Just Because It's Not Wrong Doesn't Make It Right by Barbara Coloroso

Just Because It's Not Wrong Doesn't Make It Right: From toddlers to teens, teaching kids to think and act ethically
by Barbara Coloroso
Viking Canada, 2005
249 pages

You're not likely to see a lot of parenting books show up here. I mostly don't read them. I maybe should read more than I do, and maybe someday I will, but between the business of actually parenting, other parts of life, and reading things I enjoy... well, parenting books generally fall behind on the priority list. This is not to say that I don't see a lot of them go by and think I'd like to read them very much, or that they might be tremendously useful to me. They just tend to get brought home and then spend three weeks -- or longer -- sitting on the table, looking interesting and not getting read. See, the thing is, I am lucky enough to have some excellent role models, and besides that one doesn't work with children and their parents for ten years (!!) and not pick up a few things. (Or decide there are things I'm not going to pick up, thank you.) So while there's always room for improvement... and those books do look awfully interesting... I'm going to read Kimberly Derting's The Body Finder next, okay?

Barbara Coloroso's books may be an exception. My mother has always had Coloroso on her shelf, and I have grown up knowing her as an authority on parenting. I am primed to respect Barbara Coloroso's views on parenting and children, and after finally reading an entire book by her, I think I'll be ready for more.

It helps that she writes well. Just Because It's Not Wrong... is an easy book to read -- in some ways. Certainly the ways related to writing. Occasionally she uses a bit of blunt instrument to drive her point home, and there is a lot of repetition. Most of the times the things she repeats bear repeating. It does make me suspect that I wouldn't enjoy this book very much in audio, since repetition tends to be more noticeable and irritating (to me) there.

The point she's driving home, as a brief summary: we are all born with the ability to care deeply about ourselves, others, and the planet, but moral behaviour needs to be nurtured from infants on up. There are ways to help children become adults who think critically and behave compassionately and ethically. There are also ways to stifle those impulses. Coloroso explores the positive ways to interact with and teach children, and the pitfalls that can lead to children who conform to authority and the mob, and behave selfishly, unkindly, or with an absence of caring. In many ways, this is a companion to her book kids are worth it!, which I have yet to read, but is now creeping up to the top of the list.

Nurturing children's ability to care without teaching them to think critically will not serve them well. In his 1963 book Strength to Love, Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote, "Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity."

As I read parenting books, I tend to be extremely wary of the sort that make me want to lock myself in the bathroom and cry because I am DOING IT WRONG and I will ruin my child forever. This book didn't do that, not quite. I think there's potential there, because Coloroso does have some pretty strong views on certain things, and it's pretty clear that she thinks it is possible to do things wrong. It just so happens that I agree with her on the particulars, and so rather than make me want to quit, she validates my parenting philosophy and makes me feel better about what I'm trying to do. Also, I read it at the right time. I think if I was attempting to parent a teenager and reading this book, I'd find it a lot more alarming. Because I think (I hope) that if one reads this book early and starts to live the concepts in it early, it might make the later stages of parenting a little bit easier, a little bit smoother.

I like that this book makes me think just a little more carefully and critically about how I do things, how I interact with smallfry as she starts to get into her "Why?" stages and her "No!" stages. It makes me think about rules. Why do we have that rule? What is at the core of saying "don't throw food on the floor"? Because that is a rule, and a reasonable one, but what is it about throwing food on the floor that's problematic? (It's wasteful. It's disrespectful. It makes my life harder. In general, it's not a nice thing to do.) But if I can't answer the question "why?" for a rule, I think I should be thinking harder about it.

Apparently this book is helping me revert to my terrible twos.

But I did find this book alarming. I find it alarming that anyone feels a book like this is necessary, and alarming that it clearly is necessary. I find it alarming that Coloroso has enough real-life experience to pull terrible stories and examples into the discussion to explain a concept. I find it alarming that I recognize the counterproductive behaviours and attitudes she identifies because I've seen them in real life. Or I've felt those impulses within me. Or I've actually done that thing.

I find it alarming because it makes it very, very clear that parenting is going to be really, really hard work. This book makes me feel a bit daunted by the enormity of the task and the responsibility. These are things I know intellectually, and knew before we decided to have a kid, but it's sometimes better to just work away piece by piece rather than stepping back and having a look at the whole. On the other hand, seeing the whole every once in a while is a good thing too.

I find certain parts of this book flat out scary. The bits on media are not exactly scare-mongery, and she stops short of blaming video games for real-life violence, but I'm not always the most responsible, aware consumer of media myself. So how do I ensure my daughter is? Is our current strategy of not having a television (mostly out of lack of space and lack of interest, not actually a parenting strategy) going to actually serve her well in the future? When does she get her own computer? When does she get to use mine? When do I stop asking her for her passwords? Why can't we just pick up as a family and move into a cave somewhere very, very remote? (Answer: because we'd starve.)

Throughout all of this, though, Coloroso makes it clear that disengaging (see: cave) is not the answer either. Offering children safe chances to make their own decisions, make their own mistakes, and engage the world around them in a caring way helps them become ethical individuals. And while the task may seem daunting, it is also not an impossible thing. She offers counter-examples and clear advice to balance out the alarming pieces. In all, despite the parts that are somewhat hard to read and the parts that should scare the pants off any reasonable parent, this is a very balanced book. And frankly, as a primer on how to be in this world for any and all of us, not just our children and not just parents, one could do much worse.

Growing a Reader from Birth by Diane McGuinness

I'm going to have a hard time with this book. Let me say this straight off: I didn't like it. The problem for me now is going to be to explain why in a reasonable way. At first I thought it might just be because McGuinness spends a lot of time refuting other research I have read. It's hard to be told "what you believed is wrong!" (see: Santa) so occasionally my hackles will get up if I read a claim that refutes something I understand to be true, even though my inner academic is rolling her eyes at this unscientific sentiment. However, I think my main problems with this book stem from other things. Her claims have piqued my interest enough that I intend to look into the research myself so as to assure myself that what I understood was correct, or to recognize that I to reevaluate.

I was reading this with professional development in mind. Part of my job involves running baby and toddler sessions at my library, and I tend to be very interested in anything about what is called "pre-literacy" -- that is, the skills that children need to have in place before they can learn how to read. I want to see what I can do to help kids develop those skills.

The premise, which makes a great deal of sense, is that learning to read is a relatively simple matter -- a matter of decoding a code -- if children have the vocabulary, meaning, and understanding of how language works ahead of time. What McGuinness looks at throughout this book is language development in children: how they progress from babies who listen to their mother's voice in utero, recognizing vocal patterns without attaching meaning, to five-year-olds who can carry on a full conversation. Much of this was quite fascinating. Each chapter is set up to explain the concept, the research, and then to offer activities, games and solutions to parents to help their children learn language and learn it well. If you're looking for a book on helping children to read, though, look elsewhere. The information on reading is scanty except for the last chapter, and the last chapter is mostly a damning condemnation of the English-speaking world's education systems when it comes to reading instruction.

It was the way the information was presented that really got under my skin, in two ways. Even if unintentional, these two traits of parenting books are very noticeable and I wish editors would recognize that they're not attractive traits in a book.

First, this is one of those books that can make a person feel a) stupid and b) a bad, bad parent. I got a distinct feeling that if you do not do this right your child will be illiterate for life. I don't even have kids and I was feeling like a bad parent. It's not that she scolds, but there is a very strong "this is the right way, that is the wrong way" dichotomy in the writing. And I don't know how to get around that sort of thing, when she does so clearly believe that there is a right way/wrong way to interact with your children so they learn language. But the feeling I came away with was anxiety; I can't imagine how I would have felt if I was a working mother of two young children who wasn't doing things right. I picture myself throwing the book against the wall, and then locking myself in the bathroom and crying. The how-to suggestions were often vague or unhelpful; very few concrete activities, and lots of "behave this way." I really wanted more.

Second, and this is a huge pet peeve of mine: the caregiver is almost exclusively referred to as "mother." When fathers are included, it's most often parenthetically.

I really, really hate that.

I know it's common. I know that many of the studies are done on biological mothers and their children, and if you're reporting research carefully it makes sense to report on mother-baby relationships. But please, please make it explicit. Say "I can only generalize to mothers because it was only mothers involved in this study." Maybe make an effort to find research on fathers and language learning. If there is none out there, say so.

One of my big goals with my programming as I am moving forward is to get fathers more involved in the literacy lives of their kids. Books like this, where it is assumed that Mom's the one who wants baby to learn how to read well, do not help. It's exclusionary to the extreme. It will not make fathers interested in being involved.

I know the reasons for doing this are to make it easier to read, that having to say "mother and/or father" all the time doesn't work, and I know personally that saying "caregiver" all the time is awkward. There are ways around all this. The major problem I had here aside from the parenthetical dads was that I suspect that in some cases there are times being the biological mother might make a difference, where an adoptive parent or a father might not have the same result. Or, there might be nothing at all different about a biological mom. But I don't know. Everything is mashed together under "mom."

I get riled up about this stuff.

Anyway. So there, in a very large nutshell, are the two big reasons I didn't enjoy this book. They're common problems in parenting books, but I really noticed it here. Then add in the last chapter, which ended up making me wonder how the hell any of us can read at all. I can appreciate that in a society where, at last check, 60% of children have difficulty learning to read, there are problems with the way reading is taught. But 40% of children don't have trouble learning to read and presumably those children are in the same classrooms. Is it because parents teach them at home? Possible. But those 40% who can learn to read easily weren't in evidence at all, so I don't know what the difference is.

I did learn some things that I thought were interesting, particularly about communicating with children and especially about how parents communicate with children. I appreciate now that when the toddlers in my classes speak to me, it's a gift, and something they have had to work hard to do. I'll be treating those interactions as such now.

This book wasn't a complete loss, and I stuck with it for that reason. I think there's good information in it, and I can tell that McGuinness really cares about kids learning to read and become good communicators. I agree with her essential premise, that kids who have the proper language foundation will be literate as opposed to just being able to read. I have a hard time recommending this book, though, because of the issues I had with it. I am probably hyper-sensitive to them. If you're interested in the topic and the issues above don't bother you, go for it.

For the perspective of a mother, check out Rebecca Reid's review. I think she got more out of this book than I did. I'll be getting the second book she mentions in that review if I can find it.