Adoption Bloglandia

[marydell]

You know how certain parenting behaviors and beliefs kinda go together?  Like, moms who are into babywearing often also tend to be into breastfeeding, as well as sometimes co-sleeping and attachment parenting.  I enjoy reading about all of those things, although I don't practice them, except occasional babywearing back when my baby could reasonably be "worn," instead of "hauled."  So my blog reading on that front has been enjoyable, even though much of it doesn't apply to me.

In the land of special-needs parenting blogs, I don't encounter a lot of parents whose kids have the same specific needs as mine, but I do encounter an attitude I like, particularly among parents of kids with developmental delays and emotional challenges.  There's a lot of focus on the unique situation of each child, and a very strong emphasis on communication and reasoning--at least in the blogs I read.  So, yay that; another blog environment where nothing really makes me go "guh?" except the very occasional anti-vaccination thing.

Unfortunately, in the land of transracial adoption and toddler/orphan adoption, there is often a correlation with an authoritarian ideal of parenting, and a control-based approach to solving all problems of behavior and attachment, up to and including forced eye contact, holding, and so forth.  Which is a style of parenting that bothers me a lot, particularly when applied to children who have already been through trauma and/or abuse.  A lot of adoptive parents are also very religious, which sometimes intersects with either authoritarian parenting or racial "colorblindness."  It's not impossible to find adoptive-parent blogs that feature non-authoritarian parenting & racial awareness in a single package, but sifting through the other ones can be....unpleasant.

Is there something you're passionate about, that seems to often go hand-in-hand with something you're passionately against?  (Despite the serious topic of this entry, feel free to provide facetious and/or silly answers to this question :)

Comments

[almeda.livejournal.com]

When I was growing up, my mother imposed the following rules about TV in her house(*):

Anything (a) on PBS or (b) contained in the nightly network news broadcast, was whitelisted. Later, when TNG started, 'any episode of Star Trek' was also put on the whitelist.

Aside from that, the TV was not to be on except by very special, applied-for-in-advance dispensation. Sometimes we'd watch movies that were being aired (or later, rented ones).

This is why, unlike most of my age-mates, I'd never heard of Schoolhouse Rock until after I was out of high school -- it was on ABC on weekdays, so I never got to see it.

On the other hand, if PBS (11 or 20) found it fit to air, Mom saw no reason why I shouldn't watch it, so I saw a lot of nature shows and BBC products. :->

Watching some of them as an adult, I'm taken aback at how overdone and even somewhat melodramatic many of those classic nature shows are, but I was clearly the right age for them the first time around. And MAN do I know a lot about nature now that I wouldn't if I hadn't spent hours every week with Marty Stouffer and David Attenborough and Jacques Cousteau! Plus I learned to do the accents. :->


* -- at Dad's house on visitation weekends, the rules were rather different; also, Mom didn't try to control what I did or didn't watch at the after-school program (where programming was basically decided by majority vote of the kids present who wanted to watch the one TV available).