Bad Judgement part two

Not all judgement, of course, is helpful.
 When someone is not looking for, doesn't want, and indeed doesn't need help, it is not particularly useful to offer a long, reasoned evaluation of their activities and ways that they can improve them.
Or a short one, really.
 Likewise, even the most constructive and helpful of opinions, eagerly sought, and full of precious nuggets of delicious wisdom*, will be less than gladly received if it is offered with the sort of tactless rudeness that would make Simon Cowell** blush.
 Then there are the comments that aren't even meant to be constructive.
There are people who will break into a Facebook thread, or a forum conversation, to offer what is quite simply an insult: "Anybody who does this doesn't really love their kids" is a popular one, or "People who do this are just lazy"***, occasionally the person offering this opinion is simply rather boorish, but more often than not they're actually trying to be rude.

By now everyone on the internet has probably seen that Facebook post: you know the one from the mother saying that baby boys don't deserve to have breastmilk because they're already stronger than baby girls****, and claiming that if she has a boy she'll be feeding him formula, as well as circumcising him so he can't get as much pleasure out of sex.
 It got a lot of attention and, unsurprisingly, stirred up a lot of horrified responses.
Because, as it happens, that mother already has a son.
She also lives under a bridge and eats billy goats.
 Because she's a troll.*****
Most of the people who offer such rude opinions are trolls too.
They sit, in cosy anonymity behind their screens and, out of boredom, or a weird sense of power, or whatever-the-heck-it-is that motivates them, they poke people on their tenderest areas to see if they can make them jump.

Which is all very unpleasant.
What makes it worse, though, is that because of idiots like this, and because parenting is already such an insanely sensitive issue, and because some of the trolls are disguised as newspapers with inexplicable American accents******, many people on the internet are now preconditioned to expect judgemental nastiness whenever anything child related is mentioned.
I was on a Facebook group the other month******* when I saw a new post from a woman complaining that there was "too much judging" on the group and asking everyone to read an enormous glurgey post about how everyone was equally lovely.
 The thing is, there was nothing remotely judgemental on that group.
Occasionally there has been, in fact from time to time there are massive rows, but for the last month everything had been sweetness and light.
Somehow, however, this woman felt judged.********
Presumably she had endured enough slights, real or perceived, that almost any conversation on whatever-topic-it-was was now felt to her like a judgement on her personal choices.

 What was funny though, was that in reaction to this she responded with a very judgemental post to the entire group, saying that everyone needed to read her enormous sticky sweet post, and especially the last line, which they should read twice (and which, of course just said that everybody was equally great).
And the odd thing is that I think that post may actually have offered a worse kind of judgement than the negative kind.

I tried to find it to repost here, but I couldn't*********.
Essentially, however, it compared and contrasted every facet of parenting she could come up with, though she missed slings versus buggies as well as hitting your kids versus not hitting your damn kids.
After mentioning each option she gave some inane comment about why it was a good thing, following it up with "Good for you!" or "You're a good mom".
The thing is, that most of her opinions probably did more harm than good.
She contrasted cloth nappies (ok, she said diapers) and disposable ones for example.
Why bother?
 Why on Earth take the time to write a little paragraph on how cloth and disposable nappies are equally valid ways to keep your baby from dripping all over the place?
 It's not exactly a subject of furious debate, at most, some people think cloth nappies take too much time or are unhygienic and some think disposables are bad for the planet, or something on those lines.
It's a subject that at most deserves a "meh", a shrug, and a new topic of conversation.
 But by putting it in her Big List Of Things she somehow managed to imply that it was a topic of dissent, that people on either side of the nappy line were glaring at one another with judgemental fury.
 If anyone was feeling a little uncomfortable about their choice of infant-rump-covering, they probably felt a lot worse after that.

There were others in a similar vein.
What bothered me about them was not only the weird sense that if she had to tell us all not to fight we must secretly have been hating each other all along, but also the repeated statement that "You're a good mom".
 Because, seriously, how would she know?
Breastfeeding doesn't make me a good mother, you can't tell whether or not I'm a fiend in human form based on the amount of television I let my daughters watch (though they might claim otherwise).
Breastfeeding just feeds Phoebe, all you can tell from the amount of television I let my daughters watch is how much television I let them watch.
 If you read this blog you know that we homeschool, you know I used a sling, that I'm vegetarian, that we make an awful lot of pie, that I think I'm funnier than I actually probably am, and that I'm terrible at updating my blog regularly.
 Maybe you know a few more things, too, but in general, that's it.
You do not know whether I'm a good parent.
Because none of that information can tell you whether I'm a good parent or the maternal equivalent of Snidely Whiplash.

Generally speaking, calling someone a good parent when you don't really know whether they are one isn't going to do a lot of damage.
 When it came to one of the entries in the list of Things That Can Be Done In Two Different Ways, however, things seemed a little different.
One of her "good mom"s was "The mother who fed her kids takeaway every night this week".
 The thing is, that isn't ok, it certainly isn't the sort of thing that should be met with a "good for you" or a trite little remark about how it's no worse than making a home-cooked organic meal each week**********.
 I've thought this over for quite some time and, honestly, the only decent response I can think of to a mother who's fed her children takeaway every night is "Is everything alright?" or maybe, "What can I do to help?"
 Because the mother who feeds her kids takeaway every night has a problem.
Perhaps it's a temporary issue: maybe her kitchen has been flooded out and she can't cook, or maybe she's getting over the flu and just hasn't felt like cooking all week.
Perhaps there's no-one else in the house who could make a hot meal.
Or a cold one.
Perhaps she just couldn't get to the shops for some reason, perhaps she's too tired, or too busy, and just can't fit everything in.
Perhaps she's depressed.
Perhaps she could use a friend, to pick up the kids from school so she has time to shop, or to bring round a home-cooked meal while her life gets back under control, or to lend her some fridge-space, let her cry on their shoulder, commiserate with her woes, or tell her that, no, that doesn't sound quite normal and does she think it would help to talk to someone?
Perhaps she's fine.
But if all you say is "Good for you! You're a good mom!" then you'll never know.
 So nobody will help poor Mother-on-the-theoretical-edge: her woes, if she has any, will go unnoticed and unanswered, brushed under the carpet with "You're a good mom!"

Ok, enough ranting about the presumably well-meaning woman's awful diatribe.

My point is, that if you just respond to everything with a cheerful "That's great! Everything's fine!" then real problems get ignored.
 It's bad enough to tell someone they're doing everything wrong, when they just wanted to tell you how much their toddler loves Dora the Explorer, but when they're actually seeking help, or even just sympathy, to tell them that actually, they're imagining their problems, everything's fine, hurrah for them,  is to completely ignore their pain and leave them feeling that, actually, no-one cares about their difficulties.
 If poor takeaway-mother wasn't miserable enough before she probably is now.

I remember, some years ago when I was overweight.
I wasn't badly overweight, I was a little over the average weight for my height, but for me it was a nightmare.
I'm naturally thin, my normal healthy weight is a little under the recommended weight for my height.
 But I had M.E. and couldn't exercise, could barely drag myself out of bed in the mornings and this, combined with what was, for me, a huge weight gain, made me thoroughly miserable.
What I needed was sympathy, or some useful suggestions for ways to lose weight without actually starving myself.
 What I was given was reassurance that I looked fine, that my weight was perfectly normal, and various remarks about the way society judges women based on their weight.
I was told to read The Beauty Myth, and Fat Is A Feminist Issue.
 But I didn't look fine, my weight wasn't normal for me, and I didn't care about society.
I cared that I didn't look like myself any more, that I didn't feel like myself, that everyone was too busy deconstructing societal norms of beauty to listen to me telling them that the only norm I cared about was my own.
 So I was miserable.
And the more everyone told me that I was fine or that I looked great, the worse I felt, because what I heard was that no-one really cared.

So here's the thing: sometimes people don't want your judgement.
Then, unless it's really urgent, unless they're telling you how great it is to knock your kid out every night with a couple of shots of vodka and a chaser of cough syrup, you probably shouldn't give it.
But when they are extolling the virtues of the vodka-meltis cocktail, someone really needs to speak up.
 And sometimes people do want it.
Because judgement, as I said before, doesn't mean telling people off, or running them down.
It just means a reasoned opinion.
Sometimes people need that, sometimes they want, not praise, but your real opinion, or advise, or help.
Sometimes they just need someone to hold their hand till the pain goes away.

The trick is to listen, to hear what people want, or what they need.

Listen, be thoughtful, be considerate, be kind.
 Say what needs to be said, do what needs to be done.

Then move on.***********









* Mmmmmm wisdom Mcnuggets.

** Yay, pop-culture references!
That was fun, I'm going to use more!

***I've seen this applied to pretty much everything: feeding formula, breastfeeding, using a sling, using a buggy, cosleeping, not cosleeping.
Apparently all parents are unconscionably sluggish.

****Although actually it's the other way around on the whole.

***** Yes, I know it was obvious, and it sort of ruins the punchline, but I just knew that if I didn't say something then the one and only comment I'd get on this blog would be from someone asking me what the heck I was talking about.

****** Stupid "Mommy Wars".

*******Hey Facebook Breastfeeding Is Not Obscene, if you must know.

******** Given the theme of the page I would hazard a guess that she fed her baby formula and felt uncomfortable among so many breastfeeding-based posts, but I honestly couldn't say for sure.

*********I did find a much shorter, much better one, containing some identical phrases, so I suspect hers was copied from there.
That one was actually rather nice and mentioned a few moments where parents can feeling utterly at a loss and generally rubbish, before assuring them that everyone has the odd bad moment and it doesn't actually make them a bad parent.

********** No, really, that was the comparison.
Did I forget to mention that the juxtaposition gave the distinct impression that, actually, she did think there was a better and a worse choice each time but was pretending she didn't?

***********Unless they've written some awful glurge about how everyone is lovely.
Then you should totally write a long ranty blog about how dreadful they are.

The Local Education Authority Visit

*cue the Dark Lords march*

We were very scared about this, even though we had invited them to visit, the WYHEC boards are full of horror stories from Leeds, now we're in Wakefield but we still spent the sometime tidying, ensuring that no washing was left out (in case they decided that it was a sign of neglect and called in social services)

When they arrived it was slightly stiff at first, they asked us why we wanted to home educate, and we explained because we can't afford private school, and what she's done so far, after a few minutes it became obvious they weren't out to put a stop to this horrific home educating and were actually really helpful.

They told us that we can make use of the local Schools Library Service and put us in touch with the local School music service as well to look at getting some cheap musical tuition for Ellie.

Ellie helped immensely by sitting in a corner and just reading one of her library books the entire time. The book was in the same series one of the visitors much old daughter was reading (....bloody Rainbow Fairies)

So a good visit overall and they've already sent us the information they promised so, so far I'm really impressed with Wakefields Home Ed team.

Bad Judgement part one

If you read any parenting forum for long enough you'll find somebody accusing someone else of judging them.
 It isn't confined to fora, of course: articles on breastfeeding, private conversations, even public health campaigns, at least where children are concerned, are apparently rife with considered opinion.
 Sorry, I mean with judgement.
Which is, apparently, a bad thing.

Of course the people accusing other people of judgement actually don't mean that at all: they mean that the accused is being judgemental, a rather different thing.
 You don't have to do a lot to incur this opprobrious slur on your good name, indeed all it takes, sometimes, is the expressing of an opinion.
 In short, if you exercise judgement you will be thought to be judgemental, and accused of judging.
It's all very confusing.

I have in the past been accused of judging an acquaintance because I* asked for advice on her behalf.
I've been accused of being judgemental and condescending because I mentioned that I did things differently to my accuser, and that her methods weren't something I'd come across before.
I've been accused of sitting there smugly judging from my lofty pinnacle of perfect parenthood** because I, oh horror, shared a link to the World Health Organisation's website.

What's funny is that each time my accuser was in fact judging me***: they looked at my words, decided: "She's judging me", and announced their verdict to the world.
 Yet if I had mentioned this they would not have been at all amused.
The problem is that parenthood is fairly stressful and one is frequently uncertain that one is doing the right thing.
 Once one has chosen a course it can be horribly distressing to find out, some way down the line, that it was the wrong one, or at least not the best possible choice one could have made.
Add to this all the fuss that is made in the newspapers about judgement, the Mommy Wars****, and so on, and you can see why some people might be on a hair trigger.

Imagine, for a moment, that you are a parent in pre-revolutionary China.
 You have a daughter, and wanting only the best for her you have, as any good parent would, crushed the bones of her growing feet and over slow, agonising, potentially fatal months, remodelled them into a more aesthetically and socially pleasing form.
 Then the revolution hits.
Suddenly your daughter's feet are symbols of the corrupt imperial past.
 She is unfit for work and unsuited to life in the new China.
 What is more, it turns out that it was never a good idea to torture her like that.
What you believed was an act of love which, however painful it might be for both of you, would eventually ensure her happiness by enabling her to marry and live as a good wife should, was in fact just a pointless, dangerous cruelty.
 Imagine how that must have felt.

That, I suspect, is not a million miles away from the way a parent must feel when they hear that, for example, leaving their child to cry to itself all night long was not, as they believed, the only way to teach their child to sleep, but a good way to encourage future insecurities, and perhaps even cause brain-damage later on.
 Of course it hurts.
And of course it must feel as though the person offering their opinion, however well-meant, however gently given, is being judgemental.
Everyone wants to do the best for their children, to be told that you may have failed, or by extension that your actions may have harmed your child, is like a knife in the stomach.

Of course, this doesn't mean that we shouldn't offer our opinions, that we shouldn't share our judgement, our reasoned decisions, with others.
 Because, actually, footbinding really was a terrible idea, and there are other and better ways to teach a child to sleep, and a hundred little things which seemed the right choice last year, or last week, or the day before yesterday, will turn out on further study to have been rather less than ideal.
 We should be considerate of others, of course, but we shouldn't keep silent: to do so would be to offer tacit approval, to suggest that in our judgement that not-so-safe method was just fine.
And so, because no-one said anything, nothing, not even the worst things, would change.
 And that just isn't worth it.

Not in my judgement anyway.





* With permission.

** not in those exact words, though smug, perfect and a few other such words were certainly employed.
I just like the sound of pinnacle of perfect parenthood.
I like the image too: somewhere high and pointy with wisps of cloud, and me sitting cross legged, surrounded by exquisitely balanced children who I, bodhisattva-like, am bringing up, my many arms each attending to a different task.

***Not to mention being rather judgemental in the process.

****In England too, you'd think we could at least have Mummy Wars, or something.
I favour Maternal Skirmishes, myself.

Inevitable Ice Cream Pieday

I convinced myself*.

Actually, the world seems to have righted itself once more and so our latest food-experiment, making coconut ice-cream via the salt-and-ice method failed spectacularly.
It even failed to freeze after I put it into the freezer**.
 So I feel the need to dwell lovingly on a happier time: a time when everything seemed to go right, a time when even ice cream wouldn't melt before we told it to.

In short:


We made Baked Alaska



Ingredients

Swiss roll (shop-bought or home-made)
Vanilla ice cream
Raspberries (about a punnet)
Four egg whites (use the eggs to make scrambled egg or something)
125 grams caster sugar.

Slice the swiss roll and use the slices to line a reasonably deep oven-proof bowl.
Try to prevent the smallest cook from putting pieces in her mouth.
Rejoice in your triumph over Smallest Cook.
Scatter raspberries over the bottom of the cake-lined bowl.
Realise you rejoiced too soon: Smallest Cook is now a fetching shade of scarlet and the rest of the raspberries are nowhere to be seen.
Fetch a flannel and wash Smallest Cook.

While holding Smallest Cook at bay with one hand, use the other to help Merely-Small Cook to fill the rest of the bowl with ice cream.
Smooth off the top with a spatula, cover with clingfilm and put the whole thing into the freezer for a few hours.

Go and play in the paddling pool

Just before you want to eat it whisk the egg whites till they form soft peaks, then gently fold in the sugar.
Turn on the oven to a highish setting (about 200 should do it).
Take the bowl out of the freezer, remove the clingfilm and cover with the meringue.
Put into the oven for five to ten minutes till the meringue is cooked and crisp on top.

Eat with an appropriate air of wonder.



*Ok, it has an outer shell, which is sort of crust-ish, it has a decidedly crusty lid, it has a filling.
I'll call it pie.

**Eventually it froze hard.
I cannot*** currently respond to rumours that it met its eventual fate via a blender, assorted ardent spirits and a curly straw.

***Because I don't want to.

Sourdough and Baked Alaska

We've almost finished our latest project.

This one was originally going to be Where Food Comes From, but quickly evolved into a general Food project.
 It turns out that food is a brilliant topic for home ed: apart from all the cookery (with attendant reading recipes, following instructions, weighing and measuring, etc) we've fitted in geography*, history, biology** and some general-purpose safety and hygiene rules along the way***.

We've been on a few field trips, some of which involved actual fields, and generally had a lot of fun.
 And of course we did a lot of craft activities****.

Two of our activities, though, seemed to sum up the way we go about home education.

The first was making sourdough bread.
I came up with this one very early on and planned it meticulously: we were going to make a starter, feed it and eventually make bread with it.
Ellie would write down what we did each day and how the starter reacted.
 I was fairly sure it was going to be one of those experiments where you have to sit down and ask, brightly "So, why didn't that work?" as if you'd planned it that way.
In fact, I sort of did plan it that way.
 My plans however never quite go as I intend, and this was no exception.
Despite faulty advice causing poor Bamba***** to come perilously close to starving to death, he survived to become a really rather decent loaf of bread.
Jeremy, his successor, lives on in a cupboard, eating flour and water twice a day, and providing us with fresh, if somewhat chewy, loaves in return.
To put it plainly: the experiment was an unqualified success, drat it.

Then there was the Baked Alaska.
This was not in my original plan.
I spotted the recipe in a book Ellie got out of the library and thought, in a vague sort of way: "Oh, that would be a good one to do, we must make that".
This week, as we finally got to the sticky, sugary, pointy bit of the food pyramid, I remembered that thought and make it we did.
 I hadn't really planned for it, I had no expectation of it working out, we just assembled the ingredients, threw them together****** and hoped.
We didn't even have a recipe as the book had gone back ages ago, I just worked from memory: line bowl with slices of swiss roll, add raspberries, fill hollow with ice cream, freeze, top with meringue and bake*******.
 I got Ellie to guess what would happen to the ice cream then, when it didn't, she had to figure out why.
Surprisingly, as before, the laws of physics were not suspended for our amusement and everything worked out perfectly.
 Ellie's theory, as written, was that "The ice cream stayed cold because it had a blanket" which may not be the usual definition of insulation but wasn't bad going for a four-year-old.
 So, exciting and delicious scientific discovery was hers.
Not bad going, really.

Most of our activities work out like one of the above: either I plan something ages in advance and we try to follow a prescribed pattern, stopping several times to patch it up, changing direction if it doesn't work out, and eventually doing something completely different*********, or we come up with something on the spur of the moment, jump in blindly, and surface some time later, amazed by whatever it is we have just done.

One way or another it all works out.


*That'd be the Where Food Comes From part, with a side order of Food Miles and the environmental impact of various foods.

**Why we eat, how we eat and what we eat.
Where shall we have lunch? is geography, of course.

***I imagine a school would call that PSE or PHST or some other collection of initials that stand for Don't Smoke, Don't Drink and Please Don't Get Pregnant.
I call it common sense which, some may argue, amounts to the same thing.

****Every project we do involves craft activities, I could come up with a project called Theoretical Calculus For Under Fives and it would still involve coloured paper, glitter and cardboard tubes.
...and now I want to do that.

*****Our starter for ten.

******You're expecting me to say "literally" or something here, aren't you?
Well, snooks to you: we did it perfectly.
 Ok, Phoebe ate some of the cake.
And quite a lot of the raspberries.
But no-one threw anything.

*******If I could have called this pie I would have.

*********In this case actually making, writing about and eating the sourdough instead of having to work out why our starter was now a nasty-smelling blob.

Where have we been?

We seem to have been away from this blog for an awfully long time.
 I'm afraid I have no excuse for most of our absence, beyond the* obvious one of being far too busy home-educating, to write about home-educating.

Last week, though, we were away: thoroughly, emphatically, unarguably away.
 We were, in fact, in Sardinia**.

Sardinia is a rather small island which gives the impression that a rather larger country has become crumpled up in the wash.
 This is due, not only to its swooping landscapes*** but also to the sheer quantity of fascinating things that manage to squash themselves into a relatively small space.

We saw breathtaking vistas.

Ancient tombs.

A painted village.

An enchanted grotto.

Mind-boggling drystone castles****

A more traditional but still exciting castle with extra gorgeously-muralled chapel.

And exquisite sunsets.

In between we visited beaches, strolled about at a snail's pace to allow every elderly person in Italy to admire the girls, ate far too much gelato and too many pastries, and generally ensured that we'd  be coming home three shades darker, and two stone lighter than when we left.

And Phoebe learned to say "Ciao".





*actually fairly reasonable

**Many thanks to the lovely Chiara and Morgan for inviting us to stay with them.

***The parts I saw were beautiful, I missed a lot though, due to my eyes being inexplicably closed.

**** Technically these are called nuraghi, but drystone-castle sort of sums them up.

Hot Cross Pieday

We made a hot cross bun pie!
Or, to put it another way, we made a rather peculiar treacle tart.

The recipe we worked from is here, but of course we took some liberties with it.
Most significantly, we did not use "Sainsbury's Be Good To Yourself" hot cross buns: I feel, quite strongly, that a hot cross bun that goes to such lengths to be healthy does not deserve to be called a hot cross bun.
 Besides, we didn't go to Sainsbury's this week.

Baffled Americans may be comforted by the knowledge that a treacle tart is a confection similar in nature to a molasses pie, or sugar pie.
Only not that similar.
 Other baffled foreigners will just have to find peace in their bewilderment.
Or bake it: that will explain all.
 Ultimately, this is one of those ultra-cheap desserts that languished in obscurity* until rescued by a wealthy benefactor in the form of the gastropub.
It is, however, none the worse for that, and is actually quite nice served with that very-rich-but-good white vanilla ice-cream that such places insist on presenting with all desserts.
I would advise against the sprig of mint, though.


Ingredients

Sweet pastry, or ordinary shortcrust, whichever you prefer, pick a recipe and go with it.
300g (most of a bottle) of golden syrup
Two and a half hot cross buns
Two tablespoons of cream (unless you bought creme fraiche by mistake, in which case use that and pretend you did it on purpose)
An egg
A pinch of ginger
A smaller pinch of cinnamon (or just buy cinnamon hot cross buns)

Optional silliness

Orange juice
Icing sugar



Roll out the pastry, use it to line a tart tin, put it in the fridge and forget about it.
 Fetch a big bowl and dole out the hot cross buns, giving the half-bun to the smallest cook.
Tear and crumble the buns into the bowl, trying to prevent the smallest cook from eating too much of hers.
 Now prevent Smallest Cook** from returning her half masticated chunk of bun to the bowl.
Give up and present Smallest Cook with a handful of raisins.
Smallest Cook has Won.
 Let merely Small Cook finish crumbling the buns, while you heat the golden syrup on the stove.
Turn off the heat once the syrup is simmering and is of the same consistency all over.

Pour the syrup onto the buns.
 Do not let Smallest Cook touch the syrup because the syrup is hot.
Hot! Don't touch!
 Give Smallest Cook another handful of raisins.
Now Small Cook needs some raisins too, or it will not be Fair.
 Beat the egg and let the various sizes of cook decide for themselves who will pour it in.
Take turns stirring in the egg then dollop in the cream (or otherwise), ginger and cinnamon.
 Distribute stirring privileges according to your autocratic whim.

Once all is combined, pour into your chilled pastry case and put it all into a lowish (we used 180 degrees) pie oven for thirty-five minutes, or until it is slightly risen, firming a little on top, and a deep golden brown.
 Allow to cool.

If in a silly mood***, combine icing sugar and orange juice to make a reasonably runny icing, and ice a cross on the top.

Eat, with or without ice-cream.****









*Obscurity being the food equivalent of a debtors prison or a workhouse.
I really wanted to use the word gaol there, but I couldn't make it work.

**I decided she needed capitals.

***Read the above and judge for yourself.

****Except for Phoebe, who isn't allowed any.
If you feel that this is peculiarly cruel of me then I refer you to my Snail Pieday, and the events therein.
 Or, if you cannot be bothered to look this up (and a quick search by me completely failed to uncover it) then you may simply console yourself with the knowledge that she ate two hot cross buns this morning, not to mention the bits she was supposed to put into the bowl, and two handfuls of raisins.