Despite my less than stellar experiences with pushchair makers’ web sites, I managed to decide on a new pushchair. In the beginning of August we bought a second-hand Bugaboo Chameleon. (I’m not going to honour their atrocious web site with a link.)

One month later, I gave up and decided to get a new Stokke. The Bugaboo wasn’t a bad pushchair, really, but Stokke suits me much better. (Eric spends less time pushing the pushchair about and wasn’t as interested in the choice as I was, but he also liked the Stokke better.)

The deciding factor for me was the ease of “driving”. The Bugaboo started misbehaving as soon as the road sloped sideways. The pushchair was pulling me off the road, and the struggle to keep it straight left me with achy wrists every single afternoon. Add a heavy load of groceries and I was near tears at times. I never had that kind of trouble with the Stokke. I think the frame of the Bugaboo has a fundamental design flaw, at least for my body: the angles at which I can apply force (determined by the angle, attachment points and shape of the handlebar) were very inefficient given the direction I wanted to push or turn it.

Also, the handlebar on the Bugaboo can be raised and lowered, but its angle cannot be changed. When I had it at a comfortable height, I was walking way too close to the pushchair, so my toes kept hitting the rear axle. I had to either walk with my arms outstretched, or the handlebar too high, in order to avoid that. The Stokke doesn’t have a rear axle – the lower section of its frame is sort of x-shaped – and both the height and the angle of its handlebar are adjustable, which made it much easier to adapt to how I stand and move.

The two pushchairs are quite similar in many ways – robust design, well constructed, adaptable, expensive – and if you haven’t tried them you might well think that they’re pretty much the same. But once you take a closer look, it turns out that there are a lot of differences.

• The Bugaboo has suspension on its front wheels. It’s also got foam rear wheels, while the Stokke has hard wheels with a layer of rubber. So the Bugaboo offers a smoother ride, especially on uneven roads, and is slightly easier to push up and down over pavement edges. But I think the suspension contributed to its headstrong behaviour on sloping roads.
• The Stokke has better options for adjusting the handlebar. The Bugaboo only allows you to adjust the height, and changing it means unscrewing and then rescrewing two screws. Which means you wouldn’t adjust the handlebar every time you hand over the pushchair to your partner when you’re out walking together. With the Stokke we definitely do that. In fact adjusting the handlebar is so easy that I change it for a 100 metre uphill stretch, when I want a slightly different angle, and then put it back when I reach the top.
• The Bugaboo allows you to reverse direction by just flipping the handlebar to the other side, so you end up with the large fixed wheels in front and the small swivel wheels at the back. Their instruction manual says it’s good for tricky terrain, snow and sand and such. The Stokke has nothing like that.
• The Stokke has a more convenient basket. The Bugaboo basket has a curved bottom which makes it harder to pack (especially with boxy things like cartons of milk and juice) and it’s a bit difficult to access (almost impossible with the carrycot in place). The Stokke basket/bag has a flat bottom and is perfectly accessible with the seat facing backwards, and relatively convenient with the seat facing forwards, too.
• The Bugaboo is lighter: 9.3 kg vs. Stokke’s 12.5 kg according to the official stats. Which was a real surprise to me, because the Stokke feels lighter when I’m pushing it.
• The Stokke can go up and down stairs: you don’t need to lift it, you can pull it up step by step, i.e. less strain for your back, and no need to wait for someone to help you. This is less important in Stockholm where all train and tube stations have lifts, but in London this feature made all the difference.
• On the Stokke you can raise and lower the seat, and at its highest, the seat comes much higher up than on the Bugaboo, or any other pushchair I’ve seen for that matter. I like that a lot, especially when Ingrid was a baby.
• The Bugaboo carrycot has a carrying handle and can be used as a Moses basket. The seat can also be lifted off the pushchair and used separately. The Stokke doesn’t give you that option.
• The Stokke comes with an infant insert for its seat, so the seat can be used from about 3 months’ age. (We never even bought a carrycot and got by with just the seat, since we didn’t use the pushchair much in the first months.) The Bugaboo has quite a deep seat so when it’s upright, small children tend to sink down into a “sack of potatoes” position.
• Releasing the seat for reclining can be done with one hand on the Stokke, so the other hand can stabilize the seat and slowly lower it down. On the Bugaboo you need two hands to push two buttons on either side of the seat, so the seat always reclined with a jerk. Or perhaps there is a trick that I just didn’t discover yet.
• The Bugaboo has a more “normal” shape, while the Stokke has a central axle which means that you need a special “split” foot muff and can’t use any old sleeping bag. It’s also a bit tricky to wrap a sleeping kid in a blanket when there’s a stick in the way.
• The Stokke has a removable plastic footrest. Especially in autumn and winter, I often removed the footrest to shake off the gravel and dust. On the Bugaboo, the footrest is part of the seat, i.e. made of fabric and not removable, i.e. it gets pretty gunky pretty fast.
• The Bugaboo has much more convenient brakes: the brake handle sits on the handlebar and is easy to put on and off. On the Stokke, the brake is operated by a little lever that sits down by one of the wheels, so you can only reach it with your foot, and sometimes I need to jiggle it a few times before I get the brakes on or off.

Edited on October 4th to add another paragraph (on brakes).

Top five unhelpful things you can say to your toddler, especially if the child is crying, angry, sad or upset – learned from actual playground encounters:

• Sluta! (Stop that!)
• Skärp dig! (A direct translation would be “Pull yourself together!’ but I guess in English you’d say something like “Behave yourself” instead.)
• Vad är det för fel på dig?! (What’s wrong with you?!)
• Nu lägger du av. (You will stop that right this moment.)
• Varför ska du vara så jobbig? (Why do you have to be so difficult?)

Every time I hear a variation on this theme I can just imagine the toddler thinking, Thanks for the reminder – I had totally forgotten that crying is not the accepted method of argumentation in this setting. Of course I will stop. Not.

Småbarnsförälder is a very useful Swedish word meaning a parent of young children. It is useful because it allows one to concisely express wry observations about parenthood, such as “only parents of young children would have their Sunday dinner at IKEA’s customer restaurant”.

(Ingrid has not discovered McDonald’s yet, so the IKEA restaurant is her idea of fine dining. Meatballs! With jam! And you can watch TV afterwards!)

Do children make us happy? The question has been raised in a few articles. There was a Newsweek article earlier this year, reporting on a study of whether having children makes people happy. The study reported that

Parents experience lower levels of emotional well-being, less frequent positive emotions and more frequent negative emotions than their childless peers

and

In fact, no group of parents—married, single, step or even empty nest—reported significantly greater emotional well-being than people who never had children. It’s such a counterintuitive finding because we have these cultural beliefs that children are the key to happiness and a healthy life, and they’re not.

There’s also an essay at Babble.com, which has as its starting point Daniel Gilbert’s book Stumbling on Happiness. The essay features this chart which also seems to say that married people without children are happier than those with children:

Stumbling on Happiness also mentions a study trying to ascertain which activities women enjoy most, and reporting that “taking care of children” is rated lower than grocery shopping, sleeping, or socializing.

The initial angle for both stories is that parents lie to others (perhaps because it isn’t socially acceptable to say that you were happier before you had children) and maybe even delude themselves:

“Perhaps parents find it psychologically advantageous to talk themselves into thinking this is a great thing,” theorizes Oswald, who has two daughters. “It would be psychologically difficult to come to the view early in life, I’ve made a huge mistake having these children. I imagine that humans are good at the flexibility of thought that stops them from taking that view.”

I don’t find that explanation very convincing. If parenting consistently made us unhappy, then we’d have died out long ago. So there must be more to this.

Firstly, this might be a new phenomenon, as Newsweek recognises: changes to family and work patterns may have made parenting a lot more stressful than it used to be. We don’t live with our extended families, we are stressed and hurried. (Perhaps even more so in the US, where these studies have been performed?) And our expectations have changed as well: rather than having kids so they can help you on the farm and one day inherit it, people now expect parenting to be a fulfilling experience, a way to realise themselves. And indeed people in the Western world are having fewer and fewer children. Perhaps they have indeed concluded that children aren’t worth the bother, the money, or the loss of freedom.

Another explanation is that the studies may have asked the wrong questions. Parents may not enjoy “taking care of children” but that doesn’t mean their children don’t make them happy. You wouldn’t conclude that beautiful clothes don’t make women happy because women don’t enjoy “taking care of clothes”, to pick a random example.

But even more importantly, I think the studies have looked at the wrong measure of happiness. Average happiness is not how we judge our lives, and not what we remember afterwards.

“How do [the experiences of parenthood] balance out?” Gilbert asks. “It turns out that if you average all the moments, they balance out a little on the negative side. Being a parent lowers your average daily happiness. But average daily happiness isn’t all there is to be said about happiness. Indeed one could make the case that average happiness across a day isn’t what we’re trying for. As human beings, it’s not our aim. It shouldn’t be our goal. What we should be looking for is special transcendent moments that may even come at the cost of a lower average.

This is what a childless / child-free adult’s happiness levels might look like over some arbitrary time period unmarked by any major life events:

And this is what they might look like for a parent:

The little ups and downs of normal life have been replaced by a rollercoaster. The lack of flexibility and freedom and time have dragged down the average, and there are more troughs than before. Those are the troughs of teething, sleepless nights, and tantrums, and later on “I hate you mummy!” and so on. But you also get more peaks, of the kind that make your heart melt and that you wish you could remember forever: the early morning snuggle, the happy child running to greet you with a hug.

Finally, long-term happiness is different from short-term satisfaction. Satisfaction is about the balance between feeling good and feeling bad. But for durable happiness, something more is needed. I myself think of it as growth. Gretchen Rubin, one of my favourite bloggers, has a slightly different angle and describes it as feeling right: “to be happy, you must think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right”.

Parenting makes you grow as a person. It’s corny but it’s true. You learn things about yourself, and you change, and you become a more mature person. You aren’t fully adult until you have taken care of someone else.

Links:
Newsweek: True or False: Having Kids Makes You Happy
Babble.com: Are You Happy? Are You Sure?
The Happiness Project: Do your children make you happy?
Momaroo: Do Kids Make You Happy?
Walrus Magazine: Parenting makes you miserable. Discuss.
National Post: Do our kids make us happy? Answer: It depends what you mean by ‘happy’.

Last weekend’s Berlin trip was my first night away from Ingrid. It quite naturally became the end of night-time breastfeeding for us, without too much complaining.

Things would have been different even just a few months ago. Breastfeeding has been an important source of comfort and security for her. Whenever I have tried to cut out night feeds (and I’ve tried this every few months or so) she has been very upset. Sometimes she understood what I wanted and tried her best, really tried, but she couldn’t go back to sleep – she just lay there, tossing and turning and whimpering, for close to an hour. (After which I gave up, fed her, and we were both asleep within minutes.) As a result, both of us got even less sleep than usual during those nights, which is why I didn’t repeat the experiment too often.

This time she was upset the first night I wasn’t there, and then she accepted the new deal. For several nights she still woke once or twice, but didn’t even ask to breastfeed: just rolled closer to me, confirmed that I’m still there, and went back to sleep. The last 2 nights she’s had a cold, slept worse, and missed breastfeeding again, but now that I know she can do it, it’s a lot easier to refuse.

I was slightly concerned that this might be the end of breastfeeding for us. I feared that a 2-day separation plus no more night feeds would cause supply problems, and then she’d be less interested, leading to even lower supply, and thus even less interest. But that hasn’t happened – she’s still breastfeeding at least once a day, and generally both morning and evening.

You might think that 2 years of breastfeeding is enough, even more than enough. Somehow it’s become the cultural norm to wean as soon as you can, and definitely before the child’s a year old! (I have my theories about why this may be so, but that’s a separate topic.) Had you asked me two years ago how long I’d breastfeed, I would never have guessed that I’d go on for this long. But that was then. That was before I knew how enjoyable these moments would be for both of us – and before I had seen how natural and right this feels.

I recall posting some time ago about how becoming a parent hasn’t really changed me. I have to modify that statement a bit. I have changed. I have developed patience.

At root I’m not a particularly patient person. I twitch with impatience when I cannot walk up the escalator because people are standing in the way, or when the people in the queue in front of me cannot find their way around their own wallets because the wallet is stuffed with junk.

But now I have learned to sit quietly in a dark bedroom for 20 minutes (or longer, on a bad day) doing nothing but waiting for Ingrid to fall asleep. And that’s after 10 minutes of bedtime story + lullaby. It was hard in the beginning, but now I manage to wait it out without any real frustration, night after night.

Hmm, I just had an idea – audiobooks! Why haven’t I thought of that before? Thank you, blog.

Parent hack #1: Store bibs in the kitchen (or a dining room, if that’s where you eat).

In London all we had was one large room that served as kitchen + dining area + home office + living room, plus a separate small bedroom. In our new house we actually have multiple rooms. This is a novel experience, and one I will have to get used to. (We intend to fight it, though: the wall between the kitchen and the living room will come down soon.) This means that we suddenly need to think about what room we put things in.

We used to store bibs in a dresser with all the rest of Ingrid’s clothes. But the dresser is in the bedroom, which is at the other end of the house from the kitchen. So before every meal one of us would walk all the way to the other end of the house to get a bib for Ingrid. Until finally a light went on, and I moved the bibs from the dresser to the top kitchen drawer, next to the cutlery.

Parent hack #2: Use empty cereal boxes as drawing paper.

Ingrid likes drawing. Actually mostly she likes to watch me draw, and occasionally she does some brief but energetic scribbling. We used an ordinary A4 pad of paper to begin with. But her scribbles often ended up outside the paper, or the paper got wrinkled by her vigorous actions, so I figured we needed something bigger. The only large piece of paper I could find was an empty box of HavreFras, that I split open and flattened. It keeps its shape a lot better than plain paper – not only during drawing but also when I fold it up and tuck it away between our drawing sessions. Now I keep all our cereal boxes, and sometimes find myself thinking that I should finish that cereal so I get a new box to draw on.

Parent hack #2b: Draw on a carpet.

Despite the larger surface, Ingrid’s scribbles still often veered dangerously close to the edge, and I had to scrub crayon marks from the floor. Then a few weeks after we’d moved we finally unpacked and unrolled the carpet, which covers most of the free floor area in the living room. Naturally we ended up sitting on the carpet and drawing on our cardboard box (something you couldn’t do with a plain sheet of paper). And I realised – crayons don’t leave any marks on a dark carpet! You’d have to really work hard to make a mark of any sort with a crayon on a soft carpet. As an added bonus, dropped crayons don’t roll as far on a carpet as they do on a bare floor.

Realising that washing dishes is, in fact, quite a pleasant and peaceful activity, when compared to alternatives such as trying to brush a toddler’s teeth, or singing “baa baa white sheep” for the umpteenth time.

Via Bruce Schneier I found this essay by a mom who let her 9-year-old son take the NY subway home on his own.

Long story short: My son got home, ecstatic with independence.

Long story longer, and analyzed, to boot: Half the people I’ve told this episode to now want to turn me in for child abuse. As if keeping kids under lock and key and helmet and cell phone and nanny and surveillance is the right way to rear kids. It’s not. It’s debilitating — for us and for them.

Even more interesting is this graphic that Bruce links to, showing (anecdotally) how children’s freedom of movement has decreased over the past 4 generations. While I think some of this decrease is sensible (the 8-year-old in 1919 did not have to cope with cars doing 70mph on busy roads), much of it is due to excessive anxiety.

I am also reminded of this TED talk about 5 dangerous things you should let your kids do.

A few months ago I wrote about Ingrid’s crying and tantrums, about how strongly they affect me, and how I cannot ignore them. The more I think about it, the more I think that is a good thing, and I shouldn’t try to ignore her crying.

A commenter said she is immune to her child’s wailing if it’s not because he is sick or hurt. But then I thought about what would make me sad, and I can think of many things that would upset me more than plain physical pain. Disappointment, frustration, loneliness, anxiety, loss, fear… I am sure these all are as upsetting for a child as for an adult, if not more. Frustration and disappointment in particular must be a big part of a toddler’s life. They are just starting to understand the world and want to do more with it, but still have very limited power to express their wishes and to affect the world around them.

Sometimes the root cause of the unhappiness is something that can be solved. Lonely and tired and don’t want to sit in the pushchair? OK, we’ve got a baby carrier for that (a whole stash of them in fact). Other times I either cannot or will not solve the problem. Upset because I don’t allow her to stab the kitchen table with her fork? Too bad, I still won’t allow it. Disappointed because the playroom we were going to visit is closed? Well, so am I, but there’s not much I can do about it.

But even if I cannot fix the problem, I don’t want to ignore Ingrid’s crying. She has no other way of expressing these emotions, after all – I can hardly expect her to sigh and say “I’m really disappointed”. She has had so little experience of disappointment in her short life, of course she’s going to be bad at dealing with these feelings! Over time she will learn to recognise these feelings, understand, express and control them. At the moment, however, she needs adult help. So I do it for her: I talk to her, and say the things I think she might want to say if only she knew how.

Of course she would eventually stop crying if I ignored her as well. But I believe it is more productive in the long run if I help her handle the situation.

PS: Things may change when Ingrid grows older and we get to real attention-seeking tantrums, exaggerating the unhappiness because of the reaction it provokes, making noise because it might get you things. But that’s not what’s happening now.