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Parenting a "Child" with No (Human) Social Skills

12/10/2012

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Picture
Chiquito grooming Paul's hair.
     Chiquito is every parent's worst nightmare. 
    He bites and pulls hair.  He doesn't share.  He's rough with his kid sister.  He teases the dogs.  He throws food on the floor.  He has a tantrum when he doesn't get his way.  And he moons and/or humps the people he LIKES.
    He almost never does what we want or ask him to.  So we're inevitably disappointed when he doesn't "perform" for company, or videographers and photographers.  And like typical parents in denial, we bemoan the fact that "they didn't get to see his cute, feisty personality."  (He has one.  Really.  Sometimes he's cuddly, too.)
    We hire a monkey sitter so he's never left home alone.  We rush out in the middle of the night if he hears something that frightens him...hoping we look deranged enough to scare off whatever it is.
    Only a parent could love him.  And fortunately, we do. 
    But like every parent, we look forward to the day when he leaves home, is a parent himself...and appreciates what we went through?

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    Picture
    In the jungle with the monkeys.

    Michele Gawenka 

       Jane Goodall has always been my hero, and working with primates an aspiration.  Africa wasn't in the cards the summer I turned 16, when my parents offered to send me to volunteer,  and there was only one class (in physical anthro-pology) when I wanted to study primatology in college.  
         Decades later my husband and I retired in Costa Rica, and this is our journey with spider (and howler) monkeys. 

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