Tag Archives: Children

Parental guidance is suggested

I don’t write a lot here about the fact that I’m a parent. I certainly don’t try to hide it. I regularly tweet my 5-year-old daughter’s witticisms, and I post pictures of her and her 8-year-old brother on Instagram all the time. But I don’t blog about it because, well, I don’t really feel like I have that much of value to say on the matter.

I’m not a great parent. I’m not a bad parent, but I’m not one of those super-engaged, every-day-is-inspired-genius, my-children-are-the-center-of-my-universe Parents. I’m just a dude who’s married and has a couple of kids. We make sure they’re fed, bathed regularly, do their homework, brush their teeth, all of that stuff. On the weekends we try to take them out and do things that are fun, intellectually stimulating, or (ideally) both.

So, I get a passing grade in the parenting department. But whatever you do, don’t come looking to me for parenting advice.

We’re not exactly (tie-)dyed-in-the-wool hippies, but like Steven and Elyse Keaton, one of our biggest fears is probably that our son will grow up to want to wear suits to school and believe in trickle-down economics. Politically, we’re pretty far to the left (at least by U.S. standards). We value and respect a diversity of perspectives, and if we teach our kids anything in life we want it to be to respect other people, and ways of being that may be different from their own. We also want them to be independent thinkers and to question authority.

The problem then arises that we may be too reluctant to teach them our own perspectives and values and beliefs. I sometimes wonder where the line is between filling kids’ heads with (the wrong) ideas, and not filling their heads with anything at all. Where does a careful effort not to impose ways of thinking and being cross over into not encouraging them to think, period?

Our kids are smart. They’re excelling in school. Yet sometimes they seem to lack “common sense.” That idea of common sense can be a tricky one, and is something we are especially trying to avoid. Because while just about anyone can say it’s “common sense” not to put your hand on a hot stove, where does common sense stop being “common”; when does it stop making “sense”? There was a time when slavery was “common sense.” It’s still “common sense” to some people that women should make less money than men for doing the same work. We’re currently in the middle of a national struggle to overcome the idea that it’s “common sense” that gay couples shouldn’t enjoy the same rights as heterosexual couples. Common sense, in other words, is often shorthand for assumed prejudices, because it’s hard to argue with “common sense.”

Just yesterday, as our family walked home from the LRT station, we were discussing the fact that even though our kids are so “smart,” we still don’t trust them to do “common sense” things like cross the street by themselves. I mentioned how, from first grade on, I walked six blocks to school by myself (well, with a neighbor who also went to my school and was two years older). My parents knew that I could find my way safely to and from a location a half mile away, five days a week.

A couple of days ago, I overheard our kids in the living room, discussing whether or not they believed in ghosts, and I was dismayed when they agreed that, yes, they both believed in ghosts. What?! As a science-minded agnostic (leaning atheist, but absence of evidence does not constitute proof against), I was upset to hear this. But as a let-them-decide-for-themselves liberal parent, I said nothing. I was hoping that the fact that they even felt the need to question whether or not ghosts were real was a good enough start for now.

I grew up Lutheran. Went to church most Sundays, went to Sunday school through high school. Beyond religion, my parents imparted most of their beliefs about the world and how to live in it directly to me, without all of this namby-pamby moral relativism I’m using to hold back my subjective opinions on certain topics with my own kids. (Fortunately, they were — and are — die-hard Democrats.) I avoided burning my hands on the stove, or running out into the street in front of a moving car, not through my own independent discovery, but because my parents told me not to.

I do think we live in a time when parents are expected to allow their children to discover for themselves, and to treat them as precious snowflakes, rather than to teach them stern lessons about the cruel realities of the world. (And we’re seeing the results of that approach as a generation grows up and never leaves home.) At the same time, I wonder if perhaps we, specifically, are taking certain aspects of that philosophy too far, even as we intend to counteract it. Children do need guidance to learn how the world works. And trying too hard to avoid accidentally imparting your own unconscious prejudices on them might sometimes lead to not even teaching them those things that truly are “common sense,” but still need to be taught.

Changing the rules for biological parents, decades after the fact

The Girls Who Went Away by Ann FesslerA recent editorial in the Minneapolis StarTribune addressed proposed legislation that would change Minnesota’s state laws concerning adoptees’ access to their birth records, without the birth parents’ consent. The point is moot for those adopted after 1982, as laws enacted in that year gave birth parents the choice of whether or not to allow the records to be made available to their children after they turned 18. (And, if I understand the poorly-worded sentence from the article correctly, 90% of birth mothers, given the choice, have wanted to allow access under those circumstances.)

As it happens, I have a particular interest in this matter, as I was adopted in the state of Minnesota, before 1982.

My records are sealed until either I or my biological parents die, but it’s of little matter now, as some careful online sleuthing (along with a good bit of luck) allowed me to find and make contact with my birth mom. Although due to geography and the complexity of daily life, we may never have a very close relationship, we do have a relationship now, and have been a part of each other’s lives for the past five years.

Up to that point, her identity, and truly the very origins of my existence, were shrouded in a mystery that I had long known I may never solve. If you’re not in the situation, I would imagine it is difficult to understand. And for some people, including a good college friend who’s also adopted, the curiosity just isn’t there, which is fine. But for those of us who do need to know, it’s not just (in the words of the article) “genealogical curiosity.” It is a burning hunger to understand oneself.

As I said, I was lucky. Circumstances made it unexpectedly easy for me to locate my birth mom. (Credit goes, too, to three websites in particular: Google, Switchboard, and to a lesser extent, US Search. Avoid giving US Search your information, or worse, your money, unless you find it absolutely necessary. But enlist Google and Switchboard, and watch them do wonders.) We were exchanging emails two short weeks after I first made a concerted effort to find her, in 2003. But the urge to take action had been there for years.

Unfortunately the only avenue open to me in the pre-Google years was to work through the agency that placed me with my adoptive parents. That would have required nearly $600 in fees, along with several notarized documents, all with no guarantee of success. Most adult adoptees who are seeking their birth parents are stuck with this as their only option, however, and the situation is even worse for the birth parents. Mostly they just need to sit back and hope their children want to find them, knowing that they may not even be aware that they’re adopted.

So I see both sides of this story. Birth parents (mothers in particular, it seems) overwhelmingly want to be found by their children, even if they were forced by the laws and practices at the time of the birth to give up all rights to contact, forever. But if they’re in that 10% minority, they do deserve to have their rights protected, too.

Ultimately it’s a good thing that the laws were changed. Adoptees who are a decade or more younger than I am may never have to face the kind of agonizing “curiosity” that my generation and those before me have lived with since we first learned we were adopted. (Again, I believe I was lucky, in that I’ve known since I was a young child — too young to understand the stigma I might have felt if I learned as a teen or an adult.)

Despite the feel-good reunion stories that are, for the most part, the general public’s only exposure to issues of adoption, and ham-fisted legislative efforts to right past wrongs, as is currently underway in Minnesota, the true, anguished story of birth mothers (many of whom in past decades were compelled against their wishes to give up their children) is still largely unknown. I would encourage everyone who has the slightest interest in issues of adoption to read Ann Fessler’s excellent book, The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade.