The Building Blocks of a Good Pre-K

By SHAEL POLAKOW-SURANSKY and NANCY NAGER

WITH the introduction of universal pre-K in New York City, we have created a new entry point into our public school system. This raises a key question: What do we want our children’s first experiences in school to be? What does a good education look like for 4-year-olds?

This summer, Bank Street College of Education led training for 4,000 of New York’s pre-K teachers, including both veterans and hundreds of people who started teaching pre-K for the first time last month. Worried teachers talked about how the pressure to achieve good outcomes on the third-grade state exams has been trickling down to early childhood classrooms in the form of work sheets, skill drills and other developmentally inappropriate methods.

The problem is real, and it is not unique to New York City. Earlier this year, Daphna Bassok and Anna Rorem, educational policy researchers at the University of Virginia, found strong evidence that current kindergarten classrooms rely too heavily on teacher-directed instruction. Their study, “Is Kindergarten the New First Grade?” revealed that the focus on narrow academic skills crowded out time for play, exploration and social interaction. In a 2009 report for the Alliance for Childhood, “Crisis in the Kindergarten,” Edward Miller and Joan Almon reported that kindergarten teachers felt that prescriptive curricular demands and pressure from principals led them to prioritize academic skill-building over play.

This is a false choice. We do not need to pick between play and academic rigor.

While grown-ups recognize that pretending helps children find their way into the world, many adults think of play as separate from formal learning. The reality is quite different. As they play, children develop vital cognitive, linguistic, social and emotional skills. They make discoveries, build knowledge, experiment with literacy and math and learn to self-regulate and interact with others in socially appropriate ways. Play is also fun and interesting, which makes school a place where children look forward to spending their time. It is so deeply formative for children that it must be at the core of our early childhood curriculum.

What does purposeful play look like? When you step into an exemplary pre-K classroom, you see a room organized by a caring, responsive teacher who understands child development. Activity centers are stocked with materials that invite exploration, fire the imagination, require initiative and prompt collaboration. The room hums.

In the block area, two girls build a bridge, talking to each other about how to make sure it doesn’t collapse and taking care not to bump into the buildings of children next to them. In an area with materials for make-believe, children enact an elaborate family scenario after resolving who will be the mommy, who will be the grandpa and who will be the puppy. Another group peers through a magnifying glass to examine a collection of pine cones and acorns. On the rug, children lie on their stomachs turning the pages of books they have selected, while at the easel a boy dips his brush into red paint and swoops the paint mostly onto his paper.

Click here to read the entire article.

in Education / Parenting  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

What the Latest Marriage Equality Ruling Says About Same-Sex Parents

Mombian.com, October 7, 2014

What a week! Same-sex couples can now marry in Idaho and Nevada, adding to the boatload of states that have gained marriage equality in the past few days. Let’s look at what the latest court decision said about children.

A three-judge panel of the 9th Federal Circuit Court of Appeals ruled yesterday that it is unconstitutional to prevent same-sex couples from marrying in Idaho and Nevada. Their decision should soon extend to all of the other states within the circuit that don’t yet have marriage equality — Alaska, Arizona, and Montana.

Judge Stephen Reinhardt, who wrote the opinion, was not as amusingly acerbic as Judge Richard Posner in the 7th Circuit, but did come up with this zinger, responding to a statement by Idaho Governor Butch Otter:

[Governor Otter] also states … that allowing same-sex marriage will lead opposite-sex couples to abuse alcohol and drugs, engage in extramarital affairs, take on demanding work schedules, and participate in time-consuming hobbies. We seriously doubt that allowing committed same-sex couples to settle down in legally recognized marriages will drive opposite-sex couples to sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll.

Reinhardt, like all federal judges who have ruled for marriage equality since June 2013, leaned heavily on the U.S. Supreme Court’s Windsor decision in addressing the states’ argument that marriage should be restricted to different-sex couples because only they can create children, and children do better when raised with a mother and a father:

In extending the benefits of marriage only to people who have the capacity to procreate, while denying those same benefits to people who already have children, Idaho and Nevada materially harm and demean same-sex couples and their children. Denying children resources and stigmatizing their families on this basis is “illogical and unjust.” It is counterproductive, and it is unconstitutional….

To allow same-sex couples to adopt children and then to label their families as second-class because the adoptive parents are of the same sex is cruel as well as unconstitutional. Classifying some families, and especially their children, as of lesser value should be repugnant to all those in this nation who profess to believe in “family values.” In any event, Idaho and Nevada’s asserted preference for opposite-sex parents does not, under heightened scrutiny, come close to justifying unequal treatment on the basis of sexual orientation.

OK, he was a little acerbic:

Defendants’ essential contention is that bans on same-sex marriage promote the welfare of children, by encouraging good parenting in stable opposite-sex families…. Defendants have presented no evidence of any such effect. Indeed, they cannot even explain the manner in which, as they predict, children of opposite-sex couples will be harmed. Their other contentions are equally without merit.

He is clear that married same-sex couples are not the cause of more children being raised outside of marriage:

True, an increasing number of children are now born and raised outside of marriage, a development that may well be undesirable. But that trend began apace well before the advent of same-sex marriage and has been driven by entirely different social and legal developments….

The defendants’ assertion that excluding same-sex couples from marriage will do anything to reverse these trends is utterly unsubstantiated.

Click here to read the entire article.

in Legal / Parenting  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

Gay parenting: How to talk to young children about adoption

September 21, 2014 – by gaystarnews.com, David Hudson

Thinking about adoption? Children will always have questions about being adopted, and knowing how to respond with honest answers is essential. We asked Beth Friedberg of New York’s Modern Family Center for advice.

Beth Friedberg is the Associate Director of Parent Preparation and Education at the Modern Family Center at Spence-Chapin. The center provides services for parents of adopted children, adoptees, families formed through adoption, and families brought together through remarriage – including same-sex couples and LGBTI parents.

Beth has been in the adoption and parenting field for over 20 years. We asked her to give the #GSNFamily section some advice on talking to young children about adoption.

Beth, do you have any general advice for speaking to children about adoption?

BF: There are some basic well-known practices that adoptive parents should know about talking with their children about how they became a family: start early, share information slowly over time in a way that meets your child’s developmental age, and talk in a balanced way about birth family being some of the most important.

But all of these sound ideas miss one critical piece that has less to do with talking and everything to do with listening.

This is a hard thing for many parents to do – we want to say the right thing and protect the ones we love from disappointment or loss. So we can often rush in with too many words to fix things before we really know what’s on our child’s mind.

Listen for what is behind your child’s questions and slow down a bit to both tune in to your child’s ‘emotional temperature’ and also consider what their questions brings up for you.

This last part is especially important so you don’t confuse what your child is asking to talk about with what you may actually want or need to talk about.

For instance, if your child asks you why their birth family couldn’t take care of them, you might respond with something simple like: ‘Why do you think some people aren’t able to take care of a baby?’ When your child gives you their own answers, you have a great place to start the conversation.

If your child is not asking any questions, lay the groundwork to give permission for the conversation. Simply saying, ‘If you ever have any questions or want to talk about your adoption that would be OK with me,’ can open a door for a child who may feel nervous bringing the topic up on their own.

What sort of questions might adopted children themselves ask about adoption – with regard to their background, history and biological family?

BF: Children are generally curious and want to know about everything that’s happening in their world. Asking questions about their beginnings and how they came to be in their family is a natural and necessary part of their development, so a goal for adoptive families is to support and encourage this wondering.

The types of questions that children ask will depend on the specific circumstances of their placement and your child’s own character and personality.

As much as each child has their own unique experience, questions do tend to fall into some general categories such as: ‘Why did I have to be adopted? Why couldn’t anyone in my family take care of me?’, ‘Will I ever meet my birth mother/siblings?’, ‘Will I ever see my friends from the orphanage again?’, ‘Is my birthmother alive?’, and, very commonly ‘I wonder who I look like’.

Click here to read the entire article.

in Adoption / Parenting  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

Parenthood Denied by the Law – New York’s Outdated Parentage Law

After a Same-Sex Couple’s Breakup, a Custody Battle

New York Times, September 12, 2014 by John Leland

The Marriage Equality Act, which New York State passed in June 2011, allowed Jann Paczkowski to marry her partner, Jamie, with the assurance that “the marriages of same-sex and different-sex couples” would “be treated equally in all respects under the law.” But when the couple separated and Ms. Paczkowski sought joint custody of the 2-year-old boy they were raising together, she discovered the limits of that assurance. On June 30, 2014, a judge in Nassau County family court ruled that Ms. Paczkowski did not have legal standing to seek access to the boy — because even under the Marriage Equality Act, she was not his parent.

In his decision, Judge Edmund M. Dane acknowledged “inequity” and “imbalance” in the law, adding that if Ms. Paczkowski were a man in the same position, the law might point toward a different ruling. But in the end, he left Jann with no contact with the boy.

The decision devastated Ms. Paczkowski, 36. “You can see how angry and upset I am,” she said on a recent afternoon, seated beside her court-appointed lawyer after a morning spent moving cars for an auction house. She had not seen the boy since a brief visit on Mother’s Day.

“For 17 1/2 months I changed his diaper in the quickness of a dime,” she said. “I fed him. I sat him in a high chair, one spoonful for you, one for me. At night he crawled up to me in bed. Each step that my son took, I did it with him. That’s what a parent does.”

Beyond her pain, the ruling also illuminated a snarl in New York’s treatment of same-sex couples, three years after the passage of the Marriage Equality Act, according to some legal scholars.

“This is a troubling ruling because it leaves a same-sex parent as a legal stranger to her child,” said Suzanne B. Goldberg, director of the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia University law school. Family law, she said, “has not caught up with the way families live their lives, or the rest of New York law. And that gap is causing tremendous damage.”

Click here to read the entire article.

in In the News / Legal / Parenting  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

The Motherhood Penalty vs. the Fatherhood Bonus – A Child Helps Your Career, if You’re a Man

New York Times – September 7, 2014 by Claire Cain Miller

One of the worst career moves a woman can make is to have children. Mothers are less likely to be hired for jobs, to be perceived as competent at work or to be paid as much as their male colleagues with the same qualifications.

For men, meanwhile, having a child is good for their careers. They are more likely to be hired than childless men, and tend to be paid more after they have children.

These differences persist even after controlling for factors like the hours people work, the types of jobs they choose and the salaries of their spouses. So the disparity is not because mothers actually become less productive employees and fathers work harder when they become parents — but because employers expect them to.

The data about the motherhood penalty and the fatherhood bonus present a clear-cut look at American culture’s ambiguous feelings about gender and work. Even in the age of “Lean In,” when women with children run Fortune 500 companies and head the Federal Reserve, traditional notions about fathers as breadwinners and mothers as caregivers remain deeply ingrained. Employers, it seems, have not yet caught up to the fact that women can be both mothers and valuable employees.

This bias is most extreme for the parents who can least afford it, according to new data from Michelle Budig, a sociology professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who has studied the parenthood pay gap for 15 years. High-income men get the biggest pay bump for having children, and low-income women pay the biggest price, she said in a paper published this month by Third Way, a research group that aims to advance moderate policy ideas. “Families with lower resources are bearing more of the economic costs of raising kids,” she said in an interview.

Cultural assumptions aside, here is the reality: 71 percent of mothers with children at home work, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and women are the sole or primary breadwinner in 40 percent of households with children, according to data from the Pew Research Center.

Yet much of the pay gap seems to arise from old-fashioned notions about parenthood. “Employers read fathers as more stable and committed to their work; they have a family to provide for, so they’re less likely to be flaky,” Ms. Budig said. “That is the opposite of how parenthood by women is interpreted by employers. The conventional story is they work less and they’re more distractible when on the job.”

Ms. Budig found that on average, men’s earnings increased more than 6 percent when they had children (if they lived with them), while women’s decreased 4 percent for each child they had. Her study was based on data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth from 1979 to 2006, which tracked people’s labor market activities over time. Childless, unmarried women earn 96 cents for every dollar a man earns, while married mothers earn 76 cents, widening the gap.

Click here to read the entire article.

in Parenting  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

Largest-ever study of same-sex couples’ kids finds they’re better off than other children

Vox.com by German Lopez, July 7, 2014

The largest-ever study of same-sex parents found their children turn out healthier and happier than the general population.

A new study of 315 same-sex parents and 500 children in Australia found that, after correcting for socioeconomic factors, their children fared well on several measures, including asthma, dental care, behavioral issues, learning, sleep, and speech.

At the same time, two-thirds of the parents reported a perceived stigma on at least one issue tracked by the survey. These stigmas ranged from other people gossiping about an LGBT family to same-sex parents feeling excluded at social gatherings due to their sexual orientation.

Perceived stigmas were associated with worse scores for physical activity, mental health, family cohesion, and emotional outcomes. The stigmas, however, were not prevalent enough to negatively tilt the children’s outcomes in a comparison to outcomes across the general population.

Study author Simon Crouch told ABC News in Australia that previous research suggests same-sex parents don’t feel pressured into gendered roles, which lets them more freely adapt to the needs of the family.

“So what this means is that people take on roles that are suited to their skill sets rather than falling into those gender stereotypes, which is mum staying home and looking after the kids and dad going out to earn money,” Crouch said. “What this leads to is a more harmonious family unit and therefore feeding on to better health and well-being.”

Click here to read the entire article.

in International / Parenting / Science  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

The T.M.I. Pregnancy

New York Times

By PATRICIA VOLK

 

Becoming a mother was so simple when I became a mother. Pregnancy was treated as a natural experience. You peed in a cup, and then once a month the obstetrician pressed his stethoscope against your belly and you watched his face for a smile.

“We’re going to have a baby,” my son, Peter, calls. I think about being a grandma and the grand continuum. I think about the wondrous ways my boy’s life is going to change. I do not think about sonograms, DNA testing and preeclampsia. I do not think about the endless forbidding stream of fetal data.

My son is stuck at work, so I get to take my daughter-in-law for her first prenatal visit. The doctor squeezes gel on Erika’s belly and rubs it in with a paddle. A white watermelon seed pops up on the screen.

“Your baby is 7 weeks and 5 days old,” she says.

Wow, I think. Yes, but will it get into Harvard?

Erika’s blood is drawn to test for three birth defects. Taking a personal history, the doctor discovers the watermelon seed will be half Jewish.

“We’ll be needing 18 tests now,” she says.

We pretend not to be anxious waiting for the results. From that first visit on, every time I accompany Erika for an ultrasound, we leave guardedly happy. “Normal” becomes our favorite word. I’m not a Luddite. Prenatal science has helped a lot people and people-to-be. But just because a patient can know something, must she? There’s so much information available now. Pregnancy is treated like a nine-month illness cured by childbirth. Odds are in this baby’s favor, yet every sonogram adds something scary to the pot. What is one of the most joyous times of life has turned into something ominous and fraught, loaded with the potential to go wrong.

Three months before Erika’s due date, the tech turns to us with a caliper in her hands. “The baby has a short long bone,” she says. “Its long bone” — a.k.a. femur — “is two weeks behind schedule.”

We leave the office and head for lunch. Holding hands, we wait for the light to change. I look down at the white parallel lines on the crosswalk. I’m not a religious person. I own three menorahs and my biannual brisket is held in high regard. But I don’t believe in God. Yet when the light changes, I make a promise to something somewhere. I make a pledge that is the opposite of modern science: “If I only step on the white lines, the baby will be O.K.”

Click here to read the entire article.

in In the News / Parenting  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

Positively Dads – These HIV-positive gay men fathered children. Here’s how you can too

By E.J.Graff via Gays With Kids

Aslan always believed he would be a father—if not with a partner, then by teaming up with one of his straight, single female friends. But “at the age of 36, I became infected with the [HIV] virus,” he said. “I thought my whole world collapsed. Everything crashed with that. I believed that there would be no child.” He was gay and single, living in a cosmopolitan city in his southern European country, when a female friend asked him to pair up to make a baby. He had heard that it could be done safely, but when he told her his HIV status, her reaction, he said somewhat morosely, was “very naturally, not very brave.” Unwilling to face that rejection again, he spent years trying to bury his profound desire to parent.

Things were different for Brian Rosenberg and Ferd van Gameren, who were already in their forties by the time they began thinking about having kids. Their early years together focused on keeping Brian, who is HIV-positive, healthy and Ferd negative. But once protease inhibitors emerged and Brian’s health was stable, the couple decided to focus on enjoying life. They moved from Boston into a one-bedroom Chelsea co-op in New York City, started summering in Fire Island, and hopped around their friends’ parties having “a gay old time,” as Brian put it.

After several years, though, all that began to pale. “We started thinking that life had to be more meaningful for us than the next party, the next fabulous vacation.” They wanted a family, and all the responsibility, love, and exhaustion that went with it. They tried adoption first, but when one birthmother backed away, their hearts were broken–so they discussed surrogacy. Given his HIV status, Brian assumed that Ferd would be the biological dad–but Ferd wanted to raise Brian’s bio children. And so in 2009 Ferd went online and found the Special Program for Assisted Reproduction, or SPAR, dedicated to helping HIV-positive men father children safely. The program is run by the Bedford Research Foundation and its director Dr. Ann Kiessling.

Back in southern Europe, by 2011, Aslan was learning about the same option. He was seven months into a new relationship that seemed as if it would stick—and despite himself, he began to imagine having a family with this man. Coincidentally, an American friend forwarded him an article about Circle Surrogacy, which worked with HIV-positive gay men in the States. “And it gave me, like, a wow, big hope, a new window to plan my life again!” Aslan quickly contacted Circle Surrogacy, which connected him with Dr. Ann Kiessling. “She was very kind and explained all the procedures, that it’s completely safe. And this was the start.”

Click here to read the entire article.

in IVF / Parenting / Science  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

Poll: Majority of Americans Support Adoption by Same-Sex Couples

The Advocate – June 2, 2014

Most Americans support marriage equality, but even more of them believe same-sex couples should be able to legally adopt children, according to a new poll.

The Gallup poll, released last month, shows a clear majority of respondents in support of adoption equality. This finding holds across all major demographics, although there are definite spans across party lines — 80% of Democrats, 61 percent of independents, and 51 percent of Republicans support adoption rights — and age groups, with 77 percent support among 18-29 year olds, and 52 percent among those 65 and older.

Gallup notes that support for equal adoption rights has been steadily increasing since 2008. When Gallup first started polling Americans on this question in 1992, the findings were a direct opposite, with 63 percent of respondents opposed to same-sex couples being allowed to legally adopt. Today, more than 16,000 American same-sex couples have adopted an estimated 22,000 children, according to the polling agency.

In its assessment, Gallup points out that public support for equal adoption, currently at 63 percent, has remained higher than public support for equal marriage, currently at 55 percent. That’s to be expected, says LGBT public policy expert Gary Gates, of the University of California Los Angeles School of Law’s Williams Institute.

Click here to read the entire article.

in Adoption / In the News / Parenting  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

Known Donor Dad Perspective

As a known donor Dad, my daughters have 2 moms and 2 dads – how does this work?

My family can best be described as a forest. When my daughter created her “Family Tree” for a class project, there were so many branches that it covered an entire poster board. My heart soared. I am lucky enough to be called “papa” by three amazing kids. My son, 9 years old, is the biological child of my husband who we had with the help of a gestational surrogate. I adopted him and he lives with my husband and me. My daughters are 13 and 8 and they live with their mothers, who happen to live in our neighborhood in Manhattan.

ivf, known donor, sperm donor, anonymous donorI call them my daughters because I am their biological father through sperm donation, but the truth is that I am not their parent. This is a critical distinction that any donor dad must make. I am not a co-parent with my daughters’ mothers. But that doesn’t mean that I do not have a meaningful and reciprocally fulfilling relationship with them, it just means that the major life decisions that relate to my girls are made by their mothers, the two amazing women who taught me how to be a dad.

To highlight the enormity of this journey for me, I need to give you some background. In the 70’s as a closeted teenager and in the 80’s as a closeted young man in my 20’s, if you had told that one day I would have three children, I would have felt relief and seen it as affirmation that I could change my orientation. I desperately didn’t want to be gay and after running from my true self for what seemed to me to be ages; I did what many young people who grew up in my era did: I tried to end my life. My parents walked me around the back yard of our house for hours attempting to allow the effects of the pills I had taken to wear off. I am thankful every day that they did.

That moment changed my life because, with a lot of help from a lot of people, I learned that I could be a happy gay person. Once that switch was flipped, life turned on. My family is the culmination of that awareness and of so much love. But that love had to start with me. I don’t think anyone who doesn’t truly love themselves could be a donor dad. It requires patience, responsibility and, most of all, faith. I had to have faith that my daughter’s moms would allow me to have a relationship with them. They also had to have faith that I would be a man of my word and surrender my parental rights to the non-biological mother. We all had to have faith that we would be able to conquer whatever parenting trials would come our way.

But that faith is constantly tested. When my first daughter was born, my husband and I would babysit for her about once every other week and, once she was old enough, we would have sleepovers roughly once a month. I remember one time right after the adoption hearing had taken place where I formally surrendered my parental rights getting a call from one of her mothers after we returned her from a sleepover night. She was asking about a small burn mark on my daughter’s leg. Neither my husband or I could remember anything that could have caused it. But then remembered one moment when we were all in our tiny NYC kitchen and I was holding her when I turned and brushed up against an open toaster oven door. I didn’t think it had touched her. She didn’t cry and I didn’t think anything of it at the time. But when I realized that I had done this, I was so scared that my husband and I wouldn’t be allowed to see her again. I had hurt my own child! I went through a very short lived freak out until we actually talked to her moms again and they told us of how she had fallen off the changing table, a couple of times, and that I shouldn’t worry.

It is moments like that one when you truly understand perspective. But the one person’s perspective that really was tested by my being a donor dad was my husband’s. He often considered himself the odd man out. While I was busy going to clinics and running out of events because “mom was ovulating,” he was often left alone and feeling out of touch with the whole process. If I could have done anything differently, I would have made sure that he was more involved and included him more in the process. The reality, now that the kids are older, is that all three of them refer to my husband as “daddy” and to me as “papa.” When asked, they are the first to tell you that they have “two mommies and two daddies.” This, to me, is one of the coolest things ever.

Because we are honest with all three kids about where they come from, they feel special. They understand that their mommies and daddies loved them so much that they worked together to make our family a reality. If I can offer any new perspective on being a donor dad, it is that anything is possible with honesty, careful preparation and love. You can have the family of your dreams, no matter what it looks like.

June 2, 2014 – by Anthony M. Brown

Thanks to Our family Coalition in San Francisco for asking me to write this piece!

in Anonymous/Known Donation / Family Stories / Known Donor / Parenting / Personal Stories  by Anthony Brown 2 comments