Relativity

Have you ever seen one of those Baby Einstein videos? I always thought they’d be fun if you were really stoned. They have executive desk toy balls bopping, dancing puppets, children playing musical instruments, toy trains running around tracks and stuffed animals playing with other stuffed animals. They even have those clusters of strait lines that babies are supposedly drawn to (it’s some weird visual hallucination they like because they’re eyes don’t track right – kind of like those games you get in cereal boxes). I saw my first one at a friend’s house early in the morning with coffee and toast and it seemed like the perfect thing to watch as you were waking up. They are this generation’s “Sesame Street” and play the music of Beethoven or Mozart in the background, use different languages or the paintings of Van Gogh and DaVinci, and are supposed to give your little baby sponge-like genius level mental acuity.

Of course, we said that about Sesame Street, too, which was mostly about dancing puppets and Cookie Monster (not to discount my favorite, Kermit the Frog). Mine were given to me by my dear friend Ms. M, an engineer with two children under the age of 5. Another close friend, a Mr. S. now has he daughter on weekends from his difficult divorce from a difficult and obnoxious woman. I got him on the phone last week and asked if he was using them for his daughter. The question might have seemed somewhat absurd because he almost snickered: “no, those are mostly for busy parents.”

I almost took umbrage. Almost. Then I stopped myself and remembered that Mr. S. sees his daughter only on the weekend, when even the busiest amongst us makes time to play with the kids. I’m not teaching this summer, true, but I’m still on e-mail, doing household business (the only way to keep an infant in ecologically correct diapers and not spend a fortune is to buy online), revising my book, writing this blog and a few articles, etc. So yeah, Connor gets parked in front of the Einstein a couple hours a day. The latest is teaching him to count and say nursery rhymes in seven languages including Russian and Hebrew. Do I feel guilty for what seems like teaching him to watch TV? Sometimes. Sure, I’d rather be reading to him in the original German or staging plays between Shakey Cow and Crazy Frog. We do those things, but not all the time. Sometimes, Mama’s gotta get something done. Sometimes, it’s washing his clothes, cleaning his bottles or wiping up cat barf from his floor. Sometimes it’s reorganizing the third chapter of her book, the one on Dickens’s Bleak House so that it makes sense to someone not steeped in Lacanian Literary Theory. So sometimes Connor gets to fill his velvet-haired, otherwise bald little head with dancing puppets to the tunes of Ludwig Van. It could be worse.

To some parents, TV is the absolute worse enemy you could engage in the struggle to build stronger, smarter, healthier children. To some, it’s a lifesaver along with those buzzing, vibrating, singing chairs that the Baby Whisperer hates. It’s all in the flavor of the parenting you choose. Shakespeare’s Hamlet says “There’s nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so.” But thinking makes it so – that’s saying in a way, that it’s all relative. To some, good parenting is constant hands-on, granola-eating, no TV, listening to the Poetry of Rilke while dancing a waltz to Mahler and reciting differential equations.

To some, it’s letting the kid gum a moving box and use his imagination to determine what Shakey Cow might be saying to him at this moment.

We all have to find that space where we are comfortable with the choices we’re making for our little darlings that doesn’t turn us gray any faster than we’re already going. And we have to be good enough with our choices to not get defensive when someone says they do it differently. I have heard fierce debates about sleep training (where baby learns to sleep on his own, even though s/he might scream a bit) versus the family bed (where everyone sleeps together in a heap until baby kicks Daddy in the head too often and he bails to the couch). Friendships have ended over day care options or formula choices. Mothers and daughters fought viciously over rice cereal versus oatmeal. Nothing is more of a sacred cow than how you raise your kids, but some of those cows are waltzing the streets and others have been ground to hamburger between what used to be good friends.

Right now I’ve got to rescue Connor, who has drooled through his shirt and I think needs a nap, but when he wakes up, he’s going for a walk with his dad. Maybe they’ll bring Shakey Cow or maybe they’ll whistle some Mozart. But you can be sure we’ll be back with the Japanese nursery rhymes tomorrow.