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Sometimes this is my kids.

Letting the kids roam

After writing my own post about free-ranging kids, I've been trying to pay attention to what I'm seeing in my own neighborhood. Laura also posts about this and the comments are a great sharing of different experiences, both the ones that the adults had as children and the ones that their kids are currently having. I've noticed that around here, lots of kids roam pretty freely at all ages, beginning around 8. When we went to the park, a group of kids around 9 or 10 rolled through on their bikes. I see kids on foot, bikes and scooters headed to the nearby shopping center or the closer ice cream shop. Older kids walk to the middle school, around 1 mile for many students. The public library is a block from the middle school and I regularly see unsupervised kids there. Our neighborhood has plenty of sidewalks. There are other divisions nearby that don't, but you still see kids on bikes there. Today, my kids walked to the park--a whole 3 blocks away!--by themselves. I tried, to no avail, to get them to walk to the library, a bit over a mile.

In other words, I think a culture persists here of kids playing in the street, roaming the neighborhood. In part, it's because, like one commenter at Laura's says, backyards are tiny, so basketball, football and frisbee games move to the street. We have no less than 3 basketball goals on our street, with regular pickup games happening mostly after dinner. One is right under a streetlight, so the games happen well into the fall. When we've contemplated relocating, it's this culture that I couldn't be sure would be replicated in another neighborhood. And, in fact, in more upper class neighborhoods, what I've seen is no sidewalks, no kids on bikes or on foot. In those places, there are only structured activities and playdates in fenced-in back yards.

I do long for a creek or some woods, but we get that through visits to various places, so I think that's okay. And I've also seen the kids do some pretty creative things on the computer. Geeky Boy constructed a very complex map today, which he posted to a Runescape forum. When he plays, I swear he spends 1/2 hour playing and another 3 hours writing, drawing, etc. So imagination can come from other places besides the outdoors.

What about me?

As someone who stepped off the full-time career track recently, I'm naturally drawn to articles about women who choose to stay home or who want part-time options or who are struggling to manage a full-time career. Via a comment to this Motherlode post about a women who recently quit her job (after attempting to create a part-time one) to raise her daughter, I found this post about Jack Welch's recent speech where he suggests that women can't have a family and an upper level management position. Maybe they can't, but it has nothing to do with women and everything to do with societal and workplace norms.

Anyway, what has struck me about the rhetoric of many women who choose to leave is that they often say they don't want to miss out on the milestones of their children's lives. It's not really about the kids, per se, but about the mothers' experience of the kids. Occasionally, usually in situations where the kids do need extra attention for health or other reasons, the mothers will mention how their kids need them. The other rhetoric surrounding these decisions is that the mothers feel their families are suffering, as the latter post quotes from Womenomics "the costs to family of a high-octane career are just too great."

I'm going to ignore for now that one rarely sees the conversation about men revolve around these issues. Even if fathers do want to witness their childrens' milestones or feel their families are suffering because of their long work hours, there isn't a lot of ink, digital or otherwise, spilled over it.

What intrigues me is the sliding that occurs between the mothers' personal desires to be present and the families' needs for said presence. It seems that when weighing whether to work or stay at home, the personal (and potentially selfish, but not in a negative sense) desire to be with one's child must be refigured as the family's (not the mother's) need for a maternal presence. Even the original post by the mother referenced in the Motherlode post makes this slide. On returning to work, Anna feels like she's missing out--a personal desire. Then, she says she wants to do what's right for her daughter.

I find this interesting not because I think mothers are bad for wanting to spend time with their children, but that after an initial expression of this desire, they feel the need to frame their argument as something that's better for their children or for their family as a whole. They seem to find it difficult to say, I want this for myself. I can see why they would have trouble saying this. It reframes the whole working vs. sahm debate very differently and plays into all the worst stereotypes of sahms. I don't really quite consider myself a full-blown sahm. I'd say I'm working very part-time at the moment, but I can say that I made this move mostly for me and secondarily for my kids. Hindsight is 20/20 of course, but I can definitely say that I experienced a lot of personal stress and unpleasantness as a result of trying to juggle a career (not just a job) and a family. I had very little support from either the workplace or the home front. I was also watching my son suffer in school. Whether I played a role in that or not, I knew or felt that if I could be more present, I might alleviate that suffering. I might have suffered through the personal stress to get to my career goals if my family was cruising along fine (as it did for years), but because things seemed to be falling apart (and I was suffering as a result of this as well), I needed to change something. It was a complicated decision to make and I think reducing it to my own desire to be with my kids or my kids/family's need for me is too easy.

When people love what they do and/or can achieve a good balance between their work life and their family life, they tend to continue to work. I found that I'd quite loving my particular position, though I loved the field in general and I found I'd lost any sense of balance. When I think about my previous work life, I see many signs that I was personally suffering. My mental and physical health declined. I felt pretty despondent about going to work. It's pretty clear I needed to take a break for myself. As parents go through the process of raising kids, of dealing with their particular kids and their particular employment circumstances, they make different decisions at different points. Our careers peaked at about the same time, leaving us both with little time to focus on family issues. Ideally, we each could have picked up the slack for the other, but it didn't work that way. I often advise new mothers, especially, that parenting actually gets more challenging as the kids get older, and to consider cutting back at that point rather than when the kids are infants and toddlers. But some people have challenging infants and toddlers. They get sick or they have special needs of some kind or they just take more energy.

I guess this is a long and rambly way of saying, sometimes it is about you and your ability to manage, physically and mentally, the challenges that life throws at you. And I think we, as a society, need to quit judging each other for decisions we might make as a result. It would be even better if we could go to employers and say, "you know what, here's what's going on in my personal/family life and I need you to accommodate me in this way" and know that we won't get fired. I have that now, as my own employer, and any future employer is going to have a hard time competing with the flexibility I provide myself.

Gaming with your kids

I thought this post about playing WoW with a 3-year-old, was pretty awesome. I love playing games with my kids and have been doing so since Geeky Boy was 3. We played Lara Croft on PlayStation 2 together. At that time, we switched off managing the controls. Geeky Boy would often hide for the gory parts (which weren't all that gory given the quality of the graphics). And he often needed help with the more complex moves. I remember when I finally needed him to help with some complicated moves when he was about 10 or 11.

I've tried to get my kids to play WoW with me and they do on occasion, but they're hooked on other things. Geeky Girl likes The Sims and Geeky Boy is still into Runescape. I play Sims too, so Geeky Girl can't talk to me about it, and although I don't play Runescape, it's similar enough to WoW that Geeky Boy can share his adventures. I like that it's not a separate world that I don't understand and blow off. With games that involve real people, we talk about how to behave and how to respond to situations. Geeky Boy actually communes with many of his real-life friends via Runescape just as I commune with friends via WoW. We don't look at each other like we're crazy when we talk about having conversations with people via a virtual world.

The kids have also recently rediscovered Nintendo 64. Geeky Boy bought the console a few years ago. He thought he'd given it away until he unearthed it from somewhere in his room (I know, scary). So, they've been playing Mario Kart on it even though they have Mario Kart for the Wii. N64 was past my prime, but I remember playing with my stepbrother when he was their age and I was in college, so it's a fun trip down memory lane for me as well.

To some extent, I think game playing for kids can be about escaping the adult world, but my experience has been that my kids want me to be there with them, to share that experience with them. It's really a nice way to hang with your kids and have fun yourself.

Happy Bastille Day!

Image by lorda via Flickr

In honor of Bastille Day, I made croissants and pain au chocolat. The croissants turned out quite well. The pain au chocolat, while quite tasty, was too big (see right). I should have divided each square in half, as I did for the croissants, but I underestimated how much they would rise. Oh well. Lesson learned. I've also challenged my kids to find out what Bastille Day is. They're currently ignoring that challenge and playing Risk. They have until the end of the day, so hopefully, they'll meet the challenge eventually. It's another gorgeous day, so we have plans to play tennis and visit the pool again. I did a bit of writing this morning, have a couple more emails to send out, and maybe a bit of web work. I think it's hard to keep the kids occupied and get your work done. I could simply send them out (as my mom did), but I'm in that high maintenance parenting mode, where I don't want my kids to "waste" their summer. And there is summer reading to do and instrument practice, etc. So I feel the need to keep them on their toes a bit--and that takes effort. And yes, I know I've written two blog posts today already.

The Freedom of Childhood (or not)

Two posts on "Free-Range Childhoods" caught my eye yesterday. Both were comments on Michael Chabon's article on childhood adventure books and the general idea that our childhoods and our parents' childhoods were much more adventurous than our children's are turning out to be. To some extent that's true. I can remember venturing all over our neighborhood, basically spending entire days outside roaming around rather aimlessly. It seems like I did this every day in the summer, but I don't think that's necessarily true. I suspect I remember the days I did spend outside and not the ones I spent in front of the tv.

We've been lucky in that most of the neighborhoods we've lived in have been conducive to wandering. My son, now 14, has ventured pretty far from home on foot, mostly once he reached the age of 11 or 12, a little later than I remember wandering myself. Of course, my mother sent me to the corner store when I was about 4 or 5, with a quarter to buy a cheap toy and some bubblegum. Like Tim said, I think there was a definite separation between the adult world and the kid world. I was sent to the store in large part because my mom wanted a break, to reclaim her adult space. Likewise, I suspect we were encouraged to roam the neighborhood so she could have her space.

Tim suggests that there's a definite loss for the kids in that those adventures teach great lessons of independence and confidence, but there's also the gaining of a shared experience as a family or as parent and child. I have vague memories of wishing my parents would join in with us and I remember family vacations as being times when they had no choice, when we did things together because we were in unfamilar territory and we explored it together. Although my kids have spent some time hanging out with friends, running around the neighborhood, they've also spent a lot of time with me. We've gone to the park together, to the pool together, etc. And I think that's been a positive thing. I've often lamented the separation of generations. Perhaps what's happening now will mean our kids won't see such a gap between generations.

Time for reflection

One of the lovely things about being in the locations I was in on my vacation was that I was pretty much off the grid. I could use my iPhone a bit while still in the country, but once we got to France, we had little contact with the outside world. Although we could have purchased an English language newspaper, we didn't and we watched a bit of French news which was mostly about the Tour de France. We did manage to find out about Michael Jackson, but mostly we had no idea what was going on. And we didn't really miss it. At least I didn't.

I spent time just appreciating my surroundings, but also thinking about where I am and where I'm going. And this extended to Mr. Geeky and together, we reflected on our lifestyle--what was good, what we didn't like, etc. Overall, I'd say, we like where we are and how our life has turned out, but there are things that we'd like to be better. Just before we'd left, I'd commented on how I felt our lives here were sort of rushed, that it was fast-paced and it seemed difficult to slow down. In essence, I feel like this is part of the culture here. This would probably be true of any major metropolitan area where commute times (both to work and to shopping, schools, etc.) eat into time to spend alone with a book or with family. I also think there's an element of our own rushed tempo with our careers in technology that move at the speed of light. I think we have been influenced both by the locale and our careers to feel the need to do everything quickly.

Another element that feels problematic to me is the lack of connection I feel to my neighbors. I have plenty of friends, but they are far flung, living in the city or in other suburbs. I've made a real effort, though, in the last few months, to make those connections. It takes time and effort. I think improving these connections might help slow things down a bit, and make us feel like we have ties that support us.

On the material side, with my leaving regular work, the plans we had for improving our house to gain space and make it more our own have been put on hold. Moving out a ways might gain us some space, but it adds to the commute, uproots the kids from their schools and disconnects us from the few connections we do have. But there are small things we can do--painting, smaller improvements--that might make a big difference. And really, we don't care that much about our physical accoutrements.

One thing I've been thinking about is trying to not be so hard on myself. I've spent much of my life comparing myself negatively to others, and although I've mostly stopped doing that, I find it sneaking in occasionally, making me feel that who I am and what I have is not good enough. But it is. I really have few complaints. Those I have can be fairly easily remedied. So I came away from my vacation much more appreciative of what I have and the life I've built, but with an eye to continue working on the things I want to be better. And I hope to slow down and appreciate it even more.

Il y a bien longtemps . . .

Me at Indian restaurant, originally uploaded by lorda.

It's been a long time. I've been in North Carolina, and then Paris, Indianapolis and now finally home again. The weather is beautiful here, making the transition back to real life a bit easier. I'm sitting now on my back deck with a beer, trying to recreate the Paris cafe atmosphere. It's close, but not quite.

I had an absolutely fabulous time, but I am glad to be back home, not living out of suitcases. So, what's everyone been up to?

The morning view

This is where I am. It's beautiful and relaxing, all the things you need for a good vacation.

-- Post From My iPhone

Hosting other kids

Yesterday we ended up with several extra kids around. It was a good thing all the way around, keeping the kids off the electronics for a while, participating in a couple of rounds of Monopoly, followed by a trip to the park to play tennis, picking up a couple of other kids, then to the water ice stand and back again. Two of the extras stayed with us for dinner and in fact, all night. You can't plan these things. They require letting your kids roam a bit, encouraging them to stop by friends' houses to say hello. I'm thankful we live in an area where I have no fear about their doing these kinds of things.

The Black Swan

I just finished reading The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. It is, as Kevin Drum notes, an odd book to read. The tone makes you want to not trust Taleb, and he almost tells you not to trust him, but then his ideas make some sense. He seems prescient about the current financial crisis, as his whole book suggests that financial institutions are generally blind to outlier events such as the mortgage bubble and ensuing stock market crash because they use models based on the bell curve rather than a power law. His argument is basically that black swan events, those that no one predicted, happen more often than we think, and that our models of prediction are terrible at predicting even smaller versions of these events, much less the seriously catastrophic (or conversely, seriously beneficial) ones.

Taleb has equal scorn for academics and bankers. Academics are too insular, having never been in "real" decision-making situations. Bankers are in real decision-making situations but don't think critically about those decisions. They check their brains at the door. Worse for him are bankers who use tight mathematical models from academics to predict risk.

Interestingly, when searching the blogosphere to find what others have said about the book, I mostly found commentary on Taleb's hedge fund that is based on his ideas. Some have claimed it's not doing well--because his strategy is to lose small amounts of money 90% of the time and win big 10% of the time--while others have touted its brilliance. I don't care much about applying his ideas to finance, even though that's his field. I think it's more interesting to consider the idea of the black swan, both positive and negative in more general terms. He says to be open to opportunity, to be generally open-minded about what might happen. Try as much as possible to think outside the box. People are not predictable; society as a whole is even less predictable.

I remember being a kid trying to imagine how my life would turn out--what kind of job would have, who would I marry, would I have kids, where would I live--and it always felt like this black hole. I was not, back then, one of those people who planned much past the next few days. I had friends who were already planning to be doctors or lawyers and were planning their classes and colleges based on those plans. I just figured some unexpected event might occur that could change any plan I made. I was right. Just thinking that something unexpected might occur helps you deal with it. It doesn't mean that when a good thing or a bad thing happens that it doesn't impact you. It just means that you can take it in stride. You can just start doing what you need to do to minimize the pain or take advantage of the opportunity. Rather than, as I sometimes do now, worrry about what might happen, and conjure up all the most horrible images, it makes more sense to live from day to day. It's harder than you think.

Expertise

I managed a little more writing today, amid the chaos of channeling the kids' energy appropriately and the sounds of "why can't I". Today, I began thinking about and writing about the idea of expertise. Academics (an others) complain that blogs are written by non-experts and are therefore prone to promoting bad and inaccurate information. What I'm trying to reconcile in my mind is the respect I have for experts such as scientists and my skepticism toward those experts. For example, I don't like the way right-wing religious folks discount evolution or global warming or the causes of cancer. On the other hand, I don't like to be told I'm not an expert in something because I don't have the right degrees or publications or whatever. In academia, there is only one path to expertise and if you haven't taken that path (or veered from it in some way), you have no right to speak.

Enter the blogs. There are some "experts" writing blogs--hooray! And they are getting their expertise out there to a larger audience. On occasion, they have to deal with people who've made up their minds based on incomplete or incorrect data, and they often show how they come to their conclusions, revealing not just the content they have expertise in, but also the process of arriving at conclusions. And that's good for everyone. And there are blogs written by non-experts that are very, very smart. While they may not always have the deep knowledge about a subject that an expert does, they often have a very different context for what they know that is sometimes broader than an expert's knowledge. Of course, it depends on the subject. One is less likely to trust a non-expert's opinion on particle physics than on politics.

I'm reading more deeply into this issue and these are just my initial thoughts. I probably have blind spots about expertise, given my own fraught history of not being considered an expert for lack of the right credentials. But it's a fascinating topic, to be sure.