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KAREN BARTA: Good morning. I'm Karen Barta with news from Minnesota Public Radio. Another milestone in the flood recovery at Grand forks, North Dakota, and East grand forks, Minnesota. The Kennedy Bridge that links the two cities reopened earlier this morning. The bridge had been closed since April 19 because of the flooded Red River.

House Majority Leader Dick Armey is expected to tour a flood-damaged Grand Forks later today. Minnesota Department of Transportation employees will observe a moment of silence this afternoon to mark workers Memorial Day. The day honors workers killed or injured on the job and raises awareness about job safety. MnDOT spokesman Andy Brown says this is an important time of year to draw attention to safety issues.

ANDY BROWN: This is very good timing for us because we can remind the motorists and also our workers that they need to be extra careful in work zones because of the fact that construction season is starting, and we also have maintenance crews out there throughout the summer doing, you know, miscellaneous projects on the roadways. So it's an important heads up to everyone just to be safe and to slow down and pay a little more attention to what we're doing as we drive-through work zones.

KAREN BARTA: Work related accidents have killed 29 state transportation employees since 1960. Thousands of people in South Saint Paul have identified a woman who was killed Sunday in an apartment on West Seventh street. The victim was 25-year-old Lynette Benson of Saint Paul.

The state forecast clouds increasing from West to East with a chance of showers or thunderstorms this afternoon in the West, and for the Twin Cities becoming mostly cloudy with a high near 70. Skies are mostly sunny around the region this hour. In Duluth, it's 41 degrees. It's 51 in Rochester, 53 in Saint Cloud, and 53 in the Twin Cities. That's news from Minnesota Public radio. I'm Karen Barta. Today's programming is supported by 3M who generously matches more than 900 employee contributions to Minnesota Public Radio.

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PAULA SCHROEDER: Dr. Virginia Lupo says it's time for Minnesota to keep a list of people with birth defects today on our Voices of Minnesota interview, Lupo talks about her medical practice at Hennepin County Medical center, the state's largest public hospital. Lupo is an obstetrician gynecologist who is an authority on birth defects. She's also a medical school professor at the University of Minnesota.

She says the only way we will learn more about birth defects is to keep track of people who have them. Minnesota lawmakers are considering legislation this session to create an electronic birth defects registry. Minnesota Public Radio's Mary Stucky talked with Lupo about the proposal, but the conversation started with Lupo, talking about how going to an all-female Minneapolis high school in the 1960s played a role in pursuing a medical career.

MARY STUCKY: Would you say that going to an all girls high school did indeed influence your decisions? You say it supported them in that weren't competing with boys and didn't have to deal with that?

VIRGINIA LUPO: I think being in an all girls high school just takes away a whole issue of competition. The issue never comes up that-- in an all girls high school. No decisions are made based on sex or feeling inadequate or how will I appear to a guy? That just is something that does not enter in at all during the entire four years.

And I think that when you have that kind of an assumption during such a formative time of your life, I think you've got to come out of it as a slightly different person. I think it's fascinating when you look nationally at some of the women who have come out of girls high schools. It's amazing to see what kind of leadership has come out of that.

I look at Eleanor Smeal, and I might disagree with a lot of different politics that she's into these days, but she came out of a similar background. And I have to smile at that. I think there's something to be said for the background. Hillary Rodham Clinton came out of an all girls college.

When I was graduating from high school, there were a lot of colleges where women need not apply. When I was graduating, Georgetown wasn't even an option. Women could only get into the Georgetown School of Foreign Service. Otherwise, Georgetown was all guys. I think Harvard was all guys. Brown was all guys. These things were just not up for discussion. Notre Dame was an all boys school, and there was a real limit to what schools a woman could look at. Rhodes scholarships were boys only, girls not need apply.

MARY STUCKY: Where did you go to college?

VIRGINIA LUPO: I went to St. Louis University in Saint Louis, Missouri. It was a huge Jesuit coed school in the center of the city in Saint Louis. That was the late '60s, and things were happening on urban campuses.

MARY STUCKY: Influential in bringing you to a place like Hennepin County Medical Center, do you think?

VIRGINIA LUPO: Oh, extremely so. Saint Louis U was a huge Jesuit school, and the Jesuits in those days were extremely socially and politically active. They were writing some beautiful music that is still the backbone of a lot of Catholic worship in the country. These guys would write songs in the morning and sing them at noontime, and 1,000 people would come at noontime for church on a weekday to hear this music.

And then there was a social activist subgroup that came out of this where we would go and tutor in the very, very poor inner city in Saint Louis. And some of the best and brightest and-- I don't know, most hip people on campus were the ones who would go out and do some of this really helpful, socially active kind of work in the very poor parts of Saint Louis. So it feels real comfortable working with some of the poorest women in the Twin Cities here at this hospital for the last 12 years.

MARY STUCKY: How many men in your class at the University of Minnesota Medical school-- how many women?

VIRGINIA LUPO: In my Med school class, 15% of the class was women. I was on the crest of a lot of women getting into Med school at the U of M. Now the rates are pretty much 50/50 and have been for a few years.

MARY STUCKY: How did it go for women then?

VIRGINIA LUPO: Went just fine. I think that there were some old stereotypes that were still breaking down. But in medicine, for the most part, when things get busy, you judge people on how well they perform. I was a surgery resident at the University in the mid '70s, and things were so busy. And I always felt judged on how I performed, not on who or what I was.

MARY STUCKY: We've made a lot of progress in what we know about maternal and child care. I know you believe there's a lot yet to be done. What is left?

VIRGINIA LUPO: I think that it's hard to see beyond what we to realize how much we don't know. I think that we don't have a clue as to what causes most birth defects. A lot of times when a baby is born with a birth defect, I think we have about as much understanding as people did when someone got pneumonia a few hundred years ago. They had no idea that there were germs around that could cause a specific infection. I don't think we have a clue about the vast majority of birth defects out there.

We don't understand medically why a lot of women get high blood pressure at the end of pregnancy. We have a standard way of thinking about it. It's a crazy disease that you don't see anywhere else in medicine, and it can still be a very devastating problem at the end of pregnancy. I don't think we have a clue yet what causes that. The other thing, at least in the US, that we don't understand well, is the personal motivations of women to take care of themselves in pregnancy and how tremendously but indefinably that impacts how well pregnancies turn out.

I think that the recent Urban Coalition report on pregnancy outcome in the Southeast Asian population in the Twin Cities hints a little bit at this in that, a lot of the Southeast Asian women in town deliver, even though they're extremely poor, even though they may be teenagers, even though they may have had eight or nine children beforehand, and actually do extremely well. Their babies do well. They do well. They have a very low C-section rate.

They actually don't utilize prenatal care all that much, and they're sure not driving up the cost of pregnancy in the Twin cities in spite of how very good their outcomes are. There's something that we haven't defined about the social, personal, cultural motivation of our Southeast Asian population to have good pregnancy outcomes that I wish we could package and sell. If we could have outcomes that good in the rest of the Twin cities, we could close up shop and go home.

MARY STUCKY: Talk a little bit about the populations, the people that you see here delivering children at Hennepin County Medical Center.

VIRGINIA LUPO: I don't think most of the Twin Cities realizes how incredibly heterogeneous the population at this hospital is. 15% of the moms delivering at Hennepin County Medical Center speak only Spanish. About 8% of the moms are Somali immigrants and only speak Somali. We still have a huge Native American, Southeast Asian population also. We have a small Russian population, and then we have a large contingent of US-born African-American women and Caucasian women. I don't think that a lot of the rest of the Twin Cities appreciates how heterogeneous a population this hospital serves.

MARY STUCKY: And not just in ethnicity, but also in their life experiences, right?

VIRGINIA LUPO: Oh, absolutely. Yes. We have a Somali population that for the most part left Somalia, spent several years in the camps, refugee camps, before coming to the US. Many of our Southeast Asian women delivered previously in Thailand. And when a woman says, well, I delivered in a hospital in Thailand, it's not a matter of sending there for their old records and having them faxed. That meant that they probably delivered in a tent somewhere in the refugee camp that was the Thailand hospital that day.

We have women right off the bus coming from Mexico who do not speak a word of English whatsoever. We see poverty on a financial nutritional basis that is almost indescribable, except in old medical textbooks. We see women with tuberculosis throughout their entire body. That is some of the most severe tuberculosis that is seen outside of patients who have end stage HIV disease. These are medical problems that we've only read about in textbooks in the past, and we're taking care of these moms day in and day out.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Dr. Virginia Lupo talking with Mary Stucky From Minnesota Public Radio. Dr. Lupo is at Hennepin County Medical center, obstetrician gynecologist. And you're listening to our Voices of Minnesota interview on mid-morning. I'm Paula Schroeder. It's 10:17 o'clock. Coming up, after voices of Minnesota, we will hear from Janice Kaiser, a child educator who says parents need to follow their own ideas when it comes to child rearing. But let's return now to Mary Stucky's conversation with Dr. Lupo.

MARY STUCKY: Some Minnesota lawmakers are proposing a registry, an electronic database of people with birth defects in Minnesota. Why do you think we need that? You've been involved with that effort.

VIRGINIA LUPO: We have no clue as to how many babies are born with what birth defects in this state. Any information we have is from textbooks looking at rates in other parts of the country. And I would argue that Minnesota's unique. Minnesota has a lot of farmers using a lot of toxic chemicals, a lot of pesticides. We don't know what our rates of a lot of birth defects are.

It may be that our rates are lower than the rest of the country, and we don't have a problem. It may be they're a lot higher, and we should get the word out better on what we do know will help prevent birth defects. There's been a good program in Atlanta for the last 30 or 40 years looking at birth defects. There have been a few other programs in the country, some good, some not so good.

In Minnesota, we are a pretty organized state. And when we try to approach this problem, we had some PhDs from the state health department start to work on this and really think this thing through and be able to draw on the mistakes of other people as we try to set this thing up. So we've worked real hard at figuring out how we would totally protect the confidentiality and privacy of people who had birth defects.

This isn't going to be a printed thing where you can punch in on the internet to find out who in your neighborhood had a baby with a birth defect. But we're trying real hard to figure out how we could get good data to help inform our state about what the extent of the problem is. I think it's a great idea.

MARY STUCKY: I've heard, at least, of opposition to this claiming that it would set up a sort of caste system, the idea being that people with birth defects maybe wouldn't be deemed as worthy of medical attention, that kind of thing. Is that at all a valid concern in your opinion?

VIRGINIA LUPO: That would be a concern if in any way, shape, or form that data could be accessed. That will not be accessible by insurance companies. Researchers will only have access under very limited conditions with no identifiers at all as to who the people are. We are purely interested in rates of problems to decide what needs to be addressed by the state health department to help decrease these rates, if indeed this is even a problem in our state.

MARY STUCKY: Do we know enough to even know what the statistics are on birth defects? What do we know about that?

VIRGINIA LUPO: We know, for instance, that the most common birth defect is something called spina bifida, which is a defect in the spine. We know that in England, the rate is four or five times higher than it is in the United States. Several years ago, there was a comment that a lot of babies who were being born with these problems in and around Brownsville, Texas. And that was a huge o interest in the media, and no one was sure if this was really happening. They did not have a birth defects registry.

So someone would say, yeah, I saw one last month, or yeah, I saw one too. And this thing took off like wildfire. There probably was not a real increase in this, but there was sure a lot of talk about it for a while, a lot of fear going around, a lot of lack of knowledge of what was happening.

Well, we have a lot of women coming from Mexico, from the Tex-Mex border who come up here. We don't have a clue as to what our background incidence is here. It might be that we're seeing a lot of immigrants who have problems and it's not a Minnesota environmental issue, but it's an issue of someone getting pregnant in a different part of the country and being exposed to something there.

MARY STUCKY: I'm curious nationally though, we must have some statistics. Are birth defects up? Are there more?

VIRGINIA LUPO: Nationally, there are probably fewer babies born with birth defects now than 10 years ago or 20 years ago in that some women who find out they're having a baby with a birth defect choose to abort. So if you're only looking at live born rates of birth defects, you're missing at least some.

In Minnesota, a lot of women with birth defects don't necessarily choose to abort. You can't just use national statistics for different kinds of screening tests and extrapolate those national statistics to Minnesota. In other words, if nationally-- for instance, if the AMA would say, every woman should be screened with such and such a blood test because then we'll identify all the [? DownS ?] babies, all these women can abort the [? DownS ?] babies and it won't cost society much because now we won't have to take care of [? DownS ?] babies.

Those numbers don't hold true in Minnesota. Many women in Minnesota hear that they have a baby with a birth defect and smile and say, thank you, and then go on to carry their baby and to deal with the problems after the baby's born. I would argue that you cannot extrapolate national statistics to our population.

MARY STUCKY: You mentioned spina bifida is a common birth defect. What are some of the others?

VIRGINIA LUPO: Birth defects range from some that are annoying, to some that are totally life threatening. Cleft lip and palate is annoying in that baby's going to require surgery a few times and often require some speech therapy. But that sure is in no way is going to affect at all how easily a child learns or how well they do in school later.

Other birth defects we're going to track include Down Syndrome and some of the less common, but much, much worse chromosome kind of problems. There's chromosome problems where absolutely everyone who's ever had that problem dies within a few days of birth, for instance. Those are the kinds of things we're going to track also to get a feel for what the extent of problems is in Minnesota.

MARY STUCKY: What do we know-- and you say we know very little, but what do we know about what causes them?

VIRGINIA LUPO: We know what causes a few specific birth defects, we know when some of them occur, but in no way do we understand the entire topic of birth defects. We understand that spina bifida forms over about a 48 hour period within a few weeks after a woman becomes pregnant.

Somehow, we know that if women take a certain vitamin, a folate or folic acid, that that decreases the chances of them having a certain birth defect. But it sure doesn't prevent it completely. We know that women who are diabetics have a lot of these birth defects also as far as spina bifida. But what the mechanism is, we're just not sure.

We have a lot of hints and clues about what causes individual birth defects, but we don't have a whole global understanding of it as we do understand about germs, bacteria, viruses causing infections.

MARY STUCKY: And there's a genetic component, isn't there?

VIRGINIA LUPO: There's a genetic component in a lot of birth defects. How someone's genes or chromosomes or inheritance influences their susceptibility to a certain kind of birth defect is something we still do not have a clue about.

MARY STUCKY: Do you think a day will come when there will be a medical procedure-- when we will know enough about the genetic system that there will be a medical procedure to alter genes in such a way as to prevent birth defects?

VIRGINIA LUPO: Oh, I think so, definitely. I'm not saying it's a no brainer, but it's a doable kind of a thing. There's a limited number of genes and chromosomes and DNA that everybody has. And when we can understand how that all fits together, I think we'll have some kind of a clue as how to correct some of the really bad birth defects out there.

In addition, one of the most preventable mental retardation causes in the country is fetal alcohol syndrome. We don't understand how alcohol causes retardation in babies, but we do know that it definitely causes it. And a real simple solution to that is to not have pregnant women drink excessive alcohol during pregnancy.

MARY STUCKY: You mentioned pesticides. Do we know that pesticides cause birth defects? Are there other environmental pollutants that we know cause birth defects?

VIRGINIA LUPO: We don't know for certain if or what environmental pollutants cause birth defects. When you're dealing with pesticides, you're dealing with a chemical compound with lots of different chemicals in it. And if we do find someone with a birth defect and get a list of what she's been exposed to as far as pesticides, we try to figure out what's the most likely culprit. But as far as the mechanism or when in pregnancy it caused this problem, we still often don't have a clue.

When you look at a lot of the medical problems out there, a lot of things initially were identified just by a random observation. Someone said, gee, I delivered a baby with no arms and legs. Well, yes, I did take thalidomide during pregnancy. And then eventually, people started to realize, taking thalidomide results in babies with no arms and legs. Let's take this drug off the market.

In a similar way, unless those initial observations are made and someone says, gee, I wonder, is there any possibility? We're not going to have a handle on what the extent of these problems are. So that's the beauty in starting to at least record these things.

MARY STUCKY: You mentioned fetal alcohol syndrome. Are you seeing a lot more? Is it growing or is the message getting out about that?

VIRGINIA LUPO: Consistently, when you look at the data on drinking in pregnancy, the main effect of general interest campaigns is to somewhat decrease alcohol amongst women who only drink occasionally. Having labels on bottles, having signs in bars is not having an effect on the heaviest drinkers who are the ones at most risk of fetal alcohol. That will make suburban women say, gosh, maybe I shouldn't even have this glass of wine at my baby shower. Those aren't the women that are the main source of fetal alcohol.

When we have women who come in drinking a case of beer a day on a regular basis or drinking a fifth of whiskey a day on a regular basis, these are the women who are still the largest source of babies with fetal alcohol syndrome. And no amount of labeling on bottles is going to change their behavior.

MARY STUCKY: What is your advice? Stop drinking if you are pregnant, if you are nursing a baby?

VIRGINIA LUPO: We don't have any clue as to how much alcohol is a safe amount in pregnancy. When I was training in residency and fellowship for OB, the common understanding was that a glass of wine-- a glass of alcohol a day was OK. More than that was not, but one a day was probably OK.

I think that the less a woman drinks, the better she's going to do. We don't know what the threshold is, but I think we do have a small subset of women drinking huge amounts of alcohol. And I don't think that our public information programs are going to get to those women who are still the largest source of fetal alcohol syndrome babies in the state.

MARY STUCKY: What is it in alcohol that causes the problem? Do we know that?

VIRGINIA LUPO: We don't know. We don't know what chemically it is and when it causes which of its effects. No, we don't understand that at all.

MARY STUCKY: Are we making progress in educating women? You say that the woman who's drinking a case of beer a day and is pregnant is not responding to public education campaigns. What will work and are we making any progress in getting the message out?

VIRGINIA LUPO: The only thing that will work to prevent fetal alcohol syndrome is to prevent women from drinking in pregnancy. We have a somewhat mixed message though on the topic of drinking. In one respect, it's going to be hard to tell pregnant women they cannot drink and we will lock them up to prevent them from drinking when on the other hand, it's OK to drink, have your license revoked, go to jail for a while, and be driving again.

Within just a few days of Governor and Mrs. Carlson's announcements about the work they want to do on fetal alcohol syndrome, the police officer had his leg injured by a person who had a long history of driving and drinking. In Scandinavia, you are caught driving while drinking once and lose your driving license for the rest of your life. That is a society that is serious about alcohol prevention.

In Minnesota, we're not serious about that. And it's a little hard to justify state efforts to tell pregnant women to stop drinking completely or we will put you in jail and then on the other hand, not enforce much more strongly the sanctions against drinking and driving.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Dr. Virginia Lupo, an obstetrician gynecologist at Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis, talking with Mary Stucky. Our voices of Minnesota interviews are heard nearly every Monday as part of midmorning on Minnesota Public Radio. The producer for the series is Dan Olsen.

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Today's programming is sponsored in part by Sean Stoy in honor of his 16th birthday.

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PAULA SCHROEDER: It's 27.5 minutes before 11:00. You're listening to midmorning on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Paula Schroeder. Well, any mother or father will tell you that being a parent is the toughest job there is, and there's little training for it other than what you get on the job. Of course, there are myriad books available for the bewildered or frustrated new parent, but they often don't take into account the values and culture inherent in each individual. Janice Kaiser, who is co-author with Laura Davis of a new book called Becoming The Parent You Want To Be, says that's what makes this parenting guide different from the rest.

JANICE KAISER: We wanted to provide a comprehensive as well as a practical guide for all of the issues that parents face in the early years with their children, but we also wanted to provide a book that respected the needs of parents as well as the needs of children. I remember as a young parent picking up parenting books so excited, thinking, oh, goody--

PAULA SCHROEDER: I'm going to get the answer now.

JANICE KAISER: And putting them down pretty quickly, I think, is starting to feel bad about myself if my child wasn't sleeping through the night or if they were spitting food in my face. And parents need encouragement and acknowledgment and support for the work they're doing, as well as practical hands on strategies for the everyday struggles that they face with kids.

PAULA SCHROEDER: In the introduction to the book, your co-author, Laura Davis, writes that it's almost as if some of the authors of these books think that parents are blank slates, that they come to this parenting table with no background, no culture, no values, and just are there to learn everything right from the start. But it doesn't work that way.

JANICE KAISER: In fact, they come with hopes and expectations and visions and their own experiences, all of which they bring to the complex task of getting to know themselves as parents and getting to know their children.

PAULA SCHROEDER: And of course, the other thing is that every child is not the same either.

JANICE KAISER: Right.

PAULA SCHROEDER: They have very different personalities.

JANICE KAISER: In the first part of the book, the nine principles for a parenting journey, we talk about both developing a vision, who is the parent I want to be, and learning about children. In terms of developing a vision, we often start, as I said, with a vision even before we become parents, and that vision is always evolving and changing as we get to know ourselves, our family, our children.

And even though we don't fully achieve our vision all the time, knowing what we're striving for it gives us a yardstick by which we can measure our actions and our choices as a parent. In terms of learning about children, it's important that we learn about our unique child. We do that through observing, and we do that through sharing time and experiences with our child. It's also useful to get information about children in general. Why is it so hard for two-year-olds to share, and why are four-year-Olds so fascinated with gunplay and power hero play?

PAULA SCHROEDER: Yeah. And there is so much to learn about child development. But right there, we've talked about the first two principles. And I want to go back to the first one that you emphasize, and that is developing a vision for parenting. It's almost like a mission statement that a corporation has to come up with.

JANICE KAISER: And many of us feel like we don't have a vision, like, well, I just I just do what I do. But when you start thinking about it, you realize, oh, I really want to teach my child caring for other people. And I do that by encouraging her to share, by talking to her about her feelings and other people's feelings. But as our vision evolves, as we notice that our child is giving up in every struggle that she's or in every conflict that she's in, we also realize, wait a minute, I also want to teach her to stand up for herself. So we're learning about our vision. We're both uncovering it as well as creating it as we go along.

PAULA SCHROEDER: So do you recommend to young parents to actually sit down with a pencil and paper and say, OK, what is it that you want your child to be or to become?

JANICE KAISER: The focus is usually on what do you want to teach your child.

PAULA SCHROEDER: OK.

JANICE KAISER: In 20 years when your child looks back at her family, what is it you want her to say, I learned this in my family? And it's useful, I think, to make our vision explicit, both because it helps us clarify and informs our actions. But as parents together, if we're in a partnership with another parent, then it helps us to have a benchmark by which we can say, OK, if this is what we want to teach, how can we do that? How do you want to do it? How do I want to do it? When are we alike in our methods and when are we different and when is it going to be OK for us to be different?

But going back all the way to, what do we want our child to learn here, helps us decide, make some informed decisions about the intervention we do with our kids.

PAULA SCHROEDER: And what if the two parents have different values and have different goals?

JANICE KAISER: Well, indeed they do.

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It's very difficult to find parents that have the exact same values because they bring their own experiences and their own expectations. And that's why those discussions are important. But it's also not important that they agree on every single thing. It's useful for children to have a variety, a diversity of parents and approaches.

There are some things that it's important for people to agree on, and I think figuring out where our bottom lines, where do we need to listen to each other long enough, come up with a common strategy that we're not going to be overwhelming or confusing our child with this. And which ones can we disagree on?

In my family, we disagreed on television. And I wanted to monitor the television much more than my partner did. But in the same light, I respected his concern about not having censorship in our house. And so I think the bottom line is not that we're always the same, but that we have a respect for the other person that's the parent of that child.

And we say, I would do it differently, but I appreciate the fact that you let her take more chances and you let her climb up steep cliffs and you let her do that kind of stuff with her, even though it scares me to do it with her. That basic respect is important, even if we don't have the same approach.

PAULA SCHROEDER: What are some of the things that should be agreed upon though? You said that there are some things with the bottom line has to match.

JANICE KAISER: Well, I know one family was really struggling with the wrestling that was happening in the family, the tickling, I think is what it was. And I think it was dad was doing a lot of tickling of the kids. And mom was really concerned about the kids getting overwhelmed, not feeling like they could say no, and she felt like it was really important that her kids were able to say, this is my body. I don't want you to do that to me. You can play with me this way, you can play with me this way, but I don't want you to do that.

And so they really worked and worked and talking to her partner about what was important to her, I really want our kids to have that sense of control over their bodies. Can we think of another way that you can play? I love the fact that you're playful with the kids. I love the fact that you're physical with the kids. I'm wondering if we can come up with another solution here for you to be expressive and for our kids also to have their bodies respected.

PAULA SCHROEDER: You have been a preschool teacher, early childhood development instructor. When you talk with parents, are there any leading priorities that they have concerns about?

JANICE KAISER: Parents want to know what to do about sleep. We often have children in a group together, and so they want to know what to do about conflicts between children. They want to know how to help children learn how to share. They want to know about tantrums and lots of stuff around family relationships, whether it's sibling relationships or parenting with a partner, as we were talking about earlier.

There's all kinds of questions about, how do you do this together in a family? Lots of questions about balancing needs, juggling roles, as well as just the whole gamut of specific behavior, whether it has to do with eating, sleeping, some of the body kinds of things. We have that whole chapter on bodies that also has children learning about their bodies. What happens when my child discovers his penis and then what do you do then?

And that's another place where we both talk about, what's going on with the child? What are they trying to figure out. What are their questions, and what's going on with the parent? Where does it get hard? If it gets hard for you to talk to your child about those things or to know how to help your child develop a healthy relationship to their body, these are some of the kinds of things you can do.

You can use sample dialogues. This is what a dialogue might look like. Because for some people, what we want to teach is very different than what we learned in our own families. And when you're trying to really develop a whole new and different strategy, sometimes, you know what you don't want to do, but you just can't figure out quite what you do want to do. Getting support of other parents who are doing it in a way that you respect, getting ideas from books, all of those are going to help you develop your own strategy.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Before you got into really studying how parents interact with each other and with their children, you were a preschool teacher. And your focus was on child development, and you knew all about children. This is before you had your own, of course. But certainly, that is a critical factor in really knowing how to be the parent that you want to be, is to not have greater expectations than a two-year-old might be able to meet.

JANICE KAISER: Right. Yes. And that's a challenge for parents too because we always have greater expectations. We're always looking ahead to, where are you growing next? I talked to one parent educator once and she said, I always tell parents what's happening going to happen in the next stage because I always want them to be prepared.

And I said, I don't. What I do is I want to encourage parents to really be able to observe what's happening right now and to be able to fully enjoy this stage. If we're always looking forward, then our child ends up 18 years old and we go, where did the time go? We missed something here. And if we can just really appreciate and celebrate who the child is right now, it means that often, we're a couple months behind [LAUGH] and our child is ahead of us. But that's OK, because we'll catch up. If we keep in dialogue, we keep watching, we keep learning, we all catch up.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Well, particularly in the first five years, which this book focuses on, they are growing so quickly, so rapidly moving in and out of all kinds of different phases. And as you point out in the book too, taking one step forward and several steps back as they do this growing and developing. And isn't it important for parents to recognize that they have to change while their child is changing as well, in terms of whether it's discipline or education or whatever it might be?

JANICE KAISER: It's the best on-the-job training we'll ever get. And as parents, many of us want to enter parenthood feeling like we have all the answers, like we really know what we're doing. But I always encourage parents, it's OK not to have all the answers. Because if you had all the answers, you wouldn't be taking into consideration who your unique children are and the different stages and the kinds of growth that they grow through.

So if we're willing to grow along with our children-- we almost named the book Growing Parent, Growing Child. If we're willing to grow along with our children, then we're going to be the most appropriate parents at any given moment. It means that there's going to be periods of confusion. We call them periods of disequilibrium.

Those moments when, wait a minute, what we used to do to get you to sleep doesn't work anymore. We put you on the bed and you're screaming and crying and we don't know how to respond to this. And parents often come to class and you can just see them. It's like they're looking haggard and bedraggled. And it's like, what's happening this week? I don't know. I can't figure anything out.

And what they don't realize is how much information they already have. Well, it was just when my partner started that new job that the sleeping thing started to fall all to pieces, and I don't know if that's related or not. And parents really have so much of the answer already figured out. OK, there's been a change in the family.

Maybe your child needs to spend some extra time with that parent. Maybe we could change the bedtime ritual a little bit and help the child relax and learn new ways to put herself to sleep. So we are always changing and growing, and those periods of confusion can really throw us off unless we see them as opportunities. Opportunities to learn something new, to demonstrate to our kids how you take confusion and uncertainty and create a new path out of it.

PAULA SCHROEDER: You mentioned one of the words that is attached to two parents of babies in particular, and that's bedraggled, haggard.

JANICE KAISER: [LAUGH]

PAULA SCHROEDER: And a lot of times, not only the lack of sleep that is associated with raising children, but also all the other stresses of life-- economics and finances, as well as a stress on the job, the time factor is killing parents these days, often leads to frustration and anger. And I think that a lot of parents really have a lot of difficulty with knowing how to handle that. Short of, of course, becoming abusive or something, I would hope that most parents know that that's inappropriate. But I think that this is a real source of discomfort for a lot of parents. How do you tell parents to deal with that?

JANICE KAISER: You phrase a couple of important issues. One is balancing, the balancing act that contemporary parents are doing. The other one is, dealing with frustration and anger. Let's start with the balancing act. I think parents today are balancing wearing more hats, juggling more roles than we ever have before. I sometimes arrive at work in the morning, and I feel like I've worked a full day already and it's just 8:30 So--

PAULA SCHROEDER: I have a two-year-old who doesn't want to get dressed--

JANICE KAISER: And getting out of the house is a full day's job. And so I want to encourage people to relook at their expectations. What is it you're expecting of yourself as a parent? Is it too much. I think we've layered expectations on top of expectations without dropping any away. And I still have to trek across my living room, I climb over dirty clothes, I climb over clean clothes, I climb over last night's dishes, and I climb over the toys to get to my kids so I can greet them and say hello. I'm so glad to see you. Let's spend some time together.

I know one parent put it this way. She said, one week, I'm a terrific worker, I'm a mediocre housekeeper, and I'm a good parent. The next week, I'm a horrible worker. I'm a mediocre housekeeper, and I'm a great parent. And so in no one moment am I in perfect balance with all of my different roles, but I'm always moving toward that balance. And I think if we can find that in families, then we can begin to create a sense of equilibrium or a sense of balance.

However, most of us come to those moments that either because of our kids behavior, but more often, as you mentioned, it's because of we're just juggling all of the stress that we're carrying in our work life. And we get angry. We get frustrated. We just feel out of resources. It's so important that parents figure out ways to take care of themselves is to take care of their children.

And I sometimes say, if you can't do it for yourself, do it for your child. Take care of your child's parent. That may be setting up some time for yourself. That may be taking a chance to go to the gym. That may be doing something-- getting some childcare so that you can do some reading or something special for yourself. It may be talking to friends.

And I don't know-- I think parents are more and more isolated. And if you can get a chance to talk to other parents, if you can just call up somebody on the phone and say, I just need you to listen to me, you don't have to give me any advice. You don't have to tell me it's OK. You just need to listen to me, and I might cry, that's a way that we can take care of some of the stress.

And talking about it lets us release some of it and get focused again on what it is we need to do. But it really is important that we figure out ways to nurture ourselves as much to model to our children, how do adults take care of themselves? As to provide our children with a resourceful person at the end of the day.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Janice Kaiser is a parenting educator and program director in Santa Cruz, California. She is the co-author with Laura Davis of Becoming The Parent You Want To Be published by Broadway Books. It's 11 minutes before 11 o'clock. This is midmorning on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Paula Schroeder.

I can imagine that families up in the Red River Valley are very stressed. And if you would like to help with cash or goods, donation, the Red Cross and Salvation Army are accepting cash and credit card donations to assist flood victims, and they are also collecting cleaning equipment, bottled water, paper products, personal hygiene products, and other supplies. And if you want to contribute, contact the Red Cross at either 1-800 help now or 1-800-942-787 or the Salvation Army at 1-800 Sal Army.

Well, imagine the movie Fargo done with a Southern accent or Shakespeare done in flat American English. Doesn't really work, does it? In any player film, dialect is crucial to establishing time and place. The Park Square Theater in Saint Paul is putting on a production of Irish playwright Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan, and it requires English dialect.

Wilde is known for his brilliant dialogue, and a dialect coach must be hired to help the actors with their lines. In today's odd jobs, Sasha Aslanian caught up with dialect coach [? Fiachra ?] Douglas at a rehearsal.

[? FIACHRA DOUGLAS: ?] Everything's going really, really great, and I'd like to keep up the momentum as far as enunciation. Please keep that at the foremost in your mind. Enunciate every single word. I want to hear the cons, the don'ts, the twos, the ands, all of that. That will really help clip it along for you and the volume just a little bit. Just keep those all in mind and we're all set. Thank you.

SPEAKER 2: Good night, Lady Windermere. What a fascinating woman Mrs. Erlynne is. She's coming to lunch on Thursday. Why don't you come too.

[? FIACHRA DOUGLAS: ?] Good. I like that. Now, take fascinating and have more fun with fascinating. You can take it to something like fascinating. Play with it a little bit more and have some more fun. What a fascinating--

SPEAKER 2: OK.

[? FIACHRA DOUGLAS: ?] Let's try that.

SPEAKER 2: Good night, Lady Windermere. What a fascinating woman Mrs. Erlynne is.

[? FIACHRA DOUGLAS: ?] [INAUDIBLE] My position is the pest to be the bug, to keep saying this word is going to knock you off balance, and this word won't help you express what you're trying to say. Now, certainly is it's starting to come out now, certainly, and it's going a bit too much. I would--

SPEAKER 2: Certainly.

[? FIACHRA DOUGLAS: ?] Certainly.

SPEAKER 2: Go for the T.

[? FIACHRA DOUGLAS: ?] Yes.

SPEAKER 2: Certainly.

[? FIACHRA DOUGLAS: ?] Go straight to it, yeah. For this particular play, with Oscar Wilde, you have to pronounce every single thing. Every word, every syllable must be heard. There's just no two ways about it to start off. With the American accent, we can glide very easily over one of two words and everyone will understand what you're saying, but it's not going to give you the clean, crisp sound that you want. The vowel sounds are very different.

SPEAKER 3: All, Paul, Raw.

[? FIACHRA DOUGLAS: ?] Married, the tongue--

SPEAKER 4: Married

[? FIACHRA DOUGLAS: ?] --on lower teeth, just behind the back teeth.

SPEAKER 4: Married.

[? FIACHRA DOUGLAS: ?] Married.

SPEAKER 4: Married.

[? FIACHRA DOUGLAS: ?] Yes. And--

SPEAKER 4: Married.

[? FIACHRA DOUGLAS: ?] And it will help with the shape.

SPEAKER 3: Turn. Early. Certain.

[? FIACHRA DOUGLAS: ?] We're going for Queen's English, everything very clipped as though they're all on coffee 24 hours a day, and everybody's just moving along quite like this.

SPEAKER 2: Why should you be different from any other man.

[? FIACHRA DOUGLAS: ?] OK. And it was the T that was-- the Ts were falling in that one.

SPEAKER 2: Different?

[? FIACHRA DOUGLAS: ?] Yes. Different, yes. We have an Australian in the show, and Australian accent or dialect is quite difficult to understand at the best of times. But when you take it to a Midwest American audience, it can become a huge distraction.

SPEAKER 5: How do you do, Lady Windermere? How do you do, Duchess? Capital place, London, they are not nearly so exclusive in London as they are in Sydney.

[? FIACHRA DOUGLAS: ?] Keep slowing it.

SPEAKER 5: Capital place, London, they are not nearly so exclusive in London as they are in Sydney.

[? FIACHRA DOUGLAS: ?] Much better. Much better. I'm from Ireland, and I was brought up there, and we've moved around the country quite a bit as I was growing up. And I've also been in theater for a number of years, so I've had to work with several different dialects. I worked at sea for about eight years. And in that time, I met several different English characters who were true characters who I worked with. We would sit and talk and chat, and I just had the ability to pick up what they were saying and start to relate back to them in their dialect.

SASHA ASLANIAN: And how was your Midwestern English coming along.

[? FIACHRA DOUGLAS: ?] My midwestern-- [LAUGHS] my American accent really needs a lot of work, let me tell you that right now. I am trying, though.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Dialect coach [? Fiachra ?] Douglas talking with Minnesota Public Radio's Sasha Aslanian. Lady Windermere's Fan opens at the Park Square Theater in Saint Paul this Thursday and runs through May 24th. Coming up at 11:00 on midday, you can get an update on the floods. A bridge connecting Minnesota and North Dakota reopened today. We'll also look at a proposal to raise the gasoline tax. At noon, the third episode in the special documentary series Will The Circle Be Unbroken, examining the history of the Civil Rights Movement. Right now though, here's Garrison Keillor.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

GARRISON KEILLOR: And here is the Writer's Almanac for Monday. It's the 28th of April, 1997. It's the birthday of the fifth president of the United states, James Monroe and Westmoreland County, Virginia, 1758. He was elected president in 1816, proclaimed the Monroe Doctrine, which declared American opposition to European influence in the Americas.

It's the anniversary of the mutiny on the bounty on this day in 1789 in the South seas. The ship was en route from Tahiti for Jamaica with a load of breadfruit trees. The master's mate, Fletcher Christian, and the rest of the mutineers put the captain, William Bligh, and 18 crew members who were loyal to him in a small boat, which made a 47 day trip to Timor.

It's the birthday of folk singer and folklorist John Jacob Niles in Louisville, Kentucky, 1892. He was a collector of folk songs in the Southern Appalachians. He collected "Black Is The Color of My True Love's Hair", "I Wonder as I Wander", and "Go Way From My Window". It's the birthday of the Scottish poet William Soutar in Perth on this day in 1898. He wrote poetry in English and also in Scots dialect.

It's the birthday of the Norwegian novelist, Johan Borgen, in Oslo, 1902. He wrote satire in the newspapers for which the Germans arrested him and tortured him, and wrote a number of famous novels in the mid 50s-- The Dark Springs and a novel entitled We Have Him Now.

It's the birthday of novelist Harper Lee in Monroeville, Alabama, to 1926 on this day. She went off to New York. She worked for the airlines as a reservation clerk, wrote in her spare time, and came out with her novel To Kill a Mockingbird in 1960. It's the birthday of the Scottish poet Kenneth White in Glasgow, 1936 on this day, grew up on the West Coast of Scotland. He wrote,

I stand in my own inscrutable whiteness

And my heart is a blazing furnace

And I try to enlarge my soul

And I know that the deepest is the most alive

And I want nothing less than all

From a poem entitled "At The Solstice." And it's the birthday of Scottish folk singer Jean Redpath in Edinburgh, 1937 on this day. She came over to the US when she was 24 with about $11 in her pocket. Went out visiting in San Francisco and was launched as a folk singer. Here's a poem for today by Wendell Berry entitled "One Of Us."

Must another poor body, brought

To its rest at last, be made the occasion

Of yet another sermon? Have we nothing

To say of the dead that is not

A dull mortal lesson to the living

Our praise of Heaven blunted

By this craven blaming of the Earth?

We must go with the body to the dark

Grave, and there at the edge, turn back

Together-- it is all that we can do-- remembering

Her as she is now in our minds

Forever, how she gathered the chicks

Into her apron before the storm, and tossed

The turkey hen over the fence

So that the little ones followed,

Peeping, out of the tall grass, safe

From the lurking snake, how she was one

Of us. here with us, who now is gone.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

A poem by Wendell Berry, "One Of Us", from his collection entries published by Pantheon Press. And used by permission here on the Writer's Almanac for Monday, April 28. Made possible by Cowles Enthusiast Media, publishers of Early American Homes, and the historynet.com where history lives on the world wide web. Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Listen for Garrison Keillor every Sunday at noon on a Prairie Home Companion. Programming on Minnesota Public Radio is supported by the Virginia Piper Cancer Institute's Piper Breast Center, part of Abbott Northwestern Hospital providing innovative breast care in a compassionate environment.

SPEAKER 6: On Monday's All Things Considered, photographs of child labor in the third world.

SPEAKER 7: Background, we see the Himalayan mountains. In the foreground, we see the bricks, most of which have probably been made by children.

SPEAKER 6: All Things Considered, weekdays at 3:00.

PAULA SCHROEDER: You're listening to Minnesota Public Radio. 53 degrees under sunny skies at K-N-O-W FM 91.1, Minneapolis, Saint Paul. In the Twin Cities, today, our sun is going to be giving way to clouds. This afternoon, look for a high around 68 degrees. Winds out of the South, and we will have scattered showers and thunderstorms tonight. And tomorrow, partly cloudy with a high around 66.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

GARY EICHTEN: Good morning. It's 11 o'clock, and this is midday on Minnesota Public Radio with monitor radio's David Brown. I'm Gary Eichten. In the news this morning, the--