Lefty Parent

My mom had a great love for everything that had to do with Christmas, and particularly the figure of Santa Clause and what he symbolized in terms of celebrating and honoring children. She believed in God (unlike me) but also felt that organized religion was one of the great scourges of human history. Given that, she still enjoyed even the Christian celebration of the birth of the baby Jesus, and the bestowing on him of great gifts, seeing it as a metaphor as to how all people should greet and treat our children with an abundance of love.

Though they lived on a new college professor’s modest earnings, my parents made every effort to make Christmas time the most wonderful time of the year for me as a child. They perhaps more than most parents of the 1950s understood the value of play in the development of a young person and researched and bought me wonderful toys – like Tinker Toys, Lincoln Logs, wooden trains, plastic soldiers and dinosaurs – that they wrapped and placed under our Christmas tree, sometimes as much as a week or two before the big day, fueling my anticipation of this yearly event. Add to this great anticipation, we would sometimes do our Christmas celebration back east at my mom’s folks house in Binghamton, a journey usually taken by train in a sleeping compartment, one of my young life’s most memorable adventures. continue reading »

So I’m continuing to explore youth-worker John Bell’s article “Understanding Adultism: A Key to Developing Positive Youth-Adult Relationships”. According to Bell most young people experience adultism from the day they are born until the day the world around them recognizes them as an adults. It is part of the structure of society and its institutions, including families, schools, churches and government. (If you did not read my first piece introducing the concept of adultism, you can read it by clicking this link.) continue reading »

Passing some sort of metaphorical baton to the next generation (along with the key to the closet full of skeletons) is never easy. Surrendering that baton, particularly in a cultural tradition steeped with 5000 years of patriarchal pecking-order thinking can feel very uncomfortable. In many of those old stories, still hanging around somehow in the cultural zeitgeist, the “old man” only surrenders power to his son on his death bed. And then there are all those embarrassing skeletons. continue reading »

When I was a young teen I spent six hours a day, five days a week, forty weeks a year in age segregated classrooms where I was often uncomfortable, stressed out, and felt disrespected by many of my peers and even some of the adults that controlled the classrooms and the encompassing school environment. And I certainly was not there by choice, finding every excuse I could (usually illness… real or imagined) to stay away. Looking back I think I was suffering from institutional age segregation and having my rights as a human being given short shrift. Certainly, as a youth and not an adult, I had no guarantee of full civil rights under the U.S. Constitution.

First of all, I will admit to being a bit of a provocateur in that initial paragraph to build my “hook” for this piece. But I am hoping that it is a prescient, though provocative, statement of a step forward in human rights that is still percolating in our future, and the debates to come surrounding the evolutionary trajectory of the human race. continue reading »

For a year we medicating our son with the stimulant Adderall, after an ADD diagnosis, to try and make him better able to successfully navigate and perform in the conventional academic environments of his middle school, but eventually realizing that we were instead dishonoring and disrespecting who he was.

Our son Eric had always had a crisp and incisive mind, but like me he seemed to be “right brained”, that is he was highly creative and his thinking process were very non-linear, his mind taking off in several directions at once based on any stimulus. That mind served him well in all his venues – including home, travel, preschool and early elementary school – for the first seven years of his young life. He actively pursued areas of interest, enjoyed the wisdom of others, absorbed and synthesized huge amounts of information and experience, and was a joy to the adults – parents (most of the time), relatives and teachers – that he interacted with. continue reading »

An old rule of thumb of folk wisdom that I have adopted wholeheartedly is that, “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander”. I wouldn’t call this conventional wisdom, since applied to folks rather than fowl it challenges the path of least resistance of the patriarchal thread still strongly woven through our cultural trajectory. But I would recommend it as a simple metric for implementing the Golden Rule and promoting a society based on partnership rather than patriarchy.

A simple application of this rule, but metaphorically powerful I think in challenging male supremacy, is the logic of opening doors for other people. When I come to a doorway in a store or at my work just before another man I open the door for him, since I would do so for a woman. Conversely, if a woman gets to the door just before me I am comfortable letting them open it for me, since if the situation were reversed, I would be comfortable opening the door for her. continue reading »

There are moments in life when you recognize the passage from youth to adulthood. Sometimes those moments are obvious community rituals, like a coming of age ceremony. Other times it is a more private or impromptu moment when a parent or other adult acknowledges that you have joined the club, and no longer attract that extra scrutiny and judgment of your behavior that is applied (rightly or wrongly) to youth. I participated in no formal coming of age ritual in my own youth, but I certainly remember informal moments when it is clear that you have transitioned from being treated as a dependent to being treated more as a peer. continue reading »

After years of dementia, with barely anything left of who she was except a glint in her eyes of recognition when she saw me, and the ability to somehow still swing a tennis racket, my mom ended this incarnation, to relief and sadness on my part. Reflecting on the entirety of her 83 years of life, particularly the first half of it, I am struck by how she managed to use her imagination to make up for a lack of resources and “be effective” challenging conventional wisdom, including aspects of the liberal progressivism of the university town where she spent the best years of her adulthood.

My partner Sally and I were in a hotel in Denver where Sally was attending a conference and I was just enjoying a long weekend away from Los Angeles. I was woken up by a call after midnight from the emergency room at Presbyterian Memorial Hospital in Van Nuys. The nurse on the phone said that my mom had been admitted, in a coma, after collapsing at her assisted-living residence, and that the doctor needed instructions on whether to try and take the measures to keep her alive. continue reading »

My mom had always been an activist and forever relished a “good fight” for the things she believed in, but found herself, at age 76 after moving out to Los Angeles to live with us, diagnosed with dementia and a final seven-year struggle with the gradual loss of memories and the general unraveling of her once great mind. My mom was a fighter to the end, but with the continuing loss of her faculties, that fight got more and more quixotic and convoluted, and difficult for those of us around her. For me experiencing this with her, every day I grieved the loss of one more piece of the bigger-than-life person she had been.

As I indicated in another vignette (The “D” Word), a few years after my dad’s death in 1984, my mom was diagnosed with an atrial fibrillation that was causing her heart to not pump blood properly. For years it was treatable, but finally not, and the oxygen flow to her brain became permanently compromised, leading to the dementia. To my mom and the intellectual powerhouse she had once been, her diagnosis carried with it such profound fear that she could only deal with it by denial. When I tried to discuss the issue further on the way home from the doctor’s, my mom glared at me and told me candidly that she could not deal with the thought of “losing her mind” and so she did not want to talk about it again. continue reading »

A recurring theme in my writing is the quest for self-esteem, particularly by youth, and the positive benefits to individual (and societal) development that flow from achieving and maintaining that self-esteem. There has been a lot of effort in recent decades to focus parenting and educational practice on promoting self-esteem in youth, which I think is a good thing, but is still controversial. Critics of efforts to encourage self-esteem in youth, rightly point out that there have been misguided efforts as well, such as simply telling kids that everything they do is wonderful (which even the kids know is not true), which in my mind encourages narcissism rather than self-esteem. Other critics say that too much self-esteem is a bad thing, turning otherwise respectful kids into insensitive brats. continue reading »