My daughter #2 starts high school in the fall, and she's been at an orientaiton camp this week. yesterday she came home in tears, because she wasn't having any luck making friends. She said all the kids at the camp already know each other (most kids come from a different middle school than the one my daughter attended) and they just want to talk to each other about what everyone is doing over the summer.
We talked about the difference between not liking a person, and just not having anything yet to talk to them about. We also talked about how friends are made - first you meet someone, then you get to know them, then you become friends. This seemed to be a revelation to her, as she expected to meet people and immediately become the circle of friends. Why she expected this, I'm not sure.
Social networking is the number one most important activity of teenagers, and even though much is in the air lately about online social networking, in-person social lives still matter.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Not All Self-Defense is Equal
One of the things we most feared happening with son #2 came true this weekend. He got big enough and aggressive enough that he can overpower me.
Son #2 has fairly severe autism. He is non-verbal, and smack in the middle of puberty. This is a bad combination. For years we've been able to control his occassional aggression, although control involved physical restraint at times and exhausting battles that could go on for an hour or two. But this weekend, he moved past the invisible line we had been able to maintain, and accomplished what, in plain terms, was a beating. Of me. Even though his dad was in the room and reached us within seconds, he was not able to get son#2 off me for about a minute. Although I recieved no specific injury, and was not in bad shape on the scale of how things could be, I was still left with enough physical trauma to cause several days of depression, stiffness, soreness, and general unwellness. I have been told that beatings, even with little to no outward physical signs, is traumatic to the body and requires recovery. I have now experienced this first hand.
The problem now is what to do. Clearly I would be in big trouble if this happened when no other adult (preferably a big strong one) was around. I have found a real gap in advice and training for parents in this area - it is difficult to find information on physical restraints, and when you do it is all aimed at using containment first and the least possible amount of physcial force. I think that is good - but no training seems willing to talk about what to do at the next level. When containment and low physical force doesn't work.
On the other hand, self-defense training is all about incapacitating your assailant. And while I am confident I could still do that to son #2 if necessary, I want to find something in the middle. I want to find self-defense that seeks first to stop or avoid the force being rained down upon you. I feel like I the tools to handle both lesser and greater attacks, but the serious attack by someone whom you want to avoid hurting as much as possible just isn't addressed by training or literature that I can find.
Son #2 has fairly severe autism. He is non-verbal, and smack in the middle of puberty. This is a bad combination. For years we've been able to control his occassional aggression, although control involved physical restraint at times and exhausting battles that could go on for an hour or two. But this weekend, he moved past the invisible line we had been able to maintain, and accomplished what, in plain terms, was a beating. Of me. Even though his dad was in the room and reached us within seconds, he was not able to get son#2 off me for about a minute. Although I recieved no specific injury, and was not in bad shape on the scale of how things could be, I was still left with enough physical trauma to cause several days of depression, stiffness, soreness, and general unwellness. I have been told that beatings, even with little to no outward physical signs, is traumatic to the body and requires recovery. I have now experienced this first hand.
The problem now is what to do. Clearly I would be in big trouble if this happened when no other adult (preferably a big strong one) was around. I have found a real gap in advice and training for parents in this area - it is difficult to find information on physical restraints, and when you do it is all aimed at using containment first and the least possible amount of physcial force. I think that is good - but no training seems willing to talk about what to do at the next level. When containment and low physical force doesn't work.
On the other hand, self-defense training is all about incapacitating your assailant. And while I am confident I could still do that to son #2 if necessary, I want to find something in the middle. I want to find self-defense that seeks first to stop or avoid the force being rained down upon you. I feel like I the tools to handle both lesser and greater attacks, but the serious attack by someone whom you want to avoid hurting as much as possible just isn't addressed by training or literature that I can find.
Friday, June 12, 2009
Book Review: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith
Francie Nolan, the heroine of this book in the way heroine was meant to be used, is a delightful tour guide through the rough and hardscrabble life of turn of the century New York. My mother describes this as her favorite book of all time, and she desperately wanted to share it with me when I was young. I was a devotee of fantasy, devouring Dune, Lord of the Rings, and anything to do with King Arthur, and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn seemed far to ordinary to me to gift it with more than a few pages of reading.
Reading it now, however, from the vantage point of my forty-something life, I see fantasy in it - the vastness of the future that Francie sees for herself as she goes on a mythic quest for education, hungry for the rich details of life seen as pieces of a whole, and not as dead ends as so many in her neighborhood saw them.
The book is also a delighfully vivid picture of life in the 1910's, showing us the human, struggling side of America that is difficult to find in most history books, preoccupied as they are with the overarching themes of our nations growth. But Francie shows us these same themes embodied in the day to day life and actions of our citizens. She allows us to eavesdrop on the very citizens for which the ideals of this country were made - the ideal that through hard work and perseverance, anyone can better themselves and achieve a dream, no matter how far removed form reality the dream may seem when it begins.
This book is gentle, raw, and unflinching in it's look at how life and people were at that time and place. Morality is a goal, but life is lived as it needs to be. The people in Francie's world are just as varied, flawed, complex, and real as the people in my own life today. This book is a wonder, and left me inspired to live my own life in a bigger and better way.
Reading it now, however, from the vantage point of my forty-something life, I see fantasy in it - the vastness of the future that Francie sees for herself as she goes on a mythic quest for education, hungry for the rich details of life seen as pieces of a whole, and not as dead ends as so many in her neighborhood saw them.
The book is also a delighfully vivid picture of life in the 1910's, showing us the human, struggling side of America that is difficult to find in most history books, preoccupied as they are with the overarching themes of our nations growth. But Francie shows us these same themes embodied in the day to day life and actions of our citizens. She allows us to eavesdrop on the very citizens for which the ideals of this country were made - the ideal that through hard work and perseverance, anyone can better themselves and achieve a dream, no matter how far removed form reality the dream may seem when it begins.
This book is gentle, raw, and unflinching in it's look at how life and people were at that time and place. Morality is a goal, but life is lived as it needs to be. The people in Francie's world are just as varied, flawed, complex, and real as the people in my own life today. This book is a wonder, and left me inspired to live my own life in a bigger and better way.
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Rich Lives
Obama's nominee to the US Supreme Court is taking heat for a comment made during a speech some years ago. In a paraphrase of a famous quote on the value (or not) of diversity on the bench, Sotomayor said that she felt a wise latina woman could make a better decision than a wise white man who had not live the same rich life.
The implication of the statement for republicans desperate to find a politically safe way to challenge her nomination, was that Sotomayor was steeped in the racism that comes of believing your own way/culture/beliefs/religion/life is the "best."
I don't believe she meant that at all - her record is otherwise clean of potentially racist comments as far as we know, and it is certainly free of racist actions and court decisions. Traditionally undervalued groups of people like to talk among themselves not about how they could do as well as "the man," as 60's counterculture folks called the in-power group, but about how they could do better, if only they could get the chance. It's an aspirational and angry reaction to being dismissed as a valuable human being.
Sotomayor's comment was extremely mild, as those sorts of comments go.
The truth as I know it is that the only type of person who is likely to make a better decision than other types of people, is one who values the beliefs and thoughts of all groups. People who are like that are found among all ethnic and racial groups.
My only real beef with Sotomayor's comment is that she sacrificed, for the sake of an emotional affirmation, an acknowldegment that every life has the potential to be rich in experience, even that of a white man. Rich in different experiences than most latina women, but isn't that the point of diversity? White men are not bland, they have simply been the majority view. So let's acknowledge that the goal here is not to eradicate the white male point of view, but simply to provide an accompaniment of other points of view.
The violin is a beautiful instrument. It reaches it's full orchestral potential only when surrounded by all the other instruments of a symphony. Let's strive for a full orchestra of sound in our own political life, as well.
The implication of the statement for republicans desperate to find a politically safe way to challenge her nomination, was that Sotomayor was steeped in the racism that comes of believing your own way/culture/beliefs/religion/life is the "best."
I don't believe she meant that at all - her record is otherwise clean of potentially racist comments as far as we know, and it is certainly free of racist actions and court decisions. Traditionally undervalued groups of people like to talk among themselves not about how they could do as well as "the man," as 60's counterculture folks called the in-power group, but about how they could do better, if only they could get the chance. It's an aspirational and angry reaction to being dismissed as a valuable human being.
Sotomayor's comment was extremely mild, as those sorts of comments go.
The truth as I know it is that the only type of person who is likely to make a better decision than other types of people, is one who values the beliefs and thoughts of all groups. People who are like that are found among all ethnic and racial groups.
My only real beef with Sotomayor's comment is that she sacrificed, for the sake of an emotional affirmation, an acknowldegment that every life has the potential to be rich in experience, even that of a white man. Rich in different experiences than most latina women, but isn't that the point of diversity? White men are not bland, they have simply been the majority view. So let's acknowledge that the goal here is not to eradicate the white male point of view, but simply to provide an accompaniment of other points of view.
The violin is a beautiful instrument. It reaches it's full orchestral potential only when surrounded by all the other instruments of a symphony. Let's strive for a full orchestra of sound in our own political life, as well.
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