Starlighting Mama

This book was eye-opening. These stories need to be told! Your review expressed very clearly that people get bullied and pressured into things that are not good for them or their children. I have not given birth, but I have heard these stories, and know they are true, and have myself undergone bullying and unethical coercion in many other areas of medical care. It is so important for pregnant women to be aware of what they are walking in to, in order to protect themselves and their babies.

I am so happy you have seen fit to write wholeheartedly upon this subject which I feel so passionate about. I pray many blessings and good success to follow you and all those who take the honest advice to heart and can then raise healthy happy offspring.

I wish this book was out ten years ago…..knowledge is power. I would have done things so different. “Trust the doctors….” My biggest mistake. Would love to own a copy.

This is a FANTASTIC, eye-opening post! I agree wholeheartedly with another reader, Louise, who said:

“What’s shocking is not that we are seeking positive change… it’s that it’s met with such resistance.”

Can’t wait to get my hands on this book having been bullied into a c sec with my second which lead to the c secs of my third and fourth i want all new moms to open their eyes to what is going on in america

Our first child was born on a Friday and the hospital was packed, our second on a Sunday, and I think only two or three newborns were on the floor.

This whole topic brings up so much angst for me…I was bullied in this very manner with my first baby, who I ended up having via emergency c-section at 24 weeks. Long story short, and three c-sections later…I look back and see that not only was I bullied, but treated like a “liability”, like a cow in a cattle drive…and to make matters even more complicated, we were uninsured at the time. They see THAT on your paperwork and the reigns on your choices tighten even more.

After three c-sections, I’m stuck…but for new moms out there that still have a choice, I hope this book strengthens their resolve and gives them tools to understand the “system” they’re entering. Motherhood should leave a woman with something beautiful, (and pain can be beautiful!) not the kinds of “trauma center” imagery that I’ve got in my head. My babies are worth all of it…just wish I could have had a better experience. Thanks for writing this book.

I went through a very traumatic birth and believed at the time that it was unavoidable. I’ve learned so much since then and love that my daughter is becoming aware of the bullying tactics of modern medicine and how the business of having a baby outweighs common sense and nature in the eyes of many doctors.

This book looks so awesome! My first was born in a hospital 11 years ago. Even though I thought I stood firm on what I wanted and didn’t want during labor and birth, it’s amazing how fast that goes out the window when you’re in pain and someone in scrubs is telling you “what’s best for the baby”. Ugh! My second, born a year ago, was born peacefully at home. My midwives were loving, caring, and supportive. It was amazing! <3

I never felt bullied or pressured, but looking back I think I wasn’t critical enough or questioning enough of some interventions. Both of my labors were induced — the first because my amniotic sac had torn but labor didn’t start, the second because I was really close to having the baby (huge and due) and I wanted to have him when my mother was in town. But now, research is coming out about possible harmful effects of pitocin, so I’m definitely questioning my decision in the second birth. I’d like to see a wider perspective on birth and birth options become mainstream so that women make more informed choices.

I was bullied into pitocin when my water broke and there had been no change for 4 hours in my contractions. This lead to the horrible labor ever. When I started throwing up my husband had to leave te room and I felt pressured into an epidural. Due to pregnancy complications we have decided not to have more children. And it makes me sad to not have the chance to experience a natural (possibly home) birth. Would love to read this book!

It is so important to be informed. I would love to add a copy of this book to my lending library, which I share with my clients. I feel as a doula part of my job is to make sure that the mothers I serve are aware of their choices. Living in NJ, where we have an extremely high cesarean rate, and many mothers are told that they aren’t “allowed” to go post-dates makes this even more important. All women should be informed & we need to start talking to kids about this, so they are aware that they have choices & shouldn’t take everything they hear at face value.

I have been teaching prenatal yoga since 1997. Mamas come to me with all manner of questions, many that they have asked their OB and get the reply “Oh, that’s normal.” The lack of respect in the answer increases their anxiety and stress levels. I became curious about “normal” and went in search if my own answers. I became a doula, took prenatal massage trainings (already an MT) and several childbirth education trainings (teaching Hypnobabies for 10 yrs!) Being able to describe the reason they may feel the round ligament more one day than another has a powerful calming effect for them. How the mamas experience pregnancy and birth prepares the foundation for their emotions in parenting. If the medical community were to trust mamas and let them trust their bodies, they would trust their choices as a patent as well. If we are to create a calmer healthier society we must begin at the beginning. How these previous ones enter their lives affects all of us.
Thank you for sharing your message! Lets keep the conversation going!
Namaste,
Linda

As an attorney practicing in the field of assisted reproductive technologies, I can’t recommend this book highly enough. Parents who are forming their families using egg donation and surrogacy are dedicated and devoted parents who will make independent decisions on behalf of their babies, I they have the information upon which to make those decisions. The problem is finding that information. Propaganda and marketing plans are multitudinous. Sources if unbiased information are scarce. This book is an important step in meeting that need. I will be suggesting this book to future clients on a regular basis!

I have been looking forward to reading this book.

As a student completing my A.A. in ECED, and going on to get my B.S. in Education and Child Development, I am inspired by your mother’s teaching philosophy and the mission of the program she serves. Play-based and interest-lead curriculum is SO important and yet so difficult to find in programs nationwide, and I’m very happy that your mother is someone who has spent her life practicing and raising awareness of the methods that I’ve come to feel so strongly about. Happy Mother’s Day to you and to your mother!

Congratulations to your mom, Heather. What a great honor and wonderful validation of the SYC philosophy.

My mother is the living embodiment of unconditional love. She’s been 100% supportive of whatever we three children have strived for. She may not have known it at the time, but she was a practitioner of the “It’s OK Not to Share” philosophy of child rearing. She only stepped to mediate arguments if someone was hurt or about to be hurt, or property was in danger of being damaged or had been.

Her standard response to the summertime “I’m bored, Mom,” complaint was “Go outside and play.” 99% of our play was unsupervised by adults and we truly did learn how to cope with differences, negotiate, be patient, deal with problems and conflicts, and just plain “get along with others.”

She’d step in as the authority only when the situation demanded discipline, but we always knew it was our behavior that was at fault, not ourselves. Hugely important for kids to know that their behavior and their selves are two different entities.

And she was always there if we needed a bandaid, a comfort food hot lunch of chicken noodle soup and PB&Js, or just a hug at the right time. Thanks, Mom.

(All my favorite teachers happened to be male, so I don’t have a teacher story appropriate for Mother’s Day.)

My Mom went by the method of “if you’re old enough to ask, you’re old enough to know”. I guess she applied the same logic to literature – if I’m old enough to be interested, I’m old enough. She gave me boxes upon boxes of books that she read in her younger years and didn’t give me any guidance. I remember reading lots of Judy Blume books when I was 9-11 years old (this was 1999-2001). One book I read, “Forever”, was very adult in it’s portrayal of sex in teenage years. While parts of it were funny, it also represented the realities of our first sexual encounters: confusion, how young love doesn’t last, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be, seeing the gynocologist, etc. Reading this book didn’t make me sexually promiscuous or confuse me. What it did do was give me information to think about and turn over, and it ended with me and my Mom having a frank discussion about sex and birth control when I was 12. It was a perfectly organic discussion on something that many parents struggled with, and I really appreciate that my Mom never censored my reading so that we could continue having these conversations. Also, there were many books that didn’t appeal to me in any sense until I was older – I’d get like 2 or 3 chapters in and move on. So I think the situations will work itself out, but it’s important to read what your kids are reading (or have read it) and be prepared to discuss the book and answer questions. Communication is key.

Great question! My six year old loves the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books. Although, I don’t think he fully understands all the stories, I truly believe the cartoon style format helped him with his reading. I do the bulk of the reading and he likes reading the talk bubbles. I do grapple with this concept There are so many wonderful picture books and the window is truly quite short for them to enjoy these. I really let him choose what ever he wants, but I also try to pick out some other picture books of things I think he might like. Harry Potter can definitely wait. I know he would be bored with it and I am certain he would find it scary.

Heather – This is a wonderful list that deserves a wide audience. I’m going to Tweet, Google+, Scoop.it!, Digg, and Reddit it!

Bravo Cari – my hat is off to YOU!

Great tips, and good luck to Cari! I strongly agree that editing and having a writing group is imperative. I’ve been looking into self-publishing a lot lately (so far I’ve been told by agents that my idea is great but need a bigger blog following and to contact them again in a year’s time = if I’m doing all the marketing anyway then why give the bulk of my profits away?!), so I joined a writer’s group, am looking for a cover designer, and am cultivating people to do test readings. I anticipate a long revision process, but I think it’ll be worth it.

A book that I’ve actually found really helpful is APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur, it’s really good for breaking down the process of self-pub’ing done right, as well as marketing your book, before and after it’s published.

Danielle, I am adding Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur to my reading list. Chris, I agree that honest soul-searching is important, with one caveat: Don’t let your fear of the risk color your assessment. It’s scary to put your work out there, and even more so in the absence of a traditional publisher’s imprimatur. That fear, I think, can sometimes keep us stuck when we should be moving forward. With something as big as a novel — or a nonfiction book — striving to make it the “absolute best” is nearly impossible. Almost everything could be improved with more time spent. Revise, rework, listen to beta readers, (repeat) for sure. But don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good, or, as Heather puts it, the “done right.” Because ultimately, you aren’t the judge — the readers are.

Once again spot on! here is what happened on our “unstructured” Saturday. As see-saws are a thing of the past. My son came up with the idea to put a really long thick stick through a low lying v-shaped tree trunk. VOLIA an instant see-saw. Later, on the same tree he found and L-shaped stick and hung it over another branch and made a stick swing. Finally (on the same tree) he found two long sticks, he leaned up against the tree. He laid shorter sticks across in an attempt to make a ladder.

Love this post, Heather. So, so true. I get my ideas on long walks too. To tell you the truth, that’s half the reason why I wanted a dog again—so I’d have to take long walks every single day!

Heather — “…make space for our own thoughts, dreams and ideas. Some information is good, but too much can drown out our own voice. We need to leave room for IDEAS.”

I resonate with your observation to my very core!

You asked, “What prompts your best ideas and creativity?

I pulled a sentence from a post I wrote in March 2010 that speaks to my thoughts on space: “…space for transformation to occur; space to find new direction.”

As a minimalist, space is like a compass for me — it points me in the right (and WRITE) direction.

“When we step to the side, kids can experience their own lives and adventures.”

I respect your words of wisdom. My parents were huge advocates of this mindset. One small example is them putting my sister and I on an airplane in San Diego and flying us to our aunt and uncle in Chicago. We’d have a blast with them while mom and dad were making their way across county in the car. Then we’d have a family road trip back again. It was a win-win situation!

I never traveled like that as a child, but had a lot of freedom to roam the neighborhood. Rode our bikes or walked to friends, local store to buy candy. Took the bus to the mall to shop or see movies. I now live in NYC and try to give my 6 year old age appropriate independence whenever possible.

I just read “One World Schoolhouse” by Sal Khan (of Khan Academy), and he had an interesting section about his experience at MIT: basically, he stopped going to lectures and instead simply worked on the problem sets or reading or writing or whatever it was during the “school day”–this enabled him to take twice as many classes because he wasn’t spending so much time in passive mode.

His point was that people learn when they are engaged, and what I’m starting to see with my 8th grader is more lecture-type classes (which rarely engage him) and then the problems or writing or other assignments are supposed to be done outside of school hours. Which makes no sense, because wouldn’t it be better to be doing the actual work when the teacher is there to help?

That’s where the concept of “flipping the classroom” is gaining a lot of attention: Assign the video lectures (not too long, though) as homework (if you must have homework), and then use school time to actually do the work. The teacher is freed to help students as they need it, instead of us poor parents struggling to remember how to calculate the slope of a line and put it into y= mx+ b format…

I was a preschool and then a first-grade teacher for many years. Now my own son is in preschool. His teacher very occasionally (like maybe three times a year) sends home an assignment like the one we did last week, where each child made a scrapbook page about themselves and took it to school to make a class book. I think “homework” like this helps bridge the gap between home and school, and it was a fun project my son did almost entirely himself. This is the kind of occasional homework I liked when I taught as well, and there was never a penalty if a child did not complete it. I do not like worksheets for homework, and I think the point I’d stress is that it should be occasional – not every day or even every week. I love your idea for assignments for parents. As a teacher, parents used to ask me what they could do to reinforce their first-grader’s learning at home. I’d say, “read to them. Read to them a lot.” Most parents would blink and stammer on with, “well yeah, but what else?” I totally agree that kids spend seven hours in school a day, which is too long for elementary school, in my opinion. They don’t need to be doing school at home, too.

This is wonderful. I am so happy to have found your blog. I have many renegade rules for life. Get dirty when playing, throwing rocks(in water, at trees, down a hill), cereal for dinner when everyone is too tired for words, letting little boys wear nail polish or wear dresses, etc.

Heather — I recently experienced a similar sense of dismay. While shopping for a gift at a well-known toy store (that was dismay enough), I came across SEGREGATED isles:

Toys for Him
Toys for Her

WHO decides these things? A girl might well like a “boy” toy, and a boy might well like a “girl” toy.

Another great post, thank you. I love the way you dish food for thought…

Those snippets on the backs of toy packaging telling you to quiz your child do annoy me!

Interestingly our son learned his colours (early in fact – at about 20-22 months) by him quizzing me rather than the other way round. When you’ve been asked ‘what’s that?’ for the tenth car or crayon in a row, you find yourself naturally saying what colour it is. It felt like he learned them very easily over the course of a month or two without any conscious effort from me other than answering his questions. As a result all the ‘educational’ toys designed to help your child learn colours feel really bizarre and unnecessary to me. I was also quite surprised when I discovered that he knew all his shapes one day as I have absolutely no idea where he picked them up!

What children play with has to do exactly with what the parents bring into the home. Most of the time, they are usually plastic. Certainly, these items can be a lot of fun for the children. However, they can be limited in many ways. Instead, it’s time to explore the benefits of wooden toys because they have so much more to offer.`

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I agree wholeheartedly on the weather part. Kids need to go out in ALL kinds of weather. One of my favorite childhood memories is the time my mom let us put on our swimming suits and run out in the rain. It even hailed a little bit and we had blast collecting the hail in buckets.

You are so right. Kids that age don’t need calendars.