So,
the thing is... I don't really understand computers.
I
USE a computer and I even consider myself fairly computer literate, but I don't
really understand them. I just kind
of go on faith that I can do what I want with them
--not that it's very complicated stuff.
I keep our household finances on the computer and I write this column.
I use the computer to surf and shop (last year, I managed to go through
the entire holiday season without ever going to a real store.)
I scan in pictures to send to family and friends and I have a pretty
voluminous e-mail correspondence. The
computer came with the ability to do these things (well, with some help from my
husband who is a Computer Guy and keeps everything running smoothly) and I just
have to figure out how to get it to do what I want.
Kids
are sort of like this, too. They
come so well programmed --albeit not necessarily to do what *I* want them to do
(EVER). But they come preprogrammed
with so much. It's just
fascinating. I've been thinking
about this a lot because my children are so incredibly different from each other
and I've been wondering about which personality traits are innate and which
traits are formed by their environment. You
know, the whole Nature vs. Nurture, Whose Child is this REALLY debate.
It
just surprises me so much that we have these two little... INDIVIDUALS. I had no idea that babies are born with their own agendas.
No one ever told me that! I
think I believed that children are malleable little lumps of clay when they are
born and we shape them into good people by our superior parenting. You would
think that with exactly the same parents and only two and a half years between
them, my kids might be remotely similar but they just aren't.
By
far the most interesting difference between our two is that one is an introvert
and one is an extrovert. I realize
that this could change over time but it still surprises me that Ana is an
introvert. My husband and I have
our shy moments but we are definitely extroverts.
Ana isn't exactly TIMID but she's an assessor.
She's very calm and watchful and there's a LOT going on in that big
brain. It took us five weeks of
dance class before Ana would dance, even with me in the room!
Away from class, she would wear those tap shoes and tutu non-stop.
But dance CLASS was another matter --she just wasn't convinced it was a
good thing. Her daddy came by one day to see how class was going and peeked in
the window just in time to see Ana standing with her eyes shut tight and her
hands over her ears, in the midst of a classroom of toddlers who were all curled
into little seeds on the floor. (*I*,
the only mother in the room, was standing at the wall to one side, hauling Jane
back every few minutes as SHE attempted to join class.)
But
I didn't even really realize how quiet Ana was until Jane was born.
Jane has not one shy bone in her tiny body. You can already tell that Jane will be the life of any party.
And Jane has no fear. For
example, she really thinks she can swim and when we take her into the water, she
tries to leap from our arms. She
puts her face in the water and splashes about and struggles to get free of us.
She is so clearly demanding to be put down that it's FUNNY.
She's NINE MONTHS OLD! In
contrast, if Ana gets water on her face, she leaps out of the pool and dries off
with a towel. Jane is eager to try new things --she already wants to eat
everything I’M eating. Ana hasn't
voluntarily taken a bite of food in three years except for the time her
grandmother introduced her to chocolate syrup.
Jane is impulsive and has very little patience for her parents, who are
clearly always trying to control her. (Okay, so THIS my daughters have in
common.)
My
husband calls Jane our "Emergency Room Kid” because he's sure we'll be
spending a lot of time with her there. She's
eager to be running the show --or maybe just to be running --and she's ALREADY a
climber. At this rate, she'll be in
a Big Girl Bed by the time she's eleven months, except of course, that she never
sleeps for fear of missing something. On
the other hand, Ana has slept twelve hours straight through every night since
she was two months old --I can literally count on one hand the exceptions to
this. She never climbed out of her
crib. She never chased the cat (and
a good thing, that) and she never had any interest in cabinets or toilets,
despite the fact that we had more security measures in place than Fort Knox.
She never ate bugs she found on the floor.
We should have started baby-proofing for Jane before she was even born
because there is no way she’s going to miss even one potentially dangerous
thing. And I can't even talk about the things I have pulled from her
mouth.
The
girls do have some things in common (besides their parents, I mean.) For one thing, it seems that both of my kids, and maybe this
is true of babies everywhere, are programmed to respond to music.
Isn't it marvelous that we all come programmed to dance?
My kids both have distinct senses of humor.
And they both are full of love and a large capacity for joy. It's funny,
I can remember taking a psychology class in college where we were told that fear
and rage were the only innate emotions and those were hard-wired in us to help
us survive. All of the other ones
like sadness or love were socialized into us.
But I don't believe it. You
only have to watch a child respond to a warm belly rub or the softness of a
wiggling puppy to know that joy is as hard-wired into us as sadness.
Isn't it amazing that this world is full of wonderful, joy-inspiring
things and we are actually programmed to appreciate them?
I
don't know. Maybe, in the end, it's
the chicken and the egg thing. Who
really cares whether it's nature or nurture?
I guess my conclusion is that it's a combination. I think babies are born
seriously hard-wired with certain traits and that we parent in response to who
they are, with the goal of guiding them to realizing their potential and
eventually some kind of happy adulthood. The
only thing I know for certain is that you forget everything you ever knew about
babies in between having them and this seems to be part of OUR design.
If we remembered, we would no doubt try to use the same techniques on all
of our kids but this way, we truly respond to the individual.
This
DOES mean that I can never be smug about any success in my parenting because
it's probably not MY success at all. More
likely, any achievement by my kids is attributable to my getting out of the way
so they can do what comes naturally. This
can leave a mom feeling a bit superfluous.
Oddly enough, though, that doesn't mean I want to quit this job.
That's pretty much hard-wired into ME.
Come
to think of it, I don’t understand how I’M programmed either.
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(c)
Barbara Cooper 2001
Barbara Cooper is the mother of Ana (3) and Jane (nine months). She lives in Austin, Texas and she wasn't ever much of a bug eater, either.