Reasoning

Anyone can tell you, and everyone will tell you, that attempting to reason with a small child is a lost cause, a road to madness.

Except it's not true.

So far, my findings (based on a sample size of one child) are that as early as 18 months, explaining the logic behind parental decisions does make a difference. Not that it always gains compliance or averts a tantrum, but at least half the time it helps. And it probably makes me a better parent - if I'm focused on explaining why we need to brush our teeth, it keeps me calmer than the escalating cycle of "say aahh, please... open your mouth... open your mouth now... DAMMIT KID OPEN YOUR MOUTH!" Also, if I can't explain my reasons, sometimes it's because there's no good reason to be found.

I have a feeling that this approach to parenting will yield an amusing/maddening echo in another year or two, when she can turn it around and give me logical reasons for doing what she wants rather than what I want her to do. If she learns to out-logic me, I'll be in trouble.

Predictable

I ran across a piece in the NYTimes about iPhone applications that are geared towards kids of various ages, for purposes of education or entertainment. The first line line of the article posed the question "Say you were faced with a 3-year-old child on the verge of full meltdown — which iPhone apps would distract and delight him enough to avoid mayhem?"

Predictably, when I skimmed the comments to see what apps people had found besides the ones mentioned in the article, I found the following comment:

Pathetic. Parents are so helpless in how to handle their kids that they have to resort to this?
Somehow we’ve managed to raise kids for thousands of years without iPhone applications. Sometimes we’ve even done the strange thing called “interacting” with them.Oh, and occasionally saying “no” to tantrum throwing 3 year olds and leaving whatever place they’re throwing the tantrum in!— Library Lady

I wonder, has Library Lady ever been on a long plane flight with a toddler? This sounds to me like exactly the kind of comment made by people who don't have kids of their own, but are nonetheless experts on parenting. Or conversely, someone who raised their own kids long ago... long enough to forget their own troubles and shortcomings, and bemoan those of the newer generation of parents. Someone who, when faced with their own tantrum-throwing 3 year old all those years ago, would probably have killed for a device that could magically bring peace and quiet.

Personally, I plan to use my iPhone with Annika - to entertain, amuse, soothe, stimulate, teach, and whatever else I find it can do. I'm not the least bit worried that if I do so, I'll be depriving her of human interaction or somehow severing her from the "real world." The more puzzling question for me, is at what point it might be reasonable to get a kid their own iPhone. Not anytime soon, certainly. She'll have her own camera long before she has her own phone!

Brains and guts

One thing that came up during my first Birth Center prenatal appointment, while going over my general medical history, was that I have a few episodes of depression and/or anxiety in my past. No huge drama, no hospitalization, not even any medication for it, but still it's there. The nurse-midwife cautioned me that women who have such a history are more likely to suffer from post-partum depression than women who haven't had past problems. That doesn't mean I will have PPD, but that I should be alert to the possibility. She said that many women have trouble recognizing the signs because there's so much else going on at the same time - sleep deprivation, the physical recovery from birth, sore breasts from starting to breastfeed, body image issues, the sense of huge new responsibility, and the list goes on. With all that, it's hard to say what's "normal."


I wondered whether that might happen to me - would I be able to tell if I was having problems more than just the usual adjustment period to being a new parent? Thinking about it made me realize that at least for me, mental health is nowhere near as self-evident as physical health. I know at any given time whether I'm in a good or a bad mood, but if it's a bad mood I can't say whether it will go away in an hour, or a day, or whether it might drag on for much longer. I can tell after a specific stressful event that it caused a stress reaction, but if it's the more ongoing, long-term kind of stress, I can't easily say whether it's getting to be too much, or if I'm coping well. I can't tell by "asking myself" whether I'm just having a bad day or a bad week, or if it's something that I need to take steps to fix.


Then I realized that I do have an excellent built-in barometer of my overall mental health: my stomach. I may feel stressed or moody, but if I'm eating normally, that's a good indicator that it's nothing too serious, and will resolve itself soon. When I lose my appetite or feel sick to my stomach and there's no obvious physical cause, it's a probable sign that there's something that I'm having trouble dealing with. In particular, during a few times in my life that were especially stressful, I thought that I had some mysterious stomach ailment; eventually I figured out that I was having panic attacks, but without the stereotypical hyperventilating and heart-pounding.


So for me, as for many people, a "gut reaction" is a not just a metaphor. It's an interesting example of the inseparability of mind and body. I wonder whether this tendency to physically express mental turmoil evolved for some reason - can there be any possible advantage to having physical symptoms of unhappiness? Or is it just a side effect of the fact that the physical brain is part of the body, and that having thoughts and emotions is a chemical process, and is not independent of the rest of the body's workings? It just seems funny that for all its power, the brain isn't very good at identifying and troubleshooting its own problems.