De Facto Parenting, Part II: Thrice Removed

 

At two-and-a-half, my granddaughter runs a lot faster than I can run. The last time I remember running was in an intra-office softball game in 1991. After running around the bases a few times, I spent the next two or three days with a heating pad on my calves. Now I find myself having to run again, and I avoid a mental image of that scene at all costs. As the last post explained, parenting a grandchild has become extremely real lately.

Agile and athletic, Joanna Leigh can really run. She runs up and down the driveway just for sport. She also runs toward the street or from between cars in a parking lot for sport. So, when she heads that way, I scream.

Getting hit by an oncoming car is one of the many fears – some irrational, some not -- that I have as a parenting grandparent. Parenting a grandchild is about a far removed from being a grandmother as your fourth cousin thrice removed is from you.

After putting her butterfly-fairy Halloween costume on her and handing her the wand that came with it, she headed straight for the wall socket that I had once covered with the plastic gizmo that keeps children from sticking things into the electrical outlet. She had taken the gizmo out.

I shouted. Then I screamed.

Later, I read on one of the many parenting articles, books, web sites, and blogs I look at that shouting has become the new spanking for disciplining children, and like spanking, it is under fire. (Read Hilary Stout’s October 21 New York Times article at: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/22/fashion/22yell.html ).

Hunky-Dory

Now what? Do I stand there and reason with her about being run over? Or electrocuted?

“I’ve worked with thousands of parents and I can tell you, without question, that screaming is the new spanking,” Amy McCready, founder of Positive Parenting Solutions, which teaches parenting skills, told the reporter.

Furthermore, according to Stout, “psychologists and psychiatrists generally say yelling should be avoided. It’s at best ineffective (the more you do it the more the child tunes it out) and at worse damaging to a child’s sense of well-being and self-esteem.”

Well this is just hunky-dory.

Not surprisingly, the article didn’t deal with any alternatives.

Next I read that both bribery and time-outs are no-no. Yeh, no time-outs. No more “clean your room and we’ll go to the zoo.” Or “if you run out in the street, you go to time-out.” Only “punishing children with love,” whatever that is. (http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/24/punishing-children-with-love/ ).

But, he says in the original essay for the New York Times Magazine (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/15/health/15mind.html?_r=2&em ), he backed up his article’s thesis with a study. Two Israeli researchers and experts asked more than 100 college students “whether the love they had received from their parents had seemed to depend on whether they had succeeded in school, practiced hard for sports, been considerate toward others or suppressed emotions like anger and fear.”

College students. Aka, teenagers. Probably in the middle of finals or in a bar. Why not ask them at age 28 or 30, when they’ve gotten a decent job with health benefits, if they appreciate what their parents shoved into their heads?

A Get-Real Study

So, I conducted my own study. Joanna Leigh is captivated by time-outs, which she rarely gets sent to at her day-care preschool. At home, we say, “Ok, you want to go to time out?”

She says, “Yes.”

Comforting friend Teddy in time out

 

But she puts Teddy, her stuffed -- and not-so-fluffy-anymore -- bear friend and comfort, in time out a lot. She points her finger and says, “Go to time out, Teddy.” The she sits him down in a chair or a corner, until she needs him. She looks back at him, reminding him he is in time out.

I asked her, like a researcher, “Does Teddy like time out?”

She answered, “Yes.”

She once tried to put our lab Maggie into time out. That didn’t work out.

She knows time out better than any 19-year-old college student. That’s real. That’s settled.

 

Technorati Tags: Spittin' Grits,Shouting as Parenting,Hilary Stout,New York Times,Amy McCready,Positive Parenting Solutions,Alfie Kohn

De Facto Parenting, Part I: The Swine Flu

I’ve been sitting at my computer staring at the dreaded Blank Page for the past week or so. Being the de facto parent of a 2-½ -year-old has been especially real lately. When it’s this real, I’m hyper-aware that being a parenting grandparent is nothing like being a grandparent in a love relationship which carries certain luxuries. You know, like appreciating that you can hug, kiss, read, dance, and sing, but you don’t have the responsibility of sculpting an emotionally resilient, morally upright, educated, and competent human.

 The Swine Flu Virus

 

 

 

 

Image and information available at: http://www.cdc.gov/H1n1flu/

Last week Joanna Leigh had an appointment to get the first phase of the H1N1 flu shot. Like jillions of people, I had been waiting and worrying, anxious to get her inoculated, as she is for the regular seasonal flu. I picked her up at her pre-school early and headed for the doctor’s office. It was raining. A parking place was some distance from the entrance. I stopped. Looked at the distance. Looked for the umbrella. Looked for the diaper bag. Looked for her snack. Looked at her. Looked at myself.

I said to myself, “Ok, self, get your 66-year-old self in gear and get going. No one else is going to do it.”

I got her and all the stuff and started running for the entrance. Chronic back trouble aside, I’ll stop here to be grateful my knees still work.

The entrance seemed to be miles and miles away, as in a dream, when you’re running and running and getting nowhere.

Finally we were in. We headed to the waiting room with all the other kids, several of them looking feverish and sick, where you worry about all the germs on the chairs, toys, tables, everything.

The nurse called for Joanna Leigh. Relief set in. They weighed her. She’s still a pipsqueak at 25 pounds, in the 10^th percentile, but compact and healthy. She opened the computer to record everything. She looked up at me with a weird look.

“We are out of vaccine.”

“What?” I said, mouth hanging open. “You’re kidding, right?”

“I am so sorry. We ran out 15 minutes ago. There’s no more in the building, because pediatrics was the last section to have it.”

We left. I was nearly in tears. It would be another two-plus weeks before University Medical Center would get replenished. I called my husband. He said we could all go out for supper.

On the way, I spotted the Doc-in-a-Box where I had walked in for my seasonal flu shot. “Pull in there,” I said. I ran in. They didn’t have any. We went on to supper. Afterwards, on the way home a different route, there it was – another Doc-in-a-Box I had forgotten was there in that spot. “Pull in there,” I said.

I ran in. Yes! They had it. I motioned for my husband to get Joanna Leigh and bring her in. It was moments before closing, and there was literally no one else waiting. Bingo, the elixir spray up her nose.

“We did it!” I said back in the car.

“We did it!” Joanna Leigh repeated, clapping. She sang her version of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” all the way home.

I was exhausted from all that real stuff. The next few posts will deal with all that real stuff.

 

http://www.flufacts.com/about/cold.aspx

http://www.kdheks.gov/H1N1/download/Difference_Between_Cold_and_H1N1.pdf

Technorati Tags: Spittin' Grits,grandparenting,parenting grandparent,H1N1 flu shot,Swine flu,doc-in-a-box

 

Humble Pie

Which makes you fatter? Lemon pie or humble pie.

I’ve had plenty of both. Humble pie is dessert after a meal of eating your own words. It’s the prize for being wrong.

Which is harder? Going on a diet or facing your wrongness? Both, I guess.

It’s now almost a year since our granddaughter Joanna Leigh came to live at our home, which was several months prior to being awarded legal custody. She was 17 months old. Since she had been living in our house with her mother, our daughter, for the better part of those 17 months, she felt secure and happy here, reducing the harshness of such a change. We didn’t see any signs of distress in her sleeping, eating, or other behavior, despite being separated from her mother, who was again being ruled by her drug addictions.

Joanna Leigh was on time with repeating words at about a year old, with “ba-ba,” “dog,” “go,” and the infamous “NO!” She began quickly referring to my husband as “Papa.” She was not yet calling me anything in particular, even though I had begun referring to myself as “Mama Jo,” my other granddaughter’s name for me. Then the process quickly went to two-word combinations, like “my yogurt,” “my color.” The “mine” phase took on a life of its own, which I chronicled in two Words and Language posts, June 10 and July 9. (See the categories in the right sidebars.)

Then suddenly, Whammo, Bam, Pow: the trickle had turned into a torrent. Joanna Leigh was suddenly in the throes of learning language at about 150 miles an hour. We were flabbergasted daily.

When she was not speaking English sentences, she was babbling some other language, Jabberwocky, maybe. For practice, I guess.

But she still wasn’t really calling me anything. There were times when I thought she might be trying to call me “mama,” which, as it turns out, was feeding my misconceptions.

How toddlers begin using language is also humbling. According to Steven Pinker in his 1994 book, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, at about 18 months, toddlers’ language production “takes off.” Pinker says that language development goes from babbling at about eight months to “All Hell Breaks Loose” at this stage.

Vocabulary growth jumps to the new-word-every-two-hours minimum rate that the child will maintain through adolescence. And syntax begins, with string of the minimum length that allows it.

He also says that there is more going on in children’s minds than is revealed by what comes out of their mouths.

When children do put words together, the words seem to meet up with a bottleneck at the output end. Children’s two-and-three-word utterances look like samples drawn from longer potential sentences expressing a complete and more complicated idea.

My misconception began with believing I could protect Joanna Leigh from the hurt that would come with being separated from or even losing her mother.

Then I added to that the belief that I could be an adequate mother figure as her memory of her own mother began to change or even fade.

I was wrong on both counts.

In late April and early May, Joanna Leigh began seeing her mother periodically, while she was in a Birmingham treatment/housing facility for women. After several trips to the facility, Joanna Leigh woke up in the night crying for her “mommy.” The blow was hard and complete. I felt as if a tornado had spun out of nowhere, picked me up, and thrown me out into the backyard. I was afraid, sorrowful, distressed, and heartbroken for her.

It was a hard way to learn that I could not keep Joanna Leigh from hurt and to discover that she wasn’t calling me or thinking of me as “mama” or a mommy substitute. I realized she needed to see her mother.

She held the concepts in her mind, but she didn’t yet have the language to let them out. She needed her mommy and she needed me, Papa, and her home. It took language.

Right now, she sees her mother; it may or may not last. She thinks of this house, Mama Jo, Papa, Maggie, Patty, her toys, her stuffed friends in her room, all of it, as Home. This Home helps her feel secure, happy, and confident. When or if the time comes for hurt, all we can do is be here.

Language is humbling. It’s so built into us that we simply take it for granted.

Being so wrong about something so important to a child is humbling.

So I eat the Humble Pie. I need to find a way to stay off the lemon pie.

Technorati Tags: Spittin' Grits,toddlers,learning language,learning words,Steven Pinker,The Language Instinct,How the Mind Creates Language,humble pie

All Mine, All the Time, MINE – Part II

 

It’s gotten more refuctious. Yes, refuctious – one of the most appropriate words I’ve ever made up. It will be the subject of a later post.

If you remember from the Part I post of June 10, I argued that “MINE!” is a more awful attribute of the Terrible Twos than is “NO!” Now I REALLY stand by that conclusion.

How can anything this cute behave so refuctiously?

After posting that essay, I started looking for information on the question of where the belief that everything is theirs could have come from. Then I mulled over the question of how they put the word “MINE” in front of everything they saw. If she were being brought up by Paris Hilton, I could understand it.

First, I looked in my trusty toddler book What to Expect: The Toddler Years by Arlene Eisenberg, Heidi E. Murkoff, and Sandee E. Hathaway. If you’ve been pregnant, you likely have What to Expect when You’re Pregnant and know about the What To Expect series.

In “The Twenty-Second Month,” the authors have a brief section on Generosity Turned Selfish in response to a question from the mother of a female toddler:

Your daughter, like most children in their second year, has suddenly realized [the concept of ownership.] . . . Now she has a new sense of self and of ownership (These are mine!”).

It’s important to recognize that the impulse to guard what is hers (and occasionally grab what she wants to be hers) reflects not selfishness but a developmental stage. . . A willingness to share with her playmates – at least part of the time – probably won’t be forthcoming for at least a year.”

A YEAR? A Whole YEAR???

I resorted to pulling out my old Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care, the 40^th Anniversary Edition revised and updated for the 1980s. The copyright information says that Dr. Spock came out with his first book in 1945. Amazing. He essentially says the same thing: “If your child at 2 doesn’t give up her possessions, she is behaving normally. Amazingly refuctious.

So the answer to the first part of the question sounds like, “It’s a developmental thing.” As they begin to define their sense of self, everything revolves around them. It’s “theirs.” I guess Paris Hilton is still two.

Just the other day I, my husband, and our granddaughter Joanna Leigh, 25 months old, went on an outing to Piggly Wiggly. We needed thick, overnight diapers, bananas, pears, yogurt, flavored water (for her nighttime ba-ba, the subject of yet another post), cat food, and come to think of it, not much for us except a frozen pizza for that night’s supper. There was a time I wouldn’t have considered eating a grocery-store pizza for supper, but toddlers change lives, especially grandparent’s lives when they are parenting that toddler.

We were at the check-out when I realized I needed vacuum cleaner bags. “7-B,” said the clerk. So I high-tailed it to the back left part of the store. Looking, looking, looking. Suddenly I hear high-pitched wails from the front of the store.

“Why doesn’t that mother do something,” I said out loud to the cleaning supplies. No vacuum bags. Anywhere. Crying from the front. Suddenly it hit me. “That’s Joanna Leigh!”

The LOOK

I high-tail it back to the front, just as my husband and the baby were headed to the door. She had real tears in her eyes and was still crying.

“What on Earth?” I asked.

“You won’t believe it,” my husband replied. “When I got the yogurt out of the buggy to put on the scanner, she started screaming ‘MINE, my yogurt. Mine’.”

“NO. Say it’s not so.” I looked back at the check-out clerk. She met my eye, with a LOOK.

It WAS so. I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize to ALL the mothers out there that I have given LOOKS to when their kids were acting up in public, and believe me, there have been many.

I think I have found the answer to the second part of the question. You have things to do, and I’ll have to study this. I will explain it as best I can in Part III.

Meanwhile, you pronounce refuctious thusly: re-fuc΄-shus.

Photo by Emory Kimbrough

 

Technorati Tags: What to Expect,Dr. Spock,Piggly Wiggly,made-up words,Spittin' Grits

Looking Like Yourself

I recall an incident in the eye doctor’s office decades ago, when I first couldn’t read the listings in the phone book. I was trying to read a magazine, unaware of others in the waiting room. Then a little old lady, probably 65, came in and recognized another little old lady, probably 65. They embraced and talked about how long it had been. One lived out in the country and the other in a rural community up the road toward Columbus, Mississippi, just over the state line.

They gossiped a bit. Then the first said to the second, “Well, you won’t believe who I ran into the other day. Mattie Lou.”

“Oh, I haven’t thought about her in so many years. How is she?”

“Well, you just wouldn’t believe it. She looks like herself!”

I buried my face behind a magazine to keep from laughing. I know I DO NOT look like myself, but I was really cute when it counted.

I sure feel like myself, though, a 65-year old grandmother with custody of a toddler whom I have to keep in my eyesight at all times. There are days when it’s scary, like when I think those two women in the doctor’s office are likely deceased, and when I realized that in 10 years, I’ll be 75 and Joanna Leigh will be 12. I’ll be doing well to see her get her driver’s license.

Looking like myself in 1965

Who ?

I have got to remember who I am.

My husband of 40 years and I have become hyper-aware of taking the extra precautions to stay well: Click the seat belts on. Don’t fall. Don’t need any surgery. Take prescribed medications. Get sleep. Don’t pick up any more germs your granddaughter brings home from playschool than you have to. Do this, do that, and don’t don’t don’t.

The other day my husband said, “I’ll tell you this: I’m not having any heart surgery.”

I said, “Yes, you will if it’s necessary. We have a two-year-old to raise.”

Playhouse Raising

We had built one of those tree-playhouse, gym-swing-slide, combo-condos in our back yard for her. The platform was a deck that the dog houses sat on for the rare times the dogs were actually in their pen. HA.

The platform is now the floor to the first-floor enclosed playhouse, complete with windows on three sides and a front door. The second floor is the “tree house” complete with a tin roof and railing. Although it isn’t technically a tree house, we live on a wooded lot up on a ridge. The backyard slopes downward, so it feels like you are up in the trees.

 

Joanna Leigh watched with great interest as the construction progressed. Each late afternoon after playschool, we went out there to see what had taken shape. At first she was more interested in the blocks of wood created by the sawing and cutting of the framing, rails, and whatever else you make houses with. She picked out all the reasonably sized blocks to stack. Then she would pick them all up and transfer then to another part of the platform. Then stack. Then move. Then look for more.

 

Best Friends

It shouldn’t be hard to remember who I am; my closest friends, with names like Aches and Pains, are always there to remind me. When it’s time to go in and Joanna Leigh doesn’t want to, I have to pick her up crying and squirming to get down. Worse than kicking, she puts her arms straight up above her head and goes slack. She could easily just slide out of my hands and arms. It’s not easy. I’ve become creative about luring her into the house for supper.

On the day the stairs to the second floor “tree house” were built, I thought,” Uh oh. No railing yet, not on the stairway around the top floor. Eee gads.” Could I keep her on the first floor with the blocks? Nope. So, up we went. This is when I remembered who I am.

Admittedly, it was fun at the top, when I wasn’t scared to death to let go of her. She wanted no part of being held onto, so I knew we had to get down as soon as possible. How to coax her was the problem.

So, I didn’t coax. I just picked her up kicking and screaming. Down we went. It felt like forever getting down those rail-less steps. I suddenly remembered who I am and how I’d better be careful -- before the fact.

Wear your seat belt. Don’t fall. Walk every day. Eat right. And on it goes – for a while, anyway.Photos by Alice Wilson, Tuscaloosa, Alabama. See her copyrighted work: http://www.alicewilsonphotography.com/

Technorati Tags: aging,grandparents parenting,parenting,grandparent,toddlers,child's playhouse,child's tree house,playhouse raising

Real Father’s Day Part I

Ordinarily I wouldn’t give my husband a Father’s Day gift. His children will do that. But these are not ordinary times, and I did surprise him with a Sony 12-megapixel, 4x zoom lens Cyber-shot digital camera, much advanced over his 5-year-old version.

 2 photos with the new camera

 

This camera is a symbol as much as it a functional object to record many, I hope, years of happy memories.

 

As a symbol, it acknowledges that “Papa” is and will likely be the only real father our granddaughter will know, as we have legal custody of her. Truth: I hope Joanna Leigh will never have to know her biological father. He is a meth addict with other children he has never had anything to do with; he has never shown any interest in our granddaughter other than signing a paternity affidavit; he is a loser who will soon go back to prison for meth use and manufacturing.

Reality: she may want to know about him or meet him one day. Thankfully, she will have Papa to provide the father-daughter relationship that every female child needs and help to prepare her to face hard realities one day.

Newsy Fathers and Daughters

I can speak to the father-daughter relationship, particularly to the positive, healthy, and wonderful kind, and I’m forever grateful for it. The potential in that relationship is without bounds. Fathers and daughters, and by implication their special relationship, is a current newsmaker, thanks to Malia and Sasha Obama and the relationship with their father, who can serve as good a role model and ambassador as anyone. His primary message is that fathers need to be involved and included.

Instinctively we know that the father-daughter relationship is both special and necessary for the daughter’s emotional health and stability. But sometimes we don’t know how or why. Today, though, we are lucky today to have 10 or 15 years worth of science that solidly supports our instincts. I have been researching and reading in total amazement of the quantity. Thank goodness my father knew it instinctively.

Photo by Emory Kimbrough 

War Torn

Military service and war has always separated fathers and children. This was my story for the first two years of my life, which will be the subject of the following post.

There is so much research out there that it is hard to summarize. A lot is for a father’s involvement with sons and daughters. A start might be Jeremy Adam Smith’s The Daddy Dialectic blog, particularly the July 14, 2008, post “The Astonishing Science of Father Involvement.”

Science for Fathers

He lists factors that research shows matter, but a surprising one goes like this:

There's another factor that I don't think gets mentioned often enough: early involvement with infant care. When a child is born, testosterone falls dramatically in men. In fact, studies by biologist Katherine Wynne-Edwards and others show that pregnancy, childbirth, and fatherhood trigger a range of little hormonal shifts in the male body—but only if the father is in contact with the baby and the baby’s mother, a crucial point.

He also leads the reader to an important blog site, Half Full: Science for Raising Happy Kids:

My esteemed colleague at the Greater Good Science Center, executive director Christine Carter, posted two very nice summaries of research into fatherhood over at her "happy kids" parenting blog, Half-Full. The first asks: Are Dads as Essential as Moms? The answer is, Of course!

One of Carter’s points addresses the leading cause of the breakdown in the relationship between fathers and children:

One of the biggest problems with divorce is that when a father moves out, the father-child relationship frequently falters. If he stays in the game, his kids will cope far better with the divorce.

Science for Fathers and Daughters

The mother lode (sorry, couldn’t resist) of information specifically on the father-daughter relationship is Dr. Linda Nielsen’s site.   A professor at Wake Forest University, Nielsen teaches “the only college course in the country that focuses exclusively on father-daughter relationships.” She is the author of numerous works, including Embracing Your Father: Creating the Relationship You Want with Your Dad (McGraw Hill 2004) and Between Fathers and Daughters: Enriching & Rebuilding Your Adult Relationship (Cumberland House, 2008). These works are aimed at the daughters and how they can take steps to repair relationships with their fathers.

One of the most compelling reasons she gives for tending to this specific relationship follows:

• Fathers generally have as much or more impact as mothers do in the following areas of their daughters’ lives: (1) achieving academic and career success—especially in math and science (2) creating a loving, trusting relationship with a man (3) dealing well with people in authority—especially men (4) Being self-confident and self-reliant (5) Being willing to try new things and to accept challenges (6) Maintaining good mental health (no clinical depression, eating disorders, or chronic anxiety) (7) Expressing anger comfortably and appropriately—especially with men.

Wow. If you have daughters, this resonates.

But she is changing direction. Because of the huge numbers of fathers and daughters affected by divorce, she is working on Divorced Dads and Their Daughters. She wrote a 1999 article for Journal of Divorce and Remarriage,  which likely is the groundwork for the upcoming book, and more information on this topic is already available in Embracing Your Father. The last paragraph of the article likely foreshadows her book’s themes:

In many ways then, our research is reminding us that divorced fathers are often demoralized and demeaned in ways that make it difficult for them to maintain close relationships with their children. Many of our personal and legal beliefs about divorced men and divorced women work against fathers. We still have far to go in providing the support and the compassion that divorced fathers deserve as adults whose marriages have ended, but whose feelings, needs, and desires as parents endure.

What science has discovered about the effects of a father’s presence in his daughter’s life offers one clear message: The knowledge makes it clearly our responsibility to make the father-daughter relationship happen.

 

The 78 rpm record above will be explained in Part II

Technorati Tags: Spittin' Grits,Father's Day,grandparents,parenting,granddaughter,father-daughter relationship,Malia and Sasha Obama,fathers separated from children,The Daddy Dialectic,Half Full,Dr. Linda Nielsen,Embracing Your Father,Between Fathers and Daughters,divorced fathers

All Mine, All the Time, MINE – Part I

Technorati Tags: language,toddlers,Terrible Twos,gardenias,Noam Chomsky,Reflections on Language,Universal Grammar,Steven Pinker,The Language Instinct

In any language it’s the same: C’est la MIENNE, Es ist MEINE, or in Japanese, or in Swahili, or Esperanto, or pig Latin -- it’s MINE. Always the emphasis is on MINE. It’s MINE. It’s MINE. It’s MINE.

Most people think “NO!” is the language of toddlers. I don’t believe it. “MINE, it’s MINE!” puts “NO!” in time out.

But what escapes me is where toddlers come up with the word “mine” in whatever their language is. Normal adults speaking any language don’t walk around saying “MINE” constantly. How do toddlers attach the word “MINE” to their egocentric, self-oriented, singular world? Then after that, where does the concept that EVERYTHING in the entire world is theirs come from? Adults also don’t go around saying, “THIS is yours, and THIS is yours and THIS is yours,” as they go for a walk in the park.

Maybe later they might say, “All this COULD be yours,” but that’s not the same thing.

Granted, the Terrible Twos are simply preview to the teenage horror to come, but this MINE business really becomes like vomitus.

My granddaughter and I were outside in the garden the other morning. I have about 20 gardenia bushes in the back, and when they are at their peak, the entire back yard smells of the sweet scent of gardenias. I thought, “Oh, this is a wonderful time to add ‘sweet-smelling flower’ to her repertoire.” HA.

I took her to see one of the bushes. I explained how the bloom’s scent is so heavenly. She started grabbing at the flowers. “Mine. MINE. MY sveet fower.”

Oh, yuk. That’s just IT.

My sister was here recently and was amused and horrified at this obsessive use of one word among millions. It became a running joke. We became more and more hysterical. “MY TV clicker.” “MY napkin.” “MY spilled wine.” “MY sponge.” “MY toothbrush.” “MY pillow.”

I was introduced in graduate school to Noam Chomsky’s theories about the predetermined nature of language structure in humans, transformational grammar, and other heady stuff. In his 1975 book Reflections on Language, he poses a hypothetical situation where a scientist is observing a child (maybe a two-year-old?) learning the English language. The scientist sees that the child has learned to form statements and questions like “the man is tall – is the man tall?” He then runs through a scientific method to arrive at the following conclusion about UG (Universal Grammar): “Linguistic theory, the theory of UG construed in the manner just outlined, is an innate property of the human mind.”

Oh, YIKES. But he didn’t hear Joanna Leigh saying, “The fower is sveet – is the fower sveet?”

No, she said “Mine. MINE. MY sveet fower.” And yanked it off the bush.

At the end of that chapter, Chomsky writes, “In the next two chapters I want to say something more about a few of these mental faculties and their interaction.” Well, I looked in the index and did not see “The Terrible Twos.” So not even Chomsky can answer MY question.

When MY sister was leaving, I said to her that when she got back to work on Monday, she could get things straight in the office by starting out with “MY file folders,” “MY cubicle,” “MY ad copy proof,” MY staff meeting,” and so on and on and on and on.

I’m going to go back and re-read MY copy of Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct. Meanwhile, can anyone shed light on this troubling aspect of the human condition?

 

Photos by Alice Wilson, Tuscaloosa, Alabama. See her copyrighted work: http://www.alicewilsonphotography.com/

For recession watchers: Used copies of Chomsky’s Reflections on Language are available on Amazon.  Used copies of Pinker’s The Language Instinct are also available at Amazon. 

About Spittin’ Grits

_© Maggie Mae and Patty Cake napping. They are now five years older, but, like most women can be, continue to be very close friends. They are also close friends with our two-year-old granddaughter.

Spittin’ Grits_©, from Joanna Cravey Hutt, presents observations, beliefs, and information about topics including (but not limited to): Grits, Grandparents Parenting and Toddler Whisperings, Drug Addiction, Funny Bones, Politics, Reunions (I have been to a few), Southern Stuff, Travels, and Words and Language. Some lives turn out pretty much as expected. A lot of mine is not what the script called for. As I ad libbed my way through the surprises, amazements, shocks, disappointments, I learned some stuff, which inspired me to create Spittin’ Grits_©.

Why these subjects? I know grits and Southern stuff from having lived only in Alabama since 1961 when I entered The University of Alabama; my husband (of nearly 40 years) and I are raising our (now) six-year-old granddaughter because of our daughter’s nearly lifelong, intractable drug addictions; as a retired writer, editor, adjunct English instructor, and freelance writer, I have worked with words and language all of my professional life. Other topics reveal interests.

            Welcome to my thoughts and experiences. Some will be more personal than others, particularly those posts on drug addiction, which I have come to know because of my daughter’s addictions. Some will be informative, I hope, which contributes to my goal of sharing what I have learned. Some will just BE.

            Thank you for visiting. I hope you will return, comment, and tell others about Spittin Grits_©. Comments must be civil, short and to the point. Obscene, profane, abusive and off-topic comments will be deleted. Repeat offenders will be blocked. Thanks for abiding by these rules and for taking part. 

Spittin’ Grits is a registered trademark and is the sole property of Joanna C. Hutt. Copyright 2009, all rights reserved.