All raptor sightings quicken the pulse, but none of them quite so much as an owl, seldom seen in daylight, entangled in so many layers of lore. Just after her eleventh birthday last year, my daughter spotted a barred owl sitting calmly in a tree in the Litchfield Hills in the middle of the afternoon, and yelped—surely it carried the Hogwarts acceptance letter she had been praying for?

We had to pass on that first invitation—great horned owls in the Bronx, for which I would gladly have traded the nachos and Madonna—but a week later the summons came again. Snowy owls in Queens. This time we were ready. By 8:15 Sunday morning we were skimming along the Belt Parkway, my husband, our eight-year-old son and I, squinting into the sun on the coldest morning of a weirdly warm winter.

Past the approach to the Verrazano Bridge, past the Wonder Wheel at Coney Island, down the last stretch of Flatbush Avenue to a small deserted parking lot next to Floyd Bennett Field, our rendezvous point. The street lamps were shuddering in the wind. We waited, our breath fogging the inside of the car. And eventually three more cars pulled up, their passengers bundled to the eyes. Nature ninjas.

We pulled out again in single file, following our leader, a local naturalist whose infectious enthusiasm is impervious to extremes of temperature. Over the Gil Hodges Bridge and through the Rockaways to Breezy Point. Out of the car at last, staggering through sand instead of snow, following a single lane through a landscape of tall dried grasses and poison ivy, looking innocent in winter without its oily triple leaves.

A crow slanted above us, tailed by a crowd of starlings. House finches and myrtle warblers perched in the bare bayberries. The road sliced through the scrub like a part in short hair, and where it met the sky we could see the blinding flash of water. Puffy white clouds crowded the horizon. Our shadows stretched out straight behind us.

No guarantees. We crested the dunes and the broad flat beach spread before us, strewn with broken shells and crisscrossed with tire tracks. Gannets were diving, their flight more sinuous than the gulls’, their sudden plunges throwing up more spray than the whitecaps. Massive container ships stood like buildings behind them. A cormorant pumped its wings low over the water; a black-bellied plover hugged a ridge of sand, avoiding the worst of the wind.

Someone whooped and pointed: another birder far ahead, with a spotting scope planted on the lip of the dune, focused inland. Following its line, we could see a single white dot.

If I had been alone my eye would have skipped over it—a plastic grocery bag caught in the stubble of grasses. But it had a certain solidity, and it sat still in the gusts. We planted our own tripod about a hundred yards away, and took turns kneeling to look, hardly believing our good luck.

Snowy owls are active during the day as well as at night, and this one was awake, swiveling its head to scan for small furry movements that might mean a meal. No lemmings in the metropolitan area, but plenty of mice and rats. One glance through the scope revealed the back of the owl’s head, the next its yellow eyes and the vertical black dash of its beak. It was almost pure white: a mature male. Females and juvenile males are flecked with small black vees.

We kept our distance. For a snowy owl, home is the tundra—any owl staking out a stretch of dune in Queens has come a long and weary way in search of food. The New York Birding List, an online forum where area birders post sightings, had lit up the previous week with invective against trophy-hunting photographers who harassed owls for the sake of the perfect shot—one, it was rumored, had even brought a bag of live white mice to Breezy Point to release as bait. Then there was more invective against prissy birders who do their own share of harassing, even if they don’t carry cameras. “Photographers are clearly muggles, but the birding community has its share of death eaters,” someone posted. Though there was no evidence that this particular owl was an emissary from the wizarding world, we would not risk insulting it.

We watched the owl until our smiles stiffened in the cold and the juvenile males in our group began to whine for home. Our quest had its happy ending, and without a singular purpose now we straggled back along the beach, picking up souvenirs: a battered whelk, a slate-blue scallop shell, a cockle, a well-traveled piece of coral. A horseshoe crab a foot across. A small sand-scoured coconut.

A coconut?

Back in the car we blasted the heat and uncurled our toes and fingers. Traffic was sluggish as usual on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. The exaltation of wind and waves began to fade. At home in Yorkville, the spill of sand from our beachcombings looked out of place on the kitchen counter. But out of the wind at last, we could hear the coconut slosh when we shook it. A few taps with a hammer and it cracked around its equator, snowy white inside. And my son giggled with pure delight, just as he had when the owl came into focus on the dunes.

The post Hedwig at Breezy Point: A Family Adventure in Queens appeared first on The Faster Times.

There’s a muffled yelp of excitement from the direction of David’s bedroom.  The door flies open and he explodes out of it.

“MOMMY!  It’s Dynamite!”  And he disappears again.Following, I find him in full boogie mode next to his radio, on which Taio Cruz is throwing his hands up in the air, going on and on and on.  David gyrates too hard, topples over, jumps up, grins with his whole face.  It’s impossible to stand there with this delighted child and not shake your booty, just a little.

A few months ago David discovered Z100, New York City’s pop radio standby.  It is now the soundtrack to his life.  As we walk to school he’s warbling Katy Perry’s Firework; at bedtime he scorns Dan Zanes and falls asleep to Rihanna’s What’s My Name, except “ooh nana” becomes “ooh mama” as he cuddles next to me.  When we get into the car it’s “can we listen to some Z?”  The child who never wants to be alone now hangs out solo in his room once in a while, listening to music while shooting hoops on his closet-door basket, or lying on his bed and making his stuffed animals dance.

The melodies are repetitive, the lyrics too sappy or too sexy, but David’s not listening to the words.  He likes the beat, the bounce, the way the syncopation livens up his day.  When slow songs pop up he complains: they’re not “rock-y” enough.

The top 40 haunts my dreams these days; I hum the accordion riff from Stereo Love until my husband’s raised eyebrow stops me.  Some of it is painful—can’t Bruno Mars think of a better word than “amazing” to describe his girl?—but I’m not too proud to admit that Ke$ha is good company in the kitchen.  Sure, we make David listen to our music sometimes, but you can’t howl along to Dave Matthews or Ben Harper or Joni Mitchell in quite the same campy, vampy way.  And I’m making up for lost time.

When I was little, my father’s musical preferences ranged from Beethoven to Brubeck, my mother’s from Carole King and Carly Simon to the Great American Songbook.  As the only child in the back of the car, it never occurred to me to try to influence the musical selections.  Their music wasn’t my music, but I hadn’t chosen any of my own. Declaring allegiance to this or that singer, this or that band, seemed impossibly daring.  I remember receiving a gift certificate to Tower Records as a birthday present one year in middle school.  I had no idea what to do with it.  I ended up buying early stand-up sessions by Woody Allen and Bill Cosby.  The new tapes joined the stack of original Broadway cast recordings I received from my aunt every year.  When she gave me “A Chorus Line,” she dubbed it onto a blank cassette, editing out “Tits and Ass.”

What I needed was an older brother, lounging in a messy bedroom and picking out R.E.M. on a battered guitar, letting me tag along to a concert now and then.  What I got, instead, is a son who can’t help bopping when the radio is on.  Sure, his parents flinch when Travie McCoy sings “I wanna be a billionaire, so frickin’ bad,” but the first time it came on in the car it sparked a discussion about materialism and its discontents that lasted most of the way home.  (It also provided an opportunity to clarify that the word “fricking” would not be tolerated under any circumstances.)  Better to confront the ugliness in pop culture and teach our kids to recognize it than pretend it isn’t there.

So when Taio starts to sing at our house, all-family dance marathons erupt spontaneously, the four of us writhing like freaks.  That didn’t happen when I was little, and by the time I reached teenland I was too self-conscious to party with my peers.  David and his sister are not shy about their preferences: Taylor Swift good, Lady Gaga bad, Black Eyed Peas slightly annoying.  The strength of their opinions thrills me, even if I’m not crazy about the music.  These days I throw my hands up in the air sometimes, and dance with them.

Photo by Mark Watmough

The post Taio and Katy at Our House: Parenting in the Top 40 appeared first on The Faster Times.

It’s winter wonderland time in New York, when fir trees sprout along Park Avenue, entire buildings gift-wrap themselves, and the traffic between Grand Central Station and the American Girl store comes to a grinding halt. For those in search of respite, there is no better antidote than the Yoshitomo Nara show currently at Asia Society, where the elfish children on display through January 2 are more naughty than nice.

I visited last week with two 7-year-old imps who immediately recognized a kindred spirit at work. The first major New York exhibition of one of Japan’s most prominent Neo Pop artists includes drawings, paintings, sculpture, and ceramics in whimsical playhouse installations that had my son David and his friend Brendan grinning in incredulous delight. This was a museum?

Entitled “Nobody’s Fool” and representing the arc of Nara’s career with over a hundred works, the show includes plenty of his trademark creepy-cute kids and marshmallow-smooth dogs. But it moves beyond the iconic as well, revealing the influence on Nara’s art of bands from the Ramones to Green Day, and exploring themes of helplessness, solitude, rebellion, and the meaning of home.

Nara’s own handpicked playlist fills the top two floors of Asia Society with unaccustomed raucousness. The walls of one gallery are papered with his favorite album covers, and (once I had explained what a record was) the boys spent some time peering at the graphics and even recognizing a couple of names from their dinosaur parents’ CD racks. In the center of the room stand oversized gourd-shaped vases, glazed in black and white with scrawled messages and strange faces. What were they for? the boys asked. What did they think? I countered. “Water?” they ventured. “Frogs?” said David. “I know—silly bands!”

Another installation features a tiny house glowing from within, through the windows of which they peered at an artist’s workspace, complete with stubby pencils and rough drawings of fierce little girls. Surrounding the house were pinwheel-painted pedestals, perfect for jumping atop and playing air guitar, which, if you are under 12, you are allowed to do. (They did.)

There are many windows to peep through, as well as doors to open and tiny interiors to duck into. David and Brendan spent the most time in Untitled (formerly Home) a cozy little house with calico curtains, a pile of patchwork pillows to lounge on, and a looping slideshow of photos from Nara’s travels: children, animals, landscapes urban and rural, everything suffused with something like nostalgia, punk rock replaced by folk. The boys curled up and gazed, completely relaxed, as older visitors stepped around them and smiled.

The sweetness has an acid edge, though—works like The Girl with the Knife in her Hand (1991) are perfect exemplars of what’s called kowa kawaii in Japan: scary adorable. Having spent a lonely youth in northern Japan, Nara speaks to the unease of childhood, tipping quickly into fear or rage. The melon-slice eyes of his figures contain everything from mischief to anger to mesmerizing malice. It’s hard to look away. “She looks mean,” said Brendan, skipping off with David to read the song lyrics written around the edges of other pictures.

So if you feel queasy when you hear sleigh bells jingling-ring-ting-tingling in the supermarket aisles, head for the odd little world Nara has created on the Upper East Side. And bring your own elves.

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These days the parents around me talk about the digital divide: our children are digital natives and we are immigrants, halting speakers of a second language no matter how tech-smart we think we are.  There’s a new generation gap yawning, they say.  Just as my Yiddish-speaking great-grandparents struggled to understand their rapidly Americanizing offspring a century ago, I will be increasingly out of step with my children as they assimilate in a networked world, learning skills I don’t have and facing hazards I can’t grasp.  The implication is: be afraid.

I don’t buy it.  Technology is not culture, and using it does not require new manners and mores.  It’s just another tool—like a car, like a corkscrew—that can make life more productive and more pleasurable, and that needs to be understood before it can be used wisely.  My husband and I take good care of our car, we drive safely, and we expect our children to do the same.  They are only ten and seven, but they are learning: what the symbols on the dashboard mean, how to fill a tank with gas.  They are years from the drinking age, but when we have a glass of wine with dinner they dip their pinkies and taste—there’s no taboo, and we hope no titillation when alcohol does enter their social lives.  It’s our job to teach them this stuff while they’re still listening to us, before the distracting voices of friends, roommates, and love interests join in.

I am not a techie—the only app on my iPhone is a carpenter’s level; I still get the New York Times delivered every day—but that does not mean I’m a dinosaur.  I’m learning my way around Facebook at 39 instead of 13 (Facebook’s official minimum age), but I catch on quick, and it’s not that complicated.  If Facebook is something my children are going to use, then it’s my job to learn it too.  I don’t want them experimenting with something I don’t understand—something that, like alcohol, can be a pathway to both pleasure and harm.  I may have Luddite tendencies, but as a parent I don’t have the luxury of indulging them.

I went to see “The Social Network” last week, and enjoyed it as much as anyone, but I’m sick of reviewers telling me that people my age and older see the film one way (Mark Zuckerberg as sinister puppet master), and younger wired types see it another (Mark Zuckerberg as misunderstood hero).  As Aaron Sorkin told New York Magazine, the screenplay he wrote could just as easily be about “the invention of a really good toaster”: it’s a classic story of alienation, inspiration, and the sacrifice of friendship to ambition, speeded up for the communications age.  We’re not talking about Elvis here, swiveling his hips in the widening space between rebellious teenagers and their prudish parents.  Mark Zuckerberg’s creation is a tool, essentially neutral—it’s how you use it that matters.

Social networking online doesn’t change you, it just amplifies who you already are: private types ignore most of it, exhibitionists have endless new arenas in which to perform, gawkers gawk, procrastinators procrastinate.  But a ten-year-old is only partly formed, and she certainly shouldn’t finish the job on Facebook, a place more public and more permanent than a child can begin to imagine.  At curriculum night there’s always a parent with a hand up, asking how the school teaches Internet safety.  But kids don’t experiment online at school, they do it at home—it’s not the teachers who have the primary responsibility for keeping them safe, it’s us.  I don’t let my children wander aimlessly on the streets of New York, and I don’t let them wander in cyberspace either.  But to do that I have to know my way around.

So no, I’m not afraid, just alert: to the example I set in my own use of technology, to the scrapes children can find themselves in online, and to the new skills my children are acquiring, and can teach me.  My daughter came home the other day and reported that she was one of only three kids in her fifth-grade classroom without an e-mail address.  Did she want one, I asked?  “I guess so,” she said.  “But I’m not really sure what I’d do with it.”  We’re going to set one up for her this weekend—before she really needs it, and while she’ll still let us teach her how to use it gracefully.

My children’s technological prowess will outstrip mine, and I’m not interested in keeping up with them.  But the gap that will open between us will not be cultural.  I will take an interest in their new apps and gadgets, and share their delight in them, even if I choose not to use them.  And they will understand the pleasure of a good book or a well-crafted thank-you note, even though mine are on paper and theirs on a screen.  Our tools will be different.  But by the time they are adults, I hope they will have learned all our lessons about using them wisely.  I plan to be good friends with my children when they’re grown, and not just on Facebook.

Photo by Erik Hersman

The post Generation Facebook: Bridging the Digital Divide appeared first on The Faster Times.

“I went to Smith! I untangled my issues in therapy! I worked for the poor! I married a nice (partially) Jewish boy! I recycle! I vote! I eat my greens! I go to yoga!” Potts writes in her foreword. “So…WHERE’S MY BABY?”

The artist at work

In a city like New York, the capital of prenatal yoga, overpriced strollers, chic diaper bags, in-vitro twins, and new parents in their 40s, Potts’s book has an obvious audience. But if you’ve ever struggled with faith, creativity, a dead-end job, or a parent who always says just the wrong thing, Potts’s candid wit will comfort. As portrayed here, Potts’s mother, or “The Source,” as one therapist dubs her, is the kind of “fiercely controlling, overwrought, over-tired, ultra-generous” mother you can’t live with and can’t live without. “I hope you don’t talk about ME in there!” she says when her depressed daughter starts therapy. Potts learns to imagine a parallel universe where her mother says things like “that must be hard” and “tell me about it, I’m listening” and “you’re handling this beautifully, I can tell”–things we all could remember to say when confronted with someone in need of empathy. And Potts does hear those things, occasionally, from a colorful cast of friends, relatives, and her hairdresser.

Overstimulated eggs

Potts sneaks her funnies in around the edges of her panels (the frieze on a medical building, upon close inspection, reads “JEWS GAVE MONEY TO BUILD THIS HOSPITAL AND REALLY, LET’S FACE IT, THANK GOD THEY DID”), and she is quick to skewer the absurdity of the infertility clinic. In her imagination, hyperstimulated follicles release eggs who boogie to Marvin Gaye, and the waiting room is populated with every stereotype: “the doting gay men & their plucky surrogate,” “the woman who makes the rest of us feel hopeful because she is 44 years old,” and many more, including Potts and her fellow-artist husband, Jeff, “fresh off the boat from Denial.”

After a fertility appointment

The years of repeated frustration are increasingly unfunny, and Potts lets us see that too. Jeff is her rock, her beloved, the one who says “the things I need to hear, even if they are not true, when the alternative is just too hard to take.” But even Jeff falters once in a while. “First it’s just you and me,” he says of the road to conception, “but now it feels like you and me and NASA.” Potts jokes that if they are lucky enough to have their own “fertility twins,” she’ll name them Finally and Agony. “Fertility treatments,” she says, “have put us on a long, expensive road full of hope and heartbreak.” But then again, she concludes, that’s a fairly apt description of parenthood, so when someday, somehow, she becomes a parent, she’ll be ready.

Strength comes from the progressive Jewish congregation next door to Potts’s home in Gloucester, Massachusetts, whose genial rabbi (“Omigod! He’s SANTA!”) and child-friendly community make Phoebe and Jeff, as “Jews-In-Training,” feel at home. And then, of course, there’s art-the book itself is a poignant tribute to Potts’s having transcended the demons of depression and blocked creativity that have plagued her all along. “Making art is like slicing open your stomach, spilling your guts out & saying to everyone: ‘Don’t you love it?’” a friend says to Potts.

In Good Eggs, Potts has spilled it all. You’ll love it.

The post Where’s My Baby? A Graphic Memoir Tackles Infertility appeared first on The Faster Times.

It’s the week after Labor Day, which for New York City parents means mostly what it means for parents everywhere: new shoes, sharp pencils, please let that obnoxious kid be in the other class, who’s doing pick-up on Thursdays? Adrenalin is up, temperatures are creeping down, new routines are taking shape. And suddenly it’s September 11.

I remember when I was little my parents and their friends would play an occasional round of “Where Were You When Kennedy Was Shot.” Each had a set piece to recite, smoothed by time into a memory-pebble, a piece of history proudly and sadly displayed for the wondering younger generation. I can imagine a time, a decade or so from now, when the planes and the towers become our generation’s JFK, a day that grows in symbolic weight as it recedes in time.

But nine years is not enough time for pebble-smoothness. Every year in the Five Boroughs September 11 lands in the middle of the first weeks of school, and no one quite knows what to do about it.

It’s like discussing sex: every family has their own approach, their own baggage, their own bias. Introducing the subject too early is unnecessary. Not talking about it is cowardly. Going into too much detail is frightening. Oversimplifying robs the event of meaning, and insults our children’s intelligence.

As a parent, I got off easy: my eldest was a toddler in 2001. We didn’t have to explain anything to her as we crouched by the TV that morning, five miles north of the towers. If it seemed surreal to us to mingle with the dazed crowds in Central Park in the middle of a Tuesday morning-the sky bluer than blue except when you dared to look south-it seemed like business as usual to her.

We’ve taken the slow-drip approach over the years, starting with the bare facts and embellishing as necessary when questions arise. I don’t know how to explain religious fundamentalism to a 10-year-old girl and a seven-year-old boy growing up in an agnostic household, so I’m not going there just yet. This is where the sex analogy fails, at least at our house: a 10-year-old needs to understand the facts of life, but she doesn’t necessarily need to ponder the horrors humans can inflict on one another.

Others take a different approach. On October 11, 2006, a small plane piloted by a Yankee pitcher crashed into an apartment building on 72nd and York, blocks from our apartment, just as school was getting out. An endless procession of wailing emergency vehicles raced past as I pushed my son’s stroller toward my daughter’s school.  “There was a plane crash by the river,” I told them as we walked home. “I don’t know if anyone was hurt but we’ll find out.” The whole thing had faded from their minds by dinnertime.

One of my son’s four-year-old classmates lived across the street from the crash, and watched the aftermath from his living room window. His father came to pick-up a few days later. “Oh, it was just awful,” he said. “My son saw the whole thing, so of course then we had to tell him what happened with the Twin Towers.”

You did?

“Yeah, we had to tell him all about it, and he had nightmares, and it was really hard.”

Oh.

My daughter is starting to read novels about children in the Holocaust, or children in the Civil War, and we are starting to talk about battlefields and refugees and terror. It’s all still fairly remote. Last year in fourth grade they studied the Three Monotheistic Religions, the same curriculum I studied at the same school 30 years ago. They read Old Testament stories and learned about cathedral architecture. When they got to Islam they memorized snippets of the Koran and painted tiles with geometric patterns like the ones that adorn traditional mosques. They had a Middle Eastern Feast. Aside from the Crusades, there was little mention of religion as a root cause of human conflict.

Neither of my children’s schools has ever acknowledged September 11. I can’t blame them-it would be impossible to do it in a way that felt appropriate to all. This year it falls on a Saturday. My daughter is going to a birthday party, oblivious of the date. But now that her friends are starting to turn 11, it’s time to open the discussion a little wider, go a little deeper.

Talking about sex was so much easier.

FURTHER READING

Every September brings a new crop of 9/11-related literature. I have no recommendations for children, but here are a couple of thought-provoking adult titles.

Hiroshima in the Morning, by Rahna Reiko Rizzuto (Feminist Press, $16.95)

Novelist Rizzuto, whose mother was interned as a Japanese-American during World War II, left her husband and two small sons behind in Brooklyn for a six-month research fellowship in Japan in the summer of 2001. Immersion in the stories of Hiroshima atomic-bomb survivors helped her forget her mother’s encroaching dementia and her own tottering marriage, and then September 11 shifted her perspective in ways both devastating and liberating. A projected novel morphed into this quirky memoir, a meditation on war, motherhood, and the wake of explosions both literal and figurative.

The Report by Jessica Francis Kane (Graywolf Press, $15)

Though on the surface Kane’s elegant debut novel-a tightly constructed reimagining of a civilian tragedy in London’s East End during World War II-has little to do with September 11, it is prefaced with a quotation from the 9/11 Commission Report:  “We want to note what we have done, and not done.” In March 1943, nearly 200 people were crushed to death at the entrance to a bomb shelter in Bethnal Green, on a night when no bombs fell. A young magistrate confronts the task of tracing the factors that led to so many needless deaths, and composes a report that is a masterpiece of carefully chosen truths. Kane’s sensitive and nuanced portrait of a stricken community resonates; like the residents of Bethnal Green, the American public in the wake of September 11 was hungry for a version of events that made sense.

Photo by Jens Grabenstein

The post Dreadful Date: Talking To Children About 9/11 appeared first on The Faster Times.

Twenty-one years ago, when Julie Ross’s first child was born, she made a discovery: those child-development textbooks she’d read for her master’s in psychology had little to do with diapers and feedings and crying spells. Theory was fine, but now she needed on-the-job training. She looked for a parenting support group, and discovered that the people leading them had the same degree she did.

“So I thought, let me just explore this,” she remembers. What she found was that parenting books and media “experts” were creating a generation of panicked parents uncertain about how to guide their children through the minefield of body image, Internet safety, substance abuse, sex-in addition to the less modern challenges of plain old growing up. “My whole business began with the idea of giving parents practical techniques to fix these things that people are writing about.”

Two decades later, Ross’s Parenting Horizons offers an array of workshops as well as individual counseling to New York City parents. I sat down with her in her office, which is also her living room-an eclectic space decorated with folk-art masks and anchored at one end by a grand piano, under which a free-range pet rabbit was shuffling around.  ”Our goal isn’t to create cookie-cutter anything,” Ross explained. “We believe in standard techniques that we’ve found work for everybody, but we’re very clear that everybody has their own story and that each child is different, so we keep the groups small in order to address that diversity of issues.”

She offers different “toolboxes” depending on the age of the child: zero to five years, elementary school, tweens, teens. All of her techniques involve good communication, but as children grow there is an important shift. “Parenting younger kids involves dialogue, but it’s much more rule-focused: we say these are the rules, and if you break the rules, here’s what happens,” she said. “With tweens and teens we’re really saying, let’s talk about what the rules need to be-let’s develop a relationship in which parents can influence rather than control.”  Her latest book, How To Hug a Porcupine: Negotiating the Prickly Points of the Tween Years, illustrates her approach with the stories of her clients. Practical and forthright, it’s the antithesis of the broad-brush child-development titles that were so little use to her years ago.

A Texas transplant, Ross has found fertile ground for her work in New York. “There’s one group of parents who’s so focused on financial or career goals that they farm out the parenting to somebody else. I don’t deal with them, because they don’t come to me. Then you’ve got the parents who are A-plus achievers, and they also want to achieve in parenting, and that’s my population,” Ross said. “And then you’ve got the parents who have kids with some sort of special need: the ones who are highly gifted, or have learning disabilities, or both-those are what we call 2-E children, meaning ‘twice exceptional’-very tough. Or they’ve got ADD or ADHD, or obsessive-compulsive disorder-they’ve got something, and those are the parents who need a lot more support.”

And then there are clients who just need a little help with a rough parenting patch. Full disclosure: my pediatrician sent me to Julie Ross five years ago when my two-year-old wouldn’t sleep and his nocturnal screams started to draw hate mail from the neighbors. Ross’s recommendations were reasonable, not revolutionary. With her guidance I created a script: a step-by-step manual of actions and statements to follow during nighttime screamfests. Kiss him goodnight, leave the room, wait this many minutes, reassure him, repeat. Ross dictated specific language to convey serene firmness with no room for negotiation. It seemed awkward and canned at first, but David did better on the new plan, and it was quickly clear that we had both been in need of retraining-the script was teaching me a different way to respond to him, and soon I was ad libbing in the spirit of Ross’s advice without reciting her phrases verbatim.

As Ross sees it, the challenges facing children and parents in New York aren’t that different from anywhere else-the difference is one of intensity. “There’s a pressure-cooker mentality,” she acknowledged. “The Northeast is much more focused on the Ivy League, and that trickles all the way down to the preschool level. No question, that’s different here.”

What isn’t different is the 24/7 exposure to media noise: television, texting, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter. “Kids today are what I call digital natives,” Ross said. “They’re growing up with it-it’s the landscape they live in. Parents are digital immigrants-we don’t speak the same language, we don’t understand it on the same level. We can be extremely skilled at it from a technical point of view, but it’s not innate.” It’s a perfect metaphor to describe a new generation gap. “There’s a lot of fear,” Ross continued. “How do I as a parent protect my child from something that I don’t fully understand? How do I use what my children know to create dialogue, relationships, connections?”

Ross is currently working on an updated edition of a previous book, Joint Custody With a Jerk: Raising a Child With an Uncooperative Ex, to reflect this new environment. “It used to be that estranged parents would just scream at each other over the phone,” she said. “Now there’s bullying via email, or posting on Facebook, and then the whole world knows, and in addition the kids know, because the kids are on Facebook.”

Joint Custody With a Jerk, written with Judy Corcoran, a (divorced) former client, is not autobiographical-Ross and her husband have raised two children together. Her daughter has just graduated from college, and her son, who passed through on his way home from final exams, has one more year of high school. Was it hard to have a parent who’s a parenting expert? “There have been awkward moments in the past-my daughter could recite them in fine detail,” Ross laughed. “But I think if you asked them they’d both say they appreciate what I do. They’ve been very clear about how sad it is that some of their friends don’t have as good relationships with their parents as they have with us. They see that my husband and I have put a tremendous amount of work into living these techniques at home, not just preaching them.”

Ross is an appealing combination of pragmatism and passion, a realist who loves to help smooth the kinks in the parent-child relationship. “The people who come are the ones who really want to be here,” she said. “I don’t have to persuade them of the importance of parent education. And the techniques affect real change.” A sense of humor doesn’t hurt either. “I’m almost always shocked when I meet the child,” she concluded wryly. “Invariably they’re much shorter and more innocent than I ever imagined.”

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It’s June, the month when every conversation among parents of school-age children in New York begins, “so, any plans to get out of the city this summer?” In our family June is when you start stockpiling books: one pile of summer reading, ideally to be enjoyed in a shady spot somewhere outside the Five Boroughs, and one pile to bring as gifts for the out-of-town friends whose shady spots we will gratefully be visiting when the heat takes hold.

In Japan, where my husband was born, when you go visiting far from home you always bring omiyage, a gift of your hometown specialty. Every area in Japan is famous for some local product: a curiously shaped sweet, a special kind of seaweed. If we lived in Vermont we could bring everyone a bottle of syrup. (Though if we lived in Vermont people would come to visit us in the summer, instead of the other way round.) When you live in Manhattan, it’s a challenge to come up with good omiyage-not much local produce right here, unless you count bagels. So we’ve settled on books, rather than food, as a way to share the flavors of our city.

For your own children or the children of your summer hosts, then, a brief list of titles to give or keep, starting with the youngest bookworms:

ABC NYC: A Book About Seeing New York City (Abrams, 2005)

123 NYC: A Counting Book of New York City (Abrams, 2007)

By Joanne Dugan

Photographer Joanne Dugan presents two delightful explorations of the city. Her alphabet book zooms between micro and macro, between actual letters and the words they begin: the letter B scratched into a brick on an 18th Street storefront, the Chrysler Building soaring and sparkling to represent C. W is for water tower, with a photo that captures at least 10 and has had my children scanning the skyline and counting them ever since. The counting sequel is a quiz for locals-can you identify those five bridges, or those six skyscrapers? The spread with nine sculptures led to a field trip to the 14th Street subway station in search of more whimsical bronzes by Tom Otterness.

SUBWAY

By Christoph Niemann (Greenwillow, 2010)

New from New Yorker cover artist Christoph Niemann, a love letter to the New York City subway system, rats and all. Two boys and their father, not much more than whitewashed stick figures, escape a rainy day by spending it underground, looping and detouring through the colorful spaghetti of the subway lines. Slightly stilted text is more than compensated by bold gouache paintings that are simple enough for children and witty enough for adults without condescending or pandering to either. Niemann is the creator of the whimsical “Abstract City” blog for the New York Times, and of the cult hit I Lego N.Y.

SEE THE CITY: The Journey of Manhattan Unfurled

By Matteo Pericoli (Knopf, 2004)

In 2000 Matteo Pericoli completed a two-year project: drawing the Manhattan skyline, all the way around. Two 37-foot scrolls, of the east side and the west, detailed every block, every building, every bridge in unfussy pen-and-ink with a frieze of waves below. Their cumulative power is quietly stunning. Pericoli republished his work for young readers several years later, adding a reflective personal narrative as well as handwritten notes that dance above the drawings. The book itself is a piece of art, opening in two directions to encompass east and west. Locals will enjoy pointing out their own home stretch of coastline, and budding artists will be inspired.

FROM THE MIXED-UP FILES OF MRS. BASIL E. FRANKWEILER

By E.L. Konigsburg (1967)

E.L. Konigsburg’s classic is required reading for NYC residents and visitors alike. It’s a mystery, a rite-of-passage tale, and a tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art that no one has topped before or since. Claudia, 11, and her little brother Jamie, 9, run away from their suburban home and hide out at the Met, carefully chosen by Claudia for its size, comfort, and beauty. They sleep in a sixteenth-century bed, bathe in the fountain and collect its coins to buy meals, and solve a mystery involving Michelangelo. The museum has changed somewhat over the last four decades, but if you ask at the information desk they’ll give you a “Mixed-Up Files” guide to the galleries, with a message from the author.

WHEN YOU REACH ME

By Rebecca Stead (Random House, 2009)

Rebecca Stead’s stunning second novel won this year’s Newbery Medal and has enthralled both my daughter’s fourth-grade classmates and a significant number of their parents and teachers. Drawing on influences as disparate as Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time and the game show classic The $20,000 Pyramid, Stead delivers a gritty portrait of life on the far Upper West Side circa 1979, correct in every familiar detail, and then makes it all wonderfully strange with a time-traveling puzzle of a plot. Sixth-grade heroine Miranda is indeed a miracle of understated, believably bewildered common sense. Read this one yourself before you pass it on to the kids.

Not enough to get you through a whole summer, clearly. Please add your own city favorites in the Comments section below, and happy reading.

Photo by Janice P. Nimura

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One Saturday every month is Community Gardening Day in Carl Schurz Park.  My nine-year-old daughter Clare and I head over to the volunteer table after a late breakfast to sign in and get our gardening gloves.  It’s April, with the daffodils past their prime but the cherry blossoms in full glory.  The forsythia, the first yellow trumpet-fanfare of spring, has subsided into leggy green. 

Forsythia lines both sides of the broad pram steps leading north from the plaza at 86th Street.  The shrubs have been neglected for years, flopping and tangled, some of the canes ten feet long.  Time for drastic action.  We are cutting them back to a height of three feet.  The crew cut will stimulate healthier growth and a brighter flourish of flowers next spring.

We set to work with loppers, me and two grandmotherly types from the neighborhood.  Clare’s job is to drag the brush to the side and stack it.  She holds two huge branching green antlers up to her head.  “I’m the queen of spring!” she giggles, staggering under the weight.  The brush pile grows taller than Clare.  The stubby results of our work are leafless and don’t even reach her waist.  The steps begin to look naked.  Passersby look alarmed.  Clare examines the cut canes and discovers they’re hollow all the way through.  “Like bamboo,” she says, squinting through one.

Clare wanders away out of sight for a while, exploring, then comes dancing back.  “I found a secret path!”  The weather is uncertain: a spatter of rain, then a sudden sunbeam that makes the tulips glow.  We work for several hours, long enough to see people come and go, long enough to watch the weather change.  It’s lovely to be outside, to feel rain on our faces, not to care about staying clean or dry.  We have nowhere else to be.  When lunch arrives at the volunteer table, we descend on the food and bear it off to Clare’s hideaway.

In his book Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, Richard Louv credits childhood exposure to nature-whether in an urban park or the Grand Canyon-with everything from enhanced creativity to reduced hyperactivity.  Learning the landscape gives children a sense of place, a taste of independence, and later a proprietary impulse toward stewardship.  Alienation from it will result in a generation of adults for whom natural history exists only in museums, people with a reduced capacity for wonder and no understanding of the connection between emotional and environmental health.

I’m with Louv all the way, but he can make it seem as though a childhood without regular wilderness trips, or at least a ravine at the end of the street, is less than ideal.  I prefer to sleep indoors myself, and there are no ravines on the Upper East Side, but as Clare skips away from the forsythia canes to hunt for worms brought up by the rain, she doesn’t look deprived to me.  If nature is wildness, the web of life interacting with the forces of weather and geology, constantly cycling and changing, there’s plenty of it right here.

You have to look carefully, though, and keep looking.  We walk the same route alongside the park and the East River every morning, six blocks to Clare’s school, then another seven to her little brother David’s.  In March the green shoots grow taller each day, then pop into crocuses and snowdrops and so many varieties of daffodil that we’ve lost count.  Our favorite is the kind with white petals and a fiery orange-red center.  In October the sidewalk near 85th Street is strewn with odd lime-green lumps.  It took several field guides and much examining of bark textures and leaf shapes, but we at last identified the sole Osage orange tree in Carl Schurz Park.  And while we were squinting up into its branches, we spotted a red-tailed hawk, surveying the neighborhood in perfect stillness.

Clare and David can’t catch frogs or pick raspberries on East End Avenue, but they are learning how to look nonetheless.  The sidewalk along the park is paved with a bumpy mixture that includes a few chips of recycled glass, blue, red, and green.  If you’re doing the standard New York Purposeful Stride, you’ll never see them.  But if you’re walking at the pace of two children licking ice cream cones on the way home, it’s like being at the shore.  “Look Mommy, beach glass!”

I took an informal poll of friends with small children in New York: “How do your kids experience nature?”  Most mentioned the restorative powers of the country as an antidote to city life.  But many were awake to the nature that lives in the city, and were making it part of the daily routine-”like brushing your teeth”-to help their children look and see: fog rolling in and obscuring the tops of buildings, weeds finding opportunities in brick walls, icicles growing on parked cars, squirrels nesting on fire escapes, house sparrows drinking from puddles.  Some of the best birding in the northeast is in Central Park, an Upper West Side mom pointed out.  One friend was teaching her son and daughter flower identification from the green florist buckets lined up in front of the 24-hour deli.  Several parents were encouraging clandestine tree-climbing, and many were refreshingly casual about dirt.  “I don’t want them growing up to be the kind of city kids who are afraid to sit on a patch of grass,” wrote one mother in Brooklyn.  “City living is great and I wouldn’t trade it,” said a dad in Washington Heights, “but it’s easy for kids to become like house cats.”

Slow down and open your eyes, was the refrain.  Meander a little.  Dig.  And with apologies to Mr. Sinatra, if you can do it here, you can do it anywhere.  When Clare and David find themselves in a rural setting, their city-trained eyes are sharp.  Within an hour of tumbling out of the car last weekend in Connecticut, they had collected a row of treasures: a peeled stick covered in wiggling worm grooves; a papery grey wasp’s nest, miracle of hexagons; a discarded snakeskin, waxy white; a nosegay of tiny violets.

Looking at the natural world raises questions about how things work.  Learning to answer those questions makes a child into a scientist.  The satisfaction of knowing the answer branches into more questions.  You start with biology-flowers, caterpillars-and pretty soon you’re into chemistry and physics: How does ice make potholes?  Why does the East River flow in both directions?  The questions get harder, and soon you can’t answer them without a little research.  You are remembering how to be a scientist, too.

There’s a courtyard garden behind our building, with a pair of cardinals in residence.  We wake up to their voices every morning, and we’ve started keeping a pair of binoculars on the dining table-in an avian landscape dominated by pigeons and sparrows, our brilliant red neighbors never lose their power to delight.  The male is perched in the tree outside the window right now, alternately calling and preening, digging through his red breastfeathers to the black down beneath.  His vermilion beak is framed in black, and there is the slightest frosting of grey on his wings.  With the binoculars I can see straight into his beak as it opens.  The crest on the top of his head rises slightly with the effort of each note.  It’s the same call we heard in the country last weekend.  A cardinal is a cardinal, whether in the Berkshire foothills or on East 89th Street.  Walk slowly, and you’ll see one.

Photos by D Sharon Pruitt, Todd Ryburn

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It should tell you something about Amy Wilson that the original subtitle for her new book, When Did I Get Like This? The Screamer, the Worrier, the Dinosaur-Chicken-Nugget Buyer & Other Mothers I Swore I’d Never Be, was “Tales of a Former Perfectionist and Current Mother.”  Over a sandwich the other day, trim and bright-eyed with far fewer wrinkles than someone on the far side of 40 should have, Wilson looked more Ivory Girl than harried mother of three.  The book is only her latest project; Wilson is also the author and star of Mother Load, a one-woman show that opened to critical acclaim Off-Broadway in 2007, and has toured the country since then.  Motherhood may have modified her over-achieving impulses, but clearly it hasn’t eliminated them.

After graduation from Yale in 1991, Wilson wasted no time on self-doubt.  “I wanted to be an actress,” she says.  “That’s a preposterous thing to decide you want to do with your life, but I managed to do it.”  Roles on Broadway (The Last Night of Ballyhoo), in film (Kissing Jessica Stein), and on TV (Norm, Felicity, Law and Order) soon followed.  Her success, she believes, was due to her personality: “my drive, my focus, I’m methodical-it served me very well…until parenthood.”

Growing up in Scranton, PA as the eldest of six children and 25 grandchildren, Wilson had been the assistant mother in her Irish Catholic family since second grade.  The idea of starting a family didn’t faze her.  “I thought ‘oh, this is going to be easy,’” she remembers.  “And then I couldn’t get pregnant.  I think I would have been like this anyway, but that started me down the road of ‘parenting is going to take everything you have, all your attention and all your desire.’”

Being “like this,” in Wilson’s mind, means being acutely and uncomfortably aware of her maternal failings.  “I spend a large portion of my life as a mother falling short and then feeling bad about it,” she declares in the book’s first chapter.  “I have one overriding daily thought: I suck at this.”  Life with Connor, Seamus, and Maggie (ages seven, five, and two) has made her vulnerable to every sanctimonious baby-product advertisement and scolding pediatric health report-messages that she believes are aimed unfairly at mothers.  “For a perfectionist like me,” she writes, “there is no greener and more dangerous pasture than modern motherhood, a garden in which all my neuroses have grown to rank fruition.”

So who’s watching, and who’s judging?  “We’re watching ourselves, mostly,” Wilson concedes.  “But then I think, if my kid shows up with nothing for Sharing Day because I forgot, what will the teacher think?”  Some of the craziness, she believes, has to do with age and education level.  Before becoming a parent, Wilson worked in a halfway house with teenaged mothers, who shared a little perspective.  “They didn’t have time for the noise, or the money-they tuned that out, they had bigger things to worry about than ‘is the milk organic’?” she remembers.  “But I don’t think it’s just rich women with master’s degrees, either.  Anyone who has a moment of free time or an extra dollar to spend is going to spend it on their kids.”

In Wilson’s book, parenthood is mostly a mother’s project-husband David is Good-Time Charlie, to be counted on for weekend entertainment and riling the kids up when it’s time for bed.  The portrait she paints is not wholly complimentary.  “His reading this has changed our parenting relationship for the better,” Wilson notes.  “I think it gave him a real insight.  And I’ve heard that from other men who have read it-they’re like “OK, now I get it.”

New York presents extra pressures.  “I think being a mother in New York when you’re not from New York is that fish-out-of-water feeling,” Wilson says in regard to her urban peers.  “They all seem so much cooler, much more hip than me, so I have to do what they’re telling me to do.”  On the other hand, touring with Mother Load made it clear that things weren’t so different in, say, North Carolina.  During Q & A sessions after the show,  mothers all over the country told her she was singing their song-with the possible exception of her riff on the absurdities of the Manhattan nursery-school admissions process.

“New York turns it up to 11,” Wilson says of the city she’s called home for 15 years.  “That the kids are always exposed to so much can be a wonderful thing, or it can be another albatross.”  Now that two of her children are school-age, there are new challenges.  “I feel like if you’re going to stay here, if you don’t have a backyard or a toy room in the basement, then you have to take advantage of all these fantabulous things.  If your kids are just going to stay in the apartment every afternoon scratching each other’s eyes out, you might as well move.”  She smiles ruefully.  “That’s my new project and source of guilt, to get my kids out.  I bought tickets to the Tim Burton thing at the Museum of Modern Art, and then we didn’t go because somebody was sick, and now they’re sitting on my bulletin board, taunting me…”

Though she portrays herself as up to her neck in child-rearing, Wilson has turned her chief preoccupation into a mini-industry.  She has readings and radio interviews scheduled well into the summer, she posts regularly on her blog, and she is currently booking a new Mother Load tour for the fall.  Talking about motherhood is going to require a lot of time away from the kids.  “It’s hard on them, but I think they see how happy and alive it makes me, and I’m much happier as their mother when I’m home,” Wilson says.  She is also working on a TV pilot.  “Maybe I’d be in it, and maybe I wouldn’t,” Wilson muses.  “I’d much rather be in the writer’s room.  I love acting, but there’s not always a lot of creative control.  I felt so good writing every day last summer in this intense way, like I was training for a marathon-I felt great all the time, using that creative part of myself.”

Writer, actor, comedienne, and mother of three, Amy Wilson can’t really say “I’m just an average mom” with a straight face.  What she can say, and often does quite eloquently, is that raising children is the biggest challenge a self-acknowledged perfectionist can face, and she only hopes she’s up to it.  “Day after day, I do my best to achieve something that is, on its face, impossible,” she writes.  “This, I think, is motherhood itself.”

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