A Feminist Christmas

Among the numerous gifts my daughter received for Christmas were several baby dolls, a baby crib and a make-believe kitchen. I am still not sure how I feel about this. I suppose my misgivings are due to the sudden realization that I am indeed raising a girly-girl, despite my intentions.

In my life before parenting I always imagined that I would have a perfectly gender non-biased child. My kid, boy or girl, would play with dump trucks and dollies and be totally oblivious to gender roles or stereotypes. Now I actually have a kid who plays with dump trucks and dollies, except that the number of dollies far overwhelm the number of dump trucks. In fact, the dump truck she does have is pink and hauls around pretend diamonds.

I guess now I'll never know whether gender roles are truly learned or inherent. I've already polluted the experiment with frilly dresses and pink things. I'm comforted in my failure though by the sweet look on my daughter's face when she picks up her dolly and gives her a hug and pats her on the back. It doesn't so much matter whether I taught her to do that or if she picked it up on her own. She still has plenty of time to learn that her life does not have to be tied to the goings-on of a household unless she chooses it to be. For as exciting as it is to watch her explore her everyday surroundings, I am even more excited to watch her explore all the other possibilities that life has to offer.

Just another guilt trip...

When will we moms ever catch a break?

Apparently there's a new study out by Psychology Today indicating that they 'cry it out' method of infant sleep training can be psychologically harmful over the lifetime of the child. Now, we never had to use this method with our daughter, but I know people who have and for them it was the only thing that worked. With the emergence of this article, such parents will not only have to deal with the stress of training their children to fall asleep on their own, but will also have to face the guilt of the supposed long-term effects of the method they chose to do so.

The supposed long-term effects discussed in the article are said to be caused by 'undernurturing,' which supposedly results from not immediately responding to a child's nighttime cries. I am willing to predict that there will be a similar article out in the coming weeks that will say that children of working moms are also undernurtured and experience similar psychological effects as children who were sleep trained with the cry it out method.

Sounds to me like no matter what we do, we just can't win.

Side Note--Facebook Fast

On a non-mom related note, I came across this article that I wanted to share. I recently declared a Facebook Fast for the month of December. I was beginning to feel that my Facebook interactions were becoming my only means of staying in contact with people, and that those interactions were superficial at best. Beyond that, trolling the news feed was sucking up precious hours of my life. In the past (almost) two weeks of my Facebook-free life I have been able to devote more of my time to reading. I've since finished "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" by Stieg Larsson and "Room" by Emma Donoghue. Who knows if I'll go back at the end of the month.