Raising a Confident Daughter

March 18, 2007 Deirdre Straughan Leave a comment

One of my newsletter readers asked for child-raising advice. Well, that’s putting it a bit strongly, but, apropos of my own daughter, she asked: “…what do you think contributed to her self-confidence and caring for others?” …and I felt an article coming on.

Not that I have definitive answers, or simple ones. I have wondered myself how Ross got to be who she is. Leaving aside occasional bouts of teenage angst, at 17 Ross has all of the self-confidence that I have at 44 (and then some). By the time she’s 30, she’ll be terrifying! There are doubtless many factors: the genetics of her parents and the way we are raising her, but also the culture(s) she’s growing up in.

No one really knows why kids turn out the way they do (though there are lots of theories), nor how much influence parents really have, nor how much of that influence is genetic, and how much is environmental.

We had an object lesson in nature vs. nurture during our wedding – the first time since my brother’s babyhood that many people had seen him and my dad together. (Quick history: My parents divorced when I was 9 and my brother was 1; Ian remained in Thailand with my mom, who remarried; I went to the US with my dad. I then did not see my mom for eight years, Ian did not see Dad for even longer.)

Everyone was astonished at how much Dad and Ian resembled each other. Not just in the obviously genetic stuff like height, build, face, etc., but also in things you wouldn’t think are genetic: voice and manner of speaking, yes, but even use of idiom! It seemed clear that sheer genes have a lot to do with how kids turn out, in both large and subtle behaviors, regardless of how and by whom they are raised.

A few months later, Rossella was born.

During the last months of my pregnancy, I once dreamt that I was working in a lab where I was supposed to take care of white mice. In the course of moving a dozen of these mice from one cage to another, I managed to kill them all: one fell on the floor and I stepped on it, one drowned in its water dish, etc. I woke, sweating, and thought: “I have some anxieties about becoming a mother.”

I hadn’t been around kids or babies much since the separation from my brother. I was de facto an only child (again) after that, and in boarding school you spend most of your time with your peers, seeing relatively little of people in other age groups, and you don’t have opportunities to babysit. I had never taken care of an infant, changed a diaper, or any of that, nor did I have a mother I could turn to for advice. So I thought I had reason to be anxious about my mothering skills.

I don’t recall actually talking about this to anyone, though I silently resented the idea that some sort of mystical “mothering instinct” was supposed to automatically kick in as soon as the baby was born – what if it didn’t? Would that make me a bad person? A failed mother?

Rossella was born, after 24 hours’ labor, around 5 pm on a rainy night in August. Enrico was a champion: he stood by my side throughout the labor, massaging my back and being encouraging even when I was yelling a lot, and he didn’t faint at all the blood (actually, I’m not sure he even noticed it, he was so deliriously happy to have his daughter in his arms).

But, the way most hospitals work, the father goes home after labor, and you, the brand new mother, find yourself alone with this stranger who just came out of your belly.

I had my “special” new mother hospital dinner (it was awful) while the nurses kept my baby in a bassinet in the nursery – I didn’t have a private room, so she had to be in the nursery, but I could go get her whenever I wanted.

I had slept unusually well (for me) during the last trimester of pregnancy. I have rarely slept so well since. That first night, in spite of being thoroughly wrung out by hard labor, I woke up at least once and went to the nursery to check on my daughter. And panicked: she wasn’t in her assigned bassinet. I was about to have a hysterical fit when the nurses explained that they had put her in an incubator to quieten her because she was fussy. They had also tried giving her a pacifier. She spit it out. Good girl.

I was irritated that they had even tried: I had told them I wanted to breastfeed, and, to ensure a smooth start (as recommended by the La Leche instructor), no bottles or pacifiers should be given. Ross preferred real breast right from the start, and would never take a pacifier even later on, when we half-wished she might.

As I emerged from the haze of post-natal exhaustion and began to take charge of my own child, I realized that dealing with a baby was primarily a communications problem: here was an individual who undoubtedly had needs and desires, but wasn’t very good at articulating them. But we were two intelligent, willing people: between us, we’d figure it out.

Of course I’d read books – good ol’ Dr. Spock, for starters – but I was doubtful about much of the advice I read. Try to make the baby sleep according to a schedule? Let it cry itself out if it doesn’t? That sounded like a recipe for no sleep for anybody (including our apartment neighbors). My dad had told me that, during my infancy, he was unable to bear my crying, so he was the one who would get up at 2 am to give me a bottle.

Enrico’s parents had come to stay with us two weeks before the birth, and left again two weeks afterwards. Their timing was perfect and their support wonderful – I didn’t have to cook or shop while I was coping with figuring out this new person in my life. Unlike many Italian in-laws (or so I’m told), they also maintained a strict policy of non-interference: neither ever tried to tell us how to do anything with our baby (unless we asked).

I suppose Dr. Spock would say we were overly permissive parents. We never really tried to force Ross onto a schedule. When she cried, we picked her up, and if she wanted to feed, she fed. If she didn’t, we did whatever we could to entertain her or try to get her back to sleep, til we were bleary-eyed ourselves. We wished someone woud invent a mechanism that would have the same effect as a moving car – which always put her right to sleep – so that we could sleep at the same time.

All the books say you’re not supposed to keep the baby in bed with you, in case you might roll over and smother it. This seemed over-fearful to me: I was so alert to Ross’ tiniest squeak that there was no chance I could sleep through smothering her. As often as not, we’d all fall asleep in the bed together after a night feeding. And Ross often woke up first.

Perhaps Ross’ self-confidence has less to do with anything particular we did for/to/with her than with what we didn’t do.

Mainly, we didn’t try to stop her doing anything she wanted to try. But we were always there, unobtrusively hovering, to make sure she didn’t get hurt.

Ross didn’t start walking til 15 months, so on her first birthday, which we spent at the beach with Enrico’s parents, she was still crawling. This didn’t slow her down much. She would crawl straight down the beach into the (very shallow) water, and keep going until the tiny waves lapped her face. And she would laugh, even as bystanders gasped in horror: “Signora! La bambina!” (“Lady! Your baby!”) – apparently they thought I was going to let her drown, though I was standing right over her and could scoop her up as soon as she got too deep.

Ross was never afraid of the water, even when she got completely dunked by a slightly more vigorous wave.

However, at that same beach, I saw a good illustration of what not to do. A mother accompanied her toddler into the water. The little girl strode fearlessly out, clearly enjoying the sensations, til she got to chin depth. Then a little wave broke in her face and she paused, shocked. Her face screwed up in that classic moment of childish indecision: “Is this a big deal? Should I be upset about it?”

Her mother made up her mind for her: she swooped down, scolding: “See! I told you what would happen!”

The child burst into tears and screams. She had gotten her mother’s message: she was supposed to be afraid. I wouldn’t be surprised if that girl stayed afraid of water for years afterwards.

living in Italy

Italian Garden 2007: March

March 17, 2007 Deirdre Straughan 7 Comments

They tell us that this past winter has been the warmest in Europe for 200 years. Certainly our plants are confused. Some of the bulbs I planted in October were sprouting by December. The mimosas bloomed before la Festa della Donna, which I’ve never seen happen before. Crocuses in Italian are called bucanevi – “make holes in the snow” – but they could only make pretty white spots in the grass. And now the irises are blooming, on unusually short stalks.

I’m as confused as the plants are, but I guess there’s nothing for it but to start the orto (vegetable garden). In spite of pollen allergies (also early this year) and a lingering sinus infection, I’ve been out toiling the soil. (Actually, the sun helped to dry out my respiratory system.)

Two weekends ago I cleared part of the orto (vegetable garden) of its winter weeds, and planted basil, parsley, one kind of lettuce, and spring onions. I weeded the flowerbed by the garage wall and planted coriander, dill, and arugula there. (Now if I can only get the neighbor’s cats to quit using that area as a litter box…) And I planted various flower seeds in some of the dozens of cinder block “planters” that form our retaining wall.

(This is what the wall looked like two years ago. I’ll take a more up to date picture when we have a prettier day for it. This picture was taken in May, when the poppies usually bloom at this altitude. It will be interesting to see how early they appear this year.)

This past Saturday I worked on the compost heap that occupies a corner of the bottom level of our terraced backyard. There’s too much wood in there – I need to break that into smaller pieces, and start mixing in more leafy stuff. But at the bottom, when I reached it, I found several buckets of decent compost.

I transplanted a mountain pine seedling that we had taken from the wild during a walk last year and planted in a pot. It lost all its needles over the winter and I thought I’d killed it, but now it’s sprouting new greenery. I planted it at the bottom of the retaining wall where it can, well, help retain.

We went to the azienda agricola (“agricultural company”) near home. I was hoping to get a jump on planting the vegetables, but they don’t have much yet – I guess the greenhouses weren’t expecting winter to be over so soon. But they did have, strangely, cranberries – not at all native to this region! 18 euros for six little pots of cranberry plants; we bought them on a whim. Checking my organic gardening book back home, I find that cranberries want to be in a boggy area with lots of sun. No such thing in our yard. Lots of sun, yes, but no bog – our soil is very clayey and dries out quickly. I enriched the soil in one corner of the garden with compost and planted them anyway; we’ll just have to water them a lot and hope for the best. It would be nice to have fresh cranberries for Thanksgiving.

We had a fairly successful orto last year, but I learned a few lessons to apply this year:

Plant zucchine where they will have room to spread. This year I’m going to try putting them at the top of a little slope at the bottom of the large retainin wall. This slope is usually covered in weeds – the zucchine plants can smother out the weeds for me, rather than growing down the lower retaining wall and covering plants I’d rather keep healthy.
Plant more eggplant. We didn’t get very many last year, and the fruit never got big, but they were very tasty – I want more of that!
Plant more of the tomato variety called costolute (“ribbed”) – of the various tomato varieties we have tried, these seem to do best in our environment.
Keep cutting back the lettuce and replanting it throughout the season. I let most of it bolt last year.
Can I do something to cover the strawberries so that we get to eat them, rather than the birds? Must see what I can rig up.

Enrico mutters that the roses aren’t performing as well as he had hoped when we bought them. I keep explaining that a grand garden takes time. Someday we, too, will have a wall of roses like this house in Milan:

top photo by Rossella

religion

The God Delusion

March 17, 2007 Deirdre Straughan 1 Comment

Richard Dawkins is laughing up his sleeve.

I wasn’t in any hurry to buy this book. I had already read and admired every other book of Dawkins’, and had read enough in the press to have a good idea of what this book contained, and to know that I would agree with it, as I had with Dennet’s “Breaking the Spell”.

But I saw it in the bookstore at Luton airport, and couldn’t resist buying it for Enrico – and myself. We both read through it quickly, enjoying Dawkins’ elegant prose and wry wit brought to bear on some of our favorite targets.

It’s amusing to watch all the mudslinging by religious commentators (and even some atheists), shrilly accusing Dawkins of being strident and dogmatic in his non-belief. Apparently they don’t know about the Streisand Effect, an Internet phenomenon whereby raising a fuss about something brings it more attention than it would otherwise have enjoyed.

Not that I think the world would have ignored Dawkins, but surely some of the book’s sales (23 weeks on the NYT bestseller list so far) have been due to the huge amounts of publicity he has gotten from people anxious to vilify him.

Will this book succeed in Dawkins’ aim of “converting” people to unbelief? I’m doubtful. But, judging by some of the comments on Dawkins’ website and elsewhere, he has at least made many atheists feel more comfortable with acknowledging publicly what they have long felt privately – they are indeed “coming out of the closet.”

I don’t think Dawkins deserves the label of “strident” that so many, even on his own side, have applied to him. In the interviews I’ve seen and read, he’s remarkably polite, especially considering what’s being said about and to him.

At any rate, if you think he’s strident, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. I’m now reading Perché Non Possiamo Essere Cristiani (e Meno Che Mai Cattolici) – “Why We Can’t be Christian, and Less Than Never Catholic” – by Piergiorgio Odifreddi. If this ever gets translated into English, Dr Odifreddi will probably find a fundamentalist Christian/Catholic fatwa raised against him. (Italian Catholics are generally more relaxed about such things.)

Italian food

Why Italians Drink Bottled Water

March 13, 2007 Deirdre Straughan 8 Comments

From time to time in the travel forums, I run across people complaining about the added expense of bottled water at restaurants in Italy. It is possible to drink tap water at any restaurant in Italy, and in some areas it’s the norm, but in many places the request is considered unusual.

Although the water that comes out of our taps is perfectly potable, urban Italians drink almost exclusively bottled water. Not because it’s bottled, but because it comes from real mountain springs (like the one pictured above), and simply tastes better.

City tap water in most parts of Italy that I’ve experienced has a heavily chemical taste – lord knows where they get it from, or what they do to it in purifying. It is also very “hard” – full of calcium. When you see how quickly the inside of your teakettle furs up from boiling tap water, you have second thoughts about trying to process that stuff through your kidneys every day. (Although the technology is available here, very few households have installed the water softening systems that are so common in the US.)

The further you get out into the country, and particularly into the mountains, the better the tap water is: it’s often piped, unprocessed, directly from mountain springs into homes. Many town squares still feature the municipal fountains where people used to get their water before indoor plumbing became common. (In some places, water is so abundant that these can’t be turned off: they simply run, all the time, a waste which always disturbs me.) In communities that have particularly good water, restaurants will put a carafe of the local water on the table before offering you the bottled.

For home consumption, most city households buy bottled water in six packs of 1.5 liter bottles. There are dozens of brands, some local, some national. San Pellegrino is a national brand in Italy – in fact, the town and springs of San Pellegrino are not far from where we live. Most Italian bottled waters actually come from mountain springs in specific locations, and are bottled near the sources for which they’re named. Most come in fizzy and non-fizzy varieties, with the fizzy ones being artificially carbonated, but a few, such as Ferrarelle, are naturally fizzy. Some have recognizable flavors, and after a while you develop preferences (I, for example, can’t stand Ferrarelle).

There is lots of competition between brands, with ads touting their supposed health-giving properties (especially for the house brands at the terme – traditional health spas), low sodium, etc. I don’t take these claims seriously, but it is indisputable that water (bottled or not) is the healthiest thing you can drink – no calories, for starters, and one of the few health statements that most experts seem to agree on is that everyone should drink lots of it. In Italy, this is no problem: not many households keep soft drinks or beer ready in the fridge, but everyone’s always got water. The only two beverages that you see on most Italian tables are water and wine.

You don’t always have to pay for good water in Italy. Enrico and I routinely recycle plastic bottles by taking them to the mountains and refilling them with good spring water:

technology

Cisco Expo 2007 Italia

March 12, 2007 Deirdre Straughan Leave a comment

It’s all Lele’s fault again. Or maybe Luca’s. They mentioned in their blogs that they would be speaking at this year’s Cisco Expo in Milan and, since that’s relatively close to home, I figured I’d go along and cheer for them. I also wanted to learn more about Cisco’s new “Telepresence” and other online video products, to see what ideas I could pick up for TVBLOB.

The venue was a hotel way out in the southern part of Milan. In addition to my usual 1.5 hours from home in Lecco to Milan, I had to take the metro almost to the end of the line, then a bus, then walk another 15 minutes to the conference registration on the back side of the hotel. But I had company: getting off the bus, I fell in with a teacher from Como and a guy in the web services business who were going my way, so I learned some things.

The teacher had come, on her own initiative, to keep up to date in her field: she teaches “systems” at a technical school in Como, training future programmers and, presumably, system admins. She told us that there are no government refresher courses for IT teachers. Some of her colleagues teach their students programming in Pascal for three years, and maybe some Delphi – this aspect of the curriculum is totally up to them, and they have no particular incentive to delve into more modern computer languages. The teacher I talked with seems to be one of the motivated ones who works hard to keep learning and teaching new things, though she admitted (with some embarrassment) that she’s behind on new media phenomena like YouTube.

Perhaps I should offer to speak on these topics in Ross’ IT class at school – if her teacher wouldn’t take such an offer as a slur on her own professional skills.

Anyway, the conference… It started with a plenary session of half-hour talks by local Cisco luminaries. From my (sparse and illegible) notes:

many people [in Italy?] will in coming years still be watching “general” TV, but they might see personalized ads (someone in the audience near me snorted at this – clearly he’s not watching general TV anymore).
Second Life is a virtual place generating real business – Adidas’ personal trainer service there has sold 21,000 [units of some sort]. (I created a Second Life persona, Deirdre Guru (!), a few months ago, but haven’t had much time to explore this virtual world, especially since it doesn’t display properly on my laptop – I have to use my daughter’s desktop computer. So far I can say that flying is fun, except for that time I got stranded high above the sea and then the whole world crashed.)
Cisco believes that company CIOs should be the “directors of innovation,” helping their colleagues enter the new era of the “human network.” Hmm. If you want to promote the human aspects, the CIO (Chief Information Officer) may not be the best person for this role.

While wandering around the expo and battling the crowd for a not-very-good lunch, I kept seeing faces that looked familiar. I am hugely handicapped in business by my poor memory for faces. Or rather, I recognize faces and know that I have met them before, but have no recollection of what their names are or in what context I met them. (In my defense: I have probably already met far more people worldwide than most individuals have to deal with in a lifetime…maybe my people memory is just overloaded!)

So I kept seeing people I thought I knew, but was too embarrassed to talk to them in case I was wrong, and no one acted as if they knew me. I began to wonder if I actually had met them or just thought I had, because so many looked like each other. The crowd was 95% male, most dressed in blue or gray suits with shirts and ties, similar haircuts and (for those who wore them) similar glasses. Another style among the men was wide-wale corduroy trousers in rust, red, or beige, with Clarks-style suede shoes and a sweater. Then there were a few guys in jeans with suit jackets. The women were uniformly dressed in black (as was I – but at least I had a beige sweater under my black suit jacket, and I’m pretty sure I was the only person there in cowboy boots!).

I don’t get it. We’re in Milan, one of the fashion capitals of the world, and the end result is that everyone looks the same? I longed for a real fashion statement, a Hawaiian shirt perhaps. If I’d seen one, I would have hugged its wearer, whether I knew him or not. Someone missed out on a hug.

Another thing that caught my eye was spelling errors. If I were projecting PowerPoint onto an enormous screen to an auditorium full of people (many of them potential buyers of very costly products), I would bloody well run a spell check on my presentation! I caught multiple errors in both English and Italian in the slides shown by Cisco’s top executives. That’s just embarrassing, and bad for business. If that’s how they treat me as an audience, what kind of attention to detail can I expect when I’m a client?

In the afternoon I watched a presentation about Cisco’s extremely expensive new “telepresence” system. I wonder if they even have one installed in Italy [June – they’re installing it now] – at $300,000 for a six-seat/one location configuration, I can’t imagine they will have many customers worldwide. And it was curious that they did not even show us a video of the system in action (though I had already seen such a video months ago, thanks to Robert Scoble.)

There was a video loop running during the lunch break, showing a lot of the same footage as in the ad above. Some parts of it seemed to show the telepresence system (kids talking to each other in classrooms in, apparently, Tibet, and someplace caucasian), with a note at the bottom: “Images on screen are simulated.” Uh, right. Not exactly a demo of the system’s real capabilities. And I’m pretty damned sure that there is no classroom in Tibet which enjoys the Internet bandwidth needed to support this system.

I stayed through a presentation about Cisco’s digital signage system (and, yes, got some good ideas), but left when someone started to talk in excruciating detail about the installation of high-end security systems.

Between urban transit and train connections, it took me three hours to get home to Lecco, at the end of which I was done in – still suffering with that sinus infection as well. I decided to skip the next day of the conference to work from home and rest up. I was sorry to miss Luca and Lele, but, having seen the agenda, I knew that I wasn’t really their target anyway – I am already very familiar with the stuff that they would be explaining about blogs, new media, etc., for the benefit of this Italian corporate audience – indeed, I probably could have given these talks myself.

Countries Beginning with I

Raising a Confident Daughter

Italian Garden 2007: March

The God Delusion

Richard Dawkins is laughing up his sleeve.

Why Italians Drink Bottled Water

Cisco Expo 2007 Italia

Deirdré Straughan on Italy, India, the Internet, the world, and now Australia

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Deirdré Straughan on Italy, India, the Internet, the world, and now Australia