In case you haven’t heard . . . Parents & Kids Magazine will no longer publish and the Wicked Local Parents site, that’s hosting this blog, will be taken down, or so I’ve been told.
But not to fear! I’ve moved my Picket Fence Post blog to a new platform — http://picketfencepost.blogspot.com — and have just completed The Paper Project at long last. The final tally of the number of pieces of papers my three kids have brought home during the school year is available here.
I’ve loved having you all reading this blog. Please come on over and comment on the new blog.
It is with great sadness that I learned this week that Parents & Kids Magazine, P&K, will be closing, effectively immediately. The June issue that’s out there on the stands right now is the last one . . . which means that the column I wrote about having to have discussions about sex with your kids waaaay before you’re ready to do so, won’t run in July issue because there will be no July issue.
I’ve been writing for this magazine since my twins were toddlers — they’re now going on 12 — before my youngest child was born. My first Parents and Kids editor was Erica Houskeeper, who was always a strong advocate for me and my writing, allowing me to be a bit more daring when writing about the insanity of having three kids under 4 and going for long periods of time without a solid night’s sleep fueled only by caffeine and barbecue potato chips.
After Erica, there was Heather Kempskie who’s been a fabulous editor and a big booster of mine. With her help, Parents & Kids grew, matured and moved to the Wicked Local Parents platform where this blog currently resides, though not for long. I’m very appreciative of Heather’s support throughout her tenure as the P&K editor and will greatly miss working with her.
As for this blog — and things like The Paper Project which is almost at the end!! — I’m moving the Picket Fence Post over to the Blogger platform for now, because I know you’re REALLY anxious to learn the final tally of all those papers my three kids have brought home from school this year. And given that the two boys just brought home a foot-thick stack of papers each this week, I’m wondering if we’ll top 3,000 papers.
I spent a wonderful number of hours over the past few weeks watching the recently-released third season of thirtysomethingon DVD, 24 episodes which originally aired between 1989-90, in order to write a review for my pop culture column on Mommy Tracked .
While most folks remember this as the season where Nancy, a mom of two young kids, got ovarian cancer (just after her children’s book was published and she’d reunited with her estranged husband Elliot), it was also the one where Ellyn started dating a married man and Gary and Susannah struggled with daycare and health care costs after having a baby.
It also happened to provide a provocative portrait of the marriage of the two central characters — Michael and Hope — who were left wondering what the heck had happened to their once solid marriage after raising a toddler, preparing for baby number two, Michael’s high-pressure job and Hope’s work for environmental causes was done messing around with it, leaving them precious little time for their relationship.
The 10-minute excerpt below is from an episode later in the third season where Hope and Michael had traveled to Arizona in order to attend her parents’ 40th anniversary party. Hope and Michael — who’d been drifting apart throughout the season — had been having a series of half-conversations filled with anger and disappointment and hushed voices (because they were staying at Hope’s parents’ house), only to have their anger come to a head at the anniversary party while observing how happy Hope’s parents seemed to be.
Did you have a favorite episode of thirtysomething?
Item #1: No Cell Phone = Meanest Mom on the Planet?
I am no Luddite. I love technology. The Spouse and I have BlackBerries, laptops and iPods in the house. The DVR is my favorite household gadget.
However when it comes to the Picket Fence Post kids, you might as well call me a non-conformist Luddite because I have no plans of putting cell phones into their hands for some time. (The exceptions being when I lend them my cell phone when they take the dog for a walk or when I allow them to play games on it when we’re attending one of their siblings’ sporting events.) The kids also do not send e-mails or texts to friends. But next year, when The Girl and The Eldest Boy enter middle school, I expect that my stance will make me extremely unpopular.
Already, I feel like a minority among my parenting peers because many of my 11-year-old twins’ classmates already have cell phones and/or e-mail addresses and unfettered access to the internet. (I’ve had conversations with several parents who told me that their kids are already avid texters.) This technological divide between kids who are allowed to have access and my kids who don’t is coming into sharper focus. Recently, The Girl came home from school with a handwritten invitation to a peer’s birthday party. The birthday girl had e-mailed invitations to the other kids but since my daughter doesn’t have her own e-mail address, she received the handwritten one.
On the cell phone front, in an article in today’s New York Times, several “experts” debated at what age it’s best to get your kid a mobile phone. The writer tossed in this unhelpful little stat: “58 percent of 12-year-olds now had a cellphone, up from 18 percent in 2004.”
When children are allowed to have unfettered access to the internet and to cell phones and can privately text at all hours, of course kids are inevitably going to look up stuff we’d rather they didn’t, text things we’d rather they not text. It’s likely that they’re going to use bad words because using taboo, powerful language feels grown-up, especially when there’s no adult keeping tabs on them. They’re going to sit behind the screens of their phones/computers — without looking another person in the eye — and send all manner of messages to others because texts don’t really feel like authentic, personal exchanges which carry meaning. And the kids can’t help themselves.
I’ve decided, that in the case of my own children, I’m not going to give them their own cell phones and they’re not going to text their friends. How long this ban will be in place, I honestly don’t know, but what I do know is that right now, I don’t believe my conscientious kids could resist the temptation of texting or e-mailing all the time. That’s not a negative commentary about some kind of perceived character flaw on their part, it’s simply based on the fact that they’re kids and kids have poor impulse control. They won’t turn off the TV or video games until I make them, so it’s not much of a stretch to imagine that they wouldn’t be able to resist texting or calling their friends all the time, especially when other kids have no such restrictions.
For this unpopular stance, I’m willing to wear the mantle of the meanest mom in the world who’s wreaking havoc with her kids’ social standing. Hopefully they’ll forgive me when they’re older.
Item #2: Teen Text-Rage Assault Case on Today Show
Speaking of kids and texting . . . While watching this Today Show segment about a 13-year-old (who doesn’t have a cell phone but texted her 15-year-old “boyfriend” by using her 15-year-old friend’s phone) who was charged as an accomplice in the savage beating of her friend allegedly at the hands of her boyfriend who’d reportedly been sent into a rage by a text exchange, I was horrified.
Everything about the case — including the 13-year-old’s casual, nonchalant use of the c-word on the Today Show, as though she’s completely unaware that that word is wildly inappropriate and vulgar to use in normal discourse, never mind when you’re on national television — is deeply disturbing.
And now to bring this technology thread full-circle . . . there was also an article in the New York Timesabout parents and their own technology addictions, their unwillingness to put down that cell phone or that BlackBerry. I will heretofore admit that I have been guilty of frequently checking my e-mails and Twitter feed and I’ve been making a concerted effort recently of trying to cut down on that bad habit.
I won’t check the BlackBerry during meals or during dedicated family times (like when we’re watching a movie or when The Spouse or I are reading the Harry Potter series aloud to The Youngest Boy). I won’t check the e-mails/Tweets when my kids are telling me about their day or showing me their spellings tests or drawings. I hardly ever bring the BlackBerry into my bedroom, and I’ve told The Spouse that his BlackBerry is unwelcome in the bedroom as well.
Today’s Times article featured families who seem to require cell phone/smart phone/laptop interventions as they can’t seem to stop using them, even when they’re supposedly dedicating time to being with their kids. An excerpt:
“Sherry Turkle, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Initiative on Technology and Self, has been studying how parental use of technology affects children and young adults. After five years and 300 interviews, she found that feelings of hurt, jealousy and competition [with parents' computers and cell phones] are widespread.
. . . In her studies, Dr. Turkle said, ‘Over and over, kids raised the same three examples of feeling hurt and not wanting to show it when their mom or dad would be on their devices instead of paying attention to them: at meals, during pickup after either school or an extracurricular activity, and during sports events.’
Dr. Turkle said that she recognizes the pressure adults feel to make themselves constantly available for work, but added that she believes there is a greater force compelling them to keep checking the screen.”
What do you think about all these issues of technology, kids and child-rearing, about kids texting and parents reading e-mails during dinner?
We are nearly at the end of the 2009-2010 Paper Project, my tally of the papers my twin fifth graders and my third grader brought home from school throughout the school year.
Amid all the harried last-minute school activities — there’s still supposedly an evening school event for which we have yet to receive the complete information, not that we’re all that busy right now, so SURE we can squeeze EVERYTHING in between the final soccer and baseball games, a last-minute school book swap (WHY?!), end-of-the-season team parties and the like — I’m still counting up those papers.
Among the papers the kids brought home from school during the last week of May and the first week of June included: Seventeen papers from the school staff and administrators/parent organizations (including a notice that The Youngest Boy had three overdue library books . . . which we FINALLY found after much labored searching), 67 pages on poetry (including poems The Girl wrote like one about our dog Max, and one about her father), several practice tests for the state’s standardized science (MCAS) test and a large black piece of construction paper with the partial skeletal remains of tiny animals which had been regurgitated by owls glued to it. (*ick*)
The total number of paper taken home over the past two weeks: 174.
The Eldest Boy gave me this fistful of wildflowers yesterday. He picked them for me on his way home from the bus stop and presented them to me while wearing a sweet smile. Last week, The Girl gave me several carefully selected buttercups when she came home from school. On several occasions this spring, The Youngest Boy had picked dandelions for me.
All of these offerings – physical manifestations of full, kind hearts — were afforded the same degree of respect: The flowers were placed in a vase and placed on the window ledge above the kitchen sink where they’d brighten my day when I looked out the kitchen window.
I know that, as the children get older, their gifts of flowers will likely become more sophisticated. They’ll want to buy flowers from someplace (like the grocery store) or, when they’re busy professionals, probably go online to order flowers to be delivered to my house by someone I don’t know, not from one of my smiling children who’s expectantly clutching the flowers in his or her outstretched hand. This is why these particular floral gifts — whose days I know are numbered — mean so much.
Item #2: The Village Needs to Grow a Spine
Okay, enough with the sentimental stuff . . .
My June column for the GateHouse News Service is all about how parents don’t feel socially empowered enough to correct and/or address other people’s children’s bad/harassing/bullying behavior when they see it, even when it occurs in their own homes. (In the column, I gave an example of how I didn’t give a kid – who’d been mean to The Girl – the boot from my house because I feared backlash from his parents, or worse, that his parents wouldn’t care even if I did tell them.)
It concluded with a rallying cry of sorts: “If we [parents] support one another, hold one another’s kids accountable as we would our own, we’d all be better off. The schools can’t tackle the issue of disrespectful and bullying behavior alone. If, as they say, it takes a village to raise a child, then we who live in the village need to grow a spine.”
Item #3: Silly Band Fever
It’s been about two months since I first learned about what the kids call “Silly Bandz,” though they go by an assortment of brand names. If you have grade school and middle school aged children, you are likely well aware of what these things are: Rubberband-like bracelets in the shapes of animals, objects, symbols, etc. (You can’t tell what shape they are when they’re on someone’s wrist.)
And kids are obsessed with ‘em.
Two months ago, my third grader came home with a single Silly Band on his wrist which he got in a trade with another classmate. (What did he give up in exchange for the Band? I have no idea. Hopefully it wasn’t his lunch money.) Soon, he became obsessed. When we were shopping two weeks ago, he spied a package of 24 by the check-out and I agreed to buy it for him, but said he shouldn’t expect that I’m going to be running to the school to buy more of these things. Since then, he’s been making more and more trades at school and his collection is growing.
Now not only are these glorified rubberbands an epidemic — The Youngest Boy’s school, along with many others, has banned them during class times because students had been fighting over them and getting “distracted” by their presence — but they’re getting all manner of press, including in today’s Boston Globe:
“Silly bands meet all the requirements of a modern craze. They’ve nabbed the top-selling spots on Amazon’s toys and games category. Kids can’t stop talking about them. Parents are fighting over limited supplies, according to one manufacturer. Schools are banning them. A-list celebrities are reportedly requesting customized packs for fans. And, of course, there’s the requisite Facebook page, Twitter feed, and YouTube videos.”
When I read this piece in the New York Timesthis week entitled, “For Children in Sports, a Breaking Point,” I wanted to immediately e-mail it to every single parent I know who has a kid playing youth sports. They need to read it. It really puts kids’ sports into proper perspective.
Things I loved about the article:
– Writer Jane E. Brody quoted a stat from a new book on youth sports by Mark Hyman (Until It Hurts: America’s Obsession with Youth Sports and How it Harms Our Kids) which said: “Every year more than 3.5 million children under 15 require medical treatment for sports injuries, nearly half of which are the result of simple overuse.”
– Another quote: “As adults become more and more involved, [Hyman] noted, ‘with each passing season youth sports seem to stray further and further from its core mission of providing healthy, safe and character-building recreation for children.” Boy, does he have THAT right.
– The article is thoroughly depressing as Brody consulted sports surgeons about the quadrupling of overuse injuries for children in the past five years, about the pediatric surgeries due to chronic sports injuries because parents have their kids playing organized sports year-round and don’t allow children’s muscles “to recover from inevitable microtrauma that occurs during practice and play.”
– One great stat: “2 to 5 out of 1,000 high school athletes ever achieve professional status.”
Right now, we’re rounding the corner on this season of Little League and spring soccer but I remain astonished at how many people think WE’RE the ones who’re nuts for not allowing our kids to play a sport year-round and only allow each kid to play one sport per season and no one sport in consecutive seasons. (The exception will be when The Youngest Boy plays hockey next year and the season is — get this — from fall through spring. If I had any say in that schedule, I’d want to shorten it so it’s simply a winter sport, as it should be.)
Youth sports = good. Crazy, sports-obsessed parents and coaches who push the kids like they’re on the cusp of a scholarship/world championship = bad.
Item #2: Parenting Teens
All those season of the Gilmore Girlswhich I’ve watched with The Girl apparently did an incomplete job of depicting the real migraine-inducing insanity that is raising teenagers, if you go by the recent spate of TV shows dramatizing what it’s like to parent teens. My pop culture column on Mommy Tracked addresses how challenging it is to be a mom of a teen as seen through the lens of Parenthood, Modern Family, The Middleand Private Practice.
Item #3: Sex and the City 2 Characters Vent about Motherhood
While the reviews for Sex and the City 2 have been brutal and highly unkind (I take umbrage with film reviewers using words such as “shrew,” “bitch” and “cougar”), they do note that two of the characters have at least one significant conversation about how parenting young children has been kicking their butts and how lucky they are to have childcare/household help. (If only . . .)
According to the Boston Globe’sreview, “. . . [T]he stresses faced by Charlotte and Miranda as they deal with colicky toddlers, chauvinistic bosses, braless nannies and weary spouses are realistic and amusing enough to score a few points.’
I’ll be heading off to screen the film this week in preparation for a column. I’m hoping the movie isn’t as horrifically bad as the reviews are saying it is. I’ll go into it with super-low expectations.
Okay, so I let four weeks slip by before I finally tackled the ever-growing pile of school papers that the Picket Fence Post kids have brought home from school. I’ve been, as many folks with school-aged children are painfully aware, in scheduling hell.
I’ve had to sit down with multiple calendars — and coordinate with The Spouse — to make sure we didn’t miss things like: The two poetry events for two different kids during different school days; a Memorial Day concert/science fair event during the school day; a Biography Day event in school where my third grader has to dress up as Henry Ford and read a speech about his life; a DARE graduation (I still don’t know when and where that is, but I think it’s at night) for my twin fifth graders; soccer practices for two kids; ever-changing logistics for soccer games for two kids in towns near and far; soccer evaluations — for placement for next year’s teams – for two kids; baseball practices and games (The Spouse is the coach and spends literally hours making up the schedule of who’s playing where when) and field trips for which we’ve got to make sure we’ve signed up to chaperone, as well as completed the permission slips and checks. (I wrote two, $55 checks – one per each fifth grader – to cover three field trips to be taken in the span of two weeks in June.) This doesn’t include making the time to help The Youngest Boy complete his science project and having him practice his Biography speech.
Oh, and The Spouse and I have pesky things like work and volunteer obligations as well, maybe buying and making food for our kids could be fit in somewhere, and, of course, watching and sobbing through the Lost series finale. (I’m still emotional about it.) So, we’ve been a bit harried, hence the delay in my Paper Project update.
Annyywaayy . . . Here’s the scoop on the dead trees which came home during the fifth week of April and the first three weeks of May: Total: 279 pieces of paper.
That tally includes: 29 letters/notices from teachers, administrators and the parent organizations to alert us to Dress-a-like Day, that MCAS was coming and soliciting volunteers for field days and teacher appreciation week festivities; The Eldest Boy’s soil presentation (at 20 pages) and 178 pieces of paper for math/math MCAS prep sheets.
This brings the school year total to: 2,191.
(For the background on The Paper Project and for week-by-week stats, go here.)
A question for parents of young kids: Why is it when your kid has to complete a science project, you feel as though you’ve also been assigned a science project? My 8-year-old has a science project that’s due on Monday and it’s been very stressful for me, and I’m not even doing the project like many parents are wont to do. (Yes, I’m talking to you folks who do the science project for your child; we’re all on to you. At the science fair, it’s pretty clear which projects were done by 8-year-olds who still have baby teeth, and which ones were done by thirty- and fortysomething parents.)
The Youngest Boy decided to do his project on whether the amount of sugar in chewing gum has any impact on how long the flavor will last. He and I went to the store and bought, not just a tri-fold display board, but a bunch of gum with different amounts of sugar in them, or no sugar at all. We purchased a variety of flavors to see if the flavor (like mint vs fruit) made any difference.
For several evenings, the five members of the Picket Fence Post family have been chewing pieces of gum and noting the length of time each piece of gum maintained its flavor. The Youngest Boy and I recorded the times. For quite a while now, I’ve been suggesting to The Youngest Boy that he sketch out what he wants to put on his display board so that once he has all the data, he can start work on the board, giving him plenty of time to do it without rushing. In order to give him ideas, we’ve read and re-read the instructions that accompanied the assignment. But so far, it’s been me nagging him to start and him saying, “Okay Mom,” and then not doing anything about it. When I’ve tried to press him on it, he has accused me of trying to take over the project.
Now, with soccer and baseball games, practices, soccer evaluations, a church event and a band event for The Eldest Boy on the schedule between now and Monday, all The Youngest Boy has is a notebook full of data and a blank tri-fold display board. I, meanwhile, have a tension headache in anticipation of the coming drama when he’s down to the wire and not done yet. I, for one, plan on watching Lost’s swan song on Sunday evening, the night before this project is due. I am NOT, I repeat, NOT going to be working on a chewing gum science project, thank you very much. I’m going to find out what happens to the Smoke Monster.
Item #2: Kids in the Parks . . . Alone
Saturday is a big day for parenting Free-Range Kids writer/blogger Lenore Skenazy who’s declared May 22 “Take Our Kids to the Park . . . And Leave Them There Day.” (I wrote about why Skenazy felt the need to start the campaign here.) And boy, has Skenazy gotten news coverage for this, a lot of it negative, with folks portraying her idea as nuts.
She was mentioned on page one of the New York Daily Newsthis week as spearheading a “bizarre” campaign and has been interviewed by a number of TV outlets. Two of her interviews are below.
Would you let your kid — starting at around age 8 — play with other kids at the park (not alone) without an adult standing watch?
Item #3: BPA Madness
This morning I picked up my local paper only to read a page one story about a report released by the National Workgroup for Safe Markets, “a coalition of public health and environmental groups,” which, according to the MetroWest Daily News, said out of 50 canned foods they analyzed, 46 of them had “various levels of BPA” in them.
BPA, a chemical used in the lining of canned foods and in some plastic products, “regularly leeches into the food they contain, potentially exposing people to harmful levels of the substance,” which the Daily News said can “act as a synthetic estrogen” in the body and potentially lead to “reproductive problems, heart disease, diabetes, a predisposition to breast and prostate cancer and other problems.” Five states have implemented “restrictions on the chemical” and two federal bills are pending, the paper said.
Fabulous. Just when I think I’m serving my family healthy food — like beans from a can as a low-fat, high-protein side dish — I could be poisoning them? When I use canned crushed tomatoes — which don’t contain high fructose corn syrup — in order to make my own marinara sauce, I could be serving my kids, whose bodies are still growing, BPA-filled foods?
These kinds of reports and warnings always trouble me, especially when a substance is omnipresent in our lives. I’m left to wonder why the FDA isn’t stepping on to ban it from our food packaging if it’s a toxic health hazard. I’d love to hear what other well respected organizations, like the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association and the American Cancer Society have to say about this study. Right now, the paper reported, “The National Institutes of Health is spending $30 million to research BPA.”
Where does that leave the rest of us? Forgoing all canned foods, just to be on the safe side?
When The Middleconcluded its charming freshman season this week, it did so with a guest star turn by Betty White, shortly after she showed the other hosts of Saturday Night Live how it’s really done (and got blockbuster ratings to boot). Have I said that I want to be Betty White when I grow up?
Anyway, Betty played a strict elementary school librarian who was ticked that Brick hadn’t yet returned dozens of books to the school library and complained that when he did return them, they were covered with syrup and other sticky substances. (Full disclosure: The Picket Fence Post family has a checkered past when it comes to returning library books in a timely fashion. Needless to say, we do our part to support the town library with our fines. Right now, we have a DVD that’s waaaayyy overdue at the library, so much so that I’ve told The Eldest Boy that the late fee’s coming out of his college fund.)
On The Middle, Betty White’s librarian was so irritated with Brick that she threatened to prevent him from progressing to third grade, where he’d be taught how to write in cursive, if he didn’t bring back the 31 books he had checked out long ago. “You think you can make it out in the real world without cursive?” she asked him. “You can’t!”
Author and columnist Meredith O'Brien gives you a peek behind the picket fences of modern day life and parenting in the 'burbs. With humor and candor, it's her take on real parenting in the real world.
Author and columnist Meredith O'Brien gives you a peek behind the picket fences of modern day life and parenting in the 'burbs. With humor and candor, it's her take on real parenting in the real world.
