Parenting | this woman's work

Sensory Perception Sensitivity

Jun 182010

This is so amazingly nifty — Maryanne is right that I do have more going on that straight-ahead introversion:

About 20 percent of people are born with a personality trait called sensory perception sensitivity (SPS) that can manifest itself as the tendency to be inhibited, or even neuroticism. The trait can be seen in some children who are “slow to warm up” in a situation but eventually join in, need little punishment, cry easily, ask unusual questions or have especially deep thoughts, the study researchers say.

The new results show that these highly sensitive individuals also pay more attention to detail, and have more activity in certain regions of their brains when trying to process visual information than those who are not classified as highly sensitive.

…

Individuals with this highly sensitive trait prefer to take longer to make decisions, are more conscientious, need more time to themselves in order to reflect, and are more easily bored with small talk, research suggests.

Previous work has also shown that compared with others those with a highly sensitive temperament are more bothered by noise and crowds, more affected by caffeine, and more easily startled. That is, the trait seems to confer sensitivity all around.

The researchers in the current study propose the simple sensory sensitivity to noise, pain, or caffeine is a side effect of an inborn preference to pay more attention to experiences.

via Study Sheds Light on What Makes People Shy | LiveScience and shared with me by reader Kate!

My mom always said that where she’d be yelling at (or spanking) my brother or sister, she’d only need to shoot a look at me to bring me back into line. And that caffeine thing? I’m very sensitive to caffeine (and alcohol and other substances).

Noah is like this, too.

It also makes me think about how discipline techniques worked with Noah that don’t work with Madison. I worry that we’re too hard on her but now I think we’re actually just instinctively understanding that she needs a firmer hand.

(Example: It was enough to say, “Noah, I am frustrated when I trip over your toys!” when he was six and bammo! He’d clean up the room. With Madison you have to stand over her be pretty dang bossy when it’s time to clean. Although she’s getting better about this as she gets older and her attention span gets longer.)

Personality traits are interesting and learning more about them will be a very exciting thing about school. I want to understand better why some people need X and some people need Y and learn how to meet those needs but also help us to meet each other’s needs as partners and parents and friends.

Blog beginnings and more

Grad School, Writing 8 Responses »

Jun 142010

When I first started blogging people weren’t really blogging. There were a few of us (Jennifer was my first virtual friend blogging and she was way before me and Aimee was an early blogroll edition thanks to Becca). But there wasn’t this huge community and there weren’t “blog mavens” or consultants or advertising co-ops. Blogging was something you could do and reasonably expect that most people in the world would have no idea how to find you or your blog.

You need to understand that this was before google was a verb.

So when I started blogging with my full name and my kid’s name (only one kid then), it was a little edgy but it was so far out of the mainstream that it just didn’t matter. Like sometimes people would bring it up at picnics or at parties and people would say, “A blog? What’s a blog? You write a journal online?”

Blogging got me some of my very first writing jobs because I was fortunate enough to be building an online presence when people were building online media outlets. I met other early adopters and some of them had editorial control at these new fangled “Online Magazines” and they read my blog and offered me gigs so there was a clear impetus to keep blogging as me, Dawn Friedman, writer. (I can think of several people who — like myself — owe their editorial careers to the internet because we had some lucky foresight and got there when things were still young and so you could create a site and sell it to AOL who would then sell it to Oprah’s new production company and those of us who rode the wave suddenly had very useful clips whereas before we were just hopeful that an online byline might mean something — anything — to an actual print magazine editor.)

Then the internet grew and became essential for many if not most of us; not just bloggers any longer either but people who appreciated the ease of use of other social media (even my inlaws are on Facebook now, for crying out loud). The publicness of life online became less insulated and more OUT THERE, invading our real world in ways that I did not anticipate when I started my lowly, hand-coded in HTML blog on kjsl.com. (A free website that I got for being on one of the attachment parenting litservs where I first met Jennifer and Katie and several other early adapters who are part of my social media circle although I left that email list probably a decade ago.)

Again, as a writer this worked. In fact, it was absolutely necessary. If you head to any writer’s conference, open any writer’s magazine or show up at any writer’s group people have long been talking about the necessity of being online. My blog still gets me jobs directly (through assignments from editors who read me) and indirectly (through readers who pass my name on to people I know). It is part of the tired buzzword “platform”, which basically is defined as a writer’s ability to alert potential readers to her work.

There is the crux of my dilemma — I don’t want to stop writing because I will always be a writer so I can’t just close up shop and quit having a presence. How then do I shift that presence to allow me the freedom to do other things (namely be a counselor) off-line? How do I prepare to maintain the appropriate boundaries for transference when I have been virtually an open book? And how do I do this while still nurturing my writing career?

I’m headed to a clearer path about this though since I’ve been thinking on it since I sent in my application for my GRE (but didn’t dare think about it for real ’til I got the acceptance to a program).

This is what I know for sure: I liked the challenge of writing that disruption article, (which should be on news stands any minute) and it cemented my yearning to do more nonfiction that isn’t directly related to my life. I have loved writing essays and I will continue writing personal essays but the truth of it is that my focus on that has been due to the reality of my life, which has been very small and inner-focused because I haven’t had the space or time to go out and do any reporting. I mean, there’s a reason why every couple of years you get a slew of new memoirs about new motherhood. When I went to the Nieman Conference (for writers of nonfiction) a few years back, I left feeling both excited and discouraged. Excited because I knew I wanted to stretch myself as a writer and discouraged because I knew it would be a few years before I could do it. But my kids are bigger now and one reason I want to be in school and want to have a career that is not writing-focused is that I want a base that lets me research things that are of interest to me but are not OF me.

When I imagine blogging with these goals I’m still in the process of shaping I think it will be an awful lot like this entry, which is to say it’ll be personal but not the same kind of personal (less vulnerable) and it’ll also (I hope) be more about the things that I’m learning (like Harlow’s Monkey only I can only dream of attaining her awesomeness). And I do want to blog about the reality of grad school when you’re forty-ish and have kids and maybe even are fool enough to keep homeschooling them like we hope to do.

Now the hard part is taking the plunge to start dismantling my archives because dismantling them means making a definitive shift from marketing myself as a writer who will write just about any darn thing and is practically focused on quantity although she yearns to be focused on quality and marketing myself as a more select kind of writer. Which is why I decided to find another way to support myself but which scares me since I’ve been marketing like crazy now for several years and old habits die hard.

See, one reason my blog ends up at the top of searches is that it is HUGE and it is deeply entangled on the world wide web. To dismantle it means to take down these connections, which hurts my “platform.” (And my platform was already hurting because the rise of blogging and then the fall of blogging due to the rise of social networking means my blog has taken a double hit lately.) The reason I’m at the top of this list? Because my archives are large and well indexed (i.e., linked up on search engines).

It is a largely symbolic issue though. I need to get over it and not care if I drop off those lists entirely. Again, old habits die hard, people and my habits are pretty old now.

Kids will be kids

Parenting 23 Responses »

Jun 012010

My generation of parents, we struggle. We’re worried that we’re over-involved or that we’re not involved enough. The media demonizes us either as thoughtless and materialistic abandoning our kids to disinterested “other care” providers or else as helicopter parents who are cutting our kids’ meat into their teens. People debate whether we should take our kids to the park and leave them there or not let them play outside in the front yard without supervision.

I lean to the benign neglect side of things with a dash of hovering, like homeschooling my kids to keep ‘em close but sending them out to play where they won’t give me a headache. It’s true that I didn’t wean Noah until he was just about ready for kindergarten but it’s also true that by nine I was sending him to the neighborhood corner store to get me a Diet Coke.

So far the balance hasn’t been all that tricky. The kids kinda lead the way and what works for one doesn’t necessarily work for the other (note that outgoing Madison was the preschool dropout while introverted Noah thrived in his two year preschool career) and I’ve felt pretty good at our ad hoc planning.

I have been thinking about this as Noah has begun his journey through the teen years and I’ve been searching harder than ever for examples and encouragement from parents who have been there and who are there now. But I know that really I won’t know until my kids get there and they’re sure not there yet.

Katie’s unfathomable loss this weekend is tragic and it is terrifying. It’s tempting to say “There but for the grace of God” but let’s face it, God’s grace has nothing to do with it. The truth is, that could be any of us and it could be any of our kids. (I think about Julia who has wryly observed that hers is the family that makes other parents feel safe, as if her kids’ incredibly bad kidney luck somehow protects the rest of us from ending up in the ICU, holding the hands of a son or daughter who might die. “There but for the grace of God go I,” we think, full of compassion and horror, nevermind that what we’re saying is that God’s grace is keeping us safe but has left another family out in the cold.) I dread the Monday morning quarterbacking that was already inching along when she first wrote about his addiction, assault and overdose and is sure to get worse now even though I understand it. We want to comb through her story to reassure ourselves that it will never be our story, that our children are stronger or smarter or that we have relationships that will defy whatever tragedies threaten our families.

Honestly, it’s not bad parenting and it’s not the inattention of God that sends some of our children away from us. Bad things happen. They happen in strict, religious families. They happen in open-minded, open communication families. They happen when parents stay married and when they divorce. They happen whether our kids are troublemakers or the ones who sit still and listen. THEY HAPPEN. It’s horrifying. It’s almost too scary to contemplate. But even the best advice is looking at families in hindsight and there are no crystal balls when it comes to raising kids. For every family whose child is proof that THIS is the way or THAT is a mistake, there’s another family ready to prove just the opposite.

“I talked to MY kids about drugs!” says the parent whose kid is card-carrying straightedge. And at the same time another parent of a child in rehab says, “Yeah, well I did, too.”

So how do we go on? How do we let our kids get on the school bus or bike to the community pool or go away to college or overnight camp? How do we let go when there are no guarantees that we can keep them safe? How will we live with ourselves if something awful happens and all we have is a rearview mirror? God, I don’t know. I don’t know. And I hope I never have to know.

Last month I interviewed Dick Hoyt for Support for Special Needs. I know you’ve seen his YouTubes; he’s the guy who pushes his disabled son through marathon after marathon. He’s a pretty unassuming guy and frankly, it was a tough interview. Not because he wasn’t lovely and friendly and happy to talk but because he’s a man of few words and most of those words are the ones he’s used to saying in interviews. It was hard to get him past the soundbites I’d already heard in other interviews and in reading his ghostwritten memoir. But the guy, he is terrific and very very kind. I interviewed him to be the inaugural guest in a series of articles we’re calling Future Glimpse, which are articles from parents who have raised their kids with special needs to adulthood to give some much needed perspective and encouragement. So my questions centered on Dick managed to let Rick be a kid. How did he let him head off into the neighborhood in the day before cell phones? How did he let him live in the college dorms without full-time care? Especially when Rick started partying too hard or when he had a caretaker who didn’t bother to show up on time leaving Rick to nearly suffocate. (Note: Rick began drinking heavily in college but he quit when he realized he was risking his life. Why he could quit and Henry couldn’t is not something we can ever really know.)

I’ll tell you, Dick was stymied at my questions. He didn’t understand why people might not understand. The way he saw it, his son had a right to a life that he, Rick, wanted to live and as the dad, his job was to help him get it. So Dick and his wife, Judy, stifled their fears and they fought for their son’s right to be independent.

I look at Dick, 70 years old today, still pushing Rick in their racing wheelchair and I look at the pictures of beautiful Henry, lost forever to the world and I think you just can’t know. You just can’t know. Some of our children will succeed beyond our wildest dreams because we let them fly and others, oh god, others will fall and our hearts will fall with them.

I can’t make sense of it. But I do know that I don’t look at Katie and wonder where she failed because the undertoad haunts all of us. I asked my mother, “Is there ever a time where you can say, ‘Oh I got them there! My children are finally in the place called Safe and I no longer have to worry!’” And my mom said never because life is unpredictable and it keeps on happening.

On the email list I was on way back when where I first met Katie, we’d have .sig lines, you know, in our emails. And one of my favorites was that quote from Elizabeth Stone, “Having a child is like letting your heart walk around outside of your body.” I thought it was hard watching my baby toddle away from me. I thought the worst was the sleepless nights when I worried about SIDS and unseen chokeables. My mom is right; it never ends. You just learn to live with it, that awful fear but it’s always there waiting to bubble up when your kid climbs a tree or goes on his first date or gets caught smoking cigarettes.

I will take Katie’s advice to heart, to never brush off drug experimentation as nothing serious but I will also be inspired by Dick Hoyt who refused to let fear guide his parenting. And I will accept that my heart will forever be walking outside my body, carried loosely in the hands of these two kids I’ve been blessed to parent. May the world be kind to them!

Meandering Sunday

Adoption, Parenting 3 Responses »

May 022010

I’m tired enough to do a bullet list.

Some of you likely know that Katie Granju’s son recently suffered a devastating attack and drug overdose, which she is writing about on her blog and on facebook. Henry is doing much better now but still has a long road ahead and like many of us, I can’t get it out of my head. It’s also making me think a lot of a friend of mine who is also caring for a loved one in similar circumstances and I am thinking again of how we (parents) can cause trauma but we can’t always prevent it. By which I mean that obviously there is such a thing as bad parenting (abuse) but as to that indefinable good parenting, well, it is no guarantee that we can protect our children from the world or from themselves. Bad things can happen to our kids and so much of it is out of our control and sometimes the best that we can do is love them anyway.
I have been thinking about this, too, because I’m doing interviews to expand the disruption article I’m writing (Jennifer talks about it here and by the way, they just won the Utne award for social and cultural coverage!!). And I’m thinking about what it means to be a “successful” parent. Because the successful parents I interviewed are not using the traditional measures of success like good grades or high achievement. They’re creating expectations based on the reality of their children and the parents who can do this, are better able to serve their kids.
This makes me think about Support for Special Needs, too. Because parents whose children have special needs are off the beaten path and it seems to me that the parents who are happiest as parents are the ones who accept this path and define it instead of allowing it to define them. Instead their focus is on celebrating THEIR child, THEIR child’s achievements and they are not hemmed in by other expectations or preconceived limitations.
Someone shared some information with Katie about “harm reduction” in addiction treatment, which sounds similar to what we sometimes did in shelter. Which was to recognize that most of the women we served were not going to be able to escape domestic violence at that time. Some of them might never escape. But you meet people where they are and give them tools for that time and place. So one thing that every woman got from her case manager was time to work on a safety plan so that she was better prepared to survive the reality of her situation.
And that reminded me of a parent I spoke with who has an adult child who is mentally ill and who is not always med compliant and so her parenting is harm reduction parenting, really, because she cannot make him med compliant but she can do things within her sphere to help him be safe. But her measures of parenting success are so different than what we traditionally think of as success and she is indeed very successful because she is able to love him even at his most unlovable and accept him even when she must reject certain behaviors. And that, to my eye, is some amazing parenting.
Which also makes me think about our family philosophy of adoption, which is not to assume that it must be judged against the standard of giving birth and caring for that child you gave birth to or in being cared for by the person who gave birth to you. In other words, it makes no sense to try to make Madison’s experience as much like Noah’s as possible than it does to make Noah’s experience as much like Madison’s as possible. It is a sort of “harm reduction” to appreciate and understand Madison’s unique experiences. And that is why it was easy to smile when Madison snuggled up to Pennie on the couch on Sunday and smushed her face up into Pennie’s shoulder, heaving a contented sigh then saying, “Mommy! Look at me!” because she expects the acknowledgment she deserves of her reality of being an adopted child in an open adoption with her loving birth mom.
Sometimes Julia will write “Spoken in the Mutant Family Household” entries on her blog. I love these entries. I love them because they are usually funny but also because I like how she uses the word Mutant. It’s true, for one. Their kids have mutated genes, which is why they have ARPKD. I also like the way these entries symbolize her acceptance of her kids’ abnormal status without creating excuses or defenses. They are who they are and the truth is that they are not normal and Julia does not love them in spite of their mutations or love them because she can see past their mutations or love them BECAUSE of their mutations. She loves them. They are who they are and they are lovable.
See, that was what struck me about one family in particular who I interviewed about disruption. This mother is able to see the reality of her child’s challenges and also loves her child. The child is not the sum of her challenges. She is who she is and she is lovable because her mother accepts their experience off the beaten path.
Those of us with “typical” children could learn from this. Because if we can’t see who our children ARE beyond the expectations, then how can we care for them well? Sometimes terrible things happen. Sometimes those things are temporary. Sometimes they have permanent repercussions. Will we love our kids anyway, even if they “fail?” (Even if bad things happen? Even if the bad things are their fault? Even if they make the mistakes that are the stuff of parental nightmares?)
I believe that the beaten path is an illusion anyway. I think most people end up wandering away or getting sidelined. Life is difficult and we’re here (I believe) to learn from it, which means that most of us have to make “mistakes.” How do we love our kids through the mistakes? How do we love them unconditionally? How do we hold them responsible for their own lives while still being steadfast in our support? Oh this parenting thing — it is forever a challenge.

Ohio Moms Blog Today

Parenting No Responses »

Jan 212010

Talking about parenting my revved up little girl.

I do not want to fight the Madisonness of Madison anymore than I have to, which means changing my expectations. We want her to sit still during dinner but we don’t expect her not to twirl as she chatters in the kitchen on her way to set the table. We expect her to pick up her toys but recognize that she won’t see the mess unless we point it out to her repeatedly. Raising Madison means finding ways to welcome her energy, which isn’t always easy. Especially since the higher her energy rises, the more ours seems to drop.

Read the rest at: The busiest girl in the world – Ohio Moms Blog.