Category: Village

What story do your kids tell themselves about why they do the things they do? It’s a question that’s critical for children’s wellbeing, according to UVA psychology professor Tim Wilson.

Wilson, a social psychologist, says people can improve their lives by controlling and editing their internal narrative. For example, if a new college student tanks his first exam, he can come to believe he isn’t college material, or he can decide he has the ability to succeed and simply needs to work harder.

Children too are constantly interpreting life’s events and inventing stories about why and how they happened. This is a central tenant of social psychology, according to Wilson, and not that controversial. Where things get a little more radical is in Wilson’s belief that parents can alter their kids’ storytelling in helpful ways.

“The technical term is ‘minimally sufficient rewards and punishments,’” Wilson said. “You want to use just enough to get them to do it, but not enough to make them realize that’s why they are doing it. You don’t always get it right.”

If you do get it right, your kids will come away from the exercise with a story about intrinsic motivation. “I ate those peas because I like peas,” for example, instead of “I only ate those peas so I could get dessert after dinner.” The hard part is finding the right motivators, Wilson admits.

He offers the example of the Pizza Hut Book It! Program, in which kids are treated to a personal pan pizza for completing a certain amount of reading. It’s been around for nearly 30 years, and there’s some evidence it’s been successful, but does it really bring about a love of reading? Or are the kids just doing it for the pizza?

“I’ve seen some students give back their [Book It!] reward,” said Mia Shand, a fifth grade teacher at Agnor Hurt Elementary School. “Getting kids motivated to learn is about making a connection. If you respect them for their individuality, they can see that.”

Shand has found computer games with immediate rewards like “badges” to be more effective motivators for many of her students. She figures she’s developed a handful of Civil War buffs through the game Minecraft.

But are the kids really buffs? Once the game runs its course and the students have learned everything they can from Minecraft, will they seek more info on the Confederacy and Union?

“If they are given feedback based on how well they are doing, the research suggests it can be beneficial,” Wilson said. “But it is a tricky business. There is a danger that they may just enjoy learning about the topic in those contexts.”

Whatever the reward for a desired behavior, Wilson said it’s best for parents to go over-the-top at first. Once the behavior is in line, you can scale back. Which means more peas, and less dessert.

Joel Codiamat has always had an interest in fashion (“It’s the reason I got into photography,” he said), but his take on family portraiture is giving him another opportunity to do what he loves: styling.

Codiamat started doing fashion photography when he first moved to Charlottesville four years ago, but this past year, he began fielding requests for something a bit different.

“More people I know were asking if I could style their family and photograph them with a fashion edge. Not the standard family portraiture,” he said.

Here’s how it works. Once you contact Codiamat, he’ll set up a meeting to get a sense of how grand you want to make the shoot and, based on that, he creates a storyboard with several concepts. Then he starts styling. Most of the clothes are borrowed from local stores, which requires a fair amount of measuring and fitting before a final selection. But it’s all part of the process.

“I want the family to have the ‘experience,’” Codiamat said. “The experience of being treated like stars for an entire month—a fashion stylist at their disposal, make-up artists, hair stylist. I want them to feel very special.”

It usually takes three to four weeks altogether, so he’s currently only taking on one of these types of clients a month. Pricing depends on the scope of the project, but it’s generally broken down into two costs: the styling and the photography.

Certainly, Codiamat’s happiest when he gets to push the family out of its comfort zone.

“I want the photos to look aspirational and out of the ordinary,” he said. “I want them to look at those photos years later and say, ‘Wow, we look really fabulous.’”

Like most parents, I spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about how the various things I do might impact my daughter’s emotional and intellectual development because, thanks to social science research, I know that everything I think is good is actually bad. I’m told, for example, I can’t tell my very smart daughter she’s smart because this will make her afraid to try difficult things; if she doesn’t do something right, she’ll supposedly think that means she’s actually not smart.

Similarly, I have to ration admiring comments about her appearance because if I tell my beautiful daughter that she is in fact beautiful this will make her think her self-worth comes from her physical appearance which will lead her to become a stripper or something. So I find myself constantly over-thinking what I say and wind up awkwardly shifting my word choice in mid-air so when my daughter does something particularly smart I wind up saying things like “you’re so smar—er, um…here?” No word yet on what social science says the effect on children is of having mush-mouthed and obviously dissembling parents.

While fretting about how anything I say or do could be damaging my 20-month-old daughter’s psyche, I stumbled upon several recent studies that show that the damage can go the other way, too: In effect, children (and especially daughters) screw up their parents (and especially their fathers) in ways I never would have imagined. The Pew Research Center, for example, recently published a study showing that having a daughter can turn even very politically liberal people into conservative parents who vote Republican.

Thoroughly dismayed, I initially dismissed the study’s findings. But I’ve reluctantly come to concede there is at least some small measure of truth to this—e.g., even well before my daughter’s second birthday, my long-standing support of comprehensive and serious gun control measures has started to loosen because I now realize the original intent of the Second Amendment was to allow me to have a shotgun on hand to greet any and all of my daughter’s suitors in the years to come. Other than that, though, I remain skeptical that I’m being politically reshaped in any significant way.

A couple of studies published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, however, point to even more dramatic changes that may be in store for me. A 2011 study showed that while men with higher testosterone levels are more successful at attracting a mate and having children, testosterone levels drop dramatically once a man becomes a father. But here’s the kicker: testosterone levels fall further still for fathers who take an active role in raising their children. Fathers who reported three or more hours of daily childcare duties had further reductions in their testosterone levels compared to fathers who were not involved in the raising of their children. A similar study published in 2013 goes a little further: a man’s “testicular volume” varies inversely with child nurturing behavior. The more time fathers spend with their children, the lower their testosterone level and the smaller their testicles. This is supposedly a salutary evolutionary adaptation. While high testosterone is important to attracting a mate and having children, it makes for bad husbands and fathers if sustained. Lower testosterone makes men better husbands and more nurturing fathers. In other words, the invisible hand of nature has fathers by the balls, but it’s supposedly for our own good. Or is it?

As far as I know, there are no studies showing just how far the inverse relationship between being an attentive father and masculinity goes. Does the decline in testosterone levels and testicle size stop at some critical minimum point or does it just keep going with every playdate, story-time, and tumbling class? I think it’s safe to say no one actually knows where this is going and what the long-term effects will be because the really involved father thing is, at least as a general sociological phenomena, something entirely new under the sun. Other studies suggest that men who have fully embraced the role of nurturer are regarded as unattractive and even embarrassing by their female partners, although it’s not clear if the basis for this is primarily physiological or sociological (i.e. even women who have eschewed traditional gender roles for themselves are not comfortable with men who have done the same).

I’m not a stay at home dad, but I do spend a huge amount of time with my daughter, which apparently puts me in the at-risk male population. How would I know if I’m spending too much time with my daughter and getting close to some tipping point? Will I start talking about my feelings and watching Bravo or will I merely start using more emoticons? Can I have it all by taking a more masculine approach to nurturing and doing things like father-daughter bow hunting or ultimate fighting? Should I use a timer when I interact with my daughter and limit my nurturing behavior to less than three hours since that seems to be the cutoff? Or should I just stop wearing the matching outfits my wife buys for me and my daughter? What if both the political and gender transformation studies turn out to be true? Will I one day look in the mirror and see Mamie Eisenhower—or will I become even more conservative and even more feminine and become Marcus Bachmann?

While I wait for science to tell me what to do, I’ve started talking to other at-risk fathers to come up with strategies to slow down or moderate this transformation. Right now, we meet for tea once a month and talk about how we feel about what’s going on with our bodies. The goal of these gatherings is to embrace our lives and where we are within them and push back at the stigma on the mature, nurturing man within our society. Above all, we strive to provide a safe and supportive environment for men who have lost testicular volume. We’re easy to find—to show that we’re not embarrassed about who we are and where we are in our lives we wear red hats in public. And we’re looking for new members. Bravo should do a show about us!

I vividly recall a major blowup my parents had when I was about 6 years old. I was in our basement family room, watching Saturday morning cartoons. They were upstairs shouting and throwing dishes. I’d witnessed harsh words and muffled arguments between them before, but this sounded like bedlam.

Once the noise finally subsided, I tiptoed upstairs, full of curiosity and concern, to find broken pieces of china littering the kitchen floor. I stood there horrified until my parents emerged from the bathroom teary-eyed, with their arms draped affectionately around each other.

“What happened?” I asked them.

“Nothing,” said Mom with an obvious sniffle. “I accidentally broke some dishes. Go watch your cartoons, sweetheart.”

Apparently they’d reconciled, but I was still devastated and confused.

We may have the best intentions in shielding our children from marital conflict, and of course it would be better if parents never fought, but child development experts say it’s futile to try hiding everyday disagreements from the kids. In most cases, children are acutely aware of the tension even if they don’t understand the specifics of the arguments. But that’s not necessarily the problem. What’s worse, say the experts, is that by trying to hide the situation from them, we deny our children the ability to witness that we resolved the conflict and how.

If parents begin to bicker at the dinner table, for example, but quickly decide to “discuss it later,” the children never see the resolution and may continue to harbor anxieties about it. Moreover, even if parents think they’re being discrete, it’s likely they’re modeling all kinds of ways to belittle, insult, or accuse, but very few ways to apologize, concede, or make up.

I was confronted with my own failures in this regard one morning with my own 6-year-old. My husband and I had had a disagreement the night before and had assumed the children—who sleep like logs once they finally succumb—had missed the whole business. I went ahead, however, and asked my daughter if she’d overheard us arguing. She nodded and said, “I don’t like it when you and Daddy fight,” as if what she’d heard the previous night was not the anomaly for her that we had believed.

While I wish she’d never observe an unkind word or look from anyone anywhere or experience her own home as anything other than the love nest of safety I yearn for it to be, that likely is impossible with two working parents, two young children competing for attention from those parents, mortgages, college funds, car repairs, school volunteer obligations, a New Year’s resolution to make more green smoothies, and all the other complexities of this modern life. There is bound to be some discord over who forgot to do, pay, or order something and who feels more overworked and underappreciated in any given week. I’m quite sure the dog is feeling the most slighted of all, but fortunately he’s too old to bark much about it these days.

On the whole, I hope that my children experience their home as a place of emotional security and that when conflicts do arise, they see positive examples of compromise and reconciliation and that Mom and Dad do kiss and make up. They could probably do without the kissing part, but I’m an overachiever so they will have to deal with it.

Before the birth of my second child in December, I was worried of the impact it would have on my firstborn, June, now 3. I was afraid she wouldn’t do well with a new baby in the house. Up until that point, June had been the center of everything—the object of all our love, devotion, and affection. A second child would alter the dynamic. It had to. I was afraid I would have less time, and by extension maybe even less love, for June. She’d become the generalized “big sis.”

Our second child, Kathryn Bea, was born December 13, and within the first few months of being a mom of two, I realized I had been projecting. June has been fine with the transition. More than fine. She adores her little sister (though I like to think it’s because we went out of our way to prep her for the change, see the sidebar below). She loves to hold her, kiss her, play with her, and feed her. I was the one with the hang-ups. I was the one who had a hard time letting go of June’s only child star status. It sounds petty, but there’s something so special, untarnished, and undistracted about being able to pour all your energy and love into one child. Two fractures the equation. Two requires more focus and compartmentalization. Or so I thought.

When in reality, my heart just opened bigger than I thought possible. I love seeing the differences between June and Katie (Katie is a little more relaxed than June was at this age, but that also could be because I’m more relaxed). I love the similarities even more (they look identical, those two, and both love, love, love to be swaddled).

I love how having two kids makes me feel more enmeshed in my family life than ever before, which is equally wonderful and frustrating. When you just have one child, you can still look forward to some down-time, some “me” time on the weekends by leaving your child for a bit with your spouse. With two kids, that luxury goes out the window, particularly for moms—at least at this stage when children are very young. Now on weekends, I typically have both girls with me at all times with maybe an hour or two to go for a quick jog or run an errand by myself. The effect of this is that I feel more like a Mom and less like “Jessie” than ever. The upside is that it’s brought my husband Jake and me closer together as we accept we have to be there for one another like never before. Our roles as “Mom and Dad” come into greater relief as our individuality further slips away; the roots deepen.

As for June and Katie, they each gain a friend and ally—a comrade to buffer the omnipresence of Mom and Dad. It’s a dynamic an only child never gets to experience. With a little luck, their relationship will only grow and deepen, just like their Mom and Dads’.

 

Make room for baby

Need some tips for preparing your toddler for a sibling? Start here.

Get out the toddler’s photo album and replay events of her babyhood: “Mom is going to be spending a lot of time feeding your new sibling, just like I did with you.”

Ask her opinion when shopping for baby stuff—what color socks she thinks her new sibling might like, whether to get her this or that plushy toy, etc.

Play up all the great things that come from being a big sister: It’s a big responsibility and you get to teach your new sibling all kinds of cool new stuff, like how to say the alphabet, how to build blocks, how to eat applesauce!

Stock up on books and videos to help her prepare. June became obsessed with the Dora the Explorer “Big Sister Dora” DVD that we checked out from the library. She asked to watch it every day. It put a really happy, positive spin on all the great things that come from being a big sister.

To give the older sibling a feeling of special privileges, ask her to select which of her toys the new baby can play with and which are for big girls only.

Upon their first meeting, have the baby present the toddler with a gift—a balloon, a book, a treat. It doesn’t have to be extravagant.

When the baby comes along, give the toddler some baby responsibilities: fetching diapers, assisting with wipes, throwing dirty diapers in the trash. June loves this one. (We both do!)—J.K. 

Kids think they have all the answers. And maybe they do. We put a few to the test, sending out a Q&A to youngsters age 5 to 16.

Most of our participants were born after the millenium. They don’t remember using payphones. They’ll never know the frustration of dial-up Internet. But there’s a lot of wisdom to glean from their young minds, as our questionnaire proves.

We asked everything from the serious (what would you do if you were president?) to the silly (if you could be a sound, what would you be?) and were surprised by many of the answers. It’s true: Kids really do say the darndest things.

Photos by Cramer Photo

Boy wonder

Erik Rebhorn

Age: 5

Attends: Cale Elementary School

Likes: TV, candy, Star Wars.

Dislikes: His sister’s puppy dog face.

What would you do if you were president? Make Leo [his friend from daycare] the mayor even though no one else in kindergarten knows him.

What advice would you give your parents? Be the guards of me and do nice things to me.

If you grew up to be famous, what would you want to be famous for? Looking up into space.

At what age is a person an adult? What makes you think so? 20, because the oldest teenager is 19.

What’s the hardest thing about being a kid? Moms and dads get to do a lot of things that kids don’t, like being the boss of a conference.

What do you think life will be like in five years? I can be the same size as my sister even though she is three years older than me and will be 13.

How do you know if you’re in love? When I’m with my mom.

What do you know how to do that you can teach to others? Reading.

If you could be a sound, what would you be? A rifle gun blasting.

If you could choose a new name for yourself, what would it be? I like my name.

If you could invent something that would make life easier for people, what would you invent? Something that makes parents be kids so we could do whatever we want.

Having worked toward becoming a veterinarian since she was 3, when she started pulling lambs, 10-year-old Sadie Wentz already has a head start on some of her less-industrious peers. She’s the proud owner of 13 Suffolk-Hampshire Cross sheep, a 900-pound steer, and two dogs, and is responsible for everything from delivering baby lambs to treating sick animals (sometimes in the middle of the night!) at the family’s Rapidan farm.

Her efforts have earned her some awards, too. In last year’s 4H competition, she won Outstanding Junior Exhibitor, Second Overall Novice Showman, and she competed for a Grand Champion title after winning her class with one of
her lambs.

But it’s not about competitions. Said her dad, Brian, “It’s about the animals and the bond they share—the friendships, the experience.” And, it sounds like, it’s about getting a head start on a promising future. Owning two lambs has taught her about bookkeeping, buying feed and supplies, and general money management.

“Her sheep flock is how she’ll fund her education,” Brian said. Sadie’s already started looking at colleges. Virginia Tech and North Carolina are currently in the running.