Too Good to Be True

We've been working on bedtime lately. That's kind of misleading. The truth is, we're ALWAYS working on bedtime. Getting the kids to go to bed without a thousand curtain calls and before 10pm is basically my life's work.

But lately, we've been making an extra big effort, really trying to hammer down some sort of order into the chaos because there's going to be a baby in the house soon - a real one, with REAL, justifiable sleep issues and right now, the thought of introducing more insanity into our bedtime strikes a chord of terror into my heart.

So, after OD'ing on research (polling ParkSlopeParents for advice, re-skimming my sleep books, visiting Soho Parenting, the sleep gurus of NYC) I basically realized there's no simple solution, more a war of attrition. But the Soho Parenting people did make one very useful suggestion, which was that we start the whole bedtime earlier. 8pm is a perfectly nice bedtime if your kids go to sleep, oh within an half hour or so of hitting the hay, but when it takes them 2 stinking hours to "wind down", well, 8pm might as well be the stroke of midnight.

So we pushed bedtime back about 30-60 minutes and now - miracle of miracles - the kids are usually conked out by 9:30pm. Believe it or not, that's a major improvement for us. That's reason for a ticker tape parade. Sec especially has responded well to the early bedtime, sometimes falling asleep by 9pm, which makes us feel so extraordinarily fortunate, we don't even SPEAK of it when it happens.

One night, the unthinkable happened. At 8:45, I went into the kids' bedroom to fulfill some demand of Primo's -- more milk or I need a new pen to create my comic book masterpiece or I finished this book can I have another one? -- and I saw Sec was asleep. I told Primo I'd come back in 15 minutes to turn off his book light and sing him some songs, thinking maybe I could have them BOTH asleep by a conventional bedtime.

At 9pm, I creeped into the bedroom, and climbed the first few steps of the ladder to Primo's top bunk. But I stopped short. Because my son was sleeping. SLEEPING.

"Good God," I thought, "he's fallen asleep reading his book, like a kid in a freaking MOVIE. I guess that shit really DOES happen. "

I immediately sucked my whispering back into my throat and creeped like a pregnant ninja down the ladder, slipping out of the room without a sound.

"David," I said, "You are not going to believe what I'm about to say. Primo is asleep."

"Its 9pm," he replied, confused.

"I know," I said.

We exchanged proud glances, not even daring to jinx our good fortune by speaking out loud what we were thinking, and that was, "Its working. Our massive effort is paying off. We are good parents and this is the proof. By God, we've done it."

And then, the door to the kids' room swung open and Primo darted out laughing his head off meniacally.

"I tricked you Mommy!!!" he chortled, "You thought i was asleep! But I was only pretending!"

Which made a lot more sense.

Peeing Outside

Big thread on parkslopeparents recently about the permissibility of children peeing in the park. There are those who said, “Uh-uh, no way, under no circumstances,” and those who said, “A-Ok, peeing outside is fun,” and those who thought it was tolerable in cases of potty training emergencies.

I fall staunchly in the last category. Do I want to watch a kid drop trou and piss in the middle of a picnic area while I’m eating a sandwich? No. But I don’t blink an eye if I catch sight of a toddler or preschooler peeing behind a bush or next to a tree off the beaten path. I’m constantly dodging piles of dog shit on the sidewalks here and I think if I have to do that, then I’m entitled to let my not-fully-potty-trained-child relieve himself near a tree rather than wet his pants when he’s somewhere far from a bathroom/

But the thread did remind me of one time, a month or two ago, when I was in my local playground with Seconda.

We’d recently come back from a trip to Tennessee, where the backyard is literally a forest, and where Sec made a habit of letting herself out through the doggie door and peeing outside, just like the doggies.

I discovered she was doing this one day because she came up to me and said, “Mommy, I did pee-pee!”

I said, “That’s great honey, did you use the potty?”

And she said, “No, I went out to the woods.”

“Oh, OK,” I said, “But where are your panties?”

“As a matter of fact,” she replied, “they are in the woods and they are all wet.”

When we came back to New York, it was difficult to break her off this pee-outside habit. So one day we were in the playground -- not in the park, but a plyground in the middle of a busy street – and I looked over and saw a pair of little girl underwear on the pavement. Then I caught sight of Seconda next to a tree in the middle of the packed playground, about to squat down and take a piss.

“Sec!” I yelled, “What are you DOING?”

“I’m peeing in the woods,” she replied.

It was an honest mistake. Could’ve happened to anyone.

Where do you stand on the pee-in-the-park debate -- sometimes, always or maybe? Have you allowed your little one some license when it comes to emergencies?

Helicopter Parenting: an age-old tradition

Every few months someone poses the same question on the parkslopeparents listserv: “At what age is it OK to let kids go to the playground alone?”

Every time it comes up, the response is always the same, with everyone more or less expressing the same sentiment, which is some variation on this:

“When I was a kid, I would go to the corner to get my dad cigarettes by myself as soon as I was able to walk, about the age of 18 months. When I was 3, I was taking the subway alone to bring myself to day care. I was traveling inter-continentally with NO ADULT SUPERVISION by the age of 4. And that was in the 70s, at the height of crime in the city! And there were no cell phones! So, loosen up helicopter moms, because independence is good for kids.”

I find this idea of helicopter parenting as a new, yuppie development and our youth as a time when kids roamed the streets wholly unsupervised to be very strange. That’s because when I was growing up in Bensonhurst, in the 80s (yeah, I’m younger than you thought, aren’t I?), I never got to do ANYTHING by myself.

I didn’t go to the corner for milk. I didn’t walk to school. I didn’t play on the stoop or even lean out the window without adult surveillance. My mother and grandmother made protective Park Slope parents look like freedom fighters. And when I would protest, “Don’t you trust me?” they’d say, “I trust you. It’s everyone else I don’t trust.”

The most leash they ever gave me was when I was 12, I wanted to go to the Hard Rock Café with a bunch of Manhattan kids, and my aunt and uncle conceded to follow me. Discretely, of course. Turned out to be helpful because we didn’t have enough money to pay the bill.

So helicopter parenting is an age-old tradition as far as I’m concerned. Do I think my family’s Orange Alert paranoia was ideal? Probably not. Had they been more reasonable, I probably wouldn’t have pathologically lied to them all throughout high-school. I got so adept at lying so that I could go to parties and hang out at pool halls and make out with my boyfriend in Central Park, that after a while I would lie for absolutely no reason, just to keep them off my scent, so that nothing I ever said to them between the ages of 14 and 18 was true. I’d say I was going to see the movie Ghost when I was going to see Last of the Mohicans. I’d say I was going to 79th Street when I was really going to 77th. But I was a good kid, I made good decisions, had good judgment and a healthy sense of adventure. I wasn’t scarred because I was sheltered. I fared fine.

I already give Primo and Seconda way more independence that my parents gave me (which isn’t saying much, admittedly) But I have to say, when I read the article which someone posted on the listserv, called “Parenting Without Fear” (by Lenore Skenazy -- the columnist for the NY Sun who let her 9 year-old take the subway by himself and got a ton of flack about it, leading her to write a dozen essays about the revolutionary joy-ride and how famous she is because of it), well, when I read an article called “Parenting Without Fear” I think it might as well be called “Parenting on Mars.” I’d have to be on some pretty powerful mind-altering substances not to feel fear about my children in the world, no matter what streets they are on. The best I can shoot for is, "Parenting Without Paranoia.”

I am all for people giving their kids “free-range” but it drives me crazy when I’m made to feel un-cool or even irresponsible, like I’m hindering their development, if I’m protective of my kids. We do what’s best for our families, and our families are all wildly different.

What’s your take, readers? Are helicopter mothers the curse of modern civilization? Am I the only totally over-sheltered child of paranoid parents? When are you going to let the kids go it alone?