This summer—which, like all our summers, my family and I spent in rural, coastal Maine—a woman with a llama showed up (invited) to a neighbor's house. The llama, a nasty-tempered thing, mule-kicked a 3-year-old in the chest, knocking her flat on her back. The parents, after calmly confirming their wailing child wasn't seriously hurt, grew cheerily circumspect. "Aw, it's good for her," said her father, brushing the incident aside.
"That," my husband remarked later, more flabbergasted than judgmental, "was amazing."
Amazing to us, because we're the parents of a 2-year-old who spends the school year in Manhattan, a place where llamas that kick little children are put down or otherwise made to "disappear." Not that we've ever encountered a llama in the city, and perhaps, given the general crotchetiness of the breed, this is because they're all sleeping the big sleep or have been exiled to Siberia (or Maine). Regardless, it's impossible to imagine a New York City parent—especially the parent of a hoof-punted toddler—praising the incident as an occasion for personal growth.
At 38, I'm a hybrid product of both Maine and Manhattan. I was raised in Portland by parents who subscribed to the an-occasional-llama-kick-is-good-for-you philosophy, but I've lived in New York for the past 13 years, and over that period I have subsequently internalized its more cautious, protective ways, at least where small children are concerned. As a result, I suffer from a little-diagnosed syndrome I call "parenting schizophrenia." I alter my behavior regularly based on the prevailing ethos of my location, and hear many contradictory voices inside my head, telling me what or what not to believe is best for my daughter.
Viewed from New York, the land of padded playgrounds and antibacterial gel, Maine can seem like the land of the parentally supervised toddler death wish. Another "we're not in New York anymore" moment occurred during a Fourth of July cookout. The host's backyard concluded at the crest of a steep hill that was littered with an assortment of children's wheeled riding vehicles—a plastic Tonka truck, a Radio Flyer car, a wagon. At the bottom of the hill loomed the blunt corner of a garden-bed railway tie, a sharp fence post, and a number of big trees. My Manhattan-patented Parental QuickStock Vision registered the serious-injury possibilities as infinite. A little girl hopped on the plastic Tonka truck and sped down the hill, bull's-eyeing for a tree and capsizing halfway. She stood up, righted the truck, and pulled it up the hill to go again. Soon all the kids were zooming down the hill, their parents hollering an exaggerated "oof" after every particularly impressive wipeout.
To defend the Maine way (which I come to temporarily adopt after a few weeks of urban detoxing), the worst-case scenario for the Tonka-truck hill ride is a hospital trip, yes—but all other scenarios aren't only a blast, they also allow kids to feel that they have a creative, confidence-boosting stake in beating back their own boredom. And the llama incident: You could argue that an underreacting parent helps a child overcome fears that might otherwise be legitimized by a full-scale freak-out. Maybe, viewed a certain way, it can be seen as good for a child to be kicked by a large animal and survive. Maybe the experience will provide her with a not-unhealthy belief that the world isn't out to get her.
But it would be too neatly oppositional to imply that all Maine parents are paragons of laissez-faire chillness. My Maine mothers' group introduced me to a whole slew of worries I wasn't aware I should be entertaining. The organic yogurt my New York friends consider healthy is, according to these women, "pure sugar." None of them vaccinate their kids—ever. Autism doesn't seem to be the root concern, as it is in most places. More objectionable is that the government forces everyone to vaccinate kids for diseases these parents think their children will likely never be exposed to, like hep B. Fluoride, too, evidently involves a government conspiracy of some kind, though I couldn't tell you what. Perhaps because simple human survival still seems of primary importance in New York (weirdly, we city people have more basic, caveman worries), issues of sugar and fluoride become superfluous. In Maine, the seeming lack of kidnappers and mad cabbies lets parents free their head space to worry about kids' civil liberties as well as their bodies.
Next Page: How do these two sets of rules affect my daughter?
