To your first question, my almost 2yo really likes Umbrella by Taro Yashima. Umbrella is the story of a little girl who gets an umbrella and boots for her 3rd birthday and is SO EXCITED but has to endure many days of nice weather before it finally rains. On a sunny day, she tells her mother she needs her umbrella because the sun bothers her eyes; on a windy day, she tells her mother she needs her umbrella because the wind bothers her eyes. Her mother says, "You know you can enjoy the sunshine better without the umbrella" and "the wind might blow your umbrella away" along with, "Let's save it for a rainy day." Finally, it rains, and the protagonist gets to use her umbrella. A savvy reader also notices that she matures as well. The book is wonderful for a number of other reasons, too, but to your point, the boundaries she gets from her mother are perfectly reasonable and help her understand how to live in the world, how to act in different kinds of weather.
I've been doing a lot of thinking about motherhood as my daughter gets older, and I finally settled (maybe?) on the idea that my daughter is my apprentice. We don't do a lot of baking but I have this really adorable photo of her standing on a chair stirring the scrambled eggs in the pan. She helps me with laundry, too; I hand her things from the washer and she puts them in the dryer.
Discipline is a tricky thing. There are a lot of people/programs/ideas that demand discipline in a way that I don't think is healthy, these exercise and nutrition/supplement regimens or productivity programs that require a lot of discipline but they seem to treat the body as a tool or machine that needs to be controlled or forced into peak condition, without respect for what the body is, and without room for weakness (which isn't necessarily under your control). As someone with multiple chronic illnesses occasionally slowed down further by difficult pregnancies, these programs generally made me feel ashamed of myself for not "getting it together" until I learned to think/feel differently. Discipline in general is good, but it can go off the rails if it's aimed toward the wrong ends. Choosing the right discipline is as much about the goal as it is about methods.
To circle back - when I see my toddler daughter as my apprentice, that gives me a focus for how I discipline her and what boundaries I set. I want her to be able to live as an adult, which includes skills like making scrambled eggs and attitudes like respecting other people. So I think about what she can do now (physically & mentally) and what is the next step toward getting her to the goal. That guides my decisions about what to include her in (and how to include her) and what kinds of things merit a time-out.
I loved Turning Red. In particular, I think Noah overstates the extent to which Mei’s decision to keep her panda is an uncomplicated one. There is a moment, after her decision is made, and while she is still in the spirit world, when she looks at her ancestor who started the family connection to the red panda and asks “I won’t regret this, will I?”
In the film, this becomes a positive moment: her ancestor is clearly overjoyed to have a descendant who wants to keep her gift. But, to me, it nevertheless suggested that Mei might still struggle, sometimes — but that having that powerful connection to her heritage would be worth it.
Turning Red echoes Moana in having a heroine whose coming of age is less about repudiating what went before and more about returning to it. In both cases, this framing is perhaps partly demanded by respect for the underlying culture. Certainly, it would have been deeply culturally insensitive to have a Polynesian Disney heroine whose main arc was about breaking with her ancestors!
I really like it, as a trend, though. Finding your own way doesn’t have to be about finding a completely new way. Sometimes it can be about finding your connection with something much older.
One way I've noticed that children love constraints is that they love imposing them on *others* even when their own adherence is spotty at best. When I visit home I am treated to: being reminded to stay out of the bike lane, told not to steal other people's food from their plates, admonished to ask our parents before using various tools ("NO ONE except Mum is allowed to use the sewing scissors!"), reminded to use the bathroom before we get in the car, and so much more...
Aside from being totally charming, I think it testifies to the fact that children intuitively know that behavior should be governed by rules, even if they conveniently forget this when asked to follow those rules themselves. It also ties nicely with the fact that so many of the toddler/preschooler behavioral struggles are about control: they are constantly reaching to control the most mundane things like which pair of shoes they wear that day because they spend so much of their lives being told what to do. Rules, at their best, can help enforce the idea that codes of behavior apply to *everyone,* not just them and their desire not to wear a jacket on a freezing day.
My reaction to Mei controlling her panda was a bit different than Noah's: frankly, it made sense to me that she learned to manage her panda relatively quickly because, on the whole, she was a really good and well-adjusted kid raised with a sense of self-discipline, which the movie strives to demonstrate in the opening.
I think it was clever that, of all her family members, Mei had the smallest and least threatening panda. That metaphor worked for me! As someone raised by flawed but deeply loving parents, it makes sense that she may have some of her own emotional baggage, but that the baggage would be much smaller than that of her first-generation mom, or her immigrant grandmother.
The emotional and physical upheaval of puberty might change her in some fundamental ways, but she lacks the trauma of the other women in her family. She can engage with the messy part of herself and return to a steady baseline because she was raised with emotional and physical security that the other women were not. I really, really liked that the movie treated the choice of the older women in her family to hide their pandas empathetically, and didn't judge them for doing so.
I'd LOVE a movie about the mom and her panda at some point. It would be 1000% less funny but probably a really great drama?
But I do want to highlight the Swallows and Amazon series for demonstrating something of how children left to their own devices play - or work, for from my own Catachresis of the Good Shepherd training, what appears to adults to be play is work to children.
Confidence in their own ablities and their parents' trust works together: not duffers, won't drown. The children self organize into a crew with defined assignments and responsibilities. And they do behave like real children, for all of their virtue. Both petty arguments and absolutely risky choices like sailing in the dark are part of the book, along with chosing correctly afterwards.
This is an older children's book--too old even for my oldest (who's five), but I think Anne of Green Gables is a great classic example of someone learning to channel her creativity/imagination/spirits in ways that help her and other grow and enjoy life, with lots of learning from her own mistakes along the way. And, given her dislike for her red hair and skinniness--physical qualities with which she eventually feels at peace--there's something of the body-acceptance model there too as well. (Although I feel as if I, and lots of girls I know, could have used a chubby heroine who learns the same acceptance! Goodness, what was it with all these nineteenth century authors presenting thinness as the unattractive trait to be overcome?!)
Related to Other Feminisms in general if not to this specific post ... When I read Anne of Green Gables, I was struck by how every woman in the village was a homemaker and yet they all had different personalities & identities. In our culture, we define/identify ourselves by our jobs and I think that's a big reason why motherhood often feels like a loss of identity -- for most of us, our careers take a hit, and nobody wants to hear about how many times I've read Brown Bear Brown Bear What Do You See today. But that loss of identity is not intrinsic to motherhood; it's because of a culture that's designed to exclude motherhood. The culture in Anne of Green Gables was very different.
Mar 24, 2022·edited Mar 24, 2022Liked by Leah Libresco Sargeant
I think about this topic a lot, and there are a few things that stick out. First, the nature of housekeeping prior to the mid-20th century was so physically and mentally laborious that it really *did* feel like a "job" in terms of keeping women stimulated throughout the day. This isn't to say that stay-at-home mothers have it easy now, just that the nature of homemaker tasks made it so that women didn't feel like they were constantly in "mommy" mode and had more outlets for feelings of accomplishment. Think sewing garments, raising livestock, churning butter, etc. Discrete tasks with a finite(ish) conclusion, as opposed to loading the dishwasher for the 8000th time, only to do it again tomorrow.
The second part: community! Due to career and childrearing norms mothers of small children often feel quite isolated. I'm struck by how women in 19th / early 20th c. novels are always engaged in church or charity activities while the children are let free to play. They're very rarely "actively" mothering, and often engaged in work with other adult women. Of course they don't lose their identities, because they are given opportunity to be socially embedded adults.
yes! I'd like to take this opportunity to gripe about zoning laws, too. I can walk around my neighborhood, but if I want to walk somewhere to spend money, the only option is the three-mile walk to a gas station, which is not really an option. To run any kind of errand, I have to get in the car, get my kid in the car seat, and not talk to an adult as I drive to the grocery store, and when I'm there, I bump into a bunch of adults that are strangers, and I'm just not going to be friends with them because they're strangers, and different strangers every time.
I know a family that has 10 kids and a little hobby farm with goats and rabbits and chickens and a big garden. Everyone has interesting hobbies like sewing and carpentry and such. They're fairly isolated from other families because it's a LOT to get everyone loaded into the car (and, obviously, they live in the country). But the things they do at home are a lot more interesting than loading the dishwasher for the 8,000th time (which I think they *also* do). They can give homemade gifts and show their personality in what they do, which you can't when vacuuming. Me, I have more access to interesting things and people outside the home because I only have one kid to get loaded in a car seat and I live in a suburb with two big universities nearby, but the things that happen in my home are a lot less interesting. It's mostly the dishwasher.
"They can give homemade gifts and show their personality in what they do, which you can't when vacuuming."
I'm late to the party here, but, since you mentioned " multiple chronic illnesses occasionally slowed down further by difficult pregnancies" in another comment, I wanted to confess that I've found myself expressing a personality I didn't even know I had while vacuuming as a mother, and that is a violent one. Since my first pregnancy, I've broken several vacuum cleaner wands, and once punched a hole in the wall (not that you could tell after my careful patching and painting) out of sheer fury with the awkwardness of vacuuming in my body.
Until very recently, standard advice for asthmatics was to use only a bagged canister vac with HEPA. Meanwhile, folks with mobility issues tend to do better with something less hydralike than a canister vac. Those two issues colliding in my person during pregnancy infuriated me, not least because I could not find good advice on what kind of vac to own if you had mobility *and* respiratory issues. I'd get tangled up in my canister vac and just see red — a fury I hadn't previously been capable of.
During my last tangle with the canister vac, I totaled it. It was on its last legs anyhow, and, as guilty as I feel over my anger and destruction, some sliver of my heart still believes the canister vac "deserved" it :-) Advice for asthmatics now includes options other than bagged canister vacs, such as the more maneuverable bagless stick. Ideally, asthmatics would rely on someone else willing to go outside and empty bagless vacs for 'em. Dunno if that'll happen, but here's to not getting tangled up anymore!
Nothing but sympathy for you vs the vacuum! And needing someone else to empty the bag is a good example of the kind of very small need that is hard to get met!
I love these two comments and would like to read (several) books digging into this, and how to nurture community and accomplishment in a similar fashion these days.
I read German children's literature to my daughter, and the constrast to the mothers and women in Anne of Green Gables is striking. The mothers (and fathers) tend to play a merely supportive role of the child, making cocoa, buying new clothers. Almost all of them stay in the background, don't ask much of their children and are rather nice, but instantly forgettable. Compared to them, the women in Anne are all personalities in their own right, and prickly ones at that!
I'd recommend the Little House books for stories about healthy constraints and self-regulation. Lots of the lessons would sound odd now--especially the ones about little girls learning to be ladylike, but Laura struggling more with expected roles more than her more easygoing older sister shows kids that some boundaries are more difficult because of your personality, and that's OK.
In By the Shores of Silver Lake, Laura is 14 and is helping her Pa with farm work, and he admires her physical strength. There is also an insightful observation about being 14 and having to wear a corset, and how much she hated it and it made it a lot harder to do farm work, but she's confident that she is physically strong and capable and can help her family.
Oh, on that note, I loved Caddie Woodlawn. Similar era. Caddie was sickly when she was young so her father let her run around with the boys because he thought it would make her strong. She didn't have the usual gender constraints. But, coming of age was a little awkward because she had to learn how to be a woman (which her sister was excelling at!), which meant leaving behind not only childhood but her brothers as pals. It was difficult and emotional for her. There's a moving scene where her father tells her, I let you run with the boys because I thought it was the best way for you to grow into a woman.
I love the shout "Stay in Bowl!" Like most toddlers (I hope) she hasn't been trained to see everything as just objects. She senses the active will and subjecthood of them -- which I hope later, she can reclaim as I-Thou relationships with everything around her.
As for children's books, I think first of books that are for slightly older kids -- Winnie the Pooh books, and of course, the Narnia books. Certainly Beatrix Potter's books stand the test of time very well. Don't disdain, please, standard fairy tales. Joseph Chilton Pearce, in The Magical Child, makes a convincing case about how preschool kids really need these. And many of the old standard Golden books (The Poky Little Puppy, The Three Little Kittens, etc.) are wonderful stories that accept children being children, and also -- very kindly -- show the value of limits.
Elizabeth Marie Pope's "The Perilous Gard" is a Newbery Honor book that addresses some of these questions. Her main character, Kate, struggles a lot because she is clumsy and less attractive than her younger sister. She isn't ugly, but she can't fit into other people's ideas about feminine beauty, either. Kate's close relationship with her father, who appreciates her intelligence, can't make up for her mother's rejection. Over the course of the book, she does learn how to be less clumsy (through putting in a lot of hard work), but her ability to accept and enjoy her body is really centered in finding out that, even if some people will always misunderstand her, there are others who will value her for her character and analytical mind--the very things that have made it hard for her to fit in. Caring less about society's standards actually makes her more useful to the people around her.
What an interesting topic - thanks for taking it up and many thanks to all the commentators! I find the idea of looking at my daughter as my apprentice mind-blowing, really. Looking back, I think I am the perfect mother for a baby that needs its needs fulfilled pronto; I am much less successful at being a mother of an older child - it's very hard for me to push them when they need to be pushed, to challenge them when they need to be challenged, to be strict with them when that is needed. I'd rather shower them with love and put every obstacle out of their path, which would create one huge looming obstacle to their successs in life at some point...I think looking at them as an apprentice has the potential to change the whole dynamic....thanks to the reader who suggested it.
As for literature, Laura Ingalls Wilder first comes to mind - her series of books show the whole process from learning how to meet her parents' high standards, of conforming to their expectations - and, as she grows older and more mature, to make these standards her own or let go of them, in some cases (fringe of hair! Sunbonnet! Getting brown like an Indian!).
Another example is Little Women, with Jo finding it so hard to control her emotions and her mother assuring her it must be done, and it can be done.
In Astrid Lindgren's books based on her childhood, the children do have a lot of personal freedom (free play, and lots of it), but there are always the demands of work in an agricultural setting. It is easy for a child of farmers to see that certain work has to be done at a certain time to a certain standard - if you don't, you'll go hungry in winter. So these are "natural" constraints (the parents are merely conveying this fact), and these are probably easier to accept than all sorts of "articifical" constraints modern parents have to come up with without easily recogizable consequences to back them up.
So many good books mentioned already! The additional ones that come to mind are probably out of print, but really good if you can find a copy to read.
This winter I read *The Covered Bridge* by Cornelia Meigs, a story about a young girl learning the “rules” (maybe rhythms is a better word) of winter life on a rural farm during the early years of the USA. I’ve loved all the Meigs books I have read, and this one in particular struck me with how Meigs’ stories are always about the beneficial harmony and reciprocity that needs to exist between children and the adults in their lives. The children learn how to become active participants in the life of their community by trusting the adults who entrust this work to them. Also read her *Wind in the Chimney* and *Wild Geese Flying* (one of my all-time favorite children’s books).
Marguerite D’Angeli also writes books that deal with limitations, restraints, and learning to live with them, around them, and either in spite of them or because of them. *The Door in the Wall* is still in print and deals with disability. *Bright April* and *Thee, Hannah* probably are not, but each deals with a young-ish girl from a specific culture group in America who is learning to live within the limits of her world. *Bright April* deals gently with the unfair limits around race. *Thee, Hannah* deals with learning to understand the value of her Quaker lifestyle that seem so contrary to the fashion she craves. All three books address the tension of learning to see ourselves for more than just the outward things that seem so easy to judge by.
In all of these, the children are learning to be their own responsible human-being selves, yet they are guided by loving adults who have the wisdom of experience and gentle insight.
Thanks a lot, these sound great! The "Covered Bridge" seems to be out of print and seems to have been published before the Second World War. THIS - the "beneficial harmony and reciprocity", that's a lovely expression! This is something you'll almost never find in children's books written today. It's either parents that can't be trusted or parents that aren't really THERE while the focus is entirely on the peer group of the main character. This is a loss, I think that children in fiction often are not embedded in a family that both protects them and helps them grow. Of course there are bad or neglectful parents in real life, but does a young reader profit from learning this if she is not in this situation herself?
At the beginning of Beverly Cleary's Mitch and Amy, the siblings of the title are playing pretend and answering the question they always begin with: Why are the parents gone? They feel like there can be no *real* adventure if parents are there to intervene, so they have to be away on a trip, eaten by wolves, etc.
I think this is why parents are often at a distance in novels; to avoid them "solving" the plot. Obviously, they don't always do so in life!
I won’t lie: *Bright April* can be quietly painful to read because there is so much quiet subtext that children do not fully catch but that we adults do. The limits in April’s case are unfair and part of the story is about how she doesn’t realize they are there but keeps bumping into them and beginning to realize that maybe the “rules” for her and her family are different than for the rest of America. To me, D’Angeli’s gentleness itself provides a pattern to consider in dealing with the unfairness we humans encounter from each other in so many ways.
To your first question, my almost 2yo really likes Umbrella by Taro Yashima. Umbrella is the story of a little girl who gets an umbrella and boots for her 3rd birthday and is SO EXCITED but has to endure many days of nice weather before it finally rains. On a sunny day, she tells her mother she needs her umbrella because the sun bothers her eyes; on a windy day, she tells her mother she needs her umbrella because the wind bothers her eyes. Her mother says, "You know you can enjoy the sunshine better without the umbrella" and "the wind might blow your umbrella away" along with, "Let's save it for a rainy day." Finally, it rains, and the protagonist gets to use her umbrella. A savvy reader also notices that she matures as well. The book is wonderful for a number of other reasons, too, but to your point, the boundaries she gets from her mother are perfectly reasonable and help her understand how to live in the world, how to act in different kinds of weather.
I've been doing a lot of thinking about motherhood as my daughter gets older, and I finally settled (maybe?) on the idea that my daughter is my apprentice. We don't do a lot of baking but I have this really adorable photo of her standing on a chair stirring the scrambled eggs in the pan. She helps me with laundry, too; I hand her things from the washer and she puts them in the dryer.
Discipline is a tricky thing. There are a lot of people/programs/ideas that demand discipline in a way that I don't think is healthy, these exercise and nutrition/supplement regimens or productivity programs that require a lot of discipline but they seem to treat the body as a tool or machine that needs to be controlled or forced into peak condition, without respect for what the body is, and without room for weakness (which isn't necessarily under your control). As someone with multiple chronic illnesses occasionally slowed down further by difficult pregnancies, these programs generally made me feel ashamed of myself for not "getting it together" until I learned to think/feel differently. Discipline in general is good, but it can go off the rails if it's aimed toward the wrong ends. Choosing the right discipline is as much about the goal as it is about methods.
To circle back - when I see my toddler daughter as my apprentice, that gives me a focus for how I discipline her and what boundaries I set. I want her to be able to live as an adult, which includes skills like making scrambled eggs and attitudes like respecting other people. So I think about what she can do now (physically & mentally) and what is the next step toward getting her to the goal. That guides my decisions about what to include her in (and how to include her) and what kinds of things merit a time-out.
I loved Turning Red. In particular, I think Noah overstates the extent to which Mei’s decision to keep her panda is an uncomplicated one. There is a moment, after her decision is made, and while she is still in the spirit world, when she looks at her ancestor who started the family connection to the red panda and asks “I won’t regret this, will I?”
In the film, this becomes a positive moment: her ancestor is clearly overjoyed to have a descendant who wants to keep her gift. But, to me, it nevertheless suggested that Mei might still struggle, sometimes — but that having that powerful connection to her heritage would be worth it.
Turning Red echoes Moana in having a heroine whose coming of age is less about repudiating what went before and more about returning to it. In both cases, this framing is perhaps partly demanded by respect for the underlying culture. Certainly, it would have been deeply culturally insensitive to have a Polynesian Disney heroine whose main arc was about breaking with her ancestors!
I really like it, as a trend, though. Finding your own way doesn’t have to be about finding a completely new way. Sometimes it can be about finding your connection with something much older.
One way I've noticed that children love constraints is that they love imposing them on *others* even when their own adherence is spotty at best. When I visit home I am treated to: being reminded to stay out of the bike lane, told not to steal other people's food from their plates, admonished to ask our parents before using various tools ("NO ONE except Mum is allowed to use the sewing scissors!"), reminded to use the bathroom before we get in the car, and so much more...
Aside from being totally charming, I think it testifies to the fact that children intuitively know that behavior should be governed by rules, even if they conveniently forget this when asked to follow those rules themselves. It also ties nicely with the fact that so many of the toddler/preschooler behavioral struggles are about control: they are constantly reaching to control the most mundane things like which pair of shoes they wear that day because they spend so much of their lives being told what to do. Rules, at their best, can help enforce the idea that codes of behavior apply to *everyone,* not just them and their desire not to wear a jacket on a freezing day.
My reaction to Mei controlling her panda was a bit different than Noah's: frankly, it made sense to me that she learned to manage her panda relatively quickly because, on the whole, she was a really good and well-adjusted kid raised with a sense of self-discipline, which the movie strives to demonstrate in the opening.
I think it was clever that, of all her family members, Mei had the smallest and least threatening panda. That metaphor worked for me! As someone raised by flawed but deeply loving parents, it makes sense that she may have some of her own emotional baggage, but that the baggage would be much smaller than that of her first-generation mom, or her immigrant grandmother.
The emotional and physical upheaval of puberty might change her in some fundamental ways, but she lacks the trauma of the other women in her family. She can engage with the messy part of herself and return to a steady baseline because she was raised with emotional and physical security that the other women were not. I really, really liked that the movie treated the choice of the older women in her family to hide their pandas empathetically, and didn't judge them for doing so.
I'd LOVE a movie about the mom and her panda at some point. It would be 1000% less funny but probably a really great drama?
I suspect you're well aware of this essay given you and yours' assocation with First Things: https://www.firstthings.com/article/2013/05/not-duffers-wont-drown
But I do want to highlight the Swallows and Amazon series for demonstrating something of how children left to their own devices play - or work, for from my own Catachresis of the Good Shepherd training, what appears to adults to be play is work to children.
Confidence in their own ablities and their parents' trust works together: not duffers, won't drown. The children self organize into a crew with defined assignments and responsibilities. And they do behave like real children, for all of their virtue. Both petty arguments and absolutely risky choices like sailing in the dark are part of the book, along with chosing correctly afterwards.
This is an older children's book--too old even for my oldest (who's five), but I think Anne of Green Gables is a great classic example of someone learning to channel her creativity/imagination/spirits in ways that help her and other grow and enjoy life, with lots of learning from her own mistakes along the way. And, given her dislike for her red hair and skinniness--physical qualities with which she eventually feels at peace--there's something of the body-acceptance model there too as well. (Although I feel as if I, and lots of girls I know, could have used a chubby heroine who learns the same acceptance! Goodness, what was it with all these nineteenth century authors presenting thinness as the unattractive trait to be overcome?!)
Related to Other Feminisms in general if not to this specific post ... When I read Anne of Green Gables, I was struck by how every woman in the village was a homemaker and yet they all had different personalities & identities. In our culture, we define/identify ourselves by our jobs and I think that's a big reason why motherhood often feels like a loss of identity -- for most of us, our careers take a hit, and nobody wants to hear about how many times I've read Brown Bear Brown Bear What Do You See today. But that loss of identity is not intrinsic to motherhood; it's because of a culture that's designed to exclude motherhood. The culture in Anne of Green Gables was very different.
I think about this topic a lot, and there are a few things that stick out. First, the nature of housekeeping prior to the mid-20th century was so physically and mentally laborious that it really *did* feel like a "job" in terms of keeping women stimulated throughout the day. This isn't to say that stay-at-home mothers have it easy now, just that the nature of homemaker tasks made it so that women didn't feel like they were constantly in "mommy" mode and had more outlets for feelings of accomplishment. Think sewing garments, raising livestock, churning butter, etc. Discrete tasks with a finite(ish) conclusion, as opposed to loading the dishwasher for the 8000th time, only to do it again tomorrow.
The second part: community! Due to career and childrearing norms mothers of small children often feel quite isolated. I'm struck by how women in 19th / early 20th c. novels are always engaged in church or charity activities while the children are let free to play. They're very rarely "actively" mothering, and often engaged in work with other adult women. Of course they don't lose their identities, because they are given opportunity to be socially embedded adults.
yes! I'd like to take this opportunity to gripe about zoning laws, too. I can walk around my neighborhood, but if I want to walk somewhere to spend money, the only option is the three-mile walk to a gas station, which is not really an option. To run any kind of errand, I have to get in the car, get my kid in the car seat, and not talk to an adult as I drive to the grocery store, and when I'm there, I bump into a bunch of adults that are strangers, and I'm just not going to be friends with them because they're strangers, and different strangers every time.
I know a family that has 10 kids and a little hobby farm with goats and rabbits and chickens and a big garden. Everyone has interesting hobbies like sewing and carpentry and such. They're fairly isolated from other families because it's a LOT to get everyone loaded into the car (and, obviously, they live in the country). But the things they do at home are a lot more interesting than loading the dishwasher for the 8,000th time (which I think they *also* do). They can give homemade gifts and show their personality in what they do, which you can't when vacuuming. Me, I have more access to interesting things and people outside the home because I only have one kid to get loaded in a car seat and I live in a suburb with two big universities nearby, but the things that happen in my home are a lot less interesting. It's mostly the dishwasher.
"They can give homemade gifts and show their personality in what they do, which you can't when vacuuming."
I'm late to the party here, but, since you mentioned " multiple chronic illnesses occasionally slowed down further by difficult pregnancies" in another comment, I wanted to confess that I've found myself expressing a personality I didn't even know I had while vacuuming as a mother, and that is a violent one. Since my first pregnancy, I've broken several vacuum cleaner wands, and once punched a hole in the wall (not that you could tell after my careful patching and painting) out of sheer fury with the awkwardness of vacuuming in my body.
Until very recently, standard advice for asthmatics was to use only a bagged canister vac with HEPA. Meanwhile, folks with mobility issues tend to do better with something less hydralike than a canister vac. Those two issues colliding in my person during pregnancy infuriated me, not least because I could not find good advice on what kind of vac to own if you had mobility *and* respiratory issues. I'd get tangled up in my canister vac and just see red — a fury I hadn't previously been capable of.
During my last tangle with the canister vac, I totaled it. It was on its last legs anyhow, and, as guilty as I feel over my anger and destruction, some sliver of my heart still believes the canister vac "deserved" it :-) Advice for asthmatics now includes options other than bagged canister vacs, such as the more maneuverable bagless stick. Ideally, asthmatics would rely on someone else willing to go outside and empty bagless vacs for 'em. Dunno if that'll happen, but here's to not getting tangled up anymore!
Nothing but sympathy for you vs the vacuum! And needing someone else to empty the bag is a good example of the kind of very small need that is hard to get met!
I love these two comments and would like to read (several) books digging into this, and how to nurture community and accomplishment in a similar fashion these days.
I read German children's literature to my daughter, and the constrast to the mothers and women in Anne of Green Gables is striking. The mothers (and fathers) tend to play a merely supportive role of the child, making cocoa, buying new clothers. Almost all of them stay in the background, don't ask much of their children and are rather nice, but instantly forgettable. Compared to them, the women in Anne are all personalities in their own right, and prickly ones at that!
I'd recommend the Little House books for stories about healthy constraints and self-regulation. Lots of the lessons would sound odd now--especially the ones about little girls learning to be ladylike, but Laura struggling more with expected roles more than her more easygoing older sister shows kids that some boundaries are more difficult because of your personality, and that's OK.
In By the Shores of Silver Lake, Laura is 14 and is helping her Pa with farm work, and he admires her physical strength. There is also an insightful observation about being 14 and having to wear a corset, and how much she hated it and it made it a lot harder to do farm work, but she's confident that she is physically strong and capable and can help her family.
Oh, on that note, I loved Caddie Woodlawn. Similar era. Caddie was sickly when she was young so her father let her run around with the boys because he thought it would make her strong. She didn't have the usual gender constraints. But, coming of age was a little awkward because she had to learn how to be a woman (which her sister was excelling at!), which meant leaving behind not only childhood but her brothers as pals. It was difficult and emotional for her. There's a moving scene where her father tells her, I let you run with the boys because I thought it was the best way for you to grow into a woman.
I loved those books!
I love the shout "Stay in Bowl!" Like most toddlers (I hope) she hasn't been trained to see everything as just objects. She senses the active will and subjecthood of them -- which I hope later, she can reclaim as I-Thou relationships with everything around her.
As for children's books, I think first of books that are for slightly older kids -- Winnie the Pooh books, and of course, the Narnia books. Certainly Beatrix Potter's books stand the test of time very well. Don't disdain, please, standard fairy tales. Joseph Chilton Pearce, in The Magical Child, makes a convincing case about how preschool kids really need these. And many of the old standard Golden books (The Poky Little Puppy, The Three Little Kittens, etc.) are wonderful stories that accept children being children, and also -- very kindly -- show the value of limits.
She certainly has my example as someone who apologizes to chairs. :)
How wonderful! You are a woman of my own heart.
Elizabeth Marie Pope's "The Perilous Gard" is a Newbery Honor book that addresses some of these questions. Her main character, Kate, struggles a lot because she is clumsy and less attractive than her younger sister. She isn't ugly, but she can't fit into other people's ideas about feminine beauty, either. Kate's close relationship with her father, who appreciates her intelligence, can't make up for her mother's rejection. Over the course of the book, she does learn how to be less clumsy (through putting in a lot of hard work), but her ability to accept and enjoy her body is really centered in finding out that, even if some people will always misunderstand her, there are others who will value her for her character and analytical mind--the very things that have made it hard for her to fit in. Caring less about society's standards actually makes her more useful to the people around her.
I *loved* that book
What an interesting topic - thanks for taking it up and many thanks to all the commentators! I find the idea of looking at my daughter as my apprentice mind-blowing, really. Looking back, I think I am the perfect mother for a baby that needs its needs fulfilled pronto; I am much less successful at being a mother of an older child - it's very hard for me to push them when they need to be pushed, to challenge them when they need to be challenged, to be strict with them when that is needed. I'd rather shower them with love and put every obstacle out of their path, which would create one huge looming obstacle to their successs in life at some point...I think looking at them as an apprentice has the potential to change the whole dynamic....thanks to the reader who suggested it.
As for literature, Laura Ingalls Wilder first comes to mind - her series of books show the whole process from learning how to meet her parents' high standards, of conforming to their expectations - and, as she grows older and more mature, to make these standards her own or let go of them, in some cases (fringe of hair! Sunbonnet! Getting brown like an Indian!).
Another example is Little Women, with Jo finding it so hard to control her emotions and her mother assuring her it must be done, and it can be done.
In Astrid Lindgren's books based on her childhood, the children do have a lot of personal freedom (free play, and lots of it), but there are always the demands of work in an agricultural setting. It is easy for a child of farmers to see that certain work has to be done at a certain time to a certain standard - if you don't, you'll go hungry in winter. So these are "natural" constraints (the parents are merely conveying this fact), and these are probably easier to accept than all sorts of "articifical" constraints modern parents have to come up with without easily recogizable consequences to back them up.
So many good books mentioned already! The additional ones that come to mind are probably out of print, but really good if you can find a copy to read.
This winter I read *The Covered Bridge* by Cornelia Meigs, a story about a young girl learning the “rules” (maybe rhythms is a better word) of winter life on a rural farm during the early years of the USA. I’ve loved all the Meigs books I have read, and this one in particular struck me with how Meigs’ stories are always about the beneficial harmony and reciprocity that needs to exist between children and the adults in their lives. The children learn how to become active participants in the life of their community by trusting the adults who entrust this work to them. Also read her *Wind in the Chimney* and *Wild Geese Flying* (one of my all-time favorite children’s books).
Marguerite D’Angeli also writes books that deal with limitations, restraints, and learning to live with them, around them, and either in spite of them or because of them. *The Door in the Wall* is still in print and deals with disability. *Bright April* and *Thee, Hannah* probably are not, but each deals with a young-ish girl from a specific culture group in America who is learning to live within the limits of her world. *Bright April* deals gently with the unfair limits around race. *Thee, Hannah* deals with learning to understand the value of her Quaker lifestyle that seem so contrary to the fashion she craves. All three books address the tension of learning to see ourselves for more than just the outward things that seem so easy to judge by.
In all of these, the children are learning to be their own responsible human-being selves, yet they are guided by loving adults who have the wisdom of experience and gentle insight.
Thanks a lot, these sound great! The "Covered Bridge" seems to be out of print and seems to have been published before the Second World War. THIS - the "beneficial harmony and reciprocity", that's a lovely expression! This is something you'll almost never find in children's books written today. It's either parents that can't be trusted or parents that aren't really THERE while the focus is entirely on the peer group of the main character. This is a loss, I think that children in fiction often are not embedded in a family that both protects them and helps them grow. Of course there are bad or neglectful parents in real life, but does a young reader profit from learning this if she is not in this situation herself?
At the beginning of Beverly Cleary's Mitch and Amy, the siblings of the title are playing pretend and answering the question they always begin with: Why are the parents gone? They feel like there can be no *real* adventure if parents are there to intervene, so they have to be away on a trip, eaten by wolves, etc.
I think this is why parents are often at a distance in novels; to avoid them "solving" the plot. Obviously, they don't always do so in life!
I won’t lie: *Bright April* can be quietly painful to read because there is so much quiet subtext that children do not fully catch but that we adults do. The limits in April’s case are unfair and part of the story is about how she doesn’t realize they are there but keeps bumping into them and beginning to realize that maybe the “rules” for her and her family are different than for the rest of America. To me, D’Angeli’s gentleness itself provides a pattern to consider in dealing with the unfairness we humans encounter from each other in so many ways.