How I Pretty Much Raised My Brother

By Alina Adams 

I had my oldest son a few months before I turned 30. Not young in the majority of the world. Not even particularly young in the United States. On the Upper West Side of New York, however, when I asked my doctor if, at 36, I was too old to think about having a third child, he told me, “Most of my patients your age are still thinking about thinking about having their first baby.”

The thing is, even though I gave birth to my first child in 1999, I’d already been raising one for about two decades prior to that. My brother.

Eight years younger than me, he was born six months after my family immigrated to the United States from the Soviet Union. My parents had a lot to do, what with the whole settling in another country, learning English, looking for a job, trying to survive thing. So my brother became my responsibility. I took him for walks around the block in his baby carriage. I took him to the bathroom. On his first day of preschool, I stayed with him in the classroom to help him adjust. I taught him to tie his shoes. I bought him his first baseball glove because I knew he’d need it to fit in with the other, American boys at kindergarten. I regularly went to his parent/teacher conferences (most were cool with it; but one flat out refused to speak to me, even though I tried to explain I’d been doing this for years now. I was 12). And when, down the line, he became a competitive ice skater, I drove him to practice at dawn and dealt with his coaches and was his official chaperone at out-of-town competitions.

To me, it seemed normal. Most of the kids I grew up around, also Soviet immigrants with younger siblings born in the US, understood that the answer to “Am I my brother’s keeper?” was “Yes, you are. So anything he does wrong is your fault.”

To this day, when someone compliments my mother about my brother, her response is, “Tell Alina. He’s her child.”

Conversely, when my mother wants to know what my brother is thinking, she doesn’t ask him. She asks me.
The practice has a name, apparently. I learned it in The Sibling Effect, the book I reviewed here last summer. It’s called alloparenting, and it’s rather common around the world. Except in the West.

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My Autistic Daughter is Going Through Puberty

By Dana Meijler
 

While the world of autism is talking, blogging, and arguing about Autism Awareness Month, over here we have been dealing with another kind of awareness. One in which autism, like with a lot of other things, brings challenges, not just to Maya, but to me as her mom.

Puberty.
A few months ago I wrote a post about how I and everyone around me were noticing changes in my daughter and my fears about how to talk about it with her.

She’s still so much of a kid, a kid that plays with stuffed animals and likes to hold my hand. As hard as it is for any parent to acknowledge that their babies are growing up, I do think with an autistic or other special needs child, the regular bittersweet feelings and fears are also accompanied with big-fat-scary-fears. Fears that your child will not understand the changes going on physically and emotionally, fears that the social implications of puberty will leave them even more vulnerable and unprotected. Fears that the process of growing up will wreck her innocence and that she will end up hurt, confused, jaded, and withdraw back into a world of her own. Fears that the hormonal surges might manifest itself in behavioral challenges difficult to overcome.

Still, a few months on from my post, M is still developing. I spoke to our doctor about it and he told me that although she is young, she is still within the confines of normal development and that there is nothing to be concerned about. He told me that it was possible to slow down the process through hormone therapy but that generally he didn’t recommend interfering with the body’s natural rhythms. I thought it was good that he asked me how the kids in school and around her were reacting to the changes, whether there was any teasing or bullying going on because in that situation, we may want to consider whether to slow things down a little. He did tell me to be on the lookout for changes in Maya’s behavior; if she withdraws or starts acting out a lot it might be a sign that all is not well in her social world.

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21 Parenting Tips I Learned from Genesis

1. Children will do things you tell them not to do (2:17)

2. They will blame each other (3:12)

3. You will curse at them, or perhaps want to (3:17)

4. Not all siblings get along all that well (4:8)

5. Children babble and make a lot of noise (11:19)

6. Your children may have to go off on their own journeys (12:1)

7. You may love your children so much that you put yourself at risk (19:26)

8. Do not, under any circumstances, let your children get you drunk so they can have sex with you even if they think it is the end of the world (19:32)

9. It’s possible to become pregnant even if you aren’t expecting it (21:2)

10. Be careful whom you invite to your weaning party (21:9)

11. Listen to your partner, even if you disagree with him/her (21:12)

12. It’s hard to watch your children suffer, keep your eyes open and look for the well (21:19)

13. You might sometimes want to kill your offspring, but keep your eyes open and look for the ram (22:13)

14. Don’t play favorites (Rebecca and Isaac re: Jacob and Esau; Jacob and Joseph)

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Research Indicates Early Engagement Crucial For Unaffiliated

Advocates for Jewish early childhood education and full-time care argue that the first years of a child’s life offer a critical opportunity to engage young children and their parents.

A 2010 study that Brandeis University professor Mark Rosen conducted for UJA-Federation of New York’s Beginning Jewish Families Task Force, focused on five regions in the New York area with growing numbers of unaffiliated Jewish families with small children. That study, now cited by many in the field, found that most Jewish institutions attract only the most motivated families, even as countless other parents express an openness to Jewish experiences.

The study noted that when a young family becomes involved with secular institutions instead of Jewish institutions, parents are “less likely to establish friendships with other parents who are involved in Jewish life, and will be less likely to encounter Jewish role models.”

Since the study’s release, UJA-Federation has funded various outreach efforts for young unaffiliated families in Lower Manhattan and Brownstone Brooklyn and also helped launch Kveller, a website for parents of Jewish children.

The study has also shaped the thinking of others in Jewish early childhood education, like Cathy Rolland of the Union for Reform Judaism.

“Many people in the field are out of touch with today’s families,” she said, adding that they expect the current generation of parents to seek out Jewish life on their own.

Today’s parents “will go to a Jewish early childhood program only if it’s excellent,” Rolland said.

The URJ recently launched a lay-professional support group for Reform temples seeking to strengthen their outreach to young families and to improve their early childhood programs.

At the same time, the Jewish Education Project expanded on the Rosen study last fall, conducting focus groups with unaffiliated new Jewish mothers in Brownstone Brooklyn, to learn more about what they want and don’t want.

The focus groups pointed to some contradictory findings: many Jewish mothers said they valued ethnic and racial diversity in their friendships, yet often found themselves gravitating socially to other Jewish women.

The research also found that expatriate Israeli mothers and American Jewish mothers want different types of programming.

Five Things I Don’t Understand About Sheryl Sandberg & Marissa Mayer

By Mayim Bialik

With the publication of the Sheryl Sandberg’s book, Lean In, and the related decision by Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer to no longer allow working from home (she herself returned to work two weeks postpartum albeit with a nursery built for her son next to her office) there has been a lot of “feminist” stuff swirling around the media and my head. And it’s getting crowded in there.

I want to share some things that I have been considering. Mind you, these are just thoughts. The issues at hand are so broad, so complex, and so overwhelming, that I have decided to just throw out there my initial thoughts and reactions to the media storm swirling and see what happens next.

Here are “Five Things That Currently Don’t Make Sense To Me.”

1. Returning to work two weeks postpartum is not good for your body. You’re still bleeding from birth. That’s a pretty strong indicator to chill out and maybe not return to a corporate office. Two weeks is a time of tremendous hormonal upheaval. Your body is actively trying to recover from the significant event called birth whereby a tiny person who has been in your body for 40 weeks comes out from your uterus and breathes air and all of that newborn stuff they do for the first time. Whether you had a C-section or vaginal birth, medicated, natural, homebirth (woohoo!), whatever… two weeks is a ridiculously short amount of time.

2. Since when is having a baby something to check off the list? People are talking about women in this day and age having a baby as if it’s buying a car, or refinancing the mortgage, or borrowing a car to stop off at the market: “Did you have that baby you mentioned wanting?” “Did you find the right time to have a baby? There’s a narrow window in there you want to hit on, you know.” “When are you going to have that baby? ‘Cause I’m going to need you to get back soon.”

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