One (1) Lying Teenager: Check

My fourteen year old daughter is lying to me, and it makes me happy.

Just like walking and talking, the ability to conceive of lying is an important developmental milestone. I'll never forget the moment my second child figured it out. No matter where she was or what she was doing I could always shout, "Where's my E----" and she'd answer, "She's right here!" This was helpful because, as with most toddlers, silence usually meant she was getting into trouble. The day I called for her and she responded with "She's right he......" followed by dead silence, I knew she figured it out. She was two or three and doing something she knew was wrong. I didn't get mad. To be honest, I was relieved. My first child still hadn't figured it out.

My own memory of childhood is that adults focused on teaching the importance of telling the truth, so there couldn't possibly be any importance to having the ability to lie. But like every function of the human brain, the capacity to lie, and ultimately understand deception, serves a very important purpose. From not saying anything at all (when you don't have anything nice to say), to recognizing the exaggerated claims of advertisers, to keeping your personal drama out of the workplace no matter how many people ask, "How are you?" gradients of truth and lies are important to the maintenance of healthy social boundaries. Yes, they can also be dangerous and destructive, but knowing the difference, and the subtleties between bare naked truth and outright lie, is something we learn through experimenting with both, usually in early childhood.

It's funny when a three year old publicly asks why Aunt Sue has a beard. We try to hide our chuckles and then explain why they shouldn't do that. It's not funny when an eight year old, who never understood that, is spending the night at her cousin's house and decides to ask Aunt Sue directly. Every one of us can recall the first time a much longed for toy was finally obtained, and the disappointment we felt when it failed to meet the promises of its advertisements. What if our brains never made the connection between our disappointment and deceptive advertising? How would it be for us as adults if we believed everything we saw or read? How awful does it feel to be called gullible, to be taken advantage of?

As a developmental milestone it's also very revealing about what capacity for social interaction a child is prepared for. These gradations of lying are complex. We communicate with our whole bodies, therefore understanding physical cues is as necessary a facet of this skill as having the verbal capacity to construct a falsehood. You can see a child's social awareness develop by watching the progression of their capacity to lie and/or detect the lies of others.

I never would have thought much about this subject if it hadn't been among the first signs that my oldest daughter had some developmental asymmetries. As much as I wanted to protect her innocence, the sweetness of a child who believed the best about everyone, this lack of understanding about lies caused her quite a few problems. Again and again I would walk her through the process of breaking down what someone was saying about her, or to her, determining whether it was true or not (usually not), then determining what the truth really was. There were so many times when I had to slowly explain why the thing she wanted wasn't going to be everything she believed it to be. So many times I cringed and hoped people would be understanding as she talked about anything and everything that was on her mind with out any self censoring. As uncomfortable as this process was, it was also very revealing to me, to have to deliberately acknowledge how much these little deceptions impact our daily lives.

When she was about eleven, she got into watching a television show called "Lie to Me." The show is based loosely on the practice of an actual doctor who studies the science of deception and uses this knowledge to detect lies in various criminal and business investigation situations. It helped her understand why and how people lie and she was fascinated by this foreign (to her) concept. As an older child, conscious of the process of dissecting deceptions, moving toward this developmental milestone was quite different for her than it is for a young child, who will likely tell their first lie before they're old enough to have their first conscious memory.

It is interesting for me to observe as a parent. She's fourteen now, and yesterday she got caught telling a whopper. The kind of lie a five year old knows they'll get caught in. As I dealt out the obligatory punishment, inwardly I breathed a sigh of relief. No matter how late their developmental milestones may come, that they come is something parents of developmentally delayed/asymmetrical children are hugely grateful for. That we can move on to the next stage, regardless of charts and averages, is a blessing. Even if that stage is my teenager lying to me.

Abby's Lullaby Playlist

When shopping for lullaby CDs for our first baby, my husband and I discovered a disturbing trend. Rather than compiling the best performances and recordings of the best music to put a child to sleep to, record companies have a folk singer come in and perform lame acoustic versions of these classic songs. The worst offender is Disney, who has full orchestral performances of their music for movie soundtracks, who has Julie Andrews singing "Stay Awake" and "Feed the Birds" for Mary Poppins and the Philadelphia Orchestra performing "Ave Maria" for Fantasia, yet creates substandard recordings of the same for their lullaby CDs. Even Beatles classics have fallen victim to this practice. Why would anyone ever record a lamer version of "Blackbird" for a lullaby CD when the original is so perfect for this use?

What are they thinking?!? Babies have more sensitive hearing not less. Their little brains are still developing sensitivity to subtleties in sound. Providing them the highest quality performances and recordings should be a priority. Someone somewhere decided simplicity must be more soothing to simple baby minds, but we've learned in recent years that baby minds are anything but simple.

My husband is a bit of an audiophile and this was not acceptable to him. Instead, he created a playlist on this brand new (at the time) software called iTunes, of the best recordings of the best songs, and burned a couple CDs for the car and the daycare center since mp3 players weren't really around much yet. It had to fit on a CD so it was just about an hour long, perfect for nap time. The daycare center loved it as it put all the kids right to sleep and never annoyed the adults. They seldom lasted through the second song. I had to be careful playing it in the car because it put me to sleep too. Additionally, our daughters developed a sensitivity to music and appreciation for it that was demonstrable before they could speak.

Since I don't own the rights to these songs, I can't compile and sell my magic lullaby CD to other parents, but since we've abandoned CDs anyway at this point, I can publish the playlist and you can purchase the individual songs to compile on your own digital media player. If you're looking for something better than what record companies call a lullaby album, here is...

Abby's Lullaby Playlist:

1. Baby Mine... from Disney's "Dumbo" movie soundtrack featuring Betty Noyes
2. Stay Awake... from Disney's "Mary Poppins" movie soundtrack featuring Julie Andrews
3. Feed the Birds... from Disney's "Mary Poppins" movie soundtrack featuring Julie Andrews
4. Do You Hear That?/I Wonder... from Disney's "Sleeping Beauty" movie soundtrack featuring Mary Costa
5. Once Upon a Dream... from Disney's "Sleeping Beauty" movie soundtrack featuring Mary Costa & Bill Shirley
6. A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes... from Disney's "Cinderella" movie soundtrack featuring Ilene Woods
7. Love is a Song... from Disney's "Bambi" movie soundtrack featuring Donald Novis
8. Little April Showers... from Disney's "Bambi" movie soundtrack featuring the Disney Studio Chorus
9. Lavender Blue... from Disney's "So Dear To My Heart" movie soundtrack featuring Burl Ives
10. You Belong to My Heart... from Disney's "Saludos Amigos" movie soundtrack featuring Dora Luz
11. Winnie the Pooh... from Disney's original "Winnie the Pooh" movie soundtrack featuring the Disney Studio Chorus
12. Best of Friends... from Disney's "Fox & Hound" movie soundtrack featuring Pearl Bailey
13. Bella Notte... from Disney's "Lady & the Tramp" movie soundtrack featuring Bill Thompson
14. Johnny Has Gone for a Soldier... from "The Civil War (Original Soundtrack)" performed by Jacqueline Schwab & Jesse Carr
15. Blackbird... performed by The Beatles
16. I Will... performed by The Beatles
17. A Kiss to Build a Dream On... performed by Louis Armstrong
18. I'll Be Seeing You... performed by Tommy Dorsey & His Orchestra featuring Frank Sinatra
19. When The Lights Go On Again... performed by Vaughn Monroe & His Orchestra
20. Summertime... from "The Great Gershwin" album featuring Mildred Bailey
21. More I Cannot Wish You... from Frank Loesser's "Guys and Dolls (Original Studio Cast)" featuring Brian Greene
22. Sunrise, Sunset... from "Fiddler on the Roof (Original Broadway Cast Recording)" featuring Zero Mostel
23. Ave Maria, Op. 52 No. 6... from Disney's "Fantasia" movie soundtrack featuring Leopoldo Stokowski & The Philadelphia Philharmonic Orchestra

Featured artists are included in the above list to help you find the right recording since most of the songs have been recorded by multiple artists. If you've the money to spend, all of the albums on which these songs are included are worth adding to your music library. Songs are listed in the order I established for the original CD fourteen years ago. I particularly love the way "Ave Maria" feels waking back up to the day. 

Teaching Independence

A recent article made the rounds of educational circles about the independence that children in more primitive cultures enjoy and how they appear to be happier than children in first world countries. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2013/may/04/leave-them-kids-alone-griffiths) While it would be ridiculous for us, in our modern cities, to let our children run free with machetes at the age of five, there is something to be learned from the observations made. The age of independence has been gradually increasing in America for the last hundred years. The definition of independence at each stage of development has also been under perpetual modification.

Like most people, I can look back at my own youth and see a distinctly different and far looser set of parameters for personal liberty than I can reasonably allow my own children. I don't think anyone would argue that that's a good thing. There's no going back to the days before the internet made us aware of how often and how reprehensible crimes against children can occur, so the question becomes; how do we foster independence in our children while still protecting them from societies bogey men?

Some parents argue for constant supervision and blame every mishap on the lack of it. But, the most common cause of broken bones among preschoolers is parents going down the slide with them because they're scared to let them go down alone. Supervision is generally a good thing, but overprotection has its down sides. That so much crime still happens, and to generally vigilant parents who only turned away for a second, tells us this attitude is not solving the problem. Even if we can watch our kids every second of their childhood, they eventually have to become independent enough to leave home and take care of themselves. We can become so focused on our fears for them that we create a disability in this area.

I would argue that we're already seeing the negative impact of overprotecting our children across society. However, I'm not writing this article to argue. I write to make people think, and to offer practical suggestions. Now that you know why I'm making a deliberate effort to build independence in my children, let me explain how I'm attempting to do it.

First, my husband and I spent a lot of time when our children were small discussing what we observed and remembered from our own childhoods, and what we were seeing other families do in the present. We watched our children for developmental milestones that would indicate their readiness for more independence rather than tagging certain liberties to specific ages. We talked about what was practical for us, in our neighborhood, with our resources. We communicated and were in agreement at each stage. This is VERY IMPORTANT! When you have different expectations from different parents you get holes in your security plans. Kids are great at finding holes. Sometimes agreeing requires saying that you'll try something that is perhaps uncomfortable for one of you and setting a metric for success before making it policy.

Skills for independence must be taught. When parents have to leave their kids with a key to get in the house after school because they're at work, you can bet they're teaching these skills early and often. In addition to teaching general life skills, we made a list of the rules and expectations for when we're not home and talked about them with our kids. Being able to understand why each of the rules exists is one of the ways we know they're getting old enough for short periods of being home alone. Examples: Stay in the house or back yard. Don't answer the door for anyone but certain relatives or even talk to people through it. No playing with water. They know how to feed themselves, but no cooking with appliances (including microwave or toaster). Big sisters are in charge. If little sisters are getting out of hand then big sisters can put on a movie that will settle them down. Big sisters are expected to sacrifice their own preferences (in movie, food, or games) to keep little sisters safe and calm. Call or text us early if a problem arises. Don't wait for things to get out of hand. Know how to call 911, perform CPR (for the older ones), evacuate the house, and which neighbor to go to in an emergency.

In our house the difference in ages isn't that great, so we don't have teenagers babysitting toddlers. We did have the older two "practice babysitting," beginning at age eightish, on nights mom had places to go and dad was tired. He'd go to bed with one ear open and they'd try to get along and take care of themselves so they wouldn't wake him up. They didn't always succeed, but they tried hard and learned a lot. When they were successful at that, I began leaving them alone during the day for fifteen minutes at a time while I ran an errand or went for a walk. As that time became longer, I began to leave them with a chore to do before I got home. Their drive to prove themselves was so great that they'd get more done in my absence than when I was home. A chore or some directed activity helps keep sibling conflict down.

I began allowing them time home alone at different ages. From time to time the whole family goes out and one wants to stay behind. My oldest, with her learning disabilities, was actually much older before she wanted to be home alone. She had more fear. The second is highly gifted and felt the need for independence and was ready for it much earlier. The third, also highly gifted, is such a homebody she never wants to go out with us. The youngest is still too young to stay home alone, and will probably need to be a little older than the middle two. Ten is the average age, but know your kids.

There is no law about what age parents can leave their children home alone. Some kids are super mature and get paid babysitting jobs at age thirteen. Others are still liable to burn the house down age age sixteen. Parents who get in trouble for leaving their kids home alone are charged with neglect. This is a much more flexible term that can be argued. If you can articulate how you have prepared your children for the level of independence you've given them, and why you feel they're ready for it, you're probably okay. If your argument is about how you had to leave them because of work, etc., you're probably not. Neglect is when you think of your own needs before your kids'.

Recently, we've ventured into the next level of independence; going somewhere alone without parents. After taking a couple of walks to the corner store with them, we're allowing our oldest two to walk there alone to get slurpees this summer. They have to go together, they have to take a phone, and they have to get permission from a parent who is home at the time. We're taking more local walks together to expand their list of allowable places to go alone, and also preparing them for using the city bus system to get around by using it as a family to go places.

It's a process that continues and, in our modern society, requires some deliberate thought. For some of you this probably sounds extremely restrictive, and for others far too permissive. You have to find the balance that is right for your own family. I just want to encourage you to think about it. I would love to hear from other parents how you've gone through this process.

Discovering Foreign Media

With the rise of Netflix and other streaming video sources, foreign films and television have become accessible to average Americans in an unprecedented way. Before there was access, I never thought much about foreign media. In fact, I had no idea they made so much, or that it could be so interesting. The occasional melodramatic european movie to reach American cinema did not do much for my perception of foreign media.

My interest in foreign media began with BBC television programming. A huge fan of Jane Austen, how could I not be enraptured? American film versions of her books fall far short. Then there are the epic nature and history documentaries. If any country can be said to have risen to the production standards of American Media, it is the British. More recently, Japanese animation from Studio Ghibli has been proving its mettle in the American market, raising our collective expectation of foreign production quality.

Production quality isn't everything. Even with fewer production resources, interesting story and fabulous acting can raise foreign television shows from unexpected countries into our cannon of "Must Watch" media. In addition to pressing their reading fluency to a new level trying to keep up with the subtitles, these shows expose my kids (& me) to diverse cultural ideals. They show how values differ and how cultures have adapted to their environment. I'm sure they don't think much of it when making their TV shows, but I never would have thought of Korea as so cold for so much of the year. Even though their clothes are modern, how they layer jackets and accessorize with multiple scarfs, gloves, and hats, is quite different from how we live in California.

The stereotypes are different and their concerns are different. You seldom see truly impoverished characters at the center of American tv shows. Yet the strength and tenacity of the poor is honored in many of the shows I've seen. They have pride, and the show is not about how they have to give up their pride to survive like we would expect in our media. It's about how a poor life with self-respect is better than wealth without it.

How they eat is especially fascinating. A two minute lesson on how to use chopsticks is so different from watching how they use them differently to eat different foods, or when they choose to use a spoon. No one would ever sit you down and teach you all these things. They don't remember learning them, like we don't remember learning to use a fork. You learn them by observation and trying, just like a child. This is our chance to sit at a foreign table like a toddler and watch without anybody looking back at us strangely.

These shows also show us how much we are alike. This week I stumbled on a show from Korea that felt incredibly relatable to me. We love our TV geniuses in America, but there's a mistaken idea here that genius is easy. "Bones," "House," "The Big Bang Theory," all center around characters that are passionate about a subject that they are also incredibly gifted in. Even college seems like it must have been easy for these characters.

That's not really the case for most geniuses. When everything comes easy early on in school, it's difficult to find a passion that will drive you through college into a narrowly focused career. I'm one of those high IQ people with that kind of potential, but had no direction. I didn't go to college, and I'd say about half of the Mensa members I know didn't. There are many ways for a genius to learn, and we all found other paths. Those who go to college often drop out when things get hard for the first time. They never learned how to work hard. I've spent every day since high school learning that lesson. School was easy, but life is hard. The people who know how to work hard succeed over the people who have good grades that came easy.

The show I found, "Playful Kisses," catches the genius character on the cusp of college with no understanding of how life is for students who have to work hard to learn. It places him into an uncomfortably close relationship with one of the academically stupidest girls in school. She has none of the intellectual gifts that he enjoys, but she has determination to keep trying anyway. It's ridiculously comical, and sweetly poignant. If you have a gifted teen lacking direction, drive, or empathy, this show is an excellent way to stretch their thinking in these areas.

If I hadn't ventured into foreign media, I'd never have found this gem, this piece of media that articulates the tenuous balance between intellect and effort that we all must find to be successful. Even the biggest idiot is happier than the genius because he knows what he wants to do and is prepared to work hard to do it.  As comical as he is in his stupidity, you don't feel sorry for him because you know he will find success. You even think sometimes that the girl both guys admire might be better off with him. A simple life with love can be a happy one.

Clearly I'm in a Korean television phase. But I would encourage you to follow your own interests into foreign productions. Try one of the foreign options that pop up as recommendations "because you watched..." Be a little more tolerant of slow starts, subtitles, and weak production value than you typically would, and see how they build. Check on IMDB.com for reviews. Foreign media is showing up there too, and people are watching and leaving useful reviews. Let it expand your world view in all the little ways I've described. American media is not the beginning and end of educational and entertaining television. People in other countries are making "Must Watch" television and movies too.

*** This post was featured in the Redwood Mpire Mensa Bulletin, Aug. 2014 edition.