  When Aidan was 20 months old, I took him to the Tuesday library program for the first time. It was awful. Aidan, not the program. He didn't know how to sit in a group of children (his age give or take six months) and pay attention to the leader. What was worse, he thought he was the leader. He would stand up rather than sit, face the group of kids, and do something funny to make them laugh, and they would. As I saw him become the distracting child in the room, visions of class clown replete with trips to the principal's office and parent-teacher meetings filled my head. Suddenly, the library program became vitally important to our family. I showed up early rather than right when the program started so he got the full experience of being herded into a sitting group. I sat next to him and enforced his sitting in the group, under threat of removal to the back of the room or bathroom for "timeout" if he didn't stay seated. Aidan's a fast learner, and under my imposed structure, he came to discover listening was more fun anyway. I hated risking over-structuring his participation in a fun activity, but I did it because I wanted Aidan to set his norm for lifetime participation in a classroom setting under my eye.
The real lesson I took away was that I started too late with him. I should have had him in group settings earlier. I think if I had, it wouldn't have been an enforcement issue, but rather a more natural learning experience. So now that Ella is a year old, and in her social development bloom, I've started taking her to the library programs. I hope it works. The Montrose Library program really fell apart, so now I'm in search of a new branch.
Today was my first time to go to the Heights, and I got swarmed by a few moms who seemed desperate for conversation. As one in particular talked to me, I thought to myself that this is how wide my eyes would be and how protruding my words would fall out if I didn't have blogs. Thank God for this one little social outlet. On my urlLink other blog , I've been discussing that the organizers of urlLink BloggerCon II didn't have any place in their conference for mom-blogs. It seems that, after being removed from functioning society in the real world, moms are being removed from it in the blogging world as well. How have we as a culture come to segregate childraising from other roles in our world so completely?
Even at the library, I've noticed an overwhelming majority of moms (and nannies) who are foreign. I can only guess that their cultural upbringing taught them to trust public institutional offerings, especially for rearing children, while our own has taught us that public programming is for poor people. But children were never meant to be raised in isolation, and the otherwise suburb-induced, garage-style of child raising that makes blogs so valuable for moms everywhere, must also be affecting our children. 
