Parenting

Child(ish) Reads: Diaper Dude

| Patti Webb

For this month’s Child(ish) Read, I wanted to do something a little different. The books I choose are normally about child development or parenting; but truthfully, most of these books are sub texturally written for moms. Women are the prime audience buying parenting books, so they are written with that lens.

Every time I’m in the bookstore and I see a book specifically about fatherhood, more likely than not they heavily rely on the same tropes: sports references and tired dad jokes.

I was once reading a fictionalized memoir written by a dad to his children and it was pretty much a rip off of How I Met Your Mother. The book even referenced How I Met Your Mother.

And going back to the sports thing, do you really need endless comparisons of holding your baby like a football to make the subject of being a good parent interesting? Slam dunk.

Truthfully, I don’t really take any of those fatherhood titles seriously because in no way, shape, or form would a book like that fly if written for an expectant mother.

We hear so many statistics that Millennial dads are more involved with their kids than in generations previous; not only from the time they spend, but the actual splitting of responsibilities. If this is true, I want to see fatherhood books reflect this shift in mindset. So, I gave this compare and contrast a try.

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Child(ish) Reads: Marigold and Rose

| Patti Webb

Next week is our spring break, and we are taking two weeks off and heading to the beach to enjoy our time with family. But before we go, we have a cute little Child(ish) Read to add to your TBR.

I was gifted a copy of Marigold and Rose by one of my colleagues. It is a short novella about two infant twin sisters in their first year of life. There isn’t an overarching plot or storyline. In fact, you could probably read this book in an hour. The author, Louise Glück, is a Nobel Prize-winning poet, so expect prose and getting into your feels.

The story switches narratives back-and-forth between the sisters, Marigold and Rose. They can’t walk or talk or read, but they are completely conscious of everything around them. The girls are quick to notice the differences between each other, and they have an internal awareness of their parents, grandparents, and the role they play in their lives.

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Coffee Chat: Old Enough

| Mary Stoffel, MOT, OTR/L

Have you ever seen videos of Asian kids coming home from school? Like this one.

I find these fascinating. Yes, the appliances they have look incredibly simple and efficient (and make me want to buy them), but can we talk about these kids? They seem way too young to be that impressively responsible. I couldn’t picture my 5-year-old prepping dinner or cleaning the house all by himself.

So, when surfing through Netflix shows to binge, I assumed Old Enough was the same thing.

Old Enough (or My First Errand in Japan) is a reality show featuring kids between the ages of 2-5, running their first independent errands throughout town. Despite our initial cringe of SENDING THESE KIDS OUT ON THEIR OWN for the sake of entertainment, their adventures are carefully planned and approved by their families well in advance. If anything were to go wrong (like missing a bus stop or walking home in the dark), the camera and production safety crews are ready to intervene. The show’s intention is to witness and celebrate these little kids as they accomplish something for the very first time. Although the tasks are fairly simple, it’s hard to imagine our own kids taking on the same challenges by themselves with no supervision.

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Autonomy Class

| Mary Stoffel, MOT, OTR/L

A couple weeks ago, we drafted a whole post about boundaries, along with every other parenting content creator on the block. Patti and I went back and forth on what exactly we wanted to say because at this point, “boundaries” is quite the buzzword and we didn’t know if our post actually had anything new to contribute. Emotional boundaries, trust boundaries, “I won’t let you…”, bodily consent, and so on; each with their own nuance and circumstances.

At our kids’ age (toddler to early school age), most of the boundaries we put in place are for personal safety. And why do we have these safety boundaries, besides avoiding the obvious child negligence charge? So that our kids can learn age-appropriate autonomy without harming themselves or people around them. So let’s start from there….

You know when your child refuses to eat what you made for dinner? Or when they put on some mismatched getup instead of the outfit you laid out for them? They’re not trying to be difficult. What you are witnessing is their autonomy at work.

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Coffee Chat: Postpartum Depression

| Patti Webb

I mentioned we would be getting into postpartum depression in Tuesday’s Child(ish) Reads review of Mother Brain. This is essentially Part Two of that review. Since this post is also a Coffee Chat, we wanted to add in our personal postpartum experiences and the outdated/false/damaging thought processes that contribute to the PPD stigma.

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