Day 73 - Your Kids Will Be Stupid if You Don't Buy This

We interrupt this irregularly scheduled blog to bring you a Rant (lucky you). I'm still slogging through boxes of photos and such, so I thought I'd sound off about something else instead.

When I was pregnant with Sebastian, I armed myself with every pregnancy, birth, and parenting book on the planet. I was a force to be reckoned with, and I was gonna Do This Right (whatever that is). After the blessed event, when all the dust had settled and we were sleeping more than 20 minutes at a stretch, I had a horrible realization. According to several books, I was MISSING CRUCIAL DEVELOPMENTAL WINDOWS UPON WHICH I SHOULD BE CAPITALIZING!!!!! Was I rotating colored blocks in front of his face so he could hone his spacial awareness and develop his vision? Um.. no. Was I shaking rattles around his head to stimulate his auditory perception? Tying yarn to his fingers to encourage fine motor skills? Talking to him at least 30 minutes out of every hour?..... no...... OH MY GOSH - MY CHILD IS GOING TO HAVE AN IQ COMPARABLE TO HIS SHOE SIZE! And it will all be MY FAULT!

Take one well-educated woman who has whooped some butt in the career world, add a dash of thirty-something child bearing, and you have a mama who is going to take all the energy she put into conquering the world into raising her child. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: The Uber Mama. And folks, the Uber Mama (also known as the Park Slope Mommy for those of you in NYC) is big business. It didn't take long for toy manufacturers to try to capitalize on UM's ambitions for her progeny, so they began tagging toys with a litany of Educational Properties. There's a fabulous article about this here.  All of a sudden, there's no such thing as a simple toy anymore, it's all Edutainment. It develops hand eye coordination!!! stimulates tactile development!!! or has your little Brainiac spouting his ABC's by 6 months!!! It's enough to make you crazy (or at the very least, suck all the joy out of parenting). And the thing is? It doesn't even work that well. I'll explain.

 I know from whence I speak. I jumped on the UM bandwagon so fast it would scramble your developing brain. I'm about to share an embarrassing secret with you, and I hope you won't tell anyone else: I actually ordered several activity books for infants and designed a curriculum for Sebastian. Shut up, you've done ridiculous things like this too (share! share!). Thing is, I really wanted to Do It Right, but wound up obsessing over every milestone. Turns out, you don't need a lot of bells and whistles to "stimulate development" (in fact, the curious nature of children takes care of a lot of that for you), and not everything has to be a "teachable moment". Believe it or not, Shakespeare didn't have a Speak-n-Spell or flashcards. What does work? The stuff we've been doing since Grandma's day: reading to them, toting them around, talking to them, giving them room to explore the world, playing, and leaving them alone sometimes to play by themselves (notice that "sit them in front of the television with a Baby Genius DVD" wasn't in there? More on this another time.). AND you don't have to do it for 13 hours a day! Live your life, bring them along, and love on them. Some of the best advice I got was "Treat this child as if he were your 8th" (try it, it works). So now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to throw a load in the wash and let Sebastian help - he likes to watch the clothes go round and round. Who knew it was so simple? So let's get back to basics, turn off the mommy guilt, and step awaaaaaaaaaay from the Dr Sears/Spock/Ferber - we know more about our behbehs and how to raise them than we think we do.