Letters to the Editor
firefly82
Published Letters: 288 Editor's Choice: 30
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Talk to her
[Read the article: My 13-year-old singer wants to quit piano lessons]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Wow, what other musical instrument in the history of the world has had the power to inspire such familial emotional angst?
I think the mother's a narcissist but there are enough letters at this point focused on her, so I won't add to it.
And maybe Cary's right and the girl just needs a new teacher or some more flexibility for self-expression and exploration, but I don't think he was very clear on how the LW should go about determining that: TALK to your daughter, to her as a person, not as her career potential. Relax and have a real conversation about what she wants out of her own life.
On the off-chance that the daughter is reading this: If you truly need to quit and there's no room for compromise with your mother, there's a stunningly easy solution that I employed to great effect when I was 8 years old: refuse to go to lessons--don't get in the car. Refuse to practice. Your mother can punish you any number of ways, but she can't actually force you to play the piano.
I work in the arts and I witness on a daily basis the suffering and waste caused by people doing what they don't really want to be doing, because they think they "should" for some inane reason. If you don't enjoy your work, your misery and carelessness show through.
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Except she might not
[Read the article: My 13-year-old singer wants to quit piano lessons]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"BUT MAKE HER STICK WITH IT! She'll thank you later in life."
Or maybe she'll hate you for it. It's really a crapshoot, if you don't relate to her as a real and autonomous person with some insight into her own situation.
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Your own experience does not qualify you to speak for others.
[Read the article: Pregnant and poor in Mississippi]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]<<I think there is a good case for abortion to be allowed, indeed provided, in cases of rape>>
But not otherwise? This is frightening; what qualifies anyone to decide the circumstances under which someone else should be allowed an abortion? Where can you draw that line for someone you don't know in secret and horrifying circumstances that you can't even imagine? This belongs to a category that I don't think syoung made quite explicit enough: Those who CANNOT trust women to know themselves and their values, assess their circumstances, and use their own judgement. Though I suppose they could be a sub-category of the neo-Victorians.
It says that women can't possibly know enough to be afraid of the right things.
To be fair and clear, I'm against abortion. I think it's awful. I believe as a matter of my faith that every potential life is valuable not only to God but to the rest of us. But it won't work to legislate it away. I want to see the day when this country truly values life as it claims to, when an elective abortion would be near-unthinkable because a woman with an unplanned pregnancy would have no cause to doubt that she would be supported by her community, would be able to earn a decent living, and that her child would be unconditionally wanted and valued.
But that isn't what most current anti-abortion really want. As syoung articulated in a way that hadn't really struck me before, what they want is an underclass of people to devalue, manipulate, and scapegoat. They need it in order to reassure themselves of their own righteousness. They don't value these unborn children, they value their ability to make the rules and as far as they're concerned, speak for God.
So I can disagree and morally object to abortion till I'm blue, but I can't judge a girl who's in a situation I could never imagine. I know other religious liberals who believe the same--that abortion is wrong, but the current consequences to the most vulnerable girls and women of outlawing it are far more wrong.
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To turn things around on therapy v. books....
[Read the article: Does self-help breed helplessness?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]<<I think people turn to self help books when they are depressed instead of turning to expensive treatment.>>
I will never denigrate any reputable psychotherapy or psychiatry that has helped someone live more fully, but I actually wish there were LESS pressure to turn to therapy, less assumption that it's the right and responsible way to take care of yourself.
People may turn to books instead of therapy because they're cheaper, but otherwise, I think people often turn to therapy for similar reasons that they use self-help books--because it's sold as the way to feel better, whatever that means to various people.
And all the same things can go wrong.
What I mainly found in therapy was an insistence that, as a condition of "feeling better," I accept certain precepts or assumptions that my perceptions were wrong, or things about myself and the world that I just didn't see as being true. The fact that I couldn't see them as being true, or had already rejected them after long observation, was held up as an example of my "illness."
What actually helped, and eventually led me to realize what my real problems were, was to own and accept what I saw as true about myself, and within the parameters of certain things that weren't going to change, live how I wanted to live.
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Don't forget "kids' menus"
[Read the article: Junk food education]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The NY Times did a great article a while back about restaurants finally starting to trend away from kids' menus filled with almost uniformly starchy beige food--cheese pizza, chicken nuggets, hamburgers and spaghetti--and toward kid-sized portions of "adult" food: dishes including fresh produce, seafood, interesting textures and flavor combinations. Seconding Allie's beef with the way we educate kids--treating a child's education as somehow separate from his real life--I think it's past time to get over the delusion sold us by the convenience foods industry that children are somehow unable to handle real food. Look at a restaurant children's menu sometime. Would you want to eat it? Then why would you feed it to your child?
I would never want to wholesale revert to the Victorian ideal of children as little adults, but there's a healthy middle ground to be found between that and our distorted paradigm construct of children's life not being real life--school as separate from the real world and kids' food as different from real food are both part and parcel of the bigger problem of the ways we cut children off from healthy reality.