Fasteners

 

 

In the 1950s and 60s – and probably for centuries before that – anyone playing with dolls had the opportunity to learn how to use a variety of fasteners.

Of course, they learned to use them on their own clothing and shoes, but, especially with the advent of Barbie, fasteners on a much smaller scale appeared and gave them some rigorous training in tiny fine motor skills.

Barbie’s dresses either zipped (a 2-3 inch zipper with about a ¼ inch zipper pull), snapped or buttoned with buttons the size of snaps, and button holes to match. Ken’s trousers had an even shorter zipper. Dresses almost always had a hook-and-eye closure at the top of the zipper to keep it from unzipping, and Barbie’s cardigan and pullover sweater set had tiny pearl beads that buttoned through thread loops.

Snaps and buttons were generally the closures on larger dolls’ clothes, often because they were actually infant hand-me-downs – at least in our house, since I was the last baby and they wouldn't be used again.

Doll shoes offered a unique opportunity to learn to tie shoelaces that were about 1/3 the length of a child’s shoelace, if that. And some shoes buckled, as did children’s sandals. Practice on a micro scale made operating fasteners on people clothes a piece of cake.

There was no Velcro.

Nowadays there’s seldom anything but Velcro.

The American Girl Doll, which is a very nice size doll (18 inches tall), whose clothes would be far easier to manipulate than Barbie’s, is Velcro paradise. The only other fasteners I’ve seen on those dolls are zippers on her jeans, a buckle on a belt from the ‘90s (I can’t swear that zippers or buckles are still used on anything of hers) and on one occasion I found snaps to close a “button front” shirt. But that may have been a home-made outfit. Doll sneakers still have laces, though.

And it seems to be the way of things in doll life that Velcro is the closure of choice, just as it has replaced buckles on people shoes and a few other items.

As an Occupational Therapist for over 30 years, I worked in schools with special needs children. Some had physical challenges, while others had mental, sensory or visual-perceptual ones. At the beginning of that career, I would’ve welcomed Velcro. The only place it was at the time was on their hand or foot braces, if they had them.

Part of my job was to teach some of these children how to put on socks, foot/leg braces and shoes. While some had issues that precluded them putting on their own braces, I did teach them how to put on their socks and then the shoes over the braces, a more difficult task than putting shoes on unbraced feet.

Once a child was able to get that far, I took on shoelace tying. There are a few different ways to learn to tie shoelaces. When I started out, I only knew the way I’d been taught, but I quickly learned other ways to get the job done, and I let the kids decide which way worked best for them.

I did have the occasional parent who looked at their child’s age rather than their physical abilities when insisting on my teaching them a particular skill. Of course, there was also no reason why the parent couldn’t teach a skill at home if they were so insistent.

“How would I do that?” one parent asked.

“How did you teach your other kids? Do the same thing,” I replied. I had to keep my face palm in my head.

One mother of twins was constantly telling me that I wasn’t doing enough for one of her sons. Of course, despite them being twins, one was much more capable than the other. She berated me at an IEP meeting because shoelace tying wasn’t one of the objectives for the less capable twin, even though his brother had mastered that skill the year before. I told her I considered it important to learn to put his shoes on before we tackled tying laces.

I also suggested Velcro closures for his shoes – they had recently become available on children’s shoes at that point. She acted like I’d slapped her. She told me in no uncertain terms she would not get Velcro closure shoes for her son because it would make him look – and here she used the R-word. Actually,  no one would have noticed his shoes.

I was wearing shoes with Velcro closures at the time she said that. I looked at my shoes, then back at her, but she missed my point.

I also at times had to teach some children how to buckle shoes. That wasn’t as easy as one might think, since often the buckle is out of the line of sight while being buckled.

Coat zippers were another challenge. Getting the two sides attached at hip level or sometimes lower, is difficult, and sometimes the coats are too bulky to allow for the bottom to be pulled up to waist level. Getting the one side all the way into the slot on the other side is also difficult, so it is a great accomplishment when it finally happens.

Generally, when learning coat zipping, the children would practice it with the coat on a table. Sometimes they would pull the coat over their head afterwards so they didn’t have to try zipping it while it was on them.

I have a few coats myself that have reverse zippers (the kind that zip normally, but also unzip from the bottom for more comfort when sitting) that I find difficult to attach because of the reverse zip component. Or maybe because they're right-handed zippers and I'm left-handed.

Perhaps the most difficult thing I ever had to fasten was my school uniform blouses in high school. Some designer decided it would be cute to make school blouses that buttoned up the back. Given the fact that I had to go to school earlier in high school than in elementary school, and I’m simply not a 6 a.m. kind of person, that was not going to work for me. (And my maid simply wouldn't touch buttons!)

As a lefty, I have a history of needing to adapt things to my needs. The blouses were no different. I buttoned all of my blouses up except for the top button, and they hung in my closet that way, so that I could pull them over my head and button the top button very easily once the blouse was on. I then had to beg my mother to leave them buttoned that way when she did the laundry. Since they were that wonder material known then as “perma-press” she didn’t need to iron them, so my blouses were permanently buttoned through my high school years.

One thing I never understood was that, although most of my shoes had laces while I was growing up, the laces seldom came undone. I didn’t know about double knotting, so they were simply tied and stayed that way.

As an adult, however, my laces have frequently come undone. The round type often seen in men’s dress shoes – and a few of my own shoes – simply refuse to stay tied. I don’t know how my father managed to keep his tied, but I have had to resort to flat laces, since double knotting doesn’t work for round laces, either.

Of course, as an OT, I learned about many types of shoe laces, from the round and flat varieties I’ve just mentioned to elastic laces and alternate-closure laces.

Although I usually worked with children in schools, a couple of summers I worked with adults in rehabilitation. One gentleman with whom I’d worked a few days earlier was sitting on a chair with his shoes untied. He’d had a stroke, so he had one non-functional arm. I stopped to ask if he needed help with his shoelaces, and he said his therapist was getting elastic laces for him.

He and I had a rapport such that I could joke with him and he wouldn’t be offended. I quipped, “What, you mean you can’t tie your laces with one hand?”

He laughed and said he bet I couldn’t either. I said I bet I could.

Now at this stage in life – I was in my mid-30s – I had never tried such a thing. I had no idea whether or not I could tie shoe laces with one hand. And he called my bluff.

“Okay, let’s see you do it,” he said.

“Which hand?” I asked. If I was going to fail, it would be huge.

Once he ascertained that I was left-handed, he told me to use my right hand.

So, I sat down, untied my shoelace, and proceeded to tie it with one hand. It took a bit longer, and I couldn’t get the laces as tight as if I’d used two hands, but I’d done it. The man was duly impressed, but then suspected I’d lied about being left handed, so insisted that I tie the other shoe with the other hand. So I did. And that, my friends, is my stupid people trick.

The man was thrilled that I could do that and wanted to know where I’d learned it. I told him I’d never done it before, and figured it out just then. He told everyone.

Being able to tie one handed or double knot hasn’t kept me from modernizing my shoe wardrobe. I’ve never been very good at keeping slip on shoes from slipping off. As a nod to laziness, I’ve tried Sketchers hands-free shoes, which are pretty good, as well as the shoes that have elastic laces with a slider to tighten them. I also discovered that stretchy shoe laces and metal closures to go on the ends of them can be had through Amazon. They work well for regular lace-up shoes if you don’t want to have to tie them. While there’s no little bow at the top, things like that don’t concern me.

I don’t expect to forget how to tie my shoelaces any time soon, so a little time-saving – especially at the airport where I have to remove my shoes to go through TSA – is a good thing.

Not Ice, and Other Stories

 

 

When I was a wee small child, I got a lot of things wrong.

Until I was about seven or eight, I had recurring ear infections, so I don’t know whether or not that played a role, causing me to mishear things. It sounds logical, so I’m sticking with it.

My oldest brother has always been amused by things I say, and several people in my adult life have suggested I try stand-up comedy.

The thing is, I don’t actually know how to write comedy. I just know that sometimes the things I misinterpret, or just the way I say something makes other people laugh. I don’t think it would work if I tried to do it on purpose.

Part of the reason some things happened was my total failure to ask questions when I didn’t understand something.

Why, you might ask? It wasn’t shyness or fear of being laughed at (I was laughed at quite a bit growing up). It was simply that for most of my early childhood, when I asked my mother, “Why?” about anything, she would reply with, “Because I’m your mother, and I said so.”

So I knew the answer. It didn’t solve anything for me, but it taught me to not bother asking.

When I was small, we had a very silly way of interrupting my mother when she was talking to another adult. Now, the three of us knew that interrupting adult conversations was a huge no-no, but in an emergency – and what isn’t an emergency to a child? – I would stand quietly for a few seconds and then, if they didn’t stop to pay attention to me, I’d say, “Excuse me, Mother, but the house is on fire.”

Granted, I thought that was the craziest thing in the world to say, and tremendously funny when I was three or four. But of course, I didn’t ask, “Because I’m your mother and I said so.”

There actually was a history to that one. My eldest brother came running in excitedly once when he was small, saying, “Mother, Mother, Mother!” while she was having a conversation. She excused herself from the adult conversation and turned to my brother and said, “You do not interrupt when adults are having a conversation. I don’t care what’s going on. If the house is on fire, you say, ‘Excuse me, Mother, but the house is on fire,' and then wait.”

As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she realized how ridiculous that statement was, and she and her friend both had difficulty keeping a straight face. But she solemnly went on. “Now, what do you want?”

It turned out that whatever it was my brother thought was such an emergency wasn’t for an adult. But because of that, he told my other brother when he was old enough to interrupt that that’s how it was done, and the two of them passed it on to me. They didn’t pass on the entire story, only what you had to say to my mother in order to interrupt. I was in school before I learned the whole story.

Another thing I was told as a child was to look up and down before crossing the street. This was the single most ridiculous thing I had ever heard. But again, “I’m your mother…” kept my questions unasked.

Common sense told me to look in both directions before crossing the street. But up and down? Why? Were there helicopters and submarines just waiting beyond my peripheral vision to kill me?

However, an obedient child, I dutifully looked at the sky and the ground before I crossed the street, while secretly looking to my left and right so I wouldn’t be hit by a car.

My mother thought I was being silly or a smart Alek or whatever she thought, but her complete lack of curiosity as to why I would do such a thing is a marvel. Maybe by the third child mothers are worn out with trying to understand their kids. Or maybe I was just too weird, and she didn’t want to go there.

Prayers were another fun place for misheard words. Being Catholic, we had a whole repertoire of formal prayers from which to choose. Somehow, The Lord’s Prayer I learned without a glitch. The Hail Mary had a word I wasn’t familiar with (womb) so I thought everyone was saying, “And blessed is the fruit of thy wound, Jesus.” How Jesus was considered a wound was anyone’s guess. I assumed it was something to do with the wounds from being on the cross, since that’s the only way he was pictured in school. But what he had to do with fruit, I didn’t get until several years later.

The Hail Holy Queen had several wrong words in my version. I would pray, “Hail Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, Our life, our sweetness and our hope. To thee do we cry poor vanished (banished) children of Eve, To thee to we send up our sides (sighs) mourning (I thought it was morning, though) and weeping in this valley of tears. Turn then most gracious advocate, thy knives of mercy toward us (thine eyes), and after this, our exile, show unto us the fruit of thy wound, Jesus.” It didn’t strike me as terribly odd, since prayers had lots of old fashioned words, so I just thought it was more of the same. Besides, so much was in Latin in those days, it could’ve been something Latin.

Then there was the Pledge of Allegiance, which I got mostly right. “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for witches stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” Since I didn’t understand half the words, putting witches into the mix was perfectly normal. There had been witch trials, after all.

But the best was a sign I saw at the bottom of the church parking lot, stapled to the telephone pole. I saw it every Sunday on the way to church. I had only recently learned to read, but I could only see the top line to read from a distance. While the parking lot also doubled as our recess yard in school (people who attended schools with real, actual playgrounds shudder that we played on a sloping lot of asphalt) we weren’t allowed to go close to the road, and the sign was right beside the road.

I was proud of my reading skills, but what I read made no sense to me. At the top of the sign were the letters N-O-T-I-C-E. Now, I only knew three and four letter words so far when I saw that sign. So, one fine Sunday morning I said, “Not Ice. What does that mean?” My parents didn’t know what I was talking about, so I pointed to the sign. “It says, ‘Not Ice.’ That doesn’t make any sense. What does it mean?”

My mother started to laugh, and it was several minutes before she had herself under enough control to teach me a new word: Notice.

Now, in our family, whenever something doesn’t make any sense, someone is bound to say, “Not ice, huh?”

I’ve had friends who have asked if we laughed constantly when I was growing up. No, I was a rather serious child, actually. They couldn’t believe these things happened without gales of laughter.

The end of childhood didn’t end my occasional failure to understand.

I had a rather untalented teacher in high school chemistry. She was essentially a warm body with a science degree, but chemistry wasn’t it. The only way she could explain anything to do with chemistry was word for word out of the book.

Can you put it another way? She could not. Unfortunately, not all of us could understand the concepts quite the way the authors of the book wrote them.

When the time came for our first exam, more than half of the class failed the exam. This was a class that now would be classified college prep or AP. The students in this class were not ones who were used to failing anything. Ever.

We reviewed the questions, and one in particular had people asking repeatedly for her to explain the concept. She did, using the same words over and over.

I have been convinced throughout most of my life that I have a short-circuit somewhere in my brain between my understanding of some things and my conscious mind. Either that or I’m possessed by demons.

This situation intervened just at that moment in class.

I raised my hand and asked, “Do you mean – ” and I launched into a 5 minute explanation of whatever concept was escaping my classmates. I used totally different words than the teacher had, actually saying it a different way. All around me I heard, “Oh, now I get it!” and “Is that what she meant?” The lights had come on. My teacher’s face lit up like the understanding of her students.

“Yes! Yes, that’s it!” she replied.

I wrinkled my face and said, “I don’t understand that.”

How I managed to not get sent to the principal’s office or at the very least kicked out of class, I don’t know. I wasn’t being a smart Alek. I truly didn’t understand any of what I’d just said. It was as if an alien was speaking through me. I guess my totally mystified look was the only thing that kept the teacher from sending me out. Instead, she angrily told the girl in front of me to explain back to me what I’d just said.

To this day I can’t do chemistry.  The closest I can come is a cooking recipe, but how it works is complete magic. Mine is not a chemically-oriented mind. I’m convinced my chemistry teacher ruined me for that science, and if I’d had a competent teacher, I might have actually understood the subject. Or not.

I had a similar experience regarding electricity. A friend was trying to explain how electricity works, and try as he might, he couldn’t impart that wisdom to me. He explained in several different ways. I finally explained it back, and he told me I was right. Again, I told him it didn’t make any sense.

He was exasperated and had run out of different ways to explain it. Someone who lived in the same house he did happened to come in and heard our discussion. That person then explained it to me, and I somehow understood what he was saying. His words weren’t that different, but enough that I got the concept. The second person was English, and my friend insisted that the only reason I understood was the accent.

Of course, then my friend followed up by saying, “Picture the wire like a faucet. Water runs through the faucet. Electrons do the same in a wire.  At that point (mind, I was an adult, if you consider someone in their 20s an adult) I picked up a wire, closed one eye and squinted at the end of the wire.

“Where’s the hole?”

I never did manage to live that one down. But my friend got to see firsthand how my brain short-circuit works. And while it’s frustrating to me, it certainly provides my friends with a certain level of amusement.

 

 

Kids Today

 

 

“Kids aren’t like they used to be.”

“You can’t raise kids the way you were raised because the world isn’t what it was when you grew up.”

“It takes a village to raise a child.”

These sentiments have been chanted for years now, and I don’t think they’re entirely true.

Kids haven’t changed over the decades. What has changed is adults’ attitudes toward them and the adult expectations. They are no longer seen as moldable pieces of clay without individual personalities. Adults don’t treat them with the “Do not speak until spoken to” rules we were given, and they accept that children have opinions. They’re no longer told, “You’ll do it and you’ll like it,” as we frequently heard on “Leave It to Beaver.”

Instead, they’re allowed to have opinions, and they’re listened to, sometimes far beyond what their experience and knowledge indicate they should be.

In the dark ages, when I was a child, I was more likely to get a backhanded smack on the mouth if I tried to argue once I was told to do something. No, I didn’t come from some repressed family. Most kids in my era had a similar upbringing. And the backhanded slap was more of a flick that startled rather than hurt.

My opinion was only considered when I was choosing what to eat in a restaurant, or what I wanted for Christmas. Even then it was taken into consideration as part of what my parents could afford. When my mother took me clothes shopping (before about age 10), she shopped for the clothes, and once she had decided what clothes were in her price range and what style she liked, I was consulted on which of three or four items I wanted and what color – as long as it wasn’t purple, since my mother hated purple. As I got older, I had more choices, but she had the final say on price range and level of modesty until I bought my own clothes, when I was finally allowed to choose purple. I was never without opinions and desires. They simply weren’t always taken into consideration.

So, it wasn’t kids that were different, it was what was acceptable behavior that changed.

As far as the world being different, yes it is. Of course there have always been differences according to where one was raised.

My parents grew up in the city. There was a certain sensibility one had living in the city that wasn't the experience in the suburbs or in a rural area. Most of my cousins grew up in suburban areas that were more citified than my more rural suburban area, so they had more street smarts than I ever needed. I was seen as the unsophisticated country mouse who didn’t think ducks and chickens in the next yard was any big deal, but was impressed by sidewalks and street cleaners.

Our city parents moved to the suburbs ostensibly to have more room to raise a family, and demonstrate more prosperity than their first-generation parents. What was less apparent to us kids was our parents’ desire to stay in a white neighborhood as the cities became less segregated.

I’m not ashamed of where I grew up. I had no say in that decision. I think I missed opportunities for growth and understanding in my childhood because my parents saw racial segregation as somehow protecting their children. From what? I’ve never been clear on that.

And yes, we’ve thankfully moved beyond people being allowed to refuse to sell their house to someone of another race, so children are exposed to and more comfortable with people of other races and ethnicities. Even still, I heard a couple of high school students complain not long ago that there isn’t as much racial and ethnic diversity in our area as they would wish.

Many of my friends’ adult children are moving back to the city our parents couldn’t wait to flee.

As far as education, children don’t learn in the same way we did. They print and some don’t know cursive. They use chrome books and tablets and not copybooks and looseleaf. Their textbooks are often written in “soundbites” rather than full-length pages or double columns with few pictures. They sometimes sit in “pods” or around tables, sitting on therapy balls instead of chairs. They don’t sit in desks with the chair attached, in long rows facing a blackboard. Many kids today would ask what a blackboard is. (Psst: it's a white board that you use chalk on.)

But my generation was subjected to changes in the curriculum, too. Starting at about age 9 (4^th grade), we had this anomaly known as “modern math” in which we had to organize objects into sets and subsets. What this had to do with math, I still can’t fathom. I never used it in subsequent math classes, but for four years we wasted the first two months of school with a repetition of this nonsense before we got down to the business of learning arithmetic. And it’s only gotten worse, at least in the schools I’ve worked in in New Jersey.

A “new” method of setting up algebra problems made the subject more difficult for me until I finally got a teacher who taught algebra equations “the old fashioned way,” which was what clicked with me.

Education has always evolved, based on what subjects were necessary and what was no longer relevant.

But school education is not about raising children.  Teachers  aren’t in charge – even in religious schools – of forming a child’s behavior, values and empathy. That’s the parents’ job, although there are some who would prefer to dump all learning on the schools.

A teacher’s job is more difficult if parents don’t teach basic good manners and consideration of others’ rights and feelings. While a child needs to learn subtle differences in acceptable behavior in different environments, such as the classroom and the school yard, if the basics aren’t there, the subtleties will be meaningless.

It’s still the parents’ job to instill basic good behavior in their children, just as it was for our parents and grandparents.

So, yes, you can and should raise your child with morals and values and a sense of acceptable behavior. Maybe the morals and values are slightly different, but there are still some,  regardless of how “modern” society becomes.

I believe the greatest disservice we do to children is to raise them with an inflated, entitled sense of self and no manners.

And then we come to the village.

While it’s true that no man is an island, I wouldn’t want the village determining what sort of people my children would become – if I had children. As my mother told me when I went away to college, “I had 18 years to instill my values in you, and if I didn’t succeed, it’s a little late now.”

And the village’s values didn’t always align with what she wanted for me, which is why she taught me to fight against peer pressure. If I complained about not being allowed to do what “everyone else” was doing, she’d reply, “And if everyone else jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you jump off after them?” At the time, I didn’t know where Brooklyn was.

When I was a child, neighbors wouldn’t hesitate to correct anyone’s child who wasn’t behaving. But if you needed correction by the neighbors, you heard about it from your parents when they found out. As the parents saw it, they were being judged by your bad behavior.

I think neighbors trying that now might be in for a good telling off by some parents who think their children are too precious for correction. But they can still tell you to get off their lawn.

While the village was reinforcing what behavior was acceptable, it was your parents who had the final say. Now, sadly, many people don’t even know their neighbors, so the village suffers by not being allowed to help as the guardrails of society.

So, while each of these assertions has some level of truth to it, none is entirely true. We need the village to guide acceptable behavior, not to teach it. And while the world continues to change, kids are kids, and they can and should still be taught basic civility and manners because kindness and empathy never hurt anyone.