readers would be entirely alienated by some of the psychospeak. Others would struggle to get through the sheer number of words to find the gems hidden within.