parenting

Girl w/ Pen is excited to present this guest post from Laurel Wider, a psychotherapist with a speciality in gender, relationships and identity.  She’s also a mom and Founder of Wonder Crew, a new line of toys that brings connection and kindness into boys’ play.   

Play is how children learn, which means toys have the power to create change. As I began to pay more attention to toys marketed to boys, it occurred to me that so many of them emphasized muscles and aggression and NONE offered a play experience that encouraged connection or even friendship.  Thrilled by the surge of toys that encourage  STEM and positive body images for girls, I want to help expand the way boys see themselves and the world around them.

I’m a mom, psychotherapist and now founder of Wonder Crew, a line of dolls that bring connection and feelings into boys’ play.  In my therapy practice, I’ve worked with several boys and men who have painfully grappled with impossible stereotypes of masculinity. Boys are raised to prioritize toughness and self-reliance – in my work with clients I’ve seen this lead to isolation, depression and sometimes aggression.

And then about a year ago, my son came home from preschool with the idea that “boys aren’t supposed to cry.”  I was floored that my own son had gotten a hold of this message. These stereotypes impact and harm everyone.  This is how I ended up a toy inventor.

Change is generally something that happens gradually. With this in mind, I thought long and hard about how to create a “hybrid” toy, one that still resembled familiar play scenarios for boys, but also offered the opportunity to connect and nurture.  So I came up with action figure meets favorite stuffed animal.  This morphed into Wonder Crew:  a line of Crewmates (aka dolls) that come with a matching piece of adventure gear (dress-up) plus mini open-ended comic book.  The formula:  Child + Crewmate = Wonder Crew.

Right now we have one Crewmate, his name is Will and he comes in three adventures with a fourth in the pipeline:  Superhero, Rockstar, Builder and Chef.  These adventures were based on interviews with over 150 parents, educators and kids that spoke to me about play that they’ve observed/ kids’ favorite play scenarios.

At first I thought that these adventures were too stereotypical, but I’ve come to realize that it’s important to show that nurturing fits in with all kinds of play, even the kind that’s stereotypically masculine.  And really the big picture idea is that anyone can be a connected, empathetic, nurturing person.

Wonder Crew is all about friendship and adventure and clearly this is not just a boy thing!  I plan to incorporate a girl Crewmate, while keeping with the same adventures. This would have been my preferred doll growing up.

While inspired by boys, Wonder Crew will be an interest-based brand, not gender based.  And the plan is for Crewmates to represent all kids (race, gender, ability).

Wonder Crew’s Kickstarter launched last week. We’re already over 40% funded, but we’ve got a ways to go. Please check it out and help spread the word!  It’s our goal to not only fund first production, but also to show public interest.  A large toy company told me that dolls for boys will never work; help Wonder Crew enlighten them!

In 2013, I became the director of an unusual gender center. This is its story.

September 18, 2014

My Girl w/ Pen column is called “GenderLab” or watch what happens when you run one of the most unusual gender centers in the country. That sounds hyperbolic. I know because I can’t believe I’m living it. As we are about to finish year one today, I’ve come up for enough air to document this experiment. And this year I’m going to be writing about it.

The heart of our center is a story of father/daughter love. You heard that right. Not an abstract story about rights and politics–though we know from Women’s Studies that those things are also personal. But ours starts with the personal. This is a story of love across difference. Of grief and transformation. Of a father who listened to his daughter and a daughter who stayed in dialogue with her father.

Cassandra Voss, for whom the center is named, was my student. She was effervescent. Let me give an example. When I first met her in 2004, I was two years into being an assistant professor. In class I was talking about the film Iron Jawed Angels, which is about Alice Paul and the suffragettes who secure the women’s vote in 1920. In the film, Alice Paul is played with pluck and determination by Hilary Swank; she wears her hair in long braids on occasion. After class, a young woman, Cassadra Voss, ran up to me and said, “Look, I wear my hair like Alice Paul. Ever since I saw the film, I love to wear my hair in braids like her.” I thought who is this luminous, geeky creature in front of me who does feminist cosplay? I loved her from the start.

Cassandra set out to be the first-ever major in Women’s and Gender Studies at our school. We started a minor in 2005 (notably late in higher ed), but she wouldn’t settle for that. She was also determined to put on the first production of the Vagina Monologues. And she insisted on hiring the first man in the Women’s Center. So she wasn’t so different from Alice Paul afterall. The thing that’s harder to capture about her is that she was one of the most hopeful, ebullient people I’ve met in my life. And that combination of bravery and delight was intoxicating. She was the kind of student who always bounded into my office and plopped on my couch. There was nothing small or half-hearted about her.

You see I’ve been in Women’s Studies a long time. Since I was 19–the same age Cassandra was when she first took Introduction to Women’s Studies. At her age, I was equally passionate about gender and social justice, but I was not nearly as loving. Early I had to manage so much anger about deep inequality and oppression; I didn’t know what to do with it. Cassandra managed to keep believing in people and “their better angels” which often made me feel a bit sheepish in her presence. She recentered my politics in love. And one of the ways she did that was how she talked about her dad.

I’ll never forget when Cassandra said to me, “My dad is coming to hear our panel on The Women’s Room and he’s conservative and I want you to meet him.” I had taken Cassandra and a handful of students to present their work on that interesting, rarely taught early classic, The Women’s Room by Marilyn French. Now they were presenting it again at our undergraduate research day. I walked in the room and spotted him immediately. He had the starchiest shirt in the room. On a campus that is uber midwest-casual, Kurt Voss was pressed and tucked. And like his daughter, game for anything. Which is why the Fox-news watching, deeply religious CEO was in the front row taking notes about second-wave feminism. Some of Cassandra’s friends snickered at his questions which were uninformed, understandably, and real. Real questions, ones they needed to answer to not cocoon themselves in their private ideologies. That day in the spring of 2006, I had no idea that a little over a year later, Kurt and I would begin a friendship after Cassandra’s death that would last six years.

Cassandra died unexpectedly in 2007.  Sometimes I still dream about her. Only now when I wake up, I go to work and see her face every day in the building her father built for her. Some days I talk to her. Some days, I stare at the floor because I can’t look at her face. It’s just too much. I make my coffee and get to work. But there are moments, like her birthday coming up where I remember one of the three life-long goals she wrote on her then “Myspace” page in 2007: my goal is to make my dad a hard-core feminist.

She got her wish.

Stay tuned for how that dad built a multi-million dollar gender center.

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If you care about smart toys or if you don’t live under a media rock, then by now you’ve heard about GoldieBlox, the girls engineering toy. Maybe you read about it here at Girl w/Pen. Maybe you saw the viral video about the toy that parodied the Beastie Boys song, “Girls.” In the video, three girls set off a Rube Goldberg machine and aim to take over the world. The only problem was that the Beastie Boys said thank you by suing GoldieBlox. Then the toy got critiqued left and right—too pink, too princessy, too wrong for “stealing” a Beastie Boys song. Well now, no matter how you felt about the toy, you likely saw their new ad while inhaling nachos during the Super Bowl. GoldieBlox won Intuit’s small business Super Bowl commercial competition which means they essentially won 4 million dollars, the amount equivalent to make and then screen a commercial during the Super Bowl.

And that means that GoldieBlox really just became a household name.

This commercial puts GoldieBlox, a small start-up toy company that wants to, as they say, “disrupt the pink aisle,” at your local toy store, back on top. And to make matters even better, days ago GoldieBlox’s “Spinning Machine” won the People’s Choice and Educational Toy award of the year at the 14^th annual Toy Industry Association (TIA) Awards. Debbie Sterling, GoldieBlox CEO, invented one of the first engineering toys for girls. She shares her challenges in her TEDX talk: her path as a female minority in a Stanford engineering program, a woman inventor in the big business androcentric toy industry, and as a female entrepreneur in booming Silicon Valley. Sterling’s vision as an entrepreneur, and the ideological work of the toy, are the reasons we wanted her to help us open a new gender center, the Cassandra Voss Center, on our campus. So this Fall, we became the “Midwest launch” of GoldieBlox.

What did that mean? Debbie Sterling and VP, Lindsey Shepard, spoke on our campus and taught us how to engage hundreds of kids with GoldieBlox when we created a toy zone in our Center. St. Norbert College was also among the first colleges to include the toy in their curriculum. As Assistant Professor of Education, Chris Meidl, said when he introduced the toy in his class on “Play,” “No matter any other criticisms about the toy itself, the clear message delivered is that girls can build too. And that is a message worth being heard, for girls and boys, for women and most importantly for men.”

So I’m loyal-it’s true. I know the founders personally and heard them speak passionately about their dream of the toy and for girls globally. The toy, though, has come under a lot of critique. When Slate’s holiday gift guide tagline read “Forget GoldieBlox. Buy a Birdfeeder Instead,” I wanted to throw a birdfeeder at my computer screen. The holiday season is, of course, the biggest commercial moment in the toy company year. Slate just kept going with, “First Everyone Loved GoldieBlox. Now Everyone Hates GoldieBlox.” Hate is a strong word and I guess Slate figured that out since at this writing, they removed the above title and have given GoldieBlox a second look under the article, “GoldieBlox: Great for Girls? Terrible for Girls? Or Just Selling Toys?” Well good for you Slate for modifying your backlash after the fact. Sigh. Then when Jezebel recently wrote, “GoldieBlox Means Well But Doesn’t Live Up to the Hype,” I had to weigh in.

I’ve been in Women’s and Gender Studies since I was 19 years old. On the one hand, I welcome and get the onslaught of feminist critique of GoldieBlox that is now coming to a blog near you. On the other hand, I am no ideological purist and I wonder the degree to which critics grasp what it takes to break gender barriers in all these fields—STEM, toy industry, start-up/Silicon Valley culture—and make a toy that has mass appeal. I repeat—mass appeal.

My supportive response really comes from watching the toy work on the ground. I saw hundreds of girls play with GoldieBlox for an entire day. I watched as girl after girl mastered a “basic belt drive,” the first engineering challenge of the game and saw how they interacted with the “bill of materials” that is designed to be especially welcoming to girls—girls who rarely play with construction toys. Debbie made the wheels look like thread spools, the axles resemble crayons, and the belt mimic a thick hair ribbon. A hair ribbon is stereotypically feminine, but it’s likely a girl has seen one, unlike other construction toy parts that can appear off limits in gender-segregated toy aisles. Debbie conducted research for her start-up toy and discovered that girls would frequently turn her prototypes into non-competitive games. In other words, girls needed all the adorable animal characters to spin on the spinning machine or ride the float. Everyone needed to win. So Debbie redesigned the game.

Now as a gender critic, I know that girls are socialized into these sensibilities rather than born into them, but that fact does not make their gender socialization any less real. When my three year old picked up the toy, she gravitated first to the character animals just as GoldieBlox VP Lindsey Shepard had predicted. “The character animals are the way for girls to feel invited into engineering,” said Lindsey who urged us to reach out a hand with, say, Katinka the dolphin, and welcome a girl into play. The GoldieBlox mission is to make engineering as appealing a job for a girl as the pink-collar work that so many girls are still ushered into. Debbie’s basic gender critique in her Kickstarter video asserts a claim in Gender Studies about inequity and representation—engineering is still 89% male, women make up half the population, women and girls need to be building for a better, more inclusive future. Few toys offer such a gender critique which is why GoldieBlox had an initial feminist appeal.

Critics say about the toy: it has pink on it. And the second game is called “GoldieBlox and the Parade Float” where girls partake in dreaded “princess culture” and help build a parade float. It’s all true. The toy has pink on it, but is mostly yellow. Debbie talked about how using some pink was intentional. She aimed for girls to “want to pick the toy up,” in the first place. Debbie said recently to the New York Times, “It’s OK to be a princess. We just think girls can build their own castles too.” The deeper story of the princess float—and I loathe princess culture…I avoid saying the word out loud in my house—is that Goldie’s best friend, Ruby, who is African-American, is actually the winner of the pageant. This fact prizes afro-centric beauty in a racist culture that makes beauty synonymous with whiteness. Now it is certainly more troubling that Ruby is the best friend of Goldie and not Goldie herself. Goldie of the Blox is a white protagonist, a central critique that is rarely mentioned in the feminist response. Though I wonder if Goldie is “Golda,” an homage to Debbie’s Jewish foremothers. The Jewish cultural allowance for smart girls is something Debbie mentions in her TEDX talk. On the ground, watching girls play with the toy, they actually play with the animals in the set which are not necessarily racialized. The question remains: can a toy ever be designed (add books, movies, etc.) with a girl of color at the center? Girls and women are barely represented authentically in mass culture at all, let alone women of color. We know something will have shifted with a girl-of-color is at the center of a story.

So the answers to the GoldieBlox critiques are a bit more complicated. I appreciate critic Deborah Siegel’s more balanced provocatively titled piece, “Is GoldieBlox Trojan Princess, or Trojan Feminism?” I think it’s both. Which brings me back to my point about ideological purity. Why do we keep asking this binary question of “is it or isn’t it” feminist? Let’s step back and take the long view. The truth is I want GoldieBlox to have the same appeal as Bob the Builder or Lego dudes because girls still get nada in girl toy world. Like I teach my students—you can hold conflicting ideas simultaneously and still make a commitment. GoldieBlox is listening. Let’s commit to help them navigate the hyper-stereotyped toy world many of us are resisting by giving them some advice as The Brave Girls Alliance is doing with Lego when asking them to make smart girl Minifigs. I appreciate that GoldieBlox is trying to meet girls where they are. We can find the common ground between these worlds intellectually and maybe we can even find it around play. And even if we can’t, GoldieBlox is about to change play nationally regardless.

By Roxana Cazan*

When the Russian court rejected Pussy Riot member, Maria Alyokhina’s request for a deferral in her prison term so that she can raise her son, I was shocked. Alyokhina pleaded that her son is too young for her to be removed from his side at this point, and that a sentence of years in prison would destroy the mother/son bond. She asked the court to defer her term until her son turns 14. The Pussy Riot punk team was arrested as a result of disseminating anti-establishment and feminist slogans and performing their politics in a Moscow cathedral. What drew my attention was the way in which the state handled Aliokhina’s request to mother, especially in a country where motherhood was upheld as one of women’s most important duties via Soviet propaganda.

This ideological and geographical site extends to Russia’s neighboring country, Romania, where the Communist regime that ended its totalitarian rule in 1989, imposed an intensive politics of reproduction to the detriment of women. Particularly during the last decade of Communism in Romania, the pro-natalist political program prohibited birth control, required women to procreate within patriarchal family structures, and employed women to labor outside the home, as Gail Kligman deftly argues in her 1998 book The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Reproduction in Ceausescu’s Romania.

The Pussy Riot court case received great attention in the US as did the Romanian rejection of Ceausescu’s pro-reproductive ideology right after 1989. In a way, this attention projected the two moments as standing in stark opposition. more...

Amy Chua’s 2011 book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother caused quite a stir. Apparently it was also prophetic: one year later, U.S. readers have a new crop of books about how everyone else raises their kids. Everyone except Americans, that is: the Chinese, the French, the Argentineans, the Tibetans, the Polynesians… and so on.

The verdict? Let’s just say that in the Parental Olympics, the U.S. appears to be losing, and losing big.

Over the past year, the media has reported how the Chinese are raising children capable of crushing American students on standardized math tests. (When the parent in question is Amy Chua, one of those kids also turns out to be a concert pianist.) More recently, journalist Pamela Druckerman has filled us in on the superiority of French motherhood in Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting: a certain Gallic savoir faire seems to produce tots who eat everything and behave perfectly while their mothers take frequent smoking breaks. Later this month, we’ll be treated to a slightly different explanation about French maternal superiority, courtesy of Elisabeth Badinter’s The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women. Add to that the book I just finished reading, Mei-Ling Hopgood’s How Eskimos Keep Their Babies Warm: And Other Adventures in Parenting (from Argentina to Tanzania and everywhere in between), and even the most confident mama might begin to question herself.

As Allison Kimmich pointed out last month, these books “highlight our cultural obsession with motherhood, or the failings of American mothers.”

Even so, I confess to being fascinated by these books. I don’t know if that’s because deep down I’m insecure about my own mothering (and if I am, perhaps that’s as a result of all these books…?) or because I’ve always loved travel and the distance one gains from another cultural perspective. I welcome glimpses into other ways of doing things, particularly when it comes to parenting and family. I often wonder whether the “intensive parenting” practiced by many U.S. middle- and upper-middle class parents (mostly mothers) actually benefits kids—not to mention whether it places far more burdens on mothers and primary caregivers. (“Perfect madness” was how Judith Warner described it.) Other cultural perspectives can shed light on how we’ve constructed particular ideals of motherhood and family, and maybe even how we can change them.

Hopgood is the least judgmental of all of these writers. In fact, she goes to lengths not to judge (which can also be a problem if you forever wallow in cultural relativism, an oft-discussed topic in my Women’s Studies classes). Her book is a journalistic account of how other groups of people around the world approach various parenting practices: how the Chinese potty train early, how the Japanese let their children fight, how Polynesians play without their parents, and so on.

For example, did you know that Chinese toddlers are frequently potty trained by eighteen months, if not twelve? Or that Argentine children and their families regularly stay up until the wee hours of the night? How Eskimos Keep Their Babies Warm is full of tidbits like this.

If you’re interested in more detailed anthropological accounts of familial practices in other parts of the world, you should head straight to Hopgood’s bibliography, which contains some great sources. Or, if you’re more interested in a feminist critique of contemporary motherhood in industrialized nations, you should wait to read Badinter’s The Conflict. But if you don’t mind a breezy tour of what parenting looks like globally, mixed with Hopgood’s own personal reflections about her life as a transplanted Asian American new mom living in Buenos Aires, you should pick up her book.

Hopgood’s slightly more serious intention emerges in the final chapter. She’d like us to open up to other approaches to parenting, embrace a little more cosmopolitanism when it comes to family life, and let go of some of our judgment:

It’s unhealthy to enclose ourselves in parental parochialism, ruled by the plaintive, guilty insistence that there is a single, best way to raise children. We may or may not adopt what another family in another culture or place does, but we can take comfort in knowing that there really is more than one good way to get a baby to sleep, transport her from place to place, and feed her.

Kids are “amazingly adaptive and resilient creatures,” she writes. And there are “many ways to be a good parent in the world.”

One could certainly unpack “parent” to develop a more nuanced examination of how various cultural practices are gendered—or in some cases, how they might undo heteronormative, Western ideals of mothering and fathering. (Aka pygmy fathers turn out to be pretty interesting in this regard.) Come to think of it, Hopgood’s case studies might make some great material for my Women’s Studies students.

In the meantime, her book suggests some of the wide variations within the global landscape of parenting—as well as how parenting practices have morphed over time and continue to change today, from the U.S. to Argentina to China. And that raises an interesting question: if ideas about parenting are traveling across borders, like so many other things, is this global exchange altering how we think about what it means to parent?

Last weekend at the playground, a little boy around three years old approached my daughter Maybelle, who’s also three.  “Are you a boy or a girl?” he asked her.  She didn’t answer—I suspect she wasn’t sure how to process that question.  And to tell the truth, neither was I.

After a pause, I said, “She’s a girl.”

“Then why is she wearing boys’ clothes?” he asked.

This one I knew the answer to:  “Everybody can like Spiderman,” I said.

“Spiderman!” Maybelle agreed enthusiastically.

Maybelle’s dad has begun commenting that when he picks Maybelle up at preschool, the kids are divided by gender on the playground.  It’s not that they’re playing with different things, they just aren’t all playing together.

“Who does Maybelle play with?” I asked.

“Everybody,” he said.  “She doesn’t seem to understand the way they’re dividing.  Nobody turns her away.”

This is one of the interesting things about having a kid with an intellectual disability:  Maybelle doesn’t really get gender.  She calls her bed a “big girl bed,” because that’s the exciting billing we gave it when we made the transition from the crib, but “girl” doesn’t necessarily have any meaning to her.

Her speech therapist occasionally asks her to identify pictures by gender:  “Is that a boy or a girl?”  And Maybelle doesn’t know the answer.

I have to say, I’m glad that she doesn’t.  I recognize the argument that could be made here:  gender is a central component of how our culture works.  In order to be a person who functions in the world as it now operates, a person needs to understand the conventions of gender, the backpack of cultural expectations, needs to be able to use gendered pronouns appropriately and identify girls and boys, men and women.

And yet part of what I do in my job is to try to destabilize all that stuff.  I have a number of students who identify as trans, who are recognizing that they don’t fit within the gender binary that’s been taught to them from day one.  I have a still larger number of students who may identify with a gender, but want that gender to be pretty significantly reworked.  I identify with a gender, but I don’t believe that there are only two genders, nor do I believe that anybody should be automatically consigned to one.

Maybelle currently likes dinosaurs and big trucks.  She’s a tiny bit obsessed with The Sound of Music and John Lee Hooker’s song “Boom Boom.”  She plays drums, and she does “Ring Around a Rosie” with her baby doll.  She rolls a stuffed octopus around the house in a stroller.  One of her favorite items of clothing is her Spiderman sweatshirt.  This sounds like a great collection of interests, one not at all constrained by binary gendered expectations.

When people ask Maybelle, “Is that a boy or a girl?” or “Are you a boy or a girl?”, I think the correct answer might be, “I don’t know.”  Or maybe, “Who cares?”  The fact that gender isn’t intuitively obvious to her might be a benefit.  She might have the opportunity not to have to unlearn the damaging, sexist stuff that my students, my colleagues, my friends, and I have to grapple with.

There are many reasons why women are underrepresented in science & engineering. Some are specific to certain areas and some are systemic. When I was an undergraduate in science, as I tell my students, many moons ago, the advice I received from older women was to wait until tenure to start having kids. In the late 1990s that meant waiting until about your mid-late 30s. That did NOT sound like a good plan. Nowadays I see more graduate students and post-docs starting families. I know not an ideal time, but it coincides better with fertility.

That is why I practically screamed in my office when I read that the White House was announcing some new initiatives at the National Science Foundation to assist in this family versus career battle:

• Allow postponement of grants for child birth/adoption – Grant recipients can defer their awards for up to one year to care for their newborn or newly adopted children.
• Allow grant suspension for parental leave – Grant recipients who wish to suspend their grants to take parental leave can extend those grants by a comparable duration at no cost.
• Provide supplements to cover research technicians – Principal investigators can apply for stipends to pay research technicians or equivalent staff to maintain labs while PIs are on family leave.
• Publicize the availability of family friendly opportunities – NSF will issue announcements and revise current program solicitations to expressly promote these opportunities to eligible awardees.
• Promote family friendliness for panel reviewers – STEM researchers who review the grant proposals of their peers will have greater opportunities to conduct virtual reviews rather than travel to a central location, increasing flexibility and reducing dependent-care needs.
• Support research and evaluation – NSF will continue to encourage the submission of proposals for research that would asses the effectiveness of policies aimed at keeping women in the STEM pipeline.
• Leverage and Expand Partnerships — NSF will leverage existing relationships with academic institutions to encourage the extension of the tenure clock and allow for dual hiring opportunities.

These are some serious changes folks!

For one, as the Sylvia comic points out, women, from my own sampling, do want to use their awesomeness to help the world. What some young women struggle with is seeing how their fab science and math skills translate into working with people to solve the world’s problems. I know, I know…for some of us it is obvious. For some of us it takes time to learn how imperative it is to have empathetic and caring people in science and engineering. Not that only women are those things, but girls are raised to value emotions and relationships. But even when they can see how much of the world they can impact with their civil engineering skills, many have plans to be mothers one day.

I do not believe women are leaving science & engineering because they want to be mothers, but it may be influencing how easy it can be for them to decide to leave when they hit other challenges and roadblocks.

The no cost extension benefit will be tricky. Most, if not all, scientists and engineers have others working for them off these grants. From graduate students and post-docs to supporting department administrators (like the accounting office), all that would also be on hold.

My cynical side needs to be reminded that these are just the beginning. Hopefully if the National Science Foundation is sending this strong and clear message that women in science & engineering are valuable enough to enact these changes, that other institutions like universities will follow. Perhaps bridge funding for the graduate students who need to keep working on their experiments while the faculty member is bonding with a newborn? More on campus child care centers to allow parents to stay on campus (and in the lab) longer each day, instead of dashing out at 5 pm to make the 6 pm pick up.

These changes are a start. Not a small start either, but still a start. And a huge signal to the next generation of scientists and engineers that their human lives will be valued as much as their lives in the lab.

I wanted to let you know that over at my primary blogging residence, we’ve begun a conversation about Friday’s New York Times article, “A Father’s Search for a Drug for Down Syndrome.” Over the next few days bloggers, activists, and other folks–all parents of children with Down syndrome–will weigh in.  Come have a look and take part!

This week I sent a video of my daughter Maybelle to a friend who recently had a child with Down syndrome. In this video, Maybelle—who’s almost three—is reading word cards, signing and saying the words she sees. My friend responded, “That’s pretty impressive. Is that uniquely Maybelle, or is there some sort of emerging sense that kids with Down syndrome read precociously?”

Of course I was delighted to answer this question for my friend, and I’ll answer it for you: Kids with Down syndrome tend to be good visual learners, so they can often learn to read fairly early. (Downs Ed is a fabulous group in England that’s been leading the research on this.) Kids with Down syndrome may have difficulty speaking effectively, but they can often read quite well–ahead of grade level, etc–if they’re taught to read. This “if” is important, as illustrated by another conversation I had this week.

One of my best friends is an occupational therapist. She just started working with an eight-year-old who has Down syndrome and is in the life skills class at his public elementary school. The life skills class, for those who don’t know, is essentially the class for kids that the school system has decided can’t learn. It’s a segregated special education classroom where kids aren’t taught the kind of academic subject matter you’d learn in second grade; instead, they’re taught how to get dressed, how to sit quietly, how to interact with another human being. As an example of the kinds of academic challenges that are left out of life skills classes, this child is eight, and he can count to three. To three.

Maybelle is almost three years old, and she can count to ten, say the alphabet, and read more than 100 words. I share this with you and with other people in the world not because it’s “uniquely Maybelle.” She’s not a prodigy. She’s a child with Down syndrome who has been given the opportunity to achieve, and—like most of us in the world—when given an opportunity, she rises to meet it. I don’t mean to suggest that she, or anybody, will achieve every opportunity that’s presented, of course. But it’s rare for any of us to achieve without being provided with the space, the support, and the belief that make achievement possible.

Maybelle is one hell of a reader. I am incredibly fortunate to have friends who are speech therapists, early interventionists, and scholars of Down syndrome. These folks told me about high expectations and helped shatter my stereotypes about Down syndrome. I think about the eight-year-old that my friend is working with. His parents probably followed the advice of the authorities at the school, who perhaps haven’t been doing their jobs all that well and haven’t learned that full inclusion in typical classrooms is almost always recommended for kids with Down syndrome. I’ll bet good money that, if given the opportunity, this child would learn to count, to read, to perform fairly well in an inclusive classroom with his same-age peers. But if he isn’t provided with that opportunity, he isn’t going to achieve.

Thirty years ago educators believed it was impossible for people with Down syndrome to learn to read (click here if you want to hear some of my reflections on this). It’s long past time for our false beliefs and low expectations to be sad relics of an era we’ve moved beyond.

Update from Alison: I very quickly got feedback from several people about this post that has made me want to apologize and clarify. I’m sorry to imply that kids–any kids, with Down syndrome or not–should be performing in a certain way if they’re getting the “correct” opportunities. All kids are unique individuals, and their strengths and challenges are going to be specific to them. This of course has nothing to do with Down syndrome: some kids are going to be readers, some kids are going to be athletes, some are going to have artistic sensibilities, some are going to have the knack for fixing things that are broken, some are going to be beautifully attuned to other people’s emotions. Etc. And these strengths will emerge at various times in their lives. I know about one kid who really didn’t read at all until the Harry Potter books came out, and then–as a teenager–he learned to read, and loved to read.

I want us to live in a world with high expectations and lots of opportunities for all our kids. And I want us to appreciate our kids for their gifts, whatever they are, and whenever they emerge. You’re right to be skeptical of my assessment of the eight-year-old I haven’t met: a child’s ability to count, or speak, or read isn’t evidence of lack of opportunity. And it’s lack of opportunity that’s my concern, not the individual gifts and talents of any particular kid in the world.

Again, I apologize, and I appreciate the feedback!