Smrak: the techno-social malaise that makes rational living next to impossible

We know what is healthy and responsible. Why then is everything in our society engineered to undermine our attempts to live a healthy life?

I’m fed up with conflicting messages. 

“Everyone should exercise at least one hour every day; get eight hours of sleep; spend at least four hours with their children doing homework, having family meals and authentically connecting; you have to work and commute at least ten hours to have any chance at a successful career; and cook homemade food, for heaven’s sake, unless you want to doom your children to early death by cancer.” Sociologists and scientists give dire warnings of the consequences of a slip in any of those departments. 

Creative Commons image by Riley of Flickr.com

Then they add, “And it is essential that you make time to take care of yourself because otherwise you will be ineffective at all other tasks.”

Now wait just a blessed minute! 

You already used up every single hour in every single day with the first sentence. There are no more hours left for taking care of yourself--let alone taking care of an older relative, cleaning, keeping up social relationships, paying taxes or bills or even shopping for food (unless you count that as “time with the kids,” which we all know is hypocrisy.)

And those are just the bare basics. What about sending holiday cards? Are you nuts?
It isn’t just about time. But that’s often the crux when the issue is the adult lifestyle. You should exercise. REALLY! It’s essential. And if you want any chance at success in that competitive career, you had better devote more time to it. 

Got kids? Tough. If you can’t keep up a high-powered career because you insist on a bit of time for exercise or family, you’re making minimum wage. Your kids are eligible for the free lunch program! 

And it’s full of carcinogens. 

"Shame on you for being a leach on society!"

It’s hard enough to live a healthy and responsible lifestyle in this day and age. Exercise, healthy eating, meaningful work, being kind to others, pitching in for your community, doing your duty in recycling and responsible shopping, taking care of yourself… These things are often contradictory. 

Creative Commons image by Abigail G of Flickr.com

Add being a parent to that and the struggle becomes a war. It’s like Mama against the world—TV, video games, preservative-infused packaged food, the latest fashions, advertising… You name it, it’s lined up to produce parent-child battles and undermine your efforts for basic health and sanity. 

I’m going to coin a term here—smrak.

It’s like smog, except of the techno-social variety. The word “smrak” comes from two Czech words—”smrad” meaning stench and “mrak” meaning cloud. That’s how the technological and social environment feels to a parent trying to bring up kids with health and conscience. It's all the contradictory messages about what you must do and it's the plethora of obstacles put in your path--largely by other humans or by machines made by humans.

I’m going to devote a couple of posts to the different aspects of smrak--not to depress you, but rather to acknowledge what we’re all dealing with. 

The basic elements of srmak for parents are:

Smrak 1: Screen addiction and its pushers
Smrak 2: Junk food and people who give it to my kids
Smrak 3: Gender specific toys and media that promote either ditsy or violent
Smrak 4: The disconnect from nature
Smrak 5: A generation living in bubbles of bland sameness

(I’ll add links as the posts are done, so you click on them once they’re highlighted. You can also give suggestions for other aspects of smrak in the comments.)

When fellow parents are struggling to live in a healthy and responsible way, let’s support one another without so much judgment. None of us is perfect and we can do much better if we know we’re all battling smrak of one kind or another.

Smrak 1: Screen addiction and its pushers

I joke about being a Luddite but in reality I love technology. I’m legally blind and computers really do make the difference between freedom and imprisonment for many of us with disabilities. Many technologies are also essential for increasing the ecological sustainability of our lifestyles. 

Creative Commons image by  Lars Plougmann 

I even love the internet and social media. Social media is reason we have a serious presidential candidate in the United States who discusses issues of interest to people with regular incomes for the first time in my lifetime. The prevalence of social media has opened up opportunities for small businesses, homeschoolers, social justice activists and even organic farmers like never before. If we do ever find a large-scale solution to climate change, I believe it will be spread and activated through social media.

I’m not against technology. 

I’m just against kids being connected to some sort of electronic media more than SEVEN hours each day on average. That’s a staggering statistic. It’s often half of all awake time for kids. 
Yes, media is immediate, colorful, eye-catching, flexible and dynamic. It gives you the feeling of instant control. Change the channel, skip, scroll down, click a link, friend and unfriend. It’s all right there in a split second. No self-regulation necessary, no self-control required, no need to be flexible yourself and no time to notice slower things.

A terrifying phenomenon is building in this generation--people who don’t know how to deal with non-virtual reality. It isn't just the obvious stuff, like not knowing how to grow food or cook or get around without a map navigation system (although those are significant issues). It’s also the essential ability to observe the world in real time, to connect with one’s self and with the natural environment. It’s the ability to just be without the jitters reminiscent of an addict in need of a fix. 

Creative Commons image by  Devon Christopher Adams

You might say I should just manage my kids’ screen time and rest secure in the knowledge that at least my kids will gain technology skills without becoming addicted. But any of you who have actually tried this will be chuckling.

Easier said than done.

My kids are still in preschool and I am already under fierce pressure to allow them at least several hours of screen time every day. I attended a seminar on bullying prevention because my kids are in a high-risk category for being bullied, and the only concrete bit of advice the anti-bullying “expert” speaking had was: “Be sure to allow your kids to watch the fashionable TV shows and play enough video games, so they'll be up-to-date on what will be discussed at recess.” 

My kids report that some of their classmates already have smart phones. In preschool! For my second-grade ESL students, a smart phone is a basic school supply, like they used to have personal pencil sharpeners. 

Creative Commons image by  Yan Chi Vinci Chow

When my kids were toddlers, I eagerly awaited the day when their friends would visit us and they could visit their friends. But now their friends don’t want to visit us because, “the TV isn’t on.” And when I check or even just ask what they are doing at a friend’s house, there is no other activity other than TV, video games or Barbie dolls in front of the TV, in the case of girls. Their reading abilities are scanty for Facebook yet, but that won’t last long.

I’m going to catch some flak for mentioning that some other parents are becoming part of the problem on this one. But the thing is that most of these parents who put the kids in front of the TV or video games will tell you they don’t like to do it. They feel pressured to do it and they are exhausted. They usually insist to themselves that they are doing it "just this once" to save their sanity. Like me, they want their kids to have friends and be happy and this seems to be the price you have to pay. 

It’s a spiral of smrak, the term I am coining for the techno-social malaise of today's world, leading to kids spending most of their time in front of screens and having few real-world interests or skills. 

I’m not judgmental so much as tearing my own hair out. We need to stand together and stand up for a healthy amount of technology and other diversified activities for kids. We can’t use electronics as a way to avoid discussing life and health with our kids “just this once”--every single day. We must band together as humans of all ages to take back our lives and our minds. 

Technology is a wonderful gift. Let’s use it wisely.

Raising international boys: Peace soldiers not afraid to cry or care

He loves toy soldiers. He likes the swift, bracing feeling of their uniforms. He respects the steadfast pace of their tank tracks. He enjoys the tantalizing idea of their weapons.

He stands in bittersweet sorrow at the side of the road where a shrine marks the remembrance of a family for a soldier dead these seventy years--fled from an occupied homeland and lost on the eastern front. He vows that he will smite all those who harm children and invade small countries. 

Five years old and he asks me to remember to bring rubber gloves, so we can pick up litter on the way home from school. 

On the weekend we go to the grandparents and sit around the table in the kitchen where Nazi soldiers once stole the milk and left our grandfather hungry as a little boy. 

"Don't push me!" my little son sobs when his sister jabs an elbow into his middle while they wait for Grandma's soup. He clobbers her on the head with his spoon.

"Boys don't cry!" Grandpa bellows. 

The little boy stares at him with wide shocked eyes. It is possible--though unlikely--that this is actually the first time he has heard that old adage.

At our house, boys do cry and jabbing and hitting are the more serious offenses. Gritting my teeth, I handle the situation diplomatically. 

After dinner Grandma hands out gifts to the children, since we weren't here during the holidays--earrings for the girl, a nerf pistol for the boy. They are both very happy. Who am I to complain?

And yet I know that in this adopted country where we live (the Czech Republic) the chance that one's son will become a soldier and go off into a terrible war--where he may be killed or lose his sense of humanity--is minuscule. They don't understand that for American boys in families without wealth the stats are far different. He will not always be a boy here. He is a US citizen because of me and someday he will be a young man and a target for recruiters. 

I have two new teenage ESL students. More boys. They bring in an article from their English study magazine. It's about world peace. I ask open ended questions to get them using English grammar. Do you want peace? Yes. Do you think we should have a military? Well, only a very small one. If we have a small military, who will tackle an evil force such as Hitler when it comes again? The UN.

I do understand their perspective, but one of them is headed to the US as an exchange student in a few months. I have a talk with him about it, explaining about how Americans who study only American history see these things differently, how such well-reasoned statements can be considered highly controversial. 

Later my five-year-old is still playing with his tank and toy soldiers. He loves the sound effects of war. But when we write down wishes for the next year to put into our special wish jar, he says, "I wish all soldiers would be careful not to hurt anyone." 

And when scolded, even gently he cries. And that is okay because boys will be boys. A hug will fix it.

How do I explain the world of violence to small children? Or do they know already? Sometimes they ask the most discerning questions. I could swear they know the score all too well.

"Mama, why do presidents get to make wars?"

Of Barbies and Guns: A mom in the crossfire of gender stereotypes

When my daughter was a baby, I swore we would have no pink. I never liked pink in the first place. It reminds me of overly sweet synthetic medicine and being sick as a child. 
And it promotes gender stereotypes. 

But then I was given baby clothes. My family lives on modest means and it’s against my religion to be wasteful. When you’re a new mother in a circle of friends at the lower end of the middle class, you're in the baby-clothes rotation system whether you like it or not. It’s silly to buy new when your friends are desperate to reclaim their closet space. 

The problem was that mostly I was given pink. Some boy clothes turned up but mostly I had garbage sacks full of tiny pink dresses.

When I—on rare occasions—actually bought baby clothes, they were never pink. And my daughter wore the non-pink clothes we acquired to rags. Every day I told her she was strong and smart. (And she was.) She was also very pretty and I tried not to tell her that too often. 

I had the dream that my children would grow up without the limitations of sexism and gender stereotypes. When I was a child my parents were firmly anti-establishment and I never had pink dresses. I owned only one doll before the age of seven and I played swords with my brothers. I am convinced that this played a positive role in my development. 
But my daughter had other ideas. 

My daughter adored pink from the beginning. Before she could talk, she would watch me pick out her clothes and she would reach down under the pretty blue and green dresses to the pink ones hidden at the bottom of the drawer. She’d howl any day that I insisted she where something not pink. Pink was the first color she learned to name. 

Let’s be clear. I was a “good” mother. I listened to the American Pediatric Association. My child never saw a lighted screen before the age of two, except in passing at someone else’s house. We don’t own a TV. Our storybooks were about nature, boys and very non-princess-like girls.  She didn’t get this infatuation with pink from the media. 

When I was growing up, “feminists” were people (like my parents) who insisted that men and women are exactly the same on the inside. I simply couldn’t believe that a little girl could be inherently drawn to the color pink by something encoded in her DNA. 

But as much as I am a feminist, I’m not a controlling parent with an ideology to force down my child’s throat. So, I relented and let her wear pink. I even started buying pink clothes. I even allowed a few princess books to sneak into the house, even though I still buy the anti-princess books too. 

You see. I have these troubling memories from my own childhood. Yes, I grew up out in the sticks with two wild brothers and no TV. Yes, I enjoyed playing swords and army and building forts and Legos and sled racing. 

But deep down inside, I longed for dolls and dresses. I loved my first doll and still own her, ragged and bleached by time as she is. And I notice that when we drew pictures as children, my brothers drew pictures of complex military battles and underground hide-outs. I drew ladies with amazing princess dresses and little high heels. 

Where in the world had I even SEEN high heels at that point? (Seriously. I not only didn't have a TV,  was also legally blind.)

I remember the day my daughter saw high heels for the first time. My adult niece was living with us then and she was dressing up to go to a traditional European winter ball. So, she pulled out a pair of bright red heels from a deep closet and put them on under her dress. 

My two-year-old’s mouth dropped open and her eyes literally went as round as quarters. She reached out her little hands and nearly fell over in a swoon of ecstasy. And that was the beginning of a true obsession.

It only took seeing them once and my little girl was hopelessly enthralled. For the past five years, not a day has gone by without my hearing about high heeled shoes, who has them, what color they are, what they sound like, "when when when when" she will be allowed to destroy her feet with them. 

I may have drawn pictures of high heeled shoes as a toddler, but I grew out of the interest long before I was a teenager. I have never even been tempted to wear them. As a young adult I simply thought they were ugly, stupid and a plot by patriarchal men to slow women down. Now I really and truly hate them, but I have to admit that I haven’t been able to find a man who likes them either.

Over the years, I have given in inch by inch, because I AM NOT one of those controlling parents who doesn’t accept their child for who he or she really is, now am I? (Written with gritted teeth.) 

My daughter now owns more princess dresses than will fit in the jumbo dress-up box. We’ve spent a small fortune trying to lure her away from high heels with sparkly pink, shiny black, frilly white, red-hot and every other imaginable type of princess slipper. She owns a dozen very pretty dolls (very multicultural, mind you), a play kitchen and boxes upon boxes of ignored puzzles, legos, blocks, train sets and books. She even owns pretend make-up, real nail polish and many tubes of organic lip balm (organic because she likes to eat it rather than just wear it).

I eventually simply gave up on trying to raise a non-stereotypical girl. My hope lay in my son. 
I couldn’t very well dress him in dresses in the conservative Eastern European country where we live. But I did everything short of that. He had dolls before he could crawl. He wore diverse colors, including pink. He got stories about strong women and kind men (along with all the stories read to my daughter). And the first time he saw fictional violence on TV during a visit to someone else’s house, he ran to me crying that someone was hurt. 

The truth is that my son is very kind and sensitive. At age five, he is still confused about why some kids at preschool insist that boys can’t wear pink when he and his best friend really like pink along with lots of other colors. But he likes camouflage more. A lot more. Sigh.

And his initial reaction to toy cars was very similar to my daughter’s reaction to high heels. His first word was not “Mama” or even “Papa,” but “backhoe.”

Having kids will always make you rethink your beliefs one way or another. And for me, it has meant the grudging conclusion that at least some boys and some girls do have hardwired stereotypical tendencies. 

If there was ever an environment that would have promoted a more balanced division of clothing and toys between children it was ours. Being an immigrant and unable to drive, I spent most of my children’s toddlerhood isolated from society as well as TV media. I was very careful in my approach to the issue, neither pressing one way or the other, providing many different toys and books.

But the preferences of my children were clear from an early age and stated in no uncertain terms. 

Today, my son is a camo-crazed truck and soldier enthusiast with a heart of gold, who wants to rescue the vulnerable and chase away bad guys without actually hurting them. He’s a quick reader and loves to draw things with wheels. He hordes dolls and stuffed animals but doesn’t actually play with them. My daughter is Elsa-obsessed and yearns to watch make-up videos on YouTube. She’s also reasonably good with numbers and puzzles, extraordinarily strong-willed and the more violent of the two. 

Parents, you can’t win.

There are things I draw the line at--primarily toy guns and Barbies. Sometimes unwise friends or relatives gift the children such objects. I quietly discourage the adult offenders and grit my teeth through a few days of domestic disgust until these objects are carelessly left lying around and then they are disappeared. I have talked to my kids about both issues, quite openly. I don’t like toy guns that don’t shoot projectiles because they promote unrealistic ideas about firearms and play into a violence obsession in our society that I find extremely harmful. Barbies are ugly, difficult to dress and promote ideals of women being anorexic, clumsy, appearance-focused and brainless. 

My son gets to have bows and arrows and swords because these are not quite as poorly used by the entertainment media, but it’s a fine line. He also gets to have toy soldiers and tanks because they can be used to talk about history and real warfare. Hiding from the hard things in life will do us no good. But Mama has to draw the line somewhere.

As for my daughter, beyond clothes, shoes and make-up, she is sometimes interested in drawing and music. I promote these interests with great gusto, as somewhat more wholesome gender stereotypes. She does get lots of pretty stuff and lots of dolls. Just not Barbies. She gets to watch Disney princess movies but not Barbie or Lego Friends and other things that portray girls as cliquish and ditsy. She’ll get to wear high heels when she’s reached her full height. 

These are my lines and my husband’s lines, where we have been able to draw them. Every situation is different. Would I outlaw all military toys and pretend make-up until age twelve if I could? Probably. I’m not judgmental of other parents who are trying to find balance in other ways.

It isn’t easy trying to bring up well-balanced children in a media-saturated, fashion-aware world. If you come up with any nifty secret strategies, please let me know.

Mama's got eyes in the back of her head... which is good since the front ones are busted

My six-year-old daughter has finally figured out that I'm legally blind. 

"Mama! Mama! Get that wasp!"

"Mama! Mama! What is that up in that tree?" 

"Mama! Mama! Why are people staring at us?" 

Image by Ember Farnam

I've gotten around these issues for years with basic Mama-hacks. Wasps?  Keep the doors closed, skillfully wave towels and keep the baking soda handy.

Things up in trees or across the street?  Ask detailed questions of the child until you can figure out what it is. Teach them letters and numbers early.

People staring?  Sigh.

"Honey, some people are confused when they see someone who is different. They might be staring at my stick or at my eyes. That's okay. They aren't hurting anything."

(What I don't say--yet--is that they might also be staring because we're speaking a foreign language or because our skin tones don't match the way families "should." There are so many reasons to stare. Pick one.)

But now my daughter has got the idea. I've explained,"My eyes don't work very good. If you want me to see things, you have to bring them really really close."

We're currently reading the American Girl books about the Native American girl from our neck of the woods in Oregon, Kaya, and her adopted sister Speaking Rain.  My daughter was a bit confused about why Speaking Rain couldn't run away from the bad guys who captured her when Kaya could. She didn't accept that Speaking Rain had to be led around all the time.

"Mama, you can't see and you run around by yourself anyway," she argued. 

The American Girl books did a decent job on including a blind character, although there are a few points that might be a little unrealistic. Mostly they do well. I try to explain that the girl in the story can't see anything at all. Whereas I can see some. But that is hard for a six-year-old to work out. She looks really confused again. 

And she's not the only one who is confused. It seems like every month or so, someone asks me how I parent while legally blind. So I've decided to set down the issues here for quick reference. There are a few points I'd like to emphasize about blind and visually impaired parenting:

Illustration using a Creative Commons image by Jake Stimpson

1. It isn't impossible, and no, I don't have a nanny or a cleaner or a cook.
2. There are physically hard parts and parenting is possibly the most difficult thing I've ever done in terms of adapting to my vision impairment. (Sighted parents usually say parenting is the hardest thing they've ever done too.)
3. We've never been to the emergency room and my kids have never been injured because I couldn't see a danger.
4. As with everything involving disabilities, the hardest parts are social and coming from other people.

I've built rock walls with my bare hands. I love bicycling. I have hiked in remote areas of the Himalayas alone. I have worked as a newspaper journalist covering the war in Kosovo and Macedonia. I have navigated traffic in Moscow, Russia and Dhaka, Bangladesh alone and on foot, and that should be considered an extreme adrenaline sport. 

I'm not totally blind, but I'm definitely legally blind. And my own personal opinion is that parenting is the single most challenging task I've tried when it comes to the difficulty of adapting it too my vision impairment. It has been harder than all of those other things when it comes to the specific difficulties of a vision impairment. So, yes, there are some difficulties. 

Let's see, here are the physical issues:

• Choking hazards and similar toddler dangers: I had to design my living space so that there simply aren't any choking hazards, sharp objects and medicines within reach when my kids were babies and toddlers. Otherwise my days would have been full of constant worry and mouth sweeping. I quickly learned to tell what my children were doing by sound. While sighted parents would watch their kids and have trouble when they hid under the table to draw on the floor with a sharpie, I listened. I learned to listen for the sounds of pen lids, scissors and batteries rattling on the floor. It only took my toddler cutting up a ten-dollar bill left on the table once before I hid all scissors and all money. I will often be cooking with my hands full and tell my kids in the other room something like, "Bring me those batteries right now, You don't take the batteries out of your toys and batteries aren't toys." My kids ask "Mama, how did you know?" I tell them, "That's a Mama's trade secret." By now I know the sounds made when my kids play with dolls, trucks, sticker books, anything. They may be small sounds but if they're playing with something legitimate, there is always some sound. Utter silence, as all parents know, usually means it's time to check on them. 
• Eye contact and attachment: Eye contact is a big attachment mechanism for infants. They can do it in other ways, but most of these require a lot of physical closeness. So, instead of eye contact I did a lot of snuggling. My children sat on my lap to eat until they were at least two. Food plus physical touch and/or eye contact equals attachment brain chemistry. 
• Physical safety and falls: Gates are a very good thing for toddlers. I can keep toddlers from falling without gates but it is too much work. It makes more sense to gate an area and let the kids loose. Then I can get some cooking done. On the other hand, kids will fall. Sighted parents rarely catch tumbles. I have miraculously caught toddlers vaulting head first off the couch just as many times as my sighted peers. I could feel and hear there the kid was and where he/she was headed. I've also had them crash when I was across the room, just as sighted parents have. I keep a well-stocked first aid cupboard. And my kids are now older and have a good sense of physical safety because they know that it hurts if you do overly risky things.
• Traffic:  I didn't always use a white cane. I traveled around in my twenties and just used sound, luck and speed to get across busy streets. But as I got older I knew the odds were rigged against me. I started using a white cane for traffic safety a few years before I had kids and I have to say to anyone who is legally blind and cane-resistant as I was: If you have kids, you need to get with the stick. Kids don't run very fast when they're little and they don't always listen. Canes make drivers pay a bit more attention and what parent wouldn't want an extra safety device. I taught my kids about the dangers of traffic at a very young age. I still make them hold my hands to cross roads at the ages of four and six, but they are getting rebellious, so I'm teaching them how to cross. Soon they'll probably be holding my hand to keep me from getting run over. 
• Combining strollers and canes: This is a special kind of issue, just one of sheer logistics. If I thought cars and pedestrians would use their brains sufficiently, I would simply attach a cane to the front of the stroller as a signalling device and let'er rip. But in my town the thinking abilities of drivers are not to be trusted with the safety of infants. So, I resort to the somewhat ridiculous method of carrying a cane while pushing a stroller. Obviously the cane is just in the way at that point and not doing me any good in terms of physical navigation, but I mostly need it as a signalling device for traffic anyway. When I approach an intersection, I turn the stroller around and pull it while walking with the cane out in front, to make sure that the drivers can get the message. I have also used a sling and a baby carrier but I have problems with my feet and knees that make long treks while carrying a toddler impossible and then there was the era when I had two toddlers. So, I just used a stroller most of the time. Oddly enough, no one ever seemed to notice that my cane wasn't helping me to navigate. Sighted people usually don't really know much about how white canes are used.
• Deep water: Yes, parents should teach their children about the dangers of deep water early too, as well as teach them to swim early. But unlike drivers, water won't ever "be careful." My kids and I are out and about in nature a lot and there have always been rivers and ponds around.  My approach that I stay very close to a small child around water. And I've learned that sighted parents often underestimate the dangers of water precisely because they think they will be able to see everything. When my son was a baby, I was sitting one day by a noisy rushing river with my husband, toddler and infant. I was changing the diaper and my fully sighted husband was reading while our two-year-old daughter played by the bank of the river. I happened to glance up and see her shadow against the water and then glance back down to tuck in the diaper and then glance up again and her shadow was gone. There was no audible sound at all because the rushing of the water drowned out her scream, but I knew with mother's instinct. I leaped up and launched myself into the river and grabbed her while she flailed in the water. She had already been swept away behind bushes and trees where my husband couldn't see her. The first my husband knew of the problem I already had her. He never saw her go in and because of the noise of the water neither of us could hear her splash or scream. It was only instinct and my attention to the bits of shadow that I can see that saved the day that time. And it emphasized to me that neither sight nor hearing is a guarantee of protection, especially if you take it for granted. The best protection is paying attention and being aware of your surroundings. 
• Finding children: There came a time when my toddlers realized that they could hide from me. This was annoying but never actually dangerous. I did get one of those beepers that sound an alarm when the child gets a certain distance away from you. But I never found it very useful because my kids are too curious and they'd just take the bracelet off and play with it and lose it and only the parent's side of the device beeped, not the child's side. This seemed very odd to me. I would think the child's side would beep but the manufacturer assumed that the need would be for an alarm showing when the child had left a certain radius, rather than a noise identifying where the child was. I could have attached one of those devices for finding keys to my child's clothing, but I generally didn't find the problem to be big enough to merit extraordinary measures, even with fairly independent kids. Now they roam around our dead-end street the way other kids do, out of sight for even the sharpest-eyed parents. 
• Emergency plans:  I never had to use an emergency plan but I have one. If my husband isn't there and I need to take a child to the emergency room, I can call an ambulance or a taxi. I sometimes worry about the issue of getting a child who is too big for a stroller to the pediatrician's office with a bad flu. It's over a mile to walk to our pediatrician but the issue hasn't come up yet. I generally know how to handle the flu at home, so doctor's visits tend to be either routine check-ups. Some people have asked what I would do if our house caught fire. This is a confusing question to me, because when the electricity goes out at night, I am always the one to say, "Everyone calm down. I'll get the flashlights." Then I walk calmly upstairs in the dark and reach into the box with camping supplies and feel around for the flashlights, just as I would in the day time. Obviously when visibility is low, my ability to get around without seeing much is an advantage. I know my home well and if there was a fire, I would have at least as good of a chance of getting me and the kids out as my husband would. 
• Reading aloud:  Okay, Braille readers have got this one over me. One could even get a Braille copy of the book plus a picture book for kids to look at while you read and you'd have less fights over looking at the pictures than other parents. But I don't read Braille. I read very close and I need significant light. It has taken a long time for me to find the perfect way to handle this. I wanted to lie down with a kid on either side of me, the way my mother did, but I simply couldn't position a lamp close enough so that the book doesn't shadow the print from the light, especially with two little heads poking in from the sides, trying to see the pictures. When I'm reading for myself I'm almost always listening to a text-to-speech program or audiobooks. But small children will listen much better if their parent reads and they need the reading to be much slower and more relaxed than most audiobooks. So, I finally found the perfect way for my particular eyes. I positioned an armchair between the heads of their beds with a lamp right behind the armchair and I sit in the chair while they lie down on either side of me. With a little tilt of the book they can each look at the pictures and over the years they have become a lot more patient about that. 
• Dirty faces and wardrobe:  I have enough vision to coordinate my kids clothing fine. Still, there are some issues. Kids have an incredible ability to mess up their clothes and get dirty faces. It's embarrassing to have someone else point out that your child needs his or her nose blown. I carry handkerchiefs and blow them a lot, but its just bound to happen that my kids occasionally have a spot or some snot on their faces and I don't notice for a few minutes. These things are not life threatening. The same goes for spots on shirts or tags hanging of the back of shirts. If you haven't learned to live with imperfection, kids will teach you. The other people who get it are the real friends. I avoid the people who don't get it. 
• Picking up and dropping off: You'll always hear parents complain about driving their kids to music lessons, dance classes and play dates. Driving. Right. They should try it with a backpack and a marginally functional public transportation system. This is the hardest of the physical issues. I have had to slog through snow drifts with two toddlers and a stroller (which is way harder than it sounds) to get my kids to one social activity per week because the city thought that our sidewalks didn't need to be plowed "because everyone drives anyway." Even in good weather, getting my kids to school and to good enrichment opportunities is hard and that's with having a husband who can drive and do some of it. There is a silver lining to the cloud because my kids are in immeasurably better shape than the norm. At four my son can hike eight miles and he just started soccer where he is expected to run non-stop for an hour and a half with kids nearly twice his age, and he keeps up. 

So much for the easy parts of parenting while legally blind. The hard parts are those having to do with other people.

• Getting play dates: I started out with one friend who had a child my daughter's age. But she lives two-hours away. We did play dates but obviously it wasn't constant and my daughter begged for more. We attended mommy-and-me classes whenever we could but the reception we got was far from cordial. Once I was told by another mother, "You are supposed to look at people you already know and let them know you're glad to see them." We never made one friend in three years of local mommy-and-me classes and never enticed someone to come to our house for a play date. I not only don't do eye contact and visual social cues the way other mothers do, my eyes also look odd and move erratically. Obviously motherhood wasn't the first time I ran into social problems due to these issues, but I found that all the problems I had before becoming a mom were magnified once the people I was trying to befriend were other mothers. My theory is that mothers are protective of their children and instinctively reject anyone they feel is strange. While they might want to be tolerant and open-minded at other times of their lives, motherhood makes many of us feel that prejudices are a "better safe than sorry"safety issue.  The result was that for several years my kids had severe cabin fever and wanted more social activity. Now that they are a bit older and attending preschool, they have started to make their own friends. I still get some weird reactions from their friends' parents, but so far I have been able to turn them around. Mostly all I need is a bit of contact to convince others that I am in fact a good person to be friends with. 
• The reactions of people on the street: There are the people who ask, "How dare you get pregnant and risk passing that on to your kids?" and the people who grab my children at intersections because they are afraid that I won't keep them from getting run over by cars. Both are a test of nerves and quick reflexes. Especially when I had babies in a stroller, it seemed like every time I went to town we had some sort of extremely negative encounter and it added a lot of stress to the regular pressures of mother hood. While this may seem small compared to the physical issues of parenting, I have found that the studies about the adverse health effects of social exclusion have a basis in reality. A person's mind and body can only take so much of this before it takes a significant toll.
• People who shove their view that a blind person is not safe with children in my face: There are very few comments I can imagine which are more stressful for a parent than having someone question your fitness to parent or say (or imply) that you aren't safe for children. This issue came up for me most acutely with extended family, both in general discussions and when a situation arose in which one adult would end up watching several other children and chance had it that the adult was me. I have had my fair share of hard knocks in the social world but I was utterly unprepared for the problems to come from those who were close to me and knew me well. My friends and family know that I have never had to take my kids to the ER. I have pulled a silently drowning child out of a swimming pool on three occasions when I was the fastest to react (the first time when I was twelve years old). I have taught preschool and elementary classes for ten years and I have a clean safety record there as well. So, the first time I was told that I was not capable enough to watch other children because of my vision impairment, it momentary knocked the breath out of me. Quickly my reaction changed to anger and then to icy fear.  Yes, fear. For a very simple reason. If, heaven forbid, there ever is an accident while I am watching children, I had been put on notice that I would be blamed specifically. Accidents do happen with children, even when adults are vigilant. But I can't afford to have a child that isn't mine fall and scrape a knee, because it is very possible that others will not shrug and say, "Well, that's part of being a kid," as they might if the babysitter were someone else. Instead there would be specific blame. The result has been that although I am very open to watching other people's children to give my kids more fun, I have to be very cautious about it, because of the prejudices around the issue of my vision impairment. 

It's never a good idea to end on a very negative note, so I'd like to offer a couple of unexpected advantages to parenting while legally blind as well.

• Mama really does have eyes in the back of her head: My kids still can't figure out how I know exactly what they were touching in the other room. I think the whole thing about mothers having eyes in the back of their head is just sighted mothers developing some of the attention to sound that most blind people develop. I can tell very specifically what my kids are doing in the other room, what toy they're playing with and what they're doing with it. I can often multitask and "watch" kids from the other room more effectively than sighted parents because I don't have to be looking to tell what's going on. 
• Lower gross-factor parenting: Kids sometimes do gross things that I'm glad I can't see. My children are not always well-behaved and my daughter has been known to chew up her food and then open her mouth to display it in order to try to annoy adults. She also does a lot of sticking out her tongue and "giving the evil eye" when she's angry (according to my sighted friends). I can now even tell when she is doing these things and I am just as glad to have one less thing to push my buttons. When I was changing diapers the same thing applied. While sighted people ask how I can wipe off gross things without seeing them, I have a hard time understanding why you would want to see them. Just wipe the whole thing several times carefully, so as not to get anything gross onto other objects and have done with it. I can tell if there is something to wipe even through the rag. There is no need to examine the mess too closely.
• Mommy fashions: Fashion is not a hobby of mine. I dress cleanly and presentably and that's the end of it. Sometimes I'll wear a wild scarf or skirt for fun, but I don't want to be in the mommy-glamour contest on at the playground. I know it is going on but I find that I am just as happy to miss out on the whole thing. 

So, what are your parenting challenges? Anything to add or gripe about?  Every parent I know feels a bit over their head. Here's a chance to share. Add your comments below. I always love your comments on these posts.

Would you hire a blind babysitter?

I have the same nightmares other parents do. When my daughter was three, I had a nightmare about her running out in front of a truck at night with her purple coat on and being hit. I got rid of that coat and I was paranoid about her being near roads after dark for at least a year after that. 

But I have a special nightmares too--those involving newspaper headlines. And that's not because I've been a journalist (except possibly because my brain knows all to well how the media works). My nightmare headlines say things like:  "Child drowns in river while blind mother is oblivious" or "Community shocked to learn mother of hit-and-run victim couldn't see the car coming."

Because there are a few facts are simply unavoidable:

1. A few children will die or be horribly injured in tragic accidents ever year.
2. Some of these accidents are due to parental neglect. Many are not. Helicopter parents are not all that much less likely to lose their child to a terrible accident. 
3. Most people, including most journalists, wouldn't think a blind person could safely keep track of a toddler.
4. I'm legally blind and I have two young children.

On number 3, I know this because blind parents who go out in public with a white cane and small children all get asked the same questions over and over again, such as "Why did you get pregnant and risk passing that on to your child?" and then "Aren't you afraid they'll get hurt if you aren't looking?" I've been on the receiving end of those questions and I know plenty of other visually impaired parents who've heard them too.

That's why I have extra nightmares. The irony is that I am not really worried that my vision impairment could specifically cause me to miss preventing an accident.

Here is just one example of why I think my kids are just as safe (and as unsafe) as any others:

When our daughter was two and a half, we adopted our second child. He was ten months old and he was extremely emotionally needy due to experiences in a not-particularly-progressive orphanage. As a result, our daughter became a bit more independent. 

A few weeks after we brought our son home, we went to a park by a river for a picnic. It was early in the day and there was no one else there. Our daughter was playing by a tributary stream, throwing pebbles into the water; my husband was reading a book; and I was changing the baby's diaper under a shade tree. I mentioned to my husband that he really needed to watch our daughter if she was going to play close to the river and he assured me that he could see her while he read. I don't have a real concrete idea of how fully sighted eyes work, so I accepted this, though I've since been told it isn't really possible. 

I remember looking up and catching a glimpse of the blur of my daughter's white shirt near the stream a few times. I can't see much beyond about ten feet, but I can pick out bright contrasts of color. Still, I was nervous. I didn't know why at the time, though I have since realized that I was subconsciously uneasy because the noise of the river made it so that I couldn't hear what my daughter was doing, which is how I normally keep track of her.

Once I looked up and didn't see her white shirt by the stream. I looked around and saw the splotch of white on the other side of me, about twenty feet away, near the steep river bank. My husband was facing that way though and I thought he was watching, so I went back to changing the diaper.

She ran back and forth between the stream and the river several times. There were bushes and trees around as well. If I had looked up and not seen her, I wouldn't have panicked. My husband later said he felt the same way, except that he wasn't on edge at all. He was reading his book and casually glancing up and down from it to keep track of our daughter's whereabouts. 

When I had  finished with the diapering process, I started  putting stuff back into our backpack. I happened to be looking up, watching our daughter by the river in a relaxed, summertime way.

And then she disappeared. 

It was silent. Or at least I couldn't hear a sound over the rush of the river. Not a splash. Not a scream. Not a peep. The splotch of her shirt was just there one second and then gone.

I leaped up, left the baby laying on the blanket and raced across the grass. Right by the  river, I could hear her flailing in the water. It was so cold that she couldn't scream. She had already been carried downstream a few feet by the strong current and was now hidden by bushes. I jumped into the river and had her in my arms in the space of three heartbeats. My husband was still putting down his book, looking dazed and alarmed, when I scrambled back to the bank. 

What did I learn from this experience:

1. Children can fall into a river much more quickly and unobtrusively than new parents usually think.
2. If children are by a river, an adult needs to be paying full attention at all times. 
3. If there is more than one adult, there needs to be a designated person to pay attention to children by water because relying on the idea that more adults will mean enough safety doesn't cut it.
4. Sighted people often take their ability to see where a child is for granted.
5. Being fully sighted isn't necessarily a great advantage in this situation.

We discussed this (at length) later. My husband agrees that if he had looked up and not seen our daughter by the river, he would have looked over by the stream. If he had still not seen her, he would have gotten up and gone to look behind the bushes by the stream. By the time, he determined that she wasn't there, at least 30 seconds would have passed and she would have been swept well downstream in the swiftly flowing river. She fell where she was immediately out of his line of sight, obscured by the bank and dense brush.

Parenting 101: We weren't close enough and neither of us was paying enough attention. It was only because I happened to be looking directly at her that disaster was averted. Overconfidence in one sense is dangerous.

I have learned a lot since then and I know many experienced parents (both sighted and blind) who know better than to make those mistakes in the first place. You don't have to be a helicopter parent to know that toddlers and swift water are a bad combination. 

Since then I have learned a lot about how blind parents do what they do as well. Under normal circumstances, I can hear very precisely what toy my children are playing with in the other room and what they're doing with it. They have asked me, when they got in trouble for messing with forbidden items, "Mama, how did you know?" For now, I just let them think Mama has eyes in the back of her head, because... these are trade secrets. 

But I also know what I can't see. If I'm with small children by a river without other adults, I will be physically right with the children. I won't be watching from a distance, if the water is noisy. This comes from experience of children and flowing water more than anything and my approach wouldn't be that different even if I was fully sighted. I know how easily accidents can happen.

A few years ago, a family member told me that I couldn't be safe watching small children because of my vision impairment. As it happened, a year later I was put in the situation of watching that relative's child plus my two children by a river alone for two hours. I had agreed to watch the three children by myself in that situation for only fifteen minutes. But the person who was supposed to arrive to help me, didn't show up for some time. And it turned into two hours.

That time, everything went fine, but I was still stressed out. I am reasonably confident that I can watch children by water, but three preschoolers on one adult (at a swimming hole where a child drowned the year before) isn't a great ratio in general. And this was made worse by the doubts some relatives had already expressed about my ability to watch children. I was uncomfortable with this situation because I knew that if a child slipped on a wet rock, I wouldn't be judged the way other parents are judged. I am inherently suspect.

That's where the nightmares about newspaper headlines come in. As much as I'm afraid of my children or other children I care for being hurt, I'm also nervous about the community wrath and lack of understanding that is likely to result if my child even suffers a common childhood injury.

In the light of the neon fact that I'm legally blind, some other facts that might well be overlooked. Those are:

1. My children have never broken a bone or been to the Emergency Room... yet. (Lucky dog. Could happen, just hasn't yet.)
2. My concerned relative's child has... both things, several times. (Not an extremely risky lifestyle. It just happens, but no one ascribes any special meaning to it because this parent has no disability.)
3. I taught preschool-aged children for ten years and never had a safety problem.
4. I've pulled a silently drowning child out of a swimming pool twice when no one happened to be looking. The first time I did it, I was twelve. (And, yes, I was legally blind then too.)
5. I am as careful or more careful than other parents when it comes to dangers like water and traffic without restricting children's play.

 It's never fun to know that you might be judged more harshly than others if you make a mistake. Granted, sometimes that's just life. But this prejudice raises other issues as well. Many parents won't let their children come to my house for a playdate. Might that be because they are nervous about the same things? What happens if someone brings up these kinds of issues in a custody hearing? What if a legally blind person wants to work as a preschool teacher?

I've discussed these issues with skeptical parents a lot, and it has often come down to a deceivingly simple question:

Would you hire a legally blind babysitter?

Believe it or not, I worked as a babysitter as a teenager. I'm not sure if the parents knew I was legally blind. My career wasn't very illustrious anyway... but for other reasons. One set of parents came home to find me leading their children on an adventurous expedition on their shed roof. If I hired a babysitter who did that today, there would be stern words.

And so it comes down to this. I'm not saying you should hire a "blind babysitter" because blind people always make great parents and childcare professionals. I am saying, hire a babysitter with a good track record, period. 

If he or she doesn't have a reference--not even from their own cousin or aunt who has kids, then I probably wouldn't hire that babysitter, unless I know them well personally and was prepared to be that first reference. (I'd also be careful of babysitters who take children on hikes on the shed roof, even if they might mature into good parents someday.) 

If you ran into an experience babysitter who has an excellent track record and references and also happens to have a disability, would you hire them? Does it depend on which disability they have? Do you have any chilling tales of water hazards to share? I love to hear from you. Comment below using the bubble icon on the lower left. Share this post using the icon on the lower right.