Care and Feeding is Slate’s parenting advice column. Have a question for Care and Feeding? Submit it here or post it in the Slate Parenting Facebook group.
Dear Care and Feeding,
I am a (newly minted) librarian working in the children’s department of a library, and I love it here. There’s so much room for creativity and fun in designing children’s programming, and I get to see the impact of the work I do in real-time. I do have a question, though, about working with parents when it comes to behavior issues. The problems I’m seeing run the gamut from mean girl behavior (“You can’t sit with us” when someone wants to join in at the coloring table) to disruptions at storytime (a toddler running around, knocking other kids over, and trying to go behind the screen where the kids aren’t allowed) and kids climbing the shelves. More often than not, the parents either don’t respond to the issues when they arise, or they’ll offer a token “play nice,” or “come sit over here” but not provide any follow-through when the kid starts acting up again. What am I supposed to do? I’m not a childcare provider or a teacher, but the children are attending programs that I’m running, so I have an obligation to at least try to maintain order. How do I navigate making sure that the kids are playing nicely and safely in the space when the parents don’t see an issue with the way their kids are acting?
—Between a Rock and a Hard Place
Dear Between a Rock and a Hard Place,
You’re in charge. You have every right to keep order and make sure the children are safe, behaving well, and being kind to one another. Feel free to—in fact, consider yourself obliged to—correct bad behavior when it comes up, whether the kids are running in the library space that’s your domain, knocking down other children (yikes!), or being mean to one another. If the child’s parent doesn’t back you up and your repeated exhortations to the child don’t work, I see no reason not to be as firm with the parent as with the child: “I’m sorry, we don’t allow running/climbing/hitting/knocking down/being mean to others here. If Sam can’t play safely and nicely today, it’s best if you try again another day.” It wouldn’t hurt to post a whole bunch of brightly colored, eye-catching posters that the parents can’t miss (and that might be attractive enough to the children for them to ask their parents what they say if they’re too young to read) listing fundamental rules. No climbing bookshelves in the library. Everyone plays together here! Etc. You can’t do your job, and the children can’t reap the benefits of your doing a good job, if chaos reigns in the children’s section.
And congratulations! I’m glad you’ve found work you love. I get that being a disciplinarian isn’t what you signed up for when you went to library school, or when you took this job. But anytime small children are involved, there’s going to be a little bit of that involved. Let’s hope a little goes a long way.
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Dear Care and Feeding,
At her annual physical last year, when she was 14, my daughter was given a mental health questionnaire by her pediatrician. Based on her responses, which were appropriately kept confidential from me, the pediatrician recommended we start her in talk therapy. So we did. But after three months of weekly meetings, the therapist let us know that our daughter had no issues that needed to be addressed in therapy and suggested we end. We thought maybe it had just been a bad fit, so we found a new therapist, but soon we got the same feedback. Ditto a third. Now our daughter is 15, and at her physical this year, the pediatrician made the same recommendation.
I don’t have anything against therapy—I see a therapist myself—but it’s hard to find someone accepting new clients who can meet outside school hours. And while I can think of many reasons my daughter may need therapy (she is adopted; she is exploring her sexuality; it is the internet age; she is 15), if she disagrees that any of these are issues that need discussing, is unwilling to get into anything in detail, and every therapist she has seen thinks she’s fine, do I have to keep pursuing this? Should I find her yet another therapist?
—Ineffective Therapy?
Dear Ineffective,
Ah, well, you know what they say: You can lead a kid to therapy, but you can’t make her talk. It’s great that your pediatrician is paying attention to her mental as well as physical health (though a questionnaire alone seems to me a questionable way to make a determination about this; still, it’s better than nothing, and your pediatrician may feel ill-equipped to have a meaningful conversation with a teenager—and also be too busy to take the time this would require). I’m glad your daughter answered the questions honestly—both times. As she must have, or the responses wouldn’t have raised the red flag. Have you asked your daughter about the discrepancy between the questionnaire and what her multiple therapists have told you? Perhaps the questions on that form provided too blunt an instrument to assess her state of mind. Perhaps she just doesn’t want to talk right now, to anyone… or perhaps she does, but none of the therapists she’s seen have been a good fit for her. The only way to find out is to ask her. She should be at the center of any decision you make about this.
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Dear Care and Feeding,
I need some help with a difficult conversation I need to have with my mother. My wife, Dorothy, recently had surgery and is on sick leave from work, and I’ve been working from home to take care of her. Mom offered to make some soup and bring it to our place so that we’d have something good that could be reheated quickly, and I gratefully accepted. Yesterday, Mom showed up, driven by a friend of hers whom I’ve never met, I answered the door, they gave me the soup, and I went to put it in the fridge. At no point did I invite them in, but when I went back to the door, I found they had invited themselves in: They were in the living room, sitting on the couch. I was irritated, but I wasn’t quite at the level of telling them to leave.
Then, however, my mother wanted to check up on Dorothy—who was awake at the time but doesn’t want company (she has a cat-like aversion to being seen when she’s sick or injured). So that turned into a 10-minute low-key argument between Mom and me, during which she kept insisting that she be allowed to see my wife, demanding that I at least ask her if she could go in and sit with her for a while (and I kept saying no, that wasn’t going to happen, and no, I wasn’t going to bother her—I already I knew the answer), and finally, I told my mom to leave. She complied, with somewhat ill grace. She’s never been the best with boundaries, especially with those who are younger than she is. Now my wife and I are both angry with her. I don’t want to cut her out of my life over it, but I also don’t want a repeat of this sort of thing. At the same time, I feel awkward about calling to chew her out over doing me a favor. The food is very much appreciated. How do I balance this sort of thing out?
—Fumbling for the Right Words
Dear Fumbling,
Hold on while I try to picture the scenario that led to your problem. So you took the container of soup and left your mother standing in your doorway while you went to put it away? You didn’t want her and her friend to come in, but it didn’t occur to you to accept the gift she’d brought, thank her heartily, say, “Nice to meet you” to her friend (and also, “Thanks for driving Mom over here to bring us this!”), stand chatting with Mom and friend for a moment in the doorway, and then say, conclusively, “OK, thanks again, I’ll see you soon, Mom—love you, take care,” to make it clear that the interaction was over?
I guess not. But I don’t blame them for being confused. If I were your mom, I would have called out, “Do you want us to go? Or to come in?” but I get that your mom, with her poor sense of boundaries, doesn’t think that way. Once you saw them sitting there, though, you might have apologized for your rudeness and told them outright that this wasn’t a good time for company, that Dorothy needed to rest and you had to return to her side in case she needed anything. And maybe apologized for the “misunderstanding.”
I say all of this not because I believe you can go back in time and handle the whole thing better (how much happier all of our lives would be if we could pull this off!), but because that’s how you’ll handle a potential repeat of “this sort of thing.” Please don’t call Mom to chew her out. Call her to tell her how delicious the soup was and how much you appreciate her making it and bringing it to you. Don’t mention the unpleasantness. If she does, why not tell her gently that you know how eager she was to see your wife, that you’re sorry that wasn’t possible, and that once Dorothy is up to seeing people, she’ll be at the top of the list? And for good measure, tell her now what you might have told her before she came in and sat down uninvited: That Dorothy doesn’t feel up to a visit from anyone while she’s still feeling poorly, but that you both appreciate her concern and kindness. I hope both you and your wife can get over your anger. Keep in mind that for boundaries to be observed by others, we must put them clearly in place.
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Dear Care and Feeding,
I’m hoping this is a low-stakes question, but I’m genuinely perplexed about how to respond to my 11-year-old daughter’s newfound interest in the furry community. I myself am very startled by the sentence I just wrote, as I always thought that furries were a sex roleplay thing. My daughter assures me that this isn’t the case, that it’s more like cosplay for the majority of people who participate in it. A quick internet search corroborates what she has claimed. She would like to make a furry mask and create YouTube videos of herself as an animal. I told her this isn’t a good idea for many reasons, including but not limited to potential social consequences, potential sexualizing she is far too young to handle, the immortalizing nature of the internet, etc. My concern is that she so seldom expresses interest in any activity besides video games that I don’t want to crush her interests. She has no enthusiasm for any of the things I’ve signed her up for—sports, art, music, youth groups, etc. I do not plan on purchasing craft supplies or supporting her newfound interest, but she’s been very persistent and hurt that I’m not on board. But how can I be? She has always loved animals, but this seems like a weird escalation, doesn’t it?
Some additional context may be important here. Her dad and I have been divorced since she was 2, and she has been in my primary custody since then, with weekend visitation at her dad’s. I have a very fraught relationship with him, to the point that I have a court order that prevents him from contacting me outside of a court-monitored app. Co-parenting is nonexistent; I’ve had to resign myself to parallel parenting instead. So while I don’t allow her to post YouTube videos at my house and I limit the time she spends overall on screens, the rules are different at his house, where she is mostly unsupervised (I do block content on her phone, but she has other devices over there that aren’t monitored). Also, about two months ago, I took a temporary work assignment outside the U.S. to conduct my research (I’m a professor), and her dad used the family court system to block her from leaving the country with me. She wanted to finish the school year anyway, so she didn’t mind—or she thought she wouldn’t mind—but I did. She misses me terribly, and I miss her. She’ll return to me in the summer, but these last few months have been difficult for both of us. She’s been with her dad for two months straight, which is not ideal. We talk on the phone daily, and she does have a therapist she’s seen for many years, but her dad has taken her only twice since we’ve been apart.
Does this furry obsession sound like an emotional issue around living with her dad and being separated from me? Am I justified in saying no to her involvement in it? Am I blowing this out of proportion—or is it as weird and concerning as I think it is? And if I’m justified in saying no, how do I explain this without crushing her, especially when we are only communicating by FaceTime for the next month? And then how do I prevent her from participating when I don’t have control over all of her electronics?
—Frazzled by Furries
Dear Frazzled,
All those reasons for forbidding the furry dress-up posts to YouTube you listed for me? Tell them to her and elaborate on all of them. (You’re right about all of them!) At her age, she shouldn’t be posting any videos of herself on YouTube. The two of you are close, and my guess is she trusts you: If you tell her something is dangerous, even if her dad is inclined to let her do it, she may very well accept your ruling on it.
But you have limited power here. All you can do is be honest—and firm—with your kid, and hope that good sense and good upbringing will prevail. As for the matter of her fascination with furry culture: I agree that it’s weird. But I also know that she’s right—plenty of kids and young adults are likewise obsessed, without any sexual implications. (Do I understand it? No. But not understanding something doesn’t mean it’s bad.) I think it’s perfectly reasonable for you to draw the line between her interest in all things furry and her public representation of herself in a furry mask. She can participate in the “community” in other ways. I had a first-year student once at Ohio State who had been drawing furries—painstakingly, in full color, and filling sketchbook after sketchbook with these drawings—and writing stories about them since he was in middle school. He was an odd duck for sure, but he wasn’t hurting anybody—not even himself.
Does her interest in furries have something to do with her being separated from you and left with her dad for months? Who knows? (You could always ask her if she thinks it does.) But I wouldn’t panic over it. Kids go through all kinds of phases and weird obsessions. Do your best to keep this one off the internet while not forbidding her to pursue her interest, which wouldn’t work anyway: She likes what she likes, and you can’t legislate that. Sooner or later, it will probably pass. Or it won’t (and if it doesn’t, so what?).
—Michelle
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