HORSEBACK RIDING FOR CHILDREN
There’s no denying the magnetic qualitybond that exists between children and horses. Children are impressed by a horse’s power, r and grace, and overwhelmed at the chance to ride one. Aside from fulfilling childhood fantasies, horseback riding has several unexpected benefits for kids.
Parents are always looking for healthy outdoor activities to get kids outside and away from their video games. Horseback riding is an excellent exercise, strengthening both balance and coordination while in the saddle.
Horseback riding is also a wonderful opportunity to teach children about nature and respect for animals. Building this bond at an early age provides great mental health benefits as well as an everlasting appreciation for the environment.
Aside from all the great exercise and fresh air, horseback riding is a wonderful way to build confidence. Learning to coordinate and control an animal that could easily overpower an adult is something children will be proud of. Learning to ride is not easy and takes courage and patience from new riders. The benefit of horseback riding for kids is well worth the effort and can leave a lifelong experience.
Horseback riding is also a social opportunity for children to interact with each other in a safe and encouraging environment. Also, the joy and recreational benefits of making friends at a stable will encourage children to spend more time participating in similar activities.
Finally, horseback riding teaches many lessons of responsibility. Horses require a bounty of attention, from medical care to physical conditioning. Learning about these needs and teaching children to be responsible for them will provide kids with a sense of purpose they won’t get from other outdoor sports.
The most important benefit of horseback riding is the fun and friendship of bonding with a horse. Children will naturally take to horseback riding if given the opportunity and will enjoy all of the benefits listed above.
Horseback riding is a great activity for children of all ages and can lead to great benefits in their lives.
https://the.ismaili/culture-diversity/h ... g-children
Parenting Issues
The Internet Makes Motherhood Seem Miserable. What if It Isn’t?
Scary mom stories filled me with dread. I wish I’d known how delightful I would find having a child.
The internet almost scared me out of having a baby.
By the time I reached my early 30s, I had read every miserable Facebook post from people I knew with kids, ranting about never getting to sleep past 5 a.m. or returning to work with the haze of “mom brain.” I had clicked on articles that promised the “real truth” about painful postpartum sex or losing friends when your baby takes over your social life.
My husband and I weren’t sure if we wanted a child. We waited until we felt like we could endure the hits we were warned would come with a new baby. A joint account labeled “possible family or vacation” had slowly swelled since we got engaged eight years before, and we reached a steady place in our careers and our relationship. We didn’t have a clear reason to try for a baby, but we also didn’t have one not to.
Still, I read so much about infertility that after 20 years on the pill, I doubted whether I could conceive at all. Eventually, two faint pink lines overruled that concern, and I began worrying about miscarriage rates instead.
I spent nine months bracing for the worst. I kept a list of over 350 things I Googled, from “tips for telling boss about pregnancy” to “leaking boobs second trimester” and “can you drink kombucha while pregnant.” I followed three pregnancy podcasts, two daily pregnancy apps, a weekly live chat on pregnancy nutrition and dozens of Instagram accounts and message boards. After listening to an episode of “Preggie Pals,” I became convinced that I was at risk of short, precipitous labor and brought it up at every doctor’s appointment. An article from Whole Mamas convinced me to give up sugar out of concern about gestational diabetes.
I mentally prepared for things I never knew to worry about before: pelvic floor injuries and marital resentment and postpartum anxiety. I heard enough stories to know that birth would be a mess and motherhood would change everything, mostly for the worse.
I never expected what actually happened. “I wasn’t quite prepared for how much fun it’s been,” I wrote on my son’s first birthday last year, sharing a video with chronological clips of him cooing and crying and crawling.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/12/opin ... 0920200312
Scary mom stories filled me with dread. I wish I’d known how delightful I would find having a child.
The internet almost scared me out of having a baby.
By the time I reached my early 30s, I had read every miserable Facebook post from people I knew with kids, ranting about never getting to sleep past 5 a.m. or returning to work with the haze of “mom brain.” I had clicked on articles that promised the “real truth” about painful postpartum sex or losing friends when your baby takes over your social life.
My husband and I weren’t sure if we wanted a child. We waited until we felt like we could endure the hits we were warned would come with a new baby. A joint account labeled “possible family or vacation” had slowly swelled since we got engaged eight years before, and we reached a steady place in our careers and our relationship. We didn’t have a clear reason to try for a baby, but we also didn’t have one not to.
Still, I read so much about infertility that after 20 years on the pill, I doubted whether I could conceive at all. Eventually, two faint pink lines overruled that concern, and I began worrying about miscarriage rates instead.
I spent nine months bracing for the worst. I kept a list of over 350 things I Googled, from “tips for telling boss about pregnancy” to “leaking boobs second trimester” and “can you drink kombucha while pregnant.” I followed three pregnancy podcasts, two daily pregnancy apps, a weekly live chat on pregnancy nutrition and dozens of Instagram accounts and message boards. After listening to an episode of “Preggie Pals,” I became convinced that I was at risk of short, precipitous labor and brought it up at every doctor’s appointment. An article from Whole Mamas convinced me to give up sugar out of concern about gestational diabetes.
I mentally prepared for things I never knew to worry about before: pelvic floor injuries and marital resentment and postpartum anxiety. I heard enough stories to know that birth would be a mess and motherhood would change everything, mostly for the worse.
I never expected what actually happened. “I wasn’t quite prepared for how much fun it’s been,” I wrote on my son’s first birthday last year, sharing a video with chronological clips of him cooing and crying and crawling.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/12/opin ... 0920200312
Womens Activities Seminar
Women’s Activity board held its first seminar focusing on Parenting and Behavior Management.
The topics included parenting styles and techniques, importance of routines and structure for children and fostering growth through positive interaction. It was conducted by a qualified and experienced psychotherapist who specializes in working with children and parents exclusively.
Led primarily in English and Hindi, the two-hour program was packed with information. This stimulating forum absorbed the attention of the participants, promoting discussion and resolving queries. The seminar included visual aids, reading materials, and a questionnaire that helped educate the members on best practices on children’s upbringing.
We are hoping this very informative session will be part of a series, encouraging good mental health, coping skills, and promoting awareness and positivity to functioning in ever changing conditions and environments.
While the women were attending the seminar, children participated in fun activities, such as face painting, games, and a puppet show.
The afternoon concluded with lunch and a cooking demonstration, allowing the participants to relax, socialize and enjoy International Women’s Day.
https://the.ismaili/portugal/womens-activities-seminar
Women’s Activity board held its first seminar focusing on Parenting and Behavior Management.
The topics included parenting styles and techniques, importance of routines and structure for children and fostering growth through positive interaction. It was conducted by a qualified and experienced psychotherapist who specializes in working with children and parents exclusively.
Led primarily in English and Hindi, the two-hour program was packed with information. This stimulating forum absorbed the attention of the participants, promoting discussion and resolving queries. The seminar included visual aids, reading materials, and a questionnaire that helped educate the members on best practices on children’s upbringing.
We are hoping this very informative session will be part of a series, encouraging good mental health, coping skills, and promoting awareness and positivity to functioning in ever changing conditions and environments.
While the women were attending the seminar, children participated in fun activities, such as face painting, games, and a puppet show.
The afternoon concluded with lunch and a cooking demonstration, allowing the participants to relax, socialize and enjoy International Women’s Day.
https://the.ismaili/portugal/womens-activities-seminar
Supporting Families To Help Children Learn And Develop At Home
We know that meeting the demands and expectations of supporting children to ‘learn at home’ can be overwhelming. These resources provides a note of reassurance, support, and a synthesis of available resources for parents and caregivers as they adjust to these challenging new times.
https://the.ismaili/kenya/supporting-fa ... velop-home
We know that meeting the demands and expectations of supporting children to ‘learn at home’ can be overwhelming. These resources provides a note of reassurance, support, and a synthesis of available resources for parents and caregivers as they adjust to these challenging new times.
https://the.ismaili/kenya/supporting-fa ... velop-home
Strategies to support your neurodiverse child during lockdown
AKSWB have provided some strategies that may assist parents and carers to support their neurodiverse child during lockdown.
• It is important to help your child understand why their daily routine has changed and explain it in a way they can access it– think about how they understand things; it could be simple explanations, visuals including pictures and symbols. You may find this ebook helpful:
https://issuu.com/nosycrow/docs/coronav ... utton=true
• A lack of structure / routine may cause some children to feel anxious so have a schedule (which you plan with your child whenever possible), outlining household activities, meal times, break times (including free play), activity outside the house and screen time for each day
• A visual timetable can be useful for explaining what your child is doing now, and what they will be doing next
• Give countdowns when you are about to transition to another activity either visually or verbally e.g. a timer may help them understand the start, the end and the transition between activities, perhaps display a stopwatch on an ipad or say ‘in 5 minutes we are going to be making lunch’
• Where possible, offer a choice and use the “first...then” approach so the child feels some control over their day
• Maintain connections that are important to your child; write letters/ emails, make a card or a phone call. Use pictures of important people in their lives (teachers, friends, family) so you can continue to have conversations about them
• Enjoy your child’s company; carry out a favourite activity that they enjoy doing with you
• For children who experience sensory overload, ensure that there is minimal distraction and build in some quiet time in the day as too much activity can be overwhelming
• For those that need regular movement; plan breaks, activities like a hand massage or extra play time in the bath, breathing / relaxation activities or create a sensory diet with your child for them to follow – ideas can be found here: https://www.sensorysmarts.com/sensory-diet.pdf
• Give your child positive attention as they may need extra reassurance at this time or be seeking closer proximity to you; allow them to discuss their feelings openly, read stories that encourage this
• Check in with your child regularly in order to ascertain how they are feeling or whether they have any thoughts or questions they want to discuss or communicate with you
• As the parent, look after YOU, give yourself regular breaks, connect with friends and family, make time to fill your bucket with things that give you energy and make you smile
If you are a parent of a neurodiverse child and require support, please contact the inclusion team of the Social Welfare Board on [email protected] - we are here to support you in any way we can.
https://the.ismaili/uk/strategies-suppo ... g-lockdown
AKSWB have provided some strategies that may assist parents and carers to support their neurodiverse child during lockdown.
• It is important to help your child understand why their daily routine has changed and explain it in a way they can access it– think about how they understand things; it could be simple explanations, visuals including pictures and symbols. You may find this ebook helpful:
https://issuu.com/nosycrow/docs/coronav ... utton=true
• A lack of structure / routine may cause some children to feel anxious so have a schedule (which you plan with your child whenever possible), outlining household activities, meal times, break times (including free play), activity outside the house and screen time for each day
• A visual timetable can be useful for explaining what your child is doing now, and what they will be doing next
• Give countdowns when you are about to transition to another activity either visually or verbally e.g. a timer may help them understand the start, the end and the transition between activities, perhaps display a stopwatch on an ipad or say ‘in 5 minutes we are going to be making lunch’
• Where possible, offer a choice and use the “first...then” approach so the child feels some control over their day
• Maintain connections that are important to your child; write letters/ emails, make a card or a phone call. Use pictures of important people in their lives (teachers, friends, family) so you can continue to have conversations about them
• Enjoy your child’s company; carry out a favourite activity that they enjoy doing with you
• For children who experience sensory overload, ensure that there is minimal distraction and build in some quiet time in the day as too much activity can be overwhelming
• For those that need regular movement; plan breaks, activities like a hand massage or extra play time in the bath, breathing / relaxation activities or create a sensory diet with your child for them to follow – ideas can be found here: https://www.sensorysmarts.com/sensory-diet.pdf
• Give your child positive attention as they may need extra reassurance at this time or be seeking closer proximity to you; allow them to discuss their feelings openly, read stories that encourage this
• Check in with your child regularly in order to ascertain how they are feeling or whether they have any thoughts or questions they want to discuss or communicate with you
• As the parent, look after YOU, give yourself regular breaks, connect with friends and family, make time to fill your bucket with things that give you energy and make you smile
If you are a parent of a neurodiverse child and require support, please contact the inclusion team of the Social Welfare Board on [email protected] - we are here to support you in any way we can.
https://the.ismaili/uk/strategies-suppo ... g-lockdown
National Infertility Awareness Week
This week is National Infertility Awareness Week (NIAW). The mission of NIAW is to empower individuals and change the conversation around infertility. All too often myths and misinformation appear that create barriers for people who need help building their family, and can lead to them feeling isolated. NIAW aims to empower them to share their story and feel part of a community that cares. In commemoration of this week, Farah Gina Condor has kindly shared her personal story with infertility.
“The Childless Mother” from Farah Gina Condor:
Expectations and dreams
I always believed I would be a mother; my upbringing taught me that the natural progression in life was to meet someone, get married, have a family and coupled with my natural affiliation towards children, I had no reason to believe that it would be any different.
I had little ambition to be the career, entrepreneur and business woman that I am today; all I dreamed of was to have children running around to cook for, educate, play with, love and share guidance and so help them grow into well balanced adults, able to look after themselves, and anyone else that they chose to share their lives with.
Heartbreaks
My heart was broken at 21 and I struggled deeply to muster the desire to give it to anyone else, but someone did come along and we married as I turned 31. With my fertility clock ticking, just 6 months after that day, I found myself pregnant, we were over the moon. However, joy was to be short lived.
The journey of emotional loss and pain of proportions I can’t begin to explain ensued; disappointments I had experienced, but this was quite different. The physical was bearable but emotional and psychological unbearable, the desolation, the feelings of being a failure, insurmountable. “I am a woman, I am successful in everything I do, so why can I not do the most natural thing that a woman should be able to do?
8 years later, 9 more miscarriages and a plethora of attention from natural practitioners and consultants and at nearly 38, I fell pregnant. With 23 weeks under my belt, I began to feel hope of having a child. The universe decided differently, my last attempt at motherhood resulted in my journey’s end, the birth of “Spunky Genes Condor” our beautiful perfectly formed baby boy with a still heart.
Challenges and depression
My shame was inconsolable. I told my husband that he should leave to have a birth child; he is the last in his lineage/heritage, the last of the Condors. He said no, that he had married me because of who I am. He would stay.
Deep depression consumed me, I struggled to come to terms with something no woman should have to do, days turned into weeks then months, walls enclosed me, night and day became one.
6 months later with a great deal of support from professionals, my strong and loving husband and my amazing sister, I finally started to live again.
After the horror, came children
The last tears shed, the universe revealed its plan.
I realised I was none of the things I thought, I was a mother in waiting, for my time, ‘my’ children, those of the earth that needed someone.
I didn’t adopt, have a surrogate nor foster. I was to be mother to many children, none of whom I birthed.
My nieces and nephews from birth to now, they acknowledge me on Mother’s Day; grown up as they now are, they know that I love them fiercely, know I am here whenever, however they need me.
Others who needed a mother figure came. Teenagers whose mothers abandoned them, younger children whose mothers needed rest and respite, children from a less advantaged background who were educated through apprenticeships in my business. This loving helped me deal with loss, pain and the shame of feeling like a failure.
Today my ‘children’ are there for me too if I need help. They tell me I am too protective, that I suffocate them with love, that they are lucky to have me, they laugh with me, I tease them, they say I am annoying, we cuddle, cry, sort stuff out, I help them find direction, guide them and they teach me ‘young’ stuff!
Blessings
With faith and space there is always a timeline to our story, our path, and sometimes not getting what we want is a stroke of luck.
I am not a birth mother, I gave the universe space to reveal my role, and here I am today with children still coming into my life. I have more children in my life than we could have made on our own!
I am blessed.
I helped women like me, I adopted children through PLAN and the best thing is they got to stay in their own communities and with their families.
Being a mother comes in many forms, and is personal to each woman. To me the maternal instinct to want to guide, protect, love, nourish and grow children until they become well-rounded stable adults able to do the same when they have children of their own, is being a mother.
That is all; that is why I am and always will be a mother of the earth, childless but full of joy and love for everything that children born of others have brought me, and those children’s future children. And, I hope that I in turn have brought them what they needed.
“Blessed are we who found each other and in that finding followed the path not of expectation, but of discovery”
Around 1 in 7 couples may have difficulties having children. If you or your family have similar experiences, remember your voice is your power – share your feelings with your loved ones, be honest when you need help and empower others with what you learn and experience.
If you need support or someone to talk to, the Women’s Activities Portfolio is here for you – please reach out at [email protected] at any time. WAP will be running roadshows over the coming months to raise awareness about hormonal balance for men and women, including infertility.
All together, we can.
https://the.ismaili/uk/national-inferti ... eness-week
This week is National Infertility Awareness Week (NIAW). The mission of NIAW is to empower individuals and change the conversation around infertility. All too often myths and misinformation appear that create barriers for people who need help building their family, and can lead to them feeling isolated. NIAW aims to empower them to share their story and feel part of a community that cares. In commemoration of this week, Farah Gina Condor has kindly shared her personal story with infertility.
“The Childless Mother” from Farah Gina Condor:
Expectations and dreams
I always believed I would be a mother; my upbringing taught me that the natural progression in life was to meet someone, get married, have a family and coupled with my natural affiliation towards children, I had no reason to believe that it would be any different.
I had little ambition to be the career, entrepreneur and business woman that I am today; all I dreamed of was to have children running around to cook for, educate, play with, love and share guidance and so help them grow into well balanced adults, able to look after themselves, and anyone else that they chose to share their lives with.
Heartbreaks
My heart was broken at 21 and I struggled deeply to muster the desire to give it to anyone else, but someone did come along and we married as I turned 31. With my fertility clock ticking, just 6 months after that day, I found myself pregnant, we were over the moon. However, joy was to be short lived.
The journey of emotional loss and pain of proportions I can’t begin to explain ensued; disappointments I had experienced, but this was quite different. The physical was bearable but emotional and psychological unbearable, the desolation, the feelings of being a failure, insurmountable. “I am a woman, I am successful in everything I do, so why can I not do the most natural thing that a woman should be able to do?
8 years later, 9 more miscarriages and a plethora of attention from natural practitioners and consultants and at nearly 38, I fell pregnant. With 23 weeks under my belt, I began to feel hope of having a child. The universe decided differently, my last attempt at motherhood resulted in my journey’s end, the birth of “Spunky Genes Condor” our beautiful perfectly formed baby boy with a still heart.
Challenges and depression
My shame was inconsolable. I told my husband that he should leave to have a birth child; he is the last in his lineage/heritage, the last of the Condors. He said no, that he had married me because of who I am. He would stay.
Deep depression consumed me, I struggled to come to terms with something no woman should have to do, days turned into weeks then months, walls enclosed me, night and day became one.
6 months later with a great deal of support from professionals, my strong and loving husband and my amazing sister, I finally started to live again.
After the horror, came children
The last tears shed, the universe revealed its plan.
I realised I was none of the things I thought, I was a mother in waiting, for my time, ‘my’ children, those of the earth that needed someone.
I didn’t adopt, have a surrogate nor foster. I was to be mother to many children, none of whom I birthed.
My nieces and nephews from birth to now, they acknowledge me on Mother’s Day; grown up as they now are, they know that I love them fiercely, know I am here whenever, however they need me.
Others who needed a mother figure came. Teenagers whose mothers abandoned them, younger children whose mothers needed rest and respite, children from a less advantaged background who were educated through apprenticeships in my business. This loving helped me deal with loss, pain and the shame of feeling like a failure.
Today my ‘children’ are there for me too if I need help. They tell me I am too protective, that I suffocate them with love, that they are lucky to have me, they laugh with me, I tease them, they say I am annoying, we cuddle, cry, sort stuff out, I help them find direction, guide them and they teach me ‘young’ stuff!
Blessings
With faith and space there is always a timeline to our story, our path, and sometimes not getting what we want is a stroke of luck.
I am not a birth mother, I gave the universe space to reveal my role, and here I am today with children still coming into my life. I have more children in my life than we could have made on our own!
I am blessed.
I helped women like me, I adopted children through PLAN and the best thing is they got to stay in their own communities and with their families.
Being a mother comes in many forms, and is personal to each woman. To me the maternal instinct to want to guide, protect, love, nourish and grow children until they become well-rounded stable adults able to do the same when they have children of their own, is being a mother.
That is all; that is why I am and always will be a mother of the earth, childless but full of joy and love for everything that children born of others have brought me, and those children’s future children. And, I hope that I in turn have brought them what they needed.
“Blessed are we who found each other and in that finding followed the path not of expectation, but of discovery”
Around 1 in 7 couples may have difficulties having children. If you or your family have similar experiences, remember your voice is your power – share your feelings with your loved ones, be honest when you need help and empower others with what you learn and experience.
If you need support or someone to talk to, the Women’s Activities Portfolio is here for you – please reach out at [email protected] at any time. WAP will be running roadshows over the coming months to raise awareness about hormonal balance for men and women, including infertility.
All together, we can.
https://the.ismaili/uk/national-inferti ... eness-week
Motherhood Changes Us All
The most memorable moment of becoming a mother often involves a single day. You gave birth, or the child someone else baked inside comes into your life. It’s a before, and an after. But that first day is only the beginning of an identity shift that is ongoing and eternal. The person you are after the first year of motherhood is not the same person you are after year three, year 10 or year 40.
That’s why, in honor of Mother’s Day, we decided to look at the whole messy, glorious, complicated story of identity and motherhood.
We have short essays about how becoming a mother changed the way we look at ourselves, from our relationships to our own ambitions, as well as failure, body image and more, written by Amber Tamblyn, Casey Wilson, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Angela Garbes, Robin Tunney, Jennifer Weiner and several others. There’s a piece by Jenni Gritters about how motherhood rewires your brain, and another by Pooja Lakshmin, M.D., a perinatal psychiatrist, about how not to lose yourself when you become a parent.
During this coronavirus pandemic, it can be hard to know who we are as people, as the barriers between our public and maternal selves have collapsed in ways we never considered. But if there’s one thing to take away from all of these stories, it’s that your identity as a mother isn’t fixed; it’s likely to change in ways that will surprise and maybe even delight, as you and your children grow.
Links to the articles at:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/202 ... 778d3e6de3
The most memorable moment of becoming a mother often involves a single day. You gave birth, or the child someone else baked inside comes into your life. It’s a before, and an after. But that first day is only the beginning of an identity shift that is ongoing and eternal. The person you are after the first year of motherhood is not the same person you are after year three, year 10 or year 40.
That’s why, in honor of Mother’s Day, we decided to look at the whole messy, glorious, complicated story of identity and motherhood.
We have short essays about how becoming a mother changed the way we look at ourselves, from our relationships to our own ambitions, as well as failure, body image and more, written by Amber Tamblyn, Casey Wilson, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Angela Garbes, Robin Tunney, Jennifer Weiner and several others. There’s a piece by Jenni Gritters about how motherhood rewires your brain, and another by Pooja Lakshmin, M.D., a perinatal psychiatrist, about how not to lose yourself when you become a parent.
During this coronavirus pandemic, it can be hard to know who we are as people, as the barriers between our public and maternal selves have collapsed in ways we never considered. But if there’s one thing to take away from all of these stories, it’s that your identity as a mother isn’t fixed; it’s likely to change in ways that will surprise and maybe even delight, as you and your children grow.
Links to the articles at:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/202 ... 778d3e6de3
Is Your Child Missing their Speech Therapy Sessions?
Aga Khan University Hospital Pakistan
We know that many parents are worried about their child`s regular speech therapy sessions and we recommend watching this video with your child. Ask them to repeat the same exercises as they are very helpful for you and your child. Follow these exercises and keep your child engaged during this current situation.
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_cont ... e=emb_logo
Aga Khan University Hospital Pakistan
We know that many parents are worried about their child`s regular speech therapy sessions and we recommend watching this video with your child. Ask them to repeat the same exercises as they are very helpful for you and your child. Follow these exercises and keep your child engaged during this current situation.
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_cont ... e=emb_logo
What if Some Kids Are Better Off at Home?
For parents like me, the pandemic has come with a revelation: For our children, school was torture.
In the early morning hours of Monday, March 9, I was locked in battle with my oldest son, Izac, then a freshman in high school, over what felt like his one-billionth request to skip his 7 a.m. physical education class. He said he was tired and anxious and begged for a break. I told him that when you commit to something, you show up. End of story. And so off he went to school, bleary-eyed and resentful.
Four days later, all of my kids were home, with schools closed “out of an abundance of caution” to prevent the spread of Covid-19. Before long, the morning rush to get to class on time felt like a distant memory. The pandemic changed everything.
One difference that became clear within a few weeks of lockdown: My son was happy.
Izac, my lanky, serious-faced 15-year-old who runs cross-country and listens to Kendrick Lamar, has A.D.H.D. He’s never been disruptive — he’s more the dreamy, nose-in-a-book type who likes a calm environment and a limited schedule. Sadly, he’s rarely had that. But while my husband and I knew the pressure of a traditional school day could be challenging for him, we didn’t realize exactly how miserable he was.
It felt like he started breathing again the day in-person school was canceled. He started smiling again. This happiness was profound.
We are not the only family experiencing this. Yes, students across the country are complaining that they miss seeing their friends, and many parents are struggling with the unsustainable arrangement that is working from home while supervising virtual learning. But amid all this, there’s also a group of kids who, whether because of bullying, mental health issues or simple overscheduling and pressure, struggled at school in a way that’s been made undeniable by the way they’re thriving at home amid the pandemic. Parents like me are having to contemplate whether traditional school — a staple of American childhood — in fact hurts our children.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/10/opin ... 778d3e6de3
For parents like me, the pandemic has come with a revelation: For our children, school was torture.
In the early morning hours of Monday, March 9, I was locked in battle with my oldest son, Izac, then a freshman in high school, over what felt like his one-billionth request to skip his 7 a.m. physical education class. He said he was tired and anxious and begged for a break. I told him that when you commit to something, you show up. End of story. And so off he went to school, bleary-eyed and resentful.
Four days later, all of my kids were home, with schools closed “out of an abundance of caution” to prevent the spread of Covid-19. Before long, the morning rush to get to class on time felt like a distant memory. The pandemic changed everything.
One difference that became clear within a few weeks of lockdown: My son was happy.
Izac, my lanky, serious-faced 15-year-old who runs cross-country and listens to Kendrick Lamar, has A.D.H.D. He’s never been disruptive — he’s more the dreamy, nose-in-a-book type who likes a calm environment and a limited schedule. Sadly, he’s rarely had that. But while my husband and I knew the pressure of a traditional school day could be challenging for him, we didn’t realize exactly how miserable he was.
It felt like he started breathing again the day in-person school was canceled. He started smiling again. This happiness was profound.
We are not the only family experiencing this. Yes, students across the country are complaining that they miss seeing their friends, and many parents are struggling with the unsustainable arrangement that is working from home while supervising virtual learning. But amid all this, there’s also a group of kids who, whether because of bullying, mental health issues or simple overscheduling and pressure, struggled at school in a way that’s been made undeniable by the way they’re thriving at home amid the pandemic. Parents like me are having to contemplate whether traditional school — a staple of American childhood — in fact hurts our children.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/10/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Parenting Teens & Beyond: How to Make Difficult Conversations into Empowering Ones
A discussion on how parents can engage in difficult conversations with teens and young adults to strengthen their relationships.
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBxBUXsEeGI
A discussion on how parents can engage in difficult conversations with teens and young adults to strengthen their relationships.
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBxBUXsEeGI
Parent-Child relationship: physical contact in the first years of life
Today we share with you the first article of the Parent-Child Relationship, written by Karima Juma, which talks about the importance of physical contact and touch in the first years of a child's life.
For babies and young children touch is more powerful than any words!
Human beings crave touch. Sharing physical contact in appropriate ways shows respect towards one another, builds positive relationships, trust and opens up the doors for deep connections and honest communication between parents and children. Massaging an infant proves to be very soothing, reduces crying and fussiness, alleviates constipations and colic’s and helps the baby to sleep more peacefully. The effects of such massages are immediate and they last over time.
When we set aside 15 minutes regularly to massage and bond with our baby or infant we are actually setting aside time to fully love and better understand this new person that will be in our care for many years to come.
The human skin is the largest sensory organ directly connected to our nervous system. It has about 5 million receptors, and when touched or pressured, an electrical signal is sent through neurons connecting the spine to the brain. The function of these receptors is to protect and depending on the sign received the body will recoil or relax. Therefore, when touched/pressured in a positive and respectful ways it induces an increase in serotonin. Serotonin is our body’s primary mood-stabilizing hormone (feel good hormone), so an increase in such chemical regulates the heart rate and breathing to a state of relaxation in the baby/person.
The power of nurturing touch creates a sense of trust and closeness which are very important ingredients in the development of a balanced child in all aspects. Although nurturing touch can be given from birth, some babies may find formal, structured massage too stimulating in the very early weeks. It is usually recommended to start massaging your baby once he/she is about six weeks old and when their daily routines are more settled, and their behaviour is more predictable. There are classes and workshops, with trained instructors that parents can attend to learn some strokes, otherwise you can just follow your intuition and be observant of your baby’s reaction.
Some helpful tips to consider when applying nurturing touch to your baby at home:
- Pick a time during the day when your baby is content and alert, and interested in what’s going on around them. This makes it more likely that they’ll be ready to interact with you.
- Find a comfortable spot: on the floor, bed or sofa, with your baby safely on a towel in front of you.
- Find a position that’s comfortable, gives you good eye contact with no overhead lights and where your baby is warm.
- You may decide if your child is diaper-free, but it can help to at least loosen their diaper when massaging the tummy.
- It can be a nice idea to introduce a massage after bath and before bed as part of a bedtime wind-down.
Massages are beneficial not only for babies and infants but also for toddlers and older children. For older kids’ parents have reported an improvement in their child’s concentration as well as a more relaxed approach when it comes to tackling tasks, such as homework. Parents have also noticed better relationship between siblings and parents because it is an activity that can be enjoyed as a family.
As mentioned above, the effects last a life time and babies who have been brought up with positive touch, later in life often share enjoyable and more meaningful connections with their parents because their brain has already registered these positive circuits and sensations.
If you would like to know more about massage for older children ages 4 to 12 years please visit the website https://massageinschools.com/misa/
“The vision of the Massage in Schools Program is that every child attending school experience positive and nurturing touch every day…everywhere in the world.”
By Karima Juma, certified nurturing touch instructor
References:
https://www.nct.org.uk/baby-toddler/eve ... -tips-and-...
https://massageinschools.com/misa/
https://www.parents.com/baby/care/newbo ... y-massage/
https://the.ismaili/portugal/parent-chi ... years-life
Today we share with you the first article of the Parent-Child Relationship, written by Karima Juma, which talks about the importance of physical contact and touch in the first years of a child's life.
For babies and young children touch is more powerful than any words!
Human beings crave touch. Sharing physical contact in appropriate ways shows respect towards one another, builds positive relationships, trust and opens up the doors for deep connections and honest communication between parents and children. Massaging an infant proves to be very soothing, reduces crying and fussiness, alleviates constipations and colic’s and helps the baby to sleep more peacefully. The effects of such massages are immediate and they last over time.
When we set aside 15 minutes regularly to massage and bond with our baby or infant we are actually setting aside time to fully love and better understand this new person that will be in our care for many years to come.
The human skin is the largest sensory organ directly connected to our nervous system. It has about 5 million receptors, and when touched or pressured, an electrical signal is sent through neurons connecting the spine to the brain. The function of these receptors is to protect and depending on the sign received the body will recoil or relax. Therefore, when touched/pressured in a positive and respectful ways it induces an increase in serotonin. Serotonin is our body’s primary mood-stabilizing hormone (feel good hormone), so an increase in such chemical regulates the heart rate and breathing to a state of relaxation in the baby/person.
The power of nurturing touch creates a sense of trust and closeness which are very important ingredients in the development of a balanced child in all aspects. Although nurturing touch can be given from birth, some babies may find formal, structured massage too stimulating in the very early weeks. It is usually recommended to start massaging your baby once he/she is about six weeks old and when their daily routines are more settled, and their behaviour is more predictable. There are classes and workshops, with trained instructors that parents can attend to learn some strokes, otherwise you can just follow your intuition and be observant of your baby’s reaction.
Some helpful tips to consider when applying nurturing touch to your baby at home:
- Pick a time during the day when your baby is content and alert, and interested in what’s going on around them. This makes it more likely that they’ll be ready to interact with you.
- Find a comfortable spot: on the floor, bed or sofa, with your baby safely on a towel in front of you.
- Find a position that’s comfortable, gives you good eye contact with no overhead lights and where your baby is warm.
- You may decide if your child is diaper-free, but it can help to at least loosen their diaper when massaging the tummy.
- It can be a nice idea to introduce a massage after bath and before bed as part of a bedtime wind-down.
Massages are beneficial not only for babies and infants but also for toddlers and older children. For older kids’ parents have reported an improvement in their child’s concentration as well as a more relaxed approach when it comes to tackling tasks, such as homework. Parents have also noticed better relationship between siblings and parents because it is an activity that can be enjoyed as a family.
As mentioned above, the effects last a life time and babies who have been brought up with positive touch, later in life often share enjoyable and more meaningful connections with their parents because their brain has already registered these positive circuits and sensations.
If you would like to know more about massage for older children ages 4 to 12 years please visit the website https://massageinschools.com/misa/
“The vision of the Massage in Schools Program is that every child attending school experience positive and nurturing touch every day…everywhere in the world.”
By Karima Juma, certified nurturing touch instructor
References:
https://www.nct.org.uk/baby-toddler/eve ... -tips-and-...
https://massageinschools.com/misa/
https://www.parents.com/baby/care/newbo ... y-massage/
https://the.ismaili/portugal/parent-chi ... years-life
Google translation of the original article in Portuguese:
https://the.ismaili/portugal/rela%C3%A7 ... %CC%81gico
Parent-Child Relationship: Security in the technological environment
Today we share with you the fourth article in the “Relação Pais-Filhos” section, written by Rita Fernandes, whose theme is related to security in the digital world.
Even considering all the advantages that can be found in technology, it is critical to take into account the less pleasant aspects of the digital world.
In this sense, it is important that parents know how to introduce it in a healthy way in the lives of the little ones. How to do it? Here are some important tips:
- Set time limits - set a maximum of one to two hours a day and at times that do not compromise sleep. As in everything in life, there must be a balance between the use of technological means and the establishment of relationships and the performance of activities outside the virtual environment;
- Taking care of security - the ideal is that until the age of ten, internet access should only be carried out in the presence of an adult. And from an early age there must be a lot of communication and make children aware of the reality of internet browsing, explaining the dangers of exposure and encouraging, for example, not to publish personal information, photos, videos, passwords, not talking to strangers. The use of equipment configured to block access to inappropriate content is also an alternative, essential to promote protection, as well as constant supervision regarding the execution of downloads and online purchases to avoid dubious advertisements / emails. It is important that the child understands that this attitude is a form of protection for him and not a punishment;
- Talking about cyberbullying - The evolution of digital media has also had an influence on culture and social behavior. This is reflected in the socialization of the younger strata who, through mobile phones or computers, easily socialize with colleagues. The advantage is clear: living with friends outside the classroom. Therefore, it is very pertinent to take into account situations such as Cyberbullying - violence practiced over the internet with the action aiming to attack, stalk, ridicule and / or harass the other. It is crucial to explain and instruct children to be discerning not to practice it and to report it if they see it.
In short, technology, when used correctly and safely, is a great ally for parents to guarantee their children a more complete development and adjusted to the reality in which the new generations are inserted.
We are increasingly aware that the mastery of technology and digital literacy are differentiating factors, and across all the professions of the future, so the sooner children start this learning the better prepared they will be for their professional career. And, in addition to parents being present on a day-to-day basis, it is important that they enroll their children in specific programming and robotics courses so that they receive guidance from professionals and enjoy even more what technology has to offer.
Rita Fernandes
Rita Fernandes has a degree in Economics and a Master's in Monetary and Financial Economics from the Higher Institute of Economics and Management (ISEG). She is managing partner of Happy Code do Lumiar ( www.facebook.com/happycodelumiar ) and mother of three children, all boys, between 3 and 12 years old.
https://the.ismaili/portugal/rela%C3%A7 ... %CC%81gico
Parent-Child Relationship: Security in the technological environment
Today we share with you the fourth article in the “Relação Pais-Filhos” section, written by Rita Fernandes, whose theme is related to security in the digital world.
Even considering all the advantages that can be found in technology, it is critical to take into account the less pleasant aspects of the digital world.
In this sense, it is important that parents know how to introduce it in a healthy way in the lives of the little ones. How to do it? Here are some important tips:
- Set time limits - set a maximum of one to two hours a day and at times that do not compromise sleep. As in everything in life, there must be a balance between the use of technological means and the establishment of relationships and the performance of activities outside the virtual environment;
- Taking care of security - the ideal is that until the age of ten, internet access should only be carried out in the presence of an adult. And from an early age there must be a lot of communication and make children aware of the reality of internet browsing, explaining the dangers of exposure and encouraging, for example, not to publish personal information, photos, videos, passwords, not talking to strangers. The use of equipment configured to block access to inappropriate content is also an alternative, essential to promote protection, as well as constant supervision regarding the execution of downloads and online purchases to avoid dubious advertisements / emails. It is important that the child understands that this attitude is a form of protection for him and not a punishment;
- Talking about cyberbullying - The evolution of digital media has also had an influence on culture and social behavior. This is reflected in the socialization of the younger strata who, through mobile phones or computers, easily socialize with colleagues. The advantage is clear: living with friends outside the classroom. Therefore, it is very pertinent to take into account situations such as Cyberbullying - violence practiced over the internet with the action aiming to attack, stalk, ridicule and / or harass the other. It is crucial to explain and instruct children to be discerning not to practice it and to report it if they see it.
In short, technology, when used correctly and safely, is a great ally for parents to guarantee their children a more complete development and adjusted to the reality in which the new generations are inserted.
We are increasingly aware that the mastery of technology and digital literacy are differentiating factors, and across all the professions of the future, so the sooner children start this learning the better prepared they will be for their professional career. And, in addition to parents being present on a day-to-day basis, it is important that they enroll their children in specific programming and robotics courses so that they receive guidance from professionals and enjoy even more what technology has to offer.
Rita Fernandes
Rita Fernandes has a degree in Economics and a Master's in Monetary and Financial Economics from the Higher Institute of Economics and Management (ISEG). She is managing partner of Happy Code do Lumiar ( www.facebook.com/happycodelumiar ) and mother of three children, all boys, between 3 and 12 years old.
Google translation of the original article in Portuguese
Parent-Child Relationship: Overcoming 24 hours within four walls
Lunch at the fire, meeting at Zoom and one of the children asking to go to the bathroom - it is the picture that most Portuguese families are experiencing today. Desperate? No, we still have the strength and energy to get around! Let's restart?
We are experiencing a new and demanding situation at various levels. Teleworking and distance learning in addition to the domestic tasks, family activities and financial and family management that already existed: but where will the balance be?
First of all, let us be aware that we are all different and that each family lives its own dynamics, so there are few recipes. The considerations below may serve to find the much sought after balance, but no one better than the members of the family to unravel this challenge, arm in arm. Here are some strategies:
A. (Re) Organization! Reflect, plan, execute and evaluate. Repeat. Yes, it may seem far-fetched, but, after all, this is a thorny situation and it is better to put everything we know into practice! Organizing each one's work / study spaces is extremely important. Organizing how time is used by each family member, with daily plans, pairing older and younger, helps to manage anxiety and prevent unforeseen events. Moderating working time to make space for leisure is crucial to maintaining everyone's good energy.
Tips:
- Don't forget that the little ones really need free play, whether alone or with others.
- Plan the moments of leisure and practice of faith.
- Remember that we are more productive in the morning, so you can use that to your advantage when planning your day.
B. Flexibility and Autonomy. Sometimes, we will have to do the handstand, yes. You may be able to think about compensating for work after hours (as long as it does not harm mental health), but that is not all that will require some gymnastics. Show yourself open to everyone's suggestions, this will bring motivation and tranquility in carrying out the activities. You can also change the plan if the motivation starts to fade. Reach a consensus and everyone will be more satisfied. Reflect on the various moments of the day to create greater autonomy in the performance of tasks by the various family members. Yes, we can! Rethinking some household chores can also be helpful in order to take less time out of our day.
Tips:
- Adjust the tasks to the characteristics of each one, such as tasks with greater physical demands for those who are more energetic or allow some academic tasks to be done standing up by the most restless.
- Cooking in larger quantities and freezing a portion is useful for days of greater stress.
- Leave children's snacks at hand, so that they are autonomous for breakfast and snack.
C. Responsibility… Well-defined rules, limits and responsibilities will allow you to better see the way forward. My space and yours, my time to work / rest and yours, the tasks under my responsibility and yours - agreeing on these and other topics is essential for the machine to be well oiled. Will household chores be left to adults alone? Well, let's delegate, everyone can do what they can and, thus, everyone contributes and removes some weight from adults.
D. Communication (effective, of course). Family meeting! None of this is of value if it is not agreed upon by everyone. In fact, if the plan is for the family, everyone must have a voice. And if something is not to someone's liking, or if it doesn't work as expected, the communication will benefit from the readjustment of said plan.
E. Rest is essential. Yes, we need to take care of ourselves and relationships. In fact, being 24 out of 24 with the same people, always following the same routine, becomes exhausting, so take breaks, take turns and be inventive. Creativity is the key! How about starting the day with a mini stretching session? Why not create museum sunday, with the whole family excited to watch a virtual visit and do a scientific experiment next? Or plan 20 minutes a day to be alone, relax and revitalize your body and mind? Easy, isn't it? Not at all! But we will get there. With challenge, comes change. And change can become an opportunity for us to be better. We all know that the human being is endowed with a fantastic ability called “waist game” or “juggling” ( for slang speakers), but until we get stability, it takes time. We are fully aware that we do our utmost and success comes after attempts (some unfortunate). Balls will roll across the floor, but, as the other says: Resist, Insist, Persist. Let's restart!
By Soraia Juma
About the author: Soraia Juma is a member of the Aga Khan Education Board for Portugal, mother of 2 ants, graduated in Psychomotor Rehabilitation and Master in Early Childhood Education The Aga Khan Education Board invites you to share questions, comments, ideas or proposals for topics to be addressed at
https://the.ismaili/portugal/rela%C3%A7 ... ro-paredes
Parent-Child Relationship: Overcoming 24 hours within four walls
Lunch at the fire, meeting at Zoom and one of the children asking to go to the bathroom - it is the picture that most Portuguese families are experiencing today. Desperate? No, we still have the strength and energy to get around! Let's restart?
We are experiencing a new and demanding situation at various levels. Teleworking and distance learning in addition to the domestic tasks, family activities and financial and family management that already existed: but where will the balance be?
First of all, let us be aware that we are all different and that each family lives its own dynamics, so there are few recipes. The considerations below may serve to find the much sought after balance, but no one better than the members of the family to unravel this challenge, arm in arm. Here are some strategies:
A. (Re) Organization! Reflect, plan, execute and evaluate. Repeat. Yes, it may seem far-fetched, but, after all, this is a thorny situation and it is better to put everything we know into practice! Organizing each one's work / study spaces is extremely important. Organizing how time is used by each family member, with daily plans, pairing older and younger, helps to manage anxiety and prevent unforeseen events. Moderating working time to make space for leisure is crucial to maintaining everyone's good energy.
Tips:
- Don't forget that the little ones really need free play, whether alone or with others.
- Plan the moments of leisure and practice of faith.
- Remember that we are more productive in the morning, so you can use that to your advantage when planning your day.
B. Flexibility and Autonomy. Sometimes, we will have to do the handstand, yes. You may be able to think about compensating for work after hours (as long as it does not harm mental health), but that is not all that will require some gymnastics. Show yourself open to everyone's suggestions, this will bring motivation and tranquility in carrying out the activities. You can also change the plan if the motivation starts to fade. Reach a consensus and everyone will be more satisfied. Reflect on the various moments of the day to create greater autonomy in the performance of tasks by the various family members. Yes, we can! Rethinking some household chores can also be helpful in order to take less time out of our day.
Tips:
- Adjust the tasks to the characteristics of each one, such as tasks with greater physical demands for those who are more energetic or allow some academic tasks to be done standing up by the most restless.
- Cooking in larger quantities and freezing a portion is useful for days of greater stress.
- Leave children's snacks at hand, so that they are autonomous for breakfast and snack.
C. Responsibility… Well-defined rules, limits and responsibilities will allow you to better see the way forward. My space and yours, my time to work / rest and yours, the tasks under my responsibility and yours - agreeing on these and other topics is essential for the machine to be well oiled. Will household chores be left to adults alone? Well, let's delegate, everyone can do what they can and, thus, everyone contributes and removes some weight from adults.
D. Communication (effective, of course). Family meeting! None of this is of value if it is not agreed upon by everyone. In fact, if the plan is for the family, everyone must have a voice. And if something is not to someone's liking, or if it doesn't work as expected, the communication will benefit from the readjustment of said plan.
E. Rest is essential. Yes, we need to take care of ourselves and relationships. In fact, being 24 out of 24 with the same people, always following the same routine, becomes exhausting, so take breaks, take turns and be inventive. Creativity is the key! How about starting the day with a mini stretching session? Why not create museum sunday, with the whole family excited to watch a virtual visit and do a scientific experiment next? Or plan 20 minutes a day to be alone, relax and revitalize your body and mind? Easy, isn't it? Not at all! But we will get there. With challenge, comes change. And change can become an opportunity for us to be better. We all know that the human being is endowed with a fantastic ability called “waist game” or “juggling” ( for slang speakers), but until we get stability, it takes time. We are fully aware that we do our utmost and success comes after attempts (some unfortunate). Balls will roll across the floor, but, as the other says: Resist, Insist, Persist. Let's restart!
By Soraia Juma
About the author: Soraia Juma is a member of the Aga Khan Education Board for Portugal, mother of 2 ants, graduated in Psychomotor Rehabilitation and Master in Early Childhood Education The Aga Khan Education Board invites you to share questions, comments, ideas or proposals for topics to be addressed at
https://the.ismaili/portugal/rela%C3%A7 ... ro-paredes
Your Kids Aren’t Too Old for Picture Books, and Neither Are You
These are the real wizards of the literary world.
“My kid has outgrown picture books.”
I hear this often when enthusing about a new picture book and offering to pass one along to a friend. It’s the kind of thing parents will say with a certain amount of pride because of what it implies: My child is now reading independently and no longer requires the crutch of pictures. Just as he once relinquished the binky, he has moved on.
I hear this and I think, “Poor kid,” and also, “Poor parent.” Nobody moves on from picture books. At least, nobody should.
While children’s books are, on the whole, often scorned by the literary world as not altogether serious, perhaps no format is treated with the same dismissiveness as picture books. Even board books are respected at the very least as convenient chew toys, and chapter books look enough like novels to constitute a respectable gateway to true literature. But picture books seem like a transitory phase, suitable for a sleepy bedtime read-aloud or the shushed classroom break of story time, but hardly worthy of consideration on their own.
Most picture books are recommended for kids ages 4 to 8. That’s already too narrow. But picture books are tossed out even faster since many schools expect kids to read by the end of kindergarten. Because so many parents like to think of our kids as progressing and developing new skills, we allow picture books to fall away by the time kids are sounding out their Dr. Seuss.
Don’t let this happen.
First, appreciate what picture books, the real wizards of the literary world, do. With remarkable economy, they excel at the twin arts of visual and textual storytelling. Anyone who has ever read a picture book to a child has witnessed this magic firsthand. You’ll be reading along aloud and the child will laugh, not at anything you’ve read but at something she has read in the pictures. While you are reading one story, told in words, she is reading another, told through art. The illustrator doesn’t merely reflect the words on the page; she creates an entire narrative of her own, adding details, creating secondary story lines.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/20/opin ... 778d3e6de3
These are the real wizards of the literary world.
“My kid has outgrown picture books.”
I hear this often when enthusing about a new picture book and offering to pass one along to a friend. It’s the kind of thing parents will say with a certain amount of pride because of what it implies: My child is now reading independently and no longer requires the crutch of pictures. Just as he once relinquished the binky, he has moved on.
I hear this and I think, “Poor kid,” and also, “Poor parent.” Nobody moves on from picture books. At least, nobody should.
While children’s books are, on the whole, often scorned by the literary world as not altogether serious, perhaps no format is treated with the same dismissiveness as picture books. Even board books are respected at the very least as convenient chew toys, and chapter books look enough like novels to constitute a respectable gateway to true literature. But picture books seem like a transitory phase, suitable for a sleepy bedtime read-aloud or the shushed classroom break of story time, but hardly worthy of consideration on their own.
Most picture books are recommended for kids ages 4 to 8. That’s already too narrow. But picture books are tossed out even faster since many schools expect kids to read by the end of kindergarten. Because so many parents like to think of our kids as progressing and developing new skills, we allow picture books to fall away by the time kids are sounding out their Dr. Seuss.
Don’t let this happen.
First, appreciate what picture books, the real wizards of the literary world, do. With remarkable economy, they excel at the twin arts of visual and textual storytelling. Anyone who has ever read a picture book to a child has witnessed this magic firsthand. You’ll be reading along aloud and the child will laugh, not at anything you’ve read but at something she has read in the pictures. While you are reading one story, told in words, she is reading another, told through art. The illustrator doesn’t merely reflect the words on the page; she creates an entire narrative of her own, adding details, creating secondary story lines.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/20/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Children's story: A new year and a new beginning
Today we share a story about two children, Nargis and Aziz, who celebrate the festival of Navroz with their family. Parents and grandparents may wish to read this story with children, whether in person or over a video call.
Every year, we celebrate special festivals with our Jamat. On these days, we pray and recite devotional poetry. We give special greetings to our brothers and sisters in the Jamat, and we share with them the happiness of the festivals.
One of the festivals that we celebrate with the Jamat is Navroz. It usually falls on the 21st of March every year and marks the beginning of the Persian new year. It is also the time when spring begins in many countries.
Navroz is a time when we welcome the new year. We make a fresh start in our lives, just like new leaves, buds and flowers in spring. We look forward to the new year with the hope that it will be a happy one. The story that follows is about two children, Nargis and her brother Aziz, during the festival of Navroz.
Only one day remains before Navroz. Everyone is very busy in the home. Nargis and Aziz’s parents return home from the shops carrying presents for the children.
story_1.jpg
Nargis is making pastry in the kitchen. Next to him is Aziz, placing eggs in a bowl of coloured water. The family have been getting ready for Navroz for many weeks, and at last everything is finished. Now comes the part the children love best.
Mum and Dad place on the table seven things that begin with the letter “s” in Persian: apples, garlic, vinegar, coins, hyacinths, a sweet dish made of wheat, and a plate filled with green shoots of wheat.
Nargis arranges some eggs on a mirror, next to a bowl with goldfish. All these things are thought to bring good luck and happiness in the new year.
story_2.jpg
The day of Navroz arrives. It is bright and sunny, with not a cloud in the sky. The birds are singing, and the buds on the almond trees have just blossomed.
The moment comes when the old year ends and the new one begins. At this time, many families offer prayers and recite devotional poetry.
On Navroz day in Iran, people greet each other by saying “Eid-e shoma mobarak!” which means, “May your festival be blessed!” In parts of Afghanistan and Tajikistan, they say “Shogun Bahor Mubarak!” to convey happy and special greetings for springtime.
story_3.jpg
Later in the day, a big surprise awaits Nargis and Aziz. Their parents have brought them each a gift: new clothes and shoes that they have always wanted.
The children are delighted and hug their parents. It is time to have the first meal of the new year. There is sweet pastry, lamb, chicken, rice with saffron and herbs, and fresh fruit. Everyone has a hearty meal.
story_4.jpg
Some days later, the family go for a picnic.
Nargis says, “You know, Mum and Dad, I’ll miss the old year for some of the wonderful things that happened. We visited some new places for the first time, and I met my cousins. But some sad things happened as well. My best friend moved to another school.”
They smile at Nargis. “Inshallah, this new year will bring blessings for all of us”, he says. “And it may bring many nice surprises.”
--
This story has been adapted from Festivals and Celebrations - Ta’lim primary three, book two, published by The Institute of Ismaili Studies.
https://the.ismaili/global/our-communit ... -beginning
Today we share a story about two children, Nargis and Aziz, who celebrate the festival of Navroz with their family. Parents and grandparents may wish to read this story with children, whether in person or over a video call.
Every year, we celebrate special festivals with our Jamat. On these days, we pray and recite devotional poetry. We give special greetings to our brothers and sisters in the Jamat, and we share with them the happiness of the festivals.
One of the festivals that we celebrate with the Jamat is Navroz. It usually falls on the 21st of March every year and marks the beginning of the Persian new year. It is also the time when spring begins in many countries.
Navroz is a time when we welcome the new year. We make a fresh start in our lives, just like new leaves, buds and flowers in spring. We look forward to the new year with the hope that it will be a happy one. The story that follows is about two children, Nargis and her brother Aziz, during the festival of Navroz.
Only one day remains before Navroz. Everyone is very busy in the home. Nargis and Aziz’s parents return home from the shops carrying presents for the children.
story_1.jpg
Nargis is making pastry in the kitchen. Next to him is Aziz, placing eggs in a bowl of coloured water. The family have been getting ready for Navroz for many weeks, and at last everything is finished. Now comes the part the children love best.
Mum and Dad place on the table seven things that begin with the letter “s” in Persian: apples, garlic, vinegar, coins, hyacinths, a sweet dish made of wheat, and a plate filled with green shoots of wheat.
Nargis arranges some eggs on a mirror, next to a bowl with goldfish. All these things are thought to bring good luck and happiness in the new year.
story_2.jpg
The day of Navroz arrives. It is bright and sunny, with not a cloud in the sky. The birds are singing, and the buds on the almond trees have just blossomed.
The moment comes when the old year ends and the new one begins. At this time, many families offer prayers and recite devotional poetry.
On Navroz day in Iran, people greet each other by saying “Eid-e shoma mobarak!” which means, “May your festival be blessed!” In parts of Afghanistan and Tajikistan, they say “Shogun Bahor Mubarak!” to convey happy and special greetings for springtime.
story_3.jpg
Later in the day, a big surprise awaits Nargis and Aziz. Their parents have brought them each a gift: new clothes and shoes that they have always wanted.
The children are delighted and hug their parents. It is time to have the first meal of the new year. There is sweet pastry, lamb, chicken, rice with saffron and herbs, and fresh fruit. Everyone has a hearty meal.
story_4.jpg
Some days later, the family go for a picnic.
Nargis says, “You know, Mum and Dad, I’ll miss the old year for some of the wonderful things that happened. We visited some new places for the first time, and I met my cousins. But some sad things happened as well. My best friend moved to another school.”
They smile at Nargis. “Inshallah, this new year will bring blessings for all of us”, he says. “And it may bring many nice surprises.”
--
This story has been adapted from Festivals and Celebrations - Ta’lim primary three, book two, published by The Institute of Ismaili Studies.
https://the.ismaili/global/our-communit ... -beginning
Review: webinar “Child Mental Health - Challenges”
On the 7th of April, the webinar “Child Mental Health - Challenges” took place, promoted by the Aga Khan Health Board and the Aga Khan Education Board, whose guest speaker was Dr. Tiago Vinhas de Sousa, psychiatrist and clinical director of the Clinic Nostra. If you haven't had a chance to watch it live, watch the recording now.
This webinar aimed to raise the awareness of parents and / or guardians, in order to enable them to detect and understand warning signs, at the level of mental health, that are manifested in children.
If you did not have the opportunity to attend the webinar, you can access your recording here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCDi0lGR5T4.
On the 7th of April, the webinar “Child Mental Health - Challenges” took place, promoted by the Aga Khan Health Board and the Aga Khan Education Board, whose guest speaker was Dr. Tiago Vinhas de Sousa, psychiatrist and clinical director of the Clinic Nostra. If you haven't had a chance to watch it live, watch the recording now.
This webinar aimed to raise the awareness of parents and / or guardians, in order to enable them to detect and understand warning signs, at the level of mental health, that are manifested in children.
If you did not have the opportunity to attend the webinar, you can access your recording here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCDi0lGR5T4.
Google translation of the original article in Portuguese:
https://the.ismaili/portugal/rela%C3%A7 ... brinquedos
Parent-Child Relationship: Less is more when it comes to toys
Today we share with you the eleventh article in the rubric “Parent-Child Relationship”, written by Karima Juma, who tells us about the relationship between toys that a child has and its future implications.
Less is more when it comes to choosing children's toys. I am a minimalist by nature and a firm believer that less is more in many areas of life, but today I am focused on toys and this is usually my recommendation to parents with young children.
Toys play a vital role in children's lives. They teach children not only about the world around them, but also about themselves. The toys that children play with are the basis of their future life and can send subtle messages about the values that predominate in a family.
Therefore, choosing wisely and carefully is important for children. Wise parents often limit the number of toys their children can play with, and this is done intentionally because they understand the benefit of fewer toys in the long run:
1. Increases Creativity - when children are exposed to too many toys at the same time, it prevents them from fully developing their imagination. Strick and Schubert, two German scientists, conducted an experiment in which they asked to remove all toys in the classroom from a kindergarten classroom for three consecutive months. At first the children were bored but, shortly after the initial phase, it was found that the children used their basic environment to invent games and use their imagination in their play time.
Over the years of teaching classes in early childhood, I noticed that although the classroom was full of toys and extravagant and attractive materials, my students got involved easily and with greater results when I placed several cardboard boxes of different sizes outside the classroom. classroom. The children communicated among themselves for ideals and dedicated themselves to playing with planes, houses and swimming pools, tunnels and caves to pretend. They were using their muscles, they were more active, happier and more entertained, for hours, than I could ever imagine.
2. Increases attention span - when children are exposed to fewer toys, they are able to make the most of them, exploring countless options and different ways to play with the same toy.
3. Enriches social skills - fewer toys mean better interpersonal relationships with children and adults. They learn to spend more time in conversations and interactions with their peers. Statistics show that children's friendships are inextricably linked to academic success later in life and in social situations during adulthood. Children with positive relationships with other children tend to lead happier lives as adults.
4. Greater care when taking care of things - when they have less, they tend to take care of them more carefully because they know that they are damaged, they know that they do not have much to replace them with. On the contrary, when children have many toys to choose from, they often do not care if they are damaged or not, as they have a lot to choose from.
5. More time to read, write and art - less toys means love for books, music and painting. And a lover of art and music will be able to appreciate beauty and emotions beyond measure.
6. Children become more resourceful - fewer toys allow them to become resourceful, solving problems with materials limited by hand. Later in life, being resourceful is a gift with unlimited potential.
7. Less conflict - when siblings have many toys and tend to argue for them, each new toy means establishing territory between them. Siblings with less toys are more likely to share, collaborate and work together. These are the foundation for a successful team player, later in life.
8. Build perseverance, patience and determination - because they only have a limited number of toys, they will be more determined to find out how it works. When they have a lot and are faced with a toy that they cannot understand, they are more likely to give up and move on to the next one, which is easier to manage.
9. More time outdoors - to walk and explore in nature and to engage in physical activities, resulting in healthier lives and more active bodies.
10. Tidier homes - too many toys create confusion in a home and children are often unable to keep their toy rooms / rooms tidy. Fewer toys means that the child will most likely be willing to take responsibility for managing and cleaning the area because it is less cluttered and therefore healthier for the home.
I am not against toys, but I am in favor of child center approaches both in parenting as an educator and, in this perspective, less is more with greater results in life.
By Karima Juma
Reference: Joshua Becker author of “Less is more” and “The minimalist home”
About the author: Karima Juma is a former professor at IB and Montessori. She currently works as an educational consultant at international schools and as a parent educator. She is also a mindfulness instructor, guiding parents and children with different types of learning skills.
https://the.ismaili/portugal/rela%C3%A7 ... brinquedos
Parent-Child Relationship: Less is more when it comes to toys
Today we share with you the eleventh article in the rubric “Parent-Child Relationship”, written by Karima Juma, who tells us about the relationship between toys that a child has and its future implications.
Less is more when it comes to choosing children's toys. I am a minimalist by nature and a firm believer that less is more in many areas of life, but today I am focused on toys and this is usually my recommendation to parents with young children.
Toys play a vital role in children's lives. They teach children not only about the world around them, but also about themselves. The toys that children play with are the basis of their future life and can send subtle messages about the values that predominate in a family.
Therefore, choosing wisely and carefully is important for children. Wise parents often limit the number of toys their children can play with, and this is done intentionally because they understand the benefit of fewer toys in the long run:
1. Increases Creativity - when children are exposed to too many toys at the same time, it prevents them from fully developing their imagination. Strick and Schubert, two German scientists, conducted an experiment in which they asked to remove all toys in the classroom from a kindergarten classroom for three consecutive months. At first the children were bored but, shortly after the initial phase, it was found that the children used their basic environment to invent games and use their imagination in their play time.
Over the years of teaching classes in early childhood, I noticed that although the classroom was full of toys and extravagant and attractive materials, my students got involved easily and with greater results when I placed several cardboard boxes of different sizes outside the classroom. classroom. The children communicated among themselves for ideals and dedicated themselves to playing with planes, houses and swimming pools, tunnels and caves to pretend. They were using their muscles, they were more active, happier and more entertained, for hours, than I could ever imagine.
2. Increases attention span - when children are exposed to fewer toys, they are able to make the most of them, exploring countless options and different ways to play with the same toy.
3. Enriches social skills - fewer toys mean better interpersonal relationships with children and adults. They learn to spend more time in conversations and interactions with their peers. Statistics show that children's friendships are inextricably linked to academic success later in life and in social situations during adulthood. Children with positive relationships with other children tend to lead happier lives as adults.
4. Greater care when taking care of things - when they have less, they tend to take care of them more carefully because they know that they are damaged, they know that they do not have much to replace them with. On the contrary, when children have many toys to choose from, they often do not care if they are damaged or not, as they have a lot to choose from.
5. More time to read, write and art - less toys means love for books, music and painting. And a lover of art and music will be able to appreciate beauty and emotions beyond measure.
6. Children become more resourceful - fewer toys allow them to become resourceful, solving problems with materials limited by hand. Later in life, being resourceful is a gift with unlimited potential.
7. Less conflict - when siblings have many toys and tend to argue for them, each new toy means establishing territory between them. Siblings with less toys are more likely to share, collaborate and work together. These are the foundation for a successful team player, later in life.
8. Build perseverance, patience and determination - because they only have a limited number of toys, they will be more determined to find out how it works. When they have a lot and are faced with a toy that they cannot understand, they are more likely to give up and move on to the next one, which is easier to manage.
9. More time outdoors - to walk and explore in nature and to engage in physical activities, resulting in healthier lives and more active bodies.
10. Tidier homes - too many toys create confusion in a home and children are often unable to keep their toy rooms / rooms tidy. Fewer toys means that the child will most likely be willing to take responsibility for managing and cleaning the area because it is less cluttered and therefore healthier for the home.
I am not against toys, but I am in favor of child center approaches both in parenting as an educator and, in this perspective, less is more with greater results in life.
By Karima Juma
Reference: Joshua Becker author of “Less is more” and “The minimalist home”
About the author: Karima Juma is a former professor at IB and Montessori. She currently works as an educational consultant at international schools and as a parent educator. She is also a mindfulness instructor, guiding parents and children with different types of learning skills.
How to Raise Kids Who Won’t Be Racist
If race is largely a social construct, then teaching children about it will only perpetuate racism — right? Wrong: Studies show precisely the opposite. Open conversations about race and racism can make white children less prejudiced and can increase the self-esteem of children of color.
If states ban the teaching of critical race theory, as conservative lawmakers in many are attempting to do, or if schools don’t provide consistent education about racism and discrimination, it’s imperative that parents pick up the slack.
Even if we don’t want them to, children do notice differences in race and skin color. And that means that attempts to suppress discussions about race and racism are misguided. Those efforts won’t eliminate prejudice. They may, in fact, make it worse.
So-called colorblind parenting — avoiding the topic of race in an effort to raise children who aren’t prejudiced — is not just unhelpful, it actually perpetuates racism. That’s because racism isn’t driven solely by individual prejudice. It’s a system of inequity bolstered by racist laws and policies — the very fact that opponents of teaching critical race theory are trying to erase.
Some people, especially white people like me, may shy away from talking to their children about race, either because they’ve been socialized to treat the subject as taboo or because they fear that instilling an awareness of race is itself problematic. That’s a privilege that nonwhite families often don’t have — racism is a fact of life that many can’t ignore. While parents of white children may be able to choose if, when and how they have these conversations, parents of children of color often have no choice but to discuss the subject as it arises.
Parents may believe their children are too young to learn about topics like prejudice, discrimination and violence. But it’s possible — advisable, actually — to have age-appropriate conversations about race and racism throughout children’s lives, including when they are very young.
I asked more than 80 parents about how they think their children view race. Many said their children are oblivious to skin color. Yet research strongly contradicts this notion. Babies as young as 3 months old discern racial differences, and they prefer looking at faces that share their caregivers’ skin color.
Racial awareness and prejudice continue to develop during the preschool and grade school years. A 2012 study showed that many white parents of preschoolers believed that their children harbored no racial prejudice. When the researchers tested the children, though, some said they wouldn’t want Black friends.
Children learn from what they see. They notice that in American culture, race and power intersect in a clear way. Children may observe, for instance, that all but one president has been white, that many of the wealthiest people are white and that more working-class people are people of color.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/15/opin ... 778d3e6de3
If race is largely a social construct, then teaching children about it will only perpetuate racism — right? Wrong: Studies show precisely the opposite. Open conversations about race and racism can make white children less prejudiced and can increase the self-esteem of children of color.
If states ban the teaching of critical race theory, as conservative lawmakers in many are attempting to do, or if schools don’t provide consistent education about racism and discrimination, it’s imperative that parents pick up the slack.
Even if we don’t want them to, children do notice differences in race and skin color. And that means that attempts to suppress discussions about race and racism are misguided. Those efforts won’t eliminate prejudice. They may, in fact, make it worse.
So-called colorblind parenting — avoiding the topic of race in an effort to raise children who aren’t prejudiced — is not just unhelpful, it actually perpetuates racism. That’s because racism isn’t driven solely by individual prejudice. It’s a system of inequity bolstered by racist laws and policies — the very fact that opponents of teaching critical race theory are trying to erase.
Some people, especially white people like me, may shy away from talking to their children about race, either because they’ve been socialized to treat the subject as taboo or because they fear that instilling an awareness of race is itself problematic. That’s a privilege that nonwhite families often don’t have — racism is a fact of life that many can’t ignore. While parents of white children may be able to choose if, when and how they have these conversations, parents of children of color often have no choice but to discuss the subject as it arises.
Parents may believe their children are too young to learn about topics like prejudice, discrimination and violence. But it’s possible — advisable, actually — to have age-appropriate conversations about race and racism throughout children’s lives, including when they are very young.
I asked more than 80 parents about how they think their children view race. Many said their children are oblivious to skin color. Yet research strongly contradicts this notion. Babies as young as 3 months old discern racial differences, and they prefer looking at faces that share their caregivers’ skin color.
Racial awareness and prejudice continue to develop during the preschool and grade school years. A 2012 study showed that many white parents of preschoolers believed that their children harbored no racial prejudice. When the researchers tested the children, though, some said they wouldn’t want Black friends.
Children learn from what they see. They notice that in American culture, race and power intersect in a clear way. Children may observe, for instance, that all but one president has been white, that many of the wealthiest people are white and that more working-class people are people of color.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/15/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Children’s books – on composting and overcoming fear of going to the doctor – by Sareena Jivraj and Samria Valliani
BY ISMAILIMAIL POSTED ON DECEMBER 17, 2021
“Friends, Family, Parents, Educators:
While medical school is a full-time job, I’m happy to announce that in collaboration with Samria Valliani, my “over the summer passion” has officially transformed into two children’s books now available at Amazon (Kindle and paperback).
Connor and His Composting Adventures is intended to educate not only children, but individuals of all ages, including parents, on composting. Ella and Her Vaccine Soldiers is intended to help diminish the fears children have around vaccinations and going to the doctor, and to form positive relationships with healthcare providers. We would love any kind of support in getting the word out so that many people can learn from these books.
These books were inspired by my interaction with countless children through babysitting and tutoring and would not have been possible without my involvement with the University of North Texas Health Science Center at Forth Worth Sustainability Committee and the support of so many faculty and staff at TCU and UNT Health Science Center – School of Medicine.”
Sareena Jivraj
‘Like’ and ‘Share’ at Facebook https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_ ... 1134866458
BY ISMAILIMAIL POSTED ON DECEMBER 17, 2021
“Friends, Family, Parents, Educators:
While medical school is a full-time job, I’m happy to announce that in collaboration with Samria Valliani, my “over the summer passion” has officially transformed into two children’s books now available at Amazon (Kindle and paperback).
Connor and His Composting Adventures is intended to educate not only children, but individuals of all ages, including parents, on composting. Ella and Her Vaccine Soldiers is intended to help diminish the fears children have around vaccinations and going to the doctor, and to form positive relationships with healthcare providers. We would love any kind of support in getting the word out so that many people can learn from these books.
These books were inspired by my interaction with countless children through babysitting and tutoring and would not have been possible without my involvement with the University of North Texas Health Science Center at Forth Worth Sustainability Committee and the support of so many faculty and staff at TCU and UNT Health Science Center – School of Medicine.”
Sareena Jivraj
‘Like’ and ‘Share’ at Facebook https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_ ... 1134866458
I’m Thankful Every Day for the Decision I Made After My Prenatal Tests
By Amy Julia Becker
Ms. Becker, who writes about parenting, disability and religion, is the author of the forthcoming “To Be Made Well,” about what healing looks like on a personal and societal level.
Our 16-year-old daughter, Penny, wakes up to the beeping of her alarm. On her way downstairs, she picks up her iPhone to check her texts. She eats breakfast, gathers her sneakers and pompoms for cheerleading and heads to school. When Penny was diagnosed with Down syndrome a few hours after she was born, I didn’t expect our mornings to feel so ordinary.
When I was pregnant with Penny, I chose to receive a “quad screen,” an elective and noninvasive blood test around 16 weeks that looked for elevated levels of three different hormones and one protein. I soon learned I had a one in 313 chance of having a baby with Down syndrome, higher than expected for a woman my age. We followed up with a detailed ultrasound, which showed a “healthy baby.”
Penny was, indeed, healthy. After she was born, she received a robust eight out of 10 on her Apgar score, a test doctors administer to check the baby’s heart rate and other signs, and came home from the hospital two days later. She also came home with Down syndrome.
Many women whose prenatal tests looked similar to mine are counseled by medical professionals to pursue further diagnostic testing, and, with a confirmation of Down syndrome, to consider abortion. Every day, I’m glad I didn’t.
Prenatal testing has only increased in availability, prevalence and accuracy since I was pregnant with Penny. And while these tests can offer information about the chromosomal makeup of fetuses, prenatal tests cannot prepare parents for the hardships, fragility or wonder inherent within every human life. Testing rests on an assumption that desirable children conform to a norm of development, alongside a corresponding thought that undesirable children deviate from that norm cognitively or physically. You can see the result of these assumptions in the high abortion rates for fetuses with Down syndrome.
The assumptions behind our prenatal testing programs also condition parents — and society as a whole — to see our kids as valuable according to their physical strength, intellectual capacity and social acuity rather than setting us up to receive their lives as they are given.
We need to change our approach to prenatal testing by ensuring that pregnant women who receive prenatal diagnoses get accurate information about what it’s like to raise a child with a disability and expanding the awareness of our collective responsibility to welcome and support diverse lives.
Today, prenatal screening tests are up to 99 percent accurate in detecting fetuses with Down syndrome, and they are offered starting at nine weeks. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends presenting all pregnant women with the option of prenatal screening tests. Many choose to take them — in one study, 90 percent of pregnant women were offered these tests, and 78 percent of those chose to receive them.
The problem is, most physicians do not follow professional guidelines for how to offer the tests or discuss the results. This same 2016 study found that many physicians do not present these tests as a personal choice or talk about how the results might be used. The authors wrote that many women “report being unaware of what the test was for or what the results mean.”
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists also recommends that doctors provide respectful, neutral counseling when discussing the options of continuing or terminating the pregnancy to every woman with a prenatal diagnosis of a genetic disorder or a major structural abnormality. According to the National Council on Disability, 86 percent of medical providers talked about termination of the pregnancy after a prenatal diagnosis, whereas only 37 percent discussed continuing the pregnancy. Furthermore, genetic counselors and doctors who offer information overwhelmingly relate biomedical concerns without describing the social supports available for families, or the self-reported happiness of most people with Down syndrome.
In 2008, Congress unanimously passed the Prenatally and Postnatally Diagnosed Conditions Awareness Act, intended to ensure women receive accurate and up-to-date information about Down syndrome. But Congress never appropriated the funds necessary to put this law into action. Such funding could be used to provide balanced information about children with chromosomal conditions to medical providers, train health care workers to deliver prenatal diagnoses, and establish a hotline and other methods of support for women who receive a prenatal diagnosis.
The medical establishment assumes women want the option of abortion in the face of a positive test result. Indeed, 56 percent of Americans polled by Gallup in 2018 support women’s right to choose abortion in the first trimester when the child would be born with a mental disability, compared with 29 percent who said abortion should be legal in all circumstances. And while population-based studies have not been conducted to provide firm data about the effect of these new prenatal tests on termination rates, a comprehensive review of studies published from 1995 to 2011 suggests that 67 percent of American women who received Down syndrome diagnoses on prenatal tests had abortions.
I understand the fear many women feel in facing a prenatal diagnosis. I wish more of them knew that countless families with children with Down syndrome have lives marked by love and joy, lives that have been changed for the better. While I see every abortion as a tragic loss of life, I am especially saddened for the families who have chosen abortion because they feel scared or alone at the thought of raising a child with a disability.
These decisions appear to be individual ones, and yet every decision about whether or not to bring a child with a disability into our world is made within a social context. Women who choose to continue or to terminate pregnancies after receiving a prenatal diagnosis are not making solely personal decisions. They are making decisions that reflect their communal and social reality. These decisions both create and advance a less diverse world, a world less tethered to the limitations and vulnerabilities that invite us into relationships of mutual care and concern for one another.
If having a child with a disability is seen only as an individual choice rather than a socially supported and valuable way of being, we can imagine a future in which governmental support could be denied to women and families who “choose” to bring children with Down syndrome or other genetic conditions into the world.
Penny’s relatively ordinary life is due in large part to our own social situation. We live in a town with ample funding for special education. Penny received multiple therapies each week in her early years. She also has been expected and able to contribute to the life of her community. Those contributions are as ordinary as her mornings: A word of encouragement. An inability to hold a grudge. A love for nachos and Olivia Rodrigo and the color orange.
Done right, prenatal testing could allow parents to prepare well for the birth of their children. But without broad social acceptance of people with disabilities, without a medical establishment that conveys the positive social situations of many people with disabilities, and without funding for accurate and up-to-date information in the face of a prenatal diagnosis, more and more women will face decisions about their pregnancies without the support they deserve.
And the more we assume that prenatal diagnoses of Down syndrome will result in abortion, the more we will send a message to all our children that their worth depends on their ability to achieve. Instead of reinforcing structures that welcome only homogeneous bodies and minds as units of production, we need a system that supports and welcomes a diverse range of humans with their particular limits and struggles and gifts.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/01/opin ... 778d3e6de3
By Amy Julia Becker
Ms. Becker, who writes about parenting, disability and religion, is the author of the forthcoming “To Be Made Well,” about what healing looks like on a personal and societal level.
Our 16-year-old daughter, Penny, wakes up to the beeping of her alarm. On her way downstairs, she picks up her iPhone to check her texts. She eats breakfast, gathers her sneakers and pompoms for cheerleading and heads to school. When Penny was diagnosed with Down syndrome a few hours after she was born, I didn’t expect our mornings to feel so ordinary.
When I was pregnant with Penny, I chose to receive a “quad screen,” an elective and noninvasive blood test around 16 weeks that looked for elevated levels of three different hormones and one protein. I soon learned I had a one in 313 chance of having a baby with Down syndrome, higher than expected for a woman my age. We followed up with a detailed ultrasound, which showed a “healthy baby.”
Penny was, indeed, healthy. After she was born, she received a robust eight out of 10 on her Apgar score, a test doctors administer to check the baby’s heart rate and other signs, and came home from the hospital two days later. She also came home with Down syndrome.
Many women whose prenatal tests looked similar to mine are counseled by medical professionals to pursue further diagnostic testing, and, with a confirmation of Down syndrome, to consider abortion. Every day, I’m glad I didn’t.
Prenatal testing has only increased in availability, prevalence and accuracy since I was pregnant with Penny. And while these tests can offer information about the chromosomal makeup of fetuses, prenatal tests cannot prepare parents for the hardships, fragility or wonder inherent within every human life. Testing rests on an assumption that desirable children conform to a norm of development, alongside a corresponding thought that undesirable children deviate from that norm cognitively or physically. You can see the result of these assumptions in the high abortion rates for fetuses with Down syndrome.
The assumptions behind our prenatal testing programs also condition parents — and society as a whole — to see our kids as valuable according to their physical strength, intellectual capacity and social acuity rather than setting us up to receive their lives as they are given.
We need to change our approach to prenatal testing by ensuring that pregnant women who receive prenatal diagnoses get accurate information about what it’s like to raise a child with a disability and expanding the awareness of our collective responsibility to welcome and support diverse lives.
Today, prenatal screening tests are up to 99 percent accurate in detecting fetuses with Down syndrome, and they are offered starting at nine weeks. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends presenting all pregnant women with the option of prenatal screening tests. Many choose to take them — in one study, 90 percent of pregnant women were offered these tests, and 78 percent of those chose to receive them.
The problem is, most physicians do not follow professional guidelines for how to offer the tests or discuss the results. This same 2016 study found that many physicians do not present these tests as a personal choice or talk about how the results might be used. The authors wrote that many women “report being unaware of what the test was for or what the results mean.”
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists also recommends that doctors provide respectful, neutral counseling when discussing the options of continuing or terminating the pregnancy to every woman with a prenatal diagnosis of a genetic disorder or a major structural abnormality. According to the National Council on Disability, 86 percent of medical providers talked about termination of the pregnancy after a prenatal diagnosis, whereas only 37 percent discussed continuing the pregnancy. Furthermore, genetic counselors and doctors who offer information overwhelmingly relate biomedical concerns without describing the social supports available for families, or the self-reported happiness of most people with Down syndrome.
In 2008, Congress unanimously passed the Prenatally and Postnatally Diagnosed Conditions Awareness Act, intended to ensure women receive accurate and up-to-date information about Down syndrome. But Congress never appropriated the funds necessary to put this law into action. Such funding could be used to provide balanced information about children with chromosomal conditions to medical providers, train health care workers to deliver prenatal diagnoses, and establish a hotline and other methods of support for women who receive a prenatal diagnosis.
The medical establishment assumes women want the option of abortion in the face of a positive test result. Indeed, 56 percent of Americans polled by Gallup in 2018 support women’s right to choose abortion in the first trimester when the child would be born with a mental disability, compared with 29 percent who said abortion should be legal in all circumstances. And while population-based studies have not been conducted to provide firm data about the effect of these new prenatal tests on termination rates, a comprehensive review of studies published from 1995 to 2011 suggests that 67 percent of American women who received Down syndrome diagnoses on prenatal tests had abortions.
I understand the fear many women feel in facing a prenatal diagnosis. I wish more of them knew that countless families with children with Down syndrome have lives marked by love and joy, lives that have been changed for the better. While I see every abortion as a tragic loss of life, I am especially saddened for the families who have chosen abortion because they feel scared or alone at the thought of raising a child with a disability.
These decisions appear to be individual ones, and yet every decision about whether or not to bring a child with a disability into our world is made within a social context. Women who choose to continue or to terminate pregnancies after receiving a prenatal diagnosis are not making solely personal decisions. They are making decisions that reflect their communal and social reality. These decisions both create and advance a less diverse world, a world less tethered to the limitations and vulnerabilities that invite us into relationships of mutual care and concern for one another.
If having a child with a disability is seen only as an individual choice rather than a socially supported and valuable way of being, we can imagine a future in which governmental support could be denied to women and families who “choose” to bring children with Down syndrome or other genetic conditions into the world.
Penny’s relatively ordinary life is due in large part to our own social situation. We live in a town with ample funding for special education. Penny received multiple therapies each week in her early years. She also has been expected and able to contribute to the life of her community. Those contributions are as ordinary as her mornings: A word of encouragement. An inability to hold a grudge. A love for nachos and Olivia Rodrigo and the color orange.
Done right, prenatal testing could allow parents to prepare well for the birth of their children. But without broad social acceptance of people with disabilities, without a medical establishment that conveys the positive social situations of many people with disabilities, and without funding for accurate and up-to-date information in the face of a prenatal diagnosis, more and more women will face decisions about their pregnancies without the support they deserve.
And the more we assume that prenatal diagnoses of Down syndrome will result in abortion, the more we will send a message to all our children that their worth depends on their ability to achieve. Instead of reinforcing structures that welcome only homogeneous bodies and minds as units of production, we need a system that supports and welcomes a diverse range of humans with their particular limits and struggles and gifts.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/01/opin ... 778d3e6de3
What I Want My Kids to Learn About American Racism
By Eboo Patel
Mr. Patel is the founder and president of Interfaith America, a nonprofit organization in Chicago that promotes cooperation among people of different religions. He is the author of “We Need to Build,” from which this essay is adapted.
I first heard the phrase “white supremacy” in my introductory sociology course at the University of Illinois in 1993. The image of men wearing white sheets and burning crosses came to mind, and I figured my professor was referring to ancient history. But I remember her continuing: “White supremacy is the assumption that the cultural patterns associated with white people — from clothes to language to aesthetic preferences to family structure — are normal, and the patterns associated with people of color are inferior.”
Wait, didn’t that basically describe my entire life? Feeling strange about my Indian grandmother’s clothes, about my grandmother’s cooking, about the fact that my grandmother even lived with us.
I learned that there was a whole language for this, with concepts like “institutionalized racism” and “structures of oppression.” There were influential theories, indeed entire academic fields, built on those ideas. And however bad it was for South Asian immigrants like me, white supremacy and institutionalized racism operated in the lives of other groups, including Black people, Native Americans and Latinos, in specific and often more challenging ways.
I could not get enough. I read bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Paulo Freire. Understanding white supremacy helped me see my life in a different light.
I remembered the presentation my dad had given at a conference of South Asian businesspeople in Chicago. Someone asked him why he had decided to buy a Subway sandwich store instead of starting an independent shop. “Which white people do you know are going to buy sandwiches from a brown guy born in India named Sadruddin?” I recall him responding. “A recognizable franchise covers your dark skin and ethnic name. It helps you hide.”
At the time the comment had struck me as perfectly logical and entirely unremarkable. My dad had simply spoken a basic truth of life as a brown-skinned immigrant in the United States, the equivalent of noting that gravity pulls you down. I remember most of the audience nodding along. But later, based on what I learned in my classes, I interpreted the moment differently: It was a wound from a bullet fired from the gun of American racism.
The deeper I read, the more I saw the entire world through that lens. I soon couldn’t see much else. Racism permeated everything. My principal identity was as a victim of racism. My singular purpose was to call racism out, beat it down and give it a violent death in front of a crowd.
I lost sight of many things, like how fortunate I was to be a middle-class college student spending my days reading and the role I had in building something better. I was in a conspiracy against my own agency. I sense a similar tendency in the way race and racism are taught in some schools today. Calling out racism is part of the work, not all of it. After you get rid of the things you don’t like, you need to build the things you do.
My kids have learned about “privilege” and “oppression” much earlier than I did — they were using these words in everyday conversations by the time they were 10 years old.
They didn’t learn this from me or their teachers at school. In fact, I find myself bemused by all the controversy over learning about race in elementary schools — as if the classroom is where most kids are first hearing about race.
The ways racism plays a role in American life are obvious to kids from a very young age. Before some kids can ride a bike, they are watching videos of police officers killing Black men. They see Colin Kaepernick kneel during the national anthem, hear the political statements of LeBron James and Naomi Osaka, listen to songs like “This Is America” by Childish Gambino, read books like “The Hate U Give,” watch television shows like “All American” and, above all, experience racism themselves.
It would be a tragedy if teachers pretended none of this was happening and left kids to their own devices to figure it out. The job of the school is to provide broader context for the facts of the world and to pass along the knowledge and skills so that students can navigate it. That means that a full history of America’s past and present, our ugliness and our beauty, needs to be taught.
And I would be remiss in my duties if I allowed my kids to fall into the same victim mind-set that I succumbed to as a college student. We are South Asian American Muslims, and my kids have experienced their fair share of anti-Muslim taunts, which, these days, are just as much about racial bigotry as religious bias. We work with the school so that it is better equipped to deal with the problem of prejudice, and then I remind my kids what a privilege it is to be Muslim. I want them to derive their identity from loving Islam, not hating Islamophobia.
My kids are now 12 and 15. As they progress through adolescence and become even more attuned to the politics and culture of their nation, I want their schools to play the appropriate role in shaping them to be participating citizens of a diverse democracy. That means teaching an expansive version of American history and instilling in them a sense of responsibility to help make the next chapter more just and inclusive. Citizenship is not a spectator sport.
That was a lesson it took me until the end of college to learn.
In my final semester at the University of Illinois, I did an independent study with an African American female professor of theater and education. Toward the end of the semester she invited me to attend a dress rehearsal of a play she had written with her graduate students. “Children are one of the most oppressed groups in our society,” she told me. The play was an experiment at a type of theater that put kids at the center.
I was eager to demonstrate how much I had learned in our independent study and was the first person to stand during the talk-back session after the performance. My professor smiled broadly when she saw me. I used a tone dripping with scorn. I targeted a scene in the play where a child retreats to his own room after a fight with a parent. In front of the entire audience, I declared my professor and her graduate students guilty of racism and classism for writing a character who had his own room. “What about all the families where kids don’t have their own rooms? Or the Black and brown families that don’t have houses? Don’t you realize that your play is only further oppressing them?”
The cast stared at me in disbelief. There were no more questions or comments from the audience. My critique effectively shut everything else down.
I had hoped my professor would be proud of me. So the email she sent came as a total surprise. I remember the contents as if I read them yesterday.
Her students, she wrote, had worked so hard on the play and were deeply hurt by my comments. She was hurt, too. Why hadn’t I offered constructive suggestions, she wondered.
She closed with this: Since you were disappointed with the play that these students wrote, you should try your hand at creating something better. It is always harder to create than it is to criticize.
I sat with that email for a long time. My professor was teaching me that devoting yourself to seeing the bad in everything means that you ignore the good and you absolve yourself of responsibility for building things that are better.
I know that there is a role for people who sit in the audience and criticize the show, but it was starting to dawn on me that that’s not who I wanted to be. I wanted to be the person putting something on the stage.
Parenting is in no small part the process of praying your kids get right the things that you got wrong. I hope my kids’ schools teach them that considering the role of race is a question that should frequently be asked, not a conclusion that is already reached.
Because of the way I interpreted the ideas of white supremacy and structural racism in college, the only comment I remembered of my father’s during that conference of South Asian businesspeople was the one he made about race. But my father said many other things too. He pointed out that the Subway sandwich stores we owned had given us a comfortable life, including filling the savings accounts that put my brother and me through college. Several of his managers, recent immigrants from South Asia, went on to have their own Subway sandwich stores and earned enough to put their kids through college too. My dad was proud of what he built, and the difference it had made for his family and broader community.
I don’t want my kids to shy away from confronting racism, but I don’t want whatever racism they might experience to make them lose sight of all of their other identities and privileges. Above all, I want my two sons to understand that responsible citizenship in a diverse democracy is not principally about noticing what’s bad; it’s about constructing what’s good. You need to defeat the things you do not love by building the things you do.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/10/opin ... 778d3e6de3
What Parents Need to Know About Sharing Breast Milk
More families are informally swapping milk during the baby formula shortage. But experts warn there are risks.
Margie Smith has 2,400 ounces of breast milk stored in her basement freezer. She has donated much of her extra milk to parents she connects with online.Credit...Mary Mathis for The New York Times
Margie Smith has always produced much more breast milk than her children need. When her son was born three years ago, Ms. Smith — who pumps exclusively — was making more than 50 ounces of breast milk per day, “enough to feed twins at least,” she said. With her 10-month-old daughter, she is producing less, but still more than her baby can drink.
So Ms. Smith, 32, has donated breast milk she pumped for both of her babies, giving away roughly 3,500 ounces to families she has found online. “It’s been nice that I’m doing this for my children, but I’ve also been able to help other little babies,” she said. Her children each did brief stints in the neonatal intensive care unit, where they received some donor breast milk, so she feels as though she is paying it forward in a way.
“Someone was kind enough to donate so that my babies can have it, so I’ve always felt the need to give back and help another mom that’s struggling,” said Ms. Smith, who works as an X-ray technician and lives in Elgin, Ill.
As the nationwide baby formula shortage continues to wear on new parents struggling to keep their babies fed, some have turned to informal breast milk sharing — a practice that predates the current crisis by thousands of years. Human Milk for Human Babies, a Facebook-based, peer-to-peer breast milk sharing platform, says that “potential donors and recipients are joining in higher numbers than before the shortage,” and notes that there has been a particular increase in one-time donations from mothers who have never donated before.
While parents use donor milk because they believe it is good for their babies, and lactating mothers may donate out of a sense of altruism, experts say the practice can come with serious risks. The American Academy of Pediatrics and the Food and Drug Administration both discourage casual sharing, pointing to the potential for contamination, as well as the chance that parents with the best of intentions will unwittingly expose their babies to harmful medications or drugs.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/20/well ... 778d3e6de3
Margie Smith has 2,400 ounces of breast milk stored in her basement freezer. She has donated much of her extra milk to parents she connects with online.Credit...Mary Mathis for The New York Times
Margie Smith has always produced much more breast milk than her children need. When her son was born three years ago, Ms. Smith — who pumps exclusively — was making more than 50 ounces of breast milk per day, “enough to feed twins at least,” she said. With her 10-month-old daughter, she is producing less, but still more than her baby can drink.
So Ms. Smith, 32, has donated breast milk she pumped for both of her babies, giving away roughly 3,500 ounces to families she has found online. “It’s been nice that I’m doing this for my children, but I’ve also been able to help other little babies,” she said. Her children each did brief stints in the neonatal intensive care unit, where they received some donor breast milk, so she feels as though she is paying it forward in a way.
“Someone was kind enough to donate so that my babies can have it, so I’ve always felt the need to give back and help another mom that’s struggling,” said Ms. Smith, who works as an X-ray technician and lives in Elgin, Ill.
As the nationwide baby formula shortage continues to wear on new parents struggling to keep their babies fed, some have turned to informal breast milk sharing — a practice that predates the current crisis by thousands of years. Human Milk for Human Babies, a Facebook-based, peer-to-peer breast milk sharing platform, says that “potential donors and recipients are joining in higher numbers than before the shortage,” and notes that there has been a particular increase in one-time donations from mothers who have never donated before.
While parents use donor milk because they believe it is good for their babies, and lactating mothers may donate out of a sense of altruism, experts say the practice can come with serious risks. The American Academy of Pediatrics and the Food and Drug Administration both discourage casual sharing, pointing to the potential for contamination, as well as the chance that parents with the best of intentions will unwittingly expose their babies to harmful medications or drugs.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/20/well ... 778d3e6de3
Re: Parenting Issues
Leaving ‘Mr. Mom’ Behind
With more men choosing to stay at home with their kids, the stigma — and the notion that they’re just filling in for mom — could finally be fading.
Gerard Gousman worked as a tour manager for artists like DMX, Salt-N-Pepa and Cat Power. But when his third child was born, he became a stay-at-home father.Credit...Jovelle Tamayo for The New York Times
As a father of two, Gerard Gousman enjoyed his career as a tour manager, working for artists like DMX, Salt-N-Pepa and Cat Power.
But the job required him to travel about six months out of the year. So when his wife, Quaneisha Gousman, became pregnant in 2018, he crunched some numbers. Mr. Gousman, now 45, quit his job to stay home to care for the children while Dr. Gousman, who has a doctorate in industrial and systems engineering, continued working in user experience research in Seattle, where the family lives. Becoming a stay-at-home father, he said, “was an easy decision once we realized it was viable.”
Mr. Gousman, who has since joined the board of the National At-Home Dad Network, said the move has allowed him to take an active role in his children’s education and “build the community that I want for my family.”
The percentage of stay-at-home parents who are fathers has risen dramatically over the last three decades. Pew Research Center, using the Census Bureau’s Annual Social and Economic Supplement, published a report over the summer showing that almost 1 in 5 American parents who do not work for pay are fathers. From 1989 to 2021 (the latest Pew data), that represented a 63.6 percent increase — the result of both rapid growth in the share of fathers who do not work for pay and a slight decrease in the share of mothers who do not work for pay. (The share of women working is currently at an all-time high, driven by mothers of children under 5, who have generally been likeliest to stay home.)
Image
Mr. Gousman walks through school doors with two of his children.
Mr. Gousman said becoming a stay-at-home dad allowed him to take an active role in his children’s education and “build the community that I want for my family.”Credit...Jovelle Tamayo for The New York Times
The continued rise may be partly attributable to the pandemic and its associated recession, when some men lost their jobs and very much liked being at home; or to the recession of 2008; the high cost of child care; and higher rates of women working in jobs that require graduate degrees than men, creating more job stability for the former.
For many families, a stay-at-home parent is not an option — they need two incomes to make ends meet. Others decide it’s economically beneficial for one parent to stay home — employers pay disproportionately more to workers that can be on-call at work, meaning another parent has to be on-call at home, and child care can cost more than a parent’s take-home pay.
Stephanie Coontz, a historian and author of the forthcoming “For Better and Worse: The Problematic Past and Uncertain Future of Marriage,” said shared labor is not necessarily a new development. Before the 20th century, couples were partners in work like “setting up a farm or small business,” she said. In colonial households, women were often referred to as “deputy husbands,” she said, because if the husband had to leave (to fight, for instance), it was up to the wife to keep the business running.
But in the 20th century and early aughts, being a stay-at-home father came with stigma. In fact, the notion of a father as primary caretaker was considered so absurd that it produced comedies like “Mr. Mom” (1983), “Daddy Day Care” (2003) and “Cheaper By the Dozen” (2003), to name a few.
Today, the stigma is lessening for some — as one bellwether, dad humor is all over social media — as more men become stay-at-home dads by choice.
The pendulum has seemingly swung so much that there is now comedy about working mothers’ resentment. In her 2022 special “Don Wong,” the comedian and actress Ali Wong pokes fun at the people who asked whether her then-husband, Justin Hakuta, was uncomfortable with her raunchy jokes.
“My husband is at home. In the house that I bought. Telling time, on the Rolex I got him for Father’s Day,” she said, adding that he doesn’t care “what I say onstage, because he’s too busy living the life I wanted for myself.”
The couple split in 2022, but she thanked him in her acceptance speech at the 2024 Golden Globes: “It’s because of you that I’m able to be a working mother.”
Image
Hector Jaeger holds a children’s book called “Flute” with his two-year-old daughter Pip in his lap and a gigantic stuffed animal to his left.
“I felt very much like a misfit,” said Hector Jaeger, who became a stay-at-home father in 1990 when his second daughter was born. Today, as a stay-at-home grandfather, he said, “it’s just the joy.”Credit...Jocelyn Lee for The New York Times
‘I Felt Very Much Like a Misfit’
Hector Jaeger, who ran a small business and also worked in carpentry, became a full-time stay-at-home father in 1990, when his second of three daughters was born. Education factored into the decision: Mr. Jaeger has a high school diploma, while his wife, Nancy Jaeger, who runs a psychotherapy practice, has a master’s degree.
Mr. Jaeger, who lives in Bath, Me., said the stigma of being a stay-at-home father in the 1990s was isolating: When people asked him what he did for work, he said his answer was usually a conversation ender. “People didn’t know what to do with that.”
“I felt very much like a misfit,” he added.
“It was very lonely for him,” said his wife, Ms. Jaeger. “That would be a regret I had for him,” adding that still the roles made sense because her husband is “a natural nurturer.”
Some fathers were able to find community with other stay-at-home dads. Larry Lewis, who played professional baseball and worked for a metal-stamping company before becoming a stay-at-home father in 2003, would often take his daughter, Marianna, to meet up with a group of three other stay-at-home dads — whose wives worked at the same insurance company as his — and their children at a park near their home in East Dundee, Ill.
Image
A photo of Larry Lewis with his young daughter on a baseball diamond. They are both smiling.
Larry Lewis, who played professional baseball and worked in metal-stamping before becoming a stay-at-home father to his daughter, Marianna, in 2003.Credit...via Larry Lewis
Nedra Glover Tawwab, a social worker and the author of “Set Boundaries, Find Peace,” said that at her practice in Charlotte, N.C., women with husbands who stay home often face stigma too. Referring to domestic work, she said that women often receive critiques along the lines of: “Even though you’re working, you should be doing all of these other things, because you’re a woman, you’re a mother.”
She said that her clients often find that talking about their arrangement with people outside the house “is not very safe” because so many people are “making judgments about your situation.”
Some stay-at-home parents have, of course, made a lucrative business of it. Bryan Lambillotte, 38, of San Diego, Calif., always wanted to be a stay-at-home father. In March 2022, he and his husband, Christopher, who is the chief operating officer and co-owner of a medical device company, welcomed twins — a son and a daughter.
In 2021, the couple decided that Mr. Lambillotte, who had lost his job as a sales manager at the Hard Rock Hotel in San Diego during the pandemic, would be the primary caregiver. That same year Mr. Lambillotte began chronicling the couple’s path to parenthood on Instagram. (The couple also has a TikTok account with over one million followers.)
The couple’s following grew, and Mr. Lambillotte turned it into an LLC and hired an agent and manager who help facilitate brand collaborations. The couple hired a nanny for three days a week, so Mr. Lambillotte could focus on his business part-time.
As a result, he has tweaked his title: “stay-at-home working dad.”
Image
Bryan Lambillotte holds his two toddler twins, who are holding stuffed animals.
Bryan Lambillotte always wanted to be a stay-at-home father. His documentation of it on social media has created an income and made him a “stay-at-home working dad,” he said.Credit...via Bryan Lambillotte
‘Just the Joy’
While Mr. Jaeger said he never regretted his decision to stay home with his daughters in the ’90s and ’00s, he sometimes worried he wasn’t enough for them. “I’d wonder, did they think I was not quite measuring up to these money and power type males?”
But Mr. Jaeger, who is now 73, said that his wife’s work set a positive example. “The fact that she was the primary breadwinner undoubtedly has had a huge impact on our children,” he said.
The couple’s youngest daughter, Anna Jaeger, 30, now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, said, “I didn’t know any different and I didn’t wish anything was different.” She praised how involved he was at her school. “The playground is actually called Hectorville” because he built it.
Today Mr. Jaeger, who faced so much isolation 30 years ago, is feeling much more relaxed in his current role: stay-at-home grandfather. Three days a week, he takes care of his 2-year-old granddaughter, Pip — the child of his oldest daughter, Gretchen Jaeger, who lives near him in Maine and runs the small business Mr. Jaeger ran before becoming a father.
He acknowledged that being a male caretaker for a baby today might feel much easier: “I almost feel like I’m cheating, because it’s so, so much fun.” But, he acknowledged, “I do everything during the day. It’s just the joy,” he said, “without the work.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/17/styl ... 778d3e6de3
With more men choosing to stay at home with their kids, the stigma — and the notion that they’re just filling in for mom — could finally be fading.
Gerard Gousman worked as a tour manager for artists like DMX, Salt-N-Pepa and Cat Power. But when his third child was born, he became a stay-at-home father.Credit...Jovelle Tamayo for The New York Times
As a father of two, Gerard Gousman enjoyed his career as a tour manager, working for artists like DMX, Salt-N-Pepa and Cat Power.
But the job required him to travel about six months out of the year. So when his wife, Quaneisha Gousman, became pregnant in 2018, he crunched some numbers. Mr. Gousman, now 45, quit his job to stay home to care for the children while Dr. Gousman, who has a doctorate in industrial and systems engineering, continued working in user experience research in Seattle, where the family lives. Becoming a stay-at-home father, he said, “was an easy decision once we realized it was viable.”
Mr. Gousman, who has since joined the board of the National At-Home Dad Network, said the move has allowed him to take an active role in his children’s education and “build the community that I want for my family.”
The percentage of stay-at-home parents who are fathers has risen dramatically over the last three decades. Pew Research Center, using the Census Bureau’s Annual Social and Economic Supplement, published a report over the summer showing that almost 1 in 5 American parents who do not work for pay are fathers. From 1989 to 2021 (the latest Pew data), that represented a 63.6 percent increase — the result of both rapid growth in the share of fathers who do not work for pay and a slight decrease in the share of mothers who do not work for pay. (The share of women working is currently at an all-time high, driven by mothers of children under 5, who have generally been likeliest to stay home.)
Image
Mr. Gousman walks through school doors with two of his children.
Mr. Gousman said becoming a stay-at-home dad allowed him to take an active role in his children’s education and “build the community that I want for my family.”Credit...Jovelle Tamayo for The New York Times
The continued rise may be partly attributable to the pandemic and its associated recession, when some men lost their jobs and very much liked being at home; or to the recession of 2008; the high cost of child care; and higher rates of women working in jobs that require graduate degrees than men, creating more job stability for the former.
For many families, a stay-at-home parent is not an option — they need two incomes to make ends meet. Others decide it’s economically beneficial for one parent to stay home — employers pay disproportionately more to workers that can be on-call at work, meaning another parent has to be on-call at home, and child care can cost more than a parent’s take-home pay.
Stephanie Coontz, a historian and author of the forthcoming “For Better and Worse: The Problematic Past and Uncertain Future of Marriage,” said shared labor is not necessarily a new development. Before the 20th century, couples were partners in work like “setting up a farm or small business,” she said. In colonial households, women were often referred to as “deputy husbands,” she said, because if the husband had to leave (to fight, for instance), it was up to the wife to keep the business running.
But in the 20th century and early aughts, being a stay-at-home father came with stigma. In fact, the notion of a father as primary caretaker was considered so absurd that it produced comedies like “Mr. Mom” (1983), “Daddy Day Care” (2003) and “Cheaper By the Dozen” (2003), to name a few.
Today, the stigma is lessening for some — as one bellwether, dad humor is all over social media — as more men become stay-at-home dads by choice.
The pendulum has seemingly swung so much that there is now comedy about working mothers’ resentment. In her 2022 special “Don Wong,” the comedian and actress Ali Wong pokes fun at the people who asked whether her then-husband, Justin Hakuta, was uncomfortable with her raunchy jokes.
“My husband is at home. In the house that I bought. Telling time, on the Rolex I got him for Father’s Day,” she said, adding that he doesn’t care “what I say onstage, because he’s too busy living the life I wanted for myself.”
The couple split in 2022, but she thanked him in her acceptance speech at the 2024 Golden Globes: “It’s because of you that I’m able to be a working mother.”
Image
Hector Jaeger holds a children’s book called “Flute” with his two-year-old daughter Pip in his lap and a gigantic stuffed animal to his left.
“I felt very much like a misfit,” said Hector Jaeger, who became a stay-at-home father in 1990 when his second daughter was born. Today, as a stay-at-home grandfather, he said, “it’s just the joy.”Credit...Jocelyn Lee for The New York Times
‘I Felt Very Much Like a Misfit’
Hector Jaeger, who ran a small business and also worked in carpentry, became a full-time stay-at-home father in 1990, when his second of three daughters was born. Education factored into the decision: Mr. Jaeger has a high school diploma, while his wife, Nancy Jaeger, who runs a psychotherapy practice, has a master’s degree.
Mr. Jaeger, who lives in Bath, Me., said the stigma of being a stay-at-home father in the 1990s was isolating: When people asked him what he did for work, he said his answer was usually a conversation ender. “People didn’t know what to do with that.”
“I felt very much like a misfit,” he added.
“It was very lonely for him,” said his wife, Ms. Jaeger. “That would be a regret I had for him,” adding that still the roles made sense because her husband is “a natural nurturer.”
Some fathers were able to find community with other stay-at-home dads. Larry Lewis, who played professional baseball and worked for a metal-stamping company before becoming a stay-at-home father in 2003, would often take his daughter, Marianna, to meet up with a group of three other stay-at-home dads — whose wives worked at the same insurance company as his — and their children at a park near their home in East Dundee, Ill.
Image
A photo of Larry Lewis with his young daughter on a baseball diamond. They are both smiling.
Larry Lewis, who played professional baseball and worked in metal-stamping before becoming a stay-at-home father to his daughter, Marianna, in 2003.Credit...via Larry Lewis
Nedra Glover Tawwab, a social worker and the author of “Set Boundaries, Find Peace,” said that at her practice in Charlotte, N.C., women with husbands who stay home often face stigma too. Referring to domestic work, she said that women often receive critiques along the lines of: “Even though you’re working, you should be doing all of these other things, because you’re a woman, you’re a mother.”
She said that her clients often find that talking about their arrangement with people outside the house “is not very safe” because so many people are “making judgments about your situation.”
Some stay-at-home parents have, of course, made a lucrative business of it. Bryan Lambillotte, 38, of San Diego, Calif., always wanted to be a stay-at-home father. In March 2022, he and his husband, Christopher, who is the chief operating officer and co-owner of a medical device company, welcomed twins — a son and a daughter.
In 2021, the couple decided that Mr. Lambillotte, who had lost his job as a sales manager at the Hard Rock Hotel in San Diego during the pandemic, would be the primary caregiver. That same year Mr. Lambillotte began chronicling the couple’s path to parenthood on Instagram. (The couple also has a TikTok account with over one million followers.)
The couple’s following grew, and Mr. Lambillotte turned it into an LLC and hired an agent and manager who help facilitate brand collaborations. The couple hired a nanny for three days a week, so Mr. Lambillotte could focus on his business part-time.
As a result, he has tweaked his title: “stay-at-home working dad.”
Image
Bryan Lambillotte holds his two toddler twins, who are holding stuffed animals.
Bryan Lambillotte always wanted to be a stay-at-home father. His documentation of it on social media has created an income and made him a “stay-at-home working dad,” he said.Credit...via Bryan Lambillotte
‘Just the Joy’
While Mr. Jaeger said he never regretted his decision to stay home with his daughters in the ’90s and ’00s, he sometimes worried he wasn’t enough for them. “I’d wonder, did they think I was not quite measuring up to these money and power type males?”
But Mr. Jaeger, who is now 73, said that his wife’s work set a positive example. “The fact that she was the primary breadwinner undoubtedly has had a huge impact on our children,” he said.
The couple’s youngest daughter, Anna Jaeger, 30, now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, said, “I didn’t know any different and I didn’t wish anything was different.” She praised how involved he was at her school. “The playground is actually called Hectorville” because he built it.
Today Mr. Jaeger, who faced so much isolation 30 years ago, is feeling much more relaxed in his current role: stay-at-home grandfather. Three days a week, he takes care of his 2-year-old granddaughter, Pip — the child of his oldest daughter, Gretchen Jaeger, who lives near him in Maine and runs the small business Mr. Jaeger ran before becoming a father.
He acknowledged that being a male caretaker for a baby today might feel much easier: “I almost feel like I’m cheating, because it’s so, so much fun.” But, he acknowledged, “I do everything during the day. It’s just the joy,” he said, “without the work.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/17/styl ... 778d3e6de3
Re: Parenting Issues
Mothers Are Told
That Natural
Childbirth Is Best.
Video: https://static01.nytimes.com/newsgraphi ... ldberg.mp4
It Isn’t.
A few weeks after I had my first child, I ran into a woman from my prenatal yoga class who was still pregnant. She told me, sadly, that her baby was breech, and because her desperate efforts to get him turned around had failed, she was going to need a C-section. I told her that I’d had one too and it had gone great; coming home from the hospital with a healthy baby and no rips or tears except the incision on my abdomen made me feel like I’d gotten away with something. My response surprised her, because others she spoke to treated missing out on a vaginal birth as a great tragedy. “You were the only person who made me feel comfortable about it,” she told me recently.
Even if you believe, as many experts do, that America’s C-section rate is too high, such surgeries will always be necessary in a significant minority of pregnancies. (The World Health Organization considers a C-section rate of about 10 percent to be ideal.) Yet the natural-parenting movement, which purports to recreate the practices of a romanticized premodern past, often makes women who’ve delivered via C-section, or with epidurals and other medical interventions, feel like failures. And for some, the movement’s dictates blight the early years of parenthood with rigid expectations for exclusive breastfeeding, constant baby-wearing and co-sleeping. My liberal, upper-middle-class urban milieu likes to pride itself on trusting the science, but many of us are in thrall to a toxic ideology whose legitimate insights are braided with myth and pseudoscience.
The natural-parenting movement, like the anti-vaccine movement, relies on our forgetfulness about what life was like before the innovations that it denounces. Having a baby without medical help may be natural, but so is obstetric fistula and hemorrhaging to death. It’s a miracle of modern medicine that over the course of the 20th century, America’s maternal mortality rate declined by almost 99 percent. There has never been a time when all mothers could breastfeed, and before the advent of baby formula, as the scholar Carla Cevasco wrote, “many families had to endure the agony of losing a baby to starvation, malnutrition, or related disease.” When it comes to human reproduction, nature is neither kind nor efficient.
Also like the anti-vaccine movement, the natural-parenting movement is a reaction to very real failures in our medical system, which has more than earned people’s distrust. Many women have had experiences with OB-GYNs that leave them feeling disrespected and abused. Some doctors don’t take women’s pain — especially Black women’s pain — seriously. Some force unwanted and unnecessary interventions on women against their will. Midwives and doulas may give women the sustained, individualized attention that they should be getting from their doctors but too often aren’t.
But while natural parenting sells itself as a vehicle for women’s liberation from a patriarchal medical establishment, it is shaped by its reactionary roots. Amy Tuteur, a retired OB-GYN, former Harvard Medical School instructor and longtime foe of the natural-parenting movement, points out that Grantly Dick-Read, the British obstetrician who coined the term “natural childbirth,” was a eugenicist who believed that “primitive” women didn’t experience pain in childbirth, unlike “over-civilized” white women. He regarded women’s fear of labor as hysterical and wanted upper-middle-class white women to get over it so that they’d have more babies. Ina May Gaskin, the grandmother of modern midwifery, called Dick-Read her “hero.”
La Leche League, which started popularizing breastfeeding in the 1950s, was founded by a group of Catholic homemakers with extremely traditional ideas about gender roles; as late as the 1980s, the group frowned on mothers of young children having jobs. When Dr. William Sears developed his influential theories on attachment parenting — a philosophy that promotes near-constant baby-wearing and co-sleeping — he was an evangelical Christian who believed that God had ordained women’s submission to their husbands. Natural parenting has since been thoroughly secularized, but it still preaches something akin to spiritual transcendence through female sacrifice.
Though natural parenting makes substantial demands on mothers, in almost every case, the evidence supporting its tenets is either lacking or exaggerated. Take, for example, nursing. In developed countries, where access to clean drinking water to mix formula isn’t an issue, breastfeeding has some modest effects. “The evidence suggests that breastfeeding may slightly decrease your infant’s chance of diarrhea and eczema,” wrote the economist Emily Oster, author of several books on pregnancy and parenting. But the other happy outcomes touted by breastfeeding evangelists, including increased intelligence, lower rates of obesity, and fewer allergies and behavioral problems, shrink or disappear when studies adjust for maternal class and I.Q.
Even if you distrust the natural-parenting movement, its pressures are hard to escape. Long before I was pregnant, my reporting on maternal health in countries without adequate obstetric care made me very suspicious of essentialist ideas about what Gaskin called “the ancient wisdom” of women’s bodies. During my first pregnancy, my sudden obsessive interest in birth led me to a harrowing phenomenon that I wrote about for the Daily Beast: traumatized women who’d lost babies during home births with unqualified midwives.
Nevertheless, when my first child needed more milk than I could produce, I was ashamed and hired a lactation consultant who had been profiled by this newspaper. She spoke to me with saccharine condescension and prescribed a regimen of round-the-clock feeding and pumping that would have sent me spiraling into postpartum depression if I’d stuck to it. The encounter was one of my lowest moments of early parenthood. Ironically, while there’s little evidence showing that breastfeeding is particularly important for babies, there’s quite a bit showing that maternal happiness is. If the natural-parenting movement really cared about children, it would do some introspection about how often it makes their parents miserable.
Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/202 ... ience.html
That Natural
Childbirth Is Best.
Video: https://static01.nytimes.com/newsgraphi ... ldberg.mp4
It Isn’t.
A few weeks after I had my first child, I ran into a woman from my prenatal yoga class who was still pregnant. She told me, sadly, that her baby was breech, and because her desperate efforts to get him turned around had failed, she was going to need a C-section. I told her that I’d had one too and it had gone great; coming home from the hospital with a healthy baby and no rips or tears except the incision on my abdomen made me feel like I’d gotten away with something. My response surprised her, because others she spoke to treated missing out on a vaginal birth as a great tragedy. “You were the only person who made me feel comfortable about it,” she told me recently.
Even if you believe, as many experts do, that America’s C-section rate is too high, such surgeries will always be necessary in a significant minority of pregnancies. (The World Health Organization considers a C-section rate of about 10 percent to be ideal.) Yet the natural-parenting movement, which purports to recreate the practices of a romanticized premodern past, often makes women who’ve delivered via C-section, or with epidurals and other medical interventions, feel like failures. And for some, the movement’s dictates blight the early years of parenthood with rigid expectations for exclusive breastfeeding, constant baby-wearing and co-sleeping. My liberal, upper-middle-class urban milieu likes to pride itself on trusting the science, but many of us are in thrall to a toxic ideology whose legitimate insights are braided with myth and pseudoscience.
The natural-parenting movement, like the anti-vaccine movement, relies on our forgetfulness about what life was like before the innovations that it denounces. Having a baby without medical help may be natural, but so is obstetric fistula and hemorrhaging to death. It’s a miracle of modern medicine that over the course of the 20th century, America’s maternal mortality rate declined by almost 99 percent. There has never been a time when all mothers could breastfeed, and before the advent of baby formula, as the scholar Carla Cevasco wrote, “many families had to endure the agony of losing a baby to starvation, malnutrition, or related disease.” When it comes to human reproduction, nature is neither kind nor efficient.
Also like the anti-vaccine movement, the natural-parenting movement is a reaction to very real failures in our medical system, which has more than earned people’s distrust. Many women have had experiences with OB-GYNs that leave them feeling disrespected and abused. Some doctors don’t take women’s pain — especially Black women’s pain — seriously. Some force unwanted and unnecessary interventions on women against their will. Midwives and doulas may give women the sustained, individualized attention that they should be getting from their doctors but too often aren’t.
But while natural parenting sells itself as a vehicle for women’s liberation from a patriarchal medical establishment, it is shaped by its reactionary roots. Amy Tuteur, a retired OB-GYN, former Harvard Medical School instructor and longtime foe of the natural-parenting movement, points out that Grantly Dick-Read, the British obstetrician who coined the term “natural childbirth,” was a eugenicist who believed that “primitive” women didn’t experience pain in childbirth, unlike “over-civilized” white women. He regarded women’s fear of labor as hysterical and wanted upper-middle-class white women to get over it so that they’d have more babies. Ina May Gaskin, the grandmother of modern midwifery, called Dick-Read her “hero.”
La Leche League, which started popularizing breastfeeding in the 1950s, was founded by a group of Catholic homemakers with extremely traditional ideas about gender roles; as late as the 1980s, the group frowned on mothers of young children having jobs. When Dr. William Sears developed his influential theories on attachment parenting — a philosophy that promotes near-constant baby-wearing and co-sleeping — he was an evangelical Christian who believed that God had ordained women’s submission to their husbands. Natural parenting has since been thoroughly secularized, but it still preaches something akin to spiritual transcendence through female sacrifice.
Though natural parenting makes substantial demands on mothers, in almost every case, the evidence supporting its tenets is either lacking or exaggerated. Take, for example, nursing. In developed countries, where access to clean drinking water to mix formula isn’t an issue, breastfeeding has some modest effects. “The evidence suggests that breastfeeding may slightly decrease your infant’s chance of diarrhea and eczema,” wrote the economist Emily Oster, author of several books on pregnancy and parenting. But the other happy outcomes touted by breastfeeding evangelists, including increased intelligence, lower rates of obesity, and fewer allergies and behavioral problems, shrink or disappear when studies adjust for maternal class and I.Q.
Even if you distrust the natural-parenting movement, its pressures are hard to escape. Long before I was pregnant, my reporting on maternal health in countries without adequate obstetric care made me very suspicious of essentialist ideas about what Gaskin called “the ancient wisdom” of women’s bodies. During my first pregnancy, my sudden obsessive interest in birth led me to a harrowing phenomenon that I wrote about for the Daily Beast: traumatized women who’d lost babies during home births with unqualified midwives.
Nevertheless, when my first child needed more milk than I could produce, I was ashamed and hired a lactation consultant who had been profiled by this newspaper. She spoke to me with saccharine condescension and prescribed a regimen of round-the-clock feeding and pumping that would have sent me spiraling into postpartum depression if I’d stuck to it. The encounter was one of my lowest moments of early parenthood. Ironically, while there’s little evidence showing that breastfeeding is particularly important for babies, there’s quite a bit showing that maternal happiness is. If the natural-parenting movement really cared about children, it would do some introspection about how often it makes their parents miserable.
Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/202 ... ience.html
Re: Parenting Issues
Sara Sharif’s father admits beating her to death with a cricket bat
Atika Rehman Published November 14, 2024 Updated 2 days ago
LONDON: In a dramatic turn of events at the Old Bailey, Urfan Sharif confessed to the murder of his 10-year-old daughter, Sara Sharif, admitting in court that he “takes full responsibility” for her tragic death.
Sharif detailed the brutal treatment he inflicted upon the girl, acknowledging he beat her with a cricket bat and metal pole, leading to her death on Aug 8, 2023, days before her body was discovered in their Surrey home.
The confession came during cross-examination by Caroline Carberry KC, who asked him bluntly if he had killed her by beating. “Yes, she died because of me,” Sharif responded. He revealed that he had struck Sara “severely” over several weeks, reportedly because he was angered by her frequent episodes of soiling herself and vomiting.
Sharif, 42, his wife, Beinash Batool, 30 and his brother Faisal Malik, 29, all facing charges related to what prosecutors have described as a “campaign of abuse” against Sara. The trio fled to Pakistan shortly after Sara’s death, with Sharif later calling the British police to confess he had “beat her up too much”.
A handwritten note, found near Sara’s fully clothed body, further documented Sharif’s admission, stating: “I swear to God that my intention was not to kill her. But I lost it.”
Medical examination reports presented to the court were harrowing. Sara’s postmortem revealed 71 external injuries, including fractures, burns, and bite marks.
When confronted with images of Sara’s injuries, Sharif appeared unable to look, repeatedly saying, “I accept everything,” as Carberry questioned him on the details of his alleged actions.
The prosecution presented a disturbing video clip from Aug 6, showing Sara dancing just two days before her death. Despite this glimpse of her lively spirit, Sharif admitted to brutally beating her that same evening.
The defence team for Sharif later sought a private consultation with him in court, delaying further proceedings.
The trial, however, continues, with Sharif and co-defendants maintaining not guilty pleas to the charges of murder and causing or allowing the child’s death.
Cross-examination
During the hearing, Carberry asked: “Do you accept that you had been beating Sara severely over a number of weeks?” He replied: “Yes, ma’am.”
He went on to accept attacking Sara with a cricket bat repeatedly and causing 25 fractures to her body.
Carberry continued: “I want to ask you about the occasions when you assaulted her with a cricket bat. What had she done to deserve such beatings in your mind?”
Sharif replied: “Nothing.”
She asked: “Why were you beating her so forcefully?”
He replied: “I was wrong.”
She continued: “Were you angry with her because in the summer of last year, she had started soiling herself?”
He replied: “Yes ma’am.”
She added: “And she had started vomiting, hadn’t she?” to which Sharif replied: “Yes, ma’am.”
Carberry asked: “And when she was sick you would get angry? And when she soiled herself you would get angry?” He replied: “Yes ma’am.”
He accepted causing injuries to Sara’s face and head by beating her with the bat and metal pole on 6 Aug.
Carberry continued: “You have pleaded not guilty to the offence of murder. Would you like that charge to be put to you again?”
He replied: “Yes ma’am.”
Published in Dawn, November 14th, 2024
https://www.dawn.com/news/1872257/sara- ... ricket-bat
Atika Rehman Published November 14, 2024 Updated 2 days ago
LONDON: In a dramatic turn of events at the Old Bailey, Urfan Sharif confessed to the murder of his 10-year-old daughter, Sara Sharif, admitting in court that he “takes full responsibility” for her tragic death.
Sharif detailed the brutal treatment he inflicted upon the girl, acknowledging he beat her with a cricket bat and metal pole, leading to her death on Aug 8, 2023, days before her body was discovered in their Surrey home.
The confession came during cross-examination by Caroline Carberry KC, who asked him bluntly if he had killed her by beating. “Yes, she died because of me,” Sharif responded. He revealed that he had struck Sara “severely” over several weeks, reportedly because he was angered by her frequent episodes of soiling herself and vomiting.
Sharif, 42, his wife, Beinash Batool, 30 and his brother Faisal Malik, 29, all facing charges related to what prosecutors have described as a “campaign of abuse” against Sara. The trio fled to Pakistan shortly after Sara’s death, with Sharif later calling the British police to confess he had “beat her up too much”.
A handwritten note, found near Sara’s fully clothed body, further documented Sharif’s admission, stating: “I swear to God that my intention was not to kill her. But I lost it.”
Medical examination reports presented to the court were harrowing. Sara’s postmortem revealed 71 external injuries, including fractures, burns, and bite marks.
When confronted with images of Sara’s injuries, Sharif appeared unable to look, repeatedly saying, “I accept everything,” as Carberry questioned him on the details of his alleged actions.
The prosecution presented a disturbing video clip from Aug 6, showing Sara dancing just two days before her death. Despite this glimpse of her lively spirit, Sharif admitted to brutally beating her that same evening.
The defence team for Sharif later sought a private consultation with him in court, delaying further proceedings.
The trial, however, continues, with Sharif and co-defendants maintaining not guilty pleas to the charges of murder and causing or allowing the child’s death.
Cross-examination
During the hearing, Carberry asked: “Do you accept that you had been beating Sara severely over a number of weeks?” He replied: “Yes, ma’am.”
He went on to accept attacking Sara with a cricket bat repeatedly and causing 25 fractures to her body.
Carberry continued: “I want to ask you about the occasions when you assaulted her with a cricket bat. What had she done to deserve such beatings in your mind?”
Sharif replied: “Nothing.”
She asked: “Why were you beating her so forcefully?”
He replied: “I was wrong.”
She continued: “Were you angry with her because in the summer of last year, she had started soiling herself?”
He replied: “Yes ma’am.”
She added: “And she had started vomiting, hadn’t she?” to which Sharif replied: “Yes, ma’am.”
Carberry asked: “And when she was sick you would get angry? And when she soiled herself you would get angry?” He replied: “Yes ma’am.”
He accepted causing injuries to Sara’s face and head by beating her with the bat and metal pole on 6 Aug.
Carberry continued: “You have pleaded not guilty to the offence of murder. Would you like that charge to be put to you again?”
He replied: “Yes ma’am.”
Published in Dawn, November 14th, 2024
https://www.dawn.com/news/1872257/sara- ... ricket-bat
Re: Parenting Issues
An I.V.F. Mixup, a Shocking Discovery and an Unbearable Choice
Two couples in California discovered they were raising each other’s genetic children. Should they switch their girls?
Zoë and May, both 5, were born to each other’s genetic parents.Credit...Holly Andres for The New York Times
In the days after Daphna Cardinale delivered her second child, she experienced a rare sense of calm and wonder. The feeling was a relief after so much worrying: She and her husband, Alexander, had tried for three years to conceive before turning to in vitro fertilization, and Daphna, once pregnant, had frequent and painful early contractions. But now, miraculously, here was their baby, their perfect baby, May, with black hair plastered on her head. (May is a nickname that her parents requested to protect her privacy.)
Because everything about May felt like an unexpected gift, Daphna was not surprised to find that she was an easy newborn: a good eater, a strong sleeper. The couple settled May into her lavender bedroom in their home in a suburb of Los Angeles. Daphna, on leave from her work as a therapist, was grateful for the bounty of two children, overjoyed that she could deliver to her older daughter, Olivia, then 5, the sister she had begged for since she could speak in full sentences.
Alexander, a singer and songwriter, wanted to share his wife’s happiness, but instead he was preoccupied by a concern that he was reluctant to voice: May did not look to him like a member of their family. She certainly did not resemble him, a man of Italian descent with fair hair and light brown eyes, or Daphna, a redhead with Ashkenazi Jewish heritage. Alexander often turns to dark humor to mask a simmering anxiety, and in the days after the birth, he started to joke that their I.V.F. clinic had made a mistake. Later he would explain that the jokes were a kind of superstition, a way of warding off something threatening: If you say the horrible thing out loud, it won’t happen. But friends and family members were also commenting to him on the striking difference in appearance — Alexander’s mother, for example, told him, out of Daphna’s earshot, that she would have guessed that at least one of May’s parents was Asian.
Alexander would convince himself that everything was fine, only to be walloped once again by the suspicion that May was not his genetic child. Daphna, who was accustomed to calming Alexander’s worries, quickly tired of his nervous jokes about the clinic. Looking back, she realized that her consciousness was working on two levels, that her mind was laboring not to see what was fairly obvious. She often sought reassurance from a baby photo of herself that her mother sent her, in which she closely resembled May. But occasionally, when Daphna looked in the mirror, she would see her own face and think it looked strange — as if there were something wrong with her.
Image
Daphna Cardinale with May at the hospital.Credit...From the Cardinale family
Image
A diptych of Daphna and Alexander at the hospital with Olivia and May.
Alexander Cardinale at the hospital with Olivia and May.Credit...From the Cardinale family
Trying to ease Alexander’s mind, Daphna ordered a DNA testing kit. But Alexander, threatened by its ominous presence on the night stand in their bedroom, was reluctant to go anywhere near it. Daphna grew concerned enough about Alexander’s low mood that she called his best friend for advice. That friend was the first person brave enough to tell Daphna directly what he really thought: At least one of them was not May’s genetic parent. His certainty startled Daphna. Suddenly, when she looked at May, she could see what he was seeing — she could understand Alexander’s alarm. Finally, in November 2019, they sent DNA samples off to a testing company. Then they waited.
Three weeks passed before the results appeared in Alexander’s inbox. By then, May was about 2 months old, the point in babies’ lives when they can track their mothers’ movements around a room, when they are comforted by being picked up, when their faces brighten at a caregiver’s approach. May had just started smiling back when her family members smiled at her, an emotional call and response that delighted Olivia, who often watched TV with May comfortably nestled by her side.
Alexander opened the email on his phone, as Daphna, holding May, paced around their bedroom. She saw her husband’s face immediately look drawn; his body language registered defeat. He read out loud: “99.9 percent likelihood, not a match for the father.”
“But what about me?” Daphna asked twice, quickly. She was sure that one of them must be May’s parent, the way some people who play the lottery feel certain, no matter how irrationally, that this time they’ve picked the right numbers. Alexander scanned: “99.9 percent likelihood,” he told her, “not a match for the mother.”
Ten minutes later, a babysitter arrived to watch May while Alexander and Daphna took Olivia to see “Frozen 2,” a long-promised outing. In the theater, they sat on either side of her, tears running down their cheeks in the dark, trying to understand what this news meant for their family. If the clinic had given them another couple’s embryo, what did that suggest about the fate of their own embryos? If they tried to find out and informed the clinic of the error, could they end up losing May? Even if they did nothing, could they lose May to her genetic parents, who might already be desperately trying to find her?
In the days that followed, Daphna learned with mounting distress that the law generally privileged genetic parents in the very rare cases like theirs. Just a few months earlier, a lawsuit had made the news involving a woman in New York who gave birth to two boys, neither of whom, it became obvious after their birth, shared her and her husband’s Korean American ancestry. Nor were the boys related to each other, the clinic determined when it investigated. The embryos came from two other couples, both of whom sued for custody. The Korean American woman fought to raise the boys but lost in court. She was forced, heartbroken, to relinquish her babies to their respective genetic parents.
Daphna and Alexander were under no legal obligation to tell anyone about the DNA test results, but they knew, with an agonizing clarity, that they had to contact the clinic to share what they had learned. They felt that they owed it to May to try to find her genetic parents — even if it meant losing her. “We didn’t want to be those people who were so desperate for a baby that we were going to deprive someone of theirs,” Daphna told me. “It felt like a kidnapping.” They also wanted to know what happened to their own embryos: Were they all still in the lab? If any were missing, had they been accidentally destroyed — or transferred to someone else? The couple retained a surrogacy lawyer, Andrew Vorzimer, who reached out to the clinic, the California Center for Reproductive Health, which opened an investigation.
Life took on a nightmarish quality for Daphna, who felt the possible loss of May every time she held her close. Some days she felt numb; some days she cried alone in her bedroom. Every time there was a knock on the door, she was afraid that it would be a lawyer or social worker with official-looking papers, there to take May away. Rather than distancing her from May, the thought of losing her only deepened the tenderness Daphna felt toward her. “I felt like I had to pour as much love into her as I could,” she told me, “almost like the way you store up for winter.” Olivia, who knew nothing of her parents’ concerns, also grew more attached to her baby sister. Daphna once went to lay May down in her crib and found, where the pillow would be, a drawing of a rainbow that Olivia had put there as a gift for her little sister.
On Dec. 6, Vorzimer called as Daphna was changing May’s diaper. He had news: The fertility clinic had identified May’s parents. The clinic saw couples from around the world, but May’s genetic parents, astonishingly, lived only 10 minutes away in a nearby suburb. Alexander’s mother would turn out to be right: The father was Asian American; the mother was Latina. “So I just lost my baby,” Daphna said to Vorzimer, holding May in her arms. “I just lost my baby, right?” He couldn’t be sure what it meant, he told her. But in the coming days, he relayed more news: The other family had a baby the same age as May, a little girl with blue eyes. She was Daphna and Alexander’s genetic child, and her name was Zoë.
The other couple did not have the prolonged process of waiting and discovery that Daphna and Alexander had. Instead, there was an urgent phone call from the clinic, their fertility doctor weeping as he explained that there had been a terrible mistake: They had been raising the genetic child of another couple, who had been raising theirs. The conversation was a shock that plunged them into grief, even if Zoë’s mother, Annie, wasn’t entirely surprised. On some level, she had been waiting for a phone call like that one. (Annie is a nickname, and her husband’s name is being withheld at their request to protect their privacy.)
Annie and her husband had their first child, a son, when she was in her early 40s. He was about 2 when they turned to I.V.F. to try to have a second. When Annie gave birth to a daughter with surprisingly fair hair, the extended family on both sides took it in stride as one of life’s flourishes of fate, a reminder of the mysteries of biology.
In the first weeks after the birth, Annie felt that all was as it should be: Zoë latched easily, and Annie loved the closeness she felt when she nursed her, their bodies aligned in mutual comfort in the hazy hours of the early morning. When Zoë was about 2 months old, her eye color developed into a deep blue, which Annie found confusing enough that she asked her pediatrician about it; he reassured her that recessive genes surprise parents all the time. But Annie still felt uneasy when friends commented on her baby’s looks — how light-haired she was, how remarkable it was that Annie could have given birth to her. After the phone call from the doctor, Annie, who was already experiencing bouts of melancholy after Zoë’s birth, sank into a depression. She had never felt closer to her daughter, but because of the shock, she thought, her milk dried out. She could no longer nurse.
Image
Zoë at the hospital.Credit...From the Cardinale family
Image
Zoë at the hospital.
Credit...From the Cardinale family
The day after Christmas, the two couples exchanged voice mail messages and agreed to meet the next day at a law firm near their homes. Alexander was a compulsive documenter who often captured video of important family moments, and he planned to use his phone to create a record of the event. He and Daphna arrived first and waited in a conference room to meet the people who might determine May’s fate. They stood awkwardly by a table as the other couple entered. Annie was several inches shorter than Daphna, with the dramatic looks of a movie star, her hair long and dark. Her husband was trim and about Alexander’s height. They knew his face well — because it was their daughter’s face.
Daphna walked up to Annie, and the two women stared at each other. Then Daphna leaned down and hugged Annie, who hugged her back, their embrace close and quiet. They stayed that way, clinging to each other, while Alexander and Annie’s husband shook hands, exchanged names, stuck their hands in their jacket pockets and looked everywhere in the room but at each other. When the two women pulled apart, Daphna said to Annie, “How are you doing?” Annie, her face grave, answered: “Terrible.”
The two couples relaxed: Each sensed in the other a basic decency; they took comfort in being with other people who could fully understand their surreal dilemma. They talked for a long time about how painful any resolution of the situation would be. They cried together. At times, they sat in silence. Alexander could sense that both mothers were avoiding having to speak plainly of what the future would hold. Finally, Daphna asked the question that was hovering in the air: “So, what are we going to do?”
May and Zoë were no longer newborns but babies who had, by then, spent three months hearing their siblings laugh, smelling their mothers’ scents, seeing the particular shade of dark that descended in their rooms when night fell. Could the parents now possibly rip them from all the comfort they’d known, in the name of some genetic allegiance? The known cases of I.V.F. mix-ups like theirs were rare enough that the two couples had little precedent to turn to for guidance.
Daphna knew from her training as a therapist that, at 3 months, the girls weren’t yet fully awake to the world. Their senses were still developing; their vision was cloudy beyond close range. She and Alexander felt bonded to May, and they felt that she was bonded to them — she knew her name and lit up when they looked into her eyes. But they knew that children who are adopted into loving homes, even at much older ages, are expected to thrive, especially if their early caregivers were nurturing. “It’s a difficult change — but doable,” Beatrice Beebe, a psychology professor at Columbia University’s medical school who studies infant development, told me. “The baby would have to learn a whole new set of patterns, but babies are fantastic learners.”
After going over every nuance, every emotional response and logical argument on every side, Alexander had resolved that they should switch the babies. He felt, more so than Daphna, the imperative to raise the child they’d intended to bring into the world. “There’s a pull, genetically,” he said. That Zoë would live so close, that he would know of her existence but not raise her felt like “upside-down world,” as he put it. But heading into the meeting, he had no way of knowing what Annie and her husband felt — whether they would fight to maintain custody of Zoë.
When Daphna posed the question to the room, Annie looked bewildered. “I don’t know what to do,” she said. Both of them wept as the conversation circled closer to a resolution. Finally, Annie’s husband said out loud what Annie knew, going into the meeting, would most likely be the collective decision: They would switch the babies. Alexander felt relieved that someone had said it so clearly; he knew that neither of the mothers ever would. As shaken as they were, the couples were in agreement.
But how to do it? They knew they couldn’t just turn their babies over — it didn’t feel healthy for Zoë and May, and at any rate, the parents weren’t emotionally ready. Should they make the transition with regular visits over six months? Three months? They decided they would start feeling their way toward this major shift. The babies, they all believed, would adjust. Privately, each couple wondered if they could, too.
Having made it through one dreaded conversation, Daphna and Alexander now prepared for another: They had to tell Olivia. How to explain to one young daughter that you are voluntarily giving up another? They resolved to make it as simple as possible; their voices would be bright and reassuring, their emphasis on the new baby who was going to come into their lives — one who looked just like her. The day after Daphna and Alexander met with Annie and her husband, they approached Olivia, who was lying on the couch in the living room, a blue blanket half-draped on her.
“What if I told you you had another sister?” Daphna started out. Olivia looked mildly curious and stared at her mother’s stomach, clearly imagining she was pregnant.
Daphna asked if she had ever noticed that May looked different from the rest of the family. “Yeah,” Olivia responded, which somehow surprised Daphna, because she had never mentioned it. The “So what?” in Olivia’s tone was heavily implied. Daphna explained to Olivia that there was another baby who was a part of their family and that she was gaining a sister after a bit of a mix-up. Daphna said nothing about making a switch, but Olivia was quick to figure it out.
“Wait,” she said, sitting up abruptly. She asked: Did this mean they were losing May?
Alexander responded, reflexively: No, he assured her, we’ll always have her. Daphna groaned internally. That wasn’t true, and it would be an awful promise to break; at the same time, she knew that, in the moment, it seemed like the only possible answer.
Alexander told Olivia not to be scared, but Olivia started shutting down. She made a small whimpering noise. She asked again: Were they going to give her sister away?
As Daphna tried to comfort Olivia, she burned with anger at the clinic. Somewhere along the way, a mistake had been made. Daphna knew errors could happen when embryos were being tested for genetic birth defects or when they were being transferred to the mothers. Someone must have been careless, she thought, someone who had, unknowingly, thrown her family into chaos. Alexander felt that he had been played the fool — made to love a baby who wasn’t his to raise.
Eventually, the couple hired another lawyer, Adam Wolf, and filed suit against the clinic, alleging medical malpractice, negligence and breach of contract. Wolf, who specializes in suing fertility clinics that have been responsible for life-altering errors, says he had encountered fewer than 10 cases in which an embryo was transferred to the wrong woman. But he estimates that over the past decade, he has represented more than 1,000 plaintiffs accusing clinics and their suppliers of misconduct or negligence, most commonly because embryos in their care have been accidentally lost, damaged or destroyed.
In one instance, he represented a couple who asked a fertility clinic to test their embryos for a genetic mutation the husband carried that is associated with a type of often-lethal stomach cancer. The clinic helped the couple conceive a child, whom they were told was free of the genetic mutation. But a year later, when the parents returned to the clinic to have a second child, they discovered that the clinic had made a mistake: Their 1-year-old was a carrier.
Wolf believes that the public becomes aware of only a fraction of the errors that occur in fertility-clinic labs. In Zoë and May’s cases, as in the case of the twins carried by the Korean American woman in New York, the mistake was apparent because the children were a different race from the birth parents. In most instances, parents who accept and bond with their baby may never suspect something is wrong. Even when discovered, such mistakes rarely make the news. “Most of my cases you never hear about, because we settle them before we file lawsuits,” Wolf said. “And the settlement agreements have confidentiality agreements, because the clinics want to ensure that there will be no negative publicity as a result of its error.”
I.V.F. procedures are underregulated relative to most medical procedures, says Dov Fox, a law professor at the University of San Diego with a focus on bioethics. States do not mandate that fertility clinics report preventable and damaging mistakes when they happen, as is required of hospitals. Some emblematic problems, Fox told me, included clinics or labs relying on pen-and-paper labeling systems and faulty screening measures; Wolf cited a failure of clinic employees to respond to alarms on the freezers that store embryos. “I sometimes think of our lawsuits as the policing of the fertility industry,” Wolf said, “because nobody else is holding them accountable.”
Now heavily dominated by private equity, the industry is rife with for-profit, high-volume fertility clinics operating in a regulatory dead zone. Oversight of fertility clinics has been limited, Fox said, because of the challenges it poses politically: Although many conservatives would like to impose restrictions, including limiting the number of embryos a lab can create, they have historically not wanted to jeopardize efforts to restrict abortion by also attacking I.V.F., which is broadly popular. Many Democrats, meanwhile, have been reluctant to regulate the industry for fear of opening the door to restrictions that might, for example, limit who is eligible for I.V.F. (as in some countries, where gay couples are excluded). Fox expects that the overturning of Roe v. Wade will lead to new scrutiny of I.V.F., which might ultimately threaten its wide availability.
On the last day of the year, Daphna and Alexander stood in their living room, waiting to meet Zoë for the first time. They could hear her crying as Annie and her husband approached their front door. The sound was eerily like Olivia’s cry at that age, as if emerging from a time capsule. Listening to it crystallized everything Daphna and Alexander had been feeling for the past two weeks — that there was a child out there in the world, so close, but whom they couldn’t see or hold or comfort. Daphna bounced May in her arms as they waited for the doorbell to ring. Alexander swore a nervous curse, and May stared at him, a look of consternation on her face, reaching for her father with her tiny hand. Both couples had made other plans that day for their older children; the parents knew it would be hard enough to manage their own emotions without having to manage the siblings’ too.
The bell finally rang, and then Annie was inside, smiling at the baby in Daphna’s arms, reaching for her. “I’m sorry,” she said, weeping, her breath ragged. She kissed May’s cheek twice and buried her face in the crook of the baby’s neck. She sat down on the couch, her backpack still on. “How are you? How are you?” she asked, holding May in her lap so she could marvel at her face through tears.
“Hey, Zoë, this is your Mama Daphna,” Annie’s husband said as he unbuckled the baby from her car seat. “You want to go to your mommy?” Daphna, gasping, smiling, picked Zoë up. She was shocked by how different Zoë felt, how big compared to May — she realized that none of the clothing she’d bought for this daughter would fit.
Soon the husbands were holding the babies. Both mothers’ gazes veered from the sight of their own child in someone else’s arms to the sight of the other child in their husband’s arms. Each was doing the best she could to let the other mother have all the psychic space she needed with her daughter.
For almost two weeks, the families visited each other every day, sometimes at Daphna and Alexander’s house and sometimes at Annie and her husband’s house. Often the two mothers did what Alexander came to think of as “the mama dance”: Each would go to change a child’s diaper, then step back for a moment. “Is it OK if I? … Would you rather that you? … ” They had endless tiny details to discuss: Does she use a binkie? How long does she nap? Do you hold her until she falls asleep and then put her down, or just put her down? What’s her favorite bedtime music? How much did she weigh?
The couples were inventing a new kind of relationship as they went, and it was far from a given that the transition would go smoothly. For others in similar circumstances, the attempt at maintaining connection had ended in recrimination, as in the case of Donna Fasano, who in 1998, because of a clinic’s mistake, carried another couple’s embryo to term along with her own. (The mistake was evident because Fasano and her husband are white, and one of the two babies she delivered was Black.)
When the babies were 5 months old, the parties signed an agreement granting the genetic parents, Deborah Perry-Rogers and Robert Rogers, custody of their child and allowing Fasano and her husband to visit him twice a month. The visits quickly became tense. Perry-Rogers and her husband renamed their son, but when Fasano visited, lawyers for the couple claimed, she continued to call him by the name she’d given him and referred to herself as “Mommy,” which his new parents could not abide. Eventually, after more litigation, a judge denied the Fasano couple their visitation rights.
May’s and Zoë’s families were the victims of a fluke mishap, but they also seemed to be the beneficiaries of a fortuitous alignment: Financially, they were on similar footing, which meant that neither couple feared depriving their child of that advantage. Neither couple was particularly religious in practice. Even their parenting styles were similar: nurturing, attentive and gentle. There were some evident differences — Annie was home with the children, while Daphna worked full time — but for the most part, their similarities were as unlikely as the circumstances that brought them together.
In January, the couples decided that they were ready to take the next step — a daytime visit for each child alone with her genetic parents. Daphna sent May off to spend a few hours with Annie and her husband and was knocked over by a wave of grief as soon as she was by herself with Zoë, the child she had waited so long to have. Alexander found Daphna crying, sitting on the floor, as Zoë rested calmly in an automatic swing, the one May had swung in so many times. Daphna felt trapped: For every happy emotion, there was an equal and opposite adverse emotion. “As much as I’m so happy that Zoë is here and that we’re finally home with her, I just miss my May so much,” she told him through tears. “I know they’re taking care of her, but they don’t know her either.” She looked over at the swing. “But Zoë’s here. I know it’s wonderful.”
On Jan. 16, the families each had their babies overnight for the first time, and Daphna started to feel the connection she had been longing to feel. When she gave Zoë a bath before bedtime, she took her daughter in her arms, inhaled the scent of her head, felt her soft downy hair — somehow now she smelled like home. Like their towels, their shampoo, maybe even their pheromones. Daphna couldn’t help thinking of May, 10 minutes away at Annie and her husband’s home. May seemed farther along developmentally than Zoë, and Daphna worried that the change would be harder for her. That night, in fact, May was crying inconsolably. Annie was distraught that she could not comfort her, her heart breaking for a baby she already loved but who was sobbing, she was sure, for a mother Annie could not possibly be at that moment.
The couples had discussed when they were going to switch the girls permanently, but when the time came, somehow Daphna had not fully understood that it was imminent. The morning after that first sleepover, when Annie and her husband indicated that the girls should stay where they were, Daphna was stunned — what felt like the swiftness of the decision saddened her. Even so, she agreed that it was time; the girls were already 4 months old, and the back and forth was proving hard on everyone, especially the older siblings.
On Feb. 11, the two families met at a courthouse. They had been giving each other space, and that day was the first time they had seen each other since the switch. They formalized their new parenting arrangement, signing papers that reclassified the carrying mothers as surrogates. It was real; it was in writing. Daphna shared the news on Facebook with friends and family, many of whose messages she and Alexander had been ignoring. They hadn’t known what to say. Trying to explain was exhausting.
In the days and weeks that followed, Alexander came to dread the hours after bedtime, when Daphna, who kept her emotions in check all day for Olivia and Zoë, broke down, sobbing for much of the night like someone in physical pain. At other times, Daphna would feel May’s presence and turn to Alexander. “She needs me,” she would say. “I can feel it. I’m going over there right now.” Alexander could summon the calm needed to talk her down, but he started suffering from panic attacks for the first time in his life.
Daphna and Annie had agreed that no matter what, they would do whatever they could to help the older siblings cope. On Feb. 13, Daphna texted Annie because Olivia was weeping, crying that she missed May. Daphna didn’t want to put Annie in a difficult position, so she wrote, with considerable understatement, that Olivia was “having a really hard time.” Twenty minutes later, Annie and May were at her door. Alexander took photos of May, chunky and laughing, in the arms of Olivia, who was flashing a smile that hadn’t been seen since her sister left the house. Annie acknowledged, tearily, that May also looked happier than she had since the switch. They put the two babies next to each other and photographed them gazing at each other from their respective blankets: May with a thumb in her mouth and a hand on Zoë’s face, Zoë’s hand reaching out to touch May.
ImageA portrait of the Cardinale family.
Alexander and Daphna Cardinale with Zoë and Olivia.Credit...Holly Andres for The New York Times
In a text later that day, Annie promised Daphna that she would give May all the love she could, and that she had faith that Daphna would do the same for Zoë. “You’re a great Mommy,” Annie wrote. “We can definitely visit each and check how our girls are doing. It’s so hard. I don’t know how to let go.”
Daphna wrote back: “What if we don’t ‘let go’? What if we just have 2 babies? We share them. We have to find a way to have both babies. Spend a lot of time together. Raise these girls together.”
Annie responded quickly. “Yes, let’s raise them together,” she wrote. “Let’s have two babies.”
The two families started meeting more frequently, becoming closer but sharing only so much of what was going on at home. Privately, Annie was flooded with anxiety. Sometimes, when May cried, Annie didn’t feel the same physical tug she felt for Zoë, a void that she filled with guilt and self-recrimination. They say the blood calls, she thought, gazing at her baby — why wasn’t it calling now? She loved May profoundly, but that love was somehow different from what she felt for Zoë, who had imprinted on her heart. Annie tried to stay buoyant for her son, but her efforts could be sabotaged by his innocent sweetness. “Where’s Zoë? I want Zoë!” he would say, looking bewildered. Annie would try to reassure him — now May is here, she would tell him, trying to sound cheerful, and Zoë is with her Mama Daphna and Daddy Xander.
Like Daphna, Annie was eager to make her daughter’s transition as seamless as possible. Daphna used to bounce with May on a big yoga ball, which she gave to Annie, so now Annie bounced with May on a big yoga ball. Daphna told her that May liked being swaddled, so now Annie swaddled her. Daphna said May slept better in her own crib, in her own room, with the sound machine on and the shade drawn; Annie, who was used to having Zoë sleep in her bedroom, would instead go to May’s bedroom at bedtime and hold her tiny hand through the slats of the crib until she fell asleep. Sometimes, when Annie bounced with May on the ball, she had the strange sensation that it wasn’t just that the baby had been switched but that she herself had been transformed — that in trying to replace a different mother, she had become a different person. She was depressed enough that her own mother, who had planned to stay with her for just a few months after the delivery, decided to extend her visit.
The couples had known each other for only three months when the pandemic hit in March 2020, but by June, they decided to form a pod. Annie’s son and Olivia grew as close to each other as they were to their younger siblings. They played with Legos, made slime, stole food off each other’s plates and longed to see each other if too many days went by without a visit. Annie was always eager to see Zoë, but when the two families gathered, her emotions could be unpredictable. During one visit to the Cardinales’ home, when Zoë, who had a rash, cried loudly, Annie almost shook from the effort of not rushing to take Zoë in her arms.
Daphna, too, felt that she had been transformed. From the moment she learned the fertility clinic had located May’s parents, she knew she would be changed by what was to come; she just didn’t know who she was going to be on the other side of it — would she still like that person? Many times, during that first year, she wasn’t sure. Usually so even-keeled, she was now more easily overwhelmed, quicker to snap. She gave Zoë all the love she had to give: She gazed into her eyes, held her and walked with her, sang softly into her ear, tickled her tummy gently to make her laugh. But sometimes, even when she was feeding Zoë in those murky, dreamy hours of the early morning, she would have a haunted sensation. I have the wrong baby, she would think with a start of panic.
That spring, the minister who married Daphna and Alexander reached out after learning about what happened from the update that Daphna posted on Facebook. The minister had an idea: What if she merged the two families in a formal ceremony? Because a Covid lockdown order was still in place, the “family joining ceremony” would be virtual for everyone except the eight of them, who gathered in Daphna and Alexander’s living room around the time of the girls’ first birthdays, in September. The couples expressed their commitment, and the minister said a blessing. Then each family member who was able picked a color of sand and poured it into two different molds decorated with the silhouette of a tree, representing their growing family. The colorful family trees sat on mantels over the fireplaces in each of their homes.
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Daphna and Annie with the four children.Credit...Holly Andres for The New York Times
The merging of their families was an act of hope, like a wedding, which didn’t mean their problems were behind them. Daphna worried that although she could still give love, she was not as receptive to receiving it. She felt distant from Alexander, whose panic attacks were growing worse, especially after visits with May. Sometimes they were so bad that he was sure he was having a heart attack; once, they called an ambulance. Instead of making Daphna more caring toward her husband, she felt herself withdrawing out of self-protection. What if something happened to him, too?
Something shifted for Daphna when the babies were about 15 months old. Zoë, by then, was already standing on her own and walking. One morning, Daphna left her momentarily to take out the trash. She was gone less than a minute, but when she came back, Zoë was wailing, staring at the door, crying with an operatic scale of sorrow that only a child that age can fully embody. It hit Daphna in that moment: To Zoë, she was just her mother. There was no before. There was just the wholly consuming dependency and desire that a 1-year-old feels for the woman whose face has beamed into her own with love and concern more than any other. Daphna hadn’t even realized that she still had a wall up — but now she realized she had to take it down. She had to try, as she thought of it, “to open another chamber of my heart.”
Both families, the previous December, had suffered through the girls’ first Christmas, afraid of losing their babies. Neither imagined that the next year they would be celebrating with that baby and another baby — with a whole new family — crammed together around a table. That Christmas, and every one since, the bases of their trees were buried in mounds of toys for the four children. Annie and her husband came loaded down with bags and bags overflowing with wrapped boxes, adding to the bounty that Daphna and Alexander had already amassed. Both sets of parents sensed that the excess did not so much reflect their joy as it did their lingering fear that their babies had suffered — that they had not been able to protect them. “It’s the guilt,” Daphna said. “We both feel so guilty.”
May and Zoë are now 5. They’ve celebrated holidays and birthdays together, swung on countless swings in synchrony, shared bubble baths and sliced apples and giggled under the covers when hiding, as a team of two, from Alexander in a game of hide-and-seek. They consider each other sisters. For the last two years, the girls went to the same preschool. Every day after school, they would beg Annie and Alexander, who did drop-off and pickup, for more time to play together. Annie took great pleasure in seeing Zoë so regularly; Alexander felt the same way about May. May still calls him “Daddy Xander” and Daphna “Mama Daphna,” and Zoë addresses Annie and her husband the equivalent way.
As close as they are, the girls have developed distinct personalities, and Daphna often thought about how each of them might be different, had she been raised entirely in her original home. Zoë, who had been slow to move and late to talk (it turned out she was born with a tongue tie), now was the louder of the two, more excitable. Daphna wondered whether she had changed as she got used to their family’s more boisterous energy. (“We’re like — the Louds,” Daphna said.) Zoë is devoted to the family dog, Cece, a rambunctious mutt and a licker. May, by contrast, climbs into her mother’s arms for comfort if the dog comes too close.
With time, Daphna and Alexander felt their sense of steadiness in their family returning. They had been outspoken about their ordeal to the media and pursued their malpractice lawsuit in the hopes of holding the clinic accountable, but in 2022 they decided to settle, in part because they did not want to risk having to put Olivia on the stand. (The details of the settlement have not been made public. A lawyer for the clinic declined to comment on the facts of the case but said that “the parties settled amicably.”) With the fight finally over, Daphna and Alexander realized they could put down the boulder of anger and resentment they had been carrying together. They could breathe. They could be grateful for the time they spent with May — May, whose favorite color was rainbow, who still could fall asleep, from the exhaustion of an outburst, in Daphna’s arms — and fall in love with Zoë, who harmonized as soon as she could sing, who snuggled up to Daphna for naps, who had a mind for numbers, like Alexander’s grandfather.
Every so often, Alexander would look at his phone, and there would be a text from Annie about a listing for a home on the market in her neighborhood. Once, when the girls were about 3, Annie sent them a listing for the house that was right next door. She was hopeful that they would buy it. They could take down the fence, have one big backyard — it would be as close to their dream for a shared house as they could get. Daphna and Alexander went and looked, wandering their way through the high-ceilinged house. They loved the idea of living next door, but the house was too expensive; there were limits to how much they could do to accommodate their mutual longing.
This year, for the first time, May and Zoë will be going to different schools. The kindergarten in Daphna and Alexander’s neighborhood would have been an even longer drive for Annie than the one to the girls’ preschool, and the commute would have made it harder to get her son to his after-school activities. To ensure that they would all see one another at least once a week, Annie proposed that the girls sign up for ballet on Sundays, a plan the Cardinales embraced. They were just as committed to maintaining the bond. Sometimes Alexander talked to Daphna about how much easier their lives would be if they moved to Northern California, where they had more family, but the thought always ran aground: What about May? They were still too close to her to seriously contemplate moving away.
May’s kindergarten started before Zoë’s, and both sets of parents were excited and nervous for her on her first day of school. “The teacher said she did great,” Annie wrote to their group text thread at the end of the school day. “Yay! Success!” Daphna responded. Annie wrote that May had drawn something at school for Daphna, but she had been instructed not to send a photo of it — May wanted to give it to Daphna in person.
That afternoon, Annie took her to the Cardinales’ house, where May presented Daphna with the picture. It showed a woman with red hair like Daphna’s, her pregnant belly bulging out to hold the baby May had drawn inside. The mother is holding the hand of a little girl, the baby’s older sister. At first, May told Annie that the picture was of Annie, but then she said what Annie already knew: It was a picture of Daphna. Annie and Daphna marveled over the crayon drawing — over how complicated it was that on May’s first day of school, her first day of separation from Annie, the person she was thinking about was Daphna. Annie wasn’t threatened; she knew how devoted she and May were to each other. If anything, Annie seemed almost awed by the complexities of a loving 5-year-old’s mind. “They’re still working it out,” she said, amazed.
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Zoë and May playing together.
Zoë and May.Credit...Holly Andres for The New York Times
In moments like that, Daphna reflected on how complicated her feelings about May still were. There was guilt that she gave May up, but also another sort of guilt — the knowledge that although she still loved May, she had had to change the shape of that love into something new, for everyone’s sake. “I don’t know how to let her back into my heart the same way,” Daphna told me. She and the other parents all tried to normalize what happened, cheerfully answering questions about who started out in whose belly and why, but they knew that as the children got older, they would have more troubling questions — questions about chance and choice and sacrifice and compromise. The parents might not have the answers to those questions; they would simply say that they did the best they could.
Don’t call it a happy ending, the children’s parents would say; it’s not. It’s the happiest ending possible, which is, still, more than they could have hoped for.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/25/maga ... 778d3e6de3
Two couples in California discovered they were raising each other’s genetic children. Should they switch their girls?
Zoë and May, both 5, were born to each other’s genetic parents.Credit...Holly Andres for The New York Times
In the days after Daphna Cardinale delivered her second child, she experienced a rare sense of calm and wonder. The feeling was a relief after so much worrying: She and her husband, Alexander, had tried for three years to conceive before turning to in vitro fertilization, and Daphna, once pregnant, had frequent and painful early contractions. But now, miraculously, here was their baby, their perfect baby, May, with black hair plastered on her head. (May is a nickname that her parents requested to protect her privacy.)
Because everything about May felt like an unexpected gift, Daphna was not surprised to find that she was an easy newborn: a good eater, a strong sleeper. The couple settled May into her lavender bedroom in their home in a suburb of Los Angeles. Daphna, on leave from her work as a therapist, was grateful for the bounty of two children, overjoyed that she could deliver to her older daughter, Olivia, then 5, the sister she had begged for since she could speak in full sentences.
Alexander, a singer and songwriter, wanted to share his wife’s happiness, but instead he was preoccupied by a concern that he was reluctant to voice: May did not look to him like a member of their family. She certainly did not resemble him, a man of Italian descent with fair hair and light brown eyes, or Daphna, a redhead with Ashkenazi Jewish heritage. Alexander often turns to dark humor to mask a simmering anxiety, and in the days after the birth, he started to joke that their I.V.F. clinic had made a mistake. Later he would explain that the jokes were a kind of superstition, a way of warding off something threatening: If you say the horrible thing out loud, it won’t happen. But friends and family members were also commenting to him on the striking difference in appearance — Alexander’s mother, for example, told him, out of Daphna’s earshot, that she would have guessed that at least one of May’s parents was Asian.
Alexander would convince himself that everything was fine, only to be walloped once again by the suspicion that May was not his genetic child. Daphna, who was accustomed to calming Alexander’s worries, quickly tired of his nervous jokes about the clinic. Looking back, she realized that her consciousness was working on two levels, that her mind was laboring not to see what was fairly obvious. She often sought reassurance from a baby photo of herself that her mother sent her, in which she closely resembled May. But occasionally, when Daphna looked in the mirror, she would see her own face and think it looked strange — as if there were something wrong with her.
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Daphna Cardinale with May at the hospital.Credit...From the Cardinale family
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A diptych of Daphna and Alexander at the hospital with Olivia and May.
Alexander Cardinale at the hospital with Olivia and May.Credit...From the Cardinale family
Trying to ease Alexander’s mind, Daphna ordered a DNA testing kit. But Alexander, threatened by its ominous presence on the night stand in their bedroom, was reluctant to go anywhere near it. Daphna grew concerned enough about Alexander’s low mood that she called his best friend for advice. That friend was the first person brave enough to tell Daphna directly what he really thought: At least one of them was not May’s genetic parent. His certainty startled Daphna. Suddenly, when she looked at May, she could see what he was seeing — she could understand Alexander’s alarm. Finally, in November 2019, they sent DNA samples off to a testing company. Then they waited.
Three weeks passed before the results appeared in Alexander’s inbox. By then, May was about 2 months old, the point in babies’ lives when they can track their mothers’ movements around a room, when they are comforted by being picked up, when their faces brighten at a caregiver’s approach. May had just started smiling back when her family members smiled at her, an emotional call and response that delighted Olivia, who often watched TV with May comfortably nestled by her side.
Alexander opened the email on his phone, as Daphna, holding May, paced around their bedroom. She saw her husband’s face immediately look drawn; his body language registered defeat. He read out loud: “99.9 percent likelihood, not a match for the father.”
“But what about me?” Daphna asked twice, quickly. She was sure that one of them must be May’s parent, the way some people who play the lottery feel certain, no matter how irrationally, that this time they’ve picked the right numbers. Alexander scanned: “99.9 percent likelihood,” he told her, “not a match for the mother.”
Ten minutes later, a babysitter arrived to watch May while Alexander and Daphna took Olivia to see “Frozen 2,” a long-promised outing. In the theater, they sat on either side of her, tears running down their cheeks in the dark, trying to understand what this news meant for their family. If the clinic had given them another couple’s embryo, what did that suggest about the fate of their own embryos? If they tried to find out and informed the clinic of the error, could they end up losing May? Even if they did nothing, could they lose May to her genetic parents, who might already be desperately trying to find her?
In the days that followed, Daphna learned with mounting distress that the law generally privileged genetic parents in the very rare cases like theirs. Just a few months earlier, a lawsuit had made the news involving a woman in New York who gave birth to two boys, neither of whom, it became obvious after their birth, shared her and her husband’s Korean American ancestry. Nor were the boys related to each other, the clinic determined when it investigated. The embryos came from two other couples, both of whom sued for custody. The Korean American woman fought to raise the boys but lost in court. She was forced, heartbroken, to relinquish her babies to their respective genetic parents.
Daphna and Alexander were under no legal obligation to tell anyone about the DNA test results, but they knew, with an agonizing clarity, that they had to contact the clinic to share what they had learned. They felt that they owed it to May to try to find her genetic parents — even if it meant losing her. “We didn’t want to be those people who were so desperate for a baby that we were going to deprive someone of theirs,” Daphna told me. “It felt like a kidnapping.” They also wanted to know what happened to their own embryos: Were they all still in the lab? If any were missing, had they been accidentally destroyed — or transferred to someone else? The couple retained a surrogacy lawyer, Andrew Vorzimer, who reached out to the clinic, the California Center for Reproductive Health, which opened an investigation.
Life took on a nightmarish quality for Daphna, who felt the possible loss of May every time she held her close. Some days she felt numb; some days she cried alone in her bedroom. Every time there was a knock on the door, she was afraid that it would be a lawyer or social worker with official-looking papers, there to take May away. Rather than distancing her from May, the thought of losing her only deepened the tenderness Daphna felt toward her. “I felt like I had to pour as much love into her as I could,” she told me, “almost like the way you store up for winter.” Olivia, who knew nothing of her parents’ concerns, also grew more attached to her baby sister. Daphna once went to lay May down in her crib and found, where the pillow would be, a drawing of a rainbow that Olivia had put there as a gift for her little sister.
On Dec. 6, Vorzimer called as Daphna was changing May’s diaper. He had news: The fertility clinic had identified May’s parents. The clinic saw couples from around the world, but May’s genetic parents, astonishingly, lived only 10 minutes away in a nearby suburb. Alexander’s mother would turn out to be right: The father was Asian American; the mother was Latina. “So I just lost my baby,” Daphna said to Vorzimer, holding May in her arms. “I just lost my baby, right?” He couldn’t be sure what it meant, he told her. But in the coming days, he relayed more news: The other family had a baby the same age as May, a little girl with blue eyes. She was Daphna and Alexander’s genetic child, and her name was Zoë.
The other couple did not have the prolonged process of waiting and discovery that Daphna and Alexander had. Instead, there was an urgent phone call from the clinic, their fertility doctor weeping as he explained that there had been a terrible mistake: They had been raising the genetic child of another couple, who had been raising theirs. The conversation was a shock that plunged them into grief, even if Zoë’s mother, Annie, wasn’t entirely surprised. On some level, she had been waiting for a phone call like that one. (Annie is a nickname, and her husband’s name is being withheld at their request to protect their privacy.)
Annie and her husband had their first child, a son, when she was in her early 40s. He was about 2 when they turned to I.V.F. to try to have a second. When Annie gave birth to a daughter with surprisingly fair hair, the extended family on both sides took it in stride as one of life’s flourishes of fate, a reminder of the mysteries of biology.
In the first weeks after the birth, Annie felt that all was as it should be: Zoë latched easily, and Annie loved the closeness she felt when she nursed her, their bodies aligned in mutual comfort in the hazy hours of the early morning. When Zoë was about 2 months old, her eye color developed into a deep blue, which Annie found confusing enough that she asked her pediatrician about it; he reassured her that recessive genes surprise parents all the time. But Annie still felt uneasy when friends commented on her baby’s looks — how light-haired she was, how remarkable it was that Annie could have given birth to her. After the phone call from the doctor, Annie, who was already experiencing bouts of melancholy after Zoë’s birth, sank into a depression. She had never felt closer to her daughter, but because of the shock, she thought, her milk dried out. She could no longer nurse.
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Zoë at the hospital.Credit...From the Cardinale family
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Zoë at the hospital.
Credit...From the Cardinale family
The day after Christmas, the two couples exchanged voice mail messages and agreed to meet the next day at a law firm near their homes. Alexander was a compulsive documenter who often captured video of important family moments, and he planned to use his phone to create a record of the event. He and Daphna arrived first and waited in a conference room to meet the people who might determine May’s fate. They stood awkwardly by a table as the other couple entered. Annie was several inches shorter than Daphna, with the dramatic looks of a movie star, her hair long and dark. Her husband was trim and about Alexander’s height. They knew his face well — because it was their daughter’s face.
Daphna walked up to Annie, and the two women stared at each other. Then Daphna leaned down and hugged Annie, who hugged her back, their embrace close and quiet. They stayed that way, clinging to each other, while Alexander and Annie’s husband shook hands, exchanged names, stuck their hands in their jacket pockets and looked everywhere in the room but at each other. When the two women pulled apart, Daphna said to Annie, “How are you doing?” Annie, her face grave, answered: “Terrible.”
The two couples relaxed: Each sensed in the other a basic decency; they took comfort in being with other people who could fully understand their surreal dilemma. They talked for a long time about how painful any resolution of the situation would be. They cried together. At times, they sat in silence. Alexander could sense that both mothers were avoiding having to speak plainly of what the future would hold. Finally, Daphna asked the question that was hovering in the air: “So, what are we going to do?”
May and Zoë were no longer newborns but babies who had, by then, spent three months hearing their siblings laugh, smelling their mothers’ scents, seeing the particular shade of dark that descended in their rooms when night fell. Could the parents now possibly rip them from all the comfort they’d known, in the name of some genetic allegiance? The known cases of I.V.F. mix-ups like theirs were rare enough that the two couples had little precedent to turn to for guidance.
Daphna knew from her training as a therapist that, at 3 months, the girls weren’t yet fully awake to the world. Their senses were still developing; their vision was cloudy beyond close range. She and Alexander felt bonded to May, and they felt that she was bonded to them — she knew her name and lit up when they looked into her eyes. But they knew that children who are adopted into loving homes, even at much older ages, are expected to thrive, especially if their early caregivers were nurturing. “It’s a difficult change — but doable,” Beatrice Beebe, a psychology professor at Columbia University’s medical school who studies infant development, told me. “The baby would have to learn a whole new set of patterns, but babies are fantastic learners.”
After going over every nuance, every emotional response and logical argument on every side, Alexander had resolved that they should switch the babies. He felt, more so than Daphna, the imperative to raise the child they’d intended to bring into the world. “There’s a pull, genetically,” he said. That Zoë would live so close, that he would know of her existence but not raise her felt like “upside-down world,” as he put it. But heading into the meeting, he had no way of knowing what Annie and her husband felt — whether they would fight to maintain custody of Zoë.
When Daphna posed the question to the room, Annie looked bewildered. “I don’t know what to do,” she said. Both of them wept as the conversation circled closer to a resolution. Finally, Annie’s husband said out loud what Annie knew, going into the meeting, would most likely be the collective decision: They would switch the babies. Alexander felt relieved that someone had said it so clearly; he knew that neither of the mothers ever would. As shaken as they were, the couples were in agreement.
But how to do it? They knew they couldn’t just turn their babies over — it didn’t feel healthy for Zoë and May, and at any rate, the parents weren’t emotionally ready. Should they make the transition with regular visits over six months? Three months? They decided they would start feeling their way toward this major shift. The babies, they all believed, would adjust. Privately, each couple wondered if they could, too.
Having made it through one dreaded conversation, Daphna and Alexander now prepared for another: They had to tell Olivia. How to explain to one young daughter that you are voluntarily giving up another? They resolved to make it as simple as possible; their voices would be bright and reassuring, their emphasis on the new baby who was going to come into their lives — one who looked just like her. The day after Daphna and Alexander met with Annie and her husband, they approached Olivia, who was lying on the couch in the living room, a blue blanket half-draped on her.
“What if I told you you had another sister?” Daphna started out. Olivia looked mildly curious and stared at her mother’s stomach, clearly imagining she was pregnant.
Daphna asked if she had ever noticed that May looked different from the rest of the family. “Yeah,” Olivia responded, which somehow surprised Daphna, because she had never mentioned it. The “So what?” in Olivia’s tone was heavily implied. Daphna explained to Olivia that there was another baby who was a part of their family and that she was gaining a sister after a bit of a mix-up. Daphna said nothing about making a switch, but Olivia was quick to figure it out.
“Wait,” she said, sitting up abruptly. She asked: Did this mean they were losing May?
Alexander responded, reflexively: No, he assured her, we’ll always have her. Daphna groaned internally. That wasn’t true, and it would be an awful promise to break; at the same time, she knew that, in the moment, it seemed like the only possible answer.
Alexander told Olivia not to be scared, but Olivia started shutting down. She made a small whimpering noise. She asked again: Were they going to give her sister away?
As Daphna tried to comfort Olivia, she burned with anger at the clinic. Somewhere along the way, a mistake had been made. Daphna knew errors could happen when embryos were being tested for genetic birth defects or when they were being transferred to the mothers. Someone must have been careless, she thought, someone who had, unknowingly, thrown her family into chaos. Alexander felt that he had been played the fool — made to love a baby who wasn’t his to raise.
Eventually, the couple hired another lawyer, Adam Wolf, and filed suit against the clinic, alleging medical malpractice, negligence and breach of contract. Wolf, who specializes in suing fertility clinics that have been responsible for life-altering errors, says he had encountered fewer than 10 cases in which an embryo was transferred to the wrong woman. But he estimates that over the past decade, he has represented more than 1,000 plaintiffs accusing clinics and their suppliers of misconduct or negligence, most commonly because embryos in their care have been accidentally lost, damaged or destroyed.
In one instance, he represented a couple who asked a fertility clinic to test their embryos for a genetic mutation the husband carried that is associated with a type of often-lethal stomach cancer. The clinic helped the couple conceive a child, whom they were told was free of the genetic mutation. But a year later, when the parents returned to the clinic to have a second child, they discovered that the clinic had made a mistake: Their 1-year-old was a carrier.
Wolf believes that the public becomes aware of only a fraction of the errors that occur in fertility-clinic labs. In Zoë and May’s cases, as in the case of the twins carried by the Korean American woman in New York, the mistake was apparent because the children were a different race from the birth parents. In most instances, parents who accept and bond with their baby may never suspect something is wrong. Even when discovered, such mistakes rarely make the news. “Most of my cases you never hear about, because we settle them before we file lawsuits,” Wolf said. “And the settlement agreements have confidentiality agreements, because the clinics want to ensure that there will be no negative publicity as a result of its error.”
I.V.F. procedures are underregulated relative to most medical procedures, says Dov Fox, a law professor at the University of San Diego with a focus on bioethics. States do not mandate that fertility clinics report preventable and damaging mistakes when they happen, as is required of hospitals. Some emblematic problems, Fox told me, included clinics or labs relying on pen-and-paper labeling systems and faulty screening measures; Wolf cited a failure of clinic employees to respond to alarms on the freezers that store embryos. “I sometimes think of our lawsuits as the policing of the fertility industry,” Wolf said, “because nobody else is holding them accountable.”
Now heavily dominated by private equity, the industry is rife with for-profit, high-volume fertility clinics operating in a regulatory dead zone. Oversight of fertility clinics has been limited, Fox said, because of the challenges it poses politically: Although many conservatives would like to impose restrictions, including limiting the number of embryos a lab can create, they have historically not wanted to jeopardize efforts to restrict abortion by also attacking I.V.F., which is broadly popular. Many Democrats, meanwhile, have been reluctant to regulate the industry for fear of opening the door to restrictions that might, for example, limit who is eligible for I.V.F. (as in some countries, where gay couples are excluded). Fox expects that the overturning of Roe v. Wade will lead to new scrutiny of I.V.F., which might ultimately threaten its wide availability.
On the last day of the year, Daphna and Alexander stood in their living room, waiting to meet Zoë for the first time. They could hear her crying as Annie and her husband approached their front door. The sound was eerily like Olivia’s cry at that age, as if emerging from a time capsule. Listening to it crystallized everything Daphna and Alexander had been feeling for the past two weeks — that there was a child out there in the world, so close, but whom they couldn’t see or hold or comfort. Daphna bounced May in her arms as they waited for the doorbell to ring. Alexander swore a nervous curse, and May stared at him, a look of consternation on her face, reaching for her father with her tiny hand. Both couples had made other plans that day for their older children; the parents knew it would be hard enough to manage their own emotions without having to manage the siblings’ too.
The bell finally rang, and then Annie was inside, smiling at the baby in Daphna’s arms, reaching for her. “I’m sorry,” she said, weeping, her breath ragged. She kissed May’s cheek twice and buried her face in the crook of the baby’s neck. She sat down on the couch, her backpack still on. “How are you? How are you?” she asked, holding May in her lap so she could marvel at her face through tears.
“Hey, Zoë, this is your Mama Daphna,” Annie’s husband said as he unbuckled the baby from her car seat. “You want to go to your mommy?” Daphna, gasping, smiling, picked Zoë up. She was shocked by how different Zoë felt, how big compared to May — she realized that none of the clothing she’d bought for this daughter would fit.
Soon the husbands were holding the babies. Both mothers’ gazes veered from the sight of their own child in someone else’s arms to the sight of the other child in their husband’s arms. Each was doing the best she could to let the other mother have all the psychic space she needed with her daughter.
For almost two weeks, the families visited each other every day, sometimes at Daphna and Alexander’s house and sometimes at Annie and her husband’s house. Often the two mothers did what Alexander came to think of as “the mama dance”: Each would go to change a child’s diaper, then step back for a moment. “Is it OK if I? … Would you rather that you? … ” They had endless tiny details to discuss: Does she use a binkie? How long does she nap? Do you hold her until she falls asleep and then put her down, or just put her down? What’s her favorite bedtime music? How much did she weigh?
The couples were inventing a new kind of relationship as they went, and it was far from a given that the transition would go smoothly. For others in similar circumstances, the attempt at maintaining connection had ended in recrimination, as in the case of Donna Fasano, who in 1998, because of a clinic’s mistake, carried another couple’s embryo to term along with her own. (The mistake was evident because Fasano and her husband are white, and one of the two babies she delivered was Black.)
When the babies were 5 months old, the parties signed an agreement granting the genetic parents, Deborah Perry-Rogers and Robert Rogers, custody of their child and allowing Fasano and her husband to visit him twice a month. The visits quickly became tense. Perry-Rogers and her husband renamed their son, but when Fasano visited, lawyers for the couple claimed, she continued to call him by the name she’d given him and referred to herself as “Mommy,” which his new parents could not abide. Eventually, after more litigation, a judge denied the Fasano couple their visitation rights.
May’s and Zoë’s families were the victims of a fluke mishap, but they also seemed to be the beneficiaries of a fortuitous alignment: Financially, they were on similar footing, which meant that neither couple feared depriving their child of that advantage. Neither couple was particularly religious in practice. Even their parenting styles were similar: nurturing, attentive and gentle. There were some evident differences — Annie was home with the children, while Daphna worked full time — but for the most part, their similarities were as unlikely as the circumstances that brought them together.
In January, the couples decided that they were ready to take the next step — a daytime visit for each child alone with her genetic parents. Daphna sent May off to spend a few hours with Annie and her husband and was knocked over by a wave of grief as soon as she was by herself with Zoë, the child she had waited so long to have. Alexander found Daphna crying, sitting on the floor, as Zoë rested calmly in an automatic swing, the one May had swung in so many times. Daphna felt trapped: For every happy emotion, there was an equal and opposite adverse emotion. “As much as I’m so happy that Zoë is here and that we’re finally home with her, I just miss my May so much,” she told him through tears. “I know they’re taking care of her, but they don’t know her either.” She looked over at the swing. “But Zoë’s here. I know it’s wonderful.”
On Jan. 16, the families each had their babies overnight for the first time, and Daphna started to feel the connection she had been longing to feel. When she gave Zoë a bath before bedtime, she took her daughter in her arms, inhaled the scent of her head, felt her soft downy hair — somehow now she smelled like home. Like their towels, their shampoo, maybe even their pheromones. Daphna couldn’t help thinking of May, 10 minutes away at Annie and her husband’s home. May seemed farther along developmentally than Zoë, and Daphna worried that the change would be harder for her. That night, in fact, May was crying inconsolably. Annie was distraught that she could not comfort her, her heart breaking for a baby she already loved but who was sobbing, she was sure, for a mother Annie could not possibly be at that moment.
The couples had discussed when they were going to switch the girls permanently, but when the time came, somehow Daphna had not fully understood that it was imminent. The morning after that first sleepover, when Annie and her husband indicated that the girls should stay where they were, Daphna was stunned — what felt like the swiftness of the decision saddened her. Even so, she agreed that it was time; the girls were already 4 months old, and the back and forth was proving hard on everyone, especially the older siblings.
On Feb. 11, the two families met at a courthouse. They had been giving each other space, and that day was the first time they had seen each other since the switch. They formalized their new parenting arrangement, signing papers that reclassified the carrying mothers as surrogates. It was real; it was in writing. Daphna shared the news on Facebook with friends and family, many of whose messages she and Alexander had been ignoring. They hadn’t known what to say. Trying to explain was exhausting.
In the days and weeks that followed, Alexander came to dread the hours after bedtime, when Daphna, who kept her emotions in check all day for Olivia and Zoë, broke down, sobbing for much of the night like someone in physical pain. At other times, Daphna would feel May’s presence and turn to Alexander. “She needs me,” she would say. “I can feel it. I’m going over there right now.” Alexander could summon the calm needed to talk her down, but he started suffering from panic attacks for the first time in his life.
Daphna and Annie had agreed that no matter what, they would do whatever they could to help the older siblings cope. On Feb. 13, Daphna texted Annie because Olivia was weeping, crying that she missed May. Daphna didn’t want to put Annie in a difficult position, so she wrote, with considerable understatement, that Olivia was “having a really hard time.” Twenty minutes later, Annie and May were at her door. Alexander took photos of May, chunky and laughing, in the arms of Olivia, who was flashing a smile that hadn’t been seen since her sister left the house. Annie acknowledged, tearily, that May also looked happier than she had since the switch. They put the two babies next to each other and photographed them gazing at each other from their respective blankets: May with a thumb in her mouth and a hand on Zoë’s face, Zoë’s hand reaching out to touch May.
ImageA portrait of the Cardinale family.
Alexander and Daphna Cardinale with Zoë and Olivia.Credit...Holly Andres for The New York Times
In a text later that day, Annie promised Daphna that she would give May all the love she could, and that she had faith that Daphna would do the same for Zoë. “You’re a great Mommy,” Annie wrote. “We can definitely visit each and check how our girls are doing. It’s so hard. I don’t know how to let go.”
Daphna wrote back: “What if we don’t ‘let go’? What if we just have 2 babies? We share them. We have to find a way to have both babies. Spend a lot of time together. Raise these girls together.”
Annie responded quickly. “Yes, let’s raise them together,” she wrote. “Let’s have two babies.”
The two families started meeting more frequently, becoming closer but sharing only so much of what was going on at home. Privately, Annie was flooded with anxiety. Sometimes, when May cried, Annie didn’t feel the same physical tug she felt for Zoë, a void that she filled with guilt and self-recrimination. They say the blood calls, she thought, gazing at her baby — why wasn’t it calling now? She loved May profoundly, but that love was somehow different from what she felt for Zoë, who had imprinted on her heart. Annie tried to stay buoyant for her son, but her efforts could be sabotaged by his innocent sweetness. “Where’s Zoë? I want Zoë!” he would say, looking bewildered. Annie would try to reassure him — now May is here, she would tell him, trying to sound cheerful, and Zoë is with her Mama Daphna and Daddy Xander.
Like Daphna, Annie was eager to make her daughter’s transition as seamless as possible. Daphna used to bounce with May on a big yoga ball, which she gave to Annie, so now Annie bounced with May on a big yoga ball. Daphna told her that May liked being swaddled, so now Annie swaddled her. Daphna said May slept better in her own crib, in her own room, with the sound machine on and the shade drawn; Annie, who was used to having Zoë sleep in her bedroom, would instead go to May’s bedroom at bedtime and hold her tiny hand through the slats of the crib until she fell asleep. Sometimes, when Annie bounced with May on the ball, she had the strange sensation that it wasn’t just that the baby had been switched but that she herself had been transformed — that in trying to replace a different mother, she had become a different person. She was depressed enough that her own mother, who had planned to stay with her for just a few months after the delivery, decided to extend her visit.
The couples had known each other for only three months when the pandemic hit in March 2020, but by June, they decided to form a pod. Annie’s son and Olivia grew as close to each other as they were to their younger siblings. They played with Legos, made slime, stole food off each other’s plates and longed to see each other if too many days went by without a visit. Annie was always eager to see Zoë, but when the two families gathered, her emotions could be unpredictable. During one visit to the Cardinales’ home, when Zoë, who had a rash, cried loudly, Annie almost shook from the effort of not rushing to take Zoë in her arms.
Daphna, too, felt that she had been transformed. From the moment she learned the fertility clinic had located May’s parents, she knew she would be changed by what was to come; she just didn’t know who she was going to be on the other side of it — would she still like that person? Many times, during that first year, she wasn’t sure. Usually so even-keeled, she was now more easily overwhelmed, quicker to snap. She gave Zoë all the love she had to give: She gazed into her eyes, held her and walked with her, sang softly into her ear, tickled her tummy gently to make her laugh. But sometimes, even when she was feeding Zoë in those murky, dreamy hours of the early morning, she would have a haunted sensation. I have the wrong baby, she would think with a start of panic.
That spring, the minister who married Daphna and Alexander reached out after learning about what happened from the update that Daphna posted on Facebook. The minister had an idea: What if she merged the two families in a formal ceremony? Because a Covid lockdown order was still in place, the “family joining ceremony” would be virtual for everyone except the eight of them, who gathered in Daphna and Alexander’s living room around the time of the girls’ first birthdays, in September. The couples expressed their commitment, and the minister said a blessing. Then each family member who was able picked a color of sand and poured it into two different molds decorated with the silhouette of a tree, representing their growing family. The colorful family trees sat on mantels over the fireplaces in each of their homes.
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Daphna and Annie with the four children.Credit...Holly Andres for The New York Times
The merging of their families was an act of hope, like a wedding, which didn’t mean their problems were behind them. Daphna worried that although she could still give love, she was not as receptive to receiving it. She felt distant from Alexander, whose panic attacks were growing worse, especially after visits with May. Sometimes they were so bad that he was sure he was having a heart attack; once, they called an ambulance. Instead of making Daphna more caring toward her husband, she felt herself withdrawing out of self-protection. What if something happened to him, too?
Something shifted for Daphna when the babies were about 15 months old. Zoë, by then, was already standing on her own and walking. One morning, Daphna left her momentarily to take out the trash. She was gone less than a minute, but when she came back, Zoë was wailing, staring at the door, crying with an operatic scale of sorrow that only a child that age can fully embody. It hit Daphna in that moment: To Zoë, she was just her mother. There was no before. There was just the wholly consuming dependency and desire that a 1-year-old feels for the woman whose face has beamed into her own with love and concern more than any other. Daphna hadn’t even realized that she still had a wall up — but now she realized she had to take it down. She had to try, as she thought of it, “to open another chamber of my heart.”
Both families, the previous December, had suffered through the girls’ first Christmas, afraid of losing their babies. Neither imagined that the next year they would be celebrating with that baby and another baby — with a whole new family — crammed together around a table. That Christmas, and every one since, the bases of their trees were buried in mounds of toys for the four children. Annie and her husband came loaded down with bags and bags overflowing with wrapped boxes, adding to the bounty that Daphna and Alexander had already amassed. Both sets of parents sensed that the excess did not so much reflect their joy as it did their lingering fear that their babies had suffered — that they had not been able to protect them. “It’s the guilt,” Daphna said. “We both feel so guilty.”
May and Zoë are now 5. They’ve celebrated holidays and birthdays together, swung on countless swings in synchrony, shared bubble baths and sliced apples and giggled under the covers when hiding, as a team of two, from Alexander in a game of hide-and-seek. They consider each other sisters. For the last two years, the girls went to the same preschool. Every day after school, they would beg Annie and Alexander, who did drop-off and pickup, for more time to play together. Annie took great pleasure in seeing Zoë so regularly; Alexander felt the same way about May. May still calls him “Daddy Xander” and Daphna “Mama Daphna,” and Zoë addresses Annie and her husband the equivalent way.
As close as they are, the girls have developed distinct personalities, and Daphna often thought about how each of them might be different, had she been raised entirely in her original home. Zoë, who had been slow to move and late to talk (it turned out she was born with a tongue tie), now was the louder of the two, more excitable. Daphna wondered whether she had changed as she got used to their family’s more boisterous energy. (“We’re like — the Louds,” Daphna said.) Zoë is devoted to the family dog, Cece, a rambunctious mutt and a licker. May, by contrast, climbs into her mother’s arms for comfort if the dog comes too close.
With time, Daphna and Alexander felt their sense of steadiness in their family returning. They had been outspoken about their ordeal to the media and pursued their malpractice lawsuit in the hopes of holding the clinic accountable, but in 2022 they decided to settle, in part because they did not want to risk having to put Olivia on the stand. (The details of the settlement have not been made public. A lawyer for the clinic declined to comment on the facts of the case but said that “the parties settled amicably.”) With the fight finally over, Daphna and Alexander realized they could put down the boulder of anger and resentment they had been carrying together. They could breathe. They could be grateful for the time they spent with May — May, whose favorite color was rainbow, who still could fall asleep, from the exhaustion of an outburst, in Daphna’s arms — and fall in love with Zoë, who harmonized as soon as she could sing, who snuggled up to Daphna for naps, who had a mind for numbers, like Alexander’s grandfather.
Every so often, Alexander would look at his phone, and there would be a text from Annie about a listing for a home on the market in her neighborhood. Once, when the girls were about 3, Annie sent them a listing for the house that was right next door. She was hopeful that they would buy it. They could take down the fence, have one big backyard — it would be as close to their dream for a shared house as they could get. Daphna and Alexander went and looked, wandering their way through the high-ceilinged house. They loved the idea of living next door, but the house was too expensive; there were limits to how much they could do to accommodate their mutual longing.
This year, for the first time, May and Zoë will be going to different schools. The kindergarten in Daphna and Alexander’s neighborhood would have been an even longer drive for Annie than the one to the girls’ preschool, and the commute would have made it harder to get her son to his after-school activities. To ensure that they would all see one another at least once a week, Annie proposed that the girls sign up for ballet on Sundays, a plan the Cardinales embraced. They were just as committed to maintaining the bond. Sometimes Alexander talked to Daphna about how much easier their lives would be if they moved to Northern California, where they had more family, but the thought always ran aground: What about May? They were still too close to her to seriously contemplate moving away.
May’s kindergarten started before Zoë’s, and both sets of parents were excited and nervous for her on her first day of school. “The teacher said she did great,” Annie wrote to their group text thread at the end of the school day. “Yay! Success!” Daphna responded. Annie wrote that May had drawn something at school for Daphna, but she had been instructed not to send a photo of it — May wanted to give it to Daphna in person.
That afternoon, Annie took her to the Cardinales’ house, where May presented Daphna with the picture. It showed a woman with red hair like Daphna’s, her pregnant belly bulging out to hold the baby May had drawn inside. The mother is holding the hand of a little girl, the baby’s older sister. At first, May told Annie that the picture was of Annie, but then she said what Annie already knew: It was a picture of Daphna. Annie and Daphna marveled over the crayon drawing — over how complicated it was that on May’s first day of school, her first day of separation from Annie, the person she was thinking about was Daphna. Annie wasn’t threatened; she knew how devoted she and May were to each other. If anything, Annie seemed almost awed by the complexities of a loving 5-year-old’s mind. “They’re still working it out,” she said, amazed.
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Zoë and May playing together.
Zoë and May.Credit...Holly Andres for The New York Times
In moments like that, Daphna reflected on how complicated her feelings about May still were. There was guilt that she gave May up, but also another sort of guilt — the knowledge that although she still loved May, she had had to change the shape of that love into something new, for everyone’s sake. “I don’t know how to let her back into my heart the same way,” Daphna told me. She and the other parents all tried to normalize what happened, cheerfully answering questions about who started out in whose belly and why, but they knew that as the children got older, they would have more troubling questions — questions about chance and choice and sacrifice and compromise. The parents might not have the answers to those questions; they would simply say that they did the best they could.
Don’t call it a happy ending, the children’s parents would say; it’s not. It’s the happiest ending possible, which is, still, more than they could have hoped for.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/25/maga ... 778d3e6de3
Re: Parenting Issues
What I Wish Someone Had Told Me About Motherhood
Daniela J. Lamas
By Daniela J. Lamas
Dr. Lamas, a contributing Opinion writer, is a pulmonary and critical care physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
In the early months after my daughter was born, I thought it was surely the hormones surging through my body that made me, someone who had never been interested in babies, find my daughter’s every move endlessly fascinating. At some point the hormones would quiet, the fascination would diminish, and I would return to my prior self.
But nearly two years later, I find myself shoveling sand into a plastic turtle with genuine enthusiasm. How do I reconcile this reality with the ambivalence with which I once approached motherhood?
We are at a strange moment when it comes to ideas about parenthood in this country. An increasing number of adults say that they are unlikely to become parents, leading to much hand-wringing over declining birthrates. Some argue a drop in people having babies signals impending societal decline. Others believe the implications are overblown. These conversations play out in ways large and small, from political and policy arguments to the inevitable uncomfortable conversations over the holiday dinner table.
For all the talk, which many of us would rather ignore, there is a kernel of something real here that’s not being adequately addressed. For my generation — and, I’d argue, especially for women in my generation — the decision of whether to have a child has become highly fraught. It’s tied up with our desires for fulfilling careers, our willingness to risk a shift in the identities and lives we have built. It’s tied up in an understanding of all that went into making motherhood a choice that we get to make. With so much at stake, it is so easy to become paralyzed by indecision.
But perhaps what I would have wanted to hear when I was dithering was something like this: Having a child has been extraordinary. I came very close to not doing it. And if I had not, that life would have been a good one, too, just a different one. The hardest part of any decision is always the uncertainty, the time entertaining two possible outcomes, not knowing what happens on the other side. For those facing a similar choice, intensified by the holiday season, know that whatever you decide — or whatever is decided for you by biology and chance and time — it gets only easier from here.
As a critical care doctor, I deal with the gravity of uncertainty all the time. I walk my patients and their families through what can feel like impossible decisions. Sometimes families spend days or even longer in a state of limbo, uncertain which treatment path to choose. Any decision is a relief, because then we can start to plan. Just as there is relief in deciding to have a child and then getting pregnant, there is also relief in making a clear decision not to. We can leave our self-imposed purgatory.
For doctors, the decision whether and when to have a child is a particularly tough one, as our hours are notoriously long and we often work under unimpressive parental leave policies. I tell my younger colleagues that I chose to become a parent out of fear of future regret. Though that’s the truth, that reasoning didn’t feel good enough at the time and led me to moments of intense panic during my pregnancy. Surely there must be a better rationale to put myself through the mental and physical trauma of pregnancy and to potentially upend decades of career building (or so I assumed). Surely I must have within me a deep yearning and belief that I would not be fulfilled without a child. But that wasn’t the case. I did not want to wonder about having a child when it was too late.
Maybe the decision to have a child, which feels particularly heavy for those of us who make the choice to go through in vitro fertilization to do so, doesn’t need to be any more complicated than that. For many of us, there will never be that epiphany, that belief that the path we chose was the only possible one that could have led to a good life. There are simply two roads, two mutually exclusive paths. We each choose one.
When I became pregnant, a friend told me she was sure I wouldn’t become an annoying person with a baby — that is, the baby would not become the focal point of conversation. I would be the same person. Just with a baby in tow.
But I am not the same person. And for some reason, I feel almost embarrassed to admit how much I love being a mother. I spent my adult life until now with this idea that I was different from — and maybe even a little superior to — my peers who chose to spend time building their families. I was so worried about what a child would mean for my career. But what I did not anticipate was that what I would want itself would change.
I have the same desires to write, to work as a physician, to succeed, but they come up against a new and often more powerful want. Which is to be with this child. To watch her look of concentration as she strings words into sentences, to count the buses and dogs that we see in the morning. To feel her tiny arms around my neck when she gives me a hug. I find myself singing on the street and playing in the park with her, and I don’t even hear the internal narrative that tells me that I should be working, that this is not enough.
There will always be regrets, if we are the sort to entertain them. What I don’t see during my mornings at the park are the essays I will not pen, the TV show I will not interview to write for. The counterfactual was always going to be unknowable, whatever choice I made. On the other side of any decision, there might be regret, but there is also the joy of settling into your reality. It is, for me, the joy of holding my child close, knowing that of all the potential paths, this is mine.
More on parenthood
Opinion | Daniela J. Lamas
I Know the Pressure of Being a Doctor. Motherhood Is Something Else. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/13/opin ... eding.html
May 13, 2023
Opinion | Jessica Grose
If We Want More Babies, Our ‘Profoundly Anti-Family’ System Needs an Overhaul https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/opin ... -rate.html
March 8, 2023
Opinion | ‘The Ezra Klein Show’
Birthrates Are Plummeting Worldwide. Why? https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/19/opin ... iubba.html
March 19, 2024
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/28/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Daniela J. Lamas
By Daniela J. Lamas
Dr. Lamas, a contributing Opinion writer, is a pulmonary and critical care physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
In the early months after my daughter was born, I thought it was surely the hormones surging through my body that made me, someone who had never been interested in babies, find my daughter’s every move endlessly fascinating. At some point the hormones would quiet, the fascination would diminish, and I would return to my prior self.
But nearly two years later, I find myself shoveling sand into a plastic turtle with genuine enthusiasm. How do I reconcile this reality with the ambivalence with which I once approached motherhood?
We are at a strange moment when it comes to ideas about parenthood in this country. An increasing number of adults say that they are unlikely to become parents, leading to much hand-wringing over declining birthrates. Some argue a drop in people having babies signals impending societal decline. Others believe the implications are overblown. These conversations play out in ways large and small, from political and policy arguments to the inevitable uncomfortable conversations over the holiday dinner table.
For all the talk, which many of us would rather ignore, there is a kernel of something real here that’s not being adequately addressed. For my generation — and, I’d argue, especially for women in my generation — the decision of whether to have a child has become highly fraught. It’s tied up with our desires for fulfilling careers, our willingness to risk a shift in the identities and lives we have built. It’s tied up in an understanding of all that went into making motherhood a choice that we get to make. With so much at stake, it is so easy to become paralyzed by indecision.
But perhaps what I would have wanted to hear when I was dithering was something like this: Having a child has been extraordinary. I came very close to not doing it. And if I had not, that life would have been a good one, too, just a different one. The hardest part of any decision is always the uncertainty, the time entertaining two possible outcomes, not knowing what happens on the other side. For those facing a similar choice, intensified by the holiday season, know that whatever you decide — or whatever is decided for you by biology and chance and time — it gets only easier from here.
As a critical care doctor, I deal with the gravity of uncertainty all the time. I walk my patients and their families through what can feel like impossible decisions. Sometimes families spend days or even longer in a state of limbo, uncertain which treatment path to choose. Any decision is a relief, because then we can start to plan. Just as there is relief in deciding to have a child and then getting pregnant, there is also relief in making a clear decision not to. We can leave our self-imposed purgatory.
For doctors, the decision whether and when to have a child is a particularly tough one, as our hours are notoriously long and we often work under unimpressive parental leave policies. I tell my younger colleagues that I chose to become a parent out of fear of future regret. Though that’s the truth, that reasoning didn’t feel good enough at the time and led me to moments of intense panic during my pregnancy. Surely there must be a better rationale to put myself through the mental and physical trauma of pregnancy and to potentially upend decades of career building (or so I assumed). Surely I must have within me a deep yearning and belief that I would not be fulfilled without a child. But that wasn’t the case. I did not want to wonder about having a child when it was too late.
Maybe the decision to have a child, which feels particularly heavy for those of us who make the choice to go through in vitro fertilization to do so, doesn’t need to be any more complicated than that. For many of us, there will never be that epiphany, that belief that the path we chose was the only possible one that could have led to a good life. There are simply two roads, two mutually exclusive paths. We each choose one.
When I became pregnant, a friend told me she was sure I wouldn’t become an annoying person with a baby — that is, the baby would not become the focal point of conversation. I would be the same person. Just with a baby in tow.
But I am not the same person. And for some reason, I feel almost embarrassed to admit how much I love being a mother. I spent my adult life until now with this idea that I was different from — and maybe even a little superior to — my peers who chose to spend time building their families. I was so worried about what a child would mean for my career. But what I did not anticipate was that what I would want itself would change.
I have the same desires to write, to work as a physician, to succeed, but they come up against a new and often more powerful want. Which is to be with this child. To watch her look of concentration as she strings words into sentences, to count the buses and dogs that we see in the morning. To feel her tiny arms around my neck when she gives me a hug. I find myself singing on the street and playing in the park with her, and I don’t even hear the internal narrative that tells me that I should be working, that this is not enough.
There will always be regrets, if we are the sort to entertain them. What I don’t see during my mornings at the park are the essays I will not pen, the TV show I will not interview to write for. The counterfactual was always going to be unknowable, whatever choice I made. On the other side of any decision, there might be regret, but there is also the joy of settling into your reality. It is, for me, the joy of holding my child close, knowing that of all the potential paths, this is mine.
More on parenthood
Opinion | Daniela J. Lamas
I Know the Pressure of Being a Doctor. Motherhood Is Something Else. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/13/opin ... eding.html
May 13, 2023
Opinion | Jessica Grose
If We Want More Babies, Our ‘Profoundly Anti-Family’ System Needs an Overhaul https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/opin ... -rate.html
March 8, 2023
Opinion | ‘The Ezra Klein Show’
Birthrates Are Plummeting Worldwide. Why? https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/19/opin ... iubba.html
March 19, 2024
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/28/opin ... 778d3e6de3