creds [yewgo, maybe]

(Intro) [yewgo = Your Eyes Will Glaze Over. Or maybe not.]

Today I was out of the house from 10AM to 6PM. I spent some time in traffic, some time at my endo's office (2 sticks, one in each hand, to get one tube of blood), and a whole heckuva lot of time at Good Samaritan Hospital. I got my tracer dose of radioactive iodine, and after intensive discussion, the doctors asked if I could have a scan at 4:30PM. So I hung around for a while, then went out and did some errands (and bought a great magazine, Cooks Illustrated, working for them is my dream job.) Then I went back to the hospital to wait for my scan, then I had my scan, then I spent more time in traffic on the way home.

They wouldn't say anything about the scan. I have to go back tomorrow morning at 8AM for another one, and then we'll talk. I may get a PET/CT scan tomorrow if the results from the RAI scan warrants it. I may get nuked with another ablative dose of RAI. I might need a little surgery. I might need the most horrific surgery I can imagine.

I have no idea how bad the news is going to be.

(The Question...)
So, in an effort to distract myself from this very troublesome situation (Summer plans? What summer plans? Surgery? Radiation? Both? When? and what about the kids? Aaaaaauuuuggghhhh!), I was thinking about something someone said about me the other day, in the context of that whole Invulnerable Parent thread ruckus:

Here is a person who has never claimed to be trained in child psychology, mental health, behavioral psychology--psychology of any kind.

It's true, I have never claimed to be trained in psychology of any kind. I haven't discussed my education in that forum at all. It didn't, and still doesn't, seem relevant over there.

The unspoken question behind that statement called out to me, today: Who does she think she is, to be dispensing all this advice, and handing out opinions left and right? Well, I used to think I was member of the forum with the same rights as anyone else, to participate or not as I chose, but let's leave that aside for now. Who do I think I am? Where did I get all these opinions, anyway? I certainly do have a lot of them, and it's not like I made them up out of whole cloth.

(creds)
The fact is, my degree is in Behaviorial Science in Management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1984, the year I graduated after attending for only 6 terms (3 calendar years), that was the closest you could get to an undergraduate psych degree at MIT. I don't know if the Cognitive and Brain Sciences Dept. offers one now, but they didn't then. As part of my course requirements, I did take psych courses as an undergrad, and I loved them. So I do have some, albeit very little and very old, formal education in psychology.

Now, child development is whole different story. I have no formal education in child development, but what I do have is 9 years of independent research and experience in the field.

When I first found out I was pregnant in 1996, I did what I always do whenever I was facing a new situation: I got a pile of books (this time, on being pregnant and having babies and raising kids), and I read them all. Repeatedly. My favorite by far was Your Baby and Child From Birth to Age 5 by Penelope Leach. Leach's philosophy of respect totally resonated with me, and I relied on her book throughout my kids' infancies. I didn't just read Leach, though -- I read a lot, the "What to Expect" books among them. Both the "expecting" and "first year" versions were full of terrific advice. Then there were countless magazines as well as Internet sites I came to rely on. I was just a sponge and soaked it all up, hoping I'd be able to remember it all when I needed it.

My firstborn, DS1, was an education unto himself. Besides having to learn all the things every first-time mom has to learn, I had to learn how to deal with a spirited, sometimes called difficult child. Stanley Turecki's The Difficult Child literally saved my sanity, I think; reading it finally gave me a clue to understanding my son.

Even before my son was born, I was a member of a vibrant online community, MomsOnline. That was the very beginning of my experience with internet support groups, and it was wonderful. At the start I participated in the "expecting" threads, but later I became very involved in the Child Development threads, and had many long and fruitful exchanges with the MomsOnline "Parenting Pros", particularly Ben McCourt. MomsOnline was a place to learn from everyone else's experiences and share triumphs, laughs, and all the rest. It morphed a few times and was eventually bought out by Oprah's media company, and then it kind of just melted away. I was really sorry to see it go, because it had been a tremendous resource. But the Internet business model was changing, and MomsOnline had to change, too. I think that iVillage still contains remnants of MomsOnline, but by the time it came around, I had moved on.

In late 1998, my daughter was born. She was healthy at birth and the delivery was unremarkable, and unmedicated, as my first delivery had been. But she had a non-nutritive suck; she wasn't strong enough to nurse and by the end of her first week she was down to only 5 pounds, 9 ounces. She was barely strong enough to take a bottle; for the next 6 weeks of her life I pumped breast milk and bottle-fed it to her, and she would take 45 minutes to drink an ounce-and-a-half. Once she decided she'd rather live than starve herself to death, things became markedly easier, and she quickly became my son's best friend.

When DS1 turned 3, I enrolled him at Desert Sun Child Development Center, and for the past five years, I have had at least one child in attendance there. Desert Sun has been my child psychology and development workshop, in several ways.

First, it is a parent participation school, which means that parents are actively encouraged to participate in classroom activity and extras. All of the teachers at Desert Sun are well-educated in child development, and the philosophy of the school is apparent in every class. The core, once again, is respecting the child as an individual. The children are allowed to explore in a safe, encouraging environment, and they learn to expand their capabilities through practice.

One of the resources that Desert Sun offers is parent enrichment seminars on various child development topics, and I have attended many of these over the years. I have also had the occasion to do additional research and write up seminar topics for the school's newsletter. Through Desert Sun I learned about Becky Bailey and her "Conscious Discipline" technique, which is simply spectacular. I can't recommend this course highly enough.

Through the years, I've added to my parenting library. Two other favorites are by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish, Siblings Without Rivalry (I wrote up a seminar on this topic), and How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk. The teachers at Desert Sun have encouraged me to keep writing on these topics, too, and I explored several parenting issues over at Epinions. In the Epinions community, I received uniformly encouraging feedback on my parenting articles.

But I quit writing for Epinions just a few months after my third child, DS2, was born, because that's when my health issues started to spiral out of control. It has been a bit of a bumpy ride for me since then, but I'm confident that I've managed to not screw up my kids yet. Over the years we have worked with our older son to help him become less reactive, and we've taught him techniques he can use to calm himself down and retain his self-control. These are not things that I could've learned from my mother, and they're not things my girlfriends have needed with their kids, either. I learned some of these techniques at Desert Sun, and some through my own research. We've seen tremendous improvement in his self-control and self-esteem.

As for DD and DS2, they are both delightful, and both maddening at times. DS2 is very much a "baby" these days, both in the crybaby sense of bursting into tears over trivialities, and also in wanting to be snuggled a lot. I suspect that both the clinginess and the sensitivity are related to his uncertainty about me; for all of his life (that he can remember), I've been traipsing around doctors and hospitals and going into isolation. That's really, really hard on a little kid, so I give him loveys whenever he needs them.

DD's problem is both the same and the opposite. She craves my attention (and so we hug and smooch and cuddle often), but she also wants complete control over every aspect of her life (and mine), and there's no way she's going to get that, so we butt heads.

After all this unnecessarily long exposition, I can honestly say that my best child psychology/child development credential is the psychological state of my household. There is no tension in our house, no underlying sense of dread or unease. We have a calm, pleasant home, often messy, but generally happily inhabited. It wasn't always so, either. From before DS2's birth, and until my diagnosis with and treatment for Hashimoto's Thyroiditis, I was depressed and at times unhinged. "Better living through medication" is not just a flip saying around here. But it's not just the meds that have made things as good as they are. It's building a family around the central, entwined ideas of love and respect, and over the last 4 years we've done a tremendous job.

Having a parent with cancer is a difficult thing for any child to deal with, and it is particularly hard for younger children. Yet all 3 of my children are thriving. They are kind and loving. They are naughty sometimes, but they have good hearts. They understand respect even if they don't always remember to show it. So even if I were to die under the knife next week, my children have already built for themselves solid foundations to grow up on.

So that's how all of those opinions and ideas of mine have been developed. Who do I think I am? I'm an experienced, well-educated, mouthy mom, that's who. That's probably not good enough for some people, but we're all entitled to our own opinions, after all.