T A B L E++T A L K

Positive daycare experiences: Share yours in the Mothers area of Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

Mothers who think too much
By Anne S. Lewis
Will breathing while pumping gas cause irreparable damage to your unborn child?
(06/24/98)

Ask Dr. Love
By Jenn Shreve
Controversial breast surgeon Susan Love takes on hormones
(06/23/98)

Turning the tables on Terry Gross
By Lori Leibovich
Salon gets personal with NPR's maestro of conversation
(06/22/98)

Don't complain. Don't explain.
By Gina Hyams
The final days of a difficult father
(06/19/98)

Don't call me Mom
By Susan McCarthy
Why I'm Susan to my kids
(06/18/98)

BROWSE THE SALLIE TISDALE ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

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Stop worrying about bruising your children's precious egos and start worrying about turning them into big babies.

BY SALLIE TISDALE | I live on a block typical of the urban middle class -- bungalows mixed with a few larger homes, most with well-tended yards. I have childless professional neighbors, retired neighbors, stay-at-home elderly neighbors. We share two streetside basketball hoops, a large raccoon and assorted opossums and keep between us several school-age children, a few toddlers, two babies, a half-dozen dogs of varying degrees of obedience and several roving cats.

One of the neighbors across the street likes to let his little boy sit in the car and honk the horn -- and honk it and honk it and honk it. I don't think it has occurred to this man that everyone in the neighborhood gets to play his son's little game. I suspect he's just decided it's a harmless way to get his kid out of his hair a while. I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't consider it preferable to parking the boy in front of the television.

He's a little kid -- what's a parent to do?

Most of the parents with whom I'm friendly, including this man, are over 40, but have children younger than mine. I was aberrant in my generation of mobile, self-actualizing boomers, because I had my first child in my early 20s. I'm 41 now and my youngest is 14, but lots of people my age and older have children still in preschool. They have yet to confront teenagers at all. Yet in spite of the difference in our ages as parents, I see them making the same mistakes I did.

With my first child, I was so young and still so infected with the philosophy of radical education that had worked for me in college that I made the mistake of trying to use it to raise a toddler. I was hesitant to discipline and correct, concerned with his self-esteem and worried about being "negative," careful about his "personal boundaries" and reluctant to impart my will on him.

He turned into something of a monster for several years -- dependent, destructive, selfish, with little control over his temper. He's 20 now and through his own devices and my own late efforts, he's turned out to be a polite, courteous, interesting and highly self-reliant young man. We were both lucky, I think -- especially him. My immature mothering took a perfect fruit and spoiled it rotten. Somehow it was possible to bring that sweetness back. It isn't always possible.

I had been raised in the typically inconsistent style of the late 1950s, by a temperamental, inattentive father and a mother who secretly wished she was doing something else. My father drank a lot and hung out at the fire hall; my mother read a lot and used Dr. Spock and Linda Goodman's "Sun Signs" as her child-care manuals. Duties and territories were carefully divided, largely by gender. I spent a lot of time on my own, dodged my father and read a lot beside my mother, and one day blended into the other.

But I spent my childhood in the '60s and grew up largely in the '70s, in the counterculture, cultivating the carefully scripted spontaneity and naturalness of those years. As a 22-year-old single mother, confronted with a toddler who liked to tear the pages out of his books, I was stumped. My inability to simply take the book out of his hands, to say the word "no" without hesitation, seems absurd to me now. Back then, a 2-year-old's tantrums weren't all that different from behavior I'd seen in college dorms.

N E X T+P A G E: Lack of boundaries does not equal love