This is from a graduate school paper on child development I wrote in 1977, when Anne was 4 and Michelle was 2.
I am still realizing to what extent the mother I am is shaped by the child I am mothering. When I had only one child, I congratulated myself for all of Anne's superior qualities and blamed myself for her troublesome ones. Since I've had 2 children, I've become remarkably more tolerant of other mothers and of myself. I've also grown to understand why my my mom, after mothering 6 kids, has always been quite skeptical of childrearing theories. Since I belong to a community where young parents try to help each other through babysitting cooperatives, cooperative playgroups and nursery schools, and mothers' support groups, I've had the chance to observe many children of similar ages interact with their parents. When I first moved here when Anne was 17 months, I was quick to correlate the children's characteristics with their parents' childrearing practices. Now I am humbly aware of how infinitely complex the whole question is.
The only dramatic change in our lives beween Anne's and Michelle's births was our move to Chelsea from the Upper West Side. We still lived on a high floor in an apartment with a terrace and spectacular views. But although I was still at home full-time and their dad was gone from 8 to 6, their day-to-day routine was completely different. When Anne was born, none of my NYC friends had children; consequently no one I knew was home during the day. To relieve my isolation, I frequently visited my parents and my husband's parents on Long Island. As a result, Vanessa had frequent contact with her grandparents and her teenage aunts and uncles, but very little contact with other babies and toddlers. When Michelle was born, I was immersed in Anne's playgroup, with daily contact with 10 familes and their 2-year-olds. Monday to Friday Michelle was constantly exposed to the stimulation-bedlam of young kids. In fact playing with baby Michelle was playgroup's surefire activity when all else failed. On the other hand, I seldom visited Long Island; our parents and sibs came to visit us. Michelle's comings and goings are always tied to Anne's schedules.
In addition to having different daily routines, they had a rather different mother. After Anne's birth, I still did some free-lance editing. I kept wrestling with the question of if and how and when to combine motherhood with my editing career. By the time Michelle was born, I had wholeheartedly renounced publishing and was fully committed to full-time motherhood when my children were small and had chosen working with young children as my future career. My expectations for myself and my baby had been transformed by what I experienced and by how I had grown during Anne's infancy. I was far freer to respond to my emotions and intuitions about Michelle. I had gained confidence in my own style of mothering and was so longer so swayed by "expert" opinion or my prior expectations of what kind of mother I should be. I was much more relaxed about introducing solids, long-term nursing, the family bed.
Michelle's relationship with me was hardly as symbiotic as my relationship with Anne during infancy. Anne was as much as part of Michelle's life as my husband and I were. Unless Anne was asleep she was almost always in the same room when I nursed or played with Michelle. As soon as Michelle could reliably sit up, we bathed them together. Since Michelle was 8 months old, they've amicably shared the same room. I successfully diminished Anne's jealousy by involving her in every way possible in Michelle's care. I always read to Anne when I was nursing Michelle since she hated playing in her bedroom by herself.
The result? Michelle's social skills seem far more sophisticated than Anne's were at 2. Sometimes she stays at Anne's cooperative nursery school when I am the helping mommy. She knows all the children's names, interacts warmly with them, participates fully in painting, block building, clay, water play, and dress up and manages surprising well at meeting time and story time. She needs to establish eye contact with me fairly often, but she leaves me free to interact with the other children. At home she holds her own with her high-powered sister very well. As I observe her avoiding no-win confrontations with Anne, I try to imitate her skillful mixture of unmistakable self-assertion and judicious compromise. As Michelle chortles, "even Anne loves me."
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4 comments:
I keep insisting that it's BEN who's raised Jack, not me or my husband, LOL!
I'm always amazed at how my mothering changes right along with my children.
Insightful post.
Wow, Mary Joan, I loved reading this. So very familiar, I've made nearly identical observations about my boys (5 and 2) and my parenting of each of them. One thing that has especially interested me is their very different language development. T, the elder, talked very early and very precisely -- he had some genetic tendency, I'm sure, but also he spent his early months listening to (and watching) two adults speak directly to him, and constantly! My little one, on the other hand, was surrounded by children from the very beginning (and I also think he has a language brain more like my husband's, more free-form and less rule-bound than mine and T's), and was parented by a more distracted -- and laid back -- mother and father. So I think he learned to use a very different style of communication: he saw so much important connection happening through play, through movement and non-language verbalization, and this is what he emulated more as he began to communicate consciously. His pace with verbal development has also been quite different, faster than his brother once he really started putting words together. At 26 months now, he speaks with almost as much precision and complexity as his brother did at this age. Birth order and siblings' varied experience and development -- this is all just endlessly fascinating to me (not least because I'm a second born who's always mistaken for a firstborn!).
My second daughter spoke earlier than her sister; my third and fourth daughters spoke even earlier. Anne, the oldest, was so intent on physical world domination that language and small motor skills were a lesser priority. By the time Rose (no. 3) and Carolyn (no.4) were born, their oldest sisters were very articulate and willing to spend an enormous amount of time playing with them. So it's always complicated. So far in this post and the one I am writing on the third and fourth child, I am concentrating on environmental differences. Then I will write about persistent individual differences.
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