Open letter to Marguerite Kelly regarding “Mom’s at Split Ends…”

The following letter is a response to a Family Almanac article in the Washington Post.  I’ve attached the link.  I sent this letter (admittedly rushed and written while 2 kids climbed nearby furniture) to an email address included in the print edition of this article; however, the email address did not work, and the letter was never delivered.

Dear Ms. Kelly,

Regarding your article “Mom’s at Split Ends for Dealing with Toddler’s Hair-Raising Antics” (Washington Post 4/23/2009), I must take issue with your advice. Any article which includes the line “All it takes to rear a toddler…” shows that the author is out of touch with the daily challenges of parenting a toddler–if for no other reason than demonstrating a lack of empathy. Despite being a mother, you can still be out of touch with the urgency, the freneticism, and exhaustion that most parents of toddlers (those of us who don’t have 24-hour per day nanny services, at least) experience. You’ve lost this reader because your emotional removal from the experience and clear nostalgia (the kind of nostalgia that comes from being a grandparent, frankly) has affected the “voice” in your writing.

The child pulling her mother’s hair isn’t pulling it *because* she doesn’t know that it hurts. She’s doing it because she gets a reaction. Pain is irrelevant. She loves the attention and response that it brings… even if it’s negative. She may even have a cursory understanding of the pain it causes, but a 15-month old child has not developed this kind of empathy yet. Instead, she’s playing the role of the little scientist who loves watching how everyone responds to her… and thinks it’s quite a great game. She cannot psychologically make the connection between her own pain (the gentle tugging of her own fingers on her own hair) and the pain she causes someone else. True, she lacks impulse control… but she also loves a reaction. You have to take the reaction away from the child before the behavior will stop.

Parenting a toddler requires something almost more impossible than endless patience, encyclopedic understanding, boundless humor, and prescient prevention… it requires knowing when to be emotionally vulnerable and intimate and when to be detached. It is one more skill that seems unattainable, until you remember why you do it. Then, like most of the skills we learn as parents, we keep working at it because we love them, and it’s what they need to grow.

Sincerely,
Lisa Rhody